This was rather awkward, Sael thought.
The cloud had taken him and Dan up to its altitude, and Sael had stepped onto the platform with Dan a half-pace behind him. Four heads turned toward them at once.
Ilsa was already on her feet. She had clearly seen the levitation rising through the dark and had a question prepared, though she did not, after the first half-second of taking in the scene, ask it. She simply looked at Sael with one eyebrow slightly raised.
Robin had paused mid-task with his crossbow, a bolt in one hand while Lance had set his book down. Oz was still in his place at the front of the cloud, looking studiedly unbothered. Pebble, in his sealed array, was a goat doing goat things.
Then there was Orion.
Orion, who had been sitting cross-legged a few paces away with Eirwyn across his knees, glanced up at Dan, recognised him at once from the hill, and waited.
Sael cleared his throat.
"Dan will be travelling with us. I have taken him on as a student."
The cloud went briefly, uniformly still.
Ilsa's eyebrow came down again, then went up further than it had been before. Robin set the bolt down beside him while Lance closed his book with one finger still marking the page. Even Oz, who had been pretending to be uninterested in any of this, glanced over, although he did not say anything because he had already said everything he intended to say on the matter five minutes ago.
Orion's face, by contrast, went through three small adjustments in quick succession and arrived at delighted.
"Truly? Master, that's... that's wonderful." He stood up and crossed the cloud in three steps to offer his hand to Dan, who took it without quite expecting any of this. "I'm Orion. I've been studying with the Master for about three months. It's good to have someone — I mean, welcome."
"Dan."
"I know. We met on the hill. I just — formally. Welcome formally."
Sael watched the exchange and began, somewhere internally, to suspect that he had moved too quickly. Not the decision itself; Dan's mana was unusually dense and the case for taking him on was sound, and Sael did not regret saying yes. But he had not, before saying yes, run through any of the small practical questions Orion was now efficiently moving toward.
Like, for instance, the boy's family.
"...And your parents?" Orion asked. "Are they back in Kessenmark? Will they know where you've gone?"
Dan glanced briefly at Sael. "My parents are dead, actually. Since I was twelve."
"Ah, good," Sael said.
There was a small, very pure silence on the cloud.
Everyone looked at him.
"That did not come out as I meant it."
This did not appear to help, so he took a breath, and tried it cleaner.
"To be clear: what I meant by good was procedural. I do not consider your parents being dead a good thing. The fact of their being dead is, I assume, a tragedy. I should not have used the word in connection with it."
He paused, trying to find the right words, then... "What I meant was that I had not, in offering to take you on, asked about your family, which would normally be a courtesy. Had your parents been living and unaware of this arrangement, my having already given my consent would have been a significant impropriety on my part, given that you are presumably still under their authority, and I would have had to undo or revise the arrangement in order to consult them. The good, in my private use of the word, referred to the absence of that obligation. It was not a statement about the larger matter."
He looked at Dan.
"...Which I am aware is also something one should not say out loud about another person's parents."
Dan had been looking at him with an unreadable face while Orion had gone pink with sympathetic embarrassment and Ilsa had her hand back over the lower half of her face.
Sael decided to stop talking.
"Hmm."
A hmm of regret, this one.
"Old man, you're so strange."
Sael looked at Dan.
"That is not the first time I have heard that observation, no."
Dan smiled. It was a small smile, but it was the first real one Sael had seen on him since the road.
"I think it's awesome."
Sael was, for the second time in the past hour, briefly unsure how to handle a thing being said to him. Compliments arrived rarely in this register; most of the ones he received now came with titles attached, and from people who were trying to be careful with him. He had not, in some time, been called strange by someone who meant it kindly.
"...Really?"
"You don't realise it because you've been you for so long, but most people are boring once you get past about ten minutes with them. You've talked for less time than that and I've already heard you tell off a chicken, lecture me about pastoral economies, and apologise for saying my parents being dead was good. I'm having a great day."
Sael did not know what to do with this.
He decided, in the absence of anything better, to redirect.
"Let us go, then. The compass is pointing."
He turned to Orion. "Would you help Dan get settled? I'll want to give the two of you a few pointers on some spells once we're in the air properly."
Orion's eyes brightened.
"Both of us, Master?"
"Both of you."
Orion nodded quickly, and turned to Dan with the expression of a man who had just been promoted from only child to older brother and intended to do the role properly.
"Come on. I'll show you where to sit. The cloud's bigger than it looks."
Hmm, this went better than he first assumed, Sael thought, as he reached into his coat and drew the compass.
The needle, when he opened it, settled in the same direction it had been holding earlier; westward, with a slight drift north now. In a steady, insistent manner.
He closed it.
"Westward." And the cloud lifted further, found more altitude, and began to move at speed. Soon, Kessenmark fell away below them into a small string of lights along the valley road, and ahead of them the dark of the broader country opened up.
***
At the same moment....
The cart was already moving when the first wolf hit it.
Eron felt a single thunderous impact that rocked the cart sideways and threw the boy two places down from him onto the floor. There was a sound like timber breaking. The mounted guard who had been riding alongside the bars a moment before was simply gone, horse and all, and where they had been there was a long dark shape moving fast in the moonlight, low to the ground, larger than the horse had been.
A dire wolf.
Eron had heard the village men describe them. He had even imagined them many times, yet none of his imaginings had prepared him for the size of the thing that had just hit the cart. It came up against the side a second time, and through the bars he could see the line of its shoulder, well above the level of the cart's roof.
Then the screaming began.
It started at the front of the caravan, the lead riders, the spotters, and moved backwards along the line as the rest of the pack came out of the trees. There was no order to any of it. Shapes were moving fast in the dark, two of them, then four, and soon more, dropping down from the slope on the north side of the road and falling on the horses and the men at the head of the column.
The captain of the slave train, a thin man with a heavy oiled coat, was screaming at someone further up.
"WHERE ARE WE? WHERE THE FUCK ARE WE, RANNON? YOU SAID THIS ROAD WAS CLEAR! YOU SAID THE PACKS DID NOT COME THIS FAR SOUTH!"
The man being shouted at — Rannon, presumably — was screaming back, and the two of them were screaming over each other while horses were being torn open behind them.
The scarred man already had Eron by the collar.
He had pulled the boy low against the floor of the cart with one motion, and his other hand was braced against the bars. "Stay down. Do not stand."
So, Eron stayed down.
A bolt of green light split the air over the cart. The caravan mage, somewhere up the column, casting. Eron saw, for one illuminated second, the full shape of one of the wolves on the road; head lowered, shoulder height taller than a man's, breath visible in the night air. The bolt struck the wolf in the flank, and the monster made a sound like the rending of stone, and then it was on the mage.
There was a wet brief noise, and the bolt did not come again.
After that, the cart rocked. This time it tipped. The right wheel left the ground, the side rose, and the whole structure went over with a crash that drove the breath out of Eron's lungs. Inside the overturned cage, prisoners shouted and slid sideways, chains snapping tight on wrists and ankles as bodies were thrown against bars that had become floor. The scarred man kept his grip.
Then the bars broke.
Something massive struck the side of the cart from above, and the iron at what had been the roof gave way under its weight. A long jaw came down through the gap, took the head off a man two places from Eron in a single closing motion, and withdrew.
There was no time to scream.
The prisoners went all at once. They came out of the broken cart in a wave, climbing over each other, chains dragging, the ones whose ankle irons had held being trampled flat because there was nowhere for the press of bodies to go but through them. Eron was pulled along by the collar for a few steps, then his chain caught on something, and the scarred man's grip broke, and he went down.
When he got back up, the scarred man was gone.
The road was full of people running and screaming. Some of them prisoners, some of them guards. Some of them, behind, were no longer running. The wolves moved through the chaos with terrible ease, choosing, taking, leaving the ones who were not yet worth taking.
Eron did not know where to go, but he ran anyway, even as his chest wouldn't fill.
He kept pulling at the air and getting only the top of each breath, his heart going hard enough that he could feel it knocking in his throat. Still, he ran, because there was nothing else to do with his legs.
The road behind him had turned into noise. Men were shouting over each other, horses were screaming, and underneath all of it ran a wet, heavy sound his mind kept sliding off of rather than name.
A horse was down across the road ahead, thrashing and kicking at the dark while past it, on his back where he'd dropped, lay the man who'd sat across from Eron in the cart all morning. His eyes were open while a stain was spreading out from under him into the dirt, and it wasn't slowing.
That was a dead person. Eron had never seen one before. He went past three more of them before he reached the trees, and he didn't have time to be sick about a single one.
Other prisoners were running with him, ahead and off to both sides, whoever's irons had snapped when the cart rolled. Nobody slowed down for anybody.
The trees took the moonlight away in two strides. Roots, low branches, the ground dropping under him. He got a forearm up across his face and kept moving, slower now, because he couldn't see, and running blind into a trunk would finish him as surely as anything on the road would.
Behind him the screaming was thinning out, and he didn't think that was a good sign.
He also didn't hear the man come up behind him. The first he knew of it was a hand closing on the back of his collar and yanking his feet out from under him. He hit the ground sideways and rolled, the world turning over on itself, dirt and dead leaves shoving into his mouth, and when he stopped he was on his back with the branches a black tangle above him while somebody laughed.
He knew the laugh before he knew the face. It was from the big man from the cart. The one who'd wanted his bread.
The man wasn't even looking back toward the road. The world was tearing itself open right behind him and he stood over Eron easy, hands loose, breathing like a man who'd gone out for a walk.
"Told you," he said. "Soon as the chains came off. Told you I'd remember."
Eron got his palms into the dirt and shoved himself backward, heels digging, the loose chain still hanging off his wrist and dragging through the leaves. He heard himself say no, very small, not much louder than his own breathing, and then he twisted onto his feet to run.
He got one step when another hit came across the side of his head and the forest tipped sideways and went white at the edges. He was on the ground again with no memory of going down, one ear filled with a high ringing, the taste of blood coming up the back of his throat.
The man crouched next to him. He didn't look angry, and that was the part Eron's head couldn't work around.
"I hate this," he said, and he sounded like he meant it. "I do. You think I want to be the one who teaches you? Somebody has to. A boy hands over his supper because a big man asks nice. A boy runs and forgets the big man's got the longer legs. Those are lessons, boy. Learn them off me cheap, or learn them off the world later, and the world won't go as easy on you as I'm about to."
He stood up. His hand found a length of broken cart-iron in the leaves and closed around it, and he turned back, but he didn't get the chance to use it, because the scarred man came out of the dark and hit him from the side at a dead run.
The two of them went down together into the brush, the iron bar lost in the fall. The scarred man came up on top. He drove his fist down into the big man's face, once, again, and then past counting, the same short heavy blows landing in the same place, until the arms that had been trying to cover up dropped open against the ground and stayed there.
He knelt over him a second longer, chest heaving, knuckles wet and black in the dark.
Then he stood.
"Hey! Can you stand?"
Eron's head was still ringing. He nodded, which was a lie, and the scarred man read the lie off his face and hauled him up by the arm before he'd finished telling it.
"Then move."
The scarred man pulled him into the trees, downhill, away from the road, one fist knotted in the back of Eron's shirt to keep him on his feet every time his legs quit on him. Branches raked at them both. The howling spread out as it came; behind them first, then off to the left, then from down ahead where the ground fell away. They were getting around in front.
Eron ran half-blind with his head full of bells, and underneath the fear, without ever deciding to, he started to pray.
He didn't know who to. His mother had a god she muttered to over the table, and Eron had never been sure it heard her, or that it was there at all. None of that mattered now. He prayed to whoever might be on the far end of it, and what he asked for was the plainest thing he had ever wanted: for someone to come. To come now, and make this stop.
Anyone at all.