Bloodfire Quest (The Dark Legacy of Shannara, #2)(43)

“She was certain she wasn’t. But she made me promise to say nothing until we were far enough out that the Ard Rhys couldn’t make me return. I think a few of the others saw what I was during the attacks in the Fangs, though. Those boys saw me, I know.”

Coram nodded. “The Ohmsfords, Redden and Railing. Those two don’t miss much, even if they’re still a bit on the new side of knowing. But they didn’t say anything to the Ard Rhys?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

He looked down at his boot tops and scuffed his feet along the earth absently. “How are your tracking skills? We have to find our way back, but I don’t think I know where we are.”

“I don’t think I do, either,” she said, “but I might be able to get us back anyway.”

He shifted his stocky body to a different position. “How?”

She shrugged. “Look at me. I am half animal, maybe more. I can find direction as my animal self much better than any human could. I can sense how and where to go. But you will have to bear me looking the way you saw me on the dragon.”

“I’ve borne much worse in my time.” He paused. “Tell me. Which is the way you really are?”

She laughed softly. “There is no one way with me. I am both ways and others, too. I have no real self. I shift back and forth as need dictates. But each form gives me something that helps me. So I just accept that I am not one thing or the other, but many.”

He gave a quick snort. “You can be any one or all at once if it helps us find our way to the others.” He fumbled his pack off his shoulders and began fishing through it. “I have some food. We ought to eat something before we start out.”

They sat together in silence, the burly Dwarf and the young girl, sharing a little of the food stash that had survived the dragon ride and lake plunge, keeping an eye on the distant island and an ear pricked for other predators. When they were finished, they rose and faced each other. Oriantha smiled at the Dwarf almost apologetically and then abruptly changed into her other self, wolfish and dangerous. The young girl was gone completely, and the predator returned from hiding once more.

The Dwarf only barely managed to hold his ground until the shape-shifter wheeled away with a snarl.

Their journey took them through the remainder of the day. Oriantha’s animal self took the lead, loping ahead of the slower-moving Dwarf, seeming to sense which direction they needed to go even without knowing either their destination or the distance they must cover. Now and again, she circled back to him, her wolfish face staring up at his, looking savage and hungry enough to give him pause. But each time she wheeled away quickly and was off again.

They encountered no visible threats that day, perhaps because they were in the dragon’s territory and nothing it might want to eat chose to live so close by. They did not see the dragon, either. Perhaps its struggle with the company had been enough for one day; perhaps it had flown off again in another direction. Whatever the case, they made good progress and avoided any confrontations.

That night they took turns keeping watch, finding shelter within a rocky overhang that enclosed them on three sides and required only that they defend themselves from the front should something come after them. But nothing did, and when morning returned they were well rested.

“Where do you think we are?” she asked him as they ate a little dried beef and fruit from the stores he still had in his pack. She had changed back again to the girl, and there was a winsome quality to her that made her seem little more than a child. “What part of the Westland is this?”

Crace Coram had been wondering that, too. “I’ve never seen or heard of country like this. Nor of dragons. Not for a long time. They were all sent into the Forbidding, weren’t they? Back in the time of Faerie?”

“It is said. But they must have missed this one.”

“Those creatures that attacked us in the Fangs—the four-legged ones with all the teeth?” He shook his head. “I’ve never seen them before, either. Where did they come from that no one has ever run across them before now? You would think the Elves might have encountered one or two at some point, no matter how deep inside the Westland they live.”

His face clouded. “If we find our way back, I’m not going on. This is madness. If the Ard Rhys wants her Elfstones so badly, she can go get them herself. I’ll tell Seersha I’ve had enough.”

She looked at him doubtfully. “Will you?”

He started to say something and stopped. “Maybe. I don’t know.” He paused. “But that’s what I should do. What we all should do.”

They set out again shortly afterward, heading toward a line of mountains that provided the only landmark they recognized, traveling through bleak country marked by stretches of dead and dying trees and rocky flats empty even of that. They found no other water on their way, not even a stream, and the mountains seemed as distant today as they had the day before. Crace Coram could not be certain, but it seemed to him they were weeks away from where they needed to go.

On this day, they encountered a huge horned beast that resembled a bull crossed with a lizard. They saw it coming from a long way off, lumbering across the flats, slow and ponderous, and had plenty of time to avoid it. They did not have quite so much warning of the cat creatures they caught sight of several hours later from atop a rise overgrown with dead grasses, which was probably what saved them. The cat things found something else to occupy them—a thing that neither the Dwarf nor the girl ever had a chance to identify—converging on their victim and tearing it to bits in short minutes.