Godbond by Nancy Springer Read Free Book Online

rippling wing. The creature pulled me upright in its surge to get away. “Yah! Wait a moment, my beauty!” I implored it as Alar flashed in air, blazing, eager. “My mare likes fish, perhaps she would care to eat you!”
    Alar slashed deep. But the monster gave me a buffet with its other wing and tore away from my grasp, and I do not know how badly I wounded it, for I was staring like a fool at—a second one, another devourer, only a stride away from me, just lifting off—off my comrade, the wolf!
    Both devourers sped away in the night, and I did not see them go. I was gawking at the wolf. “Are you all right!” I exclaimed at it, though I scarcely thought it possible.
    But the wolf got to its feet without so much as a stagger, and sneezed strongly and rubbed its muzzle in the grass and rolled, trying to clean the slime from its fur. And I stood thinking of Korridun, of the time he had slept beside me in the night and a devourer had lain on him and one on me, and we had handbonded to help each other. And I had been nearly killed, but Korridun had gotten up without a mark on him.
    I stood with blood trickling down from the welts on my belly and said to the wolf, my voice shaking, “By my body, wild brother, you must have the soul of a strong warrior! Is that how you have survived all these years? By having the will of a human and a king?”
    The wolf stopped rubbing its graysheen fur against the grass and froze in a crouch, looking at me very much as if it had understood me. I saw a moon-white glint in its eyes and stepped back, half afraid that it would attack me. But the next moment it flashed away, gone in the night.
    â€œWild brother! Wait! Come back!” I called after it, knowing it would not. For the wolf in no sense belonged to me, not even so much as the horse did. Wild-fanged mare though she was, Talu balkily came to my call and obeyed me with ill grace when I rode her. But the wolf traveled with me or not, aided me or not; just as it chose. Nor had I ever presumed to give a name to it.
    I sighed and sat down in the dark and thought about the wolf, wondering why it had looked so enraged and afraid, why it had left me so abruptly, how it had withstood the devourer. Then, as I rubbed the feel of the devourer from my face and smelled its stench still on my hands, my thoughts turned to the other, even more eerie and urgent matter: that of my name. I remembered it well enough now that the pressing need had passed: it was Dannoc. But that other name, Darran … it had helped me. It must in some wise be true.…
    I put it into the part of my mind where I kept the things I wondered about—many things, and none of them were going to find me my way any sooner to the god. Or so I thought. I leaned back against the scab-barked trunk of a yellow pine and tried at least to rest, though I knew I would sleep no more that night.
    At dawn I got up stiffly and looked around me for the wolf, and called for it once more, and waited a while, then turned to Talu and began readying her for travel. As I worked I talked to her for want of the wolf.
    â€œYtan has done us a left-handed favor, telling us of Cragsmen to be found on these lower slopes,” I said to her, for sometime during the tumult of the night it had come clear to me what I must next do and where I must go. “I must seek them to parley with them.”
    She swung her fanged head and sourly looked at me as if to say, Fool, Most Reckless and Wrongheaded of Fools. Parleying with Cragsmen was not an undertaking for a prudent mortal. But my way seemed quite clear to me. I was no longer a Red Hart, so why had I thought Sakeema must lie in the cave of which Red Hart legend told? There were other tribes, other legends. Some I knew. The Herders said that the god had been reared by red wolves in a blackstone cave in the skirts of the thunder cones, and the wolves his foster brothers had come to take him back to that birthplace