The Black Wolves

by Kate Elliott

  He nodded as encouragement for her to go on.

  “Lifka’s situation is not of any particular importance, it’s just unusual. What matters is that the reeve halls are without a chief marshal. Auri has done a terrible job.”

  “So we hear from the reeves we know at Bronze Hall. Their new marshal, appointed by Auri, is a blustering tyrant. I hope he is not the one expected to become the next chief marshal.”

  “Jehosh has promised to make me chief marshal if I bring you back. Will you come for my sake, Captain?”

  “No.”

  “For the reeves, then? After fifteen years of Auri’s mismanagement and incompetence, the reeve halls need a strong hand to restore them. Think of the Hundred, Captain. Jehosh made Auri chief marshal because Auri was one of his old friends, not because Auri was a good reeve or a good marshal. It is bad for the Hundred if the reeves are poorly commanded.”

  “No.”

  “What of your duty to serve the kings of the Hundred all your life, Captain? You gave an oath to my father the day he spared you from execution. I remember the day clearly although I was only seven years old. Do you mean to dishonor your own word and your own duty? All the years you served Anjihosh, tracking down his enemies and crushing any and all rebels and troublemakers who disturbed the peace of the land. Are those years nothing to you now?”

  She put a hand around the bracelet. His gaze followed the movement, and an expression pinched his face: not anger but a fleeting ghost of something lost and wistful.

  “I saw you had kept that trifle,” he said in a low voice.

  “Not a trifle to me at the time,” she snapped. “I wear it to remind myself to carefully consider what it is I ask of people and if it might mean something different to them than it means to me.”

  He glanced down at the cup and its wisps of steam. Briefly he appeared shy, even coy.

  “Have I offended, Lady Dannarah?” he asked, looking up just as she glanced at the ceiling, irritated with her own juvenile fancies.

  “Yes! You have offended me by refusing to even consider the situation. Think of what I told you about my sister Sadah’s situation! If Queen Chorannah has some feckless plan in regard to supporting her sister’s incompetent son as emperor, and if he is killed as we must suppose he will be, then the prince who ends up becoming emperor may look north and decide to punish the Hundred for Chorannah’s interference.”

  He sipped his tea.

  She went on, sensing a vulnerable spot. “My sister Sadah reached the palace without being detected. Surely it disturbs you that Supreme Captain Ulyar’s spies knew nothing until she arrived! That would never have happened when my father was king.”

  He set down the cup. His gaze flicked toward the closed doors as if he was waiting for a signal that hadn’t come.

  She pressed on. “Seeing Sadah after all these years reminded me of the one time Atani ran away from the palace. When he returned he never told me what drove him to leave, but there was something different about him. He was the same gentle, kind, compassionate person, but there was a steel in him that had been lacking before. All he told me was that he had seen something that made him understand what his task was meant to be as king of the Hundred. I know you recall the incident, Captain. You were sent to track him down and bring him back, which you did. Is there anything you can tell me about that time?”

  His gaze held steady. “No.”

  “He brought back with him a necklace that he wore ever after. Years later I began to see such necklaces, called Hasibal’s Tears. We found several at the outlaws’ encampment. It’s an odd thing to wear for a man who was raised in the palace with Beltak priests.”

  “It is a common thing to wear if you pray to the seven. If you favor the teaching of the Merciful One, whose compassion alleviates sorrow.”

  Dannarah studied his bland expression. It was cursed hard to imagine Anjihosh’s most loyal soldier in league with demons. Whatever Lord Vanas might insinuate, she simply could not envision any scenario in which Kellas was involved in Atani’s death.

  “You and I both know how stubborn Jehosh is,” she said. “Say no to me if you wish but he will keep sending people down here until you say yes. I cannot believe you want the king’s gaze fixed on the people here whom you obviously care for.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  An exasperated sigh escaped her. “I am not the one threatening you. Jehosh means you to come whether you will or no. He is reminding you that he knows where your kinsfolk live. I am just the messenger he chose. It should give you pause to note that he sent me instead of Supreme Captain Ulyar or Lord Vanas. Why me, and not them?”

  “You have been bought by a promise. That is how Jehosh always has operated.”

  “I have been bought by duty, not by a promise. You and I remember how it was. My father brought peace and prosperity to the Hundred. You were one of his sharpest weapons in the war against injustice. Atani in his own way watched over the land with me by his side. Back in the day you and I both realized Jehosh wasn’t the right heir. He does not have the temperament to be a strong and just king. But we missed our chance to change the fate of the Hundred. Didn’t we, Captain?”

  His eyes narrowed as if he were staring through a slit into the darkest day of their past, twenty-two years ago.

  22

  The encampment with its tents and soldiers wears a mantle of bright promise, the sun shining, men checking over their weapons and horses as they make ready to march. They are an arrow being brought to the string, soon to be loosed across rugged mountains and into the northern kingdom of Ithik Eldim.

  “We will regret the war set in motion today.” King Atani surveys the camp as Kellas waits beside him. The king’s court clothes, a silk kilt that covers his legs to the ankles and a short sleeveless tunic sewn with ornamental pearls over it, contrast sharply with the martial air. “Its consequences will wound us in ways we cannot yet foresee.”

  “Have you some fear this expedition will end in failure, my lord?”

  “Quite the contrary. I fear it will end in success. Jehosh hasn’t the maturity to accept victory gracefully. Ruthlessness must be tempered by mercy, not allowed to trample where it wishes.”

  “The northern barbarians raided first.”

  Atani frowns rarely and when he does it is as if the blue sky has turned gray and will soon weep. “It’s never been proven to my satisfaction that they did raid first. Regardless, we have strengthened the border, doubled and tripled the watch, fortified outlying villages, and moved the most vulnerable to new pastures and towns. Why does this not content my sister and my son?”

  “Why do you not simply command the expedition be called off, my lord?”

  Atani glances toward the cloth-of-gold tent as guards straighten to attention. A retinue approaches the tent, led by soldiers in red and gold tabards whose flash and swagger clash with the somber Black Wolves who attend the king. Twenty-year-old Prince Jehosh strides among his retinue with easy laughter. The group vanishes inside the tent.

  “If I do, the generals will be forced to side openly with my son.”

  “You cannot think …!”

  “I cannot think the generals would feel obliged to depose me in favor of Jehosh? I dare not give them the excuse they need to do it. They want this war as much as he does.”

  “Do you actually think one of the generals might be plotting against you?”

  From the sash wrapped around his waist Atani draws the commander’s whip that once belonged to his father. Its leather gleams, lovingly tended and oiled. “If it is only the lash of the whip that brings peace, Captain, then there will always be someone who seeks to tear the whip out of the hand that wields it.”

  “You are not your father, my lord.”

  “No, I am not, but I am as trapped by my ambitions as he was by his. I need time to accomplish my plans. Thus I acquiesce to their war because it will keep them busy elsewhere, and I do it with eyes open to its consequences, the innocent lives it will
take, the disruption it will cause. Captain, you will accompany the expedition and keep Jehosh from doing things he will regret later.”

  Kellas always travels with his full kit but even so the sudden change rocks him. “My lord, I have heard whispers, nothing I can put a finger on, but I prefer to stay close to you. I think it would be better to keep me here and send another of your Wolves.”

  “No. You know why I trust you more than anyone.”

  He does know. He places his right fist against his heart. “I am yours to command.”

  Atani’s smile brings the soothing elegance of his features into full flower. His beauty is like the vault of the heavens: a bit intimidating. Then he raises an eyebrow as at a dry joke. “Whose you are to command I am never quite sure.”

  Kellas glances away, trying not to smile.

  Atani looks skyward. “At last comes the chief marshal, just late enough to make an impressive entrance.”

  A triad of reeves circles overhead but only one descends in a showy plummet. Lady Dannarah’s eagle has as demanding and flamboyant a temperament as she does. At the most precipitous moment the giant eagle brakes with wings high and taloned feet thrust forward as it thumps to earth. It is a magnificent bird, its wingspan truly impressive. Kellas grew up seeing eagles and reeves every day of his life, yet a thrill of fear always shoots through him to be so close to one of the huge raptors. Its brown-gold feathers fluff out, then settle as it peers around the encampment. A keen gaze touches him as a thorn might just before it jabs. The eagle’s name is Terror because as a juvenile it killed its first two reeves within weeks of being jessed. Kellas holds still, and the eagle looks elsewhere.

  She hoods the raptor without the least sign of nervousness and afterward stalks straight to her brother. As an adult, tempered by life, she radiates the intensity and ambition and natural air of command that so effortlessly marked King Anjihosh.

  “Captain Kellas!” she exclaims in a fierce tone that causes him to tap his chest with his right fist. She slaps her brother’s shoulder. “You do not like this at all, do you, Atani?”

  “I cannot like Jehosh’s eagerness, as if war is a festival at which he wishes to celebrate.”

  “Listen to me.” She grabs her brother’s wrists. They are of equal height, close in build. “A clear victory over the Eldim kings is the only way we will have peace on the northern frontier.”

  “It is never so simple. Anger and grief fester. What we do to them, they will wish to do to us in return.”

  “Crush the northerners now and it will take years for them to recover. As for Jehosh, he will learn wisdom, or he will die.”

  Her blunt speaking makes Kellas wince but Atani looks as if he already knew what she meant to say. Maybe he did. “I am not so certain he will learn wisdom, Dannarah.”

  “You are too hard on him, just as Father was too hard on you. For that is the seed of the matter, is it not? Jehosh is not you, Atani, just as you are not and never were our father.”

  “Indeed I am not,” he agrees without the slightest hint of resentment. “You have always been far more like Father than I am.”

  “It’s true.” They speak easily together, two people who know and like each other. “No matter how many times I argued that village and town councils in the Hundred include women, Father was too bound by his own upbringing to name me as his heir even though I am better suited to rule.”

  “You’ve forgotten one thing, Dannarah,” he answers with a wisp of a smile. “I do not agree with your assessment that you are better suited to rule. Which is why I am king and you are not.”

  She laughs with genuine amusement. “Your claws are so sharp because you so rarely unsheathe them.”

  She glances at Kellas to see what he makes of their exchange but he has long since perfected the art of suppressing emotion.

  Turning back to her brother, she goes on. “Let Jehosh become the man he is meant to be, Atani. Once he rides north, then you and I will have peace to deal with the other matters that need our attention rather than what we do now, which is leaping from hearth to hearth putting out the fires Jehosh has started with his cockwitted escapades.”

  “Do you know what else I have heard?” Atani asks with a breath of impatience. “That in the first raid Jehosh led across the border he fell in love with—lust, more like—a beautiful young woman. She did not just refuse him. She scorned him. ‘I am a king’s daughter, not for the likes of a bandit like you.’ The troops say he is leading this army to capture the girl and force her to marry him because she tarnished his honor.”

  Dannarah chuckles. “That sounds like Jehosh.”

  “It is no jest! What troubles me most is they all think it a hunt worth pursuing, to kidnap a girl because she rejected him. I cannot like it.”

  She shakes her head. “While Jehosh and the army are gone you can have a hundred pillars of law erected along the major roads. You’ve made a pet of that law pillar project. I’ve never understood why Father’s reorganization of the assizes courts isn’t enough for you.”

  “Law is a better shield than a sword.” The king fixes a stern gaze on her. “Why do you believe a war with the northerners will unbind the knot that tangles me and my son? Jehosh despises me.”

  “You are a fool if you believe that. He loves you. He envies the ease with which you understand people and he does not. He is afraid you can see through his lies.”

  “He thinks me weak because I am not reckless and violent. He thinks I am a broken-down horse that needs to be put out to pasture to chew over my foolish bits of piecemeal wisdom.”

  “You must let him go, Atani.”

  He does not reply. After a moment he walks toward the tent.

  She calls after him, “I’ll be there in a moment. I need to adjust Terror’s straps.”

  He shrugs and goes in.

  Kellas watches her gaze measure the neat rows of tents, the horse lines, the ranks of wagons, and the cook fires where soldiers stand awaiting a meal of rice gruel and lentils. As a girl, her thick curling black hair had, with her intensely dark eyes, been her most striking feature, but a few years after becoming a reeve she had shaved her head. The bristling black cap of hair is now shot through with bits of gray, and her sun-weathered skin makes her look older than her thirty-seven years. But no one will ever mistake her for a woman in decline. She is handsome in a way she had never been as a girl. She has become the person she needs to be.

  “You’ve never forgiven me, have you?” Her eyes have a lustrous gleam, shaded by long lashes.

  “My lady, there is nothing for me to forgive.”

  “I’m trying to say that I am sorry for what I asked of you. I was too young then to think of it as taking advantage, but I understand now you could not say no.”

  He holds her gaze with a look that a proud young prince like Jehosh would see as defiance and have him punished for. “I kept your secret, Lady Dannarah. King Atani does not know.”

  “My father knew.”

  Kellas glances down at his clenched right hand. It is true he could not have said no, for so many reasons he dares not account them. Fixing his expression to dispassion, he nods. “Considering everything, I’m surprised your father did not kill me many times over.”

  “Maybe the night my father made you a Black Wolf he foresaw all the many uses to which you could be harnessed.”

  Dannarah has always valued plain speaking, and a crude joke.

  “Harnessed? Is that meant to compare me to an ox?”

  She laughs so delightedly that guards look their way. “No ox, Captain. Not as I recall it. A very satisfactory bull for the year you put up with my whims.”

  To his horror he flushes, for the conversation makes him feel all over again all the different ways in which their clandestine relationship had been an awful idea. Not that she demanded that particular service of him after the one year. In a way it wasn’t really her fault. The seventeen-year-old Dannarah couldn’t have understood the ramifications when she demanded that
Kellas become her first lover.

  “We all have our secrets, do we not?” she says with the quirk of the lips she uses to hide her mockery.

  He is cursed sure there are things about his life she will never learn. “Why bring this old history up now, Lady Dannarah? What devious plan have you already set in motion?”

  Her brown eyes have depths as black as tar and just as murky. Then she drops the hammer.

  “Yes, loyal Captain Kellas, I do have a task for you. A few weeks ago I put it into Atani’s mind that it would be a wise idea to send you north with the army to keep Jehosh safe from his own reckless idiocy. But I didn’t tell my brother the real reason I want you to go.” She presses callused fingers to his wrist with the pressure of a reeve accustomed to fearlessly guiding an eagle so huge that it can easily kill her should it decide it has had enough of her companionship. “Jehosh is too reckless and irresponsible to become king after Atani. Any of his younger siblings would be better suited to be heir. So he must not return from this war in the north. I count on you to make sure he does not.”

  23

  Dannarah noticed the moment Kellas stopped paying attention to her, his gaze drawn inward to memory. She took the chance to study him. In her mind he remained the image of a mature man at the height of his power, as she had last seen him. The jolt that came from seeing his familiar face grown old as if overnight jangled her.

  Then, as quickly as his thoughts had drifted away, he came back. He pushed the cup around with unexpected restlessness, exhaled, and considered her. “Do you ever wonder why I agreed to obey your orders that day?”

  “Because I ordered it done.”

  “You never asked yourself if I would follow your orders when it would seem likely to anyone that King Atani would have given different ones?”

  “I knew you agreed with me about Jehosh. Sometimes we have to make the hard choices.”

  “Do you ever wonder if Atani suspected you had ordered me to kill Jehosh? If he acquiesced to the murder of his son by saying nothing and allowing me to go?”