Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [181]
“I’m going to help him torture you. Let’s see. I shall heat a bronze knife in that fire and then lay the blade upon your flesh. It’ll stink when the metal sears you and scorches all your fur away.”
The wolf warrior screeched.
“Hold your tongue!” This time the herald’s voice wavered badly. “You lie, elven bitch.”
“Don’t. You’re doomed, too, old man. We’ll let the page there amuse himself with you.”
The boy laughed and clapped his hands, but whether he was acting a part or honestly anticipating the job she couldn’t tell. The herald moaned and began chewing on the end of the staff.
“Oh, Dog Nose is gone to play,” Dallandra sang. “Over the hills and far away, and Evandar shall ride where he pleases.”
The wolf warrior turned to the old man and snatched his staff out of his hands.
“Go fetch him,” he growled. “Go fetch our lord. You know which way he rode. Go get him back here.”
With a snarl the pair of fox warriors grabbed the herald, one at each arm, and shook him. The entire warband gathered round, snarling, snapping, cursing, and shouting.
“Get him, get him, fetch him back!”
“Very well!” the herald wailed. “I will, I will. Give me my staff. Give it to me, you ugly maggots!”
When he grabbed, the human-looking fellow grabbed back, hit the wolf warrior by mistake, and got bitten for his clumsiness. Screaming and swinging they scuffled, butting at each other with heads and shoulders, flailing round with fists and paws. The herald wiggled free and rolled clear, clutching his staff, his face bleeding from long scratches.
“Hurry!” the wolf warrior swung his way. “Be gone!”
Shrieking and weeping the herald rushed into the forest, traveling in the exact same direction that the earlier messenger had arrived from, Dallandra realized. She could just see him rush between a pair of strangely identical oak trees and marked them in her mind. Down below the fighting stopped in a wail of curses, a thunder of recriminations. One of the bear warriors picked up a skin of liquor.
“Let us wash this ill feeling away,” he announced. “It behooves us to behave like the brothers we are.”
Dallandra watched the skin making its round and tried to calculate how far away the herald and his fragment of rational mind might be. She was painfully aware that every beat of her heart meant time passing, an hour perhaps for Jill, or even a day. Besides, what if the old man found Lord Vulpine fast and brought him back? Clutching the bars of his cage, the page stared up at her as if she were a goddess. If only she could get him out of there and away from harm without them seeing, just as Lord Vulpine had winkled the pair of them out from under Evandar’s nose!
“Dolt!”
She’d spoken aloud, but fortunately the guards were too busy drinking and bickering to notice. She’d been thinking of the size of her physical-seeming body as immutable, just as it would have been back on the earthly plane, but here in the Lands no such restriction held. She raised one finger, got the page’s attention, pointed to herself, then to him, repeated the motion several times since she didn’t dare whisper, “Do as I do.” He watched with narrowed eyes, as if he tried to understand.
Carefully she built up the linnet image in her mind, then concentrated on size. Immediately she felt her body melting, melding, changing. She clung to the image, made it smaller and smaller in her mind, felt her body shrinking as Lord Vulpine had made it shrink, was aware suddenly of the amethyst figurine as a weight pulling on her neck. She broke the image fast, flapped her wings, and took a few experimental hops forward. The cage towered round her, huge and looming. The little spaces between the wooden bars gaped—doorways. With a cock of her head she looked down and saw a tiny sparrow in the pageboy’s cage.
The guards were still talking