Ilse Witch

When finally she turned to leave, her recognition of him already beginning to fade, his desperation turned to rage. Without thinking, his life ruined, his torment too much to bear, he leapt upon her and drove his hunting knife through her back and into her heart. She was dead before he bore her to the earth.

He sprang up instantly then and ripped his knife free to kill the boy as well, but the boy was gone.

The Borderman ran after him, his mind collapsed and turned inward so that nothing else existed. In one hand he carried the hunting knife, wet with the shape-shifter’s blood, waving it at the shadows about him, at the fate that had undone him. In the shadowy concealment of the trees, in the silence of the forest, he sought the boy. His madness was thorough and complete. Bloodlust ruled his life.

He ran until he collapsed in exhaustion, and then he slept.

But before he could wake to resume his search, the boy found him, pried the knife from his sleeping hand, and with a sure and practiced touch, cut his throat.

Truls Rohk’s low, guttural voice went silent. Crouched and hidden from view, he continued to slide through the tall grass ahead of Bek. Bek waited for him to continue his tale, but he did not. Sweat coated the boy’s sun-browned face, a damp sheen prompted as much by his horror as by his exertion. To have watched your father kill your mother and then to have killed your father was an experience too horrifying to contemplate. What must it have felt like to have witnessed and endured such madness at two years of age? Even if you were a spirit creature, a shape-shifter, and not entirely human, what must it have been like? Worse than he could imagine, Bek decided, because Truls Rohk was half human and cloaked in human sensibilities.

“Stay low,” the shape-shifter growled in warning.

He stopped and turned back to Bek. His face was hidden in the folds of his hood and his body concealed by his cloak, but Bek could feel the heat of him emanate from beneath his coverings.

“I buried them where they will never be found. I felt nothing at first, not until later, when I had time to think on it.” Truls Rohk’s voice seemed distant and reflective. “It was not so terrible until I realized I had lost the only two people who were like me—not because we were the same physically, but because we were bonded by blood. These were my parents. No one else would ever care for me as they could. Even my father might have loved me, given time and sanity. If he had not gone mad, perhaps. Now I was alone, not all of one species or the other, human or spirit. I was some of each, and that meant I belonged with neither.”

He laughed softly, bitterly. “I never tried living with humans. I knew what their response to me would be. They spied me in the mountains a couple of times and sought to hunt me as they would an animal. I tried living with shape-shifters, for there are bands of them concealed deep in the Wolfsktaag, and I could find their hiding places. But they smelled the part of me that was human, and they knew what I was. My mother had crossed a forbidden line, they said. She had committed an unpardonable act. She had died for her foolishness. It would be best if I died, too. I could never be one of them. I must live out my life alone.”

He looked at Bek. “Do you understand yet why we are alike?”

Bek shook his head. He had no idea at all. He was not sure he cared to speculate.

“You will,” the other whispered.

He turned away and began moving ahead again through the tall grass, closing swiftly now on the castle entry, another of night’s shadows. Bek followed, not knowing what else to do, still waiting to hear why they were alike, still wondering what was going to happen to him. He had come this far on faith and because of his need to be more than a spectator on this voyage. Had he made a mistake?

The castle rose before them, a maze of crumbling stone walls a1nd black holes where doors and windows had fallen away. The moon had dropped toward the horizon, and the shadows cast by towers and battlements fell across the earth like long, black garments. No sound came from within the ruins. Nothing moved in the dark.