Chapter Text
9:17 Dragon
Honnleath, the Arling of Redcliffe, Ferelden
i.
Ceres wouldn’t play with him. Annoyingly, it seemed she knew her business. Cullen had tried sticks, dodging this way and that, poking and harrying her to try to rile her up and get her all excited. She just huffed at him through her furry jaws, twitched her ears, moved away from him, and kept watching the idiot sheep. Cullen threw himself down on the hillside and kicked at a tuft of grass.
He was so bored. He could handle watching the sheep when Branson or Father were really in charge and he could talk to them. But the pair of them had gone to market to sell wool, raw and spun, undyed and dyed with the colors they could manage from the plants Mother and Mia could find and grow. They probably hadn’t needed to both go, but Father had said something about wanting to get Branson used to bargaining and Cullen used to watching his own flock. That had been that.
Watching his own flock. Cullen didn’t want his own flock. It was beyond generous for Father to offer him a third of the flock that would be Branson’s one day to start with when he was ready to live his own life. Generous of Father and generous of Branson, because he hadn’t said one word of complaint. And Cullen didn’t know what else he could do, but nothing ever happened watching sheep. Just a walk to the pastures and a walk back to the pen, every day. Sheep-shearing and lambing in the spring. Training a new dog every seven years or so, and otherwise, nothing happened.
He wanted . . . he didn’t know what he wanted. To be a soldier, maybe, except no one wanted another war. To be a brother in the Chantry, except he couldn’t sit still when the other sisters and brothers taught them about Andraste and the Chant of Light. He knew the boy and the two girls in Honnleath they would probably want for the Chantry, and he wouldn’t be one of them. Most of the time, Cullen could just about manage good, but as hard as he tried, he couldn’t manage clever—or scholarly, anyway—and you had to be both to work in the Chantry. But he didn’t want to live and die out here. Watching sheep. Father was the best man Cullen knew, and Branson was a halfway decent brother, but days like today, out here alone as the hours crawled by, Cullen could see his future stretched out ahead of him, and it made him want to scream.
Ceres barked. “Oh, now you want to play,” Cullen complained.
She barked again and started growling, and Cullen sat up.
Ceres was crouched low to the ground, her lip drawn back against her sharp, white teeth. Her shaggy fur suddenly was standing on end. Her tail was rigid. The wind changed, and several of the sheep bleated in alarm.
Cullen stood. At the base of the hill, three wolves were crouched, beginning to slink upward.
Cullen went cold. Time seemed to slow down, and his mind seemed, suddenly, perfectly clear. Every detail of the pasture seemed to come into sharp focus. Every blade of grass, every shadow. The two wolves sneaking around the other side of the hill, on Cullen’s right. Cullen gripped his staff tight in his right hand, and with his left, brought up the whistle Father had bought for him years ago but he had never had to use.
He blew five sharp blasts on the whistle—the alarm signal. Once. Twice. Then a wolf lunged upward. Ceres snarled, and it fell back. Cullen’s mouth was dry. Without taking his eyes off the wolves, he scooped up a stone and threw it, not at the wolf that had feinted toward them, but at another on the other side of the group. His aim was precise, and the stone hit hard. His target yelped, and the other wolves snarled in rage.
“Yah! Yah! Get out of here!” Cullen shouted. Behind him, the flock was instinctively grouping together, facing outward, making it difficult for the predators to get any one of them on its own. “Get out of here, or I’ll hurt you!”
For ordinary wolves, that would probably be enough. But these were too skinny. It had been a dry year. Less good grass, less good game, less food for the predators. One of the three wolves charged at Ceres. Cullen stooped and threw another rock. Another yelp told him it connected. But now Ceres and the wolf were fighting. The other two wolves with her wolf were closing in. And the other two were harrying the flock, dashing and snapping at them. The sheep ran away, but that was what the wolves wanted. When the sheep ran, they could work together to herd one of them away from the others.
Cullen dashed toward the wolves bothering the sheep, leaving Ceres alone. He felt sick, but she had sharp teeth, a strong jaw, and powerful muscles. She had courage. The sheep had none of that.
“Help! Wolves!” Cullen yelled, beating at one of them with his staff. Those snarling, snapping teeth were too close to him. He could smell the dirt and mud in the wolves’ matted fur, see the ragged ends of their claws. Both of the pair were on him now, and Cullen laid about him with his staff, left and right. He kicked out with his heavy boots. Crack! Crack! Crack!
He rotated his hips just in time to get his knee clear of a vicious bite. “Wolves! Help! Help!” Behind him, he could hear Ceres fighting a battle just as violent as his own, taking on three wolves at once—and the wolves weren’t the only ones yelping with pain.
“Hold on, Ceres! Just hold on!”
Cullen jabbed with his staff and felt bone break on the other end. His stomach lurched, and the she-wolf who he had injured, gray-white with short ears, howled and whimpered, backing away. Limping. Her packmate, long and lean and yellow-eyed, looked after her, growling at Cullen, snapping, but moving back himself.
“That’s right! Get out of here!”
“Cullen!”
More than one voice was calling his name. More rocks whistled through the air—thrown by the neighbor, Horace. Slung by Branson. “Get ‘em, Ceres! Ya! Ya!”
Father was beside Ceres, clubbing wolves with his own staff until the last of them turned and ran back over the fields.
Then Branson was blowing another signal on his own whistle, letting the village know the wolves had been driven away, shrilling a third signal for help from the neighbors to round up the five or six sheep that had fled out of sight in the attack. Father was embracing him. “Cullen! Are you hurt? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. How is Ceres?”
Cullen fought free of Father and made his way to the sheepdog. She was bleeding from wounds on her left front paw and hindquarters, a torn ear, and a scratch on her nose. But none of them looked serious, and she grinned up at Cullen even as she whined gently. “Good girl,” he whispered, falling to his knees beside her. “Oh, good girl.” He touched her neck gently, and pulled some jerky out of the pouch at his belt to feed to her. She accepted it as her due, then whined again, looking out over the field at her charges.
“Five of them! Five of the cursed beasts!” Horace was roaring. His face was red, and his smile stretched all the way across his face. “Blight take this wretched drought, but you fought them off! Titus, I knew you raised good dogs, but I never knew your boy was such a warrior!”
“If you hadn’t come when you did—” Cullen started.
“You had them on the run, brother,” Branson disagreed. “We all saw it. We were headed back from market anyway. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Father run as fast as he did when we heard your signal. I don’t think I’ve ever run so fast! Then we see you, beating off two of those monsters while Ceres took on the other three. It was like something from a song!”
“It was horrible,” Cullen said frankly. “They’re just hungry and desperate, you can tell, but they’re so smart, and there were five . . .” He shuddered. He stood up and looked in the same direction Ceres was. “We need to round up the rest of the sheep.” He did a quick count. “Five of them were scared enough to break away completely. If the wolves catch them before we do, all this will have been for nothing.”
Men were beginning to gather around. “What’s happened, Titus? We heard the alarm and then the signal you need some help,” a man named Edwin asked.
“Wolves in the area. Pack of five, as far as we’ve seen,” Father responded. “We’ve driven them off for now, but five sheep bolted. We need to get them all rounded up and back in the pen under guard until a hunt’s been organized. If we can kill one or two of the wolves, they’ll decide to do their hunting someplace else. I could probably find the sheep with my eldest girl and my boys here, but every minute may count. We’d be grateful for your help.”
Those that had their own livestock to see to voted to go secure their own animals, but three men volunteered to help, and Horace said he would round up the men, horses, and dogs for a hunt. And Cullen was sent home to get Mia to help out—and to bring back hunting bows for all of them.
But before Cullen left, Father hugged him again, a rib-creaking monster of a hug. “Don’t scare me like that, Cullen,” he said gruffly. “But you did well. Very well. We’ll have to go and celebrate later, when every man and every creature is safe.”