Brotherhood of the Wolf

by David Farland

  Averan peeked in. She could see nothing. But immediately she heard the desperate shrieks and whistles of ferrin. In moments, twenty of the hairy little man-shaped creatures raced from the building, seeking escape, afraid that Averan might try to kill them.

  One ferrin ran over Averan’s foot and tripped, rolled head over tail, spilling some crumbs that it carried in a scrap of cloth. Averan could have booted it across the street, but though she’d never liked ferrin, she’d never wished one dead, either.

  “If the ferrin like it here, then this place should be safe,” Averan assured the green woman.

  “If the ferrin like it here, then this place should be safe,” the green woman repeated.

  Averan crept into the huge building. In its rafters high above, pigeons cooed querulously.

  “I’ll bet the ferrin were after those birds,” Averan said. In the pale light slanting in from the door, she spotted a pile of feathers on the floor. “Looks like they got one.”

  The green woman prowled over to the pile of feathers, sniffed at it. “Blood, no?”

  “I wouldn’t eat it,” Averan agreed. “Blood, no.”

  The green woman looked mournful. She squatted on the floor and began munching a parsnip.

  Averan sat next to her and gazed all about. Averan really had no idea what to do with her life, or where to go. She knew only that she wanted to get north.

  She closed her eyes, imagined the big maps in the graak’s aerie back home.

  She felt the Earth King now, blazing like a green gem. But when she felt for him, her voice caught in her throat. “The Earth King is coming south!” she said. “He’s come a long way already!”

  Averan tried to eat some mushrooms. Even though they were fresh and nutty-tasting, they didn’t satisfy. Her stomach craved something else. Aside from a crust of bread that Baron Goutgut had spared her last night, she hadn’t eaten in two days. The mushrooms seemed somehow dry and without substance.

  Averan nibbled at a fig, but didn’t much care for it, either. She wanted better food. She craved a steak, sweet and juicy.

  Averan reached into the little purse at her side and got out her wooden comb, began combing the garden soil from her hair. The green woman watched her with unabashed curiosity. When Averan finished her own hair, she took the comb to the green woman.

  “Comb,” Averan said, showing her the item. “I’m going to comb your hair.”

  “My hair,” the green woman said. Averan grinned. The green woman had more than repeated, she’d showed that she understood the difference between “mine” and “yours.”

  “You are a smart one,” Averan said. “Beast master Brand used to have a crow that could talk, but it only repeated foolishness, and it died anyway. I don’t care what Baron Roly-Poly says, you’re smarter than a crow.”

  “I are a smart one,” the green woman agreed.

  Averan began trying to comb the green woman’s hair, but the green woman kept moving her head around, trying to look up at the comb.

  “Keep still,” Averan said, holding the green woman’s head for a moment.

  She tried to distract the creature. “I think we should name you something, don’t you? My name is Averan. And Roland’s name is Roland, and Baron Poll is Baron Poll, even if I like to call him nastier things. Everyone has names. Would you like a name?”

  “What… name?” the green woman asked. Averan stopped combing, wondered if the green woman really understood the question. It seemed impossible that she could understand.

  “I don’t know what to name you,” Averan said. “You have green skin, so I suppose I could call you Greenie.” It was the first thing she thought of.

  When Averan was little, she used to play with a five year-old girl named Autumn Brown who lived down in Keep Haberd. Autumn had a white cat named Whitey and a red hound named Red. And Autumn’s hair was brown, so the last name Brown fit her well enough. But Averan thought it was really stupid to name everything after its color.

  “How do you like the name Olive, or Emerald? I know a woman named Emerald. If you squint, you can sort of see that she has greenish skin. But you’re a much prettier green than she is.”

  The green woman listened to each name, and tried them on her tongue, but did not seem impressed.

  “How about Spinach?” Averan joked.

  “Spinach?” the green woman said thoughtfully.

  “It’s a plant, a kind of lettuce.” Averan finished combing the snarls from the green woman’s hair. The green woman hadn’t yelped or complained even once. “There, I’m all done. Don’t worry, we’ll come up with a name that fits you true.”

  The green woman grabbed Averan’s hand. “True name?” the green woman asked in a strange tone, as if she had just remembered something. “True name?”

  Averan paused. Magical creatures had true names, names that must never be spoken in public, lest an enemy learn it.

  “Yes, true name,” Averan said. “My true name is Averan. Your true name is …?”

  The green woman looked up, but in the shadows, Averan could not really make out her features. The green woman chanted in a commanding tone, “Arise now from the dust, my champion! Clothe yourself in flesh. I call you by your true name: Foul Deliverer, Fair Destroyer.”

  Averan stepped back. The green woman’s tone, her whole demeanor, had changed so completely as she spoke that she seemed to be another person. Averan knew the green woman was repeating something she had heard, repeating it exactly. If Averan had doubted that the green woman was magical—if she’d thought even for an instant that she was but an oddly colored woman from some distant realm beyond the Caroll Sea—that doubt was now erased.

  Averan didn’t want to look afraid, so she stepped close again and stroked the green woman’s hair. She didn’t particularly like the sound of the green woman’s name: Foul Deliverer, Fair Destroyer.

  If the green woman was indeed a “Foul Deliverer,” a “Fair Destroyer,” whom was she meant to deliver, and what would she destroy?

  “That’s a nice true name,” Averan assured the green woman. “But I think we should come up with something shorter. I’ll call you Spring from now on. Spring.” Averan touched the green woman as she spoke the name.

  A strong gust of wind slammed the huge building, and one vast door swung on its squeaky hinges. Averan hadn’t known the building had a chimney, but suddenly she heard the wind moan up its stone throat.

  The green woman leapt to her feet and shouted wordlessly in rage or terror.

  “It’s only the wind,” Averan said. “It won’t hurt you. I think a storm is coming.”

  “Wind?” the green woman asked. “Wind?” She backed to the far side of the room. Averan followed, found the green woman huddled in a corner.

  “Good girl,” Averan said calmly. “This is a good place. The wind won’t find us here.”

  Averan put her arms around the green woman. The powerful creature felt as if her muscles were made of iron, yet she shook from terror.

  Averan had nowhere to go and nothing to do. She held the green woman and sang a lullaby. Averan’s mother used to sing lullabies when Averan was young, so Averan now sang:

  “The wind blows wild tonight,

  sweet and wild tonight.

  It shakes the trees,

  but don’t let it shake your knees.

  It’s only the wind, my child, good night.”

  The green woman didn’t go to sleep. Averan felt more hungry than tired herself, so she talked to the green woman long into the night, telling her stories and the names for things, trying to teach the green woman to speak, while keeping her calm and distracted.

  Near dawn, the green woman slapped her hand over Averan’s mouth, as if warning her to shut up.

  Every muscle in the green woman’s body tensed, and she climbed to one knee and sniffed the air. “Blood, yes,” she whispered longingly.

  Averan’s heart began thumping.

  Raj Ahten’s men are outside, Averan thought. The green woma
n smells Invincibles.

  Averan looked all around the building. It was huge and empty. It offered nowhere to hide, only shelter from the wind.

  But the building’s support posts were made of thick oak, and heavy beams crisscrossed the posts every few feet. The beams formed a sort of ladder that led up to the rafters where the pigeons roosted.

  If a ferrin can climb those beams in the dark, Averan thought, I can, too.

  She went to the wall, put her hands on the nearest beam, which was chest high, and climbed on top of it, then continued up to the next and the next.

  She was surprised at how hard it was to climb, without her endowment of brawn. It was dangerous work. Muddauber wasps had built nests on some of the beams, and cobwebs were everywhere. The rough-hewn beams had big splinters in them.

  Averan worried that she might get stung by a wasp, or bitten by a spider, or cut her hand.

  Worse yet, she could lose her grip and fall.

  In less than a minute she scurried thirty feet up the wall to the juncture of the rafters.

  Here, no starlight made its way into the building at all. She felt secure in such total darkness, though she had to find the rafters and climb onto them by feel alone.

  “Spring,” Averan whispered, “come up here.”

  The green woman remained crouched on the floor, like a cat ready to spring. If she understood Averan’s plea, she did not show it. She looked instead as if she would hunt, and this frightened Averan.

  How strong could the green woman possibly be? Averan wondered. The green woman had fallen thousands of feet from the sky without getting killed or badly hurt—but she did bleed.

  If she met one of Raj Ahten’s Invincibles, would she stand a chance against him? What if she met a whole bunch of them?

  The green woman might be as strong as an Invincible, but she was not a trained warrior with endowments of metabolism.

  Against a faster opponent, she’d be killed in seconds.

  “Please, Spring!” Averan whispered. “Come and hide.”

  But Spring remained wary. “Blood, yes,” she growled fiercely.

  The green woman’s hunger made Averan’s mouth water. She’d wanted the taste of blood yesterday morning, when she’d looked at the assassin’s corpse on the hillside. Now, though carrots and parsnips partly filled Averan’s belly, Averan thought longingly of the assassin, and hoped that the green woman would kill someone.

  No, I don’t hope that, Averan told herself. I don’t want blood.

  “Spring, get up here right now!” Averan whispered.

  But immediately Averan heard a sound that made her blood chill. Outside the building a hissing erupted, a dry buzz deeper in tone than that of a rattlesnake, a sound she’d heard only once before—the sound a reaver makes as air rattles through the chitinous flaps under its abdomen. At Keep Haberd, Averan had flown low over the reavers. She had heard tens of thousands of them making that rattling all at once.

  Now she heard only one, exhaling slowly, just outside the door.

  It must have followed me from Keep Haberd! Averan thought wildly. Then, more reasonably, she reminded herself that it couldn’t possibly be true. I rode most of the way on old Leatherneck, she told herself. Even reavers couldn’t have trailed me. No, this has to be some sort of scout.

  Averan had heard that reavers often sent out scouts. She also knew that reavers preferred to hunt on warm, sultry nights, when the weather most closely mimicked the conditions of their lairs in the Underworld. Tonight it was moist and cool, not reaver weather at all.

  She’d also heard that reavers hunted by sound, scent, and motion. If she stayed here in the rafters and did not speak or move, she might be safe.

  She yearned to yell a warning to the green woman below, but dared not so much as whisper.

  Outside the building, the reaver hissed. The green woman raised her head and shouted in delight; then she leapt up and raced to meet it.

  The reaver charged to the huge open doors.

  It stood some twenty feet at the shoulder, so that even though Averan hid in the rafters above it, she could have leapt on its back without getting hurt.

  Its huge leathery head was as big as the bed of a large wagon, and rows and rows of crystalline teeth filled its mouth. Reavers had no eyes or ears or nose, but along the back of its head, feelers fanned out like snakes. Runes of power were tattooed onto its head, on its forehead and in columns near its leathery upper lips. The runes shone silver in the darkness, glowing with their own ghostlight.

  The reaver’s four long legs were dark and thin and gleamed like bone. Its huge forearms had three-toed hands with great claws, each claw curved like an assassin’s khivar and just as long.

  The reaver bore a weapon in its foreclaws, an enormous blade with a hilt of crystal, as if carved from reaver bone. The sword’s thick blade was slightly curved and three times the length of a man.

  The reaver hissed and swung the blade overhead in a great arc, as if to bring it crashing down upon the green woman, but the blade bit deep into a rafter beam just a few yards from Averan, then stuck, hanging over the green woman’s head.

  The green woman shouted in glee and raced toward the reaver.

  Involuntarily, Averan shouted, “Spring, stop!”

  But the green woman did not stop. She merely drew a rune in the air, a couple of quick movements of the hand, and then raced forward.

  When she slapped the reaver’s jaw, the effect was astonishing: there was a clap like thunder, and shards of crystalline bone exploded through the reaver’s flesh.

  Averan gasped. Nothing should do that, she told herself. No warhammer or maul—even if it were wielded by a warrior with twenty endowments of brawn—could have dealt a reaver such a fearsome blow.

  But Averan had seen it clearly in the starlight.

  The reaver hissed in pain and tried to lurch backward, but could hardly move.

  The green woman leapt at it, and slapped the reaver’s face again, to the same effect. The sound of the blow echoed from the rafters.

  This time the reaver shuddered and dropped lifeless to the ground.

  The green woman climbed atop it, stuck a slender arm deep into the reaver’s leathery head, and pulled out a handful of its brains.

  Ichor streamed from the reaver’s wounds.

  It was said that a reaver had no scent of its own, but only tried to mimic the scents of those things around it.

  Yet as Averan stood clinging to the rafters in terror, she realized that the green woman had smelled the reaver.

  In the closed room, the stench of the reaver’s ichor was overwhelming, and now Averan could smell it, rich and sweet. She had not eaten much for days. Even the food she’d tried had not satisfied her, and she’d thought she craved a nice and juicy steak.

  Now her mouth watered as if she were a starving thing who had seldom seen a crust of bread.

  She knew what she needed, what she craved.

  Averan scrambled down the support beams of the huge shed, too excited to sit still. She wanted to wet herself in terror, for the scent of reaver blood was so alluring that she knew she could not resist, not now, not ever again.

  Reavers. She needed to eat reavers. But unlike the green woman, Averan had no way to kill her own.

  She raced to the corpse.

  “Foul Deliverer, Fair Destroyer,” the green woman had called herself. Now Averan knew what she had been created to destroy.

  And dimly Averan understood a bit more of her own destiny. The green woman’s blood now flowed through Averan’s veins, and somehow they had become one in nature.

  Averan could not resist the impulse to climb atop the reaver, thrust in her own hands and eat greedily from the sweet meat that rested warm and juicy inside the reaver’s crystalline skull.

  “Mmm … mmm,” the green woman crooned as she fed. “Blood, yes.”

  “Blood, yes,” Averan agreed as she shoved meat into her mouth.

  She knew some lore about reavers. Averan kn
ew that when a reaver died, its kinsmen consumed it. As they did, they took upon themselves the reaver’s lore of magic, and its strength, so that the oldest reavers, those that had fed most on their younger kin, became the greatest: the most powerful sorcerers, the most valiant warriors.

  Finally Averan had found a food that satisfied, that sent the blood quickening through her veins. Even as Averan sated herself with the sweet meat of her first reaver, she felt herself responding to it.

  This shouldn’t happen, Averan told herself. People don’t get strong from eating reavers. People don’t get anything but sick from eating reavers. I’m not a reaver.

  Yet she glutted herself and thanked the earth powers for this gift.

  36

  TARGETS IN THE DARK

  As the watchman blew the horns calling for Gaborn’s troops to prepare to mount up, Myrrima felt restless. She felt eager to ride to Carris. The midnight ride would be stimulating, and she was glad she would have to carry only two pups with her now, rather than four.

  So she saddled her mount, then began doing the same to Iome’s. Her pups played in the stable as she worked, running about, sniffing at each horse’s stall, chasing one another’s tails.

  She had just bridled and blanketed Iome’s mount when Jureem entered the stables. “Do not bother,” he said in his thick Taifan accent. “Her Majesty pleases not to ride tonight, but instead will wait for tomorrow.”

  “Dawn?” Myrrima asked. That would waste six hours.

  “Later,” Jureem answered. “At dawn she plans to eat, then take endowments from her pups. She will not want to carry dogs with her into battle, and her horse is fast enough so that it can overtake the main body of the army.”

  Myrrima and Iome had claimed their pups at the same time. If Iome was right, Myrrima might also take endowments from her last two pups by dawn. It would be better to take those endowments before traveling. Iome couldn’t very well ride into Fleeds with four pups in her saddlebags, lest everyone in Rofehavan mark her as a Wolf Lord.

  Myrrima hated the idea of waiting. It had very nearly cost her life to wait for Iome yesterday.