Page 237 of The Sun He Buried

“Snowpetal—”

The men break apart around her. One drops his sword without meaning to. Another takes the club-tail across the knee from the side—I hear the joint go, a wet wrong crunch—and he screams and folds. Copper eyes. I hope it never sets right.

She’s between me and all of them now, back arched, fur up and stiff with blood, that ridiculous white puff of a tail soaked red and dragging a line through the snow.

And she’s still so small.

“Get the silver,” someone says through his teeth.

Two of them drag a dark roll out of the snow and shake it open. Fine metal catches the light.

Vein-silver. Lace-fine, looped, and no torn end on it this time. Somebody made this one to hold.

“Snowpetal, run—”

She launches at them instead.

The mesh comes down over her. She hits it hard enough to drag both men off their feet, and for one breath I’m sure she’s going straight through—then the loops pull tight around her front legs, catch the club, close over her back. She twists. The little wool puffball I made her tears off her tail and drops into the blood, and the metal only gets tighter the harder she fights.

A man moves in with two silver loops on leather cords. The horn restraints.

“Don’t you touch her—”

I get a knee under me and a boot comes down between my shoulders and grinds me flat.

One loop goes over a horn. She shrieks—a sound way too big for her, big enough to shake snow down out of the branches—and throws herself sideways so hard the loop rides up the horn and off.

She gets a front leg free. Then the club. She sinks her talons into the nearest man’s wrist until he lets go, and then she’s out of it—bloodied, one horn still trailing a snapped cord, every part of her furious and wrong. Alive.

For one breath she looks at me.

“Go,” I get out. “Go—go—”

Three of them close in with the silver stretched between them.

She sees it. She sees me. She could come back, and every one of them is praying she does.

She turns and runs uphill instead.

White fur, there and gone between the black trunks. Up toward the ridge. Toward Myrkviðr.

Toward him.

The thread under my ribs yanks hard enough to take the breath I had left.

Far off, at the other end of it, something catches.

Eirik.

I don’t know what reached him. I hold onto the thread anyway—thin, pulling, the only thing I’ve got—because the people I spent all morning trying not to hurt are the only ones coming for me now.

The boot lifts off my back. Hands drag me up. My legs don’t want any part of it.

The copper-eyed man gets himself upright on a leg that hangs wrong and takes my chin in a hand slick with her blood. He’s gone grey around the mouth.

“The general’ll want her,” he says—not to me, to the others, like he’s still talking himself into it. “Alive’s worth more than a body. Move.”

The hood comes back down. The road goes with it.