Wren screamed and Freya spun around, crashed across the freezing stream, and scrambled up the steep bank toward the sound. She reached the top of the slope with Erik half a step behind her. Just a stone’s throw away there stood a man in a filthy wool cloak with one arm wrapped around Wren to pin her arms down, and his other arm wrapped around her neck with a steel knife in his hand. He had a scraggly blonde beard and his grimace revealed several missing teeth between his cracked lips.
“Who are you?” His voice broke and shook, choked with phlegm. He spat in the grass.
“Let her go. Now!” Freya pointed her long spear at the man.
He tightened his grip on Wren, and the girl thrashed about, kicking at his legs and trying to smack her skull back into his face. He lifted her up off the ground and gave her a hard shake, and she fell limp, her eyes blinking and head lolling as she gasped for breath.
The man shifted his arm around her neck to press the edge of his knife to the girl’s throat. “What do you want? Where’d you come from?”
“We saw the mill and thought there might be food.” Freya edged forward as Erik moved sideways to flank the man. “Now let her go. We don’t want to hurt you, but I’ll kill you before I let you kill her.”
“Food?” The man jerked his head at the mound of white fluff on the ground beside him. “I got food. I’ll trade you the sheep for the girl.”
“No deals until you let her go.” Freya took another step closer, tilting up her spear toward the man’s face above Wren’s shoulder.
The man’s eyes darted over to Arfast, who stood serenely a short distance away. “What about that girl there, the sleeping one?”
“We don’t deal in folk. No one deals in folk, not since the old days, and even then never for Yslanders.”
The man spat in the grass again. “Yeah, well, times change.”
“Last chance! Let the girl go!” Freya moved closer still and placed one hand on the butt of her spear, readying for a side-arm thrust.
It will have to be perfect, over Wren’s shoulder and straight through his eye.
She’d have preferred Erik to do it, but Erik was standing in the wrong place. From his position he could keep the man from running, and he could keep the man turned toward Freya, but he couldn’t run him through without hitting Wren. A pity. He’d always been better with the spear, and she with the knife. Nothing to be done about that now.
A queer look came over the man’s eyes as he stared at Katja’s motionless figure on the back of the elk. “She’s bitten, isn’t she?”
“That’s right,” Freya said.
Instantly the man let Wren go, shoving the girl hard so she stumbled several steps away before she caught her balance. The man stared at them one by one. “What in the nine hells are you doing with her? Why’d you bring her here? Are you crazy? They’ll smell her. They’ll come for her, they could be coming now.” He spun about, his wild eyes scanning the horizon. He grabbed up his dead sheep and started toward the mill. “Get away from here! Get away from me! Go, now!”
Freya lowered her spear, watching the man stumble through the tall grass as fast as he could. And she was still watching him when Wren let loose a stone from her sling and caught the man in the back of the head. He went down hard, dropping the sheep and falling down the bank to the stream’s icy edge.
Wren slowly wrapped her sling around her wrist and glanced at Freya. “What? Gudrun told me to do it.”
Freya shook her head and went to the edge of the embankment to look down at the man, who was crawling out of the water and rubbing his head. She was about to turn away and suggest that they keep moving, perhaps in search of a sheep of their own, when a mournful whine cried out from the mill.
It was a pained sound, a frightened sound, a hungry sound.
It was not a human sound.
The man by the stream froze, Freya and Erik dashed to the edge of the slope with their spears at the ready, and Wren grabbed Arfast before the shying elk could bolt.
“No, no, no!” The man waved his empty hands at them. “Stay back! It’s all right!”
“Nine hells, you idiot!” Freya shouted. “There’s a reaver in there!”
“NO!” The man threw himself across the stream and stumbled to the doorway of the mill. “No! Please! It’s my brother!”
Freya stopped and stared at the man, the same disgusting man who had tried to buy her sister just a moment ago with a dead sheep, and she lowered her spear. “Your brother has the plague. How long has he had it? Is he very far gone?”
The man nodded. “He was bitten last winter, and he changed soon after. But it’s all right, because we knew what was happening, and we chained him to the wall before he changed, to keep him safe.”
The huntress grimaced. “He’s been chained up inside there for a whole year?”
The man nodded. “Yes, yes, and I feed him and take care of him, to stop the changes, to keep him as human as I can.”
Freya glanced at Erik with wide eyes and trotted down the slope to the edge of the stream. “You can stop the changes? How? You have an antidote to the poison? Did a vala give it to you?”
He shook his head. “No vala helped me. I helped myself. It wasn’t hard. One look at him and I knew what I had to do. It’s nasty work, but he’s my brother, after all. I had to do it. You can come and see if you want. Just keep your sister away. I don’t want her smell on this place.”
Freya called back to Erik, “Stay with the others. I’ll just be a minute.” She jumped across the water and leaned her spear against the wall of the house, and with both hands on her bone knives, she ducked inside the mill behind the man. As she stepped into the shadows, she kept her eyes on her host, watching his hands for some sign of treachery, but he stood back in an empty corner, his hands empty and shaking and running through his greasy hair. Up close, she realized he was younger than he had looked before, and against her own better judgment she felt a slight kinship to him, a young man trying to save his plague-bitten brother, alone in a desolate land.
Then she looked to the far end of the room. For a moment she froze. Then she yanked her knives from their sheathes and shoved the man against the wall with one blade to his throat and the other to his belly as she snarled, “What did you do to him?”
The thing at the end of the room shivered and whined, its chains scraping softly on the stones and earth of the walls. The floor around it was carpeted in old hair and dried blood, and the air stank of urine and feces. The creature edged forward away from its wall, its chains rattling, and the light fell upon it.
It was stretched and crooked like a reaver, the shape of its body elongated and knobby like the beasts Freya had fought in Denveller. But there the similarities ended. This reaver had no fur because it had been shaved with a knife, which had left the creature covered in gray stubble and festering red cuts where the blade had slipped. It had no claws because its fingers and toes had been removed at the knuckles, and the small stumps on its hands and feet were black and yellow where the wounds had been closed with fire.
The top halves of its ears had been hacked off at jagged angles, and the rest of its face had been shaved in the same manner as its body-badly. Its eyes were gone, sliced out to leave the sockets dark and empty, and crusted with blood and flies. And around its short snout was a crude leather muzzle, wrapped over and over again around the thing’s jaws to hide its nose and mouth completely.
Stripped of its fur and claws and ears, blinded and bloodied, the thing before her did not look like either a beast or a man, but a mangled corpse.
It shivered and whined again.
“What did you do?” Freya whispered.
“What I had to.” The man’s voice shook. “I took away all the unnatural bits. Cut out the poison. That’s what you have to do, so I did it.”
The creature reached out to paw with a severed limb at the dirt blackened with its own blood.
“He was your brother.” Freya swallowed.
The man nodded. “That’s right. You understand. I couldn’t kill him, not my own brother. I had to save him. I had to do what no one else could do. I had to-”
“He was bitten,” Freya said. “He was changing. He was in pain. He was afraid.”
“Yes.”
“So you shackled him to the wall.”
