“You can talk! I’m Rinda, and this is my twin brother, Remus. What land are you from? By the shade of your skin, I’d say you’re not from the north, or are you?”
“Aurra…” was the only answer he gave.
“Pardon?” asked Rinda. “What was that?”
“Aurra…”
“Aurra? Is that where you’re from?”
“I don’t… know.”
His words were horribly muffled and slow as he struggled to speak through the leopard-head mask. Rinda was starting to get irritated and clucked her tongue impatiently as she leaned toward him.
“Aurra… Guin…”
“So, tell me—how did you ever get this thing put on your head?”
“Um, Rinda?”
Remus might not have been as quick-witted and lively as his sister, nor was he a prophet, but he never lacked in practical sense and logic. While casting worried glances around at the deepening navy shades of dusk, he had seen that getting the leopard-man to speak enthralled his sister all the more every minute; she seemed to have forgotten their grim surroundings, where they were, and how much trouble they were in. Unable to restrain himself any longer, he reached out and grabbed Rinda’s shoulder.
“What? That hurts!”
“Um, Rinda, the night… it’s coming!”
“I know that!” Rinda snapped back, but her face had taken on a somewhat worried look. She took another look around to reassess their immediate situation, and finding the shadows of the approaching night far deeper than she had thought, she quickly made the sign of Janos.
“Excuse me,” she said, turning back to the leopard-headed man. “The night’s coming. The night is coming!”
“So it seems.”
Whether the twins had become used to the speech of this man who called himself “Guin,” or whether the water he had been drinking had finally soothed his parched throat, his words were much clearer now. He looked around them, deep into the viscous violet gloom that filled the woods and hid lurid promises of fear and horrors unknown.
The underbrush in the woods around them rippled and rustled as a billow of wind picked up, carrying with it a foul rotten odor. Vampire vines swished in the treetops, and the beady eyes of vipers and things far worse glimmered crimson in the thick brush below. Silent during the day, the forest was coming alive again, showing its true face in the dark of night.
“Is that a problem?” asked Guin.
Rinda clucked her tongue in despair and disbelief. “Really! Have you no idea where this is? This isn’t the middle country anymore. Why, Stafolos Keep stands right on the border between the middle country and the Marches! Gohran rule is just a rumor in the wind out here, and even the black riders of Mongaul wouldn’t think of going farther than the Roodwood with anything less than a full company! And that’s exactly why we’ve come to the forest to hide. Better demons that don’t know where we are than riders that do, right?
“But not now, with night almost here!” she continued. “That might not be a bad thing where you’re from, but here in the Marches, the night belongs to spirits and wildlings and worse! Night is when the forest dwellers come out!”
“That’s why I want to make a fire,” said Remus, hugging himself tightly, his teeth quietly chattering.
“No,” said Rinda, reflexively turning him down. Then, after some thought, she gave in. “But I guess there’s no way around it. The vasya bushes were enough to keep us safe for one night, but you’re too big to hide there. Or wait, Guin, do you have some spirit blood in you? Are you not afraid of the night?”
For some reason, Rinda had been reluctant to call him by his name, and when the word left her mouth a peculiar, almost otherworldly shudder ran through her limbs. What’s wrong with me?
Though well-versed in omens and signs of all kinds, suddenly Rinda was scared to examine with her inner eye the tremors that now shook her body. Aware of her brother’s suspicious gaze, she followed his lead and wrapped her arms around herself and grabbed her shoulders, pretending that her shivering was due to the cold of the forest air.
The leopard-man, for his part, hadn’t seemed to notice Rinda’s discomfort at all. Instead, he had stretched his giant hands before his face and seemed to be engrossed in staring at them.
“I was wounded,” he muttered so low that only Rinda could clearly hear him. “Here, too, a scar from a blade. I must have been in battle. But this—this looks not unlike the mark of a lash. The Marches? Stafolos Keep? This ‘Roodwood,’ I have heard of… but why would I have come here? An enigma, along with this—” Here he lifted his hand to finger the leopard mask where his head and face should have been. “How have I come to have this… this…”
“You mean you don’t know?” shouted Rinda, putting her hands to her mouth in surprise. “You don’t remember at all?”
“It… seems that way.”
Thanks perhaps to the empathic abilities that ran in their blood, Rinda and Remus—particularly Rinda—had no trouble understanding Guin’s speech after a while. Had it not been them, had he spoken to unattentive ears, the slow muffled speech emitted by the great leopard mouth would have sounded nothing so much like animal whines and growling.
“Whom did I fight?”
“Whom did you fight? Why, you demolished an entire squad of the Gohran duke’s black riders!”
Rinda pointed at his handiwork as she spoke. The leopardman looked around and shook his head in bewilderment.
“I did that?”
“And what’s more, you saved us!”
“Rinda, can we make a fire? Please?” said Remus, almost shouting in his desperation, forcing Rinda back to the reality of their present situation.
“Right… right, of course. But you do know we’re not going to make it through the night alive.”
“Ghouls like the smell of blood, I hear,” added Remus. It was a little bit of trivia he had learned a long time ago. “It can’t be safe to be near these bodies.”
“The spring!” said Rinda after some thought. “We’ll just build a fire near the spring and spend the night between the water and the fire. The nixies won’t come out of the water to bother us, and isn’t fire the shield that Janos gave mankind? Right, and we’ll have to take three horses with us, too. We’ll need them, to ride out of this accursed forest at the first light of day.”
“Why are…” began Guin, struggling to find the right words. “Why are you here, in a place of such danger?”
“Well, we were—” Remus began to reply when his sister gave him a sharp pinch on the arm.
“The archduke of the Mongauli is after us,” was all Rinda said. “Well, we’d better get going.”
“Who am I?”
The giant man’s voice was so soft it barely passed his lips, yet it was so full of raw anguish that Rinda, who had just now been in a great hurry, stopped and turned around.
“Who am I? ‘Guin’—is that my name? With whom did I fight, and why am I in these woods? And this! For what possible reason could this have been put on me? What sorcery holds it, that it will not come off no matter what I do? As I sit here I cannot even recall my face.
“Was I being pursued,” the leopard-man asked no one in particular, “or had I escaped from some punishment for a crime? Where was I born? Who taught me the way of the sword? I don’t even know what kind of life I have lived; I remember nothing.”
“And ‘Aurra’ …Like ‘Guin’—the word that seems to be my name—this word ‘Aurra’ has been ringing in my head since I awoke. Aurra… Aurra? Is it some thing, or some person? What could it mean?
“My harbor, my house—my armor, my lord—where are these things? Is there a place where I might find peaceful sleep in the arms of a friend, or a place, where if I went, I would be hunted down, a wanted man, my life at risk? I… I do not know.”
With this, the warrior grabbed the leopard head in his giant fists and strained, as though he had gone mad, to take it off. But the mask stayed stubbornly affixed to his head. Crouching down, he covered his head with his arms.
Seeing him troubled so, Rinda’s kind heart was filled with sympathy. She placed a hand on the warrior’s shoulder and tried to comfort him as though he were a child. “You must be quite tired, and you’ve been wounded in battle,” she said, speaking gently in her sweetest voice.“I’m sure you’ll remember everything in due time, and find out how to get rid of that mask, too. I’ll do whatever I can to help.”
“But for now, we must go. We are not welcome here. All will be better in the morning…”