Assassin's Quest

I think she wants to mate with you. Will they accept you into their pack so easily?.

"What?" I asked startled, but it was the girl who replied, not Nighteyes.

"I said, it's lonely to awake at night and be afraid. One longs for a way to feel safe. Protected."

"I know of nothing that can stand between a person and the dreams that come at night," I said stiffly. Abruptly I wanted her to go away.

"Sometimes a little gentleness can," she said softly. She reached over and patted my hand. Without intending to, I snatched it away.

"Are you shy, prentice-boy?" she asked coyly.

"I lost someone I cared for," I said bluntly. "I've no heart to put another in her place."

"I see." She rose abruptly, shaking straw from her skirts. "Well. I'm sorry to have disturbed you." She sounded insulted, not sorry.

She turned and groped her way back to the loft ladder. I knew I had offended her. I did not feel it was my fault. She went up the steps slowly, and I thought she expected me to call her back. I didn't. I wished I had not come to town.

That makes two of us. The hunting is poor, this close to all these men. Will you be much longer?

I fear I must travel with them, for a few days, at least as far as the next town.

You would not mate her, she is not pack. Why must you do these things?

I did not try to form it into words for him. All I could convey was a sense of duty, and he could not grasp how my loyalty to Verity bound me to help these travelers on the road. They were my people because they were my king's. Even I found the connection so tenuous as to be ridiculous, but there it was. I would see them safely to the next town.

I slept again that night, but not well. It was as if my words with Honey had opened the door to my nightmares. No sooner had I dipped down into sleep than I experienced a sense that I was being watched. I cowered low inside my cell, praying that I could not be seen, keeping as still as I possibly could. My own eyes were clenched tight shut, like a child who believes that if he cannot see, he cannot be seen. But the eyes that sought me had a gaze I could feel; I could sense Will looking for me as if I were hiding under a blanket and hands were patting at it. He was that close. The fear was so intense that it choked me. I could not breathe, I could not move. In a panic, I went out of myself, sideways, slipping into someone else's fear, someone else's nightmare.

I crouched behind a barrel of pickled fish in old man Hook's store. Outside, the darkness was splintered by the rising flames and shrieks of the captured or dying. I knew I should get out. The Red-Ship Raiders were certain to loot and torch the store. It was not a good place to hide. But there was no good place to hide, and I was only eleven, and my legs were shaking beneath me so that I doubted I could stand, let alone run. Somewhere out there was Master Hook. When the first cries arose, he had grabbed his old sword down and rushed out the door. "Watch the store, Chad!" he had called after him, as if he were just going next door to hobnob with the baker. At first I had been happy to obey him. The uproar was far down the town, downhill by the bay, and the store seemed safe and strong around me.

But that had been an hour ago. Now the wind from the harbor carried the taint of smoke, and the night was no longer dark, but a terrible torchlit twilight. The flames and the screams were coming closer. Master Hook had not come back.

Get out, I told the boy in whose body I hid. Get out, run away, run as far and as fast as you can. Save yourself. He did not hear me.

I crawled toward the door that still swung open and wide as Master Hook had left it. I peered out of it. A man ran past in the street and I cowered back. But he was probably a townsman, not a Raider, for he ran without looking back, with no other thought than to get as far away as he could. Mouth dry, I forced myself to my feet, clinging to the doorjamb. I looked down on the town and harbor. Half the town was aflame. The mild summer night was choked with smoke and ash rising on the hot wind off the flames. Ships were burning in the harbor. In the light from the flames I could see figures darting, fleeing and hiding from the Raiders who strode almost unchallenged through the town.