Wolf's Blood (59 page)

The puma vanished without either sound or further comment, but the third wolf, one with a coat of shadow grey and eyes as pale as ice, said contemptuously, “They are faithless. Is that reason for us to be?”

“Our warning was meant,” the bear grunted, lumbering away last. “Beware if you cross us or our kin again. There will be no more warnings.”

Firekeeper watched, and felt that not only those who had crossed into the glade but those who had watched from out of sight were well and truly gone. She turned to Elation and Blind Seer.

The falcon was studying the blue-eyed wolf with interest.

“Did they accuse you of possessing a talent?” she asked without a trace of her usual mockery.

“Worse,” Blind Seer said, holding his head high. “They knew me for being what I am, a wolf who might, if he dared try, learn to practice the art of spellcasting.”

Elation shrieked, but it was with laughter, not indignation or anger.

“The pair of you! The pair of you! How dull life has been without you turning what everyone believes inside out and upside down!”

“Then you will remain with us?” Firekeeper asked.

“Of course,” Elation said. “I have not yet paid back that golden eagle for chivying me like some fat duck. Moreover, Blind Seer no more sought that ability than he chose the color of his eyes.”

Blind Seer looked up at Elation challengingly. “I may have. I could have let it die within me when the fevers came.”

“I have never known you to willingly lose a fight, wolf,” Elation said. “Now, enough of that. What do we do about this warning?”

“Take it, for now,” Blind Seer said. “We will retreat a day or so distant, back the way we came. Firekeeper, I saw you counting your arrows earlier. Can you make more?”

“I have iron heads for another dozen or so,” she said, patting the pouch on her belt, “and then there is always stone and even sharpened and hardened wood. With Elation close, I do not think I will want for fletching.”

“Not my feathers surely!” the falcon shrieked.

“Definitely not,” Firekeeper agreed. “But once we leave the territory of these Bound Beasts, I think you will not begrudge me the feathers from your prey.”

“Then we do not give up the fight?” Elation said.

“Not in the least.” Blind Seer agreed.

He had crossed to where Bruck huddled in his lean-to, and now he nudged the spellcaster to his feet.

“This one can give us some information. He may be glad to do so, since we have been assured no rescue is coming for him. The Bound cannot be everywhere at once, nor do I think they are as prepared as they imagine for what Firekeeper and I can do.”

“And me,” Elation reminded. “And me.”

Blind Seer grinned a wolf’s grin, white-fanged with hunting joy.

“And you.”

They broke camp—a simple enough task—and herded their dazed prisoner back toward the Iron Mountains. He came willingly enough, muttering that he had looked for help even in sleep, but none was coming. He didn’t look at all well, and Firekeeper resolved that no matter what risk they took, she would remove the iron from contact with his flesh, for a while at least.

Safety was one thing, but torture she could not stomach—not without a greater reason than this.

With Bruck’s stumbling to slow their progress, they did not make camp until many hours later than if they had traveled alone. Again Firekeeper built the spellcaster a lean-to, and after she was done, she removed the iron from around his wrists and ankles.

“But I thread it in the fasteners of your clothing,” she said, doing so. “This maybe keep you less than magic.”

Bruck stared at her. “So you don’t trust me.”

Firekeeper blinked at him. “Why should I?”

Later, after they had eaten, she sat with Blind Seer, staring away from the fire into the darkness.

“It’s wrong,” she said. “We must fight the Bound or betray Derian’s trust, but still it’s wrong.”

“Wrong?” Blind Seer said. “Because they believe in what they are doing?”

Firekeeper nodded, resting her head against his.

“It would be easier if they were compelled, but they believe in the rightness of what they’re doing. It seems wrong that we will kill them for keeping faith.”

Blind Seer heaved a sigh.

“Sometimes, Firekeeper, right must be wrong. The deer wants to live, but the wolf still must eat. So it is here. The Bound must keep their trust, but we must keep ours. We are right. They are right. All of us are wrong.”

Firekeeper sighed in turn. “It was easier when we were all just wolves,” she said softly.

“I agree,” the wolf answered without the least irony. “I agree.”

TINIEL WONDERED, COULD only four days have passed since the town meeting? Tiniel could hardly believe the difference four days could make. Four days had been enough for Skea’s drill sessions to begin to feel like routine, rather than the torture they had been initially. Four days had been enough for Tiniel to find himself assigned—in addition to his usual patrols on the gateway hills—to lessons in first aid. As if that wasn’t enough, he was also expected to join Wort as the community quartermaster coordinated salvage operations in the heaps of debris concealed beneath those ruined buildings that had not yet been excavated.

Four days had been enough for Tiniel to decide that he would betray those he now trained with and labored beside. Four days could be an eternity.

Tiniel knew precisely what had pushed him over the edge. It had not been the degrading drill with sword and spear. True, Skea was not gentle with those he must train, but then the night-skinned warrior had excellent reason to push his trainees as hard as he could without wearing them out to such an extent that they would be useless when real battle came.

Too old to be of any help with military preparations, Urgana had pushed herself to long shifts among the papers in the archives. There she had found old records that indicated that the Nexans might have as little as half a moonspan before the fleet arrived. Apparently even after the gateway installation was in place and fully operational, there had been things that were more efficiently transported by non-magical means: timber, large pieces of furniture, bulk foodstuffs.

Urgana had found records that showed when the ships bearing these supplies had arrived, and after coordinating the pre-querinalo calendars with the current ones, she had demonstrated fairly conclusively that Bear Moon began the shipping season.

Her announcement had brought momentary despair to the Nexans, despair relieved when two events gave them all reason to believe they had greater resources than they had dared imagine.

One of these events had been indirectly connected to Urgana’s researches into the shipping schedules. Needless to say, iron was not welcome on the Nexus Islands, but that did not mean alternative metals—especially bronze, but also silver and copper—were not used in their place. Wort had reviewed the shipping manifests and come to the conclusion that one building, dismissed to this point as yet another residence, might have warehoused metal goods.

This supposition had proven correct. Tiniel’s back and arms still ached from helping move aside the ruined timbers and shift heaps of masonry. Those aches were not eased by Tiniel’s awareness that without Derian Carter’s enhanced strength and the willingness of the Wise Horse Eshinarvash to cooperate with the horse-man hybrid, the clearance could not have been managed so quickly.

The storehouse had not merely collapsed from a century of neglect, but had been destroyed, probably by one of the last sorcerers during the days of chaos that followed the coming of querinalo in order to keep the resources stored within from being used against the rulers during their time of weakness.

After all,
Tiniel thought
, they didn’t know that those fevers were the end of everything for them. They probably thought it was a plague of some sort, that there would be deaths, but that their caste would recover. Until then, better keep the peasants from getting their hands on the means for marking weapons. and such.

The materials within the destroyed warehouse had suffered from a century during which the ocean-borne weather had beaten its way through here and there, but the metal goods and bar stock stored within had been packed to resist those very forces. Although their arms and armor would be unconventional, the Nexans no longer needed to worry that they would need to go into battle armed only with spears of fire-hardened wood and shields made from chair seats.

Several of the Nexans were skilled in metalworking, and from the day the imminent invasion had been announced, the forges had not been permitted to grow cold.

But as heartening as Wort’s discovery had been, Tiniel thought that it had paled in comparison with what Ynamynet had coolly announced just the evening before at the conclusion of the community dinner. Tiniel had been there to hear it himself, for with the new crisis, luxuries such as private meals had been suspended. This was not because someone carrying off a tray made more work, but because the dinner hour had become a time when announcements and reports were made.

As Tiniel recalled the announcement of the night before, his vision darkened and anger surged to fuel his motions.

“Hey!” came an indignant yelp from his sparring partner. “Remember, we’re just practicing. You’re not really supposed to kill me!”

Tiniel blinked and saw the man staring at him with mingled admiration and annoyance.

“Oh … Sorry,” Tiniel said. “I just got to thinking about everything.”

The man dropped his spear shaft back into blocking position.

“Right. There’s sure been enough to think about. Shall we take it from the start of the drill?”

Tiniel nodded, but as his hands rose and fell with the pattern of blocking and attacking moves that Skea had insisted they all learn, even though the newly appointed general was the first to admit that no real battle was ever so neatly choreographed, he ceased to see the man who stood opposite him. In his vision, Ynamynet was again rising from her place at the table at one end of the room, rapping her mug against the tabletop as a makeshift gavel.

“I HAVE AN announcement to make,” Ynamynet said, her voice carrying with the ease of long practice. “Today, I confirmed something I have suspected for several days, something that may—just may—raise our chances for survival.”

The small murmurs of lingering conversation dropped to an interested, listening silence.

“A few days ago,” Ynamynet continued, “we gathered to discuss the danger we now face. In that meeting, we reviewed what resources we had, and how we could turn them to our best advantage. Even at that time, I thought of one resource that might be available to us, but until I could better investigate it, I decided it was best for me to remain mute.

“All of us know all too well that we will face opponents who have far greater resources than we do in all areas: military, supplies, and magical. Skea, with the enthusiastic cooperation of all the able-bodied of our community, has been making tremendous strides in equalizing the first. Wort, again with much willing and tremendous assistance, has worked miracles to rebalance the second. Unhappily, because of querinalo, not much could be done to help adjust the balance in our favor in the area of magical strength—or so we all thought.

“I, however, had my small hope. That hope had come to me when I reviewed how we had learned about this impending invasion. The news was brought to us in dreams and visions. Now, the visions came from a seer known to have great power—the jaguar Truth. What I allowed myself to consider was whether or not the other visionary might also have magical ability.”

Like everyone else in the room, Tiniel had shifted to look at Isende. His sister was not sitting, as was usually the case these days, in the midst of a group of small children. Instead, she was sitting at the same table as Ynamynet. Derian, his expression grave, was sitting next to her. Tiniel had bitten into his lip with unguarded fury when he realized that they just might be holding hands.

Plik, seated across the table from Tiniel, had looked over at him in concern and said softly, “Don’t worry. No one has hurt your sister.”

Tiniel nodded and schooled his features to what he hoped was a more neutral expression.

Ynamynet had paused to allow the murmurs of surprise and interest to fade, but now continued.

“I asked Isende to spend some time with me so that I might do some tests. Kalyndra and True Star also joined us, sitting behind a screen and observing, so that I would not be tempted to see in my tests what I wished to see.

“I will not bore you with the details of those tests, but I do think a brief reminder of Isende’s history would be in order, since many of you did not meet her until long after her arrival here and her bout with querinalo.”

Not surprising,
Tiniel thought sardonically.
After all, we were prisoners, kept under guard, and except for the Once Dead who studied us, and those like Zebel, Wort, and Skea who were assigned to guard or tend us, we really had very little contract with the community at large.

“Isende has been termed Twice Dead, but the nature of her gift is not usually discussed. It manifested in the form of a close emotional link to her twin brother, Tiniel.”

Tiniel found himself the momentary center of scrutiny, but as Ynamynet continued speaking without pause, attention shifted away with almost unbecoming haste. After all, the Once Dead was not speaking about him. He couldn’t be very important.

“This link was so close that, while they could not read each other’s minds, they were very aware each of how the other felt. They could channel those emotions into a form of communication, so that, for example, if the one was injured the other would know.

“However, querinalo ended this decisively. What the Spell Wielders did not suspect at the time—that no one but a very few intimates suspected until Isende experienced these highly detailed visions—was that Isende had protected a small reservoir of magical ability within herself.”

A gem,
Tiniel recalled in mingled anger and anguish
. She called it a “small gem of power.” She barred me from her, but kept that for herself.