He walked toward her slowly, the way he approached any situation that had just been frightening and might still need careful handling.
'You're safe,' he said. 'They're gone.'
She didn't answer. She was staring at him — not at his face exactly, but at him, the way someone stared at something they had a category for but had never actually encountered before. He was also seven years old and had just taken out four Thorn Wolves in twelve seconds, so the staring was probably doing double duty.
Then the staring shifted into something more specific. Her ears came up slightly from their flattened position. Her tail, pressed flat against the ground, did not move but seemed to be considering it.
Her eyes went to his ears. Round, human, in the normal position.
Then to his hair. Normal dark hair. No unusual color.
Then to the absence of a tail.
Then back to his face.
'You're a human cub?' she said with slight apprehension.
'Hm, yes we call our cubs children though.'
Chapter 61: The Ring IIShe appeared to be processing this. He waited. He was patient.
'I've never seen a human,' she said, with the quality of someone filing information that was simultaneously more and less alarming than expected.
'How was the first impression?'
She looked at the four wolves he had just dealt with. She looked at him. The amber eyes, which were extraordinary even pressed into the corner of a tree root, did a rapid calculation.
'Better than the wolves,' she allowed.
'High praise.'
Her ears were at a middle angle now — not forward, not flat. Uncertain, which was better than frightened. Her gaze went back to him and stuck there with a directness that he suspected was simply how she looked at things.
Then she said, quietly, with the specific quality of someone asking a question they were afraid of:
'Are you going to enslave me?'
Her voice didn't break on it but it was a near thing. Her eyes had gone bright with the particular brightness that preceded something she was working very hard not to let happen.
He looked at her.
He looked at the wolves.
He looked back at her.
'I just killed four things for you,' he said.
'Humans do that,' she said, voice still careful. 'My grandmother says they help you and then they own you. She was very specific about it.'
'Your grandmother sounds like she had some experiences.'
'She had many experiences. She was very old.' A pause. 'She also said they were very tall.'
'As I said, I'm still a cub, I mean child.'
'You're very short for a slaver.'
'I'm not a slaver. I'm a farmer's son.' He crouched down to her level, which he had been planning to do for the arm anyway. 'I found you about to be eaten. I would like to look at your arm. Then I would like to take you somewhere safe. That is the full extent of my plan.'
She looked at him for a long moment. The brightness in her eyes had not gone away but it was doing something different now — less the brightness of impending tears and more the brightness of someone reassessing a situation at speed.
'You're very calm for someone who just fought four Thorn Wolves,' she said.
'You're very composed for someone who just almost got eaten.'
'I wasn't almost — ' She stopped. Looked at where the wolves had been. 'I was almost eaten.'
'A little bit, yes. The arm. May I?'
She looked at his hands. Then she held the arm out slowly.
The cut was three inches long and not deep. Wolf claws rather than bite. He ran the diagnostic quickly — no infection yet, clean edges, would heal on its own in a week but leave a scar if he didn't do something about it now.
He placed his hand lightly over it and pushed a thread of healing mana through.
She went very still. The golden warmth moved across the cut and closed it from the inside out, the tissue knitting quietly, and when he lifted his hand the skin was smooth and unbroken except for a faint pink line that would fade in a day.
She stared at the arm.
'Better?' he said.
She looked up at him. The amber eyes were enormous and very direct.
'You used healing magic,' she said. Her voice was slightly rough from the fight but the accent was slight — she knew the common tongue, which was good.
'Yes.'
'You're very young to use healing magic.'
'You're very young to be this far into the Veiling Forest alone,' he said.
Something crossed her face that was the beginning of a response. Then she swayed.
He caught her before she went down.
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He ran the diagnostic fully once she was on the ground.
The arm wound had been the visible problem. The invisible problem was worse: the kind of accumulated magical depletion that came from running physical enhancement spells for an extended period under extreme stress. Her reserves were essentially empty, and the body, when it ran its magical reserves to nothing, had a way of continuing to draw from somewhere — vitality, constitution, the deep physical reserves that kept a person walking when they should have stopped.
She had been running on empty for a while. Maybe hours.
He pushed a careful thread of his own mana across to her, slow and calibrated, the kind of transfer he had been practicing on his sisters for months but adjusted for a signature he didn't know well. Too much too fast would cause problems. He moved slowly, watching the diagnostic as her reserve began to refill, watching her body's response.
She was stable. She was going to stay unconscious for a while — the body needed to process the depletion and recover — but she was stable.
He looked at the clearing. He looked at the girl. He looked at the four Thorn Wolf bodies.
He sent Shadow back to the farm with a message — not a verbal message, Shadow's communication through their connection ran on impression and image — the impression of: I need the cart. Now. And someone to bring it. He thought about teleporting but thought against it. It was a longshot but if she had people searching for her, just teleporting away would remove any scent that he assumed beastkin relied on to track. 'I will leave a trail for any of her family to follow us home,' Arthur thought. Trying to convince himself that he was also not afraid of trying to teleport with another human - adjacent person - for the first time.
Then he sat down against a root and waited, one hand maintaining a steady slow mana transfer, and looked at her.
She had the look of someone who was usually quick and certain and was currently very still and far from home.
He ran the search spells through Shadow's extended network while he waited, threading copies outward into the deeper forest on a search pattern: demihuman signature, fox tribe markers, anything that matched what he was seeing. If her family was looking for her, he wanted to find them before they found the wolf blood and the sign of a short battle and perhaps drew the wrong conclusion.
The search found nothing within immediate range. He extended it further and sent clones of shadow even deeper into Veiling forest to search for demihuman settlements.
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