The Tiger and the Wolf

by kindle@netgalley. com

  ‘Go far enough and everything does, I’ve heard,’ she confirmed. ‘But the rivers here won’t, only they’ll be cluttered with ice. The boats’d get torn open, and you don’t want to find yourself sunk in water that cold.’

  He nodded vigorously. Already he was well swathed in woollens and a fur-edged coat, gifts of the Horse. Annoyingly, Venater seemed to care less about the cold, or else he was just suffering in silence purely to vex Asmander. He had been sleeping with one of the Horse women, too, which meant that his nights were notably warmer.

  Eshmir had been studying Asmander. ‘I travel to the Many Mouths, Champion. They rule the Wolf right now. I am sent to strengthen their friendship with the Horse.’ She had not spoken of her own mission before, and Asmander had been so wrapped up in his own that he had not enquired. Passing through the Plains she had been a model of calm authority, but now she seemed uncertain, a woman reaching out too far.

  ‘You’ve not travelled to the north before?’ he asked. She shook her head. ‘Family business, though, like yourself.’ ‘These things are known: one’s clan is the river in which a

  man swims all his life,’ Asmander quoted, hearing his own voice and its petulance.

  ‘Your father’s a big man, adviser to the throne, yes?’ When there was someone on it, at least. But he just nodded. ‘Mine is a Low Malik of the Horse Society. He has eleven

  children, each expected to bring glory, and to repay his investment in us. So I go north, to strength our links with the tribes.’ It was only in hearing those words, and only for a moment, that he realized how much she had not wanted to undertake this journey; she had kept such feelings hidden all this time, and done her duty.

  ‘I understand.’ It was an understatement.

  ‘So, Champion, where does your own path take you?’ ‘To the Wolves I must go. These Many Mouths sound suitable. They rule the others, like a Kasra? Or are their tribes at each others throats, like the Plains dwellers?’

  ‘Something in between. The High Chief is listened to. Each tribe is its own.’

  He nodded again. ‘You would like me to travel there with you?’

  ‘You will gain credit in the eyes of the Horse Society.’ She did not say: I will feel safer with you there. ‘That can mean many things in a hard land. Well?’

  ‘It is good,’ he agreed. ‘You shall have me and Venater.’

  ‘And the Laughing Man girl, she will come at your heels, no doubt.’ The Hetman gave him a look.

  ‘I am not responsible for her.’

  Her expression showed that she was pointedly declining to comment.

  The next day they saw the first Horse raft travelling south, a great construction of logs that encompassed its own commodity, that northern timber that the Sun River Nation could never get enough of. The handful of Horse people who were poling it clear of the riverbank called out greetings to Eshmir’s canoes, and this brief exchange told them that the trading post was close enough that, if they paddled hard, they should reach it around nightfall.

  Asmander found he did not want to leave the river. While they travelled these waters, no matter how far north they went, there was still an unbroken line connecting him with home. The moment he headed inland, no matter that the north was said to be a place of lakes and streams and rains, he would be cut off from the lands that he knew.

  The riverbanks were already pale with snow, and each night he huddled ever closer to the fire. The days were scarcely warmer. He was entering an alien and hostile land. He was stepping within the Crown of the World at last.

  12

  Battered by the driving snow, the air around her was robbed of all other scents and sounds. As soon as she was out through the gates, Maniye shouldered her way off into the wind, searching her mind desperately for a picture of how the world around her was put together. The infallible orienteering she had used to find the Horse post had been stripped from her just a yard outside its walls.

  Downriver , was the only thought in her mind, and yet as she stumbled onto the bank – nearly blundering straight into the swift and icy water – she was somehow upriver of the post, already out of her way and with her enemies between her and her destination.

  She would have to make a wide circle around the trading post, she knew, and hope that neither Amiyen nor Broken Axe chanced upon her. She would also have to trust that, with no visible landmark, she could even accomplish such a feat without going in circles or straying off course entirely.

  No sane human being would be out in this blizzard, no matter what form they could assume. Even if she could turn into a great bear, she would be holed up and sheltering somewhere. The idea was so tempting: find some hole to crawl into and set off again after the weather had cleared. Except that would be fatal. The falling snow was the foe of trackers, obliterating scent and prints with a liberal hand. But already-fallen snow would speak of her passing to any eyes that cared to look for it.Yes, she would be one set of wolf tracks in the Shadow of the Wolf, but it was just as Kalameshli had said: they would be very small wolf tracks. She did not think for a moment that her pursuers would not recognize her tread.

  So she turned herself around. Now the wind was behind her, mockingly speeding her steps even as it chilled her, raking her coat the wrong way and getting under the layered fur to her skin. She leapt and loped through a thickening morass of white, knowing that here again her size would betray her. Why can I not Step like Hesprec does, and be a wolf of whatever size I choose? But for the people of her totem the beast echoed the human that took its shape.

  She thought there was a shadow to her left that must be the palisade wall of the trading post, and pulled away from it, losing it amid the blowing curtain of flakes. Or else it had been just some trick of the weather, and she was ploughing away from the river entirely. Or else she had never been anywhere near the river to start with. Something within her was already losing hope. All that confidence and bloody-mindedness that had carried her this far was being sapped from her by the cold, by the constant struggle to make headway.

  She wanted to go home at that moment. If Amiyen had not made it plain that the return of a living Stone River’s daughter was part of nobody’s plan right then, she might even have surrendered herself. She was just a foolish girl, or at least she could have maybe convinced her father of that. She could even claim that Hesprec had enchanted her somehow with his Snake sorcery. They would believe many bad things of her, so why not that she was stupid and that she was weak.

  And Hesprec would die, of course: either under Kalameshli’s knife, or of the cold if she abandoned him out here. In that moment, when she was at her lowest, she could not bring herself to care.

  She realized that she had been heading for something for the last few heartbeats. Her eyes had found something to focus on in the maddening whiteness and, with no other point of reference, she had made it her beacon – just a shadow in the snow, but she was starved for any kind of darkness, trapped in the blizzard’s all-encompassing pale fist.

  It was darkness she found. There he was, waiting for her, hackles up against the cold and his pale coat dusted with snow, but with no other sign that he was sharing the same storm that she had fought her way through.

  Broken Axe.

  Abruptly she did not want to go home. Not if it meant Broken Axe. She had come to a dead stop as soon as she realized who she was looking at, and for a moment the two of them stared at one another, wolf to wolf. She bared her fangs in her best intimidating snarl, and he did not even dignify her with a single shown tooth.

  Then he Stepped, and she shrunk backwards. The man was worse than the beast, so much worse. He stood, lean and hard and with a sheepskin cloak snapping and rippling fiercely about his shoulders like a living thing.

  He moved towards her, hands out slightly, reaching. She felt a pinioning terror at just being this close to him, crouching with her belly to the snow, still showing her teeth and yet every line of her body signalling abject submission.

  Could I attack
him?The thought found her mind somehow. She was in her wolf shape still, and Wolf’s grown children all had fangs and claws, be they never so small.

  She could not make herself even consider it. She felt that if she touched him, even to tear at him with her jaws, then she would die. The death that he had visited on her mother would leap across to her and strike her down.

  His face was very calm, a slight frown over those narrow black eyes. She could discern every hair of his stubbly beard, the scar on his cheek.

  Her fear saved her, as it had before. Abruptly she had leapt up into the air, all four feet off the ground, and twisted to come down facing away from him and, even as he lunged for her, she was away.

  She knew that he would Step a moment later, and come hounding down her trail after her. Still, she put as much distance between them as she could, sending out her pleas to the spirits of weather and wind that the snow would shroud her just enough to be out of his sight. She let her path take her left and then right, sharp turns taken blind into the snow. Suddenly she needed no sense of north or south, upriver or down. The only direction she needed to concern herself with was away.

  She ran, and once again she was amazed at how she could run. Even though the snow conspired to drag at her; even though her muscles burned. She did not look back: that was not an easy luxury for wolves. In her mind, Broken Axe’s jaws were forever an inch from closing on her haunches.

  Then the white carpet was thicker and thicker, and more than once she tumbled into a sudden snow-filled dip or a drift that threatened to bury her. Worse, always there was the creeping chill that she tried to keep at bay with each instant’s burning exertion. No pelt, no inhered winter clothing could keep this early winter at bay forever. However swift she was on her wolf legs, on good ground, this heavy going was killing her by degrees.

  She did not believe that it would slow Broken Axe in the same way. She did not believe that anything could slow him, not even the great spirits of winter.

  For a moment she Stepped to her human form, stumbling and tripping on two feet, but the chill seized her instantly in its jaws and shook her, and she knew that she could not survive – that all Broken Axe would find of her would be a cold corpse. It was as a wolf again that she ran on.

  She was not sure exactly when she had reached the trees. Numbly, she recognized their shadows around her, and understood that the lessened snowfall was because of their sprays of needle-edged boughs above her, already growing heavy with white.

  Am I north, or east? She must be north, again, for there was no river in sight. North and west – so back the way she had come.

  By that time there was nothing more left to her. The well of energy that had whipped her all the way from the hall of her father had run dry. Her bones were cold and her strength used up.

  Here, below the patchwork shelter of the trees, she knew she must find somewhere to rest. Under the smothering cover of the clouds, the day had already expired. She would follow its example if she did not find somewhere to hide up and lick her wounds.

  And if Broken Axe found her . . . ? If he tracked her even through the snow? If he was staring at her even now?

  She could muster only the feeblest flicker of fear. She had revised her opinion; the weather was the greater god. Not even the Wolf’s most deadly son would willingly have subjected himself to this.

  Soon after, she found a tree that some past storm had pushed over, leaning into two of its fellows with half of its roots wrenched up out of the soil. There she huddled, out of the wind and its cold burden, a small wolf in a small space that would not have admitted the girl, let alone Broken Axe in any of his forms. Outside, the diligent broom of the snow smoothed over her tracks.

  She could not know that, while Broken Axe had been harrying her, Amiyen and her remaining son had guessed at her intended destination and set off swiftly downriver for the further Horse encampment, with murder on their minds. She would not hear their howls of rage once they realized their mistake.

  At last, after such a fierce chase, she slept.

  She woke.

  She was bitterly cold but in her mind was an understanding that she had felt colder in the recent past. The hole about her was now snug with her body warmth, kept in by the enfolding arms of the snow itself. She was ravenously hungry.

  There was light, pure white light, emanating from where the snow lay thinnest, and she could only be thankful that her hiding place had been here in the lee of the ruined tree, or she might have been buried and dead before now.

  I wasn’t thinking . There hadn’t been much room left in her for thought at the end.

  She scrabbled and pushed with nose and paws, breaking out by mere inches, then scenting the air.

  The snow had extinguished the rich tapestry of the forest’s memory, wiping it clean. She could only scent what had transpired since the storm had blown over. There were squirrels, her nose told her, and there had been a boar come foraging close not long before, and in the distance she reckoned she caught a whiff of bear.

  No wolves though – nor men.

  She would trust to her nose and dare to believe that Broken Axe had been left behind in the snow. No guarantee that he would not find her again – that he would not find her soon. Once she moved on, the snow would turn traitor and tell any curious eyes where she had gone. Still, no Broken Axe right now. No Amiyen. No Kalameshli Takes Iron. No vengeful father.

  She wriggled her way out into the open and stood, blinking at the still, white world. There was a fragile and unfamiliar silence to it, and it struck her that she had never known a winter without having the walls of Akrit’s hall to shelter her.

  And yet I live, she told herself fiercely, whilst knowing that this was just the winter’s very first flourish, and she had barely survived even that. In the back of her mind had been the fond fiction that she would simply live out the cold as a wolf, if she had to: hunting the small creatures of the forest and taking the shelter that nature provided. Her mute brothers did it, needing no better and having no human form to assume, so why not her?

  She now had the first understandings of why not. The true wolves of the forest might have human souls, but they had grown and lived as beasts, and knew all the ways of the wild. And even then, save for a few, they lived in packs. Facing the ice season alone was a fool’s game for men and women older and more experienced than she. Moreover, she was hungry and weary from her long run, and her wolf paws were tender from so much ground covered. If she kept pushing herself, seeking distance, she would wear out her ability to run until she was crippled by her own determination.

  There were villages, she knew. If she followed her nose, she might be able to find a community of the Deer or the Boar who lived under the Wolf’s Shadow. Perhaps she could even talk them into taking her in for the winter, threaten them with the Wolf’s power or beg their indulgence and hope they were kinder than her own kin would ever be. But then every morning she would step outside and wonder if the face that would greet her first would be Broken Axe’s or Amiyen Shatters Oak’s. Or her own father’s.

  Deep in the forest she heard a sharp crack of breaking wood: the boughs all about her were weighed down and sloping under their cold burden. Elsewhere she heard the slumping thud of a branch shedding its load and springing back up. Other than that, nothing – as though the world had been rid of every human thing but her.

  She felt the need to see more. Her hackles prickled with the fear that the silence hid some presence that was stalking her. In one smooth transition she Stepped to her tiger form – kept buried these last few days – and leapt up the nearest tree, raking her way up, bough to bough, in search of a vantage point.

  What she had forgotten was her satchel, that did not shift with her and had been made with the narrow frame of girl or wolf in mind. As a tiger, she was broader about the chest and, two branches up, one strap tore away, leaving the bag swinging from one foreleg.

  What fell from it was the tightly coiled shape of a serpent, which drop
ped like a stone and vanished into the drifts at the base of the tree, barely leaving a mark. What sprang from the snow with a squawk of outrage was Hesprec Essen Skese, the man, flailing and stumbling, in snow up to his knees and with his fur cap half over his eyes.

  For a second Maniye was horrified. In the next instant she found herself sitting on the same branch in human form, because she could not laugh at him from a tiger’s mouth.

  The old man glowered up at her, lips twitching over his empty gums a couple of times as he sought some suitable reprimand. At last his shoulders sagged and he seemed to accept that he had become a figure of fun.

  Maniye had already stifled her laughter, horribly aware of how the sound of it would carry in this grave-still forest. Now she clambered down, inadvertently showering the Snake priest with more snow and trying to look penitent.

  ‘I trust that the view was worth it?’ Hesprec asked her, trying to seem arch. He carefully adjusted the fur cap the Horse had given him, tapping it down more firmly on his bald head. ‘Now I know why they say not to travel during the winters of the north.’

  ‘This is not winter. This is not the north,’ Maniye rebuked him. ‘In the north this would seem like a summer.’

  He rolled his eyes. ‘This much is known: that the smallest whim of a great spirit can mean a lifetime of trials for a man. We have many troubles in my homeland, but at least the world is ordered so that the bringer of snow does not visit us there.’

  Maniye blinked at that. ‘What happens there in the winters?’

  ‘Winters are a barbaric invention of the north, and we have no time for them. In the mighty Sun River Nation there occurs no such foolishness as this.’ A sweep of his mittened hand indicated the snowbound forest around them. His expression was one of exaggerated outrage, and she realized that he was playing at mocking himself in the hope of amusing her.

  Well, he needs me , she told herself. He needs me more than I need him. It was a mean thought, but she was still unsure of him, this pallid foreigner with his faded scale tattoos.