A Different Kingdom(97)

The Wyr-fire flowed about the trunks of the trees and became a whirling immensity of light, whipping up the water further. Cat and Michael were the eye of the hurricane. They watched as the trees bent and broke under its onslaught, saw the remnants of Brother Nennian's body flung through the air like a tattered sack and felt the water retreat, sucked away. It became a wall around them, spinning and light-filled, white horses breaking off to dash against the trunks of the trees, spray filling the tortured air. Then there was a massive paroxysm of energy that staggered them and made the wood shudder. The water erupted outwards, toppling nearby trees and wrenching their roots out of the ground, sending heavy trunks hurtling and crashing in the-air. Michaeland Cat were blasted off their feet and lay with their heads pressed close to the ooze, clinging to each other. A high wind hammered them, smeared them along the ground for ten feet before Michael stabbed his sword into the earth and halted them. They clung to it, this iron spike in the world's heart, and thought they heard the forest groan. A spinning branch struck Michael on the elbow and one numbed arm slipped free of the hilt, but Cat scissored his waist with her thighs and gripped the blade until the edge sliced her fingers to the very bone and her blood was blowing in drops across Michael's face. Even in that moment he was able to realize that she was proof against iron. The Wyr-fire had left her and she belonged to him again.

Then the wind eased, descending from its scream note by note. The trees stopped thrashing like demented things and began to sway more naturally. The Wyr-fire had spent itself. Michael raised his face from the dirt to see a scene of devastation and wreckage. Dead leaves and shattered twigs were scudding through the air but the gale had broken. He could breathe again.

Cat moaned softly and he turned her in his arms to see the seeping tear in her scalp, the cut fingers, the ripped flesh that left her collarbone all but bare. But her eyes were open, and they were human, warm and green, full of tears.

'We're alive,' he said softly. 'We survived.' And she smiled up at him.

The wind fell further. In moments it was a mild breeze that tugged gently at their hair, and there was a warmth in it they had not known in weeks. The last sounds of tearing wood and crashing trees ceased.

He was bleeding, and his left hand was a useless lump of meat at the end of his forearm, but he was almost unaware of it. He thought he could still hear the forest keening to itself. A clearing had been blasted in its canopy, the trees fallen like skittles with their roots black tentacles clawing at the air. But the sky above was blue and empty, and the sunlight was pouring down on them, beginning to raise steam from the bare mud. A day in spring, sunset long hours away. He cradled Cat in his arms, half lifting her from the cold earth.

'Come on. We're getting out of this place.'





NINETEEN

THE MUD HAD stiffened on them, making Cat's hair into a helmet of spikes and clogging the raw, ragged edges of their wounds. They sat beside a high fire that it had taken the better part of two hours to light and carefully cauterized every break in each other's flesh with the pink glow of the Ulfberht's point. Even that brief flaring agony brought no more than a moan from them. Pain had become an everyday thing, as unremarkable as the need for sleep.



They had no food, nothing to drink. The pot they had boiled their water in was lashed to the back of the grey gelding, lost in the forest. The fact barely registered. There was only this present, the night that darkened around, them, the trees leaning close.

It had gone. The brooding presence that had been dogging them for days had disappeared with the unleashing of the Wyr-fire, and now there was no longer any sense of being watched. It was as if the consciousness of the forest had retreated. To lick its wounds, perhaps—or to consider a new mode of attack. They could not say which.

Why did they call it the Wolfweald when it had no wolves? Those things were the beasts the forest had been named for; the beasts that had sprung out of the ground. Wooden wolves. They were the guardians of the Wolfweald, extensions of the trees' enmity.

The scene of the fight was a scant hundred yards away—all the distance they could stumble in their beaten state. Here the ground was less sodden, for the waters had retreated. They lay on a thin layer of twigs and moss and around them the faces of lost souls strained out of the tree trunks, mouths open in silent screams. Nennian was there. A loud crack in the gathering dusk, and a layer of bark had fallen off a nearby bole to reveal his broad features caught in the wood, cords standing out on his neck as though he were striving to free himself from the clutch of the tree. Cat had screamed on seeing his face, but now they ignored it. The sturdy priest had shared the fate of his brothers. Perhaps he was exchanging stories with them in some tree-bound hell.