The Black Wolves

by Kate Elliott

  Reyad snorted. “It’s true! Everyone knows he’s afraid of his own eagle. Who is called Slip because he’s a slip of a thing, small and gentle. It’s a cursed shame any eagle is wasted on a strutting cockwit like him. Although that explains why he’s chief marshal when he’s the very kind who uses his position to grab for things he wants instead of working to make the reeve halls well run.”

  “An opinion I agree with but which you’ll do well to keep quiet.”

  He took a hasty step back, ducking his head. “My apologies, Marshal. I forget myself.”

  When she was young she had never given a second thought to her status as King Anjihosh’s daughter. Now she found that it put distance between her and people. “I’m not scolding you. Around me, do not ever hesitate to speak your mind.”

  “I poked around while I was waiting, and I did see something odd over in that hut.” He pointed with his elbow toward a hut woven of sticks and tucked against the bole of a red pine.

  They walked over together, and she saw the odd thing immediately: Over the crude lintel hung a wreath woven of supple branches bearing slender red leaves.

  “A redheart wreath!” she exclaimed. “How did that get here?”

  He squinted at the lintel. “What is a redheart wreath? I thought that was just decoration.”

  “You probably have never seen them in Mar because you’re too far south. In the provinces of Istria, Herelia, and Haldia, a redheart wreath is a decoration set over the door of a recently married couple to bring joy and good fortune. The branches come from a tree called redheart, which only grows in the Wild.”

  “The Wild? Oh, the Weldur Forest, you mean, like in the tales.”

  “Yes. This wreath is fresh. But the overland or river journey from the Wild would take more than ten days. Which means either someone has planted redheart outside the Wild, which would be a matter of interest mostly to the mendicants who wander the roads with their healing potions—”

  “Atiratu’s healers, you mean? Those are the only mendicants I know.”

  “That’s right, they used to be priestesses of the god.”

  “The Lady of Beasts, Marshal. Begging your pardon. Atiratu the Lady of Beasts is one of the seven gods and goddesses. Many mendicants and healers still serve Her. I must admit that when I was assigned to Argent Hall I was shocked to see all the seven temples have been closed in the city of Olossi in favor of a Beltak shrine. I mean no offense. I’m just a country lad.”

  He wasn’t belligerent, just persistent and proud.

  “Fair enough. The point is, either a reeve or a demon must have brought this wreath here.”

  “If demons are so cruel, why would they bring a wreath to celebrate a marriage?”

  “Demons use lies and lures to snare people into their service. Lures can include seeming kindnesses. It’s easy for a young man like you to forget that sixty years ago demons destroyed the peace of the Hundred. Villages burned. Children abused. Adults barbarously murdered, or enslaved into unspeakably brutal servitude. People starving. All of it enforced by demons’ monstrous ability to rip into your very thoughts and compel you to obey them. It was my father King Anjihosh who defeated them.”

  “Wasn’t it demons who killed King Atani?”

  She found she couldn’t bear to discuss Atani’s death with someone she barely knew. To avoid answering she pushed past a barkcloth curtain into the hut’s interior. An unrolled sleeping mat lay abandoned on a low plank platform, a pair of lovers’ pillows stacked atop, waiting for two people who would never return.

  “It’s a sad thing to see.” Reyad picked up a rice basket that someone had kicked aside and fixed its woven cover back over the top. “Makes me miss my own wife.”

  “You’re married?” She eyed him askance; he looked so young.

  “Three years ago.” He did not smile as he said so.

  She said nothing.

  After a hesitation he went on. “She came with me to Argent Hall but she hated living there so she went back to her clan in Mar.”

  “Was it leaving home she disliked? Or Argent Hall in particular?”

  “Argent Hall in particular.” His hands clenched to fists.

  “Several women transferred to serve under me at Horn Hall because of a sour trial of duty at Argent. But then they stopped coming so I thought things had improved.”

  “The last of the Argent Hall reeves who were women transferred out a few months ago. I don’t know where they went.”

  He crouched to peer under the low platform. In profile his frown made him look worn, fretful, discouraged. When he made no reply she thought him distracted by his troubles but after all he was scraping under the platform. He sat back with a grunt of satisfaction.

  “Here’s what I saw.” He held out a tin pendant strung from a leather cord. The pendant had the shape of a branch studded with seven five-petaled blossoms. “Hasibal’s Tears.”

  “A common enough thing for a person to wear who gives offerings to the Merciful One.” She plucked the cover off the rice basket and looked inside. “It doesn’t seem they were starving.”

  “See, that’s what I wonder. They had to get that rice from somewhere.” He swept up a few grains. “Look how short the grain is, and its speckled red color. At the Spears’ camp we’ve been eating rice the soldiers buy at the local villages. This isn’t the variety of rice they grow around here.”

  “Spoken like a farmer.”

  “Proud to be so! My clan grows long grain, both green and black. This rice is so distinctive we should be able to narrow down where it comes from. Then, like the redheart wreath, we just have to figure out how it got here.”

  “That’s an excellent observation.” She set down the basket before stepping outside and directing a soldier to fetch Chief Tuvas. Going back in, she caught Reyad’s attention with a lift of her hand. “If you’re interested, I have the authority to assign you to my own flight.”

  “Do you mean…” He hesitated before going on. “… a transfer to Horn Hall?”

  “Will you take a transfer? If it suited her to join you, I can assure you your wife will not face any troublesome incidents at Horn Hall. Not under my watch.”

  He rocked back. “The hells! If she would … It might … To be out of Argent Hall … Withering Taru! My thanks, Marshal! You won’t regret giving me this chance!”

  He grinned brilliantly. He was so full of the confidence that no matter how deep the pit there is a way to climb out. Not like her, embittered and weary. Losing Atani had been like losing pleasure in food: Everything tasted flat.

  Chief Tuvas arrived, flanked by soldiers. “Marshal, your report?”

  “Was the settlement abandoned before the raid?”

  He nodded. “Yes. We found the one corpse, that’s all. They even took their goats.”

  “I’d wager the machete I saw in the clearing was a deliberate lure to draw us here while people were escaping elsewhere, warned by demons.”

  Tuvas’s eyes widened. As a grandson of one of Anjihosh’s Qin company, he had no doubt grown up on tales of those dreadful days. “Demons? Do you think so, Marshal?”

  “I do think so.” She shook grains of rice into his hand.

  “What good does rice do us?” The grains dribbled through his fingers.

  Reyad kept his expression blank although his mouth twitched.

  She brushed the last few grains off her hands. “We discover how and where they got their supplies. But first I want you to come with me to interview a woman at the local Ri Amarah clan. She may be implicated.”

  10

  Sarai watched with a false cheer sewn onto her face as the new bride was escorted from the girls’ corner over to the women. All smiles, they greeted Garna with necklaces of flowers.

  “Here stand now as a woman and receive your mirror and your Book of Accounts.” Aunt Rua offered Garna a cup of the wine reserved for adults.

  A polished bronze mirror reflected Garna’s beaming face before she hooded it in a silk ba
g and looped the handle to her belt. The thick ledger was so new, Sarai could smell its freshly cut pages and scarcely dried glue. Garna opened it to display the blank pages, for it was here she would keep track of household finances, trading ventures, and the secret knowledge, written in code, that each woman learned as her part in the upkeep of the clan. Day by day and year by year the mirror would show her the truth of who she was while the book would become the record of her life. Meanwhile Great-Aunt Tsania would die as if she had never lived, unwritten except in the catalog of seeds and plantings that no one would remember as her handiwork.

  The women began singing an ancient song brought from across the ocean generations ago. Rain rolled a counterpoint along the roof.

  Now the parched land drinks.

  For this one season the land will flower.

  A rose is blooming in the garden.

  For this one breath the heart will sing.

  When trays of jubilee cakes were brought Sarai helped Tsania eat a pair of plum cakes, her favorite, but for herself she had lost her appetite.

  Tsania squeezed her hands. “I hated it, too, when I was your age. Seeing younger girls cross over and knowing I would never be allowed to take on the full measure of the women’s work that keeps our people safe and secure.”

  “It isn’t fair!”

  “You can’t breathe in here, Sarai-ya. Say you are going to fetch me some of Rua’s spread-wing tea for my lungs.”

  Sarai kissed her great-aunt’s soft cheek and crept out of the parlor into the central atrium. Standing alone in the empty hall she saw the unwritten life that stretched ahead of her: Elit was gone. Tsania would die, and Sarai would pick out other women’s embroidery stitches, catalog seeds, and grow old alone.

  Despair battered her in waves. She did not want to sit for the rest of her life at the back of the room, ignored and pitied, still called a girl when she was sixty. Yet wasn’t it shameful to pity Tsania, the woman who had raised her with care and affection and who went about her life with no sign of bitterness?

  How she hated feelings! It would be better to be the wind, never pinned down, free of the burden of all these terrible emotions.

  A bell rang at the front of the house. Uncle Makel hurried into view from the men’s wing, which faced the front drive and the grand entrance. Men’s voices rose like the river in flood, churning and foaming.

  “Sarai! There you are! Come along!”

  To her surprise he led her to the tower stairs instead of the audience parlor.

  The two-story compound had a four-story tower rising at its center. With each step up the tower stairs her thoughts turned and turned over the mystery of Elit’s unexpected appearance. Rice and reeves: She couldn’t fit the two together.

  She and her uncle passed the first landing, which let onto the women’s room of records, and then climbed past the closed door of his study on the second landing, and up the last long set of steps to the tower’s crown.

  He halted by the curtained archway. “Wait in the women’s crown until I call you.”

  He went back down.

  She pushed past the curtain, as every girl was allowed to do although no man or boy could enter this space. The top story was open to the air, protected by a railing and sheltered by deep eaves. The space housed a huge glass vessel shaped like a teardrop and almost as tall as she was. Inside the thick glass rested the sacred flame of the house.

  The twisting blue fire was lively today, as passionate as if celebrating Garna’s passage. The blue light wasn’t really a fire. It gave off no heat. Once a month at the dark of the moon the women fed it with a thimble-cup of menstrual blood. Men were forbidden from invoking the flame because males risked waking the slumbering Imperators who, in the ancient past known to the ancestors, had worn the flame as their crown. Only married Ri Amarah women knew its secrets, for it was women’s sacred duty to tend the fire that protected the clans from the pitiless Imperators who, as it said in the children’s tale, had once enslaved their people and would do so again if they ever found them.

  Usually the flame’s writhing dance soothed her with its endless variations, but tonight she glimpsed a young woman’s face in the fire: sharp brows, a bold nose, dark eyes, a ring hanging by a chain around her neck stamped with the likeness of a wolf’s head. The face was that of a stranger.

  She shut her eyes against an encroaching headache. Each Ri Amarah household cut a unique layered pattern of slits in the eaves of its sacred tower so that by the tune of the wind you could hear which clan owned which house. She listened to the wind singing through the roof, its whistles and humming acting as herald to the storm blowing in from the east.

  A door shut below, startling her. Although the floor beneath the vessel was solid, a latticed square in each corner gave added ventilation to the room below. Kneeling at one corner, she peered down into the study. Two men had entered.

  “I have other urgent business, Abrisho. This interruption comes at a poor time.”

  “My apologies, Makel.” Abrisho was Aunt Rua’s cousin. “I’m sorry I have to leave just as there is this trouble with the Spears and reeves, but Beniel and I must return tomorrow to Toskala. I urge you to favorably consider the offer I have brought. Such a chance will never come again.”

  “It is impossible to accept.”

  “How can we pass up a chance to place one of our children into a family as well connected as the Herelian barons? They are the descendants of General Sengel, who was King Anjihosh’s most honored soldier of all his original company!”

  Makel halted by an open window just below Sarai, staring toward the river. Fortunately he did not look up. “You walk too much among the courtiers, Abrisho. Your son Beniel walks with a foot outside our people already.”

  “His friendships with the young men of the court aid us with information and preference. He has more than once received the courtesy of a friendly word from King Jehosh’s third son, Prince Kasad.”

  “Be careful lest he stray into error and forget who he is. We need not curry favor.”

  “Of course we need the palace’s favor if we wish to protect ourselves in these uneasy times! Do you think the wave of violence against our cousins in High Haldia an isolated incident?”

  “We must not act precipitously.”

  “Do you believe their compound was half burned and their furnishings smashed because of a freakish storm instead of by the suspicion and envy of their neighbors?”

  Burned and smashed! Sarai pressed her ear to the lattice. She had heard nothing about trouble for Ri Amarah in the city of High Haldia. News of such a frightful attack was the sort of thing only discussed among the adults.

  Abrisho went on, so worked up that he was shaking a hand almost in Makel’s face. “We are vulnerable because we are still seen as foreigners and outsiders even though our clans have lived in the Hundred for five generations. In the past King Jehosh has been an advocate for our people, like his father and grandfather were. But his humor is famously known as changeable weather. Anyway he has been absent so much these last few years fighting in the north that it is hard to know what he intends now. His two older sons are in thrall to the Beltak priests, and they emphatically do not trust us. Don’t you see? The goodwill of the Herelian clan can protect us.”

  Makel said nothing. Sunlight wove a sheen along the folded silk with which he covered his hair.

  Abrisho went on. “Gilaras is the youngest of the six sons of Sengel’s elder son, Lord Seras.”

  “A son of Lord Seras! Are you daft? How can allying ourselves with the disgraced branch of the family help us? Lord Seras murdered King Atani!”

  “That was twenty-two years ago. Seras died in the attack as well, and nothing came of his demon-inspired conspiracy to place himself on the throne. Meanwhile his two oldest sons grew up to become notable generals in the army and have served loyally and with honor. As a clan the Herelians are still connected to some of the most powerful people in the palace. Furthermore, the peculiar nature of th
eir menfolk and the complete destitution of their clan’s coffers means they are desperate. They need our money to restore their fortune and they are willing to seal a marriage alliance even with a Ri Amarah girl to get it.”

  “If this Lord Gilaras is the youngest, then any girl he marries will become least among the women of the household,” objected Makel.

  “Quite the contrary,” said Abrisho. “Her position would be paramount. You see, Gilaras is the only one of the brothers who still has his testicles. After their father murdered King Atani, the boys were all castrated in punishment for his treason. This is why it is of paramount importance to the family that the young man marry and give their branch of the clan a future.”

  “The old Hundred families do not care whether their heirs come through the male or the female line. What of his sisters?”

  “The lad has one sister but because of the family’s lack of fortune she remains unmarried as well. They hope to restore all with our help.”

  Makel walked away from the window, out of Sarai’s sight. “A young man from such ill-favored seed may have grown up twisted and perverse.”

  “Do you think I have not already considered this aspect? The money will be settled on the clan through the girl and thus will remain in her keeping, as is our custom. Any abuse or trouble heaped upon her would result in an immediate dissolution of the contract. Their desperation will protect her because if they anger or abuse her she will leave and take the money with her.”

  Makel’s pacing halted. His tone cracked. “To marry a child outside our people is the same as killing the child. I will not allow it.”

  Abrisho wore city clothes, festooned with beads, and the silk that hid his hair was a shimmering gray. Silver bracelets hid his forearms, the mark of his success as a merchant. “I will give my own second daughter to this venture because I believe it is that important. I have taken the step of asking her if she will consent to the marriage, and she has agreed. But I need your permission.”

  “No. As head of the clan, I refuse it. I refuse it. I refuse it.”

  The rain died off as the wind dropped abruptly. Voices rose from the front of the house. Sarai crept to the railing where she could stand hidden in the corner by the eaves and see the graveled forecourt. Four carts escorted by soldiers rolled into view.