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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.
