The Mark Of The Wild
Chapter 5:
Dusk again was bruising the sky when they came upon the ruins. Aria gasped and stared. Half-toppled arches of stone. There were broken pillars wreathed with ivy. Moonlight slipped in and out among the moss and stone that lay broken here and there, like parts of some old song that comes up in the silence.
Quietly she said, “Is this it?”
Kael did not respond at once. He moved forward to step over a few lower branches, and then tossed his head back. His answer was yes. This was among the places where the Moon used to talk.
Aria walked back after him. This was a different air cooler, and quieter. She only heard a velvet rustling of the wind wreathed between crannies of rocks. There was a faint pulse in her Rune.
“By what means have you discovered this place?” she said.
Kael sat on an altar that was shattered.
“I have lived longer than you have lived hunting old things. My mother used to tell me about such places. They were not used in prayer only. They were to be prepared.”
“Preparation?” Aria echoed.
“And on the blessed. To the blasted. The in-between ones.”
She knelt down by his side and touched with her fingers the old, rude carvings. The words in which they were written were not open to her, but the weightiness which stilled itself in every sign could not but penetrate to her.
“Will this assist, do you think?” she mumbled.
Kael looked at her.
“Do you reckon it will not?”
She shrugged and crossed her arms. “I do not know. I just... I am not prepared.”
Said he, “No one ever is. But you are not the one you were yesterday.”
She glanced at him and then turned her head.
“And you? Why take care of me?”
The jaw of Kael tightened.
“Due to the fact that I will know what being hunted over a gift you cannot even ask to be sent in your direction feels like.”
It shut her up. They sat an instant in the dusk of the setting sun whose shadows cast themselves over their faces.
And Kael rose. “This is where we are tonight. This is still a secure ground. But it is morning. The other ones will begin tracking in the morning.”
Aria blinked. “Who are the others?”
“The Alpha King does not surrender,” Kael said, “and is not this one alone. Then that you shall be wanted now the Rune is awakened to every leader of the Five Clans.”
“CLAIM me?” Cold came to Aria in her voice. “Is that like property?”
Kael was gazing at her calmly. “As power.”
Aria dreamed that night too. Of fire not to-day a Moon Goddess of fire. The fire was jumping around her. There was singing of words she could not make out. She was alone in the middle with her naked feet in wet soil, and the back of her neck was burning where the Rune had put its mark.
She looked back but she saw nobody. And then a murmur.
“It does not always happen that those who are marked live.”
And she turned around. “Who said that?”
The fire leaped. There was a shape upon it now, black-clothed. It had no face, but there was a glint of silver where its eyes would be. And it said, “Thou hast to choose what to burn. And what to preserve.”
And then the fires sprang up, fierce and furious, and engulfed her.
She sat bolt up by the gasp of her heart. Kael had already woken and was standing at the edge of the rubble. His sword was out, glinting faintly in the poor dawn light.
“You dreamed,” he said, without looking away.
“Yes,” she breathed.
“Bad?”
“The truth is I don’t know yet.”
He stood and turned to her completely. “Eat you must. You will need to be strong.”
She pushed herself up and shook her cloak of the snow.
“Do you think is it for something? The dream?”
Kael bobbed his head. “They normally would.”
They kept ambulatory noiselessly after breakfast. The woods in which I worked were denser to-day; they seemed to feel something bad was going to happen. Kael walked with his hand reaching step to step, and Aria followed him with her hand holding the hilt of the dagger with which he had equipped her two evenings before.
By noon they came to a stream to take a rest. The water was clean, but Kael did not drink. He stared out into the voids of space for a long distance, eyes closed.
“Something is out there,” he mumbled.
Aria tensed. “What?”
He listened, not moving a fiber of his body. So, softly, “Footprints. Not human.”
She held fast to her sword and stood with her back to a tree.
Kael held up his hand for quiet.
There was a low snarling in the trees. And then something came out of the brush. A wolf. No bigger than a wolf. A half-shifted thing, creature between man and animal, at the mouth froth, the eyes aglow and red.
“Rogue!” Kael snapped.
The monster leaped. Kael was in the middle of it, showing his blades in the blare of glittered blood. Aria drew back up, horrified. Powered unnaturally strong the rogue. It scraped and yelled and tore. Kael grunted, and, cutting swiftly, kicked the creature wildly back into the undergrowth.
But that is it again.
Then something welled up in Aria. Her hand went up. The Rune on the back burned hot. She shrieked, and a sheet of silver fire and light burst out of her breast, striking the renegade as he was in the air. The thing screeched and writhed, and then lay motionless.
Kael spun and stared.
“What did ye do?”
“I do not know,” said Aria, hugely; then, in a low whisper, as if to herself, “I am frightened.”
He moved toward her and stared upon her, as one sees with initial eyes.
“This was Moonfire. No one has said that since”
He stopped.
“What, a long time since?” she inquired.
“Ever since the first Luna.”
There was an air of silence between them. Then Aria said, drawing it out, “I guess I know I am more than they thought.”
Kael nodded.
“And now they are going to come at a more rapid rate.”
She stared at her hands. “The idea was not to hurt it. I just... lashed out.”
“It was by instinct,” he said. “The Rune is responsive to danger.”
She nodded. “Then I would better learn to master it.”
He smiled the rarest smile. “Well, you see, that is the principle.”
That night they came to a forest on a cliff, black and monstrous with pine. At the top of this hill Kael took her into a pathway of stone half covered with leaves.
“What place is it?” she demanded.
And drawing aside a vine, he showed a carved mark half moon, half fang.
“A threshold. After this time, you will cease to be who you are.”
“And turn into what?”
He gazed at her in a steady fashion. “What you are supposed to be.”