Darkwood

by M. E. Breen

  The wolves stopped a few yards short of her. The run seemed to have cost them no effort. They regarded her intently through bright eyes.

  “I am glad to see you,” Annie said.

  One of the wolves stepped forward. She had a short muzzle and small, almost dainty, paws. “You speak Hippa well, girl. So tell us this: where are you keeping Brisa, our queen?”

  “Me? I’m not keeping her. I—”

  The wolf interrupted her with a snarl. “We know you killed Rinka, and now you have his mate.”

  “You know this from Gibbet?” Annie said.

  The wolf narrowed her eyes. Then, as suddenly as if she had been shot, she dropped to her stomach and rolled over, lifting her chin so her neck was completely exposed. Until now, Rinka had been hidden from the wolves’ view by the wagon. Now he stepped from behind it, head held high. As Annie watched in amazement, the wolves dropped to the ground in one motion, offering their throats in deference to their leader. He did not immediately tell them to rise.

  “Gibbet has betrayed us,” Rinka said. “I made a grave error in dealing with him. We will have our revenge, but first, the queen. Rise, all of you.” The wolves came up fluidly, as if one body. They were thin, terribly thin, their fur dull and matted.

  The wolf who had spoken to Annie lowered her head.

  “What is it, Mira?” Rinka asked.

  “When Gibbet learned that the girl had taken the wagon, he sent us after her, as well as a small troop of men. Rumors passed through the camp that you were alive but we did not—of course we did not know you were with the girl.”

  Rinka nodded. “And the rest of the pack?”

  “Two hundred already gone. He was preparing to send the rest when we left. As for men, they look so alike, it’s hard to be certain. The ones he sent after us here are poor soldiers, I think, but well armed.”

  “Quickly, all of you. The queen.”

  The wolves began to dig at the hard earth around the pit. Annie watched them as if through a gauze curtain. A thousand wolves. A thousand wolves after the king, which meant a thousand wolves after Page. Oh, please, let him not have found her.

  From a distance the men’s muskets looked like a crop of sick, leafless plants. The men looked like sticks themselves, hardly better fed than the wolves. They were miners, she realized, miners from the Drop.

  The wolves erupted in victorious barking. They had broken through the thawing earth to the pit beneath, the hole just wide enough for Rinka to slip through. He reappeared in a matter of seconds, dragging Brisa behind him by the scruff of the neck. Her muzzle was tied shut with a piece of cord and blood had dried around her nose and mouth. Her eyes were open but she didn’t seem to recognize Rinka. Annie looked over her shoulder. The fastest men had almost reached the fence.

  “Keep digging!” she cried to the wolves. Then she, too, squeezed through the opening into the pit.

  Right away, she felt the darkness as a kind of relief. She could see better down here, here in the black element. The air was humid and thick, almost muddy. The pit was smaller than she remembered, too. For a moment, Annie wondered how much she’d grown in these last few months. But of course not. After she found the tunnel Gibbet must have moved the ringstone and filled in the cave, so now the dirt wall extended a few feet farther into the pit. Poor Brisa. The pit felt more like a tomb than ever. Then again, a tomb was just what Annie needed.

  The fence was no more than five feet high, but the first men who tried to climb over it fell back, yowling. The top bar of Chopper’s fence was covered with broken glass. One man began to cut at the rope she had tied around the gate, his companions egging him on with shouts and curses.

  She would have only a minute to get this done.

  “Stand back!” Annie felt the wolves’ many eyes on her, suspicious and interested. She coaxed Baggy backward until the rear of the wagon was even with the edge of the pit, then pushed the lever that controlled the wagon bed. At first the rabbits stuck to the wagon bed, the poison working as an adhesive. Then they began to peel free and fall. The bodies dropped by the dozens into the pit.

  Rinka looked up from tending Brisa to address his pack. “This is the victory supper Gibbet promised us,” he said.

  With a chorus of shouts the men pushed through the gate, then stopped abruptly in the middle of the lawn. They could see now that the wolves had not attacked Annie. The aggression in their faces slackened into confusion, then fear. Mira, who seemed to have been the leader in Rinka’s absence, saw her opportunity and seized it. The wolves reached the men before their muskets were even halfway to their shoulders.

  A wolf dipped her head, teeth bared.

  “No!” The command came not from Annie, but from Rinka. The wolf obeyed immediately. Rinka looked at Annie as if to say, Do whatever you plan to do, but do it quickly.

  She grabbed Baggy’s bridle and ran with him to where the first man lay splayed on his back. She reached for his musket, and the wolf guarding him stepped politely aside. The man gasped. He had freckles on his forehead and the sparse beginnings of a moustache on his upper lip. For a moment his eyes locked with hers, full of fear and something else she wouldn’t recognize until later: awe.

  Annie moved on to each man in turn, until all the weapons were heaped in the back of the wagon. Once more, she backed Baggy up to the pit. With a clatter, the muskets slid into the hole. A muffled popping sound rose from the pit, followed by the bittersweet smell of gunpowder. She nudged a clump of dirt toward the hole with her foot and watched the darkness swallow it.

  Free of her bonds, Brisa turned her head to the side and lapped frantically at the snow. Rinka hovered over her, nuzzling her head and back.

  “You’d better stay with her,” Annie said over her shoulder as she cut away the last of Baggy’s makeshift harness.

  “But you’ll need help, a wolf to vouch for you.”

  “What about Mira?”

  “Mira is … yes. But even so …” He barked an order and Mira ran over to him. The man she’d been guarding remained just as he was, thoroughly terrorized.

  “Mira, go with the girl. Do as she says. She is one of us.”

  Annie felt her face grow hot. She kept her back turned, pretending to fiddle with the horse, so she did not see whatever Mira did to make Rinka say, in a sharper tone, “You will do as she says.”

  “I will.”

  He approached Annie and, to her surprise, touched his muzzle to her palm. They looked at each other for a moment, Annie struggling to find words for the queer sensation around her heart.

  “I’m sorry about your leg,” she said.

  He cocked his head to the side. “I think I got off rather easily, considering.”

  As she rode out of Chopper’s yard, Annie turned and saw him watching her, and knew that he would watch until she disappeared among the trees of the forest.

  Mira did not slow or turn around for several miles. She would run ahead, double back, run off again. Gradually the gap between her and Baggy increased, until Annie could see her only intermittently through the trees. Quite suddenly she appeared at Annie’s side. She spoke in the clipped tones a parent might use with a fretful child.

  “The camp is deserted. He’s already sent the second wave. They’ll have a good start on us already, but a pack never travels as fast as …” She looked doubtfully at the horse. “I hope we catch them before they reach the king’s army.” She started to trot away.

  “Mira, wait! Rinka called Brisa queen. Is he your king?”

  It seemed an innocent enough question, but the wolf’s expression turned positively ferocious.

  “Yes, he is our king! Some may choose not to honor him, but he is no less a king because of it.”

  Annie hesitated, but she was curious. “Who does not honor him?”

  “Fristi and her followers. They wait for another, some figure of legend. They cannot accept the power already in our midst. She was with him the night he fought that old traitor, Sharta.”

  “W
hy do you call Sharta a traitor?”

  “He abandoned his own son to serve a human. Who could forgive such an act?”

  Several miles passed before Annie had the courage to speak to Mira again.

  “What do you know of the apothecary?”

  Mira’s ears stiffened.

  “The dark feeder.”

  “Why do you call it that?”

  “That’s what it does. We also call it witch, shape-changer, spell-caster. It does all of those things.”

  “Is she—is it an animal?”

  “Human, animal. It is ancient and has many forms. And many children.”

  “It has children?”

  “Why not?”

  Annie decided to try a different tack. “When you say it feeds on darkness, do you mean instead of food?”

  “Judging by the teeth, I’d say it eats meat. But the dark makes it strong. Light makes it weak. We have a legend that tells how the witch cast a spell to hide the moon, but that would make it very old indeed.”

  “Seven centuries,” Annie murmured.

  “In any case, I’d keep clear of it. It can’t do much to you unless it can see you, and then it can do anything it wants.”

  Uneasily, Annie looked around her. The apothecary was everywhere and nowhere: a hand with long, dirty nails turned out to be no more than a branch full of twigs, the black tips bare of snow; the hunched shape of a shoulder nothing worse than a boulder; the glint of black teeth only the sun striking off a tree trunk slick with ice. Annie’s eyes grew tired with looking. Her eyelids drooped. Baggy’s rolling gait felt strangely soothing, and she found herself thinking not of the apothecary but of her own mother, and whether she had ever rocked her like this in the brief time that their lives overlapped.

  “Wake up. We need to make a decision. The tracks split in two here.”

  “Is it part of the battle plan?” Annie struggled to remember everything she knew about warfare, which was nothing.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Which way did Gibbet go?”

  Mira tossed her head. “If you can pick one man’s scent out of all this, you have a better nose than I do.”

  Annie looked around. Hundreds of wolf tracks had turned the forest floor into a muddy slough. Tracing an individual scent would be as difficult as tracing a single set of footprints.

  “Perhaps we should split up?”

  Mira looked delighted.

  But Annie was uneasy. Why had Gibbet split the army in two here? She peered through the trees ahead of them, but all she saw was more trees. She wished she could cut them down, just for a second, just to see.

  And then she smiled, really smiled, so that Mira asked sharply, “What is it? Are you ill?”

  “The cutting fields.”

  “Explain yourself.”

  “The fight will be in the cutting fields. Gibbet needs an open plain to see the battle, but he’ll want the wolves hidden from view as long as possible.”

  “How does that explain his decision to split the pack?”

  “I’m not sure.” Annie closed her eyes, trying to remember. Her uncle and Chopper had approached the field separately from the east and west. She had had a clear view from where she stood … Her eyes flew open.

  “There’s a hill overlooking the fields from the north. You can climb down the wash, but it’s steep and very narrow. The field is open in the other directions. They’ll see the wolves coming from the west, they’ll turn to fight … they’ll turn their backs to the hill, and”—she pointed to the path branching north—“the wolves using that trail will drop down on top of them.”

  “Clever,” Mira said.

  “You take the northern branch. Like I said, the path down the hill is narrow. Block it with your body if you have to.” She hesitated. “You’ll be all right?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Good-bye, then.”

  The wolf’s expression softened, and in that moment she reminded Annie of Aunt Prim. The moment passed. Mira turned and ran swiftly along the tracks left by Gibbet’s army.

  The day had dawned white and cloudy and even now, at midday, the sun struggled to brighten the forest floor. For the third time in as many minutes, Baggy stopped to consider his route. Where the wolves had simply jumped clear of roots and bushes, the horse proceeded gingerly. All her coaxing, even her sharpest kicks, could not make him hurry. Abruptly, Annie turned his head straight south, and the horse, as if knowing they were headed at last to a proper road, hustled along. A quarter mile later they broke from the trees and joined the road that connected the cutting fields to Gorgetown. It was strange how quiet everything was, how normal. What had she expected, a black flag waving from every rooftop?

  Two dark specks were making their way toward her, now clear against a patch of snow, now lost against the muddy ground. Wolves? They were much too small to be wolves.

  Then Annie was standing in the middle of the road, the cats purring and rubbing against her ankles. Around her neck Prudence wore a circlet of braided hair. The hair was pale gold, nearly white, without any other colors mixed in. Page’s hair. Page was safe. Annie slipped the circlet onto her wrist. But Isadore wore something around his neck as well, a red ribbon shot through with gold thread, the colors of the king’s army. Annie dropped the ribbon to the ground.

  They were together. He had found her. She had wanted to be found.

  A farmer at work in his field felt the sun’s warmth on the back of his neck and straightened up, resting his spade against the toe of his boot. Nothing had grown in this plot of land for more than a decade, but every spring he turned the soil and planted seed. Lifting his face to the weak light he saw a girl fly past on a horse, her body bent nearly flat to the animal’s back, her hair whipping out behind her like a black flag. What can that poor child be running from? he wondered. He watched her a moment longer, then smiled and stuck his spade into the thawing earth. She was not running away, he decided, but toward.

  Chapter 17

  The smells of the battlefield reached her first: death and dying, fear, of course, and exertion, clouds and clouds of doubt, and someone, somewhere, reeking of joy. She heard shouts and gunfire, the fierce barking of a wolf, cries of pain. Then they rounded a bend in the road and she reined the horse in so hard his front feet left the ground. She had wanted desperately to reach the fight, but now that she was here she wanted just as desperately to turn around and go back—not just back along the road, but back in time to the Annie who had never seen a war.

  Corpses covered the field, red for the king’s army, black for the wolves. The men fought with guns and swords and axes. The fighting was thickest closest to the hill, just as she had feared. The men kept their backs to the ridge. The wolves hemmed them in. Their numbers were about equal, which meant the rest of the wolves had not yet arrived. Had Mira caught up to them? Had she stopped them? Annie scanned the hilltop. There was the oak clinging by its roots to the cliff, and the spot where she had stood with Izzy and looked down at her uncle and Chopper. And there, in the shadow of the oak, a square of purple, an odd patch of color amid the landscape’s grays and browns. Uncle Jock had complained for days about the purple patch on the knee of his breeches.

  Womanish. I look a fool.

  It’s all I have. Would you rather the wind freeze your joints?

  He had tipped the gun almost vertical, barrel pointing down as though he planned to fire at the very base of the wash. Of course she would be there. The king would try to protect her, might even shield her with his own body. But would he think to look up?

  Look up, look up, look up.

  Uncle Jock took aim, frowned, lowered his weapon, and took aim again. Page must be moving. Running back and forth, maybe looking for Annie even as Annie was looking for her.

  Look up, look up, look up.

  Annie watched her uncle take aim once more. He smiled. His shoulders relaxed.

  She threw back her head and howled.

  She left the horse—too skittish, too
slow. She left her boots, useless without their laces. When she fell on the blood-slick field she got up and ran on. She climbed over the dead bodies of men and wolves. She pushed living bodies out of her way, until they seemed to move themselves, an avenue opening before her, on either side a wall of red and black. She could see them now, Page and the king, standing at the end of the avenue. They were looking at her, their mouths open in shock, in greeting.

  Uncle Jock’s finger moved on the trigger.

  Annie’s body struck Page just ahead of the bullet. She felt her sister jerk in her arms, then they landed together in a heap. The king bent over them.

  “Where? Where’s the shooter?”

  Up there, Annie tried to say, but her voice came out a snarl.

  The king flinched.

  “Up,” Annie tried again. “Uncle.”

  She pointed, but Uncle Jock had disappeared. The king’s face turned pale.

  “Look,” he said to Annie. “Look.”

  The rest of the wolves had arrived. They crowded the hilltop. At the front stood a wolf with a reddish coat that Annie recognized from the night Sharta died. She stood stiffly, her tail held high as she surveyed the battle below. But her face …

  She looks so sad, Annie thought. There was a stirring in the ranks behind her, a wolf pushing through to the front. Mira, foam flecking her jaws and sides heaving. Mira had reached them.

  All this time Annie kept her hands pressed over her sister’s throat. The bullet had struck Page in the neck, just under the jaw.

  “It’s only a flesh wound,” she said to the king. “It’s only a flesh wound,” she said, again and again, as the blood ran over her hands and soaked her sister’s hair.

  “Is there anyone to help? Any doctor? Your Highness, answer me!”

  “East,” the king said. “Two sisters. A medical tent.” He spoke slowly, dreamily. “Will you run there, as you ran here? I have never seen anything like it. I thought at first you were an animal.”