Free Skillful Death by Ike Hamill Page B

Constantine rolled as he hit the ground, found his feet, and produced his own roar as he ran at the cat again. He flipped his flint to his right hand and ran straight for the cat’s face, meaning to gouge out one of its amber eyes.
    The cat shrank from Constantine’s attack. It turned away from the men and snarled at the boy. Blood spurted from the cat’s shoulder and ran down its leg. A C-shaped wound cut loose a chunk of skin and muscle.
    Constantine’s swing carved the air. The cat spun and ran before the boy’s flint could find flesh. Constantine ran after the cat, but it accelerated away from the boy, still gaining speed as it slipped into the bamboo leaves and disappeared. Patches of the cat’s blood stained the blanket of maple leaves on the ground. The only sign of the cat in the bamboo was a splotch of its blood on a stalk near the edge.
    Constantine meant to chase the big cat, to track it by its spilled blood and catch it when it stopped to tend to its wound. With luck, he figured he could drive it until it was exhausted, and then he could cut it again.
    The crowd watched the little growling boy run towards the bamboo and held their breath. Some expected the cat would return and devour the little boy with a single bite. Others, those who’d heard stories of a half-animal boy who roamed the woods, figured Constantine would morph back into some animal form and disappear.
    Across the silver fur on the boy’s back, eight red slashes marked where the cat’s claws had cut through his suit. They angled upwards and nearly met in the center, like four arrows pointing up at the boy’s head.
    Perhaps the excitement and blood-loss overwhelmed the boy, or perhaps his concussion from the day before caught up with him. Before he reached the bamboo, Constantine dropped to his knees. The flint fell from his hand and he collapsed forward. His face landed in a paw print left in soft mud by the fleeing cat.
    Three men ran to Constantine: a blacksmith, a pig-farmer, and the man who picked apples for the widow on the Sapockin Road. The blacksmith flipped Constantine over and the pig-farmer gasped.
    Constantine’s face was black with mud except where the paw print had spared it. His face was marked with the paw of the lion.

12 ORPHANED

    B IRDSONG MET HIS EARS . He kept his eyes shut.
    Constantine woke completely disoriented. This was the third time in a row that he was waking up to a complete mystery, and he was growing rather tired of it. He’d woken in a daze after the blond-haired boy bashed his skull with a rock, and then he’d woken in a pot of frigid water, being dunked by the Midwife. Now, he was stretched out on a soft bed with fire pulsing in his back and a tight, throbbing pressure behind his right eye.
    “Is he awake?” he heard a woman’s voice ask.
    He kept his eyes shut.
    Someone adjusted a blanket stretched over him and he realized that yet another one of his suits had been stolen from him.
    “We’ll give him some more time to rest. Poor thing,” a different woman’s voice said.
    He heard the footfalls of two people retreating.
    When he was sure they’d left. Constantine opened his eyes. He saw the moving shadows of sunrise against the walls of a white tent. The tent had three beds in it, but he was the only occupant. He slipped from under the blankets and moved on bare feet to the tent wall to listen. He heard voices moving away, towards the sunlight, so he edged to the other side of the tent and lifted the flap.  
    He was looking past a carpet of foxberry to a grove of birch trees. A layer of mist surrounded the trunks of the birch. With that detail, Constantine knew where he was. He ducked under the flap of the tent and ran towards the trees.
    “Stop!” a woman cried after him, but Constantine kept running.
    The woodlarks dipped and dived at him as he ran through their nesting grounds. He’d hunted here before, relishing the tiny eggs to be found in their earthbound nests. These birds held a