The troll shifted as the tree-trunk fell. Rather than hitting it squarely, the projectile opened a gash in its side. This just enraged the troll rather than skewering it. Luckily for Wistala, it took its temper out on the tree, which had lodged itself in the shallow water of the riverbank. The troll picked it up and cracked it against the cliff side, again and again until only a shard remained in its grip.
Only then did it notice the arrows and spears from above.
Brave or foolish, Rainfall’s gang flung spears and fired hunting arrows down at the troll as Wistala made it to the first pillar of the bridge. She saw a spear lodge in the troll’s back. The sense-stalk stood straight up, and it began to climb.
The next thing Wistala knew, she was climbing. Using the deep crevices between the joined stones, a skilled man could make the long climb, but it would take him ten times the effort it took Wistala, with her four shorter limbs and thick muscles. She crawled up the bridge’s support like an ant hurrying up a grass stalk, her pace not greatly reduced from what she could achieve on flat ground.
But she was only halfway up when the troll reached the men.
One, a lumberman, judging by his broad leather girdle, tried his axe on the troll’s hand as it came to the cliff top. She heard the sharp thwack of the blade as it bit into the troll’s fountain-size hand even from her distance. The troll’s other hand came up and struck the lumberman such a blow, he exploded into pieces.
She passed over the bridge-rail to find the troll standing on the cliff top, searching the tree line for the fleeing men. It flushed a man and ran him down on the road, where it smashed and then swallowed him. A group of horses fled screaming from the woods, one or two pulling men along.
Wistala wasn’t sure what she could do, but she hurried toward the north end of the bridge anyway. She had one good gout of flame left in her fire bladder, if not two; she’d eaten heartily for months, and there was still an angry liquid ball inside her, waiting to get out.
She’d diverted the troll before; perhaps she could again, long enough for it to lose track of the men. . . .
A white flash on the road ahead. Wistala, gulping air as she ran, recognized the shape.
Avalanche!
The stallion—with blood in the air, even on a rainy night, and the frightened calls of mares behind him—had given in to instinct and stood his ground, eagerly pawing at the road.
The troll rounded on the stallion.
“Come on! Beast!” Avalanche neighed. Then he screamed and reared up, front hooves cutting the air before him. “Try to take of mine. I’ll kick your teeth out!”
Wistala dragon-dashed, her vision red with lost breath. The troll’s air sacs bulged from its behind; she could see flaps of raised skin like a pinecone opening and shutting as it tried to catch its breath—or was it damaged in some way? No matter—she homed in on the deep whooshing sound.
Then the troll lunged forward, its gait even stranger because of cradling its wounded hand. . . .
The troll reared up and reached for the horse as Avalanche charged. But the stallion danced sideways, and lashed out with a hind leg, kicking one of the thin forearms. Avalanche reared up and struck the troll in the mouth-without-a-face that constituted the front of its body.
The troll backed up and lifted itself.
The sense-orb hung over all like a watchful bird. As the troll’s mouth dropped open, seemingly with the idea of swallowing Avalanche whole, Wistala slid to a stop and spat her fire, as though trying to get an extra few tail-lengths of distance into it by letting momentum carry the contents of her fire bladder up her throat, accelerated by ring after ring of throat muscles.
The sense-orb whipped around, and Wistala caught one glimpse of a wide-open eye? nostril? ear? in the center of a wormy fringe—
The fire struck the troll in its breathing sac.
It spun, tucking its hindquarters and covering the breathing spicules with its rear legs. An elbow knocked Avalanche aside, and the stallion crashed down, as though tripped. The troll jumped awkwardly away like a spastic frog, stomping on Avalanche in its flight, beating at its hindquarters with its rear feet where Wistala’s flame clung and dripped and burned.
It made for the river, by plan or blind flight of instinctive pain. The troll hurled itself into the trees along the roadway and fell in ruin, its limbs no longer capable of supporting the mouth-body. The sense-orb looked this way and that at the twitching limbs before it, too, collapsed.
Wistala couldn’t stand and gape—she hurried to Avalanche.
Avalanche fought for breath, his tongue extended and bloody foam on his lips and the roadway. At her approach, the stallion raised his head a little.
“Beast?”
She realized it wasn’t an epithet, but a query. “It’s dead. You killed it.”
“Kicked its head in. Warned it.”
“Yes, you did. I heard.”
The head fell back to the ground. “The mares. Hear them?”
Wistala couldn’t hear anything but the soft rainfall.
Avalanche let out a friendly nicker, sightless eyes rolling this way and that. Then his struggling body ceased to move, and the horribly lolling tongue went still.
Wistala flung herself across her old stablemate, determined to fight off wild pigs, crows, bears, and set Bartleghaff himself ablaze if any but Rainfall came to claim the body.
Chapter 13
Rainfall took her to a quiet corner of the estate, a long-sloped hill overlooking the river gorge. It was a scenic spot, but too rocky to be of much use.
Trees thrived there. Well spaced, with thickets of wildflowers all around, bursting with the blues and yellows of spring.
With them was a windburned lumberman named Jessup driving a team of timber-horses pulling a haywain bearing Avalanche. He had been introduced to her as the younger brother of Lessup, the brave lumberman who’d taken his ax to the troll’s hand.
Jessup also served as a foreman on his bridge crew and had seen the whole fight from a hiding spot in a muddy ditch beside the road. He was a man of trim beard with the close-cropped head hair married humans in this part of the land wore, and liked to whistle through his teeth, though he didn’t do so today out of respect for their duty.
“This is his spot,” Rainfall said.
Wistala stood up a bit from the wain. The trees crowned the hill in a half-circle, and within the arms stood a pile of quarried rock, placed so as to make a wide pair of stairs in mirror image facing each other.
“This is the cairn of my son. He loved Avalanche, and Avalanche loved him. It’s only right that Avalanche rest at his feet.”
Jessup said something to Rainfall. One of the words might have been rocks.
“We should get to work,” Rainfall said. A month ago, Wistala would have been happy to dispose of the horseflesh in the most efficient and belly-filling manner possible, but her omnipresent appetite vanished when she looked at the dead horse.
The humans had gathered to do service to their own killed at sunset. Wistala had seen it only from a distance—torches flamed at the spots of their deaths and some kind of priest had passed out powders that the families threw into the torch flame. Puffs of colorful smoke came up, and they marked their faces with fallen ash. Rainfall walked among them, embracing many, but took no other part in the ceremony.
They’d burned the troll’s body.
All that was left was Avalanche. Rainfall showed Wistala where to dig, and she began to work.
Wistala enjoyed the labor. It felt good to score up soil under one’s claws, pull up rocks, tear through thin tree roots. Her body had recovered from the encounter with the Dragonblade’s dogs; even if her spirit was happy at Mossbell, her body craved effort.
She smelled metals under the cairn rocks nearby, and rust bleeding into the soil, a fact she tried to take little notice of. Imagine Rainfall’s reaction to her prying up the cairn-stones of his son and gobbling down a few buckles and buttons! But civilization requires ignoring one’s instincts, as Rainfall liked to tell her in their fireside chats.
Perverse to have such thoughts about a man who’d saved her life.
Earth . . . rock . . . rock . . . more earth. She smelled a mole and extracted it with her tongue.
Rainfall maneuvered the wain so they could roll Avalanche out from the uphill side. He was a wonder with the horses, who didn’t like her smell one bit and shifted nervously whenever Rainfall didn’t stand at their noses to calm them. Once the wagon was in place, Rainfall led the horses into the trees so they could rest and eat with dragon out of scent, out of mind.
Jessup helped by widening the channels she dug. Eventually they had a shallow grave and a pile of earth and rock to go atop it.
Wistala rested after they pushed Avalanche out of the wagon. Rainfall and Jessup placed earth and rocks over him.
With that done, Jessup ate and drank from a meal he’d packed in a bag. Rainfall led Wistala up to the crest of the hill and the ring of trees. The canyon wind took up his willow-leaf-like hair, and he tied it together with a bit of red-colored silk.
“How do you like this spot, Wistala?”
She looked across the gorge. A series of small waterfalls ran down the opposite side, though the wind caught much of the spray and turned it into a white mist.