From the Waters' Edge
an excerpt

Where we had come down the mountainside, a dark shape shifted from cover to cover, moving extremely fast toward us. I could barely see it from that distance, but it seemed too low to the ground for its size. As I watched, the wind changed and began to blow up toward us from that end of the valley, and immediately both horses went wild.
“Head for the water!” Niall cried, fighting to keep control of Kilian. Braith’s eyes were rolling, and his ears swiveled back toward the black spot, trying desperately to move upstream. Instead, I kneed him behind the girth to turn him to the water itself. I could only assume Niall wanted us to swim the river, which looked fairly deep at this point in the bed. Braith still wanted to run, so I kicked him on both sides, hard, and he bolted for the river.
Once inside, the water was so cold I had trouble breathing for a few seconds, but Braith seemed to have calmed down a little, for he was swimming—slightly upstream, against the current, but headed for the further shore. I held on grimly to the pommel of my saddle and tried to swim forward with my legs kicking slowly beside his back, arbitrarily thinking of all the things in my saddle bags that would be soaked. A tremendous splash sounded behind me, and I looked over my shoulder to see that Kilian had made it into the water, but Niall was still having trouble controlling the stallion. I caught a further glimpse of the black streak behind us, and turned around with a gasp, urging Braith onward. The image hung before my vision, gleaming teeth and weirdly glowing eyes in a body as dark and thick as night shadows, superimposed on the background of the riverbank ahead of me.
A few moments later Braith reached the riverbank and pulled himself out of the water, and I was trying to get my feet back into the stirrups when the scent came on the wind again. Braith bolted, and I felt myself sliding off his back. All my instincts kicked in, and I found myself swinging my other leg over his back to that side while pushing off his withers. The impact of the ground left me crouched for a few seconds, but I landed on my feet, and stood breathlessly.
Braith still sped up the valley, and behind me Kilian climbed up the bank. Across the river, the black thing loped, red tongue hanging out in a malicious grin, and I knew then that we could never outrun it. It was the length of the horses and half as high, with a thickly furred coat that did nothing to disguise the massive muscles underneath.
Kilian jerked his head, trying to escape the reins, and Niall kicked him into a run. As they passed me, he shouted, “Try the fire spell.” Then I was alone by the shore, defenseless save for a small knife in my pocket, provided it hadn’t been washed away. I had never been so terrified in my life.
Despite this, or perhaps because of it, my mind was clear. The words of the spell rang in my ears as if I heard them sung, and I knew how to rearrange them to do what I wished. The creature reached the other side of the river and grinned at me for a moment, confident of its victory. But as it threw back its head and let out a weird, undulating cry, I struck.
I started with a small fire on the base of its tail. It turned, confused, to bite at the paining object, and burned its nose. The snarl filled the valley with hate and anger, and it shifted its head to look at me, correctly identifying me as the culprit. With no further concern for its tail, it started across the river, and I began to run.
In my mind, the words arranged themselves again, with a few additions and an extremely clear image. The wolf-thing confidently had expected the fire to expire when submerged, but I kept it burning, and listened to its yelps of distraction as I ran. Halfway up to where Niall waited with Braith and Kilian, I turned.
The second spell lined my riverbank with fire. The wolf-thing had just reached it, and the sudden blaze caught both nose and ears. Its howl sounded like music to me, and I started walking toward Niall again, panting. When I reached him, he was staring back at the spell fire and the wolf-thing.
“What was that, anyway?” I panted, and he started.
“I was just about to ask the same thing,” he said dryly, and I looked at him in dismay.
“You don’t know—what that creature is?”
“I know all too well,” he said. His voice was grim. “That creature is a wulvern, probably sent by grotochs. The two often band together, though they have no compunction about killing and eating each other also. Wulverns are extremely hard to dissuade, let alone kill. No, I was wondering what that spell was.”
“Oh.” I put my hands on my knees and panted a little more, then moved to mount Braith, who was still twitchy and shivering. Niall had conveniently placed him by an outcropping of rock. Once up, I tried to catch my breath, and turned Braith to face the slope.
“We should probably—go as far as we can,” I said, “before the spell fails. It isn’t meant for that.”
“Right.”
Niall kneed Kilian into a trot, and we started away from the valley, picking our way up the side. “What is it meant for, then?” Niall asked finally, some twenty minutes later. The river was out of sight, along with the tormented wulvern in it, and we were weaving our way up the mountain along a deer trail.
I looked at him and half smiled. “Just for cooking fires, if the wood were damp. Nothing more grand than that.”
“That’s why you’re still tired, then.”
“Why?”
He tilted his head to the side, watching me. “You put your own strength into that spell, Lesa, or it never would have become so strong,” he said. “The price you pay for saving our lives is weariness.”
I smiled tiredly. “I’d rather be weary than torn to pieces, I think. The wulvern will follow us when my spell dies, yes?"
He nodded, and even the sun on my damp back was not enough to warm me. "Yes, it will follow us. And there may be others also. It would not have given the hunting call otherwise. I see no choice but to press on as quickly as possible. Had I ten other men here, we might try to bait and kill the one, but if there are others, and just you and I--" he shook his head. "Our only chance is to reach Eira's walls."
"How far away are we?" I asked, hoping against reason that it would be close. He looked at the horizon, and pointed.
"See that white capped giant there? Maybe a hundred miles away, upslope and down. If we push, we will be there in two days time, before noon."
I chirruped at Braith, and slid my right leg over his hindquarters, dropping to the ground.
“If we push, the horses need all the rest they can get. I’m walking, for now.”
Silently Niall dismounted also, nodding. “We cannot stop them from expending energy if they smell another wulvern, and we need their endurance. If only for their sake, we should camp for a few hours tonight.”
I agreed, but the hours before nightfall seemed to stretch on unendurably. Tenuous as a thread, the link between my spell and myself still held. We were well into the depression on the further side of our mountain and the shadows were deepening quickly towards evening when I felt the spell fail. The thread seemed to snap back at me, and I staggered a little. Niall looked at me, eyebrows raised.
“Fire’s gone, Niall.”
There seemed to be nothing more to be said. The race was on.