That night we made camp the way we usually do: Ferius sent me off to find firewood, while she set up her collection of traps around our campsite. She never let me see them, which annoyed me no end. For his part, Reichis went hunting, and brought back the slightly mangled remains of a rabbit to add to our dinner. His fur had taken on a greenish-brown colour, his stripes now looking like the thin angular lines of sage brush.
Squirrel cats can change the colours of their coats to match their surroundings, making them particularly skilled hunters. Reichis’s favourite tactic is to hide behind whatever greenery is available, and by the time a rabbit or other small animal gets close enough to see that he isn’t just some slightly tubby shrub, it’s too late.
Rabbit isn’t a common food among my people, but I found I liked it well enough. Mind you, nothing will put you off the taste of an animal faster than hearing Reichis kill it. The problem isn’t so much the ferocity with which he tears into them, but the fact that he keeps talking to his prey even after it’s dead.
‘That’s right, you dumb rodent. Who killed you? I killed you.’ Reichis was standing over the animal’s carcass, its blood still dripping from his face. ‘When you get to the afterlife, be sure to tell your stupid rabbit god that I ripped out your throat and now I’m feeling a craving for divine bunny flesh.’
He waxes poetic sometimes. Mostly on the subject of violence.
An hour later, after the meal was cooked and we were halfway through eating it, Reichis kept on extolling his great victory, describing every detail at length, making the story grander with each repetition.
‘Did you see the teeth on that rabbit?’ he asked us. ‘Huge. Lion’s teeth, that’s what this one had. I’m not sure it even was a rabbit. Must have been some kind of hybrid half-rabbit, half-bear.’
At times like these, it’s best to just stay quiet, eat your food and let Reichis talk himself out. It helps to think of him not as a two foot-tall squirrel cat but more of an eight-foot pissed-off lion.
Sometimes I don’t mind listening to him brag though; there’s not much to do at night in the open countryside once the horses are settled and the fire is going strong. Most of my evenings were spent staring at the flames, trying not to shake as my mind turned over one near-disaster or another. I used to shake a lot more, but I guess lately I’d gotten used to being scared all the time.
Ferius would sit cross-legged on one side of the fire, strumming the little guitar she carried with her as she told us stories – she has hundreds of them. I’m pretty sure most of them are made up, especially the daring, improbable adventures she claims to have had with remarkable people in exotic locales I’d never heard of. Given that I’d learned plenty of geography in school, I was fairly sure she was making up her settings too.
Reichis is highly competitive by nature, so likes to try to one-up her with his own stories. These come in two varieties: impossibly large animals he’s killed, and incredible treasures he’s stolen. There isn’t much evidence for either, but he nonetheless makes me translate his tales of squirrel-cat valour for Ferius in painstaking detail, always demanding that I emphasise, ‘And this next part, which is all true by the way …’ Ferius does an excellent job of pretending to believe him. After a couple of nasty bites on my forearm, I learned to pretend too.
That night Reichis had just launched into a particularly gruesome account of his slaying – and devouring – a creature that I was fairly certain had actually just been a big mouse, when Ferius uncharacteristically cut him off and set her guitar back in its cloth bag. ‘I think we’re done with stories tonight.’
‘Really?’ Reichis asked. ‘How about the tale of the Argosi who got her face bitten off for interrupting?’
She ignored his chittering and got up, walked over to her saddlebags and reached inside. When she pulled her hand back out, she was holding a deck of cards I recognised: steel, thin and razor sharp. In her hands, those cards were as deadly a weapon as any I’d ever seen. She cut the deck and handed me half of them.
‘Are we going to practise card throwing now?’ I asked. She’d taught me the basics on the first night we’d met, and I’d developed a pretty fair hand for it.
‘In a manner of speaking.’ She gazed out onto the long road that wound down the slope back towards the town. ‘No more talking now, okay, Kellen?’
‘What’s –’
She shook her head, signalling me to keep quiet. Something was up. I closed my eyes, trying to hear whatever it was Ferius had heard. The wilderness always seems quiet, but if you listen close enough it’s full of noises: animals shuffling about in the hills, insects chirping, wind rustling the leaves and the sand. It took me a while before I made out the sound of a horse’s hoofs underneath it all. One rider, I guessed, though I wasn’t particularly good at judging this sort of thing. I caught Ferius’s gaze, wondering why she was so concerned. Even if one of the townspeople had decided to try to attack us, I doubted we had much to fear.
I heard a growling noise and looked down to see Reichis next to me, his fur now black and rising in hackles, sniffing at the air. ‘Crap,’ he said.
I kept my voice below a whisper as I asked, ‘What is it?’
‘The air stinks of magic,’ he replied. ‘Jan’Tep magic.’
I had to stop myself from gripping the cards too tightly and slicing open my palms on the sharp edges. There was only one reason why one of my people would be out here in the borderlands alone in the middle of the night: a hextracker had found me.