The Wild - 1301 - early Summer - night
(Two weeks later.)
Despite the fire, I feel cold. My hands tremble holding the pen. My fingers are ice. I am telling myself that setting it down will ease my mind. It is the first chance I have had to do so in days.
They leave the fire to me, but I can feel them about. They are not dogs, but wolves, if anything—like no wolves I have ever seen. These are not the lithe, quick, shy animals of the coastal lands. They are great hulking creatures who do not fear me. No wonder this land trembles. I think they could pull an oxcart if a man could draw near enough to put on the harness without losing an arm. Their eyes are strange. They have not harmed me.
My calling worked better than I could have hoped, and yet not well enough. The horned man has not appeared, but that these are his creatures I can have no doubt. The shrine by the woodcutter’s house contained a deer’s antler and what had appeared to be a hound’s tooth, except too large. Now that I know what manner of beast it came from, its size is only reasonable.
They came to me that night and ringed my fire, which made their eyes glow. They sat and sprawled like any human lord’s dogs, but they have about them a queer intelligence that disturbs me. They send out scouts, and fore- and rearguards, as hunting parties and armies do. They looked on me as though waiting for me to speak, and so I did.
I told them that my daughter was hurt, and that I had come to the Wild to seek answers of their master. I chose the word deliberately, and they most definitely took offense, growling and glaring so that I thought it might yet come to a fight, and I not the victor. My heart was in my throat then, but I forced past it the words, “The horned one, then,” and they seemed to prefer that. That they understand what I say to them there can be no doubt. One of them tilted its head at me in a way I would have found appealing, had it not been possessed of paws broader across than my spread fingers, and jaws wide enough to envelop a man’s head.
They herded me onto a path. I worried about the fire, but they treated the matter with the utmost unconcern. I also worried about where they were sending me, but I had asked for this, and I am not without power even here. This does not lessen my alarm when I find one of them at my flank where none was before, or when I hear them howling from the ridgetops. I knew by the moon and stars that we were tending generally south, but beyond that I knew nothing. The Wild is wild indeed, and I saw no sign of any path beyond a game trail, nor of any human habitation.
Yet the sense that there are people here, careful and hidden, will not leave me. I look to Tanios’s book for answers, but there are none there that I can understand.
The horned one is a man. I am quite sure of this. What else he may be, I hardly dare suspect.
The moon has risen and we will move again. I travel and sleep as they do, moving by night and lying up by day. It has been curiously easy to accustom myself to this, to staying alert as they do, to let the night hours slide by like a dream. It is, in its way, like Simindâr, and utterly unlike the bright, sharp-cornered world of humankind.
I still fear them, and fear more what they are bringing me to.