Fell (The Sight 2) (9 page)

“Zen I zank you indeed,” said Ottol graciously, dipping his head politely.

“And now I must be gone,” cried Fell, startling the little ones with the power of his growling voice, “for if I do not hunt soon, it is I that’ll be dead. And I am a wolf.”

“Ah yes, your freedom,” said Ottol, his eyes twinkling like dewdrops. “Zen perhaps you should go zat vay, to zee clearing beyond. I zaw deer tracks zere, zis morning.”

“And have you no sadness for a deer?” asked Fell a little coldly. “Just because your own kits are safe?”

“Oh, yes, yes indeed,” answered Ottol, “but as you zay, zey are mine. And I love life, Fell, and a fair chase too. Nature is nature, as zee Great One decrees, in all its harshness, or zelfishness. But tell me, Fell,” added Ottol, watching the wolf as he began to pad away, “you have your freedom perhaps, but have you nothing to protect? To care for.”

Fell did not answer and felt a strange sorrow in his belly.

“Well, good hunting zen, Fell of zee Riverbank,” cried Ottol, as his family gathered nervously around him.

Fell began to run, his right paw stinging furiously. He realised that he was sad to leave the beaver, and his pretty little family, for it had been good to talk with Ottol, almost like a friend. But then he came to the clearing and saw the slots of a sika deer in the snow. Fell’s head went down immediately and his pace grew faster, and in a moment the wolf had spotted it. It was a small deer, grazing on its own, and although it looked thin and scrawny, at least it was a meal.

The excitement coursing through Fell’s body protected him from the pain of his wound, and his pace didn’t slacken. The little deer was young and inexperienced, and within a moment the black wolf had sprung.

Fell missed the kill. The thing that had happened to Larka long ago, and to Fell many times, was happening again. In his mind’s eye the Sight had already given Fell a vision of what might have been, and of the stricken deer’s pain, which Fell experienced in his own body, while in reality he missed the leap and the deer ran free.

“The light or the darkness?” growled Fell as he licked his still hungry lips and looked mournfully at the animal vanishing into the distance. Fell realised that his path had taken him towards the edge of the trees, and as he looked out, he saw the valley and, far below, the village of Moldov he had been skirting now for three days, despite his reluctance to follow the voice. Fell’s heart beat faster, as he thought of his vision in the pool and wondered if the child was really sleeping somewhere below. Was he not sworn to hunt for meaning and to track down lies? But he shook his head. Ottol’s words of the Guardian had been utter madness and he wanted nothing to do with it. He threw back his sleek black muzzle and howled.

ALINA SCULCUVANT HEARD THE SAVAGE VOICE on the wind, and it made the young woman start and turn fearfully. She was in the open and far below her she could see the valley where her flight had begun, laid out like a picture book. She shivered bitterly and stamped her booted feet in the snow. They were so cold they felt like blocks of ice, but her shirt was damp with sweat, and Alina knew that if she stopped too long the air might chill it to her back.

Alina had halted for a moment to sit on a large rock, and around her the air was filled with chattering cries, as three magpies scavenged in the snow behind her. The late afternoon sun was pressing through drifting clouds, and she suddenly pulled up the sleeve on her right arm to look at the mark. Then she got up and scrambled on up the slope.

Just that morning, along the edge of the tree line, Alina had seen a group of villagers from Moldov and amongst them Malduk. Now she hated him with all her heart. They had almost caught her with their dogs, but Alina had managed to pull herself down into a large abandoned badger’s set, and the scent had masked her own.

The scent had made the hunting dogs so wild that their masters had begun to drive them back down the mountain. Alina had waited almost two hours in that tiny, cramped space, curled up like a ball, but at least it had been warmer in there, and the girl had almost fallen asleep.

Alina had known that she had to keep moving, to get as far away as possible from her home, or that terrible place she had had to call home. They would never stop hunting her now, and the chase could not end in a trial, or any kind of justice. It had only one possible end, if they caught her—Alina’s death.

The terrified girl felt darkness swamp her thoughts as she scrambled on. Any friends she had in the world, and they were few enough, she had had to leave behind her, and she was bound she knew not where. Her world had changed entirely with the discovery of that parchment, and the revelation that she was not a changeling, but somehow connected to the great Lord Vladeran in the region of Castelu.

But how? She had always known that she was not destined to be a mere shepherdess, dressed as a boy. Yet when she recalled her dreams, they were of a household where she slept in a bare room and was treated little better than a servant. Her past seemed no better than her life in Moldov. Alina had understood from the parchment that she had been given over as a little girl to be murdered. But how could someone so great as a Carpathian lord want the death of a child, and a girl child too? Was she really a traitor? Alina strained to remember but could not.

Something else had changed for Alina, in these three days of her flight. Each night she had managed to take shelter from the bitter weather, first in the hollow of a great oak like a fairy child, then in a drift of leaves, kept warm by the snow itself, and finally in a narrow cave in the mountain. She had felt like a goblin as she had done so, but each night her strange dreams had grown stronger and stronger.

Alina had dreamt of that child again, lying in its cot, the baby she had felt was her brother, smiling up happily at her. And of that beautiful woman with curling black hair again—Roma, Roman, or something like it—yet who had ordered her about as roughly as Ranna had, and who had entrusted her with some grave duty. Then Alina had been looking down at that wooden cot, and it had been empty, and suddenly she had heard a cry, a low, searching howl. Wolves. Why was it that so many times in recent days Alina Sculcuvant had dreamt of wolves, who seemed to be summoning her to some deeper understanding?

The guilt connected to the fate of that sleeping infant was more terrible than ever though, and Alina realised that the herbs that for so long Malduk and Ranna had tried to control her with had worn off, and that the dreams, or memories, could only get stronger.

The night before, in that stony shelter, the dream had been the most real—of the great black wolf with fearsome, piercing eyes. It had been standing before her, its ears pressed forwards as though listening. Was it hunting her too, or had she somehow really summoned it?

Alina pushed away the horrible thoughts, and stumbled on through the forest she had just entered. She was desperately hungry, for Mia’s food had been finished on the second day, and although she knew it had saved her life, and she had managed to slake her thirst with handfuls of snow, it was not like a real drink and her belly was grumbling. Her climb into the mountains was taking her away from the streams and rivers, and Alina wondered now if her stomach would ever feel full again, or her tongue refreshed.

Although she had had to kill a sheep once with Malduk, and had hated doing it, she had no experience of hunting, and knew only a little of the berries or plants of the land, what few remained with the growing winter. She had tried gathering some that morning, berries as dark as ink, and although at first they had tasted fine, they had made her sick in the snow. Even if Alina had known how to set a snare, or to chase the wild creatures like a man, with the loss of her knife she had no tools or weapons, and besides, apart from birds flying south, Alina had seen no animals at all.

She looked up at the trees around her and felt fear whispering in their branches. Night was coming, and the forest was a place she had always associated with fairies and spirits. Now she realised how exposed she was.
Without the witch’s charm to protect me, perhaps the goblins really will come and snatch me back
. The thought lasted only a second, and Alina realised suddenly how foolish she was being. She wasn’t a changeling at all, the parchment proved it, she was a real girl now, and she was suddenly sure fairies and goblins didn’t exist at all.

Alina stopped in the wood. She had come to a clearing and sensed that there were people about before she reached its edge. Alina spotted a fire, blazing in the snowy twilight, and eight or nine men and women crouched around it in the clearing, warming their hands and feet.

She heard a strange, haunting melody—the sound of a fiddle whining softly through the coming night. Alina wondered in amazement if she had stumbled on the fairies after all, until she realised from these people’s colourful clothes and their dark faces that they must be Tsingani—gypsies.

The sight was almost as mysterious and magical as coming on a real fairy encampment, and Alina crept behind a tree to watch. They were talking and laughing loudly, as they passed around a bottle of rough wine and plucked spitting chestnuts from the flames, or munched on goat meat around their fire. One of the gypsies, a tough, handsome man with coal black hair, suddenly spoke.

“What will the winter bring this time?” he said. “It looks like it’ll be a bad one.”

“Perhaps I should look into the flames,” said a gypsy woman at his side, “or read the cards.”

“Why?” said the man. “You have the Gift?”

“The Gift, Father?” said a voice at his side, and Alina noticed a little boy with curly chestnut hair, sitting beside him on the ground.

“A true gypsy power,” said his father. “A gift to see things, beyond the ordinary insights of people. They say that you’re either born with it, or not, and it comes through here.”

The gypsy touched a finger to his dark forehead in the firelight.

“A gift of seeing further, and of knowing more,” said the woman with a kindly smile at the little boy. “A gift to predict, and to understand too, although there are those that might call it a curse. They say changelings have it above all, so let’s hope the fairies didn’t drop you here amongst us, boy.”

The others laughed, but Alina’s ears had pricked up, and she wondered if she herself was a gypsy.

“A gift to look into the minds of wild animals too,” the woman went on, and the boy’s eyes boggled in his head. Alina remembered Malduk’s words.

“Wild animals,” he whispered, peering nervously around at the forest and almost spotting Alina behind the tree.

“It’s not any animal that we gypsies have to fear, son,” said his father with a laugh, ruffling his hair fondly. “It’s those damned villagers. They’re hunting something again. I’ve seen them on the mountain.”

“It’s wolves,” said the woman. “They think they’re demons.”

Some of the gypsies chuckled loudly around the fire, and shook their heads at such foolishness.

“You’re brave on such a night to laugh at demons,” said another man, “when they say Lord Tepesh rides out again.”

Nine pairs of eyes were suddenly regarding one another through the firelight, like nervous wolves themselves. There was no more terrible name in the lands beyond the forest than Vlad Tepesh, even to the Tsingani, who tried to live outside the laws of men. The name itself meant the “Impaler,” after the Wallachian warlord’s custom of impaling the bodies of his enemies on wooden stakes. He had used the practice to suppress his own people, and collect taxes too, but also to strike terror in the hearts of his Turkish enemies in the Ottoman lands.

He was the son of that great Prince of Wallachia, Vlad Dracul, who had been murdered by the Hungarians years before, and whose name signified that he was a member of one of the secret Orders, the Order of the Dragon. Dracul itself meant “Dragon,” but in those dark days of fear and symbols, if such things have ever lessened their grip on man, it had another meaning too, for it was a name for the devil himself. This Vlad Tepesh then, because he was the son of Vlad Dracul, carried another title, which has lit fear and horror in the hearts of humans to this day—Draculea. Dracula.

“We’d better not be heard saying it though,” muttered the gypsy woman, in the growing darkness, “if we value our hides. Not of a great overlord like Draculea.”

“What have the Tsingani to fear of overlords, woman?” said a third man scornfully. “Lord Tepesh’s palace is more leagues away than I can count. If I could count.”

The others laughed again, but the gypsy who had spoken first was shaking his head.

“They rumour that Draculea drinks human blood,” he said angrily, “and that in his castle he invokes spirits and talks with the very dead.”

“Old wives’ tales,” said the gypsy woman, trying to calm the frightened boy, “stories for Baba Yaga. We Tsingani shouldn’t trouble ourselves with such lofty matters anyhow.”

“Know our place, eh?” said the boy’s father, raising an eyebrow.

“Perhaps. And isn’t it Tepesh who, like King Stefan, keeps the lands at peace and the Turk at bay? Besides, I’ve heard of the kindnesses Draculea does. His charities. The Orders are sworn to protect the land, and the Tsingani too.”

“That they may be, but he’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing, all right,” murmured the man, with a look of deep suspicion. “And the Orders are not what they were.”

“You know Draculea seeks alliance with his cousin in Castelu, Lord Vladeran,” said the second man, “some say against the King.”

Alina’s eyes flickered at all this high talk. She had never heard before that the terrible Lord Tepesh was the cousin of Lord Vladeran, and it filled her with fear.

“Because, like Draculea, Vladeran walks the left-hand path,” said the first gypsy. “They say the fathers in their holy church have heard of it. It would be the flames even for grand lords if they found them guilty.”

Alina was attracted by these people and their haunting tunes. She was bitterly hungry too and could have done with some of their food or the warmth of their fire, but with this news of Vladeran walking the left-hand path, and plots against King Stefan Cel Mare himself, the poor girl suddenly felt more terrified and alone than she had ever felt.

She had feared fairies once, but now the real world seemed far more frightening than anything she had dreamt of in her powerful imagination. Alina Sculcuvant turned and crept away into the night.

She slept fitfully again and woke with the dawn, continuing her flight from Moldov, and thinking for a time she had escaped. But by late afternoon she heard the sounds of the dogs on the slopes below her again and quickened her pace. Alina had come to the beginning of a col, rising up through a narrow ravine, and because it was out of the wind, and the trees on the sides of the slopes hung outwards, shielding it from snowfall, much of the jagged rock was bare, and glistened in the damp like knives.

It was a cold, forbidding place, but Alina could hear the delicious sound of mountain water somewhere above her, and at the thought of a drink hurried on. She stopped to refresh her parched lips in an icy rivulet that flowed from the slope, but as she was bending down, and twilight began to fall, Alina heard the sharp snap of a branch and swung round. Someone was coming straight towards her.

The path behind her was shielded by a twist in the mountain, but as she looked back Alina realised that there was nowhere to hide, and that she could not possibly climb the steep slopes around her quickly enough. If the men and their dogs had picked up her tracks or her scent again, she was cornered. Alina crouched down and clasped two large rocks in her hands to hurl at them. But as she stood again, she saw a single figure appear, struggling wearily along and panting as he came on up the slope with his staff.

“Ivan!” cried Alina delightedly.

“Thank God,” whispered the old shepherd warmly as soon as he saw the boy. “I thought I’d never catch up with you, child.” He gasped for breath and stopped to lean on his crook. Its top was carved finely into the shape of a ram, and Alina had often admired the thing.