Fell (The Sight 2) (14 page)

Yet as Alina slept at Fell’s side, the vision changed to fields and gardens and orchards, well tended to by laughing men and women. The wolf’s growls became calmer, as did Alina’s breathing, and Fell thought of a story of long ago, about the clever wolf Fren, the hero of all young wolves, and of his best friend, the red girl. The story had told of how Fren had saved the child from his brother Barl, and how he had killed Barl and so been marked by Tor forever, in the centre of his forehead, with a difficult power. The power of the Sight.

Fell looked at Alina’s short red hair and wondered if her very presence had turned the vision to one of beauty and peace. Then Fell remembered something Kar had spoken of long ago, a vision of man that Larka had given him alone. Not man humbled into meekness or despair, by the anguish of his sensitivity, and not man as just a violent, fighting animal destroying all before him. But man as a Guardian. A Guardian of being and nature itself, as strong and healthy as the wolf that chases the wild deer, unashamed, yet as wise, heroic, and loving as a god. That vision had been of men and women, but men and women with the eyes of wolves. Now Fell helped a human. Perhaps it was a vision both could live up to.

Yet the images seemed to change back again, and the wolf started to snarl as he began to see deserts and dry water beds, the earth cracked and broken and dying.

He swung his head suddenly towards the human, with an angry growl. Was it because of her kind that this might come to pass in the world? If it was to be so, why should the wolf help the human child? The wind howled and suddenly Fell blinked. That voice he had heard in his cave seemed to be there again.

“Fell.”

As Fell listened, he heard no more words, but he thought once more of a Guardian, who knew the deepest mysteries of the Sight. Could such a being really exist outside Kar’s vision, like some secret god, in the lands beyond the forests? Even as he thought it, Fell looked on in amazement.

There was Larka again, in the ice, but now her face was gigantic in the cavern, a hundred feet high, and she seemed to be looking down kindly on them both. Larka’s image lasted only for a moment, before melting back into the bluey white, but her fleeting presence had awed her brother, and made him guilty for his thoughts about the child.

When Alina opened her eyes again, woken by the sound of a stalactite falling from the ice ceiling above, the wolf was gone. She felt the sting of loneliness and sorrow, but the swirl of dreams took her once more. Her short young life had been so full of pain and mystery already, so full of the anger and hate of people, that she hardly cared anymore. She wanted it to end at last, and the sleep of eternity to enfold a changeling in its tender arms.

The girl felt it near her face first, then smelt something sweet and sickly fill her nostrils. Alina had smelt that sickening smell before, when she had slaughtered the sheep with Malduk outside the house at the Christ Mass. It was the smell of blood and raw meat. A kill.

Her senses recoiled in disgust and she opened her eyes to see Fell standing before her again. His tail was raised and his black muzzle was red with blood. Fell looked strong and powerful with the kill, and beside Alina lay a haunch of meat. It was part of a mountain goat that the wolf had found and hunted on the very edge of the glacier. Alina blinked in horror as she looked at it. She knew what the wolf intended her to do, but something deep inside her refused. Then Alina felt the familiar sensation in her forehead.

“Eat, man cub.”

“I cannot, Fell.”

“Would you give up so easily, little woman?” growled the wolf angrily. “It’ll bring you strength and life.”

Alina blinked slowly. The meat was warm and wet with blood.

“Take it down, Drappa, or you will go to join Tor and Fenris sooner than you should.”

Alina was human indeed and no changeling, and thus, as Larka had shown the animals up at Harja, her instincts for survival were just as strong, perhaps even stronger than Fell’s. Or would have been if she’d had an easier journey of it. Should she fight? Could she? She thought of little Mia urging her on and sat up a little.

Alina pulled a thin sliver of flesh from the prize and she blanched and curled up her face in disgust as she raised the raw goat to her freezing lips.

“How fragile you are, man cub. Take it. It’s good.”

Alina put the bloody meat to her lips, and tearing away a little piece with her teeth, she started to chew. She almost retched, but held it down, and felt strength returning. Alina was loath to eat the raw meat though, and she suddenly saw something else on the ground beside her. It was a large root, of the kind that Fell had once seen deer digging for, and which he had scented near where the goat had been. He had had to scrabble through the snow to get to it.

“Oh, Fell.”

Alina picked it up and, touched by the wolf’s determination to help her, felt a new determination in her own mind. She bit into it hungrily, and though it tasted acrid, she felt even stronger. She sat up a little more and persisted.

“Good, man child. You may prefer roots, but one sun I shall teach you the ways of the wild hunter. The true power and freedom of the Putnar. Of nature.”

Fell lay down beside her again and watched like a Dragga guarding a cub in the den, as the young woman took that primitive meal, and soon life was flowing once more through Alina’s warming veins, making her cheeks glow.

“There,” came Fell’s pleased mind. “You’ve done well, human. Like that man cub long ago.”

Alina turned her head questioningly. Her lips were mouthing silently now as she ate.

“Man cub?”

“You could not know the story, human. I almost think it a fable myself. It was a child, a baby Dragga, stolen by the Varg to protect it from the she-wolf Morgra. My aunt. It was part of a legend.”

Alina looked at Fell in astonishment.

“Stolen? From where, Fell?”

“From a human village, below a castle on a mountaintop. The Stone Den, we call it. The empty place, whose hundreds of steps my aunt Morgra once climbed. Though there was nothing at the top.”

Alina’s eyes opened even wider. The fairy castle of her dreams and nightmares, floating amongst the clouds. Could it have something to do with her?

“But why? Why was it taken?”

“As I said, it was part of the legend of the Sight. It was marked, like you. A wolf called Tsarr found it first.”

“Marked? How?”

“A natural mark. A little strip of fur on its belly. Like wolf fur.”

Alina’s thoughts flamed into clarity.

“My brother,” she cried. “I think it was my baby brother, Fell.”

Fell looked back hard at Alina.

“Your brother? How can this be, human? I carried it on my own back.”

As they stared at each other once more, and caught the flicker in each other’s eyes, with those shards of green, they both knew it was true. Their fates had always been bound together by the Sight.

“Yes,” thought the wolf. “And you have the Sight too, human. You asked me of your destiny, and now you are stronger, I shall tell you.”

Alina blinked and shivered nervously.

“If the words I heard are true, you are somehow connected to the survival of nature itself.”

Alina Sculcuvant’s eyes opened in utter disbelief. It couldn’t be. What was the wolf saying?

“How?” she whispered fearfully, staring helplessly about the chasm. “Why?”

“That I don’t know, Alina. There is one who might know though, if he exists. The Guardian.”

“Guardian?”

Alina thought she remembered a giant face in her dreams, and she felt as if the wolf was suddenly talking of God himself.

“The Guardian of the mysteries of the Sight,” said Fell, though doubting himself. “I would find him and reveal your destiny.”

But Alina was thinking of a different destiny to her own now.

“What happened to him, Fell? My brother.”

“Bran we called him, after the Sikla of our pack. He brought the Lera a vision, a vision I just saw again.”

Alina stirred. She had seen such strange things herself as she slept in the cave.

“But the child was returned, by me, safely to the village beneath the Stone Den, to its own kind. To its mother with the curling black mane.”

The curling black mane. Alina knew that it was the woman of her dreams, and so that the woman must be her mother. There was confusion at that, but Alina felt as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders too. The child, her brother, who she herself had failed to protect in its cot, wasn’t dead. He hadn’t been eaten by wolves after all. Suddenly the feeling that she was a traitor, that she had been sent justly into exile, seemed to leave her.

“Oh, Fell,” came Alina’s grateful mind, “I don’t know how this is, or how I’ve met you and can understand you, but I know now that I have to find him. And my mother too. Not goblins or fairies, but real people. Find them and remember.”

“Where, human?”

“What was it like,” Alina asked suddenly, “this village where you left my brother?”

“Simple enough. Like many I’ve seen in my travels. With a wooden stockade and wooden dens.”

Alina shook her head. That was strange. It sounded like Moldov, and hardly connected to a great lord like Vladeran in Castelu, or some high destiny.

“I must go that way, Fell.”

“Then I shall come with you, human, and we shall learn together and seek out the Guardian. A Drappa alone in the wild always goes in danger.”

“This Stone Den, is it far?”

Fell licked his black wolf lips, cleaning the goat blood from his jaws, and wondered what the root had tasted like.

“Many paw marks, across the mountains. It will take us half the winter.”

Alina was already pushing on her elbows, struggling to get up.

“Peace, human,” growled Fell. “Don’t waste your strength. You know nothing of moving in the wild. You must be neither hasty nor foolish.”

But Alina was standing. She swayed slightly.

“Very well, Fell. But now I must be in the sun again and heal.”

Fell suddenly remembered that Larka had once said that the greatest power of the Sight was to heal, as Alina punched through the hole and rose from that icy tomb once more. The day opened before her, a sweeping vision of rocky crags and clear white mountains, bounded by the bright blue sky. The storm was over.

A bird was winging through the distance, a beautiful snow hawk, and Alina felt a sudden, glorious sense of freedom and elation, as someone would who has walked through darkness to discover only the light, and the marvellous beauty of being. She must have stood there for a good hour, her spiky red hair thrown back to the brilliant sunlight, drawing it into her skin and being, like a flower opening to the summer. She swallowed in the fresh clean breeze, as if gulping water, and wanted to laugh and shout with pure joy.

Fell stayed in the giant cave, pondering in his shadowy mind their strange meeting and this news of the child’s link to another baby, but feeling an odd foreboding in that ice cathedral, as he finished the goat and left Alina alone on the glacier.

The girl did not notice the men coming over the brow of the mountain. Their path was silent across the snowy ice, and by the time she turned, they were already on her. There stood six villagers, carrying staves and knives.

Barbat was there and another shepherd Alina knew called Fermin, who had always been kind enough to her. But in their middle stood Malduk, holding his back painfully. It had been a bitter struggle for the old shepherd to maintain that pursuit, but his hate and will had driven him on. And his fear of Ranna too.

“So, changeling,” cried Malduk, “you survived the storm by some witchcraft. But you’ll not escape us now.”

Alina could not believe her eyes, but, though stunned, she noticed how wary the other men seemed of her.

“What have you to say, murderer?” hissed Barbat. “After Ranna and Malduk gave you succour for so long. Traitor.”

“Lies,” Alina WovenWord cried furiously, and her eyes glittered contemptuously. All the fear that she had felt for Malduk had suddenly vanished. “Ranna’s the murderer. Stabbing Bogdan in the back with my stolen knife and stealing his dagger.”

The other men looked at each other questioningly and turned to Malduk, but Barbat spoke again.

“And why should she do such a thing?”

“So you would think it was me, of course, and hunt me.”

Malduk smiled thinly. “Those are the lies, changeling. And you’re good at lies, indeed, SkeinTale. I saved your life, you ungrateful brute. Why should we want you dead?”

Alina slipped her hand to her pocket, but realised the parchment was no longer there. She had consigned it to the flames. All proof had gone.

“Because of Lord Vladeran’s secret. That he tried to kill me once too.”

The other shepherds were looking at one another wonderingly now.

“Lord Vladeran?” whispered Fermin.

“Wicked boy,” cried Malduk, feeling a terror that Alina should mention the lord at all. “Talking of high lords. You besmirch even the name of Vladeran.” Malduk was smiling at the others and spoke loudly and with scorn to cover his fear.

Barbat had stepped forwards.

“What’s this talk of Vladeran, boy?” he hissed. “What have such high folk as Vladeran to do with you?”

“Yes,” said Fermin. “Do you speak of it because Vladeran’s soldiers have been in these parts again? You heard them outside the church, didn’t you, when that man was talking of Vladeran and the Lady Romana?”

As soon as Fermin mentioned the name “Romana,” Alina went deathly cold.

“The Lady Romana?”

“Lord Vladeran’s wife,” said Fermin. “That’s how this got into your head, isn’t it?”

Alina felt a yawning despair, and she wanted the ice field to open again beneath her and swallow her up, or goblins to fly down and snatch her away. That was it. Not Roma, a Tsingani name, not Roman, but Romana. The name she associated with that woman with a curling black mane. Her own mother. This woman Romana was Lord Vladeran’s wife. Could it really be? Then Vladeran was her father, and her own parents, human parents, had tried to have her murdered. Alina’s legs went weak.

“Come back with us now, Alin,” said Fermin suddenly, “and you’ll be judged fairly, boy. We’ll see if there’s truth in what you say.”