The Black Wolves

by Kate Elliott

  Dannarah laughed, although even to her own ears the sound had an edge of desperation. “How can you know this?”

  Mai’s soft smile made Dannarah flinch. “Because I was there.”

  “You attended Queen Zayrah at the birth?”

  Her eyes like murky waters hid what lay beneath but for an instant Dannarah was sure she saw faint blue threads chasing through the dark pupils. “No. I gave birth to Atani in a cave beside a fireling’s pool. Later, when I bargained for my freedom, Anji stole our baby from me and gave him to Zayrah to raise as her own. Later yet, in exchange he gave me the infant Hari to raise away from the palace. Hari is your full brother because Hari, like you, is a child of Anjihosh and Zayrah. You and Atani share only a sire. Zayrah loved Atani, and she was a good and loving and kind mother to him. But he came from my womb. Thus I know what transpired on the day of his birth and how he became the sort of demon he was.”

  The words tumbled like stones, grinding through Dannarah’s mind.

  After a bit she touched the nearest cup. Had they poisoned the tea so as to cause this nightmarish hallucination of accusations?

  She had not taken even the smallest sip. Deep in the pit of her belly she knew it as truth, however much she wanted to scream a denial, because it answered so much.

  They studied her with calm expressions. None carried a weapon or at least no weapon she could see. But their soldiers drilled beyond the wall, and somewhere in these three compounds, two demons walked, having left their winged horses to graze. Their weapon was the secret they had concealed all these years.

  “My father should have made me king instead of Atani,” she said.

  “Had he made you king, things would have turned out very differently. You would have kept the Hundred the way he wanted it to be.” Mai nodded with a compassion that made Dannarah want to slam the baton into her serene face. “But Anjihosh could not learn the lessons the Hundred had to teach him. His mind ran deep but very narrow. In the world he knew, a king’s heir is his son.”

  Sweet laughter broke into their stalemate. Up the street walked two young women. Lifka was impossible to mistake for anyone else. The other was an unusually pretty girl whose face seemed cursedly familiar. Then she had it: This was Reyad’s estranged wife, Hetta, whom she had last seen in the Suvash Hills. She wore a taloos that looked as if it had been wrapped by four drunken children, and the way she had to keep tugging up its hem so as not to stumble kept the two young women in gales. What in the hells was this girl doing here?

  “We are not your enemy, Lady Dannarah,” said Mai. “Atani loved you. He admired and respected you.”

  “But he didn’t trust me. Because I remained loyal to our father, he considered me his enemy, didn’t he? You all plotted behind my back to destroy the Hundred that my father built. I think we know where you and I stand.” She rudely turned her back and strode down the steps. “Reeve Lifka! Did Tarnit return to Toskala, as I ordered?”

  The young reeve halted, glanced toward the people on the porch, and back at Dannarah. “Yes, Marshal. She left days ago for Toskala. Have you not seen her there?”

  “We must leave at once.” She took several steps toward the clearing before she realized Lifka had not moved to follow her.

  In a shower of excited barking, the Runt barreled out of the open porch door of Plum Blossom Clan and raced to Lifka. She gathered him into her arms as he licked and whined. “I’m sorry, Marshal. I am no longer under your command.”

  “Has Tavahosh discovered you are here? Has he threatened you?”

  “Prince Tavahosh does not command me. What I mean is, I no longer consider myself to be under the command of the reeve halls. My apologies.” Lifka glanced toward Mai, who offered an encouraging nod in reply.

  Demons needed no weapons except lies and lures. Her father had taught her that their power lay in being able to know what would tempt, or anger, or frighten you most. Desire and vulnerability make you weak, Dannarah, he had told her, and now when she looked at the woman called Mai she understood that her father had wanted a person who had rejected him and thus become his enemy.

  “What did they offer you, Lifka?”

  She was a good girl, well brought up, and honest enough that she scraped the toe of a sandal on the ground as she let out a troubled sigh. “Safety and security for my family.”

  Dannarah considered the report she had received from Tarnit right after the debacle of Lifka’s clan being attacked by soldiers and burned to the ground. The injured, destitute family had been forced to take temporary shelter in the precarious and unpredictable shelter of the Weldur Forest among its mysterious and often hostile denizens. How clever of Plum Blossom Clan to figure out exactly the bargain Lifka could not bear to refuse.

  An outlawed marshal had nothing better to offer the girl, not now.

  Not yet.

  Because she liked Lifka and anyway felt it prudent not to burn the bridge between them, she nodded. “I know you love your family. Very well. You have chosen, as we must all choose. So be it.”

  As she began to walk away the dog whined again. Lifka set him down. To Dannarah’s surprise he ran after her, snuffled a circle around her ankles, and bolted back for Lifka.

  From the porch they watched her go. No one said a word, not even farewell.

  She flew to the Suvash Hills.

  Reyad’s eagle Surly was preening herself on a sunny hillside, out of her harness, so relaxed that she watched with only mild interest as Dannarah guided her raptor to the landing on the opposite side of the valley. She left Terror unhooded in case she was walking into an ambush. Folk were busy about their daily tasks, children at the temple school reciting their lessons in such loud voices she could hear them all the way up here. But word spreads fast. Reyad came pelting out of the archon’s big house and raced up to meet her. He looked trim, clean, healthy, and brimful of news.

  “Thanks to all the gods, Marshal! I was worried something had happened to you when I heard those rumors that all women reeves are to be arrested by the priests.”

  “Arrested by the priests?”

  “Yes, Prince Tavahosh had an order ready to go.”

  “An order ready to go?”

  The hells! Tavahosh was not only in the process of betraying the reeve halls; he had also deliberately lied to her, and to his own father, the better to ambush them later!

  “What happened after I left Horn Hall? Did my people get away safely?”

  “They did. Nesard got a messenger out immediately after your departure, sent to Toskala.”

  “If anyone can get my reeves out of Palace Hall before the priests take over, it will be Tarnit,” she said, more to herself than to him.

  “I have something to show you!”

  He had the cocky grin of a good-looking lad accustomed to admiration. He led her out past the village washhouse where she and Tarnit had cleaned up that morning so many weeks ago, the very place from which they had overseen the meeting between Reyad and Hetta.

  As they pushed up past terraced fields she asked, probing, “Have you had a happy reunion with your wife?”

  His smile fell into a sulky frown. “She’s left to get work in Salya. I wanted to go track her down, but I knew I had to wait here in case you came.”

  “Work” in Salya, indeed. Hetta was obviously up to her neck in the demons’ rebellion, and it seemed equally clear Reyad hadn’t the least idea of what was going on. Kellas was almost certainly training his own little army. Briefly she considered sending Reyad to Salya to infiltrate Plum Blossom Clan, but Hetta would prove too great a temptation.

  “Here we are,” he said, breaking into her thoughts.

  Up on the hillside among scrub brush a disused trough likely used to water goats had fallen into disrepair. A rank odor made her squint as he pulled loose bricks off one end, reached into a hollow in the ground beneath the trough, and pulled out a damp, dirty cloth bag. Tipping it over he shook it, and a thing rolled out.

  The smell hit her first as her
eyes watered. But when her hazy vision cleared she had no trouble identifying the greasy tangles of hair, the pits where bugs had begun eating out the eyes, the ragged flesh and the white of the shattered spinal bones: Tavahosh’s head.

  She blinked so many times her eyes got dry. The events of the past few days had stripped all emotion from her. Both outcast and outlaw, she had nothing left except her years of experience and the lessons her father had taught her. Yet for all that her father had loved her, he had still withheld from her the tools she needed to become what he was. So be it. She would forge her own tools and her own weapons.

  She said, “How did you manage it and not get caught?”

  He poked the head back into the bag with a stick. “That was easy. He heard what you said to me at the end and he wanted to know if it was true.”

  “That I had demanded sexual favors from you?” She laughed harshly. “Yes, he can’t have known that my sexual interest in men your age is many years behind me, for which I am deeply grateful since mature men are quite more imaginative than callow youth.”

  His gaze flicked to the sky and he gave a little sigh, as of relief. As if he had been worried that she would importune him as Tarnit had!

  He said, “That. Also you taunting him about not having the courage to fly as a reeve. He wanted to show he wasn’t a coward. I suggested I would tell him the truth in private, which meant taking him up with me on a tour of the countryside. I said that about a tour to give a little time.”

  “Why did he trust you?”

  “Because I told him what he wanted to hear. Anyway, I outflew the reeves who were meant to escort us. Surly is fast and, honestly, they were inexperienced and not very well trained. He did talk a lot in the short time I knew him, insisting everything would be better now he was taking over and doing things in a proper way. It got to be so cursed annoying that I simply unhooked him and let him fall, then came back around to pick up his dead body.”

  “Where is his body?”

  “I stripped the clothes and rings from it so it couldn’t be identified, dropped it in the ocean, and brought the head here. Just as you ordered, Marshal.”

  She nodded as he shoved the bag back under the trough and replaced the bricks. “Good work, Reyad.”

  “How can it be good? You’ve become an exile and an outlaw. King Jehosh will not forgive you for murdering his son. What can we possibly do now, Marshal?”

  The wind picked up, carving ripples through the tall grass. Over on another slope a pretty girl with her hair pulled back and her midriff showing stood watch over a munching tribe of goats. No doubt Reyad had first glimpsed Hetta when she was about such work, the poor goatherder’s daughter who captured the interest of an archon’s handsome grandson, who then defied his entire family to marry her. Reyad was far more ruthless than his congenial manners suggested.

  A wave of exhaustion swept her as on a gust of wind. Unsteadily she sat on the edge of the trough, the scent of Tavahosh’s murder tingling in her nostrils. It would be so easy to fly to the palace and get back into Jehosh’s good graces by turning in Reyad as the murderer of his son. After all, Tavahosh, like Farihosh, stood between the throne and Kasad, who was clearly Jehosh’s preferred heir. If she supported Kasad, Jehosh might finally name her chief marshal.

  She slumped, bracing her head on her arms and her arms on her knees. How had it come to this, that she was trying to talk herself into another begging expedition to the very man she had once thought must be killed in order to save the Hundred?

  “Marshal?”

  Atani had lied to her for their entire adult lives. The boggling truth fit nowhere in the pattern she understood of her life and relationships. Atani had been the most honest and best of people. She preferred the idea that her father’s discarded lover Mai was lying to her, but at every angle she turned the puzzle box of confessions and secrets they only made sense if Atani’s last whispered intimacy had been him telling her the truth at last, and too late.

  I am a demon.

  Their childhood closeness, the illusion of trust, was gone forever. He had chosen a path she could not follow, and he had taken loyal Captain Kellas down that road with him.

  “Are you all right, Marshal? I’d better take you to the house.”

  She lifted her head and took in a long inhalation of heady air. Sunlight gilded the slopes of hills. Everything was so bright it made her eyes water.

  “I daresay I need to eat and sleep, rest for a day or two while I consider the terrible wrongs being done to the reeve halls. Also I have new information about a catastrophic conspiracy of demons that threatens the Hundred. I have to convince Prince Farihosh I am willing to help him overthrow his father and return peace to the land.”

  53

  The flat waters of the salty Olo’o Sea shone under the hot sun. Dust coated Gil’s face. Midday the work gang saw a pair of unfinished mud-brick towers rising in the distance. They marched into view of a compound with half-built walls. In the scant shade offered by the outer wall the work gang was allowed to rest while the chief vanished into the compound. The soldiers pretending not to be soldiers unrolled canvas between the wagons and sat beneath, sharing a midday ration that the work gang did not receive.

  To avoid staring at the men eating, Gil studied the surroundings. A clot of ragged shelters was ringed by fields of drying bricks. Farther away stood a hill with a ruin atop it, an old fort; below a palisade ringed a much newer town. Along the shore people tended racks of drying fish.

  “I’d sell my brother for one of those fish,” said Menon.

  “You don’t have a brother,” said Kurard, always the first to point out the obvious.

  “He’d sell his sister for a fish,” said Posenas with a glance around the others to see if they appreciated his edgy wit.

  “Fuck you,” said Menon genially. “What do you take me for? Three fish for my sister.”

  “What about your brother, Adiki?” said Posenas.

  “You know better than to joke with me about my brother or say one unkind thing about him in my hearing, because I can beat the shit out of you and I will. So don’t try my patience.”

  “Now, lads,” said Natas. Old enough to be their uncle, he had taken on the part of peacemaker.

  Adiki shaded his eyes to examine the men shaping bricks, laboring slowly in the heat. A few scrawny fellows wheeled carts stacked with bricks toward the gate, prodded along by guards with whips. “If this is the mighty Beltak shrine we’ve been headed for all along you’d think there’d be more laborers.”

  “The one they’ve been building for five years?” Gil looked toward the wide gate where bored soldiers stood guard in the shade. Over the top of the high wall all he could see was the ragged edges of the towers, not even that high. “I thought it would be mightier, and more finished. What do you think, Ty?”

  Ty sat with head on knees, ignoring them. So cursed silent all the time.

  “Heya!” Adiki lifted his chin toward the road. “Look there.”

  Dust rose from the road, kicked up by horsemen riding their way with banners flying. The chief’s whistle brought them to their feet, all except Ty.

  “Get up,” Gil said, hooking Ty under the armpit.

  Adiki moved back to help him. They dragged an unresisting Ty to his feet just as Chief Roni strode out of the gate in company with an elderly priest. The holy man’s seamed face had a mean look Gil distrusted.

  “All right.” The chief paced down the line of the work gang. “Here we are at Shining Fort, soon to be a citadel of righteousness and holy worship. You lot have a choice. I can leave you here to make bricks and build walls. It’s hot work but manageable for any simpleton. You get one ration a day. For nighttime you can build whatever shelter you can scrounge together. If that’s your choice, go over to the brick building supervisor and get to work.”

  He paused to scan up and down the line, but no one spoke or moved.

  “Alternatively I can sell your labor to his exalted holiness here.” H
e indicated the old priest. “He’ll be taking a work gang out to the naphtha fields west of here, in the Barrens. Working the fields is dangerous, but your ration will be increased to twice a day and you’ll share barracks and be given boots as part of your work gear. Also, instead of seven years you’ll only have to serve four.”

  Gil wanted to say, And die twice as fast, but he had learned his lesson and kept his mouth shut.

  “What’s the third choice?” asked Adiki in that way he had, like he couldn’t decide whether to laugh at you or slap you.

  The chief regarded him with the wary respect of a man facing a scorpion. “Those who are man enough will be allowed to choose glory and honor.”

  “How many rations a day and what gear does glory and honor come with?” Gil asked, because after all he just could not keep his mouth shut.

  The chief smirked. “You’ve already been assigned to the naphtha fields. You and that one.” He indicated Tyras.

  “What if I don’t want to go to the naphtha fields? What if I’d rather choose glory and honor?” Gil said.

  Cursed if the man didn’t close his beefy fingers around Tyras’s upper arm. “I think you know what will happen if you say one more thing to me, Lord Gilaras. I’ll have another hankering.”

  Tyras spat into the chief’s face. The chief backhanded him so hard he staggered back, tripped, and fell on his ass. The other men—all except his own little squad—laughed nervously.

  “Move,” said the chief. “Go over to the exalted priest who is now your master.”

  “Fuck you, Gil,” said Tyras under his breath as Gil tried to help him up. Shaking off Gil’s grip he slouched over to the priest and stood there staring at the ground.

  Adiki caught Gil’s gaze and raised a brow as if to ask whether they should all go, but Gil shook his head and walked with head high to stand beside Tyras. No reason for their comrades to be fucked just because he and Ty were fucked. Likely the only reason he and Ty hadn’t been murdered along the way was because the chief was paid for the number of prisoners he delivered.