good thing I was wrapped up in this cloak when I fell over, or I'd have frozen.
He pushed the pack away, and rolled over onto his stomach. That at least got the sun out of his eyes. He got his knees under him, and pushed himself up off the snow with his arms; he was stiff and cold, but otherwise intact. Only his head hurt, and that in the peculiar 'inside' way that meant he'd 'bruised' those new senses of his. He knelt where he was for a moment, then pushed his hood back and looked around. It looked as if he'd fallen right over sideways when the shock hit him.
Guess I'd better get moving. Before I turn into a snow-statue. He pulled himself to his feet with the help of the stump, then stamped around the snow for several moments, trying to get his blood moving again.
He hitched his pack over his shoulder, and took his bearings. All right, let's try again. Center - and ground - and open - and If I find out that Moondance had anything to do with this I'll -
His head rang again, and he swayed and almost fell, but this time the shock was a clear, urgent, and unmistakable wordless cry for help. It sobered him as quickly as Andrel's bucket of cold water.
There was no 'presence' to the cry, not like any of the Gifted or the Tayledras had; it was just simple and desperate. This was no trained mage or Herald. It could only be an ordinary person in mortal fear.
Gods! His head swiveled toward the source of the cry as a needle to a lodestone. And without any clear notion of why he was doing so, except that it was a cry for help, and he had to answer it, Vanyel began stumbling toward the source at a clumsy run.
He had been following a game-trail; now he was right off any path. He ran into a tangle of bushes, and could find no way around it. Driven nearly frantic by the call in his head, he finally shoved his way through it. Then he was in a beech grove; there was little or no growth between the straight, white columns of the trunks, and he picked up his pace until he was at an all-out run.
But the clear, growth-free area was too soon passed; his breath was burning in his lungs as the forest floor became rougher, liberally strewn with tangles of briar and rocks, and hillier as well. His cloak kept hanging up on things, no matter how hard he tried to keep it close to his body. He tripped; stumbled wildly into the trunk of a tree, and picked himself up only to trip a second time and fall flat in the snow. The breath was knocked out of him for a moment, but that panicked, pleading voice in his 'ear within' would not let him give up. He scrambled to his feet, pulled his cloak loose from a bramble, and started running again.
He must have tripped and fallen a good dozen times over obstacles hidden in the snow, and he surely made enough noise to have warned anything that wasn't deaf of his coming.
Anything that wasn't deaf - or very busy.
Winded, floundering blindly, and unable to focus on anything more than a few feet ahead of him, he fell over a root just as he reached the crest of a low hill, and dropped into a thicket of bushes that crowned it.
He saw the danger before he got up and broke through their protective cover. He froze where he was. The 'danger' was too intent on its victims to have paid any attention to the racket he'd been making. Likely an entire cavalry troupe could have come on it unawares.
This was the very edge of the cleared lands of some smallholder; a fertile river-valley, well-watered, sheltered from the worst of the winter weather and summer storms. Arable land like this could well tempt an enterprising farmer out into the possible perils of the Pelagirs. There had been a stockade around the house and barns to guard against those hazards that could be foreseen.
But the stockade, of whole tree trunks planted in a ring around the buildings, was flattened and uprooted. It could not have held more than a few moments against what had come at the settlers out of the bright winter morning.
Vanyel had never seen a colddrake, but he knew what it was from descriptions in far too many songs and tales to count.
Less like a lizard, and more like a snake with short, stubby legs, it was the largest living creature Vanyel had ever seen. From nose to tail it was easily as long as six carts placed end-to-end. Its equine head was the size of a wine barrel; it had row upon row of silvery needle-sharp spines along its crest and down its back, and more spines formed a frill around its neck. It snarled silently, baring teeth as long as Vanyel's hand, and white and sharp as icicles. Its wickedly curved claws had torn the earth around it. Vanyel knew what those looked like; Moondance had a dagger made from one. Those claws were longer than his hand, and as sharp as the teeth. Huge, deep-purple eyes, like perfect cabochon amethysts, were fixed unwaveringly upon its prey, a young woman and her two children. It was a pure silver-white, like the cleanest of snow, and its scales sparkled in the sunlight; it was at least as beautiful as it was deadly.
As one mangled body beneath its forefeet testified, the creature knew very well how to use its wickedly sharp claws and teeth.
But neither tail nor fangs and claws was what held the terrified woman and her two children paralyzed almost within reach. It was the colddrake's primary weapon - the hypnotic power of its eyes.
It stared at them in complete silence, a silence so absolute that Vanyel could hear the woman panting in fear where he lay. The drake was not moving; it was going to bring its prey to within easy reaching distance of it.
Vanyel hadn't reshielded since he'd first been impaled upon that dreadful dagger of the woman's fear. He could still sense her thoughts - incoherent, hysteric, and hopeless. Her mind wailed and scratched at the walls that the colddrake's violet gaze had set up around it. She was trapped, they were trapped, their wills gone, their bodies no longer obeying them.
That was how her husband, the children's father, had died; walking right into the creature's grasp, his body obedient to its will, not his own. The beast was slow, that was the true horror of it - if they could just distract it for a crucial moment, break its gaze, they could escape it.
Vanyel could 'hear' other minds, too - out there on the opposite side of the clearing. The rest of the extended family - there must have been dozens of them - had made it past the slow-moving drake to the safety and shelter of the woods. Only these four had not; the woman, burdened with her toddlers, and the man, staying to protect them. He could 'hear' bits of their anguish, like a chorus wailing beneath the woman's keening fear.
Vanyel stared at the trapped three, just as paralyzed as they were. His mouth was dry, and his heart hammered with fear. He couldn't seem to think; it was as if those violet eyes were holding him captive, too.
