Fell (The Sight 2) (37 page)

The snarls were terrible, and in any normal fight one Varg would have retreated into submission immediately, for nature’s first art is to warn off the danger of battle, but this was a fight to the death. First Fell was knocked backwards and Jalgan nearly caught him in his throat, but Fell rolled away and, leaping up again, he sprung forwards and knocked Jalgan back in turn. But his bite missed too, and the wolves both sprang to their feet and faced off again. On and on it went, their terrible duel, but as the sun began to dip, once again Jalgan saw an opening, and lashing out with his right paw, he caught Fell in the side and raked his claws viciously right down the black wolf’s body.

“No, brother,” gasped Larka helplessly.

Fell yelped, and now his great black shape was spattered with blood. His own paw caught Jalgan in the muzzle and opened that brutal face, but as they fought on, it was Jalgan’s size and strength that began to tell in his favour. Both wolves grew tired, and slowed too, but Fell’s wound was far worse, and his strength was being sapped faster.

Jalgan could see it, and knew that it was only a matter of time. The ranks of the terrible Vengerid had begun to growl approvingly. Then, as they sprang apart, Jalgan turned to see that Fell had faltered. His right paw had buckled under him in exhaustion and he had nearly fallen over.

“No, Fell!” gasped Tarlar bitterly. For she knew now that she loved the wolf.

With his last ounce of strength, Jalgan leapt through the air in triumph at the failing wolf, and it was as if his mind could already see the vulnerable opening at the back of Fell’s neck that would end the business forever. As if Jalgan had the Sight himself to see it with.

Fell had made an oath to Jalgan, and he did not use the powers of the Sight, but at the moment before the leap, Jalgan’s angry thoughts flashed through Fell’s mind and he knew what was happening. He had no time to spring away, but suddenly it was as if Pantheos was whispering to him again—
when others are strong, be soft
—and instead, just as Jalgan reached him, Fell let his front paws buckle beneath him and he rolled, turning his head and closing his teeth around Jalgan’s forepaw.

The bite made Jalgan’s legs buckle in turn, and he was tumbling on the ground with a snarl. Fell was almost too tired to move, but move he had to, and one thing above all drove him on. It wasn’t hate, it was anger at Jalgan’s cruelty, anger at what he had wanted to do to his parents’ bodies, but something else too—Ottol’s words, although they had changed slightly:
Strike upwards, Fell, if you strike at the Wolf Trail
. What did that mean? That it was easy to show natural strength against that which was weaker, but not so easy to strike at what was more powerful. The words and Fell’s anger rose inside him like pure energy and hurled him up through the air.

Fell landed on Jalgan’s back, and opening his jaws as if to howl to the heavens, he brought them down and snapped them shut around that line of fur at the top of Jalgan’s neck. There was a terrible squeal of pain and then silence. Jalgan went limp in the grass. Fell had broken his neck.

Fell lay on top of the Vengerid leader, panting desperately and dripping with blood, and the Vengerid pack looked on in amazement. Some of them wanted to act, others to howl. But they were pack wolves, trained to obey by the most powerful of Draggas, and now all they knew was the last order of their leader. One by one the Vengerid began to turn away, and then, as the shadows came in, they were gone.

For a while the little pack just stood there, in amazement at all that had happened and how the complex fortunes of life could change so quickly. But change they had, from utter despair to elation and joy. Suddenly they were all around him.

“Oh, Fell,” cried Skop, “I thought you a coward, brother, but I was wrong. Will you forgive me?”

“It was a brave fight, Fell,” said Kar, in admiration, tinged with only a little jealousy. “I’ll remember it forever, brother.”

“Fell,” growled Tarlar, “you’re hurt.”

“Yes, Tarlar,” said Fell, raising his head and stepping wearily off Jalgan’s body, “but it will heal.”

“And then you’ll lead our new pack, and we’ll all be happy again,” said Larka warmly.

“Oh, yes,” cried Kipcha delightedly.

The others were nodding, and wagging their tails at their elder brother, the true Dragga amongst them, but the black wolf swung round to face them.

“No,” he growled, though not angrily, “and now I must be gone. There’s little time, I think. I may be too late already.”

“Gone?” said Kipcha in astonishment. “Gone where?”

“The human,” answered Fell, thinking of Alina and of Larka’s pelt as well. “She needs my help too. They both do.”

“But I thought you’d left them,” said Khaz.

“And that you want to be a wolf again, Fell,” agreed Tarlar.

“Yes, Tarlar. But we’re linked, she and I, and first I must face my destiny. For I have taken the challenge, as Father would have done, life’s challenge. It is for all of us that I go now. For nature itself.”

Fell realised that he was still sopping wet, not with blood but water, and as he heard the falls thundering beyond and spoke of destiny, he gasped. Pantheos’s words came back to him again and with them thoughts of what had just happened. He had come once again from a river, just as Skart and the Stone Mouth had foretold. He felt as if he had been reborn.

With that, and to the total bewilderment of the little pack, Fell the lone black wolf turned and went leaping away. Leaping into darkness once more, and back towards the humans.

“DON'T FEAR, ALINA. DON'T GIVE UP HOPE. All nature unites to help and guard you now.”

The voice seemed to be in Alina’s mind, but she couldn’t tell if it was Fell or the wind outside her prison.

“Fell, are you there, dear Fell? I can’t reach you anymore.”

Alina Sculcuvant opened her eyes and stared into the shadows. She heard the wail of the wind, and the distant moans about her too. The young woman knew that the wolf could not hear her searching mind anymore, and she was suddenly thinking of another presence, Catalin.

Yet thoughts of the wolf returned. Once before, on her bed of straw and stone, Alina had managed to reach out across the distances and touch Fell. She was sure that at least the wolf had understood that she had been kidnapped by Cascu, to be chained in this prison in Vladeran’s palace. The prison she had seen with the Sight.

Understood too that her father’s old friend knew all their plans and was laying a terrible trap for Catalin and her people. Alina had not wanted to trouble the black wolf, on his journey to see his dying father, and had felt the dreadful pain in Fell as they had first spoken, but it was the only thing she could think of to do to fight Lord Vladeran.

He had visited Alina only once in that terrible place, just after the traitor Cascu had left her there to rot. That great bolted wooden door had swung open on its hinges, and a man, six foot two and wearing a wolf cloak of grey and pure white, with a strange red cross on his chest, had strode into the prison, surrounded by his Shield Guard.

Alina had not remembered her father’s friend at all, but Vladeran had recognised Alina Sculcuvant immediately.

“Yes,” he’d grunted, smilingly. “It’s the changeling, all right. She looks even more like her father now than she did then.”

Then he had taunted her by whispering with Cascu in the corner, of their plans for the Helgra. “There’s only one way for so many Helgra to approach the palace. They’ll be like a wolf, seized in metal teeth that they’ll never escape. And all because of her.”

Alina had listened in horror, before Vladeran had turned towards the door again, but he had said something else, almost as an afterthought. Her father’s best friend had swung around angrily and, looking Alina WovenWord in the eye, he’d hissed. “And don’t think I fear you, child, because you’ve returned and walk with the wolf. I fear nothing, don’t you see? For
she
has told me that I’m safe. Forever. That’s my destiny now.”

The prison door had slammed, to the sound of laughter and stamping boots, and Alina had been left alone again, wondering why he had said it, and who he could mean by “she,” wondering if he could have meant her own mother, Romana. For it was the truth of Romana she now feared above all.

Since then days and nights had passed in a terrible dream, with hardly any differentiation between light and dark. There was only one meagre little window in her prison cell, looking out onto a gloomy cloister far below, and the nights were as black as pitch, filled with the wails and moans of the souls who suffered in Vladeran’s dungeons.

Alina felt she would have been better off back in Malduk and Ranna’s barn, so hungry was she, forced to exist off little tin plates of food that were pushed through a slit in the bottom of the door every two or three days, along with a beaker of rank water, or a bowl of thin, grimy porridge and a crust of weevil-covered bread. But Alina knew instinctively that if she didn’t eat she would surely die, and so, holding her nose and taking sips of water, she forced the evil-tasting fare on herself. Now the young woman even looked forwards to the sound of that flap opening, not only because it meant food and so survival, but because it was the one thing that broke the dreadful monotony of her days. That was almost the worst of it, the ghastly boredom of that place, along with the terrible noises.

Noises. The days and nights were filled with noises. Her nose and mouth had long closed themselves to the foul odours that circulated in that place of horror, but her ears had become more sensitive to all around her: the sound of the door flap and of metal scraping on stone, and the jangling of a prison warder’s keys, or the heavy tread of his boots. The sudden scuttling of a mouse, or a rat, in the shadows. Human sounds came too. Muffled conversations in the tiny passageways beyond, or the occasional burst of cruel laughter in the dark. And those cries, those terrible, imprisoned cries.

Lescu’s training had come to Alina’s aid, for although the girl no longer had her sword, which Cascu had taken from her when he had drugged her and the men who guarded her in the Helgra village, she still had Lescu’s words about calming the mind and directing her thoughts. It eased her fear a little, and helped her concentrate on all that was happening around her too.

As she waited and listened, Alina WovenWord noticed that her hearing, in comparison, seemed to have doubled in strength. It was as if senses are not things at all, or absolute facts, but parts of us that can grow or diminish in strength. As if the very fact of using them is the key to what we are, or might be, and that there is an art to their use too—the arts of seeing, and the art of taste and smell and touch. The arts of hearing also. Listen, Alina WovenWord, listen.

As Alina lay there and listened, she seemed to be able to send out her hearing in different and precise directions, and it allowed her to build up a picture of what was directly outside. It was not without danger though, this journey of her senses, for a noise might suddenly come as she turned a corner in her listening mind, a scream or a wail or a blow, and Alina would recoil immediately and then she was back in her lonely cell again. The young woman realised there was another sense involved in all this too, that also seemed to be growing stronger, the sense to imagine things. Perhaps the most powerful sense of all.

Or was it a sense? For Alina realised that it was only experience that allowed her to recognise certain noises, like dripping water or the turning of keys. She had heard them before, and so she knew what they were, like recognising words that give meaning to things. What would it be like to hear these things though and not know what they were, or to not have the human words to describe them, and thus picture them in her mind?

Then Alina wondered about the black wolf, with his snarls and growls and howls, and what Fell heard in the night with his ears. The other Lera too, all of them in the wild. Was thought itself only possible with language, and if it was, where did that come from? Fell had a kind of language, because of the strange powers of the Sight, yet those creatures that did not, whose minds and words had not given them a map of the world, and of reality, what did they hear in the shadows of their lives? Only the ghosts of longing, struggling towards consciousness? It gave Alina a pain to think of it. How could it all be? It seemed quite miraculous.

Yet was that other sense, that sixth sense, to imagine, really just an act of recognition, or something far deeper and more powerful? And where did it come from too? Just as Alina had always had the sensation that she could know things before they happened, and had seen the Helgra halls and this place in her vision, so too she felt that she knew things about this palace that no physical sensation was really telling her.

She knew, for instance, or sensed, that there were many floors below her. She sensed that the cells around her were crowded almost to bursting, although that may have been from the number of cries she heard in the night. She sensed that there was a great body of water nearby too. A river.

But what use was it all? If the Sight was a power, then it was nothing like the goblin powers she had imagined when she thought herself a changeling. It was a power that gave her little command of the real world, and one that had brought her to this horrible place. There was no magic in the world, the young woman told herself bitterly in her prison, and no gods either.

Alina had one other sense, though, that kept nagging at her, like a worried friend, tugging at her sleeve. She sensed that her mother Romana was somewhere nearby. She knew it of course, or knew at least that she must be if she was in Lord Vladeran’s palace. But it was more than that. It was a feeling deep inside her, as though she could feel her mother and her half brother too. As though they were all connected. Were people really all connected? The thought would wake her sometimes in the night.

Alina got up now and stretched herself with a yawn. The thinning darkness heralded a new day, and pulling her chain to its full length, Alina walked over to that small patch of window and peered out miserably through the metal bars. Bars that only humans make.

Again a warning voice came to Alina, one that she had first heard at the table of the Helgra—
Lord Vladeran, he loves your mother dearly
. What if Romana loved him too, and had colluded in his plans and betrayed the Helgra? Perhaps she had known that Alina was in this cell all along, perhaps it was she who had ordered her kidnap and murder seven years before. Alina would not believe it. She could not. It was not the mother of her earliest dreams.

A noise sent her lunging back to her bed of straw—the bolts being drawn back on the cell door. It swung open with a horrible creaking, but rather than the guard, Alina was amazed at what walked into that prison cell.

It was a dog, large and thin, but it was old too and its eyesight was not good. It growled with distaste at the rank smells that assaulted its nostrils and began to sniff the ground as it dropped its head.

“Out of the way, damn you, Vlag,” came Vladeran’s voice, as he gave the animal a kick and entered the cell too. The dog slunk to the side of the cell. Vladeran wheeled round and looked down hatefully at the young woman, but there was something else in his veiled eyes too, Alina was sure of it—fear. Could he really be frightened of her?

“So, child,” he hissed, “you’re awake?”

“I’m no child,” said Alina angrily, straightening herself and glaring back at him.

“No, perhaps you’re not,” whispered Vladeran, with something close to admiration, “and even this place has not entirely sapped you of your damned spirit, I see. A spirit that so nagged at me when you were a little girl. You’re quite a survivor, Alina Sculcuvant.”

Alina felt the stirrings of memory, the memories of feelings for her father’s best friend. She hadn’t hated him then.

“And I’d show you my true spirit,” she hissed, “if my hand were free and I had my sword.”

“Such a fine sword,” said Vladeran with a smile, “fine enough for the head of my Shield Guard, Cascu, to want it for himself. He tells me that you can use it too, like a magic wand, to bewitch the Helgra. Or should I say your people, Alina WolfPaw?”

Vladeran flexed his right hand painfully.

“And are not such things man’s true power? Not magic and the lies of a feeble storyteller, but swords and tools and weapons. Look at you now, with your cropped hair and your boy’s jerkin. Isn’t a girl ashamed to walk so unnaturally through the land?”

“Unnaturally?” said Alina proudly. “Is it not you that is unnatural, friend of my father?”

Vladeran’s eyes narrowed.

“You who talks to the shadows,” said Alina scornfully. “You whose duty should have been to protect me, but who instead tried to kill me, and stole my mother’s love. I know now that though they tell us how dangerous the world is, a greater danger always lurks closer to home.”

Vladeran’s eyes flamed.

“And your father’s dead, changeling. Which is the only reason I haven’t slit your pretty throat, WolfPaw,” he whispered dangerously. “Do you know why, storyteller?”

Alina looked up. She had wondered it in her prison. Seven years ago he’d tried to do away with her, but for some reason had stayed his hand, and instead had her stolen away beyond the borders of Castelu, risking her survival.

“It’s true that if my plans misfire with the Helgra I might use a Helgra woman as a bargaining counter,” said Vladeran. “But now they are coming towards my trap. The real reason is that I myself once stood on a battlefield soaked with blood, and saw a brave man fall from his charging horse. Saw your father, Dragomir, get up once more, only to have his heart pierced by a Turkic spear. It’s full of chance, the battlefield. Like life.”

Alina didn’t understand what Vladeran was saying.

“Why does this keep me alive, murderer?”

“Because it proves you are no threat to me. I can only be killed if your father is in sight of this palace. It has been prophesied.”

Alina looked at the man in amazement.

“And that, my dear, brave Alina, is impossible.”

Vladeran smiled coldly again.

“Real life is hard, no? Harder than children know. But you had one thing almost right, calling me a murderer, though you still live,” he said. “It’s too strong a word perhaps, but that day there was a reason you father fell from his horse, after his saddle slipped from its back, as the girth broke. For a sharp knife in a stable at dawn may do much to loosen the cords that bind us all, and so change many fortunes.”

“No,” gasped Alina.

It was as if her eyes were misting over and the bloodlust had come on the young woman. She saw herself turned into Fell, leaping across the cell and burying sharp claws in his throat. She wanted to hurl herself at this man and tear at him, and as Vladeran looked at her, he suddenly stepped back.