Fell (The Sight 2) (11 page)

“Who’s there?” Alina cried angrily, thinking of her dream, but her weary, piping voice was swallowed by the wind.

She shook her head, as if trying to shake off a nightmare. Nothing could be out here with her on the ice field, Alina told herself, and even her pursuers must have given up the chase in this terrible weather and bitter cold. She wondered now, with the intensity of prayer, when morning would come to her aid.

Suddenly there it was again, and Alina swung round. She was sure of it this time. A shape, like a huge black dog, and close.

In Alina’s terror and distraction, she had forgotten to keep testing the snow, and suddenly she lurched forwards, her arms and the crook flailing out in front of her, as she heard a loud crack. It was breaking ice, and Alina dropped violently. One hand was holding Ivan’s crook in its middle, and as she plummeted, she felt the stick catch on the ground above, and her other hand grabbed at it instinctively.

Alina was swinging in midair from Ivan’s crook now, which was spanning the top of the hole she had just fallen through. She looked down in terror as she hung there. The drop beneath her seemed to disappear into a plunging black chasm, falling away forever.

“This is the world,” whispered Alina Sculcuvant bitterly, through gritted teeth. “This is the real world.”

The girl pulled with her arms and her shoulders, with all her might, and with some effort she had begun slowly to rise, when suddenly there was a terrible snap. Ivan’s staff broke in two and the girl was falling, dropping into the fatal gulf.

Great walls of blue green ice rose around her, as she fell into the glacier. The shock of it was bad enough, but nothing compared to her landing, for her right foot buckled under her and she felt an agonising pain shoot through her whole body. Her head struck something hard and cold, and within the moaning belly of the storm-driven mountain, everything went black.

Fell’s ears came up. The wolf had turned away from Moldov and thoughts of a child and now was scenting a storm on the wind. But amongst the shadowy trees in the darkness, it was something else that set fear running like poison through the Varg’s veins—dogs. They were close, somewhere below amongst the thinning forest, and Fell knew by the tones of the cries—hunger mixed with fear—that they had scented him too. In a straight fight between a wolf and a dog, even a large hunting dog, Fell had very little to worry about. But, by the sounds of it, this was a large pack, and besides, Fell had injured his paw on the beaver’s lodge.

The black wolf saw them break from the trees, and behind them came a group of ten or fifteen humans. Fell’s lips curled up to show his teeth. A human was already pointing up the slope in the darkness towards him, and Fell was suddenly furious that his thoughts of a child had brought him so close to man again.

“There. Not a wasted journey,” cried Barbat on the slope, although he was tired and angry, after his group had split from Malduk’s. “The boy may have slipped our clutches, but that wolf has been haunting the valleys for far too long. Its pelt will fetch real gold, and besides, the dogs need to taste blood.”

The others agreed and were already unleashing their animals. Fell turned and fled. The wolf slipped several times, and because of the cut to his paw, and not having eaten anything substantial in so long, he found his natural vigour failing him. But Fell reached the top of a steep slope and the edge of the ice field, just as the wind rose furiously and the blizzard began.

Fell was used to the higher mountains, far more so than tame dogs were, no matter how they were starved and beaten to make them ferocious and keen for pursuit, and he could see well in the dark. But not even Fell had encountered country like this before. He could feel the ice sheet below him, and it reminded him of that fateful day, long ago, when he had fallen into the waters through the river, when his family had been fleeing Morgra and her Balkar fighters. Ice, he thought grimly, what had they called it then? “The still element that holds all in potential.”

The path of a springing wolf is light compared to many though, and Fell did not fall foul of the fissures and cracks before him; nor was he even aware how much danger he was in.

It was not for a good while that the fleeing animal spotted the shape ahead of him. At first he thought it was another Lera and he wondered if a wild lynx was abroad. But his eyes were accustomed to blizzards, and the black wolf soon realised in astonishment that it was a young human. The creature was faring badly in the storm, and though the wolf could not imagine what it was doing out here, Fell smiled inwardly as he thought how vulnerable these talking Lera were, when away from their dangerous packs.

Animals weakened in the wild were easy to hunt and so provided food for a wolf, but in their sacrifice also helped to keep the rest of a herd and the wild Lera of the land strong and healthy. That was the harsh law that had shaped Fell’s life, and now he thanked the wolf gods Tor and Fenris for the gift, for in his furious hunger Fell realised what easy prey lay ahead of him.

Once again the balance of nature had turned. The sound of the dogs had faded and now the hunted was suddenly the hunter again, and it restored the wolf’s courage and pride, sending warm jets of adrenaline coursing through his powerful being. His quarry had already begun to turn, clearly aware of the hunting wolf now, but Fell was long used to stalking and worrying a prey, sometimes for days on end, and he began to circle it.

Yet even as he did so Fell felt a sharp pain right in the centre of his forehead, and then, as he watched his prey through the terrible storm, his eyes opened wide. Like a ghost the human had just vanished into thin air.

ALINA WOVENWORD OPENED HER HAZEL EYES, with that fleck of green in the left pupil. The very effort was painful, for it felt as if the lids were frozen together, and as she stirred, she felt an agonising pain in her leg and cried out. Her voice surrounded her in a hollow echo, and she sensed immediately that she had fallen into some kind of cave. For now though she couldn’t see if this was so, for she was blinded by the sunlight shining straight down on her face, from somewhere high above.

Alina managed to move her head a little, out of the glare, and caught a hint of clear blue sky above her. The dawn had come, and it had stopped snowing. She wondered how long she had lain here. In truth it had been no more than half a day.

Alina’s hazel eyes were clearing, and she managed to turn on her side painfully, and looked around in utter amazement. She was inside a cave, although not a cave made of rock or stone, but of pure ice. It was about half the size of Malduk’s hovel, and the rounded ice walls were a deep turquoise blue, ribbed with green, that shimmered and sparked in the brilliant daylight about her, warming her weary being.

The sunlit cave was far warmer than it had been up on the glacier in the open, but Alina felt awe and fear to be in that place, a place as ancient as the glacier itself, and as pristine as the forming of the world. She had dreamt of fairies kingdoms or elven dales in the past, but this seemed far, far stranger.

She raised herself on her elbows, but as she tried to move, the pain came in her right leg again. She had sprained her ankle badly, and now she could hardly move. As she looked up, her heart sank too. She would never be able to climb those sheer ice walls to freedom. They rose straight up, broken only by the presence of a wide ice ledge about halfway up, but too high to reach. Alina was trapped in the ice cave.

She closed her eyes and laid her head back bitterly. Alina realised how much danger she was in, and she was thirsty and desperately hungry. She thought of how Ivan had warned her against falling asleep in the cold and then, more hopefully, of the food in Ivan’s pack. But when she opened her eyes to look for the pack, she saw that it had slid to the far corner of the ice cave and she would have to crawl across to retrieve it.

She tried and slid hopelessly on the ice, unable to get any hold. For the moment Alina was simply too exhausted, and she slumped again. Although she fought it, sleep came quickly, in a whirl of frightening dream images, and the girl lay there groaning and muttering in the ice cave, bathed in sweat that froze to her body and made her red hair spikey.

The dream that came when she closed her eyes was so real that Alina Sculcuvant felt that she wasn’t sleeping at all. She was standing in that room she had often been in in her sleep, and next to her in a cot lay that baby she thought her brother. Not a goblin, but a human child. But whereas before it had always been just a ghostly shadow, now its handsome little features were perfectly defined, and she could see its little stomach, with a thin line of hair on its belly. Alina knew then that she was not only dreaming, but remembering.

The woman with the curling black hair, her mother, was suddenly standing next to her—Roma, Roman—and she was telling her sternly to watch the crib. Alina felt confusion, for she wanted to hug her mother, yet she had talked to her so coldly. How proudly the young girl had answered though, and how proudly she had begun to stand guard over that baby boy, with his charming face and that strange little line of fur that threaded up to his belly button. But then, in the night, Alina had felt hungry and gone to the kitchen nearby, to fetch some food.

On her return Alina had found the doors to the chamber open, and to her horror, the child was gone. Suddenly Alina’s dream memories were filled with rushing figures, carrying burning tapers, and the air was torn with cries and fearful shouts, and little Alina heard the mournful cry of wolf song. Then her mother was shouting and accusing her, and the girl realised with horror that a wolf had crept into the chamber and snatched the baby away. Her own baby brother.

That awful feeling of guilt that had dogged her for so long consumed Alina entirely. Now Alina knew why guilt had hung in her heart for years, and she almost wished she were dead. Her own brother had become the food for wild animals, for wolves, because Alina had failed in her duty. She wondered suddenly if all her thoughts of a fairy past, of goblins and spirits, had been because of more than the witch’s story of a changeling, and if she had clung to them somehow to avoid confronting this terrible reality, for stories often conceal a bitter truth of life. The thought seemed to call a howl out of the shadows themselves. “Traitor!”

Alina opened her eyes with a start. Something was above her, looking down.

The great shaft of sunlight was still shining into the cave, making everything glitter and glow eerily, and as Alina peered up, her heart nearly froze. That pair of yellow gold eyes from her dreams was watching her hungrily, through a cloud of smoking breath. Yet they were real.

Alina could just see a muzzle too, and the hard glint of vicious white teeth. Her dream was coming true, and suddenly the shadow moved. The creature sprung down to the ledge above her. It was the black wolf.

Alina backed against the ice wall in horror. She knew enough of hungry dogs to know that it was hunting, and she realised in that instant that there was no escape. Alina had the knife, but it was in Ivan’s pack, and she would never reach it in time.

Alina began to shout and scream. “Go away! Get away from me!” she cried, and in return the wolf let out a furious growl. She started to kick at the floor of the ice cave with her boot in her terror, sending up shards of frozen water to try and frighten the animal away. It seemed to inflame the hunter even more, and with a dreadful growl, it suddenly jumped again.

“No!” cried Alina, lifting an arm to shield her throat, as Fell sailed towards her. For years the girl had been made to hide from danger, and now the world had caught up with her at last. To Alina’s surprise though the animal landed noisily on the floor of the cave near her, like a huge cat testing its balance on the slippery surface, and stood there with its tail raised, only a few feet away.

Fell did not strike. It had gone against all his instincts to enter that strange place at all. For hours he had watched Alina from above, and at last his hunger had got the better of him. Yet something extraordinary had happened as soon as he had landed on the ledge and seen Alina’s face properly. Fell had recognised the face he had seen before in his own vision. The boy in the water.

His heart was filled with wonder and fear, and he thought of the voice’s words about destiny. But now he was near the human, he saw that this was no boy. It was a human Drappa. And something else had come upon Fell. It was that throbbing ache in his head again, that he had first felt above, and his sight seemed to mist over. Opposite him Alina was feeling it too—a dreadful pain through her mind, like looking too long into direct sunlight.

The girl and the black wolf stared at each other in the glittering ice cave. Fell looked around at those walls of ice, and it was as if he were under a river, but although an ancient voice was telling him once again to fear a watery death, he suddenly realised that this frozen element could not drown him, or pull him down into its depths. The wolf felt less afraid.

Then to Alina’s relief and astonishment, Fell simply lowered his tail, turned, padded over to the far corner of the ice cave, and lay down, though he swung his muzzle, still watching the girl intently. Alina realised that he might change his mind at any moment and attack, and that she was now the prisoner of this dread creature. If she did one thing wrong, it could be the end of her.

The girl could see every aspect of the wild animal. The silky delicacy of his thick, black coat, the great paws and the curling claws, the thin, spindly vigour of his legs. He was at once a dog and not a dog, because Fell was much more than a dog. Mist wreathed out of his panting muzzle, and Alina felt as if she had been reborn suddenly amongst the wild beasts, in a womb made by pure cold.

She thought of the animals she had encountered on Malduk’s farm. Alina liked them far more than many of the people she had met, and from what she knew of some of the villagers, especially the men, or from stories of war, she always thought of them as far less dangerous than people. Yet even tame dogs could suddenly turn, and here was something she had never encountered, a real wild wolf. Alina shuddered as she thought of what Malduk had said of the bite of a lone black wolf under a full moon, turning a human into a vicious beast—a werewolf.

It seemed like hours that they stared at each other, the wolf and the girl, in that mysterious cave in the heart of the glacier. Fell remembered playing a game of stares as a cub by the riverbank, near their den. If Alina moved faintly, or made a sound, Fell would growl or snarl and lift his tail in warning. Their eyes watched each other, fascinated, appalled, yet drawn together by more than fate, by the ache in their heads, by the secret knowledge that these ancient enemies were not here by mere chance at all, and that they had seen each other before. It was the dreams they had shared. It was Fell’s obsession with man since he had become a Kerl, and what that voice had told him in the cave. It was Alina’s fascination with the wild. It was the Sight.

But as they looked at each other, Alina Sculcuvant noticed that although the wolf could hold her gaze far longer than Elak or Teela, he would soon have to look away too, if only for a moment. The girl realised then that her very will was grappling with his, and since she could see that the strength of her eyes made the wolf angry and nervous, she too would look away, so as not to challenge the wild creature into anger and attack. If she had been in the open, she would simply have run for her life, but here she could do nothing.

With time the ice cave began to grow darker and colder and a full moon rose in the heavens above them, while the light travelling from the stars across millions of miles of as yet uncomprehended space, began to pick out tiny specks in the failing glare of the setting sun.

Then hunger, fear, and sheer exhaustion got the better of the girl and the wolf, and they began to grow desperately tired. Alina found her eyes drooping, and thinking of the danger of sleep, and of the wolf, she had to fight to keep herself awake. Fell had begun licking his injured paw and whimpering slightly, and Alina could tell that the animal was hungry too.

“What are you, wolf?” she whispered nervously. “What are you doing here?”

Fell looked up at the echoing voice and his ears rose with a snarl.

“Why haven’t you eaten me?” asked Alina softly, trying to smile at him, but thinking herself utterly foolish.

Fell heard the strange human sounds, and although no comprehension came to him of the meaning of Alina’s words, he could sense from their tone that there was no threat in her voice, only a desire to understand.

“I’m Fell,” whispered the black wolf’s thoughts, amongst his growls. “Who are you, human Drappa? I’ve seen you before in my dream. No. I’ve seen you with the power of the Sight. But I thought you a Dragga. The boy I once …”

All Alina heard with her human ears was a deep, rumbling growl from the black wolf’s throat, but as she lay there she shivered, for it was as if some thought had just jumped into her mind, like a voice whispering to her from far away. Almost a name—Fell.

“We’re both injured,” said Alina quietly, wondering if she was somehow being enchanted, “and you’re starving like me, by the look of you.”

Then Alina remembered the food in Ivan’s pack and his knife too.

“If you let me closer to my pack, perhaps I can help you,” she said softly, looking towards it.

Fell just licked his paw again, and slowly Alina stirred. She was pleased to find that the pain in her leg had lessened and some of her strength had returned. She shifted towards him and Fell gave a warning growl, but Alina raised her hand slowly.

“It’s all right, wolf. I mean you no harm.”

Fell growled again, but he wasn’t frightened of a wounded Drappa, and his golden eyes were lit with interest. Could this vulnerable creature really have something to do with the survival of nature itself?

Alina began to pull herself slowly across the ice floor towards the black wolf and the pack nearby. She could smell the creature now, and the scent was something like a fox, but far stronger. On Fell’s icy breath she caught the odour of his last kill, and it made her recoil instantly. Alina sensed the power of the animal too, held in the living vigour of his body and muzzle and teeth, and she knew that if she moved too fast she would be dead.

But Fell let her come and open the pack, pulling out Ivan’s knife and the meat. It was a fine piece of deer, smoked into tenderness by Ivan’s loving wife, and Alina quickly pulled it apart with her hands. There was a small piece in her left hand and a much larger in her right, and with a smile she threw the larger towards the wolf.

It landed just in front of Fell’s snout and his eyes opened wide. Though it was cooked, Fell was far too hungry to resist the gift of meat from this strange Drappa. Alina nibbled at her own piece of venison, feeling the life-giving juices begin to churn in her stomach. It was oddly embarrassing to be eating in front of the wolf, but Fell opened his jaws and snapped up the venison, whole. In three or four powerful bites, it was chewed enough to disappear in a gulp down his hungry throat.