No Fear of the Owl
Part VI: Blood and Stone, Briar and Storm
Orpek never settled. He laid his pack out with plate and helm at the ready, the clasps waiting to be done up at a sprint before the weight of his possessions had even settled onto his shoulders. An arm slipping into the buckles of his shield, a fist clenching around the hilt of his nameless nail, helm set down on his skull at full sprint.
He made it three steps out of the door, still buckling his breastplate, when the mice of Hilldown Burrow caught up with him.
They had cut him off. Orpek counted as he slammed a foot down to cancel his momentum, taking the neutral defensive stance he favoured. Three and three and thr- four. Ten.
“Now, this don’t have to be hard,” said Ghofin, standing at the head of the pack. “Just… gis’ us that nail and, in the morning, we take you across the stream and you go on your way. No heroics.”
Orpek released his grip on the hilt of his nail.
“No heroics,” he said.
His helm hung from his hand.
A long time ago and a long way away he had said that he would stand aside and let matters take their course.
A long, long time ago.
Good, thought Ghofin, taking a moment to enjoy the surge of satisfaction as the rat hung his head and held up his arms in surrender, that wooden helm with its two angular teeth hanging limp in his hand. The rat’s smarter than I-
The next thing he knew something was slamming into his jaw and he was falling backwards, skull ringing.
“Aw, bugger-” he swore, hefting his axe just in time to see Orpek, wielding only his helm, catch the point of a thrust spear in the eye hole and snap the shaft in half just as he dodged out of the swipe of a sickle from the other direction, quick as a flash grabbing onto the arm of the attacker and swinging them away like they were no heavier than a litterling even as the others surrounded him, weapons bared.
“LET ME PASS!” the rat roared. “I WANT NONE OF YOU HARMED!” His nail had not left his belt.
Ghofin worked his jaw where the rat had hit him. He could taste copper and his tongue found his gums ragged.
“I made a promise,” rasped Orpek, panting as he turned, keeping the mice surrounding him at bay with twitching feints as his paw clenched onto his helm. “Let me fulfil it. I beg you, please, you are honourable mice-”
“Hard it is, scabtail,” Ghofin said. He spat blood.
The first mouse to move was the sickle-wielder, the long copper blade curved to cut down grass and sharpened to a wicked edge. If Orpek had allowed himself his nail he would have laughed- tool-sharp shattered against armour, one swift parry would break the edge- but he would have to offhand parry it or somehow catch it in his helm, a task all the harder for its curved shape. A sliver of a second slipped by and he spun, smacking the blade off its course with the helm. But the weight of the pack on his back sent Orpek off-balance, unable to take his usual careful stance to compensate for his lack of three-quarters of his tail. He stumbled, exposing him to a stab from another fire-hardened spear that grated off Orpek’s breastplate, leaving a pale gash in the varnished wood, the mouse darting out of his reach before he could snatch the shaft.
You cannot outrun them with the pack on, he realised suddenly. You cannot defeat them without your nail.
A concession, then.
Only one cannot at a time.
Orpek dropped his pack, smacked his helm on his head and lunged at the mouse directly behind him, managing to grab her by the fur of her throat and, ducking into the dive, heft her over his head before she could even raise her spear. He had already dodged past a frantic, over-compensated scythe swing from the next nearest assailant and landed three swift blows to his head before she landed with a high-pitched whoof somewhere behind him. The scythe mouse tried to bring the blade back to bear but Orpek simply grabbed it and wrenched it out of his grip, swinging the handle into the waiting snout of another mouse charging with a long, serrated knife. The mouse staggered but did not halt her charge. Orpek brought the scythe back to bear, hooking her knife between the scythe’s shaft and blade, wrenching the scythe up and tearing her weapon from her grip, a swift smack to the top of her head sending her keeling over backwards like a dropped broom.
Then a split-second before it pierced his side he saw a mouse with a spear charging him and he sidestepped, caught the spear under his arm and elbowed the assailant squarely in the nose. The mouse managed to keep ahold of his spear, the rough, splintery wood digging into Orpek’s palm as the mouse tried to lever it out of his grasp, just as two other mice charged him, weapons raised. Orpek danced backwards, wrapping his arm around the spearmouse’s neck and pushing him into the path of the incoming two, who came to a skidding stop. The spearmouse, sensing an opportunity, jabbed his spear up at Orpek’s jaw, the point drawing blood at the base of his neck before he could grab it and force it down, slamming his helm down on the top of the rodent’s skull with all the force of sudden anger. There was a crack and the mouse fell, Orpek’s heart lurching.
The remaining mice formed a line abreast the tunnel. Six assailants remained standing. Two incapacitated, one unconscious, one apparently fled.
At their head stood Ghofin, clutching his woodaxe.
“Curse you, rat,” he sneered. “Want to save us so bad you’ll kill us to do it?”
Orpek’s eyes watched, alert and impassive. “I made a promise,” he said. “I will fulfil that promise and neither you, nor any creature out in the mist, will stop me.”
“I really thought y’were cursed with some splinter of heroism,” said Ghofin, shifting into a more level rank with the others. “But y’just insane. Y’just insane.”
“I want to do good by you,” said Orpek.
“We don’t want it,” said Ghofin. “We don’t need it.”
“You are wrong,” Orpek said simply.
“Well, that’s that, ‘ent it,” muttered Ghofin through bleeding gums, the fur around his mouth stained red, “can’t expect reason from a rat-” he lunged forward without finishing the sentence, axe sweeping in a horizontal blur.
Without thinking Orpek half-drew his nail, the axehead rebounding from the guarding metal. Ghofin heaved the axe again and Orpek was forced to take step after step backwards, ducking out of the heavy blade’s cleaving path and the jabbing spears of the mice beside the whittlesmith, blows landing on his side and a shallow cut from a blade splitting the skin of his left arm. Ordered as they now were his advantage of size and experience was lost, their joined backs a slow tide he had no hope of bulwarking. He needed to cut through, make a run for the palisade, and he could not do that with fists alone-.
Elder Fensht’s face appeared in his mind then as though speaking from down a darkening tunnel, features vague at the edge of the light. “As bitter and cruel and unfair as it is there will be no justice for Efishti, though I wonder if that is what you truly seek,” his voice echoed.
Orpek could feel Fensht’s imagined gaze on him, the mouse watching him sidelong as he vanished in a quiet tinkling of brass-and-stone charms.
His nail was in his hand.
The splintering grating of the table on the grout and flint of the floor as it was pushed tight against the enterance tugged at the base of Anhol’s ears. He had emerged from under the table to sit, eyes focused on what remained of his meal. The soup had gone cold and Anhol felt too sick to even try finishing it.
The roar of Hilldown’s residents had devolved into a terse, half-whispered weave of individual conversations. The fire in the mice had sputtered down since Ghofin had led their strongest and most willing after Orpek. What remained now was the quiet of those who knew they were standing in history, fresh-laid and still smelling of blood and soil.
There was a slow creaking of wood as Etkin sat down beside him. Anhol found his fur bristling as though she were covered in thorns. Like her touch would burn like ice.
“…Hey,” she said, and Anhol forced himself to look at her. “You feeling okay?”
“No,” said Anhol.
“…Yeah,” Etkin said. Her eyes drifted.
“You joined them,” said Anhol. His mouth was dry.
“It’s not Orpek’s place to make decisions for us,” she said, coolly. It sounded as though she’d practiced that sentence.
“I don’t-” said Anhol, grasping for the words. “It’s-”
“It was the right thing to do, Anhol,” said Etkin, gently, but a rushing fire lit under Anhol’s breastbone and he turned. Etkin’s whiskers flinched and something in her eyes withdrew in response, a cold wall rising under her brow.
“You hate him,” he said, shaking. “It’s not right to hate someone like that-”
“I don’t hate him!” Etkin exclaimed.
“They do,” Anhol said simply, a cold weight settling in him. “And you agreed. It’s not even that he’s right, it’s that you’re wrong.”
“Well-” said Etkin, choking on her words a little, “I think that’s unfair-”
She caught the look on Anhol’s face and stopped herself.
“Is this it?” she asked, suddenly, the words as still and cold and gracefully curved as a lump of flint.
“It’s all right,” said Anhol. It’s not right.
He looked back at Etkin. Her face was the same, the same whiskers, the same dark eyes, the same glimpse of tooth through her uneven frown, but it wasn’t the Etkin he knew, and maybe never had been. In the gulf between who they were and what the other saw, both knew, something had split.
There was more to both of them than small secrets and skirting chores in the evening dark down dusty storage tunnels, now.
“Don’t,” he said, trying to find the fire in him to fight. “Don’t be like- don’t be this.”
“Grow up,” said Etkin. Her tone was soft. “It’s time to grow up, Anhol. The story isn’t like that.”
She watched him for a moment longer before standing again, leaving him alone.
He tilted the bowl toward him with a finger before letting it fall backward with a small clatter.
Who was he supposed to grow up to be? Like the others, like Etkin? Or like the wanderer with a kind eye and a heart of nailmetal? Thoughts of leaving Hilldown, of learning about the world even as it seemed to grow crueler by the day, rushed through him. What was he to do? Who was he to be?
He didn’t know.
Anhol watched as a spot of water appeared on the table before him, and another, and another.
And five years hence he stepped past the palisade in the early morning light on a spring day thick with mist and set out west, tracing the path that the wanderer had cut through his burrow on the last day that he was a child. And below, scrubbing at flagstones that had been clean for hours, Etkin tied off the part of her heart that still dreamed with coarse twine.
They had never managed to drift all the way apart, had never found a way to simply cut the other out as they found themselves lost in the fullness of adulthood.
Despite who they became they would always share half a beating heart between the two of them, brother and sister despite their blood.
It would be many more years before Anhol began to understand his pain and found it lessened by opening it, but Etkin?
She blamed the world.
She taught her children to blame the monsters.
The storm was seething like a frothing maw as Orpek tore out of Hilldown’s palisade, the same palisade hardly a day before he had been welcomed into. He dropped to all fours, the raindrops falling like fists rapidly soaking into his pack and raising spurts of mud all around him as he sprinted across the clearing into the long grass. He watched, panting, through the thrashing stems as torchlight flickered in the tunnel and raised voices drifted out of the warmth within to be whipped away by the storm.
The palisade closed. He was on his own.
Cursing with half-formed words that were lost in the keening of the wind even before they passed his teeth he pawed frantically through his pack for his oilcloth cloak, the few objects that were the things he counted and gripped until he couldn’t feel his fingers when the world was too big for him soaking and jostling in the rain, falling to the mud. The fur on the back of his neck raised against his wooden plate. The creature would be waking up now, and he- no, no, this wasn’t how he died. Oh, no, no, no-
He pulled the oilcloth out, the rolled fabric scattering his bowl and spoon and knife into the writhing mud and fastened it around his cloak, scrabbling to put the mud-soiled precious objects back where they were safe, all the while scanning the rain-thickened darkness.
He fastened the pack, shaking paws tying the drawstring tight, the hempen rope rough beneath his palms. Set his shield on his arm, half a tourniquet for the weeping gash. Tightened the straps on his helm.
Orpek wasn’t sure if he was going to break down weeping or laugh. Instead he breathed in for the count of four.
Out for the count of four.
Somewhere before him Efishti was buried.
He drew his nail, forcing his head up against the pounding rain.
“I promised,” he mouthed.
Her ruined face flashed before his eyes, bleeding into the rich, wet earth of the briarpath where he had found her.
He strode forward, eyes dark and hard in the recesses of his helm.
A lightning bolt flashed silently, illuminating the hunched shape of the armoured rat, blade held hanging point-down, head high against the sheeting water. Then thunder rumbled and his figure was cast into darkness again.
Inside the briarpath the fury of the storm was distant, the tunnel of woven-round tendrils of thorn dripping cold wetness. It was terribly dark and through the gaps in the weathered support beams that kept the weight of the bush off the path Orpek could see the writhing mass of the briar itself, seeming to stretch to the end of everything.
There was a rustling ahead that wasn’t the wind.
Orpek slipped from his pack and cloak.
“Beast,” he called, knowing that he had no advantage from stealth. “You have much to answer for.”
Despite the fear and the anger and the promise he had made there was one last piece of the affair that did not quite fit, and he would not use his nail until he got his answer.
A flash of lightning. Glinting eyes in the briar, just there, to the left of the path? Orpek kept moving, noting the places he could slip into the briar itself, out-manoeuvre the creature with his smaller stature.
A shifting darkness twisted through the gloom of the path ahead.
“You have no speech,” said Orpek, half to himself. “Very well.”
Another flash of lightning. Nothing.
His brows furrowed.
Orpek whirled, just in time to see two darkly glinting eyes set in a terrible shape blocking his escape.
A maw opened. Glinting yellowed teeth and saliva.
“Rat,” it said, glottal. “What you want.”
Orpek adjusted his stance, watching his back and flanks. Now faced with the creature he had felt so much sadness and rage at he felt only cold. “You killed a forager,” he said, teeth wet with rainwater. “Efishti, who I have promised to find justice for. Yet you did not eat her.”
“Was not hungry,” said the creature, and as lightning flashed again Orpek saw that it was a weasel, long neck twisting sinuously, though its fur was abnormally greasy and unkempt.
Then, above the ravening of the storm, another voice was raised. “We will leave soon,” it said, higher and thinner, and on the back of the stoat Orpek saw the diminutive shape of a vole. “No good can come of this, just leave us-”
The stoat growled low in its throat before the vole could finish. “Nowhere to go,” it growled. “No more running.”
Orpek tightened his grip on the hilt, rainwater freezing his paws and the hungry cold of the metal biting even through the leather wrapping. “Answer the question,” he called, fighting to be heard without screaming. “Answer me.”
The stoat laughed with a hacking, thumping sound before breaking into a fit of coughing. “You want answer?” it- he- panted. “Tell him, Ubari.”
The vole spoke again. “No good can come of this, just please, leave-”
“TELL HIM!” the stoat snarled.
“I met her here, on the briarpath,” said the vole quickly, panic in his voice. “My companion was concealed in the briar b-but when she- the forager, that is- asked whereto I was going and I could not answer I faltered and- and she grew angry and- he appeared from concealment to my aid and then the forager, she threw her spear and hit my companion in the eye- and she was crushed under a pounce.”
The wind lulled for a moment before returning in full force. “I am not sure I believe you,” said Orpek.
“Not whole- whole truth,” the stoat said, ignoring the frantic attempts of his companion to stop him. “Wanted to kill her. Because she wanted to send us away. Because everyone sends us away, even before I killed her. Bec-” He broke out in coughing, a wad of something dark and sticky retched from his throat. “You know why,” the stoat growled.
“Yes,” said Orpek, and even knowing what the stoat had done the injustice cut deeper and than the wind or the rain.
“If I stay,” said the stoat, “They will find me, and I will kill again. That is the story. I am the monster. You are the knight. Cannot run- any more.”
“That is the only just option remaining to you,” said Orpek. “You must see that-”
“Run where?” the stoat snarled. “Nowhere, nowhere! This is the age of mice, rat. We are the wrong shape for it.”
“But-” the vole spoke again- “but if we- that is, if we had your protection, Syr, we could- until he heals, and then- then we could go, yes? Surely there is some place for us further east?”
“Get down,” said the stoat.
The vole faltered. “Wh- what do-”
“Get down.”
The vole’s protestations were ignored even as he clung to the stoat’s fur ever tighter.
“I will not roll over and let them slit my belly with their long knives,” said the stoat, anger building like a cresting wave in his shaking voice. “Run along, little rat. Find that safe place.”
“I cannot do that,” said Orpek. He raised the point of his nail.
“No,” said the stoat. “That’s not the story.”
There was a distant flash of lightning, silent in the wind.
The stoat lunged.
Orpek half-turned, raising his shield and bracing his sword against it, angled at the falling mass of fur and teeth and spit. The stoat dived to Orpek’s right, long neck twisting and a paw slamming off his raised shield, claws distended. Orpek thrust out at the blurring mass before retreating back into a tight guard, blood wet on the tip of his blade, turning to face the stoat again as it pounced again. He caught a glimpse of the vole, still clinging to the stoat’s neck, eyes wild, still trying to stop a foregone conclusion.
Orpek ducked into a roll under the stoat’s jaws and buried the hilt of the blade in the dirt, the stoat throwing itself aside mid-air to avoid impaling itself. Advantage. He pushed to his feet and braced his left paw on the flat of the single-edged nail, lunging at the exposed underside of the stoat only to swing the blade into a parry, the swipe of the stoat’s filthy forepaws meeting his nail and almost jarring the weapon from his grasp, though a line of red showed on the pads in the darkness.
The stoat rolled and Orpek, sensing more than seeing that he would be backed into a corner mere seconds from now, turned and ran, almost slipping in the mud before squeezing between two thick tendrils of briar, a thorn grating against his breastplate. Once past he dropped onto all fours, crawling under the gleaming, arm-length spines of a twisting branch only to feel the whole bush shake as the stoat tried to force its way in after him before screaming in either rage or pain and, in the corner of Orpek’s vision, turning and vanishing. Orpek realised he may have made a mistake. In theory he was more manoeuvrable in here, but the stoat knew the briar and he did not.
He had to change that. Had to set a trap.
Frantically crawling under and over the terrible thorns that snagged at his fur and scraped over his plate, slipping on the mud and almost falling onto waiting spikes several times, he scoured the darkness for the right kind of branch.
A flash from a distant blot of lightning illuminated ahead of him what he needed just as the tearing of the stoat’s movements started to close in faster. Orpek crawled to the lingering after-image, jaw to the muck and breastplate dragging through the sludge as he held his nail in his jaws, gums aching from the cold. The briar was tearing apart around him as the stoat approached and he was too slow, too damn slow- He dragged himself closer, half-drowning as he crawled through a rivulet that covered his mouth, limbs slipping uselessly as his back caught on a thorn above him. Pinned. Orpek looked to his right and saw the stoat’s eyes blazing, the briar twisting and smaller tendrils torn apart in its frantic progress. Panicking, he jabbed the point of the nail down into the mud and pulled, the thorn scraping as Orpek dragged himself forwards before be broke free and scrambled to his feet. He stood, dripping filth, in a small clearing in the briar, the wind-pounded thrashing of the branches all around him matched with the frenzied approach of the stoat.
Orpek turned and began hacking at a tendril of thorny briar with his nail, a green-weeping gash revealed in the wood as he struck again, spine and back shoulders shaking under the exertion, ears twitching as the stoat began to push aside the last few obstacles with a creaking and thrashing that sounded like death.
Even between the moaning and snapping of the briar and the endless exhale of the wind and the lashing of the rain he could hear, battling through the sea of sound, the vole’s voice, calling out from somewhere in the briar.
“PLEASE!” roared Orpek, one last time. He met the stoat’s eyes, but saw only an immensity of anger welling from the kind of wound that took a long, long time to heal.
In a flash Orpek saw everything from a different perspective, like the swaying canopy of a forest arranging itself into a face, glimpsed and gone.
Perhaps, he thought, chasing after that clarity as the stoat finally forced his way into the clearing as he pushed himself upright and took a stance, the mud shifting in his fur, Monstrousness is not so exceptional-
The stoat lunged and Orpek swung his nail in a full arc, as hard as he could, and with a blow that felt like it shook his entire skeleton brought it down. With a final crack the branch sprang upwards free from the tension that had chained it to the mud, a blurring of wicked, curved thorns that hit the stoat squarely across its long, muscular throat, digging in, the stoat writhing as the briar drew it further up like a hanging rope, blood staining the earth it trampled with its back legs.
The nail went into its chest, between the rips, breaking through fat and gristle, Orpek twisting one paw into its fur to dig the cold metal further in.
He felt the stoat’s pulse die. Only then did he pull his blade out, a sucking and grating sound sliding through his ears.
It was black with blood, softly diluting in the dripping rainwater.
Out of the path the stoat had torn the vole emerged, stumbling, eyes focused on everything and nothing.
“Come,” Orpek called, hurrying toward the vole and wincing at a wound in his side from a thorn he had not noticed. “Come, we must not linger here.”
“How do you know I’m not a threat,” returned the vole, shuffling back. “Wh-why don’t you kill me too?”
Orpek sighed, exhausted. “You are not going to hurt anyone.”
“What about vengeance?” his eyes grew wider, teeth baring.
“That wasn’t vengeance,” said Orpek. “That was…”
He wiped the mud and rainwater and sweat and blood from his forehead with the back of his equally filthy arm.
“The result of bigger forces than any amassed here,” he finished, uselessly. Then, “Your friend. What was his name?”
“Tubeln,” said the vole. “His name was Tubeln, and mine is Ubari. T-Tubeln and Ubari.” The vole- Ubari- shiverered.
“Come,” repeated Orpek. “We are not welcome here.”
“I’m not welcome anywhere,” said Ubari, pushing roughly past Orpek, the rat stumbling back a step.
Ubari knelt at the body of his companion.
Orpek joined him, a few strides behind him.
He could see sweat and tears and rainwater dripping down the vole’s face, writ with fathomless shame and sorrow.
“I am sorry,” Orpek said, though it was almost lost in the sound of the storm.
Ubari bent closer to the corpse of his friend. His mouth opened and shut silently until at last a single sob left his lips.
“Please come,” said Orpek.
The vole half-turned to him and blinked, the only movement that was not the ragged pumping of his breath.
“It was… so slow,” said Ubari. “Hardly noticed it. The change in him. Th-the hardening. I can’t…”
Orpek felt the terrible weight on his heart increase by the weight of a single leaf.
“I had someone like that,” said Orpek. “I had…”
The wind tore. Moaned.
“I’ll never forgive you,” said the vole. “But I don’t b-blame you either.”
Orpek frowned. “I do not understand,” he said.
Ubari’s shoulders heaved once in the motion of a laugh. “Th-that’s ok-k-kay, S-Syr. I h-hardly underst-st-stand myself.” He is freezing, Orpek saw. If he does not get somewhere dry and warm-
“It is cold,” Orpek said, words drowning in the wind. “There will be somewhere to rest in the moors, just over the stream.”
“In this weather?” the vole snorted, the sound half-sob.
“I believe,” said Orpek, grunting as he pushed himself to his feet. “That must be enough to keep going.”
Past the end of the briarpath the rain was unrelenting. Orpek shouldered his discarded pack and drew the oilcloth around himself and Ubari before slogging off into the loosening mud, holding the thick fabric over his companion in exile.
In the terrible vastness of the sky, roiling clouds veined with distant silver moonlight and fissured with lightning, something like an owl called.