Fell (The Sight 2) (12 page)

Fell licked his lips and looked once more at the human. There was gratitude in the wolf’s strange eyes, but Alina drew her legs up to her chest and huddled back against the cave wall. As it grew darker and colder in the ice cave, gloom fell on the two of them, for now they felt as if they were being frozen into statues in the heart of the mountain, and it grew so cold that soon Alina could no longer move. “Wolf,” she kept whispering. “We must stay awake, wolf.”

She fought off the dream sleep, from which she might never awaken again, although weariness had seized her very blood. She pinched herself and could no longer feel the pain. She knew that if she closed her eyes she would never open them again. Then Alina remembered Ivan’s little tools in the pack. How could she have been so stupid? Fire.

Clasping the pack again, she just managed to open it and pull out the little sticks that Ivan had used to make his sparks, though her hands ached with cold. She saw the remnants of the broken staff on the cave floor and realised that she could use it for fuel, and the log that she had picked up on the edge of the glacier. Alina was furiously grateful now that she had not discarded it in her exhaustion, and began rubbing her legs hard to make them work again, then pulled herself over to the bits of crook. She managed to snap them into several pieces and made a little pile, as Fell watched her with a tilted muzzle and growled softly.

Alina took Ivan’s two little fire sticks and, balancing the top one between her freezing hands, began to rub furiously, although she could hardly hold them straight. Fell whimpered a little beside her, uncomprehending of what the Drappa was doing, but fascinated too. As Alina worked, she could feel the wood growing hotter and hotter, but she suddenly realised with despair that she had no kindling to make the tiny sparks ignite.

She was at her wits’ end and ready to give in totally, when she remembered the parchment. It was still in her pocket. It was the only proof of her strange story, and one day she might need it badly, yet there was no choice now. She pulled it out and crumpled it up angrily, then set to work again. Fell snorted, as he saw little puffs of smoke begin to rise between Alina’s shivering hands, and his voice turned to a growl.

The parchment suddenly caught and Fell whimpered. A flame lit in the ice cave, like fire from heaven, and the paper flared brilliantly, and with it the evidence of who Alina really was, sending light and sudden warmth flickering around their little ice prison. The girl hurried the bits of crook onto it, and blowing hard, soon she had a good fire going on the cave floor. Piece by piece she added the broken crook and then perched the log against them happily, as it all began to catch and burn.

A deep wonder had woken in the black wolf as he watched this miracle. A wonder and a fear too, as he felt the warming heat against his fur. Fell had seen many human fires, like the fire by the cooking pot, and had watched a conflagration burn in the forests after a lightning strike, like a bolt of heavenly power, but he had never seen how man mastered the flaming red flowers before.

He whimpered again, and when Alina looked at him once more, he dropped his eyes immediately. If the structure of a wolf pack is made in the hierarchy of relations between dominant individuals and their weaker relations, then Alina WovenWord had suddenly become a Drappa indeed.

The girl felt a pride flame in her too, almost as warm as the flames that the healing fire was now giving off. Life seemed to move through her being like a hot wind, and it was like breathing again. Alina let out a great, relieved sigh. She knew that the fire could not last forever, but if it kept them going until the sun rose once more, then perhaps they would have a slim chance. For another day at least.

So they sat there, the young woman and the injured black wolf, their thoughts rippling with the firelight dancing in the ice cave, mesmerised by its heat and brilliance, and the shadow images it seemed to summon from their minds too, as it flickered around those walls. Their fearful breaths stopped smoking with cold, and a sort of cheer settled over them both. With his thick winter coat, Fell would naturally have survived longer than Alina in the ice cave, but he too was grateful for the heat and light.

The comfort of the fire brought memories to Fell of his time as a cub in the den, with his old nurse Brassa and his sister Larka. Memories of his adopted brother, Kar, too, who had survived his own parents’ murder at the hands of the Balkar packs and had become part of their family. Poor Kar, who had spent so long in his own cave on a mountaintop, wrestling with loss and pain and the madness of isolation.

What was Kar doing now?
wondered Fell.
Is he growing old and weak, at seven years in the wild? What of my parents?
Alina was remembering too, as she looked into the firelight. Remembering things that had lurked like shadows in the back of her troubled mind, and it felt like nourishment. She remembered her mother’s once tender arms about her, as she sat at home by a fire, until something had caused a change in her. She remembered that red-haired man, strong yet aloof. Her father. She remembered too the birth of her baby brother and the jealousy that it had brought. Had Alina betrayed her duty on purpose, that terrible night?

“Who am I?” she whispered to herself, as she sat at that impossible little camp fire, opposite a wild wolf. And what had occurred after that evening? The reason Alina had been driven from her home to be murdered still eluded her.

The fire saved them. Fire which Prometheus, in the myths that the ancient forebears of this land—the Romans—had told around their own campfires more than a thousand years before, had stolen from the gods and given to man. The god Zeus had punished Prometheus, chaining him to a rock, to have his liver eaten out each day by an eagle.

The log was heavy and damp, and it burnt very slowly, but now the embers had crumbled into a hot grey dust. Alina’s spirits were flagging again, when the two prisoners caught the first sensations of returning sunlight steal across their faces. It came like a breath of hope, the daylight high above them, and Alina looked at Fell as a companion in arms might after a terrible battle.

Yet the warm light of day brought a bitter revelation too. The fire may have saved them, but they were still in exactly the same predicament as before, and now Alina felt hungrier and weaker than ever.

“Wolf,” she said, “I’m going to try and stand up.”

The girl’s hand hurt as she pressed it against the ice floor, and as soon as she pushed herself upwards Fell rose too, his tail lifting, his front legs set in attack. “Down,” Alina nearly said, until she realised that this was not Elak, and not a creature to be tested so lightly.

Alina took all her weight on her good leg and then gingerly pressed down on her right. It was too painful to stand on properly, and she hopped backwards to the edge of the cave and propped herself up against the ice wall. The knife was in her right hand, and Alina looked around properly. To her horror she saw that the cave floor fell away completely on one side, the drop she had seen when she had been hanging from Ivan’s staff.

“It’s a dark place we’re in, wolf,” said Alina gravely. “And it’s time we got out again. Both of us.”

She looked up. Even standing, she couldn’t reach the ledge Fell had sprung from. She had an idea though, and she turned to the ice wall and, with a sudden swing that made Fell growl, struck the ice with the knife. It sank in deep, and grasping at a small outcrop of ice with her other hand, Alina pulled herself up a little way, as Fell watched her warily.

There was another small outcrop that she managed to get purchase on with her left foot, and pulling the dagger free and swinging it again into the ice above, she pulled herself even higher. Alina was wobbling precariously though, and she realised that if she fell she could tumble over the edge of the chasm. But the lip of the ledge above was almost in reach now, and Alina swung her arm and managed to get her fingers over the edge. It was wet and slippery, where the sunlight from above had melted the ice, and as Alina pulled, her hand slipped completely.

The girl went sailing backwards and, to her horror, found that she was falling, not towards the drop, but towards the wolf. Her body struck Fell’s, and with a furious snarl, he turned and sprang at her, as she landed on her back on the ice.

His jaws were open, and Alina didn’t feel fear as such, just a kind of grim resignation, yet as the wolf stood over her, something new stirred in her too, the anger of a fighter. Her eyes blazed.

In that moment Fell remembered the powers of the Sight to control wills. Could he control this human? His thoughts, directed by the Sight, began to reach out towards her consciousness, as they had once reached out to the Balkar.

“Give in, Drappa,” whispered his angry mind. “Obey me. I, who have been darkness. I, who shared the vision with Larka and all the Lera. The secret of what man is and what sorrow he can bring. I command you.”

As Fell wrestled there, he realised that it was as if, in all his journeying, he had reached the borders of a strange new land, and that no curse or blessing would ever let him pass. He could not reach Alina’s will. Fell felt strangely foolish.

They both sensed the energy though in each other’s being, moving through their bodies like a secret language, and as their eyes locked again, so close this time it was as if they might meld into each other, Alina saw the strange sliver of green in Fell’s right eye and the wolf the green splinter in Alina’s left.

It brought something like wonder and recognition to them, and although all Fell’s wild instincts were telling him to strike, he couldn’t attack this Drappa. The wolf remembered wrestling long ago with his sister Larka in the Red Meadow, the field of spirits that lies before the journey beyond, and the words about destiny and a Guardian, and then the ache in his head came again. Suddenly Fell was thrown sideways in the cave.

Alina had not moved, or done anything at all. It was like the force that two lodestones make when brought together, that men in later days would call a magnetic field, and somehow both the girl and the wolf knew then they could not harm each other. Ever.

A voice came sounding and echoing through their heads, as if from the cave itself. “What is happening to us?”

The wolf and the girl looked at each other in utter amazement, and suddenly they were talking. Not in words or in growls, but with their thoughts.

“You are Fell, are you not?” asked Alina’s frightened, wondering mind. “The lone black wolf.”

“A Kerl, my kind call it, man cub. And you are Alina, I think. I’ve dreamt of you, with that mark on your arm. Though I thought you a Dragga.”

“But how can this be? Are the shepherd’s stories of werewolves and transformations true? How are we talking like this? Is there really such magic in the world?”

Alina thought of goblins and sprites and fairies. This was far more miraculous.

“It’s the Sight, child. The gift that comes through the forehead. Only a very few possess it. My sister Larka looked into the mind of the Man Varg once. The Man Wolf. It brought the animals a terrible vision of the past and future. And I have the power too. The power to look into minds and control wills entered the world when my aunt Morgra summoned the spectres from one of the worlds beyond, with her Summoning Howl.”

“But what do you want of me, Fell?”

Fell remembered that voice in the cave, the voice he had tried to resist.

“I don’t know. To aid you perhaps? To learn from you and understand? Before I met you, my dead sister told me to help you, I think. Told me you may have a great destiny, child.”

Alina’s pretty eyes opened wide in the ice cave. She, have a great destiny? Alina had wanted to believe that she was better than a shepherd, even if she wasn’t a goblin princess, and to see more of the world than the environs of Moldov, but that was not the same as having a great destiny.

She thought of the parchment and the link to Lord Vladeran, and of the way she had usually felt with Ranna and Malduk. Alina had thought so little of herself in Moldov, and now the gulf between these two worlds seemed quite impossible. Fell’s thoughts filled the girl with one emotion alone: fear.

Fell could feel this, and he thought again of trying to control her will, but as the wolf looked into her strong, bold eyes he knew that that was a thing he could never do. Yet as he lay there he was not angry at that powerlessness. Indeed, he felt a strange calm. He suddenly wanted to help this child.

Like a snapping rope, the link between them both broke and there they were again in the ice cave, as Alina spoke with human words now.

“Did I … did I really know your thoughts, Fell? But it can’t be. Animals don’t think like us.”

Fell growled. The human sounds were incomprehensible to him.

“The Sight,” whispered Alina, remembering the gypsy’s words about a gift. “What is the Sight, Fell? Where does it really come from?”

The wolf did not answer her. Alina had raised herself again, but as she did so she felt something on her cheeks that made her shiver furiously. Both creatures felt an icy gasp of air breathe into the cave, as if from a tomb, and surround them. They had to escape soon.

Alina noticed something else then. Her clothes were wet. Next to where the fire had burnt, the ice had melted, creating a little pool of water in a dip in the ground, but the water was trickling now to the back of the cave. Alina expected it to form another little pool where it hit the wall, but instead it just vanished. There was some kind of hole.

She scrambled over to it and, with the hilt of Ivan’s knife, began to bash away at the ice wall. A section of it crumbled away and Alina could see an opening beyond. She turned the knife and started to scrape and cut more purposefully, and after a while, a passageway was revealed through the ice. Alina’s heart leapt, as she saw the glow of daylight somewhere beyond.

“Fell,” she cried happily, finding it strange to use his name aloud. “I think there’s a way out.”

Fell had already got to his feet and come padding over.

“I’m going to try and crawl through, Fell. Come after me.”