A Play of Shadow by Julie E. Czerneda Page B

let go of his hammer to join the fray. “Now, Mother—a wee girl would be wonderful.”
    “Another girl, and we’ll have to order in husbands by the handful!”
    Frann woke up, blinked, and said happily, “You’ve had the baby?”
    “You haven’t, have you?” Tadd demanded. “I mean, you can’t, like that. Can you?”
    Devins leaned back and roared with laughter. Hettie’s face turned pink.
    Perrkin’s ears went flat.
    In one fluid motion, Bannan threw himself around in the saddle and dug in his heels to drive the willing horse toward the wall of trees. He put his hand to the hilt of his sword, but didn’t draw it as they charged, hearing but ignoring the shouts from behind.
    Almost in the shadows, he leaned back sharply in the saddle. The gelding almost sat in its urgency to obey, then half reared as now Bannan did pull free the blade. “Hold!” he shouted, thrusting the gleaming thing high as his blood pounded in his ears and all his better sense told him he was an idiot.
    The martial display wouldn’t impress Scourge in the least. Hopefully, it might deter a few faint-hearted bandits.
    Unfortunately, it did nothing to slow the onrush of the huge and shaggy bear, mouth agape in a roar!
    Perrkin, wiser than his rider, whirled and bolted.
    While Lorra, never one to miss the essential point, shouted, “Save us! It’s after the sausage!”
    Later, Bannan couldn’t be sure exactly what had happened, and was glad of it. He remembered turning the gelding back toward the caravan. The shouts and commotion as horses rightly contested being asked to stay anywhere close to the bear. The roars and snarls of what wasn’t a huge bear after all, but a miserable and maddened creature, late to its den, bent on attacking anything edible.
    Then the
smack!
as Scourge hit it from the side at full charge, likely breaking its back, but that hadn’t been enough for the old kruar who’d . . .
    The truthseer swallowed. According to Devins, who’d promptly lost his lunch at the side of the road, Scourge had ripped out the bear’s entrails and tossed them high in the air.
    Before diving back in to pluck out and eat its heart. While purring.
    Drama done, the little caravan resumed its journey. The horses were understandably unhappy, an opinion they expressed by breaking into a jog toward Endshere and its stable as often as allowed. The villagers, who thankfully remembered Scourge as his warhorse, if nothing more, accepted with good humor that the beast had followed the caravan and heroically saved its master.
    From what they emphasized had been a very small bear.
    Bannan was almost offended, for Scourge’s sake, if not his own; surely the beast had been large enough to bring down a horse or man, and enraged at that. Seeing the truth in their faces, he kept his peace. Perhaps the north harbored a different sort of bear.
    As for the giant mass of flesh stalking alongside poor Perrkin? Bannan shook his head. “You could go home,” he suggested quietly, again.
    A roll of a still-red eye.
    “Do you—can you remember? Home? What you are?”
    Scourge might be unable to speak beyond the edge, but that curled lip eloquently dismissed any of his, Bannan’s, concerns as trivial.
    Fair enough. Scourge had brought him to Marrowdell in the first place. They’d make do. “Idiot beast.” Bannan reached over to slap the dusty hide, avoiding a glob of bear blood. His voice thickened. “Hearts of my Ancestors, I swear I’ll get you home again.”
    A shudder worked under the skin, whether at his touch or the alternative.
    Well enough. They were safer for the kruar’s company.
    If not any mice in Endshere’s stable.

    The turn came, sliding night’s deeper blue over the Bone Hills, leading shadows down the Tinkers Road to the village, spreading wide across the fallow fields. It roused efflet to whisper in their hedges, their eyes cold and pale as they watched for unwary nyphrit. They remembered, did efflet, how very many of them had