Frost Burned

The searcher looked for a wizard and would never notice the wolf who concealed the man in its shape unless the fever betrayed him.
    He should lie low, it was the best defense . . . but he was so afraid, and his illness clogged his thoughts.
    Death didn’t frighten him; he sometimes thought he had come here seeking it. He was more afraid he wouldn’t die, afraid of what he would become. Perhaps the one who looked for him was just idly hunting—but when he felt a third sweep, he knew it was unlikely. He must have given himself away somehow. He’d always known that he would be found one day. He’d just never thought it would be when he was so weak.
    He fought to blend better with the form he’d taken, to lose himself in the wolf. He succeeded.
    The fourth sizzle of magic, the searcher’s magic, was too much for the wolf. The wolf was a simpler creature than the mage who hid within him. If he was frightened, he attacked or ran. There was no one here to attack, so he ran.
    It wasn’t until the wolf was tired that he could gather his humanity—that was a laugh, his humanity—well then, he gathered himself together and stopped running. His ribs ached with the force of his breath and the tough pads of his feet were cut by stones and an occasional crystal of ice from a land where the sun would never completely melt winter’s gift. He was shivering though he felt hot, feverish. He was sick.
    He couldn’t keep running—and it wasn’t only the wolf who craved escape—because running wasn’t escape, not from what he fled.
    He closed his eyes, but that didn’t keep his head from throbbing in time with his pounding pulse. If he wasn’t going to die out here, he would have to find shelter. Someplace warm, where he could wait and recover. He was lucky he’d come south, and it was high summer. If it had been winter, his only chance would have been to return to the caves he’d run from.
    A pile of leaves under a thicket of aspen caught his attention. If they were deep enough to be dry underneath, they would do for shelter. He headed downhill and started for the trees.
    There was no warning. The ground simply gave out from under him so fast he was lying ten feet down on a pile of rotted stakes before he realized what had happened.
    It was an old pit trap. He started to get up and realized that he hadn’t been as lucky as he thought. The stakes had snapped when he hit them, but so had his rear leg.
    Perhaps if he hadn’t already been so sick, so tired, he could have done something. He’d long ago learned how to set pain aside while he used his magic. But, though he tried, he couldn’t distance himself from it this time, not while his body shivered with fever. Without magic, with a broken leg, he was trapped. The rotting stakes meant no one was watching the pit—no one to free him or kill him quickly. So he would die slowly.
    That was all right because he didn’t want to be free so much as he didn’t want to be caught.
    This was a trap, but it wasn’t His trap.
    Perhaps, the wolf thought, as his good legs collapsed again, perhaps it would be good not to run anymore. The ground was cold and wet underneath him, and the flush of heat from fever and the frantic journey drained into the chill of his surroundings. He shivered with cold and pain and waited patiently . . . even happily, for death to come and take him.
    “If you go to the Northlands in the summer you might avoid snowstorms, but you get mud.” Aralorn, Staff Page, Runner, and Scout for the Sixth Field Hundred, kicked a rock, which arced into the air and landed with an unsatisfactory splut just ahead of her on the mucky trail.
    It wasn’t a real trail. If it hadn’t led from the village directly to the well-used camping spot her unit was currently stopped at, she’d have called it a deer trail and suspected that human feet had never trod it.
    “ I could have told them that,” she said. “But no one asked me.”
    She took another step, and her left boot sank six inches down into a patch that looked just like the bit before it that had held her weight just fine. She pulled her foot out and shook it, trying unsuccessfully to get the thick mud off. When she started walking again, her mud-coated boot weighed twice what her right boot did.
    “I suppose,” she said in resigned tones as she squelched along, “training isn’t supposed to be fun, and sometimes we have to fight in the mud. But there’s mud in warmer places. We could go hunting