Free The Raven Warrior by Alice Borchardt Page A

plants flourished, purple-flowered spikes of pickerelweed, broad green leaves lifting from the water to spread cooling shade in the shallows. Abundant yellow-flowered cress choked the freshwater canals, and fed the geese that settled like pale clouds on the water and nested among the hard stems of horsetail and reed.
    He had power, the thing that flowed up my arm from the coiled serpent. Power bought and paid for in pain, blood, sorrow, and death. The way all real power is bought. They had been his people, and at dawn he climbed the house posts, using the carvings as a serpent ladder, and coiled on the matting at first light, near the fire. And awaited his offerings of live mice, milk, and honey.
    And always he received them.
    The serpent fell away from my wrist toward the dark depths, though I could tell it was loath to leave, for their kind burns lower than ours do and they love our fire. He obeyed the command of his “possessor.” And I understood more of hate, love, anger, and revenge than I had wanted to. My mind was drenched with all four, and I knew I could burn that fortress down.

    Black Leg wasn’t prepared for the sick fear that gripped him when he saw the blood in the water. He had never experienced a major life-threatening injury before. But thanks to a fairly large number of minor ones, he knew what to do.
    The worst being when he and Guinevere had been detected by a pair of lovers they were sneaking up on. A rock thrown by the strong arm of an adult male can cause a fearsome injury. The first stone clipped her over the ear. He didn’t feel the second crack into the back of his head. They both were already in full flight, running away as fast as they could.
    When they slowed and came to a stop about two miles away, she told him, “You have blood running down your neck, staining your collar.”
    He reached back, felt the warm, sticky trickle, tasted it to be sure . . . then plunged into the wolf. He was a boy again before he hit the ground, still wearing his clothes but rolling on the turf, the injury healed. When he got his footing, he saw she’d been hurt, too, and the blood was pouring down over and around her left ear.
    “No!” he said, then realized she couldn’t do the same thing he had.
    She gave him a strange look, the sort of look she had given him when she sent him away. Only then he hadn’t understood what it meant. Not then. But later, after she told him they could never be lovers, that look became clear to him.
    His blood was staining the rapids red. Black Leg knew he had to chance the falls.
    He went wolf.
    He heard the water spirit scream, “No!”
    Then he shot into space.
    “Fall. . . .” He heard his father speaking. “Curl your body in on itself.”
    Black Leg did, pulling his tail up between his hind legs, arching his neck to push his head down between his forelegs. Beauty, terror, detachment; all lived in his mind simultaneously.
    Beauty because the falls was a breathtaking thing of beauty, the water a wavering, golden curtain in the afternoon sun, limned with rainbows as the light struck down into the mist. Above, he saw the water spirit come down. At the ledge, she elongated, dissolved, becoming one with water, light, and mist.
    Then something like a horse kick hit his back. That was terror, because his whole body went numb and he thought his spine had snapped and he didn’t know if even the change could heal that.
    Then, at last, detachment, because he was sure he was going to die and rather belatedly understood that he would be dead before he could worry about it or even feel any pain. He saw his own muzzle with bubbles rising up from his mouth, forepaws drifting beside the dark nose.
    Then the Weyvern appeared in the blue gloom, the giant dragon jaws picketed with teeth like spearheads. Reflex thrust him into the change, and he almost laughed. What the hell was wolf or man going to do against a thing like that?
    A split second later, the claws on one foreleg closed around