Warrior of the Wild Page 9

  “That’s good for us.”

  “There is no us!” I shout. “I neither need nor want your help.”

  He doesn’t want to help me. Getting close to me only serves his own ends, whatever they are. I know this. I know that people are only capable of thinking about themselves. I don’t have any desire to find out what it is Soren wants. I don’t care.

  I will not make myself vulnerable like that ever again.

  “It’s not up to you,” Soren says. “The goddess wills it. I will not disobey her laws. Will you?”

  “You—”

  A sound fills my ears. Something loud, like a rock falling to the ground. It comes again. And again. And again.

  “What is that?” I whisper.

  At first, I think I see one of the trees moving. Moving. But then I realize it’s no tree. Its skin is the same color as the deep brown bark of the innas, a perfect camouflage. It’s so very tall and large, over four heads taller than Soren and me. Four black eyes stare down at us, unblinking. They dilate simultaneously once they take in the two of us. I realize now that the loud, crashing sound is each of its steps across the ground, but I can’t make sense at all of what I’m looking at.

  But Soren must make something of it, because he says, “Run.”

  * * *

  I TAKE OFF AFTER him down the road, Soren barely one leg stride ahead of me. And whatever that thing is, it races after us, bounding on two legs.

  “What the hell is that?” I shout.

  “The gunda,” Soren says.

  “The gunda isn’t real.”

  Soren flings an arm behind him in the direction of the creature, an emphatic gesture.

  Yes, I see his point.

  I dare a glance back over my shoulder. Despite its large girth, the beast is fast, those legs taking longer, quicker strides than our own. What I had mistaken as the texture of bark, I now realize are actually tendons connecting to powerful muscles. The gunda doesn’t have any arms, just toned legs to carry it. The beast doesn’t have a neck, either. The main body thins toward the top, where all four eyes rest in a row. A tail snakes out behind it, balancing the gunda as it runs.

  It doesn’t make a sound, no cackles like the ziken, and somehow, that silence is even more terrifying. Where is its mouth?

  “It’s gaining on us!” I shout.

  “We can’t outrun it. Watch your feet,” Soren says. Then he turns quickly, heading right into the thickness of wild.

  Now I’m leaping over rocks and brambles and thick tree roots, running into low-hanging boughs and ferns. Snaketraps snap closed as we pass by them, our momentum enough to stimulate the plants’ natural response, even though we haven’t stepped into the leafy, teeth-clad mouths.

  The gunda plunges in after us, but it has a harder time with its body. It can’t fit into places we can, and it must take a less direct path in order to continue following us.

  “Can it climb?” I ask.

  “No, but that won’t stop it from reaching us.”

  I rack my brain for all the stories I’ve heard about the gunda, trying to fathom how a beast with no mouth could be dangerous. But in the stories told to me as a child, the sheer size and many eyes of the beast were enough to frighten me. It was a creature said to consume men whole. Hunters and warriors would disappear, never to be seen again. But no one from my village has seen the creature in a hundred years. It’s become only a myth.

  And now it’s chasing me.

  The muscles in my legs are screaming at me to stop. I’ve already exhausted them once today by fleeing the god. My arms don’t want to pump any longer. I’m not in good condition for the fight ahead.

  Soren is spent, too. He slows considerably and barely catches himself when he falters on a loose rock.

  “We need to stop,” I say to him.

  “We stop and we die,” he says.

  “Then where are we going? Do you have a plan?”

  He doesn’t answer as he suddenly puts on a burst of speed. Somewhere, I find the strength to match it.

  We break through the foliage. The rough rocks turn into smooth pebbles, which angle downward into a small lake.

  On the opposite side of the lake, a rise—a small cliff—extends over black water. It’s a good ten-foot drop into fathomless water housing goddess-knows-what horrors.

  “It—can’t—swim,” Soren says around heavy breaths. I want to ask him how he knows this, if he’ll stake his life on this information—

  But the gunda breaks onto the shore with us. So close. Too close.

  “Axes out. Now!” Soren stops running and turns to face the threat, but his gaze isn’t focused on those eyes up top. No, his attention is directed much lower. Toward the base, where the rough skin has started to move.

  Tendons strain and muscles flex as a flap of skin rises directly at the front of the gunda, until it is parallel with the ground, just below all those eyes. Something falls to the ground from the interior—a tangle of white and red—

  At first, I can’t make sense of what lies beneath. Some sort of fleshy pink skin, coiled like a snake and held tight against its side.

  But then that pink skin lashes forward, like a frog’s tongue, and I realize that’s exactly what it is, a tongue, ready to strike and catch its prey.

  Soren dodges that forked tongue, rolling off to the side. When the tongue meets the ground instead, rocks stick to it, and they’re drawn back into the gunda’s body. That flap of skin lowers back down, trapping it all in place.

  And that’s when true horror washes over me. There were no teeth around that tongue, no mouth or throat. Just wet, sticky skin. If that thing catches me, it’ll enclose me in darkness, hold me tight to its body, and slowly I will decompose, absorbed through the gunda’s skin. I’ll likely die from the lack of air first, but the thought of being unable to move, encased in wet, sticky darkness—it has me backtracking, nearly tripping over my own feet.

  My eyes lower to the white-and-red heap on the ground in front of the beast, and I realize now what it is.

  A carcass—the remains of its last meal.

  The gunda quickly realizes it’s captured nothing edible. The rocks and dirt clods tumble to the ground as that flap of skin rises once more.

  I send a prayer up to the goddess. And when that tongue flings outward again, toward me this time, I throw myself out of the way.

  Pain burrows into my side and clears my head as I strike the rough ground.

  I’ve been cast out and rejected by my village. I’ve been sleeping on the ground in the wild. I have a ridiculous boy following me everywhere I go.

  But I am a warrior!

  I am Rasmira Bendrauggo, and I’m going to kill this beast.

  I’ve made this decision, when someone else comes bounding through the trees.

  Iric.

  He already has his ax in hand.

  “No,” Soren whispers from beside me, and I take a moment to wonder why he would protest more help, before Iric speaks.

  “What have you gotten yourself into?” Iric demands, and I’m certain he’s talking to Soren. “Ziken wasn’t your preferred method of dying? You’d prefer the gunda?”

  “What are you doing here, Iric?” Soren shouts back.

  “I couldn’t focus on anything when I knew you’d gone after the girl again. You’re lucky I spotted you cutting into the wild with the gunda on your heels.”

  “Get out of here!” Soren demands.

  “Don’t tell me what to do!”

  After the gunda drops its newest mouthful of dirt clods, it turns in Iric’s direction.

  Soren reaches between his feet to grab a sizable rock and hurls it at the gunda. It strikes the creature solidly in the back, but it doesn’t budge. Doesn’t turn to see what disturbed it, provided it felt the impact at all.

  So Soren charges it, ax held high. He only gets a couple of steps before I join him.

  Opposite us, Iric dodges a tongue lash and attempts to bring his ax down on the thick muscle, but the
pink flesh returns to its resting place much too quickly. The skin flap starts to lower as Soren and I make contact.

  It’s like striking rock. Only, rock crumbles eventually. But this, the skin of the gunda, it doesn’t even dent.

  I rear back my ax, taking a heavier swing, but all it does is send pain ricocheting up my arms. The skin is impenetrable.

  We need to carry on with Soren’s plan: drowning it.

  “We need to get it up that ridge,” I say. “To push it into the water.”

  “We need to get it away from Iric,” Soren says. He darts around the beast, trying to get it to focus on him instead of his friend. I’m all for saving friends and family, but Soren’s single-minded determination is a bit extreme.

  The two of us are exhausted. But Iric? He must be fresher than we are, especially if he only walked the distance from the tree house to the lake.

  “Iric!” I shout. “Run up the ridge over the water! Get it to follow you. We need to drown it.”

  Iric takes off running, heeding my command, and the gunda follows. Soren tries to hurry after the pair, but he’s so spent. We scramble after the two figures curving around the lake.

  The lake that’s now rippling, I note. Deep green skin skims the top of the water. Nothing distinct for me to make out the shape, just enough for me to know that whatever lives in the water is enormous.

  I hope it likes to eat gunda and not people.

  Soren and I are practically crawling by the time we get to the base of the ridge overhanging the water. Iric is dodging the gunda’s strikes as best he can. The gunda’s tongue lands at the edges of the cliff, pulling rocks up and sending more tumbling into the water. I can imagine whatever lives in there circling in place, just waiting for something living to fall into the lake.

  “Iric, get away from the edge!” I say as I force my legs up the incline.

  “No problem!” Iric says sarcastically.

  He runs in as much of an arc around the beast as he can, but the ridge isn’t wider than fifteen feet. He just barely gets around the gunda before that tongue strikes, curling around Iric’s foot.

  Iric loses his ax, his fingers clawing against the ground as the tongue starts to drag him backward, slower than its previous retractions, due to Iric’s weight.

  I leap forward, ax raised high above my head, but Soren gets there first. He brings his own weapon down across that tongue, severing the tip from the rest of it. It frees Iric, who hurriedly pulls the wet flesh from his ankle.

  “I’m going to be sick,” Iric says. Then he unloads his stomach’s contents onto the ground. Soren reaches Iric’s side a second later, and Iric manages to kick the severed tongue over the cliff.

  Meanwhile, the gunda is wriggling. It has no voice with which to scream, but it’s clearly in pain. Flap open wide, tongue swishing aimlessly on the ground, blood trailing after the severed end.

  I rush straight at it.

  “What is she doing?” Iric asks, but I don’t spare either boy a glance. I put my focus on the gunda. On that open flap and exposed skin. That soft skin.

  Let’s see if that’s impervious.

  I let the spike come free of my ax and ram it into the gunda at a full sprint. Flesh gives way, spike and ax points embedding deeply, and brown blood spurts right into my face. Blinking rapidly, I pull my ax free and swing again, this time from the side, letting one of the ax blades sink in even deeper.

  That does it.

  The gunda is swaying side to side on its two legs, ambling around like a bird with its head cut off. I leap over the flopping tongue.

  The gunda backs up toward the cliff edge.

  I ram it again with the point of my ax, pushing it the rest of the way.

  The body falls first, the impossibly long tongue sliding after it along the ground.

  A yell.

  I turn.

  Soren and Iric must have been coming to help me, because they’re both much closer than I realized.

  And the gunda’s wriggling tongue end had found another target while it was sinking.

  Iric’s waist.

  At a speed much too fast for me to do anything, he’s dragged right past me and over the edge, joining the gunda in the depths of the lake.

  CHAPTER

  9

  Soren and I both dash to the cliff’s edge, watching the water settle into place. Whatever creature resides in the water dives down, its dark shadow fully receding below the surface after Iric and the gunda.

  Soren shucks off his armor, and I realize that we’ve no hope of swimming while weighed down so heavily.

  “He can’t swim,” Soren says.

  “What?” I say incredulously, pulling off my second boot.

  Soren doesn’t answer; he drops the last of his armor to the ground and dives in after his friend.

  When I finally get the rest of the metal off my body, I join him.

  I can’t manage a graceful dive like Soren did, so I leap feetfirst, taking a large gulp of air. A cool wind rushes past me before cold water engulfs me. It’s not unbearable—we’re in the summer months, and after a few seconds, my body adjusts.

  The water is murky. I think it might be clearer if there weren’t a disturbance on the bottom of the lake, churning up mud and plants. It’s impossible to see much, but I swim down, because I know the solid body of the gunda would have sunk.

  I see dark shapes mostly. The large solid figure that looks like a log must be the gunda, and something much bigger swims around it, as though waiting to pounce. I see a flash of white. Teeth.

  That has me kicking backward until, there—

  Two figures that look like they’re wrestling in the water.

  I swim for them, arcing my body down, fighting against the air in my lungs that tries to drag me up toward the surface. Bubbles float out of my mouth as I try to make myself less buoyant.

  But after a few more feet, something changes, and I have no trouble reaching the lake’s bottom. The weight of all the water above me is enough to keep me from floating back up, I realize.

  I reach the boys. The tongue, I see, has already been discarded. Soren tries to pry the armor from the folds in Iric’s clothing.

  I swim toward Iric’s legs to unbuckle his boots and slide out the armor covering his shins, while Soren works at the metal around Iric’s forearms. It’s difficult forcing metal to move across wet leather. My throat already burns. Though I know how to swim, I don’t spend much time underwater. I’ve not practiced holding my breath for long periods of time.

  And Iric, who’s never even learned to swim—I can only imagine how he must be faring.

  A force of water rushes past me, sending me spinning in a full circle before I can right myself. A shot of ice runs down my spine as I realize it’s from whatever lives in the water swimming past me. Just how big is it?

  Soren reorients himself and swims back for Iric. I join him, despite my lungs begging me to go up for air.

  We finally get everything undone. The two of us working together, Soren and I kick Iric to the surface. I’m breathing deeply, appreciating the feel of air in my lungs more than I ever have before.

  Iric is coughing, clawing at Soren and me, panicking. He’s trying to climb atop the two of us, and he pushes me under the water more than once.

  Finally, Soren slaps him, which seems to calm Iric some.

  We’re so very close to shore when I feel something rough brush against my leg. I kick at it, using it to push me forward to a section of lake where I can actually touch the bottom.

  I turn around, and that’s when I see it.

  The monster in the lake.

  Toward the surface, where the water is much clearer, I see its profile. It’s long and slender with bumpy, dark green skin. A long snout the length of my arm sports an army of teeth overlapping its lips. It dives down, maw gaping wide, presumably to take another bite out of the gunda.

  I lose my footing, scramble on hands and knees to reach dry ground. As Iric finally finds his own fee
t, he races ahead of the two of us before collapsing far away from the water’s edge. He falls onto his back, staring up at the sky, reassuring himself he’s not trapped below water.

  Soren bends in half to rest his hands on his knees. He lets out a warrior’s victory cry. Now that the danger is past, the thrill of defeating the gunda burns through me, too, and I throw my fist in the air and let my voice call out toward the heavens.

  But then we both notice Iric. His breaths come fast, too fast, and I think he might be having some sort of fit.

  Soren drops down to Iric’s side and awkwardly pats his shoulder. “It’s all right. You’re safe.”

  “Did you see it?” Iric asks between quick breaths. “The hyggja?”

  Soren sits back, resting his arms atop his knees. “Only its shadow.”

  “The monster in the lake?” I ask. “I saw it.” A shudder goes through me.

  Both boys turn toward me.

  “Yes, the monster in the lake,” Iric says. “The beast I have to kill if I’m to return home. If I ever want to see Aros again.”

  His mattugr. He fears the water. He can’t swim, and his village sent him to kill the water beast—the hyggja.

  He’s still breathing too rapidly. Iric seems trapped in his own mind, replaying horrors. His eyes flit across the sky wildly.

  “Who’s Aros?” I ask, hoping to distract him.

  Iric turns. Blinks. “The man I love.” His eyes stare to the right of me, as if he can’t quite focus.

  “When I have bad days,” I say, “I think of my sister, whom I love more than anything. Think of Aros now. Focus on him, and if it helps, you can tell me about him.”

  I don’t think he’ll do it. He’s shaking badly, and his breaths aren’t slowing. But he grits his teeth, forces himself to take a deep breath.

  “He’s short,” Iric says after a minute. “Shorter than even Soren. Dark hair. Strong hands. He’s a hunter.”

  He gulps down more air. “He’s funny. Loves to laugh and be outside. He never could stand to be cooped up indoors for too long. I really got to know him when I was … fifteen, I think. I was upset because Soren didn’t—couldn’t—return my feelings.”