The Black Wolves

by Kate Elliott

  The reeve hall was a large rectangular compound ringed by high walls except on the side overlooking the cliff. The compound had a wide front courtyard where eagles could land. Three large lofts faced the landing ground. The barracks, tack rooms, and storehouses were built into the outer walls, a lot of people crammed into a small space. At the back of the compound a small garden flourished, planted with troughs of sunburst and lazy-blue-blinks around a dry fountain. The marshal’s cote had the malingering look of a structure that has gone unrepaired for years. Despite all the carpenters laboring around the lofts, he discerned not an oat’s worth of work on the cracked tiles of the cote’s roof or a porch made uneven by listing support posts.

  Two soldiers in red-and-white tabards waited at the base of the steps that led up to the porch. The doors into the outer audience room were closed, but angry words spilled through them nevertheless.

  “—you are hiding the girl from me!”

  “What manner of child’s tale are you telling yourself, Tavahosh?” The derision in Dannarah’s tone was as rich and smooth as butter. “Now that you have assigned me to be marshal of your new courier service, I must send my reeves with messages. She is on courier duty.”

  “Then you don’t even know what your own reeves are up to. I was warned that you would treat me with exactly this level of disrespect and incompetence. I should never have given in to my father’s pleading and left you in charge.”

  “Since you are in charge, nephew, I need you to give me more carpenters. If I have to house four flights of courier reeves here instead of the current two, either we must expand both lofts and barracks or I will have to house most of my reeves and eagles outside Toskala. I can scarcely manage an efficient courier service if I have to send a courier to fetch a courier in order to send a courier out on courier duty.”

  “You defy me at your peril, Lady Dannarah. I told you the girl was to be branded as a slave. Slaves have no right to be reeves.”

  “That choice is not ours to make.”

  “So you erroneously claim. It turns out the slave was raised in a nest of outlaws. Sixteen soldiers were killed when the archon’s soldiers went to arrest the family—”

  “The hells!” Kellas muttered, and the two guards glanced at him suspiciously.

  Inside the prince and his great-aunt went on quarreling.

  “Why would her clan need arresting, Tavahosh? They are humble carters who sell firewood.”

  “You are such a fool, taken in by their lies. They made an unprovoked attack on the soldiers. When they are in my hands—and they will all come into my hands, I assure you, for the priests have a means to track those who have insulted the god—I will institute the old imperial punishment.”

  “Left to die of thirst in a cage by the road?”

  “An example to all who pass!”

  “You still have not explained to me what Lifka has to do with this regrettable incident.”

  “If you do not bring her to me, you will indeed regret it.”

  The door slammed aside. Prince Tavahosh stamped across the creaking porch and down the steps past Kellas without noticing him. To Kellas’s amusement Steward Toughid scurried after the prince like a dog hoping for scraps, followed by the guards. Not a single steward, guard, or reeve remained in sight. He walked in on Lady Dannarah slicing a short scroll into jagged pieces.

  “What in the hells do you want? Aui!” She set down the knife, put a hand over her eyes, let out a breath, and lowered the hand. “Captain Kellas. I did not expect you.”

  “Sixteen soldiers dead? Is this true?”

  “If I knew, why would I tell you? I can keep secrets from you just as you have kept secrets from me.”

  He hooked his hands together behind his back. She rarely got into this high a temper, but when she did he knew better than to stoke the flames. “Well, then, Marshal, let me not keep you. I am come to ask if you will deliver a message to my home in Salya.”

  “My reeves are not your personal messenger service!”

  “Nor do I believe they are. I ask this from my position as chief of security of the lower palace, under the king’s authority. Last night there was a serious disturbance in the city—”

  “I heard. I also heard your people were the first ones to bring order to the scene.”

  “The city militia had no orders to act, so I took action. If there is going to be more trouble in the city then I need a core of effective troops to really protect the lower palace.”

  “And you keep a core of effective troops in Salya?”

  He hesitated for an instant too long.

  She swept the cut-up pieces of scroll into an untidy pile, but her gaze did not leave him. “Here’s the thing that puzzles me still. The story goes that because Lord Seras was the son of my father’s most brilliant general, he hoped to become king in Atani’s place. To set himself on the throne while the army was in the north. But he didn’t act alone. He had allies, men driving carts, their families, and hired soldiers. Several of these were later identified as men who had some time previously been whipped out of the Black Wolves for criminal activities and insubordination. That’s why for the longest time I was sure you were party to the conspiracy, wittingly or unwittingly coerced by demons.”

  The accusation still stung, especially from her. “As easy to argue it was you behind the plot to kill him, Lady Dannarah.”

  “The hells! You don’t really think I had anything to do with it.”

  “At the time, when I was convalescing, I could not help but think that if you hadn’t assigned me to go with the army, I would have been with King Atani.”

  “You think your presence could have prevented his death? You were with him at the end, were you not?”

  At the end.

  He didn’t want to remember, but he did.

  44

  Too late. Too late.

  Fear hammers in Kellas’s head as the eagle glides down the currents, following a road that is little more than a pair of wagon ruts winding through forest. Several isolated villages carve out their precarious existence here in the high foothills with the mountains towering at their backs. The goats and gardens and the sheds where pelts and fur are treated and stored for trade show no sign of trouble, seen from above. Tiny figures of people go about their business with scarcely a glance for the eagle and its reeve and passenger overhead.

  He scans for any sign of the rear guard. When they skim over what appears to be the last night’s campsite, now abandoned except for ashy fire pits and still-flattened grass, he finds himself so tense that the reeve speaks.

  “No need to worry, Captain. The passenger harness is safe. River has never harmed a single person in all her years.”

  As if in answer, River squawks with the high-pitched and rather ridiculous noise that would be comical in other circumstances but he cannot laugh now. He cannot even speak. He doesn’t care if the reeve thinks flying harnessed beneath the eagle frightens him; it does, and it doesn’t matter that it does. All that matters is the threat to Atani.

  “There!” cries the reeve, nudging him from behind with a knee and pointing with an elbow.

  He stares at treetops and the tangled scar of the road, but he hasn’t a reeve’s skill at identifying the contours of the land from the air. The eagle banks to the left, shifting angle, and he sees it: bodies sprawled on the road, empty wagons with canvas covers flung every which way, an overturned cart with tent canvas rolled out over the ground, ten horses down. A kneeling man keeps himself upright by using a spear as a staff, then slowly pitches over as his wounds master him.

  His throat closes as the fear slips its leash and opens its maw to devour him.

  He is too late. The ambush has already happened.

  His training kicks in, and his mind catalogs the sight as they fly over and bank around to find a landing place. The king and his entourage and carts were traveling south, down out of the foothills, and met a wagon train coming north up the track. Because the road has only one set of
ruts, the wagoners split into two lines, one on each side of the road, to allow the king right-of-way.

  If he had been in command he would never have allowed the king to keep riding and thus pass between the two rows of wagons.

  But as the eagle descends with the speed that on another day would cause him to throw up from sheer terror, he sees children cowering behind the wagons and he knows how the ambush succeeded: The instigators used their families as cover to lull the king’s Wolves into a false sense of security. Atani’s reign has been peaceful except for the sporadic northern raids out of Ithik Eldim that Prince Jehosh has used as an excuse to instigate a war.

  No one expected this.

  They thump so hard on landing that he lurches forward and then slams back into the reeve, who curses and adds, sharply, “Quit twisting.”

  “You need to get back aloft to alert Marshal Dannarah. She was accompanying the king.”

  “The marshal is flying the advance scout for the king,” says the young, female reeve, whose name Kellas does not even know. “Give me a moment to unhook us both, and the hells don’t bolt or River will think you are prey. I’ll find the marshal.”

  Bile rises in Kellas’s throat and he has to swallow all of it: His fear, his anger, his grief, his raging sense of impotence. His hope, because he is cursed sure he does not see King Atani’s body on the ground. Atani had been escorted by his six day-and-night bodyguards, eight stewards, and a cohort of thirty-six Black Wolves. Many people lie dead and wounded on the ground, many of them Wolves. Four of the day-and-night guards are dead and one is unconscious and by the blood bubbling from his parted lips he is likely dying. It is obvious from the angle and penetration of their wounds that they shielded the king with their own bodies. Two dead men wear the gold tabards marking them as soldiers under the command of Lord Seras in his capacity as governor of the province of Teriayne. The remaining men wear leather-scale armor and no identifying colors or symbols. A few are apparently unarmed workingmen and -women in laborers’ clothes.

  The moment the reeve walks him out from under the shadow of the eagle he runs toward the wagons. Chief Oyard limps out to meet him, leaning on a spear. The very young man he first met at the long-ago ambush when he uncovered a traitor within the Wolves has become an extremely fit and disciplined officer. Right now Oyard has blood on his trousers and scale coat, a seeping wound at his shoulder, and his left hand bound with a bloodstained cloth.

  “What happened, Chief?”

  “They said they were delivering salt and rice to the upland villages. They had children with them! A traveling clan of carters, it looked like. They courteously swung to either side—”

  “Splitting their line and allowing the king’s party to ride between them. Yes, I see the rest. Instead of rice and salt they were carrying armed men, hidden by the canvas covers.”

  Oyard rubs his eyes as if trying to smear away the soot of failure. Kellas can see he is fading, weakened by blood loss and pain.

  “Where is the king?” he demands.

  “We were trapped, easy prey for their first assault with arrows and spears, and our men hampered by not wanting to kill the children. Chief Tobuk broke the king out in search of defensible ground…” He gestures toward trampled undergrowth and broken branches marking a trail into the forest toward the ridgeline rising beyond. “Lord Seras followed in support—”

  “Lord Seras is the man behind this attack!”

  As the truth hits him Oyard sags, and Kellas catches him and eases him to the ground. Looking around, he spots several uninjured soldiers moving among the bodies and killing any of the injured among the enemy. A woman is sobbing over the body of an unarmed man but Kellas looks away. He cannot allow himself to be distracted. “Heya! Help me here!”

  Six young Wolves trot over. “Why aren’t you hurt?” he snaps, wishing it was Atani standing before him instead of them with their wary, tense faces.

  “Captain Kellas!” All the young Wolves know of him but the one who answers, Vanas, is known to him because he has long been Jehosh’s best friend … and Lord Seras’s younger brother. “We were the rear guard. We just caught up.”

  “Very well. You!” He indicates Vanas, then changes his mind and indicates a different man. Best to keep Vanas close by him in case he is in on his brother’s plot. “Stay here, and keep order and treat the wounded until Marshal Dannarah arrives to take charge. You five come with me.”

  He and the soldiers set off, following the trail of destruction, listening for sounds of fighting ahead. He asks names so he can more easily call orders: Ulyar, Auri, Tanard, Kedi.

  Ulyar served under him briefly two years ago—nothing remarkable—and he does not know the other three. They find the body of an armed man—not a Wolf—twisted on the ground and then a second man slumped against a tree, both so close to death it isn’t worth the trouble to kill them.

  “Captain?” asks Vanas in a low voice. “Did the king’s spies have no inkling of a plot?”

  “Nothing.” Kellas whacks the top off a sapling that is in his way, then another, but spares his sword the third blow although he really wants to fell every tree within sight with a burst of fury at his own incompetence and failure. He should have known something was brewing. “Be sure we will not rest until we have recovered him and brought all the conspirators to justice.”

  Branches rustle ahead. He gestures an order; they fan out, faces grim, swords ready.

  Instead of enemies they discover a woman and two children huddling beneath a bushy milk-sap tree. The older child has an arrow in its hip, the shaft broken off. It stares at them with pain-filled eyes as the woman lifts begging hands.

  “Please help us. We knew nothing. We ran when the fighting started.”

  Her plea scrapes at him but he nods at the soldiers and they move on without an answer. The day is cool and the sky clear. Except for their own footfalls and the creak of their leather-scale coats they hear no sign of fighting men but they know they are following the right trail when they find two more men, one dead gold tabard belonging to Lord Seras and one unmarked attacker trying to crawl away into the brush. Kellas signals, and Auri dispatches him as the rest push on. Birds warble songs he does not recognize, for he grew up in the city.

  Abruptly Ulyar whispers. His drawn-out vowels and the slow roll of his words reveal a northern hill country origin. “That’s the fourth time I’ve heard the spark’s call, Captain. Don’t you find that odd?”

  “What is a spark?”

  “It’s a mountain bird. That high-pitched whistle that cracks…” He gives a creditable imitation, a distinctive call Kellas realizes he has heard without making note of it.

  “We are in the mountains, are we not?”

  Ulyar shakes his head. He has a scar on the back of his neck, an injury that just missed his spine. “I grew up in Amsharith. Sparks nest in the rock above the tree line. They don’t fly in the forest. That’s no spark.”

  “Make a wedge,” says Kellas.

  Without breaking stride they shift from double file to a wedge with three in front, two behind, and a single man at the back, able to shift quickly to face three men toward any threat. Fortunately the undergrowth is thinning as they climb the slope so it is possible to move without breaking formation. He studies the young Wolves. Jaws clenched, backs straight, weapons ready: They are ashamed of having lost the king, as they should be, and thus determined to make things right. Vanas looks as stunned as any of the others, but it can be hard to tell.

  A bird calls with a falling lilt of notes, not the spark this time but a marsh chat that lives in the boggy sinks around Salya. No marsh chat would fly here.

  A branch snaps in the trees behind them. At the rear Ulyar swings around to aim his crossbow toward the sound. A young woman with a baby in a sling staggers out of the trees, wide-eyed and shivering, gripping a walking staff as if it is the only thing keeping her upright. She looks foreign with the eye-fold and pale-golden-bronze skin Kellas associates with the Silvers,
but no Ri Amarah woman uncovers her face in public. No Ri Amarah woman would be traveling with humble, treacherous carters out in this wilderness away from her secretive clan.

  One of the young Wolves whistles under his breath and for a jarring instant Kellas sees past his mission to note her unexpectedly stunning loveliness. Irritated at his lapse of discipline, he examines her to see if she is concealing a weapon.

  “Stay back, verea,” calls Kellas. The baby stirs with a questioning, anxious babble, cut off by the mother giving the infant a finger to suckle on. “We mean you and the child no harm.”

  She stares without speaking in a way that makes him wonder if she is deaf or mute. Then she blurts out in perfectly ordinary Hundred-speech, “I can’t lose my man. I have no one else. Please don’t kill him, ver. He and his uncle needed the money. They didn’t know until it was too late to leave without the lord killing us. Please believe me.”

  “Where are they?” Kellas asks. “How many are left?”

  “I don’t know. It all happened so fast. I ran after them and fell behind.”

  Maybe she is telling the truth. Maybe she lies. She wears a taloos of ordinary cotton like any ordinary woman, the cloth grimy and rumpled. Her arms are not those of a fighter or even of someone who has engaged in hard physical labor. If she means to use the staff as a weapon she’s not had much training, so he judges her a lesser threat.

  A distant shout catches his ear, rolling on the wind down from the top of the ridge.

  “Move!” he commands.

  They scramble up an increasingly steep slope clumped with sedge grass and straggling vines. At the top of the ridge amid pine and juniper they discover a game trail. People passed this way recently, rockrose and broom trodden down, a scrap of fabric caught on a twig, a spray of blood. It is simple to tell which way the Wolves have gone: Upslope on the trail a man lies on his back, one eye open and sightless and the other a pool of blood where a blade flayed off half his face. The setting sun pours a shimmering golden gleam over the corpse. Beyond rises a knobby crown of rock rimmed with shrubs and twisted juniper, exactly the sort of defensible position a beleaguered cohort of Wolves would seek. Below, soft footfalls draw his attention: The young woman is following them, puffing as she climbs the steep slope with a look of fixed desperation.