The Black Wolves

by Kate Elliott

  “You left in disgrace. Under suspicion.”

  “I failed in my duty to King Anjihosh. I did not protect Atani from the demons.”

  “It’s true!” Like a man on fire Jehosh strode in the other direction, over to the chained door, and turned and strode all the way down the length of the chamber to the steps and then back to the chained door. “It was always true. My father told me himself that he had made a pact with demons!”

  Years of experience had taught Kellas how to keep utterly still, to stay unnoticed, someone to be overlooked until he struck.

  He spoke in a quiet voice. “So naturally I feared you also might be in league with demons, Your Highness. I feared the demons might have poisoned you with their false promises and seductive words in the same way they had poisoned King Atani. That’s why I left the palace.”

  “I’m not in league with demons. It makes sense you would have feared I would succumb, if you knew for certain that demons had corrupted my father.” He halted by the cupboard and tapped a hand against its side. “How did you find out? What proof convinced you?”

  “Demons want to overthrow the king, do they not?”

  “Yes, demons want to restore chaos in the land.”

  “It was right there in plain sight. King Atani raised law pillars calling for the restoration of the old custom of assizes courts and temple witnesses not under the oversight of a king. He meant to abolish the kingship.”

  “Yes, yes! You understand!” Jehosh clasped his hands together and touched them to his lips. A flush heightened the color in his cheeks. His eyes looked a little wild. “Such a foolish plan could never work. People called my father strong because he was calm and patient but in truth he was weak. He was really just a broken-down horse that needed to be put out to pasture to chew over his foolish bits of piecemeal wisdom. How I got tired of him lecturing me about justice and mercy!”

  Rage may smolder where it lies buried, but when it catches dry tinder it flames. Kellas had to fix his trembling hands behind his back, standing in soldier’s parade rest. He had to pretend to speak as with another man’s voice, not his own; so might one of Hasibal’s players take the part of the Loyal Captain Standing Before His Rightful Lord.

  “It’s just as well Lord Seras killed him, but I don’t understand how Lord Seras discovered the truth about King Atani and the demons. How could the son of the revered and faithful General Sengel have thought to attack the chosen and named heir of King Anjihosh the Glorious Unifier?”

  Jehosh shrugged as thoughtlessly as he might have swatted at a wandering fly. “I told him.”

  “You told Lord Seras?”

  “Yes, after my father told me the truth about his law pillars and his pathetic plans. I realized he meant to disinherit me, and not even in favor of one of my younger brothers. I confess naming one of my brothers as heir over me would have angered me, but if I had been offered a generalship instead that might have been an acceptable bribe. Let them preside at assizes. But no! He meant to disinherit all three of us! He meant to dismantle the kingdom—everything!—his father built. He would have dragged down the Hundred with him.”

  “And you would never have become king.”

  “No one would have become king. He succumbed to the lies of the demons. That’s what it means to be demon-ridden. I loved my father, Captain Kellas, but what can you do when someone becomes diseased? If they are suffering and there is no cure, isn’t it better to kill them?”

  “An act of mercy.”

  “No one loved him more than I did.”

  “And Lord Seras?”

  “He understood the danger, too. He and I agreed that his daughter Sinara would marry Farihosh when they grew up. But Vanas wanted to inherit Lord Seras’s place as head of the clan.”

  “Just as you wanted to rule.”

  “Vanas has a younger brother’s sense of grievance. He felt he had to prove himself because Seras was not only older but so well loved and respected. My sole concern was for my grandfather’s legacy. I have a duty to preserve it. You understand me. You served King Anjihosh.”

  “I was once his loyal captain,” said Kellas, considering the distance between him and Jehosh, the king’s greater height and speed and youth, and his own knife.

  A tap brought Jehosh’s head around to consider the chained door. “Who is there?” he demanded.

  Silence answered.

  “No one ever comes up that passageway if I have not arranged it beforehand. The far end of the corridor is secret, and anyway it is locked.” The king walked to the door and set a hand against it as if by touch he could see through to the other side of the thick wood. “Who is there?”

  “Your aunt,” said a faint female voice.

  “My aunt? Aunt Dannarah? I thought you went to the convocation.”

  “I am not Dannarah.”

  “Am I meant to guess? Lady Anah, who ran away with one of Hasibal’s pilgrims when I was a boy? Sukiyah and Gedassah who went south to marry lords in the empire? I think you are not them, nor my Aunt Meenah who never spoke aloud in all the years I knew her.” He glanced at Kellas as if to gauge whether the captain had moved but turned his attention back to the door like a fish snapping after bait. “Aunt Sadah, is it you? Are you returned with your son?”

  She said, “I am your father’s full sister, Your Highness, born to the same father and mother. You do know that your grandmother Queen Zayrah did not herself give birth to Atani, don’t you? Did no one ever bother to tell you, Jehosh?”

  Jehosh stared at the door for the longest time.

  “Captain, is this incredible assertion true?”

  Kellas took a step toward him, guessing that the best way to get Jehosh to do what he wanted was to tell him the opposite. “Don’t open the door, Your Highness.”

  “Jehosh, let me in and I will tell you everything.” Ghosts might tap with such soft insistence, seeking entry into your waking thoughts. “All the secrets they kept hidden from you.”

  The king touched a chain at his neck, fingering the key looped there.

  Kellas took another step, again speaking to hold Jehosh’s attention on the door and the person behind it and away from the man slowly closing in on him. “Don’t open it, Your Highness. I fear it is a demon.”

  “What is your name?” the king asked.

  “My name is Arasit, daughter of Anji and Mai. Mai was the woman Anjihosh truly loved, as much as he could love anything except his own ambition. She is the one who walked away from him because he wanted to keep her in a cage after he had used her wit and her strategy to conquer the Hundred, although conquest was never part of her plan. She just wanted to make a home. Atani was my older brother, their first child. Anji gave the baby to Zayrah to seal their marriage. He made Zayrah take an oath never to reveal that the boy did not come from her womb. I do not wish to diminish Zayrah’s part in Atani’s upbringing because by all accounts she truly loved him and treated him as her own son. Atani loved her and considered her his mother.”

  Kellas took another step.

  “I don’t believe it,” said the king, pressing his cheek against the door. “Why would my father never have told me?”

  “Why should Atani have confided in you, Jehosh? He knew you scorned the way he chose to rule.”

  “Did my mother know?”

  “Queen Yevah obeyed her husband’s wishes. After his death she didn’t trust you. That’s why she left the palace. Do you even know where she is now?”

  Kellas took another step.

  “Every month she sends me a letter by a courier and I reply. I am a dutiful son.”

  “Do you know why she never sees you, Your Highness?”

  “She never liked the palace. She never wanted to stay, nor would I ever have kept her here.”

  “You gave her daughter to Lord Vanas although she was against the marriage. You sent both her other sons to die in your war although she begged you to leave one behind.”

  Another quiet step.

  “They wa
nted to go!”

  “They admired you, it is true, as younger brothers may admire an elder. They admired your Spears and your tales of glory and your beautiful prize, the king’s daughter you brought back as a trophy. Your mother never forgave you for making your brothers believe they should want the same things you did.”

  “It isn’t my fault they died. People die in war.”

  “A war whose pretext you created, Jehosh.”

  “A war my father allowed me to lead, because he wanted me out of the way so he could disinherit me and destroy the kingdom.”

  Kellas struck.

  He plunged the knife into Jehosh’s belly and up under his ribs, aiming for his heart. But he was slow, and not as strong as he had been in his prime. Jehosh slammed backward into the wall and with a shout broke away. The captain used the force of the push as a torque to spin himself around and attack again. Jehosh’s elbow caught him under the chin, knocking his head back and throwing him against the door.

  “Hai! Hai!” shouted the king, screaming for his guards. Blood soaked the front of his golden tabard.

  Kellas flung his full weight into Jehosh to batter him back against the wall.

  Jehosh got a hand around Kellas’s neck and squeezed, trying to choke him, but Kellas dropped to his knees to loosen the hold. The king’s fingers caught on the silver chain, pulling it loose. The ring skittered free to land behind them on the carpets, but no matter.

  Kellas had the angle he needed to finish the job.

  Again he stabbed Jehosh, right up under the ribs, and again, and when Jehosh sagged slackly between him and the wall, he stabbed him again and again and again. His rage coursed as bloody as the king’s dying.

  “Your Highness!” cried voices from the rooms above.

  The words jolted him back to himself, where he knelt on a damp carpet over Jehosh’s body. Footsteps pounded on the stairs. He yanked the key to the chained door from its chain around Jehosh’s neck. His heart was racing and his mind had nothing in it except survival. Hands steady, he unlocked the pins.

  As four guards clattered into the room and stared in astonished horror at the dead king, the chains slithered down in a hasp of sound. He shoved the bar out of place and turned the latch.

  Arasit stepped into the room, dressed in reeve leathers—a good disguise—and with her curly hair loose over her shoulders. Although as old in years as Dannarah, she could have been mistaken as an age-mate of Fohiono or Melisa, one of the peculiar effects of her particular demon-nature.

  She caught the soldiers in her demon’s gaze. “You have seen nothing. You will go back upstairs and forget you ever came down here or that the king or Captain Kellas came down here. As far as you know, no one was down here.”

  They walked back up the stairs in silence.

  “The way you can punch holes into minds never fails to disturb me,” said Kellas, breathing calm back into his shattered heart. So he would bind fury into a smooth surface until the world again would see him as reasonable and wise. Many times before this he had climbed these thousand steps of coiling the rage into a tiny ball of shredded fragments that he could stow deep away and afterward pretend he was a whole man. Every person who lives suffers wounds. Some have a chance to repair them. Others live with them and pray to the gods that they be granted the strength to get through each day.

  Arasit knelt beside Jehosh’s inert body and held a palm above his face. For a moment she did not move; then she closed her hand around an object in the air invisible to Kellas, like a stray floating feather or a departing soul.

  “The human spirit is so bright,” she murmured. She opened her hand and he blinked, thinking he saw a spark of light. But it was only the sun angling through the narrow windows.

  Jehosh’s topknot had come partially undone in the struggle; she brushed wisps of hair off his forehead as tenderly as a loving child grooms an invalid elder.

  “He doesn’t remember meeting me,” she said. “It was a long time ago. He must have been fifteen, and I looked fifteen at that time as well. He flirted with me, not knowing I was his aunt. I remember him being witty for his age. I know why Atani and my mother are veiled to my sight but I’ve never understood why all of Atani’s children are also veiled. None show any other sign of demon kinship, but somehow they possess the mask that conceals them from demon-sight.”

  “Yet the rest of us are scrolls unrolled to their full length in your gaze,” said Kellas.

  She shrugged, still examining Jehosh as if looking for her lost humanity in his lifeless face. “Don’t worry; you’re safe from me peering into your mind, considering your relationship to my mother. I do think Jehosh loved Atani, though. Do you think Atani suspected that his son fomented the plot against him?”

  “Love is the greatest veil of all. It’s like looking into the sun when you should be looking at the shadow the light casts.”

  “We must get rid of the bloody rug.” She stood, offering him a frown to go with a disapproving shake of her head. “I could have managed his death with much less fuss.”

  He, too, shook his head only to discover it throbbing. “It was my duty. My honor. My responsibility. Not anyone else’s.”

  He had pulled a muscle in his back, but with teeth gritted he helped her roll Jehosh up in the carpet on which he had died. They dragged it into the narrow passageway, a dim corridor hacked into the rock and cut with air-and light holes at intervals. Then he went back into the carpeted chamber and, casting around, discovered the ring on the ground. With it clasped in a trembling hand he went back into the passageway. He stayed with the body as she closed, barred, chained, and locked the door from the inside, so she remained in the chamber while he waited in the lightless passageway. The ring dug into his palm.

  In darkness he rested beside the cooling body.

  Another aspect of Arasit’s particular demon-nature was that she could walk on air, which meant she was perfectly placed to lock up from behind and exit the chamber through one of its rock-cut windows. Soon enough she squeezed through a light hole and dropped down beside him.

  “Here’s the key,” she said, handing it over.

  Her skin was cool; she had a pulse just like an ordinary person did, but she wasn’t an ordinary person or even an ordinary demon. Probably he ought to fear what she was, but she was also Mai’s daughter, and whenever her strange magic took him aback, he remembered the way he had met her atop a roof as she complained about the boy who had fallen in love with her dearest cousin and best friend just as any girl of fifteen might grumble.

  They walked together down to the other end of the long passage up which untold women had made their way, some to meet the conqueror and others his grandson, each a part of the same chain. The other end opened into a dusty storeroom stacked with shelves of ledgers, the record room of the king’s treasury. They locked and barred and chained this door, too. It would take a while for people to sort out what had happened to the king; Kellas knew of no other key, but probably Lord Vanas and Queen Dia each had one.

  The only clue to the murderer of the king would be the sword Kellas had left behind at the entrance to the king’s chambers, and he had made sure to bring along a student’s training sword bought in the market and thus untraceable.

  “I’m sorry, Uncle Kellas,” Arasit said in a low voice as they paused in a storeroom, out of sight, so he could catch his breath and rub at the ache in his back. “I think you liked Jehosh.”

  “I did like him. But I loved Atani.”

  “Funny to think you were once King Anjihosh’s loyal captain. I wonder if you are the only man who successfully betrayed him.”

  “No, he is the one who betrayed the Hundred by claiming to save it and instead imprisoning it. The Hundred does not belong to its conquerors. It belongs to the people who live here. Yet I thought our plans would all be for nothing when Atani died.”

  “Mama didn’t think so. She never gave up.”

  “It’s your mother who has always been the patient one, able to take t
he long view even if that meant the struggle has to continue into the next generation. She is the strategist. I am only the sword.”

  He opened the door of the storeroom to peer through, and saw an empty corridor and, in a nearby room, clerks hunched over writing desks industriously filling in ledgers, all unaware of the chaos about to crash down over the palace.

  At last he opened his hand and considered the ring.

  He had obeyed Dannarah’s order. But even as he thought it, he knew that today he had acted only for himself.

  “Still,” murmured Arasit, “even though my mother’s secret network spans the Hundred, even though they think we have only four Guardians when we really have nine, even though they don’t know about me, will it be enough? Jehosh’s heirs and his queens and lords and courtiers and soldiers have the coin and the assizes and the administration. They will hang on to their power. I think you struck too soon.”

  “What matters is that we act when the moment demands action, not that we wait until we deem the time to be right.”

  “Compared with the army Jehosh’s heirs can command, you don’t even have that many Black Wolves trained and ready to go.”

  “That may be so,” he said as he slipped the ring on his finger. The wolf’s head gleamed. “But now we have one more.”

  Acknowledgments

  Black Wolves became a tremendously difficult book to write because it got caught up in my beloved father’s final illness and death. Therefore I have a long list of acknowledgments to people whose help proved more crucial than they could possibly know.

  My thanks to: Alexander and David Rasmussen-Silverstein for long plot conversations and talking me off the ledge on multiple occasions. Rhiannon Rasmussen-Silverstein for listening when I needed to complain.

  Jay Silverstein for sticking it out.

  Delia Sherman, the Structure Whisperer, who talked me through my despair and into a plot/emotional structure that made sense.

  Robin LaFevers and Malinda Lo for support at a pivotal time.

  The participants in a Sirens Conference 2013 roundtable, led by Joy Kim, on “Women Political Leaders in Fantasy,” whose comments about what they wanted to see in epic fantasy turned my head around in a way that made me reconsider the entire nature of the story.