The Jewel of Turmish - Mel Odom [1]
If the hunters had found their victim so easily, it only meant that they were armed with a magical talisman of some sort. It was the only way they could have found her in the forest. After all, she was at home there, and the hunters were interlopers. They should have been her prey-or at least been toyed with and abandoned in the forest.
Haarn touched the scimitar hanging upside down behind his back and under the pack. Silvanus willing, his blade would drink the blood of the hunters before morning. Only a little farther on, he found her.
Her body lay in a tangle of flattened grasses and brush where she'd fought her tormentors with her last breath. Blood stained the ground and foliage around her.
Creeping and flying insects from the forest drank of her blood from the grass and brush. A clutch of green-glowing fireflies, drawn by all the activity around the corpse, swirled in the air over the victim's head like a ghastly ghost-light.
She was young. Haarn saw that at once, and she'd left a litter somewhere behind her. Her body, even torn and savaged as it was, showed heavy with milk. She hadn't been part of the pack the hunters had trailed through the forest; she'd just been another target that had crossed their sights. Wherever it was, the Utter was too young to take care of itself. Without help, they would become casualties, too.
Haarn studied the wolf sprawled out in the forest. The signs showed her struggles against her foes, and he hoped she had given a good accounting of herself before being executed.
Quietly, Haarn mourned the wolf, though he had not known her. She was small in stature, barely more than five feet in length and just over a hundred pounds, covered in yellow-red fur flecked with black. Evidently she'd been on her own with her cubs because they had sucked her down over the last few tendays. Game was hard to come by for a solitary wolf, and much of what she had caught had probably been regurgitated for her cubs. Her eyes held round pupils that stared sightlessly into the darkening sky as the insects and small carnivores tore her to pieces.
Haarn didn't try to stop any of the savage feasting. It was nature's way, an unexpected bounty for those that had found her. He slipped his hunting knife free of his moccasin and stepped forward.
A trio of raccoons and a lynx gave ground reluctantly, hissing and spitting. Even the insects retreated somewhat before him.
The hunters had scalped the wolf before they'd left her. Her skull shone brightly white at the top of her head, and the blood had already started to coagulate.
Haarn rolled the wolf over and cut quickly, praying as he did so. "Silvanus, Keeper of the Balance, thank you for the table you have set before me. Watch over me now as I seek to right the imbalance her death has wrought."
The knife sliced the wolfs flesh cleanly. Haarn cut four steaks from the body, cutting out the best meat. Even that, he knew, would be tough and stringy, but it would save a brace of rabbits that he would have taken for his dinner later.
Finishing his prayer, his voice soft and low in the forest, Haarn wrapped the steaks in leaves from the broad-leafed box elder trees where the wolf had made her last stand. When he had the steaks protected and masked somewhat by the scent of the crushed leaves, he stored them in his pack.
Then he took up the trail again, knowing the slight delay wouldn't keep him from catching up to the executioners. He kept his stride long and measured, crossing through the forest with the silence of a shadow. Where a more civilized man would have seen only dense brush and near-impenetrable walls, his trained eyes discerned a dozen different trails through the forest, all with different benefits and costs.
The executioners had primarily stayed with the game trail. Bent grasses and twigs on either side offered mute testimony of the passage of the men.
And the woman, Haarn reminded himself.
He loped through the forest, occasionally hearing his traveling companion pass through the brush behind and to the left. Broadfoot was nearly five times as big