The Black Wolves

by Kate Elliott

  “Your cousin?”

  “Yes. My mother’s sister’s eldest child.”

  A ringing of bells as light as a summer’s breeze rustled the night, a glissade with the searing beauty of a hymn. Voices rose out of the darkness, singing:

  We are but arrows flying on the wind.

  An unseen hand set us to fly,

  The archer’s thoughts unknown to us.

  Whose heart we will pierce we cannot yet know.

  Farihosh’s head came up with the look of a deer surprised at the appearance of a lion. He climbed to his feet with more grace than she had expected and suddenly she doubted he was drunk at all. He waved toward the shadows. A trim young man in reeve leathers stepped into view.

  “Marshal Armas! Am I mistaken—? You assured me they were not yet anywhere close to us. Four days’ ride higher on the pass, you told me.”

  The marshal approached with a long side-eye at Dannarah. “I don’t understand, Your Highness. The scouts saw the Banner of the Moon flying among a troop of several hundred riding at speed up the southern incline, and behind them in pursuit the banners of Prince Edesihosh with at least a thousand men.”

  “What other travelers did the reeves see on the pass?” Dannarah interrupted. “Did it not occur to the scouts that a larger group may act as decoy to protect a smaller one?”

  “Can this be the case, Marshal Armas? Did that not occur to you?” A crease of displeasure clouded Farihosh’s brow. He wiped his face and hands on a towel brought to him by the lad, then glanced in a mirror and flicked a strand of hair off his forehead just as a woman might who wanted to make sure she looked her best when meeting a lover. “Did you give your scouts no instruction to investigate other travelers?”

  “I don’t … We thought … There was one small party of decorated women, flower girls on their way to a new establishment, but no sign of any other imperial troupe…”

  “That’s exactly the kind of group you should be looking at most closely!” Dannarah said.

  On the road soldiers fell back, parting to line up in disciplined ranks with a swiftness that her father would have approved. Out of the veil of night horses pranced into view, lanterns flaming around them. Flowing robes covered the riders from the top of the head to their knees. The hems and sleeves of their robes were sewn with tiny bells that made a music of their arrival. Even the knee-high boots they wore, painted with silvery vines and shining crescent moons, had bells affixed.

  Farihosh clapped his hands three times, and his attendants, officers, and lords swarmed back from the neighboring rooms and courtyard to form up at his back with him centered among them. Dannarah noted a few familiar faces but she did not know his crowd, not as she knew her people.

  “Marshal Dannarah, I hope you will stand beside me. Clearly you are the most experienced and canny of the reeves who attend me, as that little exchange just proved.”

  “Your brother tried to arrest me. The priests will not approve.”

  “Tavahosh’s decisions do not rule mine. I am not interested in the priests’ musty rectitude. I am interested in victory.”

  Two steps took her to his right hand, from which she watched as the horses executed a proud dip of heads in greeting.

  One rider dismounted and walked forward, the bells sewn to her robes softly chiming like the whisper of ambition in the ears of unquiet youth who can be lured by a seductive proposition others cannot perceive. Farihosh walked forward to meet her, his hands extended palms up in greeting. Her hands were dark and slim, painted with moons flowering into bursts of flowers that vanished up beneath her long sleeves. Her eyes had all the mystery of forbidden secrets.

  “Prince Farihosh, we are met at last where the stars shine,” she said in a voice whose music was that of assurance.

  “Princess Ruvikah.” He trembled as on the cliff of elation. “Under the lantern of the moon do we meet for the first time.”

  “Hu! I see it now,” murmured Dannarah. She could not help but be caught by the night, and the lanterns, and the bells, and horses in their golden harness, and the ambitious prince who faced the dead emperor’s favorite child, the one the emperor must have wished could inherit a throne that law and custom closed to her.

  The princess withdrew her hands and stepped around him to study Dannarah with a look neither accusatory nor friendly. “Who are you?” she asked in the pure accent of the Sirniakan palace. “No woman of rank dresses in the coarse garb of a menial, yet I judge you no common woman.”

  Farihosh swept an arm like opening a door. “This is my new chief marshal, Lady Dannarah, who commands the reeves and thus will join and enhance our alliance with her years of experience and her caustic wisdom. Unless you have other plans, Aunt.”

  For the first time in days, months, even years, her heart unfurled from its guarded nest of diminishment and grief. In the release of a single breath a life can extinguish, or it can change and grow.

  “Of course I am with you.”

  56

  Kellas sat at his desk facing Chief Oyard, his granddaughters Fohiono and Melisa, and the woman he called daughter, Atani’s sister, the demon Arasit. Oyard carefully did not look Arasit in the face, and she politely did not make him do so.

  “All two hundred of the company that sailed with me from Salya to Nessumara have reported in,” said Fohiono.

  Oyard added, “They are housed in small groups in various workshops and clan compounds throughout Toskala as arranged by Yero.”

  “Very good.”

  “There is one other thing,” said Fohiono with an eyelash-fluttering glance at her cousin Melisa, a signal of things they knew about each other that he didn’t know about them. Seeing the two young women together made the accomplished businesswoman known in Toskala as the Incomparable Melisayda look younger and far more like the girl who used to stampede through the house with her cousins shrieking and laughing in voices loud enough to hurt the ears.

  All the children of Plum Blossom Clan, raised in a multiple-household extended family, had a closeness that reminded him of his own childhood’s bustling clan compound. For all that he had worked alone so much of his life, he understood now he’d always had the shelter of family to creep back to when needed, now as much as ever. In the end every person dies alone, it was true, but it made a cursed lot of difference knowing you had a chance of a hand holding your own when you crossed the spirit gate to the other side.

  Fo rested a cupped hand on his desk. “Grandmama sent this for you. She said maybe it is time for you to put it on again.”

  She opened her hand to reveal a ring. His ring, the sigil of the Black Wolves.

  He swayed back. “I’m not…”

  I’m not ready. I’m not worthy. I failed him.

  But he clamped down his mouth on the words. He would not burden his granddaughters with his fears. They mustn’t ever feel responsible for those.

  “I took it off after Atani died,” he said, the only words he dared say.

  Fo nudged Melisa, who drew a silver chain from around her neck and deftly strung the ring from it.

  Fo held it out. “Grandmama said you wouldn’t wear it at first, so Melisa and I thought you could wear it around your neck.”

  They both smiled at him like twin flowers, like sunbright so bold and vivid that it fixes in the heart forever. He had to prop his forehead on clasped hands for a moment to hide the smile of pure, giddy, fathomless love that washed through him for the children and grandchildren he had been so fortunate to raise as his own.

  Honestly, it was impossible to refuse them.

  “Grandpa? Are you well?”

  He raised his head and snagged the chain from Fo’s hand, then slipped it over his neck and tucked it beneath his inner tunic. The metal, although cool, seemed to burn straight to his heart.

  With an exhale he rose. “It is time,” he said as the others got to their feet with him.

  Fohiono made to grasp his hand but remembered she was now a Black Wolf and clasped her hands be
hind her back instead. “Let me come with you, Grandpa.”

  “No. I must do this alone.”

  “Except for Arasit!” Fohiono blurted out with an indignation that made him smile.

  “Let us know when you can walk on air, Fo,” said Melisa with all the heady maturity of her two years serving in the field. “Or survive a hundred arrows drilled through your flesh.”

  Silent until now, Arasit brushed her gaze across Fo, more scold than threat. “You’ll get your chance to die, Fo, no doubt sooner than you wish.”

  Kellas grabbed a practice sword and walked to the door but Fo and Melisa hurried after and hugged him. “Be careful, Grandpa,” Melisa said.

  Fo added, “I don’t want to be the one to tell Grandmama that you aren’t coming home.”

  He kissed their foreheads, nodded at the other two, and left the barracks and guardhouse, pausing briefly to contemplate—with some satisfaction—how he had built a tightly disciplined unit over the last few months.

  The gods had granted him the mercy of a cool day with which to ascend the Thousand Steps, each stair-step another layer of memory building the story of his life: The restless and reckless young man offered the chance to serve King Anjihosh as one of his elite Black Wolves. The ambitious soldier who had chosen his profession over everything else. The loyal captain sent to track down a runaway sixteen-year-old prince. The man who had fallen in love with the one woman Anjihosh had ever loved, the woman who had forced the king to relinquish her. Anjihosh had done everything in his power to keep Mai from ever touching another man again. But Kellas had climbed cliffs, swum seas, endured physical hardship, and crept unseen into cities and isolated mountain valleys to hunt down outlaws who did not want to be found. The day Mai had invited Kellas to find a way to reach her, even knowing he would be executed were he caught, had been the day his life changed.

  Had love made him a simpler man or a more complicated one?

  No, even that was too incomplete an explanation.

  He had respected and admired King Anjihosh the Glorious Unifier but he had loved Atani as the son he never had, however he had refused to admit it even to himself.

  The ring hung heavily, like an itch that never goes away. Atani’s death had scraped at him ever after because he could not understand how he had missed the signs, the warnings, and the instinct that should have told him to refuse Dannarah’s order to kill Jehosh and stay with Atani instead. He had done everything else. How had he come to fail so disastrously that time?

  The young guards standing on the porch of the king’s apartments in the upper palace let him in at once, although as always he had to relinquish his sword to their care. Normally he would have left his sandals on the porch as well but he dangled them half hidden behind his back so he could sneak them inside. A steward greeted him in the audience chamber.

  “The king has not yet returned from the assizes at South Gate, Captain. Did he ask you to meet with him here? He gave me no orders to prepare for your arrival.”

  “Stofi, is it not?”

  “That’s right, Captain. You always remember people’s names.”

  “I do my best. The king has done a great deal to restore order and peace to Toskala in the twenty days since the riots. To preside over assizes down at South Gate, right in the center of the disturbances, was a graceful touch. If you don’t mind, I’ll await the king. It was a long climb.”

  “Yes, yes, of course, Captain. For an elderly man like yourself to still be able to ascend the Thousand Steps! By the will of the Shining One, I hope and pray to live to such a vigorous old age!”

  Over the years Kellas had honed his stare into a potent weapon. “Yes, indeed, a man of my age needs a peaceful place to sit where he won’t be interrupted until the king returns. A pot of tea would not go amiss.”

  Age gave a man the privilege of walking past the steward into the balcony room and then, ignoring Stofi’s birdlike cries of protest, clicking the door in the wall and descending the stone steps to the chamber carved into the rock.

  King Anjihosh’s meek wife, Queen Zayrah, had birthed nine children, two sons and seven daughters, out of which six daughters had survived as well as the son he had sent away to be raised elsewhere. Anjihosh had never treated his queen as anything except a polite duty. Yet he also wasn’t a man to flaunt in her face that he found pleasure elsewhere. So he had this chamber cut into the rock with its own private entrance, now chained and barred. As king, Atani had never come down here because it reminded him of the disrespect with which his father treated the woman he called Mother, the one who raised him and loved him.

  Jehosh, of course, had found the hideaway charming and provocative. In the early days after the first northern war he had kept Dia here. Later, as Dia spent more and more time with her women and on her estate with her children and her weaving establishment, he brought lovers to these lush carpets and cushions. Like his grandfather he never kept any lover for long because there was only one woman he truly cared for in that way.

  But whatever else Jehosh might be, he did not have his grandfather’s brutal possessive streak, the will to prevent anyone else from tasting a nectar he wanted to keep for himself.

  Jehosh loved the pursuit.

  His grandfather desired control.

  Atani had carved a different path for himself, cut short far too soon.

  Hearing footsteps, Kellas turned as the steward brought in a tray of tea and a platter of warm flat bread with ewe’s cheese sprinkled on top.

  “My thanks, Stofi. I will indulge myself in a nap, if you can make certain I won’t be disturbed by anyone except the king.”

  “Yes, Captain.” The man paced once around the carpets and cushions, jangled the chains on the door to the secret passage, and went back up the other stairs. Kellas sat cross-legged on a cushion. He slowed his breathing and relaxed his body into a state of composed readiness, yet his mind would not fully fall quiet.

  After establishing himself as king of the Hundred, Anjihosh had named the cloaked Guardians as demons and called them false and dangerous because a few had become corrupted. Under Anjihosh’s command, the first thing his Wolves learned was how to kill a demon and cut away the cloak called a demon’s skin so it could not rebirth itself into a new person. The Guardians had been forced to go into hiding, and with that the old customs had begun to die. Anjihosh had torn apart the fabric of the Hundred that had used to be, and remade it as an orderly, peaceful, prosperous land that thrived under his rule as long as no one challenged that rule. Those who tried to challenge him were hunted down and killed by the Black Wolves. It was for the best.

  He had believed the lie for so long.

  “Captain Kellas?”

  Jehosh’s voice seared across his clouded thoughts like a strike of lightning.

  He was on his feet, weapon in hand, before the impulse to act formed as a thought in his head.

  “What enemy are you expecting, Captain? You have your knife drawn.”

  His gaze caught the edge of the tray. “Just cutting this bread and cheese, Your Highness. Would you care for some?”

  “I’m not hungry. Sitting in judgment over all those wrangling people and their endless complaints ruins my appetite.” Weariness shadowed the king’s eyes but he had the restless vigor of a man who does not like to stay still for long. He paced to one of the slit windows to look out over the view, a man elevated above the common run of life by an accident of birth. Light made a mask of his face. Jehosh seemed easy to read and yet he concealed so much.

  So much that Kellas had never dreamed might be true.

  “I have not seen you for some days, Captain. Not since the night of the riots, when Lady Sarai escaped the palace. Have you any news of Tavahosh? Chorannah is frantic and I must admit I am deeply concerned that he hasn’t been seen since he was invested as chief marshal at Horn Hall. Can it possibly be true what the people at Horn Hall told me, that he decided to take a proper reeve’s tour of the Hundred? He’s always been such an obedient boy
, I almost like to think he did choose to defy his mother. He’s been gone a cursed long time with no word, though. It just seems odd, and worrisome.”

  “I admit I am as puzzled as you are, Your Highness,” said Kellas truthfully. “I reflect that things would be very different today if you had appointed Lady Dannarah as chief marshal before Queen Chorannah snatched the initiative from you.”

  “Yes, I should never have let her get the jump on me. But Tavahosh has always let Chorannah push him around. Maybe he got tired of her demands and ran off with Lady Sarai to make a new life as rice farmers.” His laugh grated.

  Kellas said nothing. It took most of his concentration to keep his hands loose at his sides. He sank his focus into the ring lying lightly against his skin. He had been a loyal soldier. It was just he hadn’t seen the ambush coming.

  “This rash of disappearances troubles me like an itch I can’t reach,” Jehosh went on. “We’ve had days of seeming calm but I am certain there is a storm rising. Any news of Lady Sarai? And Ulyar, too! Chorannah has appointed his deputy as supreme captain but I intend to assert my power and place you in the position instead, Captain.”

  “That is why I came today, Your Highness. I have bad news. A body was fished out of the river downstream and identified as Ulyar.”

  “So Ulyar is dead.” The king laughed again, running a nervous hand over his hair. “Under the circumstances I’m not sure that’s bad news. Do you know what happened?”

  “Yes. I killed him.”

  “What?”

  Kellas did not repeat himself, just let the words hang there.

  Jehosh’s gaze flicked toward Kellas’s knife, then measured the distance to the steps and the angle of how Kellas was standing a little closer to the steps than he was. “Did you? Why?”

  Kellas sheathed the knife and noted how Jehosh’s shoulders relaxed. “We see our own face in the mirror. Don’t we often look at the behavior of others only to see not them but what we know of ourselves?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Of course you have always wondered why I left the palace after your father’s death.”