Merlin turned just as the blur of a wolf jumped at her back. She shrieked and went down.
Only a few feet away, Merlin sprang at the creature, being careful to differentiate the gray fur from Natalenya, and thrust his blade into its back. The blade slid off a rib and sliced deeply into the wolf’s chest. Despite this, the wolf still tried to snap at Natalenya, and so Merlin stabbed it again and then threw it off.
Natalenya was crying.
“Are you hurt?”
She grabbed onto his arm with a shaking hand and pulled herself up. “Just a few scratches. I bunched up my cloak to keep him from biting me. The latch …”
Merlin reached up to find the wooden handle and pulled the string to lift the bar.
He let Natalenya slip inside first, and then he entered, banged the door shut, and dropped the bar. The room was dark and reeked of fish. Merlin suspected that Megek’s barrel of guts was ripe and ready to be closed up, rolled over to the woods, and dumped. The old man had apparently finished for the day and gone home.
Natalenya caught her breath and then broke the silence. “Thank you.”
“I’m just glad you’re safe. If anything happened to you, I couldn’t live with myself.”
“You risked your life for me.”
Merlin gulped. “It’s me they’re after. If you hadn’t been there to help me find my way …”
She raised her hand and touched his face. “That would have been terrible.”
Merlin reached out, and she embraced him, her tears flowing freely. Time fled away as he held her close and breathed in the smell of her rain-soaked hair.
Then a wolf began scratching at the door and sniffing. In the distance one of them howled.
Merlin released Natalenya and backed away, awkwardly aware of their situation.
“How do we get out of here?” she asked.
“We fight them.”
“We already tried that.”
“Not this way.” He oriented himself in the gloom, walked forward, and ran into a worktable. Sliding a hand along its slimy, fish-sullied edge, he made his way to the wall that cut the crennig in half. From there he found the door that led to the preserving side. It was warm to the touch, and smoke leaked through the cracks.
He tried to see what was in the room, but it was too dark. “Is there any wood here? There should be a pile —”
“Sure, just to your left.”
He reached down and took two branches, then ripped off his torn left sleeve in two parts. After tying some material around each branch, he opened the door and then had to step back, for a cloud of noxious oak-fired smoke filled the air and made him cough. Inside, Megek had lit a great fire in a stone hearth and then smothered it partially with stones. If the fire had been brighter, Merlin would have been able to see the rows and rows of fish hanging from the ceiling.
Taking a deep breath, he ducked into the room and inched his way forward until he found one of the drip pans by kicking it. After wetting the makeshift torches in the greasy liquid, he shoved the tips in the fire. It didn’t take long for them to light, and moments later he made his way back to the workroom, closing the door behind him.
He handed a torch to Natalenya, opened the smokehouse door, and stepped outside, torch first. Two wolves were there, and they stopped growling and backed away.
“Wait!” Natalenya called. “What if the torches go out?”
“I’ve still got my dirk, and the smithy isn’t far. We can run if we need to.”
Natalenya stepped out next to him, one hand holding Merlin’s staff and the other grasping the torch, which she thrust toward the wolves.
“You watch behind and to the sides,” he said, “and I’ll wave my torch out front.”
Merlin stepped into the well-worn path that his feet had almost memorized. Just a short distance to the large rock next to the pine, and then the path turned south. But the wolves harassed them, and their progress was slow. Three times Natalenya had to shove her torch into their faces, and Merlin had to use both his torch and his dirk to keep them at bay. If he wasn’t already wet from the rain, he would have felt the anxious sweat trickling down his back. He felt foolish for risking their lives in this way, but what other choice did he have? There wasn’t much time before Vortigern would attack