Free The Raven Warrior by Alice Borchardt Page B

him like a cage, four claws around his back, one thumb claw across his chest. Up, up, up they flew. The Weyvern broached like a porpoise or a leaping whale, coming almost a full body length out of the water.
    Black Leg vomited, then screamed.
    A second later, he was free and the monster dove down, vanishing into the dark, hazy blueness at the foot of the roaring, storming falls.
    Black Leg may have walked on water. He was never afterward sure how he got out of the river. The only thing, or things, he remembered about the next minute were the sight of a nearby shore made up of fallen slabs of stone tilted helter-skelter against one another and a seemingly unpleasantly long time span before he reached it.
    Then a second later, he was standing well away from the water on one of the more horizontal rocks, looking down and watching “her,” the water spirit, rising from the depths with languid grace, swimming up toward the light. Every hair on Black Leg’s back, neck, and head stood straight up. She broke the surface and swam toward him.
    “That was you!” he screeched. “You! What—do—you—really—look—like?”
    She ducked under the water to protect her ears as echoes boomed out from all over the canyon.
    “Jesus Christ! Son of God—Savior,” she added hurriedly. “Stop screeching. As for what I look like, you stupid asshole, what the hell do
you
look like? Wolf, human, human wolf? Holy and eternal God, I don’t know what to grab. I damn near killed you. I was just hoping you wouldn’t change again, you pinhead, while I was getting you up to air, and manage—in spite of my most earnest efforts—to drown yourself.”
    “Why that thing?”
    She looked deeply annoyed. Deeply annoyed.
    “Bend an ear in my direction and listen . . . quietly.” She was speaking in a rather low tone of voice, but Black Leg backed up a few paces anyway.
    “That thing—those things, I should say, once there were a lot of them—swims tremendously well. Once upon a time there was no river they couldn’t negotiate, though most of the time they lived in the sea. But they are long gone now, yet the shape is still encoded into my . . . my . . . God, you’re ignorant as dirt. Life substance, and I can be one, if the need arises. As—it—just—did. Satisfied?”
    “I don’t think I want any more to do with you,” Black Leg said stiffly.
    “Yeah, fine. How are you going to get home? Because I have a horrible feeling we’re both stranded.”
    “Stranded?” he heard himself say dimly.
    “Yeah! Stranded!” she said as she hauled herself out of the water onto another nearby flat rock.
    Black Leg noticed she’d found herself another dress. It was a mass of round, green, succulent leaves, dotted with small, red flowers, blazing scarlet flowers, in fact. It fit rather like a loincloth on the bottom, but was more of a bustier at the top, surrounding and supporting her small but well-shaped breasts.
    “New friend?” he asked, gesturing at it.
    She nodded. “Grows on the rocks around the falls. It has problems, or maybe I should say
he
has problems. It’s a he. Well established vegetatively, but hasn’t seen a female in a long time. Believes there must be some downstream, though, because there’s a small bird thing comes around for nectar and will make deliveries if asked.”
    “Dugald didn’t teach me about these things,” Black Leg complained.
    “Probably thinks they’re beneath his notice,” she said.
    “Why are we stranded?” he asked.
    She pointed down to the water. “Remember the passage?”
    Black Leg nodded.
    “I can’t get back to it,” she said.
    Black Leg had been squatting down on the rock. He stood and took stock of the situation.
    To his left, the falls plunged down from what seemed an incredible height. On all sides, the canyon walls rose ever further up toward a blue sky. The pool he was looking at formed the widest spot in the canyon; ahead, the rock slide ran along one side of the river, forming a