Was that what Inhya saw—n’da, felt?—when she looked into his eyes? Tokela had taken her recent inability to hold his stare as a shameful and sorry triumph; now it hurt him, wondering.
Breaking the creature’s gaze with a small shudder, Tokela decided the stouter limb just an arm’s length away might make a safer perch, and tried to shove upright. It was a miserable failure. To move, after being still, was agony. It took every fibre of will Tokela possessed to merely crawl across the limb. Forever, it seemed—with the creatures following every wobble, every shift.
Finally, he lowered himself against the thick branch, panting and grateful.
The leg looked worse than it was; bleeding, a’io, but not spurting. Untying his hip wrap proved difficult; easing out of it, more agony. Again, forever, and once Tokela had the thing free he had to lean back, wait until his heart stopped pounding and his limbs stopped jerking. Only then could he even think of wielding his knife in what should have been an easy task: ripping the triangle of spun seed-pod fibre in two. No doubt he’d catch his fair share of misery from Inhya for ruining new finery.
Assuming he made it back.
He had to prise his hands from his slimed knife, fingers sticky with the creature’s… it had to be blood. Yet it was unnatural. Clotting slow and hued, not with the normal crimson of a sullen Sun’s rising over River, but like…
Like indigo.
One corner of his mouth gave a sudden tip upwards. With his middle fingers, Tokela scooped the blood from his blade then made two smears across his left cheek. Smile widening—a gleam of teeth that made the creatures below him bristle—Tokela did the other cheek then looked down. Growled back.
“I’ll have a new fur for my bedshelf and teeth to string for a necklace.” Mere bravado. Yet the voicing of it soothed, almost as much as the prickle and draw of the oddling blood on his cheeks.
The brindled leader settled onto his haunches. He looked set to wait forever.
“We’ll see who can wait,” Tokela muttered under his breath.
It was as if the creature understood. Teeth showed and the pale eyes gleamed, eerie and white as Starlight.
Wind picked up and began to sway the tree branches, soft and sap-heavy, across Tokela’s sweat-streaked face. He tied the torn hip wrap snug about his wounded calf and let Wind ply what comforts They could. There would be little enough of those from here on out. He’d come away with not so much as a strip of dried meat, a handful of nuts, or fruit. A clutch of small amber berries lay well within reach. Unfortunately, an overabundance of those would merely make him piss his water away all the faster.
Instead Tokela turned his attention to wrapping the lesser mauling on his right bicep, then set himself to cleaning his knife with peels of bark and what remained of his hip wrap. He’d begun a painstaking attention to the wrapped hilt when everything sidled abruptly sideways, skimming the hilt and his hands into a blur.
The fuzzy vision retreated with several good blinks and a rub against his tunic sleeve. Likely a splash of sweat or a flake of blood in his eyes. He began cleaning again.
Below, several of his captors had started to pace. The leader stood and began a strange, guttural… it was like to a howl, wavering upwards and tapering down.
This meant something.
Only Tokela wasn’t quite sure what it meant. He should know, certainly, but possibilities kept drifting, just past any reach. And the odd scum—sweat or blood—returned. Tokela gave a fierce rub of his eyes, nearly dropped his knife. Catching it just before it would have fallen, he clutched it tight. Sweat rashed over him, prompting a wave of shivers. Dully, Tokela contemplated this, came to a just as leaden conclusion. The bites. Poisoned.
The lead creature kept yowling. Tokela snarled back, but it wavered, threaded with fear. The creatures knew. Had likely known all along what would happen, its timing and its end.
The rest took up the noise—not anywhere near as melodious as the pack-call of wolfKin, so Tokela refused to designate it a true howl. For all the good it did him. Soon or late, he was going to drop out of this tree, easy meat…
N’da. Tokela began unwrapping the bandages from his leg and arm, revealing an unhealthy, black and yellow tinge to the bites like aged bruises. The sick-sweet reek of it made him gag.
It also cleared his head.
Gritting his teeth, Tokela sheathed his dagger and began binding himself to his perch with the soiled bandages. If he had to die, it was not going to be as meat for those things. Ai, something would have him in the end, but the pack would have to wait for whatever dropped from the scavenges of flyingKin.
If they were indeed flyingKin, not Shaped into obscenity like the twisted whatever-they-weres below.
Hard—so hard—to focus. It shouldn’t be. Tokela had used these wraps and knots since his fingers had grown limber enough to rig weirs and mend nets. The creatures’ caterwauling didn’t help; increasing in pitch, a maddening hum behind his ears that he couldn’t quite hear, only feel.
And answers, faint but unmistakable. Others approached. Tokela tried to squint through the trees, but his vision kept fading into blurry shadows. His hands, too, were traitorous, twitching as he worked. His teeth chattered; he gritted them, entreating whatever Spirits would listen that the fabric should not give when he finally did fall.
Lashed to the tree like a wyrhling ship’s sails during Wind’s anger, Tokela growled down at the crooning creatures again.
The leader paid no attention; he’d fallen silent, alert. As quiet spread through the remaining creatures, Tokela also heard it. Different, this, a high-pitched drone hanging in the treetops. Disturbing, too; akin to the
