Aengus and Lena are discovered

“I don’t hear anything,” Aengus whispered after a long silence.

“Whisht!” Lena hissed.

Aengus had enough experience with Egelric’s half-​​elf boys to know he could trust Lena’s ears. He sat up slowly, as quietly as he could manage, though he could not help the sodden leaves that fell in clumps from his shoulders and chest and flopped onto the leaves piled around him.

They both stared up at the ceiling, though nothing could be seen beyond the black beams. The night was clouded over, and if Aengus had not lost count of the days then the moon should have been dark in any case. It had been full when he had fallen, and over two weeks had passed.

Then he heard it, too: a rustling overhead in the dripping bushes. Lena could identify what trees and bushes were above their prison from the sounds she heard when the wind blew, but this was not a rustling of wind. This was the sound of large bodies pushing through dense growth.

He looked to Lena. The smoldering fire at their feet gave just enough light to reveal the fear on her upturned face. It was enough to chill him deeper than even the damp cold of their prison could reach.

He wanted to believe her innocent, but he had never quite shrugged off his suspicion that she knew more of their situation than she was telling. Now, he wondered, did she believe their captors had returned? To finish them, perhaps? Or were they liberators come in time to spoil her plans? Should he cry out or remain still?

He reached up a slow hand and dragged it down his neck. One of the fleas in his beard had gone vicious, but he dared not scratch the bristly hairs. He knew elven ears too well for that, and anyway not one of his fingernails was uninjured after fifteen days of scrabbling against the stone walls like the claws of a trapped rat.

Then he heard a familiar sound, though it was made eerie by coming from overhead. He was a rat hiding beneath a cairn, and there was a dog digging, digging above him. Clots of damp earth and tattered bits of moss showered down upon them. If only he could dig like a dog!

Then he shook off the fear he had borrowed from Lena – he was not a rat, he was a man, and dogs were the friends of men.

“Help!” he cried. His voice was hoarse from drinking dirty water.

“No, no!” Lena whimpered.

“Lena! It’s a dog! There could be a man!”

“No, no dog!”

“Aye, it’s a dog! Digging! They could be looking for me!” He lifted his head again and cried, “Help!”

“No, no dog! It is wolf!”

His third cry stuck in his throat, and his aching muscles shuddered and then locked tight. It was the fear he had inherited from his ancestors: the instinct that would have prevented him from running and awakening the wolf’s own ancestral instinct to chase anything that ran like prey.

Lena held up four fingers, still white and lovely. “It is four wolfs.” She no longer bothered to whisper.

The wolf overhead stopped digging and announced to the others, “Whuff.” Aengus heard a whine or two, and a few more bits of dirt and moss fell between the cracks as the wolves turned and trotted back into the brush.

At last Aengus was able to swallow the cry that had died in his ragged throat. Gradually his muscles relaxed, and he sank back onto his bed of leaves.

“The devil take me if I shouldn’t have been a little glad to see them get in here,” he muttered. “If they can get in, we should damned well be able to get out. And if not, at least they would kill us quickly.”

“No, no kill,” Lena pleaded. “You have sword.”

“Don’t remind me.”

“It is cloud-​​moon. It is night-​​dark-​​cloud-​​moon. It is night for kill elf.” She crept closer to him beneath the leaves.

“Wolves kill elves?”

“No, no. It is night for not go up, not go out,” she explained. “It is night for be in, for sleep. For all elf. If wolf go, it is alone, in dis night it is dark-​​cloud-​​moon.”

“Wolves go alone in this night?”

“Aye. In dis dark-​​cloud-​​moon-​​night, it is sleep for all elf. Wolf go, it is go alone.”

“I see. No elf will find us this night.”

“It is sleep. It is sleep for all elf, every elf, sleep sleep.”

“That means sleep for you too, Lena-​​elf,” he sighed and pulled her close.

He had no choice but to trust her. She was all that stood between him and madness, him and despair. Without Lena, he believed, he too would have long since sat up against the wall and died, like the skeletal third prisoner. He lived by her; and if he ever wondered why he bothered to live at all in this squalid limbo, he would have to admit it was for her, too.

“Sleep for me and you,” she corrected.

“Go, it is go alone,” he spoke into her grimy, mold-​​scented hair. “Stay and sleep, it is I and you.”