The Jewel of Turmish - Mel Odom [54]
Blinded by pain and fury, blood still seeping into his eye, Haarn tightened his grip around the wolfs neck, hoping to shut the animal's breath off. One of Stonefur's leathery ears raked against Haarn's face. Seized by impulse and the desire to live, the druid opened his mouth and took the ear in as the wolf began to rake his midsection with his claws again.
Haarn bit down, plunging his teeth through the wolfs ear.
Stonefur squalled in pain and changed his tactics. No longer interested in attacking, the wolf sought escape. Instead of raking Haarn with his claws, he pushed against the druid.
Unable to hold his opponent with his flagging strength,
Haarn felt the wolf squirm from his grip. Stonefur shook his head, helping Haarn finish sawing the ear off. The leathery piece of flesh remained in Haarn's mouth, which was filled with blood.
Panting, eyes only half open and threatening to close out of exhaustion, Haarn swallowed the wolfs blood and forced himself to his feet. He swayed in the storm winds, searching the muddy ground for the club. His breath puffed out in gray patches before him, burning as it entered and as it left his body.
Druz stood where he'd left her, but her sword was naked in her fist. Concern marked her features beneath rain-matted hair. Broadfoot roared again, filling the night with his challenge.
Stonefur trotted back and forth only a few feet away. The bloody stump of his shorn ear thrust up from his head, no longer cocked at an angle the way the other ear was. The wolf shook his head several times, slinging blood over himself and the ground.
You will die, lifekeeper.
Then come slay me, Haarn said. You already know Tm no boy to be stalked without fear of injury. Fve marked you, and even if I let you live after this, everyone will know you.
You were lucky.
Haarn spotted the club only a few feet away. He strode toward it, watehing the haunted lights in the wolfs eyes. Hunger showed in those orange eyes and hate as well, something Haarn had seldom seen in the eyes of an animal. He'd only found it in the eyes of those beasts that had spent time in the company of humans, and he wondered at Stonefur's background.
Standing in the cascading rain as the storm raged around them, Haarn prayed to Silvanus. Steeped in two schools of thought, Haarn had often found himself conflicted. He didn't know what he might have chosen had his mother not stopped coming to the forest years before, but that conflict was fading. The outcome of the battle before him resided in the sphere of his mother's teachings, not his father's. His father's skills had brought him to the wolf, but they couldn't save him.
The druid gripped the club and knife as the driving rain sluiced blood down his body. His stomach, back, and thighs bled profusely, but the muscle walls holding his internal organs remained intact. Liquid fire ran through his shoulder and neck where Stonefur's fangs had torn into him. He kept his feet apart in the manner his mother had taught him, left foot forward and right foot back, perpendicular to his forward foot. He kept his knees slightly bent, weight balanced. It was the most basic martial arts stance, the position everything else evolved from.
Haarn breathed out in slow deliberation, focusing his thoughts and quelling his fears. In doing that, he lost some of the perspective his father would have wanted him to keep. The wolf was no longer a part of the forest or of the world Haarn had sworn to protect as a druid.
The wolf was an enemy.
Perhaps, Stonefur said, I should let you live.
No, Haarn said, standing his ground and no longer mirroring the wolf's movements. He became the center of the world-as his mother had taught him. As the center, all things would come to him. That kind of thinking was foreign to druids, who believed they wove through the cycles of nature without creating ripples of their own. If it doesn't end here, Stonefur, I will track you down, and I won't