Windrose #03 - The Dog Wizard by Barbara Hambly

Author:Barbara Hambly [Hambly, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-1665-1
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Published: 2011-09-19T04:00:00+00:00

Better to sleep among wolves than in a wizard’s house.

—Sykerst proverb

Chapter XIV

ANTRYG CAUGHT THE LADY in his arms as she fell. Though her eyes were shut, there was consciousness, if not strength, in the arm she flung around his neck; he took a running leap down a broken dip of ground, ducked into a thicket of moss-choked alder and blackberry bramble, then immediately slipped toward the shelter of a small outcropping of boulders forty feet away, running half-crouched in the waist-deep jungle of fern.

“You see it?” yelled a man somewhere, and another replied, “Two of them, it looked like...” “That big gray one with the three white paws...” “You see any blood? I swear I hit one...”

“Stopping the bleeding... best I can,” gasped Rosamund’s voice, scarcely a breath in his ear. “Cold... dear God, so cold...”

“Can you hold a cloaking-spell around yourself at the same time?” Antryg shed Aunt Min’s seedy old shawl for her to lie on, slipped out of his patched, tawdry coat to cover her, and hastily ripped a strip from its lining to tourniquet her leg. Ferns and horsetails grew thick about the boulders, offering them minimal cover; with luck the men would beat the thicket and pass by this less obvious place.

The dark head moved against the dull rainbow of tangled color. Her lips already had a grayish cast; in spite of his makeshift dressing, she was losing blood. If she went into shock or lost consciousness, he thought, she was through.

“Hold on,” he breathed and broke cover, darting through the ferns with the golden blades of late-morning sunlight sparkling on his earrings and beads. Another musket roared—They’d had time to reload—and with a snarling, woody twang the steel-and-hornbeam shaft of a crossbow appeared in a tree trunk inches from his shoulder. He remembered that, when they hunted predators, Gru Gwidion and his hunters put datura on their arrows; with no magic at his disposal it wouldn’t take more than a scratch to kill him.

Another arrow flashed in the sunlight. Leaping like a scared deer, Antryg cut through the fern and spruce needles of the soft forest floor, the hunters in full pursuit. They knew the woods as well as he did—better, for their experience was fresh and not something half-forgotten for nine or ten years. In any case he couldn’t think of losing them yet. They were still far too close to Lady Rosamund’s hiding place.

Three spells, he thought, springing down a vine-choked streambed and scrambling up the other side. A major healing-spell to keep blood loss and shock at bay, a cloaking spell to turn aside the eyes of searchers, and a summoning to whomever she could think of in the Citadel... No wonder the Lady could spare nothing for direct action against her attackers. The musket roared again, and the leaves of the hawthorn brake into which he dived shuddered as if smote with a whip. That’ll teach her to put potential defenders under geas.

He crawled through the thick cresses near the

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