Blood Song (7 page)

Although grateful that the test took place in summer he was starting to chill from the swim. Master Hutril had taught them that the best way to dry off without benefit of a fire was to run, the heat of the body would turn the water to steam. He set off at a steady run, trying not to sprint, knowing he would need his energy in the hours to come. He was soon embraced by the cool dark of the forest and found himself instinctively scanning the shadows, a habit he had acquired during the many hours of hunting and hiding. Master Hutril’s words came back to him:
A smart enemy seeks the shadow and stays quiet.
Vaelin suppressed a shiver and ran on.

He ran for a solid hour, keeping a steady pace and ignoring the growing ache in his legs. The river water was quickly replaced by sweat and his chill receded. He checked his direction with occasional glances at the sun and tried to fight the sensation of time passing quicker than it should. The thought of being pushed out of the gates with a handful of coins and nowhere to go was both terrifying and incomprehensible. He had a brief and equally nightmarish vision of turning up on his father’s doorstep, pathetically clutching his coins and begging to be let in. He forced the image away and kept running.

He took a break after covering about five miles, perching on a log to drink from his flask and catch a breath. He wondered how his companions were faring, were they running like him or stumbling lost amongst the trees.
The others are not to be helped.
Was it a warning, or a threat? Certainly there were dangers in the forest but nothing to pose a serious threat to the boys of the Order, toughened by months of training.

He pondered for a short while, finding no answers, before stoppering his flask and rising, still scanning the shadows… He froze.

The wolf sat on its haunches ten short yards away, bright green eyes regarding him with silent curiosity. Its pelt was grey and silver, and it was very large. Vaelin had never been this close to a wolf before, his only glimpses vague loping shadows seen through the mists of the morning, a rare sight so close to the city. He was struck by the size of the animal, the power evident in the muscle beneath its fur. The wolf tilted its head as Vaelin returned his gaze. He felt no fear, Master Hutril had told them that stories of wolves stealing babies and savaging shepherd boys were myths, “Wolf’ll leave you be if you leave him be,” he said. But still, the wolf was big, and its eyes…

The wolf sat, silent, still, a faint breeze ruffling the silver-grey mass of its fur, and Vaelin felt something new stir in his boy’s heart. “You’re beautiful,” he told the wolf in a whisper.

It was gone in an instant, turning and leaping into the foliage quicker than he could follow. It barely made a sound.

He felt a rare smile on his lips and stored the memory of the wolf firmly in his head, knowing he would never forget it.

The forest was called the Urlish, a twenty mile thick and seventy mile long band of trees stretching from the northern walls of Varinshold to the foothills of the Renfaelin border. Some said the King had a love for the forest, that it had captured his soul somehow. It was forbidden to take a tree from the Urlish without a King’s Command and only those families who had lived within its confines for three generations were allowed to remain. From his meagre knowledge of the Realm’s history Vaelin knew war had come here once, a great battle between the Renfaelins and Asraelins raging amongst the trees for a day and a night. The Asraelins won and the Lord of Renfael had to bow the knee to King Janus, which was why his heirs were now called Fief-Lords and had to give money and soldiers to the King whenever he wanted them. It was a story his mother told him when she had succumbed to his pestering for more information on his father’s exploits. It was here that he had won the King’s regard and been raised to Sword of the Realm. His mother was vague on the details, saying simply that his father was a great warrior and had been very brave.

He found himself sweeping his gaze across the forest floor as he ran, eyes searching for the glitter of metal, hoping to find some token from the battle, an arrowhead or perhaps a dagger or even a sword. He wondered if Sollis would let him keep any souvenirs and, thinking it unlikely, began to ponder the best hiding places on offer in the House…

Snap!

He ducked, rolled, came up on his feet, crouched behind the trunk of an oak, the whisper of the arrow’s flight hissing through the ferns. The sound of a bowstring was an unmistakable warning for a boy like him. He calmed his pounding heart with effort and strained to listen for further signals.

Was it a hunter? Perhaps he had been mistaken for a deer. He discounted the thought instantly. He was no deer and any hunter could tell the difference. Someone had tried to kill him. He realised he had unhitched his bow and notched an arrow, all done instinctively. He rested his back against the trunk and waited, listening to the forest, letting it tell him who was coming for him.
Nature has a voice,
Hutril’s words.
Learn to hear it and you’ll never be lost and no man will ever take you unawares.

He opened his ears to the voice of the forest, the sigh of the wind, the rustle of the leaves and the creak of the branches. No bird song. It meant a predator was close. It could be one man, could be more. He waited for the tell tale crack of branch underfoot or the scrape of bootleather on soil but nothing came. If his enemy was on the move he knew how to mask the sound. But he had other senses and the forest could tell him many things. He closed his eyes and inhaled softly through his nose.
Don’t suck the air in like a pig at a trough,
Hutril had cautioned him once.
Give your nose time to sort the scent. Be patient.

He let his nose do the work, tasting the mingled perfume of bluebells in bloom, rotting vegetation, animal droppings… and sweat. Man’s sweat. The wind was coming from his left, carrying the scent. It was impossible to tell whether the bowman was waiting or moving.

It was the faintest sound, little more than a rustle of cloth, but to Vaelin it was a shout. He darted from behind the oak in a crouch, drawing and loosing the shaft in a single motion, before scooting back into cover, rewarded with a short grunt of pained surprise.

He lingered for the briefest second.
Stay or flee?
The compulsion to run was strong, the dark embrace of the forest suddenly a welcome refuge. But he knew he couldn’t.
The Order doesn’t run,
Sollis had said.

He peered out from behind his oak, taking a second before he saw it, the gull-fletched shaft of his arrow sticking upright from the carpet of ferns about fifteen yards away. He notched another arrow and approached in a low crouch, eyes scanning constantly for other enemies, ears alive with the voice of the forest, nose twitching.

The man was dressed in dirty green trews and tunic, he had an ash bow clutched in his hand with a crow feathered shaft notched in the string, a sword strapped across his back, a knife in his boot and Vaelin’s arrow in his throat. He was quite dead. Stepping closer Vaelin saw the growing patch of blood spreading out from the neck wound, a lot of blood.
Caught the big vein,
Vaelin realised.
And I thought I was a poor archer.

He laughed, high and shrill, then convulsed and vomited, collapsing to all fours and retching uncontrollably.

It was a few moments before the shock and nausea receded enough for him to think clearly. This man, this dead man, had tried to kill him.
Why?
He had never seen him before. Was he an outlaw? Some homeless footpad thinking he had found an easy victim in a lone boy.

He forced himself to look at the dead man again, noting the quality of his boots and the stitching on his clothes. He hesitated then lifted the dead man’s right hand, lying slack on the bowstring. It was a bowman’s hand; rough palms with calluses on the tips of the first two fingers. This man had made his living with the bow. Vaelin doubted any outlaw would be so practised, or so well dressed.

A sudden, sickening thought popped into his head:
Is it part of the test?

For a moment he was almost convinced. What better way to weed out the chaff? Seed the forest with assassins and see who survived.
Think of all the gold coins they’d save.
But somehow he couldn’t bring himself to believe it. The Order was brutal but not murderous.

Then why?

He shook his head. It was a mystery he wouldn’t solve by staying here. Where there was one there could be more. He would get back to the Order House and ask Master Sollis for guidance… If he lived that long. He got shakily to his feet, spitting the last dregs of gorge from his mouth, taking a final look at the dead man and debating whether to take his sword or his knife but deciding it would be a mistake. For some reason he suspected it may be necessary to deny knowledge of the killing which led him to briefly consider retrieving the arrow from the man’s neck but he couldn’t face the prospect of drawing the shaft from the flesh. Instead he contented himself with snipping off the fletching with his hunting knife, the gull feathers were a clear signal that the man had been killed by a member of the Order. He fought a fresh bout of nausea at the grinding sensation of the arrow as he grasped it and the wet, sucking sound it made as he sawed at the shaft. It was done quickly but seemed to take an age.

He pocketed the fletching and backed away from the corpse, scraping his boots on the soil to erase any tracks, before turning and resuming his run. His legs felt leaden and he stumbled several times before his body remembered the smooth, loping stride learned through months of training on the practice ground. The slack, lifeless features of the dead man flashed through his mind continually but he shook the image away, suppressing it ruthlessly.
He tried to kill me. I won’t grieve for a man who would seek to murder a boy.
But he found he couldn’t deafen himself to the words his mother had once shouted at his father:
Your stench of blood sickens me.

Night seemed to fall in an instant, probably because he dreaded it. He found himself seeing bowmen lurking in every shadow, more than once he leapt for shelter from assassins which turned out to be a bushes or tree stumps when he looked closer. He had rested only once since killing the assassin, a brief, feverish sip of water behind the broad trunk of a beech, his eyes darting about constantly for enemies. It felt safer to run, a moving target was harder to hit. But this vague sense of security evaporated when the darkness came, it was like running in a void where every step brought the threat of a painful fall. He had tripped twice, sprawling in a tangle of weapons and fear, before accepting that he would have to walk from now on.

The bearings he took from the north star by finding the odd clearing or hauling himself up a tree trunk told him he was holding a steady course southward but how far he had come or the distance he still had to cover he couldn’t tell. He peered ahead with increasing desperation, all the time hoping to glimpse the silver sheen of the river through the trees. It was when he had stopped to get another bearing that he saw the fire. A single flickering blob of orange in the black-blue mass of the forest.

Keep running.
He almost followed the instinctive command, turning away and taking another stride toward the south, but stopped. None of the boys from the Order would light a fire during the test, they just didn’t have time. It could be a coincidence, just some of the King’s Foresters camped out for the night. But something made him doubt it, a murmur of wrongness in the back of his mind. It was a strange sensation, almost musical.

He turned around, unslinging his bow and notching an arrow, before beginning a cautious advance. He knew he was taking a risk, both in investigating the fire and indulging in a delay when his deadline for getting back to the House could not be far away. But he had to know.

The blob grew into a fire slowly, flickering red and gold in the infinite blackness. He stopped, opening himself to the song of the forest again, hunting through the nocturnal resonance until he caught them: voices. Male. Adult. Two men. Quarrelling.

He crept closer, using the hunter’s walk taught by Master Hutril, lifting his foot a hair’s breadth from the ground and sliding it forward and to the side before laying it down softly after tentatively checking the soil for any branches or twigs that could give him away in an instant. The voices became clearer as he closed on the camp, confirming his suspicions. Two men, engaged in bitter argument.

“….’asn’t stopped bleedin’!” a self-pitying whine, its owner as yet invisible. “Look, it’s gushing like a slit hog…”

“Stop fiddling with it then, shit brain!” an exasperated hiss. Vaelin could see this one, a stocky man seated to the right of the fire, the sight of the sword on his back and the bow propped close to his hand provoking an icy shiver.
No coincidence.
He had a sack open on the floor between his booted feet, studying its contents intently in between casting tired insults at his companion.

“Little bastard!” the unseen whiner continued, deaf to the admonishments of his stocky companion. “Playing dead, vicious, sneaky little bastard.”

“You were warned they were tough,” the stocky man said. “Should’ve put another iron-head in him to make sure before you got so close.”

“Got him in square in the neck, didn’t I? Should’ve been enough. I’ve seen grown men go down like a sack of spuds from a wound like that. Not that little shit though. Wish we’d kept him breathing a little longer…”

“You disgusting animal.” There was little venom in the stocky man’s words. He was increasingly preoccupied with the contents of the sack, a frown creasing his broad forehead. “Y’know, I’m still not sure it’s him.”

Vaelin, fighting to keep his heart steady, shifted his gaze to the sack, noting the roundness of its contents and the dark wet stain on the lower half. A sudden, overpowering chill of realisation gripped him, fearing he would faint as the forest swayed around him and he fought down a gasp of horror, the sound undoubtedly an invite for a quick death.