The Blood of Ten Chiefs (32 page)

**Blood guilt .**

Bearclaw staggered. His hands clamped the sides of his head. He plunged sideways into Strongbow, who had followed him through the forest at a slight distance.

"Bearclaw!" Woodlock caught the chief's elbow.

Something was in his mind. Bearclaw knew that for certain now. "Stay back," he choked, wrenching away from the others and stumbling to the center of the clearing.

**Dangerous. **

Grimacing, his teeth bared again, he forced his hands down and willed himself to relax. Something was trying to overpower him—or contact him. There on the mossy mound in the clearing, he stood still.

Strongbow and Woodlock shared an uncomfortable glance-almost an embarrassed awareness of each other—and immediately looked once again at Bearclaw's back. He turned away from them. They couldn't see his face at all.

Bearclaw no longer fought the invasion. He gave himself to the impassioned sending as it overwhelmed his thoughts and replaced them. He felt nauseated, disoriented. Pictures of carnage flooded his mind—images of mutilation, of blades or teeth chiseling through bone while on the run—panic— splattering flesh—blood.

Were they images of madness? Or intent? —And which was worse?

"There's something out there."

The others stiffened behind him.

**Humans?**

"Not humans. Something else."

Woodlock unconsciously moved closer to Strongbow. "And it's sending? What could do that?"

**Animal?**

"One of our wolves?" Woodlock offered.

Bearclaw frowned. "Our wolves don't send like ... like what I'm getting."

"What are you getting?"

"Images ... no—feelings. Like the hunt and the kill."

"Something out there means to kill?"

"Or has already," Bearclaw concluded.

Woodlock scanned the forestscape with new apprehension. "And the humans are blaming us ... Bearclaw, what can we do? Reason with them?"

**Invite them home for a game of stones,** Strongbow sent on a sting of bitterness.

Woodlock's anxiety made him face the archer boldly now. "But I don't want to die fighting a cause that's not ours! The Wolfriders shouldn't pay for something we didn't do."

Insulted, Strongbow pushed past him and confronted Bearclaw. **What is it? Can you tell?**

The night became a bodiless enemy, its silence like an animal's throaty growl. The three Wolfriders stood alone in its midst. Even Woodlock and Strongbow imagined they felt something—perhaps only because Bearclaw did.

"A bear," the chief murmured, "or a big cat ... a longtooth—maggots! I don't know. Maybe something we've never seen before. It's out there, hiding or waiting. ..."

"But how can it be sending?" The tremor came out in Woodlock's words no matter how hard he tried to steady it. He forced himself to unclench his fists, loathing the images of Rainsong's beautiful face crumpled in fear when she learned of this. He longed to have the problem solved and finished before he had to go back to the holt and tell her what was going on. Bearclaw would surely order him home when things got bad—he always did. Woodlock knew he was nothing with a blade and only fair with a bow, but he shuddered at the idea of waiting at the holt to see if death was coming tonight. "If it killed humans, how can we defeat it? And if it hurt them, why would they head toward our trees?"

"Maybe they don't know what it is either," Bearclaw said. "If you were human and you didn't know what animal hurt you, what would you think?"

Woodlock stared at him and tried to put it together. Bearclaw waited, hardly even breathing, forcing his tribe-mate to piece out the problem. It was hard for a Wolfrider to think like a human, to imagine life among the animals and trees while not really a part of them. The humans hid from the night— usually—and they either hunted or feared all the creatures of the forest. Woodlock's task was a strain. Bearclaw continued to wait.

"No ..." Woodlock's eyes drifted closed. "Our wolves!"

**Our wolves?** Strongbow hadn't put it together yet, either. **What do you mean? What do the humans want with our—** He stopped suddenly, and nearly choked on his own sending. His eyes glazed with sudden knowledge.

Bearclaw looked at him. "Now you know. And Woodlock's right. We shouldn't pay for another beast's kill. And neither should our wolves. We've got to get the humans off our trail. Woodlock, go back to the holt and tell our pack to move into the hills and stay away for a few days."

"But if we have to fight—"

**We can't fight the humans without our wolves!**

"Swallow it, Strongbow! We'll fight them on squirrel-back if I say we will. Get going, Woodlock."

"All right ... Bearclaw?"

"What?"

This time Woodlock's message was sent rather than spoken, excluding Strongbow as he gazed at his chief. **We'll follow you, no matter what happens.**

Touched to calmness, Bearclaw breathed deeply and squeezed Woodlock's shoulder. Then he gestured him off into the woods toward the holt.

He and his archer stood in the core of their home forest, between their holt and the encroaching humans, whose torchfire they could now smell strongly as it wafted through the trees.

"We've got to find the longtooth," Bearclaw said.

**First sensible thing you've said all night.**

Bearclaw hovered a moment before leading the way in the direction the poignant sending had come from. "Let's hope it's not the last."

The images of fear and hurt and flesh flayed to the bone led Bearclaw unerringly to the area of forest where the beasts lay together in their thicket. As he came nearer, he moved more slowly, trying to piece together more and more of the images as they came to him. They no longer caused him pain, but something was touching the deepmost parts of his being—even his soulname fluttered toward the surface now.

And that frightened him.

Could he be so much beast himself that a longtooth or a demon-beast or something with thoughts so horrible could actually reach his soulname? Joyleaf knew his soulname, as a Recognized lifemate must. And Crest had known it before she died. She had been his wolf for moons uncounted, and when she saved his life during an attack by enraged waterbirds in the far lakes, Bearclaw had given her his soulname in gratitude. It was part of the Way, as Strongbow would have insisted, but it was also a matter of choice.

Now, though, he had no choice. His soulname floated near the beast's sending star at the top of his mind, swimming in and out of the kill-thoughts, ready to jump into one of them and be taken freely by the invader. All at once he had something else to guard besides his holt and his tribe. The barriers to his personal self were being clawed down. Only constantly reminding himself that he was chief and had responsibilities kept him from fleeing in the opposite direction, farther and farther from the distressing thought waves gushing over him now. Behind him, Strongbow was still apparently unaffected. This sending came only to Bearclaw. So close now, he ached to know what beast this was who stirred his soulname and almost caught it.

Before them, still many paces away, lay a giant fallen tree, sheathed in vines. Its plate of roots rose high out of the ground. Evidently some cataclysm of the earth had pushed it out, and it had collapsed, sacrificing itself to the nourishment of other life. Now it hid the source of Bearclaw's shredded perceptions. He stopped. Behind him, Strongbow stopped too.

"There," the chief said quietly. "It's there."

**Will it attack?**

"If it has to," Bearclaw whispered.

In his mind he saw a blackness that had life—a creature more dark than a bottomless pit, blacker than the starless sky, driven by instinct and yet—more than instinct. It knew the difference between sense and impulse. It had chosen to send; he felt that clearly.

**We'll have to kill it.** Strongbow drew an arrow. **I'll do it.**

"Stay where you are. I haven't decided yet."

**What needs deciding? It's the only way we can prove to the humans that we didn't hurt them.**

"I'm getting tired of you. Now stay here."

**You're not going alone.**

"I'll go as I please," the chief snapped, teeth showing. Moment by moment he became more like the images he saw.

He started forward, slowly, but a hand in the crook of his elbow pulled him back. Astonished, he looked to his side and saw the face of embodied determination.

**You are not,** Strongbow sent, **going alone.**

Mellowed by the disorientation in his mind, Bearclaw let himself be overcome by Strongbow's willingness to face the unknown at his side. Others would not be so willing, he knew. It was a gift. He would accept it. "Then, follow."

He moved once again toward the wall of vines.

The two elves moved carefully, one step at a time, around the huge plate of torn roots, around to the other side where hedgy overgrowth concealed their quarry. Strongbow kept his bow nocked and ready to fire. A longtooth or a bear would attack instantly, without warning. He couldn't be sure of Bearclaw's condition, with all this sending and confusion, but he was sure of himself and kept the arrow leveled over Bearclaw's shoulder.

"I feel pain," Bearclaw said, hushed, "but not body-pain."

**What, then?**

"Heart-pain."

Strongbow resisted the cold shiver that ran down his arms. **Didn't know you had a heart.**

Even in the midst of "heart-pain," Bearclaw smiled his wicked smile.

They stopped abruptly as a faint glow of torch flame washed across the vines before them. The humans were coming closer. Time was sifting away.

The elves froze still and remained still until the torch glow passed. Each of them felt the new urgency—having passed them, the humans were now between them and the holt. If anything was to be done, it must be done soon.

Too soon for Strongbow.

He nudged Bearclaw out of the way and approached the vine hedge quickly, before Bearclaw could shake off the numbness of the beast's sending.

The chief blinked, his concentration broken. To his horror, Bearclaw watched his archer shove through the vines and take aim at a looming shape that rose before them there. He heard the twang of the bowstring and a distinct thud as the arrow struck not flesh, but the hard ground. Incredible! Strongbow had missed—

Sounds of struggle flashed at him, both into his ears and into his mind through sending. Strongbow was sucked into the vines. The leaves closed up.

"Strongbow!" Bearclaw rushed forward, eyes so wide they burned. He grated to a stop at the vine hedge, gripped by a notion no Wolfrider had had before; the beast sent whole-thought into his mind!

Reversing the course, he sent, **Don't hurt! We can help!**

He barely understood why he would send such a message. Only now did he realize that the rabid sendings had been messages of desperation, not of intention. Help what? Why had he told the beast they would help it? What could Wolfriders do for a longtooth?

The vines rustled violently, and there was a great gush of breath as Strongbow's form catapulted over the root plate and crashed through dense foliage. Bearclaw drew back his sending star instantly. "Hairballs—!" he swore, and rushed through the leaves, thrashing around until he found Strongbow crumpled beside a stump. Bearclaw shuddered as he lifted the archer to his feet. If Strongbow had fallen a pace farther, the stump's jagged spires would have impaled him.

Strongbow's eyes were squeezed shut in pain. His arms coiled around his ribs. Bearclaw got a good hold of him and dragged him deeper into the woods, away from the fallen tree. He leaned Strongbow against an outcropping of rock and checked for bleeding.

"Look at me," the chief demanded when he could find no cuts—only red tooth marks scoring the archer's rib cage. Bearclaw tore a leaf from a nearby frond and pressed it to Strongbow's ribs. "You all right?'

Strongbow struggled through a brief nod. He leaned heavily against the rock wall and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, still breathing heavily.

"That was stupid," Bearclaw said.

**No stupider ... than doing nothing...**

"You don't know what you're talking about," Bearclaw told him. "The longtooth doesn't want to kill us or the humans. I thought it was sending me dreams of killing, but it wasn't."

**They were dreams of flowers, then.**

"They were dreams," the chief said firmly, "of fear. There's a difference. They're images of what it thinks the humans will do to it."

Strongbow straightened up with effort, still holding his sore ribs. **And what the humans will do when they reach the holt. Don't forget that. We have to kill the longtooth and put it in front of the humans. They'll find it and leave us alone. It's the only way.**

"There's more than one way!" Bearclaw bellowed. "If the longtooth has killed, then it's entitled to its kill."

**Then, what do we do, great chief? Offer them our home, wolves, and cubs instead?**

"Idiot! You're impossible to talk to!"

**And you're perfect proof that the blood of chiefs carries no chief's wisdom. You'll never be half the chief your father was.**

Bearclaw prepared to rip away Strongbow's thoughts, lips peeling back from white teeth; but something stopped the flood of accusations and tirades that gurgled in his throat. He looked at Strongbow's battered form, saw the concern as well as the challenge in the archer's half-hidden eyes beneath the headband, and shook with the effort of pulling the anger back within himself. He raged so in his mind that even the beast's sending was crowded out.

In a low kind of firmness, he intoned, "You'll say the same thing to my son some day." With a gesture that ended the argument, he stomped a cake of mud from the bottom of his boot and scraped the sole with the long metal knife he called New Moon. He hadn't even realized the blade was drawn. Drawn ... on Strongbow?

"Come on," he said, and turned back toward the fallen tree, already thinking about how he would deal with the beast within it.

He was halfway back to the fallen tree before he realized Strongbow was not following. Bearclaw turned to look.

A different being stood there against the rocks. The harshness was gone from the angular face. The archer's arm hung limp at his side now. His eyes were fastened unseeing on the ground.