Of Truth and Beasts

The mottled one’s jowls quivered around bared teeth as it raised its head and sniffed the air in Wynn’s direction. It snorted, as if expelling a foul smell caught in its nose.

Wynn wondered why it needed to smell her at all. It should’ve picked up her scent without such effort. Then the reason dawned on her—perhaps it wasn’t her that the newcomer smelled.

Chane was the one who didn’t smell right. The brass ring could do nothing about that.

Ore-Locks pushed past Wynn into the clearing, his long iron staff at the ready but his blade still sheathed. The silver majay-hì swung its head toward him.

“Everyone be still,” Wynn said. “They aren’t animals. They’re as intelligent as you are.”

Shade still rumbled, and the silver one eyed her as if puzzled by Shade’s actions. It stretched out its muzzle toward her, and Shade bared her teeth.

“Easy, Shade,” Wynn whispered.

Shade was caught between two opponents and swung her head back and forth to keep track of them. When the silver majay-hì was a head’s length away, Shade turned fully to it.

There came the briefest touch of noses.

Shade flinched back and fell completely silent. The silver-gray dog turned and dashed back into the brush the way it had entered. The mottled brown one wheeled and followed. Shade, still frozen in place, looked to Wynn.

“Go,” Wynn told her.

Thrashing onward, Wynn could hear the pack on all sides in the forest. Their hidden potential threat made the way seem longer, so that when she finally broke into the open, she bent over, panting behind Shade. She was light-headed, and her breath still caught when she looked ahead.

Strange, bulging lanterns of opaque amber glass hung in the lower branches of maples, oaks, and startlingly immense firs. The trees loosely framed a broad gully with gently sloping sides that stretched ahead. Decades of leaf fall had hampered undergrowth, leaving the gully clear of underbrush. But ivy climbed over exposed boulders and around and up evergreens. Bushy ferns grew here and there, but these were all that broke the mulch, aside from the crackle of paws on fallen autumn leaves.

A dozen or more majay-hì paced in the view before Wynn.

They dashed past each other, rubbing heads, cheeks, or shoulders. Wynn could only imagine the memory-speak passing rapidly through the pack. She wished she could’ve listened in, as she did with Shade. All of them paused intermittently, looking at the black majay-hì, before wheeling toward another of their own in whatever they shared so rapidly.

Shade’s presence had caused trepidation or excitement or both.

“What is this place?” Ore-Locks asked. “It is not overgrown, like the rest of the forest. But the trunks ... they are too large for these kinds of trees.”

“Ahead ... slightly left,” Chane whispered. “Look to that fir.”

Wynn looked down the gully.

The fir tree’s trunk was almost as wide as a guild keep tower in Calm Seatt. The barest hint of a dark opening showed in its base. Some kind of hanging, perhaps aged hide or dyed wool, filled that entrance and made it seem part of the bark until Wynn looked right at it.

After the structures in a’Ghràihlôn’na, she would’ve never imagined that tree. But there it was, a living tree home, like those in the an’Cróan’s wild enclaves. It looked almost out of place in this forest.

“What are you doing here?”

The warning in that lilting voice made Wynn turn quickly, shifting her gaze. And then there she was, coming from the trees, down the slope, walking right through the pack of majay-hì.

Vreuvillä stopped, tensely poised like some wild spirit manifested in elven form. A circlet of braided raw shéot’a strips held back her silver-streaked hair. In place of the skirt draped to her feet, she now wore pants; high, soft boots; and a thong-belted jerkin, all made of darkened rawhide.

“I told you,” she said, “your presence disturbs Chârmun.”

Her Numanese was too perfect for someone who lived an isolated life so far from foreigners, let alone her own people.

Ore-Locks watched her closely but held back. Releasing Chane, Wynn took a step up behind Shade.

“We need to speak with you,” she said.

Vreuvillä moved toward them, barely disturbing the fallen leaves beneath her narrow feet. The mottled bark brown majay-hì paced her.

“Where is your friend, that white-robed heretic?” she demanded.

“He’s no friend or anything else to us,” Wynn answered. “We came all the way from Calm Seatt, and I have no idea how he beat us here.”

“No, I am sure you do not.”

Wynn was too tired of being played at every turn to care what that meant. But she didn’t care for the taunt itself. Then the silver majay-hì from the first small clearing circled into Vreuvillä’s path and passed close along the woman’s side.

Long, tan fingers combed between the dog’s tall ears.

Vreuvillä slowed for an instant. Only her large amber eyes lifted to gaze beyond Wynn. And her nostrils flared.