Their stopover to eat their fill of meat had subtly changed them. Both felt stronger and more confident, and their bellies lacked that deep, gnawing hunger. Their starved muscles had received the protein they so desperately needed.
Not that they knew this. Bernard only knew that he felt better than he had the night of the ball, and that running uphill was not so tiring as it used to be.
Charlotte did not notice at all. She was pondering the location of her clothing in the manor, and wondering if anyone had looted it or moved into it in their stead.
The morning wore on, and the sun broke through the clouds for a few hours. The woods were dense and green with new growth, and birds sang in the canopy overhead. Charlotte followed Bernard's bounding gray shape, and only paid attention to their surroundings when he stopped to sniff the breeze.
Finally he murmured, "We're almost there."
Charlotte snapped out of her thoughts at once, and peered around. "Now that you mention it, I recognize these trees," she said. "I once had a playhouse right over there."
They listened and sniffed, but there were no enemies nearby. They could smell woodsmoke and humans, which grew stronger as they neared the outskirts of Graymane City. They crept on, wary and alert.
Finally they arrived at the foot of their own back lawn. Bernard dropped to his belly and peered out of a a tangle of saplings, and Charlotte imitated him. The mansion looked dark and deserted, and many windows on the first floor were broken. They watched, listened and smelled, but their senses told them that the place was abandoned.
"I want to check my laboratory," murmured Bernard, circling around the edge of the yard, keeping to the cover of the trees. Charlotte trotted out onto the lawn, then shrank back into the trees. She had become so accustomed to hiding that venturing out in the open felt dangerous.
They had to cut along the side of the mansion to reach the laboratory. As they reached the steps leading up to the veranda, Charlotte whimpered, "Please may I look inside?"
Bernard halted with one forefoot upraised, and heaved a sigh. "All right, but hurry. It's too quiet."
Charlotte leaped up on the veranda, trotted to one of the doors, and tried the knob. It felt strangely small in her paw, like the door to a dollhouse. But it turned and swung open, and she stepped into the rear sitting room.
All the furniture was gone. The carpet was damp and smelled of mold, and holes had been knocked in the walls where looters had removed the furnishings in a hurry. She snorted in disgust and walked from the sitting room to the rear hall, and from there to the ballroom, which still stank of death. All the bodies were gone. She wondered uneasily how many of them were now worgen.
The mansion was empty and silent, and yet its very silence pressed down on Charlotte's mind like a weight. This had ceased to be her house. This was the dwelling place of strangers.
She ran up the stairs in three bounds and arrived at her rooms. They had been stripped as well, and she gazed in sad indignation at the scrapes across the wooden floorboards. So much for her idea of dressing up as a human.
She walked down the stairs one at a time, trailing her claws along the polished banister. What to do now? She had no idea.
Bernard awaited her in the ballroom, where he was sniffing the floor and snorting. "There you are," he said as she appeared in the doorway. "Lots of death here, lots of people transformed, too. Are our rooms stripped?"
She nodded.
He shrugged. "I thought so. Let's check my laboratory. At the very least my scrollstone will still be there. It's locked down by magic."
They jumped out of the ballroom windows, and Bernard galloped around the back of the mansion toward his laboratory. There he slowed down and listened, ears uplifted. Charlotte jogged to a halt beside him. "What is it?"
"Someone's inside," he growled, and slunk toward the door. It was propped open with a broken chair. Charlotte hung back, ready to run.
Bernard moved until he could see inside the door from a distance, and his growl rose to a terrible snarl. Charlotte had never seen him so hideous, even when facing other worgen. She moved up beside him and followed his gaze.
Inside Bernard's laboratory stood a tall, robed man with a gray beard. He carried a long scythe in one hand, and with the other he was paging through one of Bernard's notebooks.
Bernard stalked toward the door, still snarling. His growl formed words. "Arugal!"
The archmage looked up, and smiled. "Ah, Bernard Preston. I see that your little experiment was a success."
Bernard stood in the doorway, filling it so completely that Charlotte had to peer under his forelegs to keep Arugal in sight. "Aren't you afraid of me?" thundered Bernard.
"Why, no," said Arugal pleasantly. "I've been hoping that you would turn up. You cannot harm me, you know. I bear the Scythe." He gestured at Bernard with it.
Bernard backed up and sat down on his haunches heavily, as if he had been shoved. Charlotte scrambled away and stood at a short distance, panting in fright. Arugal had not yet seen her, so she crept around the corner of the lab to keep out of his line of sight.
"I found a treatment to the worgen curse," said Bernard hoarsely, no longer able even to snarl. "I tried it on myself the night they broke free."
"And retained your sanity," said Arugal, stroking his beard with his free hand. "Yes, I've been reading your notes with great interest. Have you managed to reverse the transformation?"
"No," said Bernard. "That would have been the next stage of the experiment."
"Fascinating," said Arugal, turning his back on Bernard and walking across the room. Bernard could see that his alchemy apparatus had been smashed, mingled potions in a smelly mess all over the floor. But his scrollstone was still in place. Bernard could not see if it still held a scroll, and with a sinking heart he realized that Arugal would have retrieved it first, anyway. Bernard could not move, held by a silent command from the Scythe. He glanced at Charlotte, and was relieved to see that she was hiding.
"I had heard that the mage society was seeking a cure for the worgen curse," said Arugal, picking up a book and setting it carefully on the work table, beside Bernard's notebook. He knelt, picked up a scrap of paper from the floor, and laid it on top of the books. "I had not realized that they were so close to finding one. This curse was not laid by a mortal, you see, and thus cannot be lifted by a mortal. But you seem to have gotten around that by modifying the curse's effects. Most ingenious."
Arugal snapped his fingers, and the books and paper leaped into flame.
"No!" cried Bernard, but he could not lift a finger.
Arugal stepped out of the laboratory and gestured inside with the Scythe. Bernard got up and walked inside, where Arugal once more forced him to sit. Sparks from the burning books drifted into Bernard's fur, and he winced.
"It was convenient of you to show up today," said Arugal, smiling. "I knew that I must take steps to destroy your work, and you, as well. You saved me the trouble of looking for you out in the woods." He closed the laboratory door, turned the lock, and walked off, swinging the Scythe and whistling.
Charlotte watched him go, the odor of burning wood and paper heavy in her nostrils. She dared not stir until Arugal had departed out the front gates. Then she rushed around to the front of the lab, clumsily unlocked the door, and flung it open.
Bernard still sat beside the burning table, immobilized by the Scythe's command. The little room had filled with smoke, and the flames were licking at the wall behind the table. Charlotte rushed in, grabbed him by one arm, and pulled him toward the door. She feared that he might be frozen to the ground by magic, but as soon as she forced him to move, he was able to rise and bound out the door himself.
"Thank you," he said, and coughed until he gagged.
Charlotte watched the flames climb the wall and lick toward the bookcase. "Should I try to save anything?"
Bernard nodded, hardly able to speak. "Books," he gasped.
Charlotte ducked inside, flinched away from the fire's heat, and pulled down an entire shelf of books. She carried them outside, dumped them on the grass, and returned for another armload.
She managed to save everything on the bookcase, but Bernard's notes were nothing but ash. The pair sat at a safe distance, watching smoke billow from the door and windows, Bernard still hacking and wheezing. Gradually he recovered, and watched his lab burn with his ears flattened to his head.
Charlotte looked at him anxiously. "Is the antidote completely lost now?"
"Of course not," said Bernard, but his yellow eyes were sorrowful. "I still have the formula in my head. But the elixir takes many stages to create, and all of my editions and ingredient lists are gone. I'll have to start from scratch."
"Assuming he doesn't kill us," muttered Charlotte. "I never knew the archmage was so wicked."
"I knew he liked worgen," said Bernard. "I just didn't realize how much." He would have said more, but there came a high-pitched whistling that grew louder and louder, until a bolt of blue light splashed on the grass at their feet, frosting the grass.
"Run!" barked Bernard. The pair whirled and sprinted for the woods, calling on the swift speed of their race. Behind them, more frostbolts splattered the ground with ice, and others descended on the burning building as mages approached to deal with the fire.
"What about your books?" panted Charlotte as they gained the cover of the trees.
"The mages will salvage them," panted Bernard. "They're valuable."
They ran for two miles, then had to stop to rest and drink at a pond. Bernard threw himself down on his side, and gasped for breath. "Thanks for pulling me out of there," he told Charlotte between breaths. "I felt the command give way as soon as you touched me."
"You would have died," said Charlotte, eyes wide. Now that she had time to think about what she had witnessed, she was sickened and horrified. The archmage had tried to kill Bernard! She thought of how calmly Arugal had forced Bernard inside the burning building, and then locked the door on him. She had to sit down, because her legs had begun to shake.
They rested for a long while. Bernard brooded on the knowledge that Arugal supported the worgen outbreak. He supposed that once everyone had been contaminated, then Arugal could rule them all with that Scythe of his. He wondered if the other humans knew, and figured that they probably didn't.
Underneath that, he felt a warm grateful glow to Charlotte for rescuing him. He wanted to thank her with more than words, somehow, but he didn't know what she might accept. A gift of extra food? He really just wanted to cuddle her, but he knew that she would not appreciate that.
Charlotte dozed on the edge of the stream, and her trembling gradually subsided. After a while she sat up again, and found Bernard watching her with a wistful expression. As soon as she met his eyes, he looked away. "Shall we go back to the cave?"
"I suppose," she said, rising to two legs, then stiffly dropping to all fours. "Unless you wanted to try to contact the other mages about Arugal."
Bernard looked at her sharply. "You didn't want to try to find clothes or anything?"
She gave him a hopeless look. "It's all gone, Bernard. And no one could mistake me for a human anyway. Look at me." She indicated one crooked hind leg.
He heaved a sigh. "The mage tower is on the eastern side of the city. If I could just get close enough to speak to someone, I might be able to convince them to listen to me before they kill me outright."
Charlotte didn't want to venture back into danger so soon. "Let's go slowly," she begged. "And hunt on the way." Hunting took extra time. She didn't want to risk losing Bernard again so soon.
They set off toward the southeast, making a wide circuit around the outskirts of Graymane City. They went at a walk, pausing often to listen and smell for enemies. This area was thick with the scent of both humans and worgen. Humans smelled revolting to their feral-attuned noses, something like rotting onions. "Who would want to bite something that smelled that bad?" Charlotte asked at one point.
"Animals get a taste for human blood," said Bernard with a shrug. "I imagine you'd get used to it somehow."
"But other things smell so much better," said Charlotte.
As they walked, Charlotte wondered why she was so afraid of losing Bernard. She had come to depend on him, and he knew so much more about hunting and surviving. Losing him meant losing her last contact with civilization.
But as she thought about it, she realized that she was growing fond of Bernard as a person, too. She hadn't wanted him to burn alive in the laboratory ... that was an unspeakably horrible death for anyone. She wished that she could lick his face again, but she was uncertain as to what such a gesture might mean. Licking with a worgen tongue wasn't exactly like kissing as a human, but she was afraid that he might interpret it as such. She felt her face grow hot under her fur, and avoided Bernard's eyes when he looked around at her.
Bernard moved slowly and gingerly, and his breath rasped in his chest. He wondered how badly he had damaged his lungs, and wistfully wondered if a priest's healing touch would work on a worgen body.
After a while, their noses told them that they were nearing the outskirts of the town again. Bernard slowed to a walk, and Charlotte moved up beside him. "Are we close?"
"Yes," he said softly, peering through a clump of ferns. He lifted one claw and pointed to a cluster of houses with a tower rearing up just beyond them. "That's the Mage Tower. I'm not smelling many worgen, are you?"
Charlotte sniffed, carefully sorting through the scents. Human refuse, animals, soap, cooking, and unwashed bodies. No worgen. "No," she said softly. "How are we going to do this? This is the forest edge. Look, there's fields around the tower and everything."
The space around the Mage Tower had been cleared for many acres to make room for farmland and pasturage for animals. No cover for large predators like themselves.
"Should we wait for nightfall?" said Charlotte.
Bernard stared out at the fields. "No," he said. "At night, we'll be only monsters. Let's wait until sunset."
They stretched out in the fern, side by side, and watched the distant humans go about their business. The rain that had threatened all morning finally came pelting down, and they just humped their backs and put up with it.
"How will we keep them from killing us from a distance?" Charlotte ventured.
"I'm not sure," said Bernard quietly. "I'm also worried that the mages have put anti-worgen warding around the place. Notice how nobody seems worried about worgen attacking."
Charlotte watched a woman shoo three lambs out of the rain and into a shed.
"I don't want to lose you," Charlotte muttered.
Bernard looked at her, water dripping down his muzzle. "Why not?"
"Because ..." Charlotte sorted through her muddled feelings. "Because I think I love you."
Bernard gazed at her for a long time. She kept her eyes on the damp ferns, watching water trickle down the fronds and hang them with tiny beads.
He ran out his tongue in a smile. "I think I love you, too."
"Oh." Charlotte didn't know what to say. "I ... you do?"
"I think I've loved you for years," said Bernard quietly, eyes focused on the tower in the distance. "Not that I've had romantic feelings much, but ... I always felt something toward you."
They fell silent for a while, listening to the rain pattering all around and inhaling the smells of the nearby houses.
"I never knew you very well," said Charlotte. "I never knew how ... kind you were. You always ignored me when I talked to you."
"Because you only ever talked about yourself," said Bernard. "Not exactly the best dinner conversation. But you know, I always did enjoy hearing your voice."
They talked for hours as the sun sank and the rain rolled away northward to dampen Silverpine Forest. They had grown to depend on each other and even trust each other, and Charlotte's respect for Bernard had grown exponentially. Not such a bad foundation for a relationship.
And she did not want to lose him now, not after she had come to see how he truly was beneath his unassuming human exterior.
Bernard rose to all fours and stretched. "It's time," he said.
Charlotte stood up, too, and they shook the wet from their fur. Then Bernard nuzzled her face with sudden affection. A day ago, Charlotte would have resented such familiarity. But now she welcomed it, and nuzzled him back. She would have kissed him, but worgen lips did not kiss so well. She licked him instead, and he understood.
"Pity we only figure ourselves out here at the end," he said, ears and whiskers drooping. "If I don't make it, remember that I loved you." He trotted out into the open, and Charlotte followed at a short distance.
They followed a shallow hill down, crossed a small brook, and trotted uphill again, toward the houses.
