I do not know that I can get past his blade, brother. But I think I can delay him here. He dares not turn his back on me to come down and attack you.

Be careful! It was all I had time to say to him, for the man with the club demanded every bit of my attention. Blow after blow he rained on me, and I soon realized he had stepped up his efforts, putting more force into his blows. He no longer felt he had to guard against a possible attack from me; he put all his strength into battering down my defense. Every jolt I caught squarely with my staff sent an echoing shock up to my shoulders. The impacts awakened old pains, jouncing healed injuries I had almost forgotten. My endurance as a fighter was not what it had been. Hunting and walking did not toughen a body and build muscle the way pulling an oar all day had. A flood of doubt undercut my concentration. I suspected I was overmatched, and so feared the pain to come that I could not plot how to avoid it. Desperation to avoid injury is not the same as determination to win. I kept trying to work away from him, to gain space for my staff, but he pressed me relentlessly.

I caught a glimpse of the minstrels. Josh stood squarely in the middle of the road, staff ready, but the battle had moved away from him. Honey was limping backward as the man pursued her. She was trying to ward off blows from the man's club while Piper followed, ineffectually thwacking him across the shoulders with her slender staff. He simply hunched to her blows and remained intent on the injured Honey. It woke something in me. "Piper, take his legs out!" I yelled to her, and then put my attention to my own problems as a cudgel grazed my shoulder. I dealt back a couple of quick blows that lacked force and leaped away from him.

A sword sliced my shoulder and skimmed along my rib cage.

I cried out in astonishment and nearly dropped my staff before I realized the injury wasn't mine. I felt as much as heard Nighteyes' surprised yelp of pain. And then the impact of a boot to my head.

Dazed, cornered. Help me!

There were other memories, deeper memories, buried beneath my recall of the beatings Regal's guards had inflicted on me. Years before then, I had felt the slash of a knife and the impact of a boot. But not on my own flesh. A terrier I had bonded with, Smithy, not even full grown, had fought in the dark against one who had attacked Burrich in my absence. Fought, and died later of his injuries, before I could even reach his side again. I discovered abruptly there was a threat more potent than my own death.

Fear for myself crumpled away before my terror of losing Nighteyes. I did what I knew I had to do. I shifted my stance, stepped in, and accepted the blow on my shoulder to bring me in range. The shock of it jolted down my arm and for an instant I couldn't feel anything in that hand. I trusted it was still there. I had shortened my grip on my staff, and I brought that end up sharply, catching his chin. Nothing had prepared him for my abrupt change in tactics. His chin flew up, baring his throat, and I jabbed my staff sharply against the hollow at the base of his throat. I felt the small bones there give way. He gasped out blood in a sudden exhalation of pain and I danced back, shifted my grip, and brought the other end around to impact his skull. He went down, and I turned and raced up into the woods.

Snarls and grunts of effort led me to them. Nighteyes had been brought to bay, his left forepaw curled up to his chest. Blood slicked his left shoulder, and beaded like red jewels on the guard hairs all along his left side. He had backed deeply into a dense thicket of tangled blackberry canes. The savage thorns and snagging runners that he had sought as shelter now fenced him round and blocked his escape. He had pressed into them as deeply as he could to avoid the slashes of the sword, and I could feel the damage to his feet. The thorns that jabbed into Nighteyes likewise kept his attacker at a distance, and the yielding canes absorbed many of the sword's blows as the man strove to hack through them and get at the wolf.

At the sight of me Nighteyes gathered his courage and rounded suddenly to face his attacker with a savage outburst of snarls. The Forged one drew back his sword for a thrust that would impale my wolf. There was no point on the end of my staff, but with a wordless cry of fury I drove it into the man's back so brutally that it punched through flesh and into his lungs. He roared out a spattering of red drops and rage. He tried to turn to confront me, but I still had hold of my staff. I threw my weight against it, forcing him staggering into the blackberry tangle. His outstretched hands found nothing to catch him save tearing brambles. I pinned him into the yielding blackberry canes with my full weight on the staff and Nighteyes, emboldened, sprang onto his back. The wolf's jaws closed on the back of the man's thick neck and worried at him until blood spattered both of us. The Forged one's strangling cries gradually diminished to passive gurglings.

I had completely forgotten about the minstrels until a deep cry of anguish recalled them to me. Stooping, I seized the sword the Forged one had dropped and ran back to the road, leaving Nighteyes to flop down exhausted and begin licking at his shoulder. As I burst out of the woods, a horrifying sight met my eyes. The Forged one had flung himself upon a struggling Honey and was tearing at her clothes. Piper knelt in the road dust, clutching at her arm and shrieking wordlessly. A disheveled and dusty Josh had climbed to his feet and, staffless was groping toward Piper's cries.

In a moment I was in their midst. I kicked the man to lift him off Honey, then plunged the sword into him in a downward two handed thrust. He struggled wildly, kicking and clutching at me, but I leaned on the blade, forcing it down into his chest As he fought against the metal that pinned him, he tore the wound wider. His mouth cursed me with wordless cries and then panting gasps that flung droplets of blood with the sounds. His hands seized my right calf and tried to jerk my leg from under me. I simply put more weight on the blade. I longed to pull the sword out and kill him quickly, but he was so strong I did not dare release him. Honey ended him finally, bringing the end of her staff down in a smashing drive to the center of his face. The man's sudden stillness was as much a mercy to me as to him. I found the strength to pull the sword out of him, then staggered backward to sit down suddenly in the road.

My vision dimmed and cleared and dimmed again. Piper's screams of pain might have been the distant crying of seabirds. Suddenly there was too much of everything and I was everywhere. Up in the woods, I licked at my shoulder, a laying aside of dense fur with my tongue, a careful probing of the slash as I coated it with saliva. And yet I sat in the sun on the road, smelling dust and blood and excrement as the slain man's bowels loosened. I felt every blow I had taken and dealt, the exertion as well as the jolting damage from the club's impact. The savage way I had killed suddenly had a different connotation to me. I knew what it was to feel the kind of pain that I had inflicted. I knew what they had felt, down and struggling without hope, with death as their only escape from more pain. My mind vibrated between the extremes of killer and victim. I was both.

And alone. More alone than I had ever been. Always before, at a time like this, there had been someone for me. Shipmates at the end of a battle, or Burrich coming to patch me up and drag me home, and a home waiting for me, with Patience to come and fuss over me, or Chade and Verity to remonstrate with me to be more careful of myself. Molly arriving with the quiet and the darkness to touch one softly. This time the battle was over, and I was alive, but no one save the wolf cared. I loved him, but suddenly I knew that I longed for a human touch as well. The separation from those who had cared about me was more than I could bear. Had I been truly a wolf, I would have lifted my nose to the sky and howled. As it was, I reached out, in a way I cannot describe. Not the Wit, not the Skill, but some unholy blending of the two, a terrible questing for someone, anywhere, who might care to know I was alive.