Chapter 1988: An About Turn - Part 3
A fire later in the evening, she thought, for after all it was still autumn, and the sun would fade, and it would grow cold again. It was growing colder by the second, as the sun retreated. Had the sun ever run away so fast? Her smile faded with it, a sense of alarm. The sun, scampering away, as if it were some frightened rabbit. Not setting in minutes, but in seconds, plunging her into cold and darkness. The butterflies ran away with it.
"Wait!" She called after them, but there was no sign of them coming back.
There was only the cold. And the snow. And then something growing in the darkness, low, menacing, and entirely invisible. Wolves? She shivered. She needed to get to her bow. It was just by her, never far out of reach. She just needed to move her arm, and stretch out her hand, and then it would be there, familiar and reliable. Even wolves would not be so scary with it in hand.
Her arm would not respond. She strained herself, her fear mounting, but no matter how hard she tried, the limb seemed frozen. The blood a block of ice. "Idiot," she told herself, as if she ought to have known that would happen.
Then they were coming out of the trees, dozens and dozens of them, with fur as black as the night, and eyes a bright and blood red. They growled and salivated as they surrounded her. Cautious of her they were, despite their numbers. Or were they simply playing with her, knowing that they had already secured their kill, without the slightest bit of exertion?
True terror now. When had she last felt so afraid?
Another wolf shouldered past the rest. It must have been twice as big, and for its size, it was twice as menacing. There was cruelty in its eyes, and something metallic trapped in its mouth.
A heavy paw drove into her belly, as the creature loomed closer, towering above her face.
Its eyes glowed like candles, casting a genuine small glow on her, enough to illuminate her frightened face, and enough to cast light onto that which it held in between its teeth.
She knew what it was. She had seen it far too often now. That dreadful thing, that had brought about such suffering, and seen a friend killed, and the person closest to her snatched away. A crown of silver, dancing with dragons, and covered in blood and mud.
Two shades of it, one older and darker than the other. She hated that she could tell that, hated her own knowledge. It came right over her, that beast, till its head was only a nose away from hers. And it leaned over, crown clasped beneath its teeth, allowing the fresh blood, that second shade, to drip down upon her nose where the butterfly had once been.
A scream froze in her throat. Her heart forgot to beat. When the next wolf came from the side, to lunge at her exposed neck, she welcomed its jaws, and the relief that death offered from the grief that she would surely have felt.
She awoke with a gasp.
She was on her feet in an instant, grabbing her bow. An arrow was knocked in the same motion. She glared at the shadows of the trees in front of her. The same place that she had dreamt of, and the same place that she had fallen asleep.
There were no wolves. Only the quiet stirring of snowy branches in a gentle nighttime breeze. There was hardly a sound at all other than that. Any animal with any sense would be hibernating by now, and those that weren’t would still have made sure to make it back to their nest come the cold of nighttime.
It was just her, and the shape of a body in the snow that she had left from her slumber. She breathed in deeply, once, twice, then three times, slowing the shaking of her hands, and reassuring herself of where she was. Not at all too far from Ernest. A time away from the world.
That she had fallen asleep at all, that was about the only surprise. She was not one for constant napping. When she had taken a seat there, by the partially frozen creek at the bottom of the Black Mountains, the sun had been high in the sky, marking it at midday. Now there was nothing but the purest of black.
The image of the wolf from her dream flashed unbidden in her mind, strongly enough to make her flinch. That terrible crown that sat between its jaws, and the certainty that she had as to the two different persons the blood on it belonged to. The feeling of unease that spread from her chest, down to the rest of her body. Strongly enough to pin her in place like a poison.
She shivered despite herself, wondering on the feeling. Wondering then upon the dream, then wondering if she had ever really paid any attention to dreams before. Why was it she looked at this one, and decided that it in particular was meaningful? Why did this one stink of danger and a warning that she ought to recognize?
Why too was it that she knew what it pointed to, but felt herself strongly resisting the conclusion that would so naturally slide into place.
Logic pointed in another direction. Spending time around Minister Hod, or even near him, one could not help picking up logic as a weapon and a scalpel for which one might perform surgery upon the world in order to dissect the meaning in it.
Logic pointed to the strength of their current position, the strength of their army and all likely in it. The Emersons would come. Oliver had made his decision, and he’d dispatched Verdant, and Nila had heard the news, feeling a strange degree of pride.
It was her that Lady Blackthorn had come to, when she had been at her lowest – and then she had made her excuses to flee, to spend time by herself. Then, once she did find Nila again, she struggled to hide the smile that hid behind the troubled cloud of her face.