Firebird by Mercedes Lackey

Author:Mercedes Lackey
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2013-02-22T19:31:41+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

Ilya woke with ravens quorking nearby at dawn; sore everywhere, cold, starving, and so stiff he could hardly move. Once again, an overcast sky threw the forest into a gray gloom, and the clouds were so thick he couldn't even tell where the sun was. "This is not going to be one of my better days," he said aloud, startling the ravens into ungainly flight.

With some difficulty, he untied himself from the tree, rolled his meager belongings in the saddle-blanket, and tied the resulting bundle to his back, all without rising from the branch he was sitting on. Every movement hurt—and it almost did not seem worthwhile to climb down.

He would still be lost, without food, with no idea how to get home. Even as high up in this tree as he already was, he couldn't see anything but forest. The only sound was the melancholy calls of the ravens in the next tree.

They 're probably waiting for me to die.

He just couldn't seem to make the effort to move. He leaned back against the tree and felt something soft in his pocket. Pulling off his mitten and fishing around in the hopes he might have shoved a bit of bread in there, he encountered the hank of horsehair he'd taken from the gelding's tail. For lack of anything better to do, while he waited for the sun to burn off the overcast so he could get some direction, he braided the hair into a bracelet and slipped it on.

Maybe it would change his luck; certainly the spirit-horse had saved him last night. Finally, after more time of just sitting, his thirst drove him down to the ground. Once there, he ate snow, which eased his thirst but did nothing at all for his hunger.

He thrashed around in the underbrush for a while until he came to a game-trail, and lacking any other direction, he struck out to his left. There were still no sounds of life, and if it had not been for the rings of tender flesh on his wrists, he would have dismissed the encounter with the rusalka as a dream. He stopped once to cut himself a staff, which gave him some help in the rougher spots in the trail, and late in the morning he came across another little stream and actually found some cress growing in it, which he devoured down to the last shred. His stomach was not convinced that this constituted real food, and continued to rumble complaints long after he had left the stream and gone on. A little later, he found a bush that still had a few rosehips on it, somehow overlooked by the birds. He ate those as well, though they were so acidic they puckered his mouth. Beside the rosebush was a fallen tree with several forms of shelf-fungus growing on it, one of which he knew was edible. He hunted out and ate every last scrap of this as well, though it was as dry as an old book, and he had to eat more snow to get the papery taste out of his mouth.

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