The Black Wolves

by Kate Elliott

  “The queen’s enemies set that fire, no doubt at the king’s instigation!”

  “Odd that you should make such an accusation. Fortunately the fire brigade has isolated the blaze and gotten it under control. Also, a mob has raised a bonfire at South Gate, torn down the prison gates, and released the prisoners. The king himself has ridden to South Gate to impose order.”

  “How that man loves to strut!”

  “He was always at his best in the field.”

  “A man cannot live on past glory forever.”

  “No, I suppose he cannot, Supreme Captain Ulyar, but at least he rode to confront the troubles at South Gate while you busy yourself haranguing me here. Why come to me at all? I am chief of security for the lower palace.”

  “The Hasibal players were invited into the palace by the king.”

  “Ah! You are saying the queen believes King Jehosh to be responsible for the Silver’s disappearance and therefore think I may have had some knowledge of the deed beforehand. Aui! Ulyar, you know how Jehosh is. He loves the chase, and how much more forbidden and thus tempting a Ri Amarah bride. I cannot understand why Queen Chorannah would force through the marriage to her son now, when she might simply have waited for the king’s passion to fade as it always does.”

  The pacing, impatient footsteps surely belonged to Ulyar, not Kellas. “Just as I thought, Captain Kellas! You do know where the girl is. I’ve sent a company to the Rice Farmer’s Beer in Fifth Quarter to apprehend her. She was obviously smuggled out by the Hasibal players.”

  She cupped her hands over her nose and mouth, afraid he might hear her breathing.

  “Ulyar, maybe this isn’t about the young woman at all. Maybe the king sees an alliance between Ri Amarah wealth and Queen Chorannah’s son as a threat to his rule and his person. Do you know anything about that?”

  Ulyar broke off pacing. “If he believes his sons mean to betray him and put themselves on the throne in his place, that is only because he is looking into the mirror of his own face!”

  “What do you mean?” Captain Kellas’s voice sharpened.

  Ulyar took in a hard, harsh breath. “I don’t mean anything. I mean he’s suspicious when he should be trusting! I know you are hiding the girl. An agent saw her run down the alley and never come out. I will have this establishment searched.”

  “Very well. May I finish my tea while you go about your business? Elit, can you freshen up this pot? It’s gotten cold.” Light steps departed into the interior of the house just as the door onto the courtyard slid open.

  The door to the closet wasn’t quite shut, leaving a narrow gap through which Sarai could peer. She caught a glimpse of Elit’s back retreating. Then, as if changing places, the very beautiful woman they had seen briefly upstairs wafted into the chamber on a cloud of heady perfume.

  “Ah, the Incomparable Melisayda. So pleased you could join us,” said Captain Kellas. “Do you know Supreme Captain Ulyar?”

  “I believe he and I have had the pleasure of meeting before,” the woman said in a seductive voice as she passed out of Sarai’s range of vision, undulating toward the two men in a way meant to draw attention to her hips.

  The scrape of a sword drawn overlapped a sword drawn, one in response to the other. Sarai flinched back, banging her head against the shelves, but the noise did not matter because the ring of metal striking covered it. The hiss of cloth. A grunt almost of surprise.

  “Curse it,” remarked Captain Kellas.

  The thud of a heavy weight dropping made the floor tremble.

  Sarai eased the door open a tiny bit more. Ulyar sprawled on his back on the mat floor, his own sword spiked out at an angle where it had fallen from his hand. Blood seeped up through his tabard, moist and sluggish, but his slack face and empty eyes told the true tale.

  “Are you hurt, Grandpa?” The beautiful young woman bent over the old man. He knelt, braced up on his bloody sword.

  “It’s nothing. I’m just getting old and slow.” He fingered apart a sleeve, wincing as he examined his bleeding forearm.

  The woman crouched beside him to run a finger along the wound. She had a lively face whose mobile expressions caught the eye. A tightly wrapped taloos of translucent violet silk did nothing to conceal the attractive curve of her ample breasts. “It’s not too deep. You shouldn’t have left Grandmama behind in Salya. She worries when you’re gone about your expeditions, not that she would ever tell you.”

  Kellas chuckled through gritted teeth. “Of course she tells me. Aui! Don’t poke at it. Are you trying to make it hurt more?”

  The woman grinned. “Yes. Fortunately for you I have a store of wound-heal in the kitchen.”

  “We’ll need the body transported elsewhere in the city … We could plant him by the fire at the Ri Amarah compound.”

  “No!” Sarai slammed the door open and crawled out, too shaken to stand. “Then people will blame my people for his murder and there will be more trouble for them!”

  The woman cast her a skeptical glance, then shrugged. “Let me get the ointment and linen, Grandpa. Don’t move.”

  “Make sure you clean the wound with boiled water or your strongest liquor,” said Sarai to her back. “My aunt has conducted studies of injuries. A cleaned wound is less likely to suppurate. Silk should be used for the dressing—”

  Melisayda raised beautifully trimmed eyebrows, like a challenge. “Did I ask for your advice, verea?”

  “The Incomparable Melisayda,” Sarai murmured, chasing down linked memories. “Gil told me about you. You’re a—”

  “Businesswoman and spy, and the beloved granddaughter of my wife,” said the captain with a decided edge. “Melisa, send word to Arasit to come at once to Toskala. We await her and the Wolves from Salya.”

  As the Incomparable went out, Elit returned with a fresh pot of tea and took in the situation with a glance. “Captain, is he dead? Are you wounded?”

  “Yes, he’s dead. My own injury is shallow.”

  “What is going on?” demanded Sarai. “What are you not telling me?”

  The captain rocked back from his knees to sit on his heels. Drawn and pale, he blew short breaths out through his lips to manage the pain. Sarai had a cursed good idea it wasn’t physical agony that had felled him.

  “I am looking into the mirror of my own face and realizing I mistook the matter this whole time, all these cursed years. As for you, Lady Sarai, the queen’s agents are hunting you and there are far more of them than there are of us.”

  50

  For so many years Dannarah had flown above the land, bound to its service and yet always a bit removed. Her memories of her childhood years when her father had shone as the sun in her sky with her brother as her constant companion had faded, because she had decided they needed to be put behind her. What mattered was carrying out the duty her father had charged her with those weeks she had sat with him as he died.

  Never forget that chaos breeds illness and demons breed chaos. The reeves are the eyes of the king, Dannarah. You will become chief marshal of the reeve halls after me. Under your command you must make sure to root out corruption from the ranks wherever you see it, as I have done. There will always be someone who sees the reeves as a means to increase his power or enrich his purse. Some will come from within the reeves. Others will assail you from without. All will seek to turn the reeve halls to their own ends, but the reeves serve the king. A strong king keeps order because where people live in an orderly peace, they will prosper. People have already begun to take for granted the peace I built. They believe I defeated the demons, but we never defeat demons, only contain them. We must always be on our guard.

  The contours of the land seen from on high tell a different story from what folk see who travel along the ground. Valleys hidden from the road are easy to spot from the air. A dense canopy of forest conceals a network of trails that an outlaw may use to escape. The main roads strike out across the land straight as spears, while the flat spirals of demon’s coils wink
from high peaks and isolated ledges, making one wonder: Why there? Why so hard to reach?

  The precise pattern by which the coils were woven into the land could not be discerned, and yet a few reeves knew that the Hundred was named not after its “hundred” towns and villages but after the demon’s coils. According to the most ancient lore passed down in the reeve halls, there were exactly one hundred demon’s coils in the land and not a single one outside it.

  Her father had a map on which he marked every known coil, and on his deathbed he had given it into her keeping. So far she had seventy-three. Every time she rolled out the map a sense tickled on the edge of her thoughts that an answer lay right in front of her eyes whose question she had not yet asked.

  A pattern underlies the world. For so long she had kept her gaze on the rivers and the fields and the people walking about their business like ants on their busy trails that she had forgotten the other patterns that undergird lives: the spines of impassable mountains blocking painful memories, the sweet beauty of a flower-strewn meadow like the recollection of first love, the delta of secrets spreading from old lies.

  After fleeing Horn Hall and the repulsive Talon Ceremony, she followed the West Track south with the river to the west and the grasslands called the Lend to the east. As the sun set she searched for a place to land for the night. On a stretch of road out of sight of any village and empty of traffic, she spotted an old Ladytree with its vast overhanging canopy. After landing, she released Terror to hunt.

  The old tree hulked bigger on the ground than it had seemed from the air, with a cracked trunk and a hollow inside filled with dirt and debris from years of blowing winds. Once travelers would have spent the night under its gracious limbs, out of the rain, sheltered by the goddess Atiratu, the Lady of Beasts, in whose honor such trees were planted. But for years now such itinerancy had been forbidden by order of the Beltak priests, who demanded that travelers stay in licensed hostels where they paid a tithe to the priests for a mattress and a bowl of porridge.

  Just beyond the outer branches of the Ladytree lay a scattering of boulders. One rock was set flush to the ground, flat as a bed. Withered wreaths lay there, given as offering to the old gods. She had to think a moment to recall that such rock altars were sacred to Hasibal the Merciful One, who grants peace, joy, and courage on the hard journey through life. It was the Merciful One who guided worshippers through the maze of grief one step at a time, never hurried and always compassionate.

  For all his adult life Atani had worn one of the necklaces called Hasibal’s Tears, but she had never seen him pray to any god except when required for palace ceremonies.

  Alone in the dusk, birds silent, wind soft, she closed her eyes. Grief shut its vise onto her heart, a crushing weight that staggered her and brought tears.

  Her old friends Feder and Ivo dead. Reeves whose names she would never know stuck in cages and killed like trash. Ceremonies that went against everything the reeves had always been.

  That arrogant ass Tavahosh was going to destroy the reeve halls.

  She loved the orderly land their father had passed on to her and Atani, which Anjihosh had so carefully cultivated by pulling out the weeds and tending the fields. Atani’s quirks and odd schemes and those idiotic law pillars he erected on every major road had irritated her. She’d been jealous of the way he had retained Kellas’s loyalty while she had felt pushed to arm’s length. It wasn’t that she pined over Kellas; she’d had far more enthusiastic lovers later, and from the distance of experience she knew he had done his duty without true passion, probably at her father’s command.

  Imagine how that scene might have gone!

  Captain Kellas, my daughter is seventeen and does not wish to marry, but being a girl of exceptional spirit and intelligence, she will doubtless wish to experience sexual pleasure. I cannot trust her with just any random fellow who may wish to take advantage of the connection for personal gain. So I command you to safely guide her into these delicate waters.

  Age gave her the wit to find it more amusing than humiliating. Of course her father had known. He had known everything, hadn’t he?

  Hadn’t he?

  But Captain Kellas’s damning words, The things your brother did not choose to tell you, I cannot reveal, suggested otherwise.

  She forced herself to consider that last night before Atani was killed.

  As chief marshal she had accompanied the king and the army into the northwest into the foothills of Heaven’s Ridge. When the army and Prince Jehosh had marched north to cross the border into Ithik Eldim she had turned back with Atani and his company, heading back into the Hundred.

  They camp along the road beside a law pillar planted just four days earlier on the march up. Atani pretends to be his usual self, encouraging his men to talk, singing along to popular choruses, but she sees the lie in his eyes. As the encampment settles down she chases his bodyguards out of his tent and sits cross-legged on her bedroll while he lies on a cot with an arm flung over his brow. She cleans and oils her harness, glancing at him at intervals. He wears a sleeping kilt in the local style and no ornamentation except his wolf’s head ring and his necklace of Hasibal’s Tears with its tiny plum branch made of seven exquisitely lacquered blossoms.

  The glow of a lamp hanging from the cross-poles bathes his face in light. His eyes remain open but he does not seem to be looking at anything.

  When after a while he has still said nothing, she begins to talk. “Do you remember that time at Brushfire Cove when Mama took her embroidery and her attendants down to the strand while you and I played on the rocky beach? Merlings swam into the cove and whistled as if they were trying to talk to us. Atani, are you listening to me?”

  He swings his legs over to sit on the edge of the cot. Grabbing her signal flags, he starts to comb through them looking for frays and tears. “There will be trouble with this ‘king’s daughter’ Jehosh has been talking about, the one he ran into on one of his raids.”

  “You believe that story? That he saw a pretty girl in rich clothing in a town square and begged her for a kiss, and she looked down her nose at him and said that she was a king’s daughter and thus far too high and mighty for the likes of him?”

  “I do believe the story, unfortunately. He’s going to bring her back and insist on installing her as a second wife like they do in the empire. I don’t approve.”

  She snorts. “You have sat pretty all your life with your compliantly affectionate wife and your adoringly faithful lover—”

  “Dannarah!”

  “—so his running after the fruit forbidden to him is your own fault. You can’t expect him to be content with that insipid girl you forced him to marry just because she has already pushed out one healthy boy and is pregnant again.”

  “Chorannah is a shy girl but not stupid. If Sirniakan lords do not allow their daughters to be educated in a wide range of disciplines then it is wrongheaded of the Beltak priests to claim women are unformed and ignorant.”

  She gestures, and he hands over the signal flags. “I wonder why you harnessed poor Jehosh to such an underwhelming brood mare if you object to the empire’s customs regarding women.”

  “Father arranged the marriage before he died, as you know perfectly well.”

  She bundles up the flags. “Just as he arranged yours to Yevah. Why do we keep bringing their cowlike girls into our court rather than strengthening our ties by marrying into the most powerful local families here, as General Sengel and Father’s other generals so wisely did?”

  “Why do you ask when our mother of blessed memory was herself born and bred in the empire?”

  “Father could scarcely refuse to marry Mama when his own mother brought her here and ordered him to marry her, could he?” She stoppers the vial of oil and tidies up before going over to the camp stand to wash her hands and face. “You were always Mama’s champion.”

  “Someone had to be.” The snap of his temper startles her.

  She sits back down on her bedroll. �
�You were a good son to her, Atani. Better than I was a daughter. You treated her with respect while I resented her. I regret that now.”

  Atani leans forward to grasp her hand.

  She says nothing, just lets him be.

  After a while he releases her and curls his hand into a fist. “I just have a sense that Jehosh is in danger. I should have gone with him.”

  The hells? He’s always had an uncanny ability to perceive emotion. Is he waiting for her to confess that she ordered Kellas to kill Jehosh?

  The flame gutters as the wick sucks up the last of the oil. Darkness falls.

  His voice emerges hushed and intense. “Do you think I should have marched north with the army?”

  “Do you fear you are a coward? A man who chooses to negotiate rather than fight is not a coward. Sometimes he is bravest of all. But leaving Jehosh here to gain a taste of ruling while you prosecuted the war might have been a better choice. It would have answered the raids, stymied his desire for glory, and given him some tedious administration to oversee. Why did you not?”

  The tent’s canvas breathes in a soft mountain wind. A tightness grows in her chest. Her fingers dig into her own flesh as she leans forward, waiting as if for him to throw a knife at her.

  His voice is that of a man buried beneath rock and heard through a slender pipe of bamboo. “For a long time now I have known that I am a demon, bound to the Hundred.”

  Is anxiety causing him to lose his mind? “You are no demon!”

  “Am I not?” he says with a harsh laugh so unlike him that for an instant she wonders if a demon has truly risen up inside him to engulf his spirit.

  “You’re in a dark mood like you get sometimes, worried about events out of your control. It overwhelms you with fanciful nightmares.”

  He does not reply.

  She gropes for and finds the neatly folded harness, for she needs something to hold. “It’s natural to fear demons. In other lands people simply kill them. But for so long the people of the Hundred allowed demons to rule. Until Father put a stop to that and drove them into hiding.”