Darkwood (27 page)

“You see that bird with the red tail? Can you hit it?”

“The hawk? Sure.”

The report came swiftly, then the bird's cry. Annie felt Rinka flinch.

“Wily bird. But close enough. Your girls can't fly.”

“My girls are dead.”

“Is it ghosts, then, bringing the king my news? Making friends with the kinderstalk?”

Uncle Jock didn't answer. He smelled damp: sweat and whisky.

“Girls, ghosts. It won't matter much longer,” said Gibbet. “You owe me this, at least.”

“But where do I find them? They could be anywhere in Howland! They—”

“The king will find the older girl. Why not start with her?”

“You mean the battle. You want me at the battle.”

“You'll make a fine sniper, Jock.”

“And that's all, that's all you want from me? The two girls?”

“Proof of kill. Then we're finished.”

Annie forced herself not to move for a full minute after they left.

She sniffed the air. “They're gone.” “They're gone,” Rinka said at the same time. He sprang at her, not fierce, but frantic.

“What did they say? What has happened to the pack? That blood, that blood on his hands! My mate, Brisa. That is her blood.”

Annie told him what she had overheard. She spoke without quite looking at him, afraid her face would betray what she was feeling.
Sharta was right. Page was right. Why didn't you believe us
?

At last she met his eyes. “We must track the first wave of wolves to the battle. We must try to stop it.”

“No. First we find Brisa.”

“Two hundred lives, Rinka! And my sister. If the king finds her she will be in danger.”

“You may go alone. I won't stop you. But I must find my mate.”

She had never thought of him as either old or young, and now he seemed both at once. Hopeless, full of hope.

“And when we find Brisa, you'll help me? You'll help me try to stop this war?”

“I'll do everything I can.”

As far as she could see in either direction, the bracka hedge ran dense and toweringly high. Rinka sniffed along the base, looking for a way through. Annie snapped off one of the black-green leaves. It shriveled in her hand. This hedge was no accident of nature. Even here, even in the forest, Gibbet worked his potions. But the hedge gave Annie an idea. She broke off a bit of stem crowded with thorns, then tore a strip from the hem of her white petticoat. Then she pricked her thumb and, with blood as ink, wrote a message on the cloth.

King danger hide love

She clicked softly with her tongue. The cats appeared before her, their eyes fixed calmly on her face. She tied the strip of cloth around Prue's neck.

“Go find Page. Do your best to warn her. Tell her … tell her I'll come as soon as I can.” Prudence rubbed her cheek against Annie's palm. Izzy flicked his tail. Then they were gone.

Annie stood abruptly, squinting against tears. Rinka was waiting for her perhaps fifty yards away. A small gap showed in the hedge. Through it she could see the flickering lights
of Gibbet's camp. The lights multiplied as she watched—they were lighting the torches. Dark would fall soon.

Rinka plunged through the hedge. Thorns tore at his coat. Annie knew what they would do to her skin, but there was no other way.

“Baggy.” She laid a hand on his neck. “You stay here, or go home, if you like. I'm sorry we can't—” Dark fell in the middle of her speech. Annie gasped and tightened her fingers in the horse's mane. And the horse, it seemed, had no intention of being left alone. He pushed past her and straight through the hedge. Brambles broke off in his mane and raked his sides. But Baggy was a workhorse and his hide was tough. Annie followed him through the gap, now wide as a door.

She could see the camp plainly now. Wolves, hundreds of them, milled around, their black bodies moving in and out of the shadows. A group of armed men stood near a cluster of tents. Torches blazed in a circle around them. As she watched, a wolf moved close enough to the circle to be seen by the men; one man gave a shout and another fired his pistol overhead in warning. “Stay in tight, men, stay in tight,” someone said.

Chopper stood slightly apart from the others. Pip moved restlessly between an iron pot in which something was cooking and a tent-covered wagon at the edge of camp. A flap of red flesh hung over one eye. He stopped to stir the pot, frowned, peered inside, and stirred it again.

Another wolf moved into the light, just the tip of its tail, just for a second, but there came the shout and warning shot. In the brief hubbub that followed, Pip caught Chopper's arm and drew
him aside. Annie crept into the shadowed space between the covered wagon and the tent closest to it.

“What do you mean not ready?” Chopper asked. He sounded impatient.

“No, no, they're ready, all right, it's just …”

“What?”

“It's nothing, except, well, they've rotted through the bags.”

“And?”

“The apothecary said they'll eat them, but it doesn't … it looks just awful, Chop, and it smells worse. I don't see how they will. And whatever that is in the pot, it won't begin to cover it.”

“When did they feed last, Pip?”

“Two days ago now.”

“And how long yet before they feed again?”

“Until they return from the fight. Unless … unless they eat the—”

“They've been ordered not to.”

“Right.”

“So, Pip?”

“Yes, Chopper?”

“They'll eat them. And, Pip?”

“Chop?”

“I'd listen to the apothecary.”

Pip nodded, abashed, but he didn't look convinced. He covered his nose and mouth with his shirttail and stepped inside the tent. A moment later he reappeared, stumbling backward. He held his hands in front of him as if to ward off danger.

“Beg pardon! Beg pardon! I didn't know you were inside!”

A small bent figure followed him out, leaning on a heavy
wooden staff. The figure shuffled forward, stabbing with its staff at Pip's legs and anyone else who stood too close. When it reached the cooking pot the figure straightened up a little and the hood fell back. Annie gasped.

She couldn't tell if she was looking at a man or woman, an aged person or a child. A few wisps of hair clung to a pointed head, and huge, beautiful eyes protruded slightly from a sallow face. The features were delicate, the mouth a red bow. The figure muttered something Annie couldn't hear, then shook a handful of glittering grains into the pot. She—for Annie had decided it must be a she, to have such a face—dipped her staff into the pot. As she stirred, a foul-looking blue smoke rose from the brew. But the smell that reached Annie was delicious: warm, spicy, sweet, savory, all at once. The apothecary breathed deeply, closed her eyes and nodded. Then she smiled. The bow-shaped lips, a child's mouth, parted to reveal row after row of pointed black teeth. The smile seemed to split her whole head in two, as though she would turn herself inside out. More than Chopper or Gibbet, more than Uncle Jock, this woman, this
creature
, terrified Annie. A trickle of dark fluid slipped from the corner of her mouth and ran over her chin before it dropped, glistening, into the pot. Pip's eyes widened with horror. The apothecary hooted with laughter, then drew up her hood and hobbled back into the tent.

Rinka nudged Annie's shoulder. “I've found the break in the hedge they're using for an entrance. But Brisa—”

He stopped speaking midsentence, transfixed by the blue smoke rising over the fire. The other wolves, too, had gone strangely still. Their heads were all turned toward the smell, their noses testing the air. Even the men, the men who must have known better, began to saunter over to peer into the pot. Annie's mouth filled with saliva.

Rinka was inching forward, leaving the safety of darkness. Annie made a gesture to stop him, but instead she found herself following him toward the camp, towing a reluctant Baggy behind her. It seemed to her years since she had last eaten. A fantasy banquet spread before her mind's eye: braised veal, steak and kidney pie, smoked sausages, roast chicken, leg of lamb.

But Baggy stopped and would not budge. She turned on him savagely, famished, furious. And then,
what is the matter with me
?

“Rinka!”

He was poised just on the verge of the shadows, one foot raised to step into the light.

“Rinka, it's poison! To kill the survivors.”

Still he hesitated, trembling with longing. As hard as it had been for her to resist, how much harder for him, who had been so hungry for so long?

“We must find Brisa,” she said softly.

Rinka shook his head as if to dispel the cloud of scent. He began to sniff the ground, running a few feet in one direction, then turning back the way he had come.

“I can't find her scent. The smell from the pot overpowers
everything. But the wolves I spoke to are worried. She has been missing for three days now. Oh, what has he done to her!”

Annie did not know what to say. She hadn't expected this of Rinka, that he should love another in this way. She pitied him and also felt strangely apart from him, a little uneasy, a little left out. It was the same way she felt when she thought about Page and the king.

A light appeared inside the tent next to the apothecary's wagon. Annie could see a figure moving around, his shadow sharp on the thin burlap walls. The man set his gun on the ground and lay down beside it.

“Wait here,” she whispered. From the sound of his breathing, the man was already asleep, or nearly so. She reached into her boot for the knife. With her other hand, she worked a tent stake free from the ground, glad that Gibbet's men were the kind who didn't bother to pound their stakes in well. She lay flat, cheek pressed into the ground, and lifted the loose edge of the tent. The man's face was startlingly close to her own. On his chin, whiskers poked through the skin like blades of blond grass. A hairy mole clung to his scalp.

Smirch, my old friend
.

Annie took a deep breath and rolled sideways under the edge of the tent. Lightly she placed her hand on the man's chest, seeking the opening to his heavy wool jacket, and brought the knifepoint to rest where she felt his heart beating. He awoke with a start, but Annie clapped her hand over his mouth, pinching his nostrils shut with her thumb and forefinger.

“Listen.”

The smell of whisky was strong in the tent, and Annie realized he had gone to sleep because he was drunk.
They're too afraid of the wolves
, she thought. Gibbet didn't plan for that.

“Where is the wolf Brisa?” Smirch shook his head. Annie pressed the knife closer to his side. He jerked away, but her knife followed him. Now he nodded. Annie uncovered his mouth, just a bit.

“Don't know name.”

“The leader's mate. The leader who has been missing.”

“Don't know!” he gasped.

“Think, Smirch. A wounded kinderstalk. Where are they keeping her?”

Smirch's body relaxed. “Chopper's farm.”

Annie relaxed too. She knew what to do.

“Keep quiet now, Smirch, or I'll be back for you.” Then she growled her very best Hippa growl in his ear.

He nodded. Sweat stood out all over his bald head.

She had the knife in his ribs. She might have given him a little stick, for Gregor. She almost did.