Hand of the Hunter: Chosen of Nendawen, Book II (17 page)

Ulender’s magic had stunned Durel as much as the woman—Kovannon prayed it might have knocked him unconscious. They might be able to get him through the portal and to healing in time. But no, his wet screams resumed, louder than ever, and his hands and feet hammered at the ground as he struggled to get free.

Kovannon heard Ulender beginning another spell.

“No!” he shouted. “You’ll kill Durel!”

“He’s dead already!” Ulender said.

Or as good as, Kovannon realized. Moving forward, he drew his own weapon. An axe, crafted especially for chopping
bones, not wood, and bound in many spells by the finest smiths of Ellestharn.

The woman pushed herself to her feet. In one hand, she held Durel up by his scalp. He was still trembling, but the fight had gone out of him. With her other hand, she reached forward, grabbed the sword’s hilt, and pulled it out of her.

“Stand back!” Ulender called, and began the final words that would release the spell.

Kovannon shuffled sideways through the snow.

The woman brought the sword around, almost nonchalantly, and cut Durel’s head from his shoulders. A gout of blood shot up from the gap between his shoulders, spraying the woman, then the body hit the ground.

Ulender was pronouncing the last word of the spell when the woman took one step forward and hurled Durel’s head at him. It struck Ulender in the chest, knocking him back. The gathered power of his magic sparked and fizzled out of his fingers, falling on the snow where it steamed.

She threw the sword next. It tumbled end over end one full revolution before burying itself in Ulender’s gut. His eyes went wide and he sat heavily in the snow. He looked down at the steel protruding from his body, opened his mouth, and a stream of dark blood ran out over his chin.

“Hurts, doesn’t it?” said the woman, and she turned her gaze on Kovannon.

He raised his axe and stood his ground.

“Tell me of this … queen,” she said.

Kovannon just stared back at her.

“No?” said the woman. “Why? Aren’t you afraid of what I will do to you if you don’t tell me?”

Kovannon swallowed and then spoke the wholehearted truth. “I am
more
afraid of what she’ll do to me if I do. Death at your hands would seem a relief by comparison.”

The woman cocked her head, again reminding Kovannon of some strange bird. And not in many, many years had he felt more like a helpless worm.

“I believe you,” said the woman. “If she is the type of queen you say, then she will understand this. Tell your queen that nothing this side of Toril is safe. Her people come out, I kill them. She comes herself, I kill her. These lands are closed to her and all her people. Unless she gives me what I want.”

Kovannon could scarcely believe it.
Tell your queen
, she said. That meant she was going to let him live.

“What is it you want?” he said.

“Give me the girl, and I’ll go away.”

C
HAPTER
THIRTEEN

D
O BETTER TOMORROW, OR
I
KILL YOU
.

And Hweilan had done better. She’d still taken a beating. In fact, on the second day of training Ashiin broke Hweilan’s right arm. But Gleed had set the bone and given her the foulest-tasting concoctions to speed the healing.

“Let the right arm heal,” Ashiin told her the next day. “Until it does, you fight with your left. You do as I tell you, or I break the left. Then you’ll fight with your feet. Disappoint me there, and I break your neck.”

Hweilan learned to fight with her left. At first with nothing more than her naked fist. Then a blade. Then with whatever came readily to hand.

She preferred the blade. By the time her right arm had healed, Hweilan knew a dozen ways to kill with the sharp edge, fifty with the point, and several with the pommel. Once, her determination and fury got the better of her, and she gave Ashiin a deep gash down her forearm. She was so shocked that she froze, eyes wide, and—

Ashiin might have punched her. But it could just as easily have been a kick or a swipe of the elbow. Hweilan could never remember. But she did remember waking to see Ashiin standing over her, completely undisturbed by the steady stream of blood running down her arm, and
drip-drip-dripping
off her middle finger and onto Hweilan’s face.

“You never apologize for doing as I tell you,” said Ashiin. “And you
never
let go your guard. Now get up.”

Hweilan got up.

For the first time since Hweilan had known her, Ashiin smiled. “That was a good strike. You’re learning. Well done.”

And so it continued. Day after day. In the deep woods, learning to use tree trunks and boughs and the uncertain ground to her advantage. In the streams, learning to swim and fight despite the cold water, the constantly shifting rocks, and the current ever pushing at her.

Once Hweilan had learned to defend herself and learned to strike to kill, then she learned to hunt. Not like Scith had taught her. He had taught her to track, how the animals used the landscape to their advantage, and how to use it against them. He told her that in ancient days, men learned to hunt by watching wolves, by hunting as pack and exploiting their prey’s weaknesses. Ashiin taught her to stalk, to use her enemies’ fear against them, and to hunt as the fox, by choosing her prey, getting in close and quiet, and striking before the prey even knew she was there.

“Every enemy has a weakness,” said Ashiin. “Find it. Use it. And the strongest foe will fall before you.”

But no matter how strong she grew, how fast, how agile … still she was no match for Ashiin. The woman moved quick as an adder and hit harder than a bull.

One evening, after a particularly rough beating from her teacher, Hweilan’s spirits were so low that she actually confided in Gleed.

The old goblin had already set a cold, clammy poultice on her swollen right eye. He was setting another concoction to simmer on the fire before he set about the work of pulling her right arm back into its socket.

“H-how?” said Hweilan. Her jaw was trembling so badly that she had to close her eyes a moment and gather the strength to speak. It wasn’t pain. She had long since passed
beyond the pain. But the very last threads of her body’s strength were fraying and about to snap. “How c-can I ever pass her tests?”

Gleed stood behind her, set a gentle hand on her hanging shoulder, and placed the flat of his other palm on her back. “Ready?” he said.

She nodded.

He pulled.

She screamed.

But she did not pass out. That was something. Last time, she had passed out.

“Fighting,” said Gleed, “killing … it’s more than knowing how. It’s about how far you are willing to go. And you, Hweilan, you are still holding back. When you hunt Jagun Ghen and his minions, you cannot hesitate. You must strike without pity, without remorse, no matter the face they wear.”

Hweilan moved her arm tentatively. It sent a glass-edge of pain sliding down her spine, but it still wasn’t as bad as last time.

“She’s trying to make me into a beast,” said Hweilan. She couldn’t help the tone of petulance in her voice. She’d been raised in a household of knights, to whom honor was more precious than life. To them, battle was an art, could even be a sacred act of devotion. To Ashiin, killing seemed a primal instinct, a need, no different than hunger or fear. To Ashiin, being a killer was not a matter of doing, but being, and Hweilan feared that she could never become that.

“She is not.” Gleed turned away from the iron cauldron he had been stirring. “A beast cannot be
made
, stupid girl. A beast is woken. No. Ashiin is not making you into a beast. She is trying to beat the scared, spoiled little girl out of you so that when the beast does come—and it will; it will—a little of the woman might survive.”

Three days later, when it was time for her lesson with Ashiin, Gleed followed her out of the tower, a bundle on
his back. He saw the inquiring look she cast in his direction as she climbed out of the tower and into the gray morning.

“I go with you today,” he said.

“But Ashiin said—”

“Today, you will learn from us both.”

“Oh, this can’t be good.”

He summoned the bridge and they crossed into the woods. Mist still curled around their ankles as they walked, and the remnants of last night’s rain dripped from the boughs. Hweilan watched every shadow, and her ears strained at every sound. Most days she walked to the woods Ashiin haunted, but on several occasions her teacher had ambushed her. It had been a while since that last happened, which made Hweilan think she was due for another.

Less than half a mile from Gleed’s lake, the woods thinned around a scattering of lichen-covered boulders. They were taller than they were wide, and set deeply into the soil. Mostly featureless, there were still enough irregular curves and grooves to them that Hweilan suspected they might have once been sculptures. It was there that she usually followed the slope upward to the drier woods. But Gleed kept going straight ahead, keeping the heights to their right.

“Where are we going?” she asked him.

Gleed talked while they walked. “You remember when we spoke of the skin between worlds?”

Hweilan did. One of Gleed’s lessons from many days ago. He’d told her that Toril and the Feywild were not the only worlds. There were many—some almost mirror-images of this one, with only the slightest variations. Some so different that the very air was poison, the light fire. And the barriers between them—Gleed used the word
dehwek
, meaning “skin”—ran thin in some places.

But the concept … it was not unlike what the shade of her father had said that day on the height.
Thin is the veil that separates us, and it can be lifted
.

“Portals you mean?” she’d asked.

Gleed had merely shrugged. He had his Lore, and when the names by which she knew things differed from his own, he simply ignored them.

“All things have their own song,” he’d continued, explaining that every creature had its own rhythm—a unique voice, a heartbeat, breath. So it was with the worlds. Each sang to its own rhythm, and if one could learn their songs, one could pierce the “skin between worlds.” But it was a very delicate matter, taking intense concentration and care. Fail at the song, and the skin would remain impenetrable. Make an error, and one could fall into the wrong world—and never live long enough to realize one’s mistake.

“You remember the songs I taught you?” Gleed asked, pulling Hweilan from her reverie.

“I do.”

“Good. You’re going to need them.”

They walked most of the morning, coming to the stream where Gleed had first found Hweilan. They followed it until it spread out the width of a tourney field and fell over the lip of a cliff.

Ashiin was waiting for them there, crouched in the shadows of an ancient willow whose branches played in the river. She looked at the little goblin through narrow eyes, her face otherwise expressionless. “Gleed,” she said.

“Ashiin.” He did not bow—in fact lowered his staff and stood ramrod straight.

Hweilan eyed them both warily.