And the silence seemed to grow even deeper.
He smelled the blood first. A loamy ripeness to the air. He followed the tracks to the slaughter.
It appeared like some fetid bloom in a snowy field. A glade opened, slightly brighter with the open sky above. In the middle, blood splashed in frozen streaks, as far as the treeline.
Brant paused at the edge.
She had fought. The first blow had not been a killing strike, whether done for the cruelty or merely drunken aim. Brant bristled at the pain.
In the center, blood had pooled and iced around the abandoned and frost-rimmed carcass. They had not even taken the meat, only the hide. They had skinned her here. Off to the side, they had scraped and trimmed the hide. Brant leaned down and shifted a pile of scrap. They had cut away her belly skin, too thin of fur to be of value. He spotted the abandoned heavy teats. Brant’s jaw muscles tightened. Sten’s butchers must have noted the same, known she was nursing whelpings.
But to them, all that had mattered was her pelt.
Brant slipped out his own skinning knife, cut two of the heaviest teats away, and gently slipped them into deep pockets in his heavy coat. He would bury them later. The rest of the bruised and frost-blackened flesh he would leave to the hungry forest. While Sten’s men might waste good meat, it would fill the bellies of other scavengers.
Straightening, Brant continued on. He suspected it was only the scent of men that had kept the hungry denizens of the winter wood away so far. Brant had noted the unburied shite and piss left by the drunken men. And in another spot, a pile of upturned stomach, smelling still of ale.
Had it been the ale or the slaughter that turned the man’s belly?
As he had suspected earlier, a glint of metal trailed from a rear ankle of the carcass. Razor snare. The trapped ankle was twisted at an unnatural angle.
Brant took a deep breath through his nose. There was nothing he could do to lessen her pain now. Sten’s butchers knew nothing of the Way, of honor and responsibility between hunter and prey.
But Brant did.
As he circled, he noted the smaller paw prints, mere scratches in the crusted snow. They were too small to leave true tracks. Except for a few bloody prints, bright against the snow.
The cubbies had come out of hiding, come to their mother, nosed her cooling form, smelled her blood and pain. Brant knew that pain. There was nothing he could do to lessen that ache-only end it swiftly.
He slid an arrow from the quiver on his back. He warmed the frozen fletched feathers with his breath. He would make their ends swift. Better than to let them starve and freeze, locked in grief. He would finish what Sten and his man failed to do.
Brant moved away from the other men’s trail for the first time, following a new one now. Scratches in the ice. He would find the pair together.
Who else did they have?
Brant rose from one knee. He had been fingering a broken and bent twig on a bramblebriar bush. A pluck of black downy fur clung to it.
Frowning, he straightened. The hunt had stretched longer than he would have expected. He was deep in the wood by now. The whelpings were still on the move. Had they heard him, scented him? Fell wolves were known for their cunning, but the pair of cubbies were still suckling. Surely they were not so wise to this strange forest, separated from their own dark mountainous haunts of Mistdale far to the north.
Brant felt the pressure of time. Blind to the skies in the fog-shrouded forest, he had no way of judging the coming storm. But his nose sensed the snow in the air. He would not reach Oldenbrook before it fell.
Still, he continued. Turning back was not a choice. If the Way led into the teeth of the storm, so be it.
Clearing the patch of bramblebriar, he noted a dart of shadow ahead, a flicker from the corner of his eye. He froze in place, not even turning his head. He stretched his senses. From the edge of sight, he saw a flash, close to the ground, a pair of eyes.
One pair.
Where was the other?
From the clouded skies, large flakes of snow shed downward. It started as if it had been snowing all along. First nothing. Then all around, the flakes fell heavily, silently. It was as if the ice fog had simply crystallized and begun to collapse around him.
Flakes landed on his lashes, on the edges of his ears.
Too cold.
Rather than melting, they froze the flesh they touched.
Before Brant could react further, a small hare skitter-pattered right past his toes, fleeing to the left.
Farther in the forest, the fog broke enough to reveal a large buck bounding in the same direction, head low to the ground. Behind him, Brant heard something even larger breaking through the brush in a panicked scrabble.
Heading in the same direction.
South.
Soon Brant spotted more hares. A pair of fat badgers, driven from their dens, hurried by, all but scrambling over each other. Off in the distance, snow crunched and branches cracked, marking the passage of more and more fleeing animals.
Brant finally moved, obeying the forest.
What was amiss?
The snow fell thicker, burning with its cold kiss. Unnaturally cold. He might have missed it if he hadn’t stopped, his senses on edge. He dragged up his hood, protecting his face. He moved with a steady but swift gait. He didn’t know what had routed the forest with such panic, but he knew better than to ignore it.
His trot grew quicker, his heart suddenly pounding.
A pair of flicker deer flew past him, parting to either side of him. Something large growled farther to his left. Grass bear. But the anger was not directed at him; it was a blind warning to whatever had set them aflight.
Brant found himself hurrying, boots pounding through the iced snow, dredging through occasional deeper drifts. He used his shoulders and back to keep moving. The cold rolled over him-sinking into him, drawn in with every breath.
Ahead, a hare, which had been spearing ahead of him in zigzagging bursts, suddenly collapsed on its side. It skidded into the snow, shook a breath, then lay still.
Brant ignored his own thundering heart to stop at its side. He touched an ear, blue and frosted. He nudged the body with a gloved finger. It was stiff and solid. Frozen to the core.
Impossible.
Brant stumbled onward.
Snow blinded now. But he found more bodies in agonized postures or simply dropped in their tracks.
This was no natural cold. There was something behind him, cloaked in the storm, something of Dark Grace and deadly touch. He could almost smell the taint in the air-or maybe it was just the fear in the forest. Then again, maybe it was one and the same.
Then he saw them, off to the right. Two pairs of eyes glowed from beneath a leafless thrushberry bush. The cubbies huddled together, lost, panicked.
He would have to hurry. Each breath was now ice in the lungs. But he had come to honor the Way. Even what lurked in the storm would not stop him.
He notched an arrow, drew a full pull, and aimed for the first cubbie. He clutched the second arrow between his lips. Eyes glowed back at him. He saw their trembling, a mix of fear and cold. It spread to his aim. He tightened his grip to steady himself.
Still, his fingers refused to let go of the string.
Snow burned his exposed wrist where his coat sleeve had pulled up.
Cursing silently, he relaxed the tension and lowered his bow. With an exasperated sigh, he dropped the bow and spat out the arrow. His actions were foolish, a waste of precious breath, but the forest had seen enough death this day.
Brant undid the top hooks of his coat and used his teeth to pull the gloves from his fingers.
By now, the forest had gone silent again. All the animals had fled past him already.
