Page 21 of Blood of Wolves

Wrong thing to say.

“I’m not weak,” Náli snapped. He heaved the furs off his shoulders, let them fall to the snow, and strode forward, the drake bugling after him in a distressed way. “Show me the bodies.”

~*~

The wolves had been at them. Wolves eating wolves, how fitting, Náli thought, as they crested a low hill and started down into the depression where the enemy corpses had been dumped without ceremony. A handful of angry crows lifted, squawking, into the air as they approached, black feathers lilting down slow in their wake.

It had been a longer walk than Náli had expected to make – though that made sense: it wouldn’t have been smart to leave exposed corpses anywhere near camp, where they could draw predators. But by this point, Náli’s legs were shaking, and his breaths were coming shallow, and faint black spots had gathered at the edges of his vision. Shit. Mattias had been right, because he was always right, infuriatingly. And Náli had called him dumb muscle, had thrown the strength he’d spent his whole life cultivating back in his face, and he – he–

No. No time for that now. No time to fret over impossibilities and old sore spots.

He took a deep, ineffectual breath, tried to clear his mind, and knelt beside a pile of frozen corpses.

The wolves had ripped open bellies and made off with fingers, hands, feet, before the cold had truly set in. Blood had long stopped flowing, frozen to solid sludge in dead veins, and the thick rime of frost over the gaping wounds softened the hideousness of the display a fraction. Náli’s stomach gave an uneasy pulse, but he knew it was just his exhaustion: he’d long ago stopped flinching at the sight of death.

He braced a gloved hand on the tattered remains of an arm as solid and stiff as ice, and leaned over one of the gutted corpses. He drew his knife, and, teeth gritted against the effort of it, managed to slice off a hunk of – of something. Red-brown viscera that might have been intestine and might have been stomach lining. He dropped it into his silver bowl, and then frowned at it. He’d only ever worked with sloppy, liquid blood; had always been able to smell its copper stink, feel its oily wet heat on his bare fingers.

No choice, now.

He pulled the diamond from around his neck, gathered its silver chain up in one hand, a familiar movement, second nature, like straightening his hair – like seeking out Mattias across a crowded room, when everything started to feel like too much. The diamond swung, slowly, back and forth, a natural movement – then Náli took a deep, slow breath, and let himself slip.

That was the best way he knew how to describe it. He had no idea what it was like to be a normal person, a boy who wasn’t tied irrevocably to the afterlife, because he always had been. He’d had countless nightmares as a child; Mother said he’d wailed all through the night as an infant, and when he was older, out of nappies but still just a tiny thing, he’d slid into the spirit world when he was asleep, when he was unguarded. Dreams of skeletal hands reaching for him, and cold, rotted breath rushing over his face; the dead trying to drag him fully into their realm. He’d seen his father there, once. He remembered it even now, in fits and snatches, as he released his tight hold on the world of the living and fell backward into the land of horrors that lived constantly just beneath his skin.

It was an effort to be present. It took energy, and strength; strong tea, and enough food to fill his belly. It took concentration, and alertness, and, on a bad day, a white-knuckled grip on his consciousness.

Today, the moment he closed his eyes, he tumbled down into the place in his mind he’d chosen to call the well – a mental echo of the real well back home, that place of milky-white waters and echoing, dead voices that Mattias wanted him to return to. He shivered, and a chorus of voices rose up around him. Screams, wails, sobs, pleas for help. The dead were never silent, save those rare souls who died peacefully. Only men with long beards; ancient mothers surrounded by their children. Those were rare encounters. Náli’s magic seemed to seek out the cruelest deaths.

It felt like falling, being in that well. Like hurtling down, down, heavy as a stone, cold wind on his face, burning his skin. It felt like he was cut, sliced; like fissures opened up; like something tookchunksout of him.

Concentrate. He pictured the diamond, its steady, expanding arc as it circled around and around the bowl. Felt the jerk, and shudder, and stop as it came to a sudden halt, pointed straight down.I found you.

The dead man’s last memory was of the sky overhead, smudged with smoke; of being cold, and stiff, and brimming over with pain. He’d been conscious, just before he died.

But before that – a bear cowl, and a sharp spear, and pain lancing through his gut. He’d bled out from a belly wound. There were no last words to murmur with his own lips, and a foreign voice.

He was…what was he supposed to…oh, right. Oliver wanted him to – wanted him to ask about–

Rough, warm hands touched him: one on the back of his neck, one on his forehead.

Náli panicked. No one touched him in these…thesewalksto the other side. No onewarm, anyway. He had felt the clammy grip of the dead so often he was no longer startled by it. But here, in the well, no one alive ever touched him. No one alivecouldreachhim. He was the one who slid backward into the well, and he was always the one who dragged himself back out of it, inch by ragged, painful inch.

That wasn’t what was happening now – now, someone had him; was holding him, was…

“My lord. My lord.”

Calling him, softly, over and over.

Mattias.

Náli spilled back into the living world with a gasp. It was never pleasant, but now he felt like he’d almost drowned. He opened watery eyes to find that he was pitched forward at the waist, choking on nothing. He tried to take a breath, couldn’t, and blackness crowded in around the blurred edges of his vision. Not a return to the well, but a true swoon. Gods, he was shaking, every inch of him twitching and trembling. A steaming, yellowish puddle in the snow below him, and the ugly taste in his mouth told him he’d vomited and hadn’t been aware of it: nothing but bile and lavender tea.

The hands were still there: impossibly warm against his chilled skin, pads of the fingers and center of the palm smooth and hard from sword work.

“Breathe,” Mattias said, low and soothing. “Breathe, my lord. Breathe, breathe. You’re here. You’re here with me.”

Familiar words, words said so many times, since boyhood. He trembled just as badly as he had back then – even worse, now, because he was too tired, had pushed himself too far. He needed to sleep, to eat. He needed…he needed the well, the real one, he acknowledged to himself, shuddering at the thought.

“My lord?”

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