Axe’s hand yanked at Maniye’s shoulder, and then they had seized the opportunity the southerner had given them, making a straight line through the trees, away from Joalpey, and hoping there were no more Tigers lying in wait.
Asmander caught up with them moments later, those long reptile strides easily outpacing them. By then, Maniye’s husbanded reserve of strength was almost gone. Since the three of them had set off to rescue Hesprec, it felt as though she had never stopped running. Axe was stumbling too, and she did not know how much of the blood that painted his pelt was his own. Asmander kept in front of them, leading them, guiding them downslope, darting between trees. Of the others – of Loud Thunder or Shyri or Venater – there was no sign.
Maniye realized a moment later that Axe was straying further from her. Don’t go back to fight them, she pleaded inside her head. That seemed just the sort of thing that either of the men would do. She felt that if she was left on her own, she would simply collapse, that only their presence was pushing her on.
But Axe was not heading away – he was coming back now, trying to reach her, but Asmander was in the way. Asmander was herding her, pushing close, rushing her ahead. When Axe got too close, the Champion snapped at him. In the midst of her headlong flight, Maniye could not work out what was happening.
There was a scent on the wind, a familiar one that spoke of hearths and food, so that she found a last cupful of strength to push her onwards. It was a testament to how tired she was that the smell of home seemed reassuring to her: the smell of the Winter Runners and the Wolf.
She realized too late – even as the jolt of fear shot through her, grey bodies were passing on either side of her. She heard a yelp and a snarl from Broken Axe, but there were two or three Wolf hunters between him and Maniye already. She turned, trying to reach him, but there was Asmander – in the form of the indomitable Champion – shrieking into her face, driving her away.
And then he was human, his stone-toothed blade still in hand, calling out, ‘Broken Axe, run! Run now!’
Maniye tried to do just that herself, but Smiles Without Teeth was on her already, powering her to the root-knotted ground and digging his teeth at her neck, trying to force her to change form. She thought she heard Broken Axe shout her name, but there were half a dozen wolves roiling around her already, and more vanishing into the dark to look for him.
One of the pack was straightening up, casting off its pelt and its hide and taking on the much worse guise of her father. Right now, though, those familiar and hated eyes were not on her. They were fixed on the southerner.
‘So,’ spoke Akrit Stone River.
‘You will remember our words in the Stone Place,’ Asmander spat out tiredly. ‘You had killed another chief inside the circle, but you had lost her. This was what you wanted.’
‘You take a long time to honour your bargains,’ Stone River told him.
‘But honour them I do. And you will find me the Iron Wolves my lord needs, the invulnerable warriors of the north.’
Hesprec. Maniye felt all of her grief and loss anew, because this, this was why Asmander had been travelling behind her. And then he must have met with Hesprec, his Messenger, the man he respected and followed without question.
And then Hesprec had passed on; she had saved the old man from her father but not from time or cold. And Asmander must have been left wondering then where his path led. And he owed her nothing. He had not journeyed all the way from his far homeland just to chase around after a mongrel girl.
‘I will be High Chief as soon as the Moon Eaters recognize me, and you shall have your warriors,’ Stone River replied carefully. ‘There will be many young hunters eager to prove themselves. Why should they not see your homeland and taste its joys? I am Stone River. I keep my bargains.’
And Asmander should have looked triumphant, Maniye thought. He should have been delighted at himself for outwitting all the Crown of the World to thus win his prize. But instead he looked only sick, either at the world or at himself, and he nodded as though he was accepting a punishment.
38
She had slept. In the end sheer anxiety had not been enough, and exhaustion had overpowered it. When she awoke, she was within a tent-space built about a tree, sheets of hide stretched out over the lowest branches to give the temporary dwelling a shape. She had half expected them to string her up, as they had with Hesprec, but instead there was just a collar and a thick braid of rawhide that led to a stake of iron dug into the ground. It represented wealth, that stake: enough iron to make four or five knives or a couple of axe-heads. She was being treated as a thing of value, but as a thing nonetheless.
Asmander had betrayed her. But then Asmander had never been loyal to her. The reversal still hurt her though. She was the centre of her own world, after all. She had not stopped to think that she was only peripheral to the lives of others. For a moment, when they had all been together running the Tigers’ gauntlet, she had seen them as some kind of hero-band out of the stories: Bear, Wolf and exotic foreigners bound together by mutual respect to triumph over all comers. But that had been a foolish thought, and if she had not been so young she would not have entertained it.
Time to grow up.
And to grow up she must cast aside childish things. Such as having two souls.
Trapped in her human form and unable to favour or discipline either of them, she felt them pace about within her. She was her own cage and they were her prisoners, forced into a proximity that neither could live with. She felt a desperate need to return to childhood: it seemed to her now a carefree time of freedom when she and the different sides of her nature had lived together in harmony and joy.
‘I cannot choose,’ she told the world. ‘I am both. If I was only one, I would be just half of what I am. How can I be asked to choose?’
As if summoned by her words, Akrit shouldered his way through the flap of the tent and paused to survey her. He loomed large in her memory, but right now he seemed even larger.
‘There you are,’ he told her, as though he had simply mislaid her for a moment, rather than chasing her all across the Crown of the World.
She stared at him sullenly, and he sat down cross-legged before her, even smiling just as if this was a much-sought meeting of old friends. ‘I’ve lost a lot in chasing you,’ he told her almost jovially. ‘I’ve had warriors killed by the Tiger, and you’ve turned Broken Axe from me, too. If you liked him so much, you could have had him. I told you that.’
Still she said nothing, shuffling away from him until her leash pulled taut, her back against the sagging hide of the tent.
‘What?’ he asked her quite frankly. Her fear seemed to baffle him.
‘Why?’ she whispered. ‘Why go so far? I am grown. I am not tied to your hearth.’
‘You are of my blood and I have a use for you,’ he explained patiently. ‘You are a tool of mine, a thing that I brought into being when I had your mother. And I need you to fulfil my destiny.’
‘Destiny?’ she echoed.
‘Takes Iron is sure that there is a destiny at work. There are strange things happening in the world – can you deny it? All the people of the Crown of the World feel a change, like winter. And you were at the Stones.You know what happened there. A great destiny has come to the world – and it is mine.’
‘It is not mine,’ she got out.
‘You are its,’ he told her. ‘You are a part of it. A Tiger and a Wolf child, and my only child. Who could doubt that the world meant you for a purpose?’
She stared at him. At first she could not even imagine what he was talking about, so much had happened to her since that night.
His smile was encouraging, though. It invited her to meet it with one of her own, though she refused to.
He rose in one smooth motion, rolling his shoulders and stretching. ‘You will do what you are told,’ he said mildly. ‘When you leave me again, it will be to do my bidding.You will see this is the right thing to do. But you were ever a slow child, and
disobedient.’ He loomed over her, and she saw the glint of a knife in his hand. When he hauled her up she thought he would cut her, but he just sawed at the laces of her shift until he had stripped the clothes off her back. ‘Even grown,’ he told her, ‘you are still a child in your mind. So you must be made to serve.’ And he had dropped her and taken up something that had been lying near the tent flap, something she had not noticed before. A thin switch of birch.
‘I want you to recite back to me what I say,’ he told her. His hands sent the switch keening through the air, not touching her yet but the mere sound sending a rush of fear through her. ‘You will speak it back, and back, and back until it is from your own mind you are speaking. Let us start with something simple. You will obey your father in all things.’
Even terrified, she scowled at him.
‘Yes, I had thought that would be hard for you. It always was, and I was too soft before. I did not see how you would grow, or else I would have been firmer. Tell me: “I will obey my father in all things.”’
Even as she was deciding to resist him, he struck her. The thin line of the switch seared across her arm and back and sent her to the floor, not with the force of it but with the pain. The thin wood of the whip had been split, and stones braided into it. A single lash stung like a dozen bees.
‘Tell me,’ he said again, and still in that terribly calm voice – not at all like him, in fact. This was Stone River possessed by his own destiny.
She would have spoken, but the sudden agony of the blow had driven her voice from her, and so he struck her again, laying down a second weal across her back. This time she shrieked – no words, but somehow he read in that sound the confirmation he was looking for. Perhaps he was not wrong to do so.
‘Again,’ he said, and drew back the lash. When she bared her teeth at him, he put twice the force into his next blow, hard enough to splinter the switch against her, leaving her sobbing and hunched in upon herself.
Stone River sighed with mild exasperation, and went to fetch another switch. She had already seen that there were half a dozen lying there in the shadows of the tent’s edge.
‘Now . . .’ he began.
‘I will! Please, I will!’ broke from her lips. She had not meant to say it, had not wanted to, but the traitor words got out somehow and hung in the air between them.
‘Well, now,’ he said, plainly pleased, and swished the new whip through the air, getting a feel for it. ‘Tell me how you will go to the Tiger for me.’
She stared at him because plainly he was mad. But of course he could not know all those bitter things that had happened since she had last escaped him.
‘I can’t,’ she said into the silence, and when he raised the switch she went on, ‘I can’t! I can’t! It doesn’t work, I can’t go to them!’
‘You will go to the Tiger,’ he said with more force. ‘You will tell them who your mother was. I know how they are ruled. They cannot but make you their leader, because you are the blood of their last one. That is the way of the Tiger, everyone knows.’
And it came to her, even as the lash rose again, that she had found the limits of him, the walls that hedged his mind. For this was what he had been told of the Tiger, and he had never questioned it or tried to find out more about it. His ignorance was his hearth, and he had never explored the darkness beyond.
And he struck her again and raised another torn stripe on her human skin and, although the leash restrained her physically, whatever had held her back inside now snapped. She screamed then, but she was screaming defiance at him. ‘I have been to the Tiger! The Tiger want me dead because I am yours! My mother lives and rules them, and she will not accept me as her daughter, nor would I be yours! But you will never rule the Tiger through me, because they reject me! They will eat my flesh and my soul if I fall within their power one more time!’
He had brought the whip up for another strike, but now he was frozen, staring at her. ‘Alive?’ he hissed, and then he did break free from his enclosed ignorance, leaping from stone to stone in his mind until he spat out ‘Broken Axe!’ seeing past the man’s recent betrayal to that far greater one.
‘He was never yours!’ she hissed at him. ‘He was always his own, and I will not be yours either.’ It was as if, somehow, her mind and her mouth had forgotten the whip and the pain, just for that moment.
But Akrit did not stike again. This much she could say for him: within the little domain of his thoughts, he was no fool. Already he was planning. ‘You will serve me,’ he said, whether to her or to the world, she could not say.
The switch was lowered. Akrit’s eyes narrowed. ‘There is a destiny. I tore out Water Gathers’ throat in the ring of stones, and the spirits stooped low about us, watching.You ran beneath their gaze, too, that day. You are marked by them, as am I. Marked for great things. Or for a great doom. So I must show the Wolf I am worthy, and to do so I must use what the world has given me.’ His gaze rested on her again. ‘It has given me you.’
‘Have you never thought,’ she got out, ‘that perhaps we just did those things, and the spirits don’t care?’
He struck her three times with the full force of his arm, though his hatred and anger, which would have made the blows a real terror, were concentrated elsewhere, considering his next move. Once she lay twitching and whimpering before him, though, he barely seemed to notice her, departing again, already calling for his priest.
Maniye was left to herself, after that, in a gloom that seemed lit up by the burning stripes Akrit had laid across her back. She could hear exchanges about the camp, sometimes a snap and snarl of disagreement, once what sounded like a full-scale skirmish between two of them. Akrit’s warband was fraying. They had come this far with him, and they had been bloodied by the Tiger, and now they must be looking to their leader and wondering. Some would be thinking of challenge. Who would be the first? Smiles Without Teeth was too loyal, Shatters Oak was a woman, but others would be asking themselves if their own time had come.
The wait seemed to go on forever, any sense of time’s passing taken from her, without the sky to mark it. The hurt from her whipping dulled, like embers dimming but never quite extinguished. She slept a little, but fitfully, then was awoken by her father’s voice barking loudly outside the tent. He was giving orders, rousing the warband to move. Shortly after, a pair of hunters came in and uprooted the metal stake between them, not looking at her. She could have named them both but they were working very hard at pretending that they could not see her, even as they hauled her out at the end of her leash.
The Wolves decamped so quickly that Maniye guessed the Tigers were still stalking somewhere nearby. She had a feeble hope then, for if they were to move at full pace, surely they must run as wolves, and free her to do the same. Then she would seize the first chance she had, and she would be gone from them, trusting to her feet once again.
A moment’s thought told her it could not happen. They had baggage with them, hides and tents and provisions, and loot from the Boar village. They had a pair of travois that they bundled their burdens on, to be hauled by the younger hunters. Of the rest, many did Step, running ahead or falling away to either side to keep an eye and a nose ready for any enemy, leaving a handful to stay with Maniye and the baggage, led by Smiles Without Teeth.
Smiles stooped low to speak in her ear, putting her in his shadow.
‘Stone River says he wants you to live, for now,’ he told her. ‘But he says, “If she runs, break her leg.”’ His dark eyes pinned her. ‘I asked him, “Why not do that now? No running then.” But he says there’s too much we need to carry already. But I will
– give me the chance, girl, and I will.’
She fully intended to meet his ugly gaze, but the deep rumble of his voice pitched itself right to the fear in her mind, and she could not. He took her leash himself, his hand almost eclipsing the metal stake.
Her wounds were dressed roughly, leaving her feeling as though they had lit a fire on her back. Then they headed w
estwards, away from the Tiger, and there was no talking between them. Despite their loads, Akrit’s warband set a swift pace, further reinforcing Maniye’s suspicion that the Tiger were not keeping to their own places now. And I have caused that somehow. I am a weapon so fierce that my mother cannot let her enemies grasp me. I am the spark that sets the fire.
But that was merely a sop to her own vanity. Even helpless, she was trying to spin a tale that gave her some sense of control. She had been swept before the rush of events like broken wood in the river during the spring thaw.
Akrit dropped back occasionally. He would encourage Smiles to keep up the pace, but his eyes were ever on Maniye. When they camped that night, the stake was hammered in again, but she lay out in the open, surrounded by wolves on all sides, without any true camp being pitched.
Several of the warriors had been sent ahead. My father has a plan.
Some time during that same night she woke into a darkness relieved only by the fire’s last embers and a sliver of cloudy moon. A man stood over her, and she recoiled, assuming it must be her father. Then, for a mad moment, she thought it was Broken Axe, for it lacked Stone River’s broad bulk. This was an older man, though, shorter and leaner, and one she should have known sooner: Kalameshli Takes Iron.
She was not going to speak at first, although he must know she was awake. He just watched and watched, though, and at last she got out, ‘You must be very happy, Takes Iron. You were right all along. I am no true daughter of the Wolf.’
‘Nor of the Tiger yet.’ His voice startled her, for she had not expected an answer. ‘You were wolf enough, when you were caught.’
‘Your chief is a fool,’ she said softly, wondering if any other was awake to hear. ‘He needs me to be a Wolf, so as to be his own, yet he thinks the Tiger would follow me if I was not a Tiger?’
‘He has cherished some dreams a long time.’ Takes Iron did not say ‘too long’ and yet it was there between his words. Maniye frowned, because she had never heard him even come close to criticizing her father.
‘The Tiger will not have me anyway, no matter how much Tiger I am,’ she added bitterly.
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