HE was running through the forest. It was night. Thorns and brambles ripped and tore at him, and behind him he could hear the howling of the pack as they followed. Just ahead was the canyon, if he could only reach it. But he had to have a weapon to defend himself with.
He stopped, frantically searching, but saw nothing he could use. At last, far ahead, he spotted a branch that he could tear free. But when he reached it and pulled it away from the tree, he saw that it was old and rotting, crumbling away to splinters in his hand. Useless.
And then the first of the Hounds was upon him, leaping onto his back, tearing at his clothes with paws that turned to taloned fingers as it giggled in his ear.
'Wildmage—Wildmage—Wildmage—'
HE woke up.
He was in his own bed in his own room back in House Tavadon. It. was all a dream!
Relief so intense he nearly swooned filled him. All a dream! The discovery, the trial, the Banishment, and everything that followed, only a dream! A warning, and he'd been lucky to receive it. Now he could—
But when he flung back the covers, he saw that the sky outside was the color of blood and darkness. Green fire laced across the sky, and by its light he could see the Hunt, racing across the garden toward his window.
He ran for the door, but the door was gone. His father had taken the door away, because his father meant him to die here, die with the Demons he'd summoned.
He picked up a club…
HE was standing over a Demon. It was dead, and its blood was all over him. He wiped it away, but the harder he scrubbed at it, the more it spread, and everywhere it spread his skin turned black—black and scaled. Demonskin.
He was a Demon, too.
Kellen ran.
THE Hounds pursued him, and Kellen ran. They turned into Demons, laughing at him, mocking at him, until, most horrible of all, somehow Kellen was one of them, running with the Hunt, chasing himself, howling with glee as he ran through eternal night on leathery clawed paws, hunting himself down. He would always run, always hunt. He would never be free…
Tainted. Unclean. Because of the Wild Magic, just as Lycaelon had said.
Lycaelon had been right. He'd been right about the Banishing, and he'd been right about this. Why would the High Council send so many Hounds, send not one Hunt, but many, if Lycaelon had not been telling the truth about the Demons… ?
At last Kellen spiraled down into a deeper sleep, one without dreams.
WHAT seemed a very long time later, Kellen woke up.
It was day. He stared incuriously at the ceiling for a long time, aware of being awake but without feeling the slightest need to do anything about it. He realized that he'd felt this way before—once, as a child, he'd caught the Spotted Sickness and run a very high fever for almost a week. When the fever had finally run its course he'd felt just like this, as if all his energy had been burned away by his body's fires. He wasn't sure where he was, and had no clear idea of how he'd come here, nor did it really matter to him. To think, to remember, to feel, all would take more energy than he had.
It was a pleasant sort of lassitude, a comforting exhaustion, where the body said to the mind, you will rest because you have no choice, you will not think, nor worry, because you will not have the strength.
He was lying on a bed in a small room with walls completely made out of unpeeled logs chinked with white river clay. He could see the ceiling—thatch over timbers—and parts of two walls. There was a window in one of the walls, its shutters thrown open to admit light and air; he had a view of green tree branches, and heard a chorus of birdsong, and the air smelled verdant and sweet. To see anything more would involve moving, and Kellen wasn't ready to do that yet.
He was not completely certain of how he'd gotten here. The unicorn… was Shalkan real, or was he a part of the vivid fever-dreams? Memory thrust itself into his present with the sudden unwelcome pain of a thorn in the foot. Remembering made Kellen shudder weakly—but those dreams— the Hounds, the fight—they couldn't have been real, could they? He'd been wounded nearly to death, and nothing hurt now. He was very weak, but he wasn't in any pain.
But I am here, not in my room — I've never seen anything like this room in the City. So I was Banished, and I escaped the Hunt, so Shalkan must be real…
