water energy, acrid with the salt of the ocean, flooded into Vidarian's awareness.
Vidarian let the energy roar straight through him, as though Ruby was guiding his hand. The torrent of water struck the wolf full in the chest, driving it backward. He pressed the attack with another sharpened blast of fire energy, but its effect was dampened by the water that coated the wolf in an accidental shield.
Beside them, a screech of pain indicated that Altair had found a mark on one of his wolves. When Vidarian dared look across, he saw the gryphon leap into the air for three short wingbeats, then dive sideways, beak outstretched, to snap at the injured wolf's hindquarters.
Then Ruby was flooding Vidarian with water energy again, reveling in her newly discovered ability, and Vidarian released it into the face of the thornwolf as it leapt to attack. It dodged to the side, but not enough, and was knocked even further by the lash of water. This time Vidarian followed with his sword, sinking the tip of the blade deep into the wolf's side to pierce the heart. It thrashed wildly as it died, and it was all Vidarian could do to pull his blade free and keep clear of the flailing spines.
Altair had just dispatched the wolf he'd injured when two more came leaping from the forest to join the one remaining. This one was the largest and angriest—the two other wolves closed from either side of the clearing to support it, demonstrating a frightening cooperative hunting intelligence.
Vidarian and Altair each closed on a wolf, having little other choice—and the third leapt hungrily for Isri.
Ruby, Altair, and Vidarian all cried a simultaneous warning—
And the tree beside Isri started to move.
At first the tree seemed to melt, its needle-covered branches dropping to the ground, but then they leveled and spread. Dark skin and moss-green hair flashed beneath the splintering wood, and then a spinning warrior was there, beating the wolf back with a pair of sticks tipped with long, white animal teeth. For its part, the wolf seemed to recognize its opponent, and danced back warily.
Vidarian and Altair could only concentrate on their own attackers, and so they did, fighting with sword and talon and magic. Vidarian quickly learned to coordinate his attacks, lashing out with fire to burn and blind his opponent, and only then following it with Ruby's punishing storm of water energy. Drenched, the wolf was less able to lift its spines, and Vidarian moved in with his sword to more easily dispatch this one with a precise blow to its throat.
Altair had dealt with his second wolf as well, and with it dead, turned with Vidarian to the dark-skinned stranger, who had also dispatched a wolf with a thorned noose made from a length of dried vine.
“Thornwolves,” the woman said breathlessly. “Terribly vicious. My name is Calphille. Who are you, who shelter in my father's forest?”
As silence descended again on the forest, the rain dwindling to a drifting mist beyond the camp's shield, Isri moved to soothe the agitated seridi. Their behavior was so unpredictable that Vidarian often found it difficult to tell when they were actually more agitated than usual, but Isri, her mind brushing constantly with theirs, was much more sensitive.
// We are passing through, // Altair said, while he delicately set about the grisly work of dragging the dead wolves away from their camp. Vidarian moved to assist him, but the gryphon waved him off with a talon. He reneged only out of practicality: Altair could seize the wolves by the root of their neck-spines, his large beak impervious to the barbules that would have sliced Vidarian's hands open. Now that they were still, Vidarian could see that nearly every other protruding surface—paws, knees, tails—were dressed with smaller versions of the wicked neck barbs.
“He speaks only mind-to-mind,” Calphille observed quietly when Altair had disappeared between the trees, though Vidarian was fairly sure the gryphon's sharp ears would catch the sound. “Did he lose his voice by some misfortune?”
“Gryphons…have not spoken with physical voices for hundreds of years, I'm given to understand,” Vidarian said carefully, trying to piece together when she might have last spoken with either gryphon or man. If his body and mind weren't still pounding with a battle fervor, he'd certainly be reeling still over the memory of how recently she had been a tree.
Her thoughts must have run parallel to his. A pensive frown shadowed her bark-colored face and she turned slowly, taking in the