Dain chuckles. “I think it’s saying it never wants to see another one of those, much less eat one.”
“No doubt,” I murmur.
I back away then and wave everyone else to follow. The cath palug stretches, as if it had decided to rest here and hadn’t been “trapped” by humans and their companion beasts. Then it saunters off with a flick of its tail.
“Bye, kitty!” Alianor calls. “No need to thank us for rescuing you!”
“It already did,” I say. “By not shredding my face.”
The colocolo river is long gone, leaving a swath of destruction, as if it truly had been a rushing current diverted from its course. Grass, undergrowth, brush, even saplings have been flattened.
“That was…” Rhydd mutters.
“Unexpected?”
He sputters a laugh. “I was going to say terrifying. But definitely unexpected.”
“Fascinating, too.” I walk to the flattened ground and crouch to flip over the body of another dead colocolo. “Fascinating and terrible. Something panicked them enough to make them flee, entire colonies of them, running as fast as they could, trampling everything in their path, even each other.”
Alianor shivers. “I’m with Rhydd on this. Terrifying is the right word, because all I can think of is…what would make them do that?” She peers into the forest. “While I’m always right behind you for an adventure, Rowan, I’m not sure we should hang around to see what they were fleeing from.”
When I hesitate, she steps toward me. “I’m serious, Rowan. This isn’t the time for scientific curiosity.”
“Agreed, but it’s not the time to flee for our lives either. That was a panic stampede. I’ve heard of it with colocolos, though it’s usually only one colony. Animals like cows do it, too. Even humans will, if they’re frightened enough. But with colocolos, once they start, they don’t stop. The panic is infectious. For that many colonies to come together, the root cause is likely miles away.”
Rhydd nods. “One colony panics and then ‘infects’ another as it passes.”
“That would be my theory. The only thing killing them right now is each other.”
A moment of silence, respect with a touch of grief, for the monsters so frightened they would crush one another to escape a threat that they’ve long outrun.
“Now the problem is where they’re going,” I say. “Not where they’ve been.”
With that, Rhydd straightens so fast his bad leg falters. He wheels to the east—to Tamarel.
“We need to get home,” he says. “Before they do.”
I nod. On their own, colocolos are no more dangerous than lizards or mice. A colony can destroy a crop, but they’re mostly just pests. Thousands, though? They would destroy everything in their wake. Crops, livestock, even humans, suffocated beneath them, as we almost were.
“We need to get Wilmot,” Dain says. “Forget the dropbears for now. Warn him…”
He trails off with a whispered curse as he realizes what I already know—that we delayed too long with the cath palug. That was my fault. I thought the danger had passed. I didn’t stop to think it through. Now that I have, it’s too late to go get the others.
The moment I realize the problem, I start moving and the others follow.
“Someone needs to tell Wilmot,” Dain says again.
“I will,” Rhydd offers.
Dain shakes his head. “That’s a messenger’s job, not a prince’s. Alianor—”
“Alianor has two legs that work at full capacity,” Rhydd says. “She can run. I cannot.”
“But you shouldn’t go alone,” I say. “This is still the Dunnian Woods. No one should be alone. Alianor, would you please—”
“On it,” she says, and then to Rhydd, “Let’s go, your highness.”
As Dain and I run, I try not to worry about Alianor and Rhydd. I also try not to worry about Wilmot and the expedition. Shouldn’t they have heard us cry out when we were being trampled? They were only a couple hundred feet away, weren’t they?
What if something happened to the expedition? What if they’d been fighting for their lives…and I just sent Rhydd and Alianor into danger?
Or what if they’d left the dropbears in the cabin and come to find us? Rhydd and Alianor might walk in thinking it was empty, since the hunters were gone.
These are baseless worries. If my hunters had been fighting for their lives, we’d have heard it. If Rhydd and Alianor found the hunters gone, they’d check before entering the cabin.
What’s really bothering me is the fact that I’d been too preoccupied with the cath palug to realize the colocolo stampede was bearing down on Tamarel. Having failed there, I’m going to second-guess every impulse now. I suppose that’s a good thing in the sense that I’m taking time to work through all possibilities—which I didn’t do earlier.
While I do question whether I’ve made the right choice, I don’t turn around. I’ve already lost enough time. Dain and I run full-out for as long as we can, racing after the colocolo swarm, seeing where they’re heading so we can warn the hunters waiting at the forest’s edge.
Jacko tires first, and I go to scoop him up, but Malric grabs the jackalope and swings him over his head. Jacko lands on the warg’s broad back and latches on, his semi-retractable claws digging in. Then we’re running again.
I’d wondered how the cath palug got caught up in the stampede. Of course, we’d been caught off guard, too, but we aren’t creatures of the forest. Even Malric and Jacko grew up in the castle. Yet a forest monster should have had time to get out of the way.
Soon I see what probably happened to the cath palug. Earlier, I’d reflected that colocolos were too small for bigger predators. But the stampede has left dead ones trampled everywhere, and few predators will ignore an easy dinner.
As we run, we see other carnivores. A lone wolf crunches through a small pile
