Diplomacy of Wolves: Book 1 of the Secret Texts

by Lisle, Holly

  He watched her, waiting for her to make the next move.

  She dropped the bundle between her paws, pressing it tightly so that she could pick it up again. Pretense would have to get her away from him. “My thanks,” she said. Formal words, at odds with her incomprehensible feelings. She knew him somehow, though she had never seen him before in her life. The knowing was more than simple identification; it was the bone-deep knowing of one who has, coming around the corner of a crowded city street, rushed headlong into the arms of the man who is destined to be her soul mate.

  My enemy. My soul.

  Ludicrous. It made her want to laugh—and made her grateful that she didn’t believe in destiny.

  My soul. My enemy.

  “Come with me,” he said, and his rich, rumbling subterranean growl made her own fierce Karnee voice sound soft and high-pitched. “Be with me.”

  “I must go home.”

  “But I want you.”

  “The guards are already coming,” she said. “Can’t you hear them?” She thought she lied, but as she said the words, she realized they were true. The rhythmic tramp of footsteps—double-time, strides matching—moved up through the streets. And voices, still faint but moving closer. “Break off! Search that alley! Faster, men, before we lose them!”

  For an instant he hesitated. An instant only. Then he said, “Find me. Please. Please find me.” And he picked up his own bundle in his teeth and turned, ready to run. She followed suit, and they raced toward the mouth of the alley together, claws drawn in so that they made no more noise in running than wind made moving across the cobblestones. Both cut sharply to the right as they came out into the street, moving uphill, away from the oncoming guards. For a short while they ran side by side, sometimes brushing each other, sometimes pulling away. Her muscles bunched and flowed, her spine arched and stretched, her body sang at the breeze that caressed her skin, sang with the joy of movement, and with the wonder of her nearness—however temporary—to him. The world was all her senses: sweet night scent, Karnee musk, the wetness of fog, green growing things far off and the food-scent of city vermin in the streets nearby; the steady rush of water from a fountain, voices calling from far away, the soft thrup-thrup of a nightbird hunting overhead; late moonlight falling like silver through the thickening curls of fog, the graceful lace patterns it cast through trees and buildings; the cool smooth roundness of the cobblestone beneath her feet, the damp fog condensing on her sleek fur, cooling her. The sting of her healing wounds, the fire of the air in her lungs, the joy of being alive. Later, and once again human, she knew she would feel horror at the slaughter she’d wrought. The ghosts of the dead men would haunt her dreams. Later she would grieve the actions of her monstrous half. But the Karnee Kait did not grieve. She felt glorious. Glorious. She was alive, and those who would have raped and murdered her were dead, and their deaths filled her with furious joy.

  The strange Karnee turned away from her, left down a side road. She kept to the road she was on; she’d finally recognized where she was. She had chanced upon the combination of roads that would take her home. One block, one right turn, and she would come upon the high, spike-topped fence that separated the embassy from the city surrounding it. The Sabir Karnee was already out of sight, fleeing to his own safety; he would not, then, discover who she was. Good. She’d live longer that way.

  She slowed to a lope, becoming wary. While she was in this form, her own people would be as deadly to her as any enemy. She dared not let herself be seen. She had to get past the guards, over the fence, up three stories of stone wall to the window of the suite where she stayed. She had neither closed the shutters nor barred the window before she left for the party; the Karnee part of her chafed at the smell and feel of enclosed places, and the more she needed the Shift, the worse the feeling became. That was to her benefit. Nothing else was.

  She crouched in the park across the street and watched the guards moving behind the fence. Regular movements; a sweep by two men, a short interval, then two men going across the grounds in the opposite direction. She’d watched them from above on other sleepless nights. The intervals at this early morning hour were shorter than they would normally be—more men were on the grounds, and they were more alert. No joking now, no banter as pairs crossed; they were anticipating trouble . . . or her absence in the carriage that brought Tippa home, and whatever garbled story of trouble Tippa had managed to convey, had put the embassy on alert. Kait would have to be quick and precise to get past the guards. They never looked up at the walls of the house, though. So she had a second fact to her advantage.

  She moved under cover as close to the street and the fence as she dared. Then she waited. A pair of guards passed. The fog would help hide her from sight, but would amplify any noise she made. The guards moved as far from her as she dared let them; their opposite pair already worked its way toward her from around the corner of the house, and the next pair of following guards from the first direction would not be far behind.

  She raced across the street and bunched herself into the air, teeth clenching down on her bundle. Her body compacted and then uncoiled as if she were a spring. Straight up to twice the height of a tall man she soared, clear to the top of the fence. All four paws found purchase; her back arched high to avoid the impaling spike over which she swayed; her tail lashed behind her, keeping her balance.

  From her left—“Did you hear something?”

  “Sounds like . . . like something shook the fence.”

  “Yes. Ahead?”

  “Can’t tell. The whole damned fence rattled.”

  They would stop and check. Maybe work their way back to her. She couldn’t meet them, didn’t dare let them catch sight of her. She gauged distances, then poured downward, liquid as a cat—though no one who saw her could ever have mistaken her for any sort of cat—and landed in the clipped grass on the far side of the hard path. The faintest of rustles when she landed; she heard it clearly, but the guards wouldn’t. Their voices camouflaged the sound. One leap over shrubbery, several lengths of skulking behind plantings to bring her to the spot below her window, the merest instant to ensure that her bundle was secure and that nothing would fall to the ground and draw attention upward to her. A wait, as the next pair of guards moved past, their attention on the two men ahead of them, and on the fence. Good.

  She climbed up the rough-cut stones to the window that let into her room, limbs spread wide to improve her balance, claws hooking around every projection, body tight to the wall. One moment of worry, heart-stopping, as just above the second floor she came clear of the fog. The moonlight would outline her clearly to anyone below—she was a gleaming black-furred monster on luminous white stone. But no one looked up.

  She threw herself through the window and sprawled on the floor of her bedroom; there, finally, the rush of fear and desperation that had kept her going guttered out, and the Karnee beast gave way once more to the sense-dulled, guilt-ridden creature who could pass as human, but who could never be human.

  Kait the woman washed away the blood left by Kait the monster as best she could in the darkness. She hid her bloody bundle beneath her bed, and tugged on a dressing gown. Then she fell into her bed, and into the world of nightmares and terror, where her victims’ specters hunted and haunted her, where blood clung to hands, and where a destiny she did not believe in mocked her and whispered in her ear, Your soul, your enemy; your enemy, your soul.

  * * *

  Dùghall Draclas turned to the captain of the guards and said, “I’m going to be useless if I don’t get some sleep. Wake me the second anyone finds out anything. I’ll be in my quarters.”

  The captain nodded. “You think this is like what happened to Danya, sir? That someone snatched her?”

  “I think I don’t know what to think. If this is kidnapping, we’ll get the ransom demand soon. But it doesn’t feel like a kidnapping to me. My gut says otherwise. And anything could have happened to her. She doesn’t know her way around the city; if she
tried to walk home, she could have wandered down into a bad alley and been robbed . . . or worse . . .” He turned away from the captain. “I wish she’d told Tippa what she thought she’d found. Or why she was staying behind. Then maybe I’d know where to start looking.”

  His people had already tracked down the princes who had schemed to get Tippa drunk so they could disgrace her and, through her, shame all of Galweigh House. They’d been part of a small band of the Gyru-nalle fanatics who thought a union of the Dokteeraks and the Galweighs would spell the end of Gyru-nalle independence in the disputed territories that lay between Dokteerak land and Galweigh land. All three were going to deny everything . . . until they discovered that they were being questioned on the disappearance of an ambassador and not on their plan to cause embarrassment to the Family. Had they been linked to the kidnapping of any Family ambassador, every Gyru-nalle in the Iberal Peninsula would have been hunted down and slaughtered. The Families maintained their hold on the lesser people of Ibera with the iron-clawed grip of eagles, and had no respect for the crownless royal heads of long-dead empires.

  So the Gyru-nalle princes talked hard and fast—with some encouragement from the embassy torturer—and Dùghall, after listening to the questioning, was satisfied that none of the three had anything to do with Kait’s disappearance.

  He walked toward his quarters, the weariness of a night spent anticipating disaster adding weight to every step he took. It wasn’t enough that an ambassador was missing. It had to be Kait. He had too many relatives, and most of them he loathed. But Kait was the image of his favorite sister, Grace—delicate, dark, and beautiful, and with the spirit of a young lioness. He would grieve if anything had happened to her.

  His path took him past Kait’s room; on impulse he stopped outside her door. Perhaps he should go in and look through her things to see if he could find anything that might tell him what had become of her. He felt sure the search would be pointless, but the same gut instinct that insisted she hadn’t been kidnapped told him he ought to look.

  He glanced up and down the hall to make sure no one was watching. There in the empty hallway he felt he had a bit of an advantage; spies would find it pointless to hide in rooms and spy on hallways most of the time, since the business that would keep them in the embassy in the first place would almost always take place behind closed and locked doors. Nevertheless, he’d be a fool to betray the Falcons with such a simple gesture as opening a locked door. The hallway remained empty, though. He decided to take the calculated risk. He drew his dagger and made a quick, light slash across the index finger of his left hand—just enough to draw blood, no more. When the dark droplets welled to the edge of the cut, he murmured a few words, and a soft, radiant light coalesced around his hand. He touched the lock above Kait’s door handle. A thought, a flicker of light from the tip of his finger to the smooth metal cylinder, and her door swung open.

  She lay sprawled in her bed, in restless sleep, covers flung to the floor in a tangle, her nightdress riding up to reveal several long, freshly healed scars on the back of her right thigh, and smears of what looked in the dim light like blood on her leg, her hand, and her face. She whimpered as she slept and her legs thrashed; she breathed in short, hard gasps. As if she were running from something.

  Dùghall frowned. He closed his eyes for an instant, and studied the faint glow of her form on the bed that his second sight revealed. Odd that in all the time he’d known Kait, he’d never seen that before. Odder that he’d never thought to look. The aura of magic lay lightly on her, and seemed to grow dimmer as he stood there. It wasn’t Wolf magic, though, and it wasn’t Falcon magic. She was the source of it, and yet she wasn’t, as well. His frown deepened. Mysteries within mysteries—that she could get into her room past guards who were looking for her, that she had vanished in the first place, that she carried enigmatic scars, that a faint whisper of magic clung to her in spite of the fact that he knew her to be magically unschooled.

  These were mysteries he would have to fathom. And quickly. But not so quickly that he had to disturb Kait’s restless sleep. Perhaps he would discover something useful if he just waited.

  He settled himself into the chair across from her bed, set a shield around himself that she would disturb the moment she woke, and let his head drop back. Within minutes, he slept deeply.

  * * *

  Hasmal trailed salt across the surface of the mirror with his left hand. It soaked into the line of blood that he’d drawn into a triangle. He sucked at his right thumb for just an instant to lick away the last traces of his blood—should he let any stray drops fall onto the mirror when he summoned the Speaker, he would find himself devoured. Or worse.

  He whispered the final lines of the incantation:

  Speaker step within the walls

  Of earth and blood and air;

  Bound by will and spirit,

  You must bide your presence there.

  Answer questions with clear truth,

  Do only good and then

  Return to the realm from whence you came

  And don’t come back again.

  The salt on the mirror began to burn. The pale blue flames flickered for an instant, then settled into a steady glow. And in the center of the flames, a tiny light burst into life and shaped itself into a perfect representation of a woman, though one no taller than Hasmal’s longest finger.

  She stared up at him, long glowing hair blowing in a breeze that never traveled beyond the triangle of fire. “What do you want to know?” Her voice was deep and sweet, softer than Hasmal’s whisper, but not whispered. She spoke from unimaginably far away, over the incessant sobbing of the wind that blew between the worlds, and her words only reached him by the magic of her simulacrum standing on the glass.

  Hasmal cleared his throat and crouched nearer the glass, shielding the light it cast with his body. “I met a woman tonight. She saw through my shields, though she should never have been able to do that. I told her my name, though I didn’t intend to. She frightened me. She’s not what she seems to be. Does she mean me harm?”

  “No, though she will someday bring it to you anyway. You are a vessel chosen by the Reborn, Hasmal son of Hasmal; your destiny is pain and glory. Your sacrifice will bring the return of greatness to the Falcons, and your name will be revered through all time.”

  “My sacrifice?” Hasmal felt his heart tie itself into a hard, small knot inside his chest. Having a revered name sounded good enough, but the people the Falcons revered tended to be dead, and worse, to have died badly. “What kind of sacrifice?”

  The woman waved a tiny hand, and in the flames Hasmal saw his parents being nailed to the Great Gate. Then he saw himself being beaten, tortured, and flayed by men wearing the livery of one of the Five Families; and finally standing skinless in the midst of the city of Halles while a crowd jeered and threw rotted fruit at him, and soldiers tied his limbs to four horses, then sent the horses galloping in four different directions.

  Hasmal thought he might faint. He’d suspected he wasn’t being asked to sacrifice a pure black goat, or even a bag of gold. But his parents’ lives and his own . . .

  The images died away, leaving the tiny woman looking up earnestly at him. “Your deeds will make you beloved. You’ll live on in the pages of the Secret Texts, and in the hearts of all Falcons forever after.”

  Hasmal looked away from her, trying to erase from his mind the image of his skinless body being ripped into four pieces by the galloping horses.

  I’ll forgo the glory, he decided. I’d rather live in the present than on the pages of a book.

  He stared down at the Speaker and shivered. “Can I escape this fate?”

  For an instant, he heard only the sound of that otherworldly wind. Then she laughed. “You can always try.”

  “How?” he asked.

  But the fire on the glass burned low and all at once guttered out. The Speaker vanished, leaving the mirror bare of salt and blood.

  He could draw more bl
ood, summon another Speaker, perhaps get the information he desired. But the spell had cost him in energy. And worse, it had cost him in time. He might be able to control the energy of another spell, but he would never get back the time he’d lost.

  The strange woman had said she would be coming to find him. His fate, and his and his parents’ destruction, were linked to contact with her. He had no guarantee that he could escape the Speaker’s images of doom; he’d been given no promise that he could spare his mother and father, either. But if he was not in Halles, the woman would not find him, and perhaps he would not be such a danger to them—or to himself.

  He rose, tucked the mirror back into his case, and stepped out of the storeroom. Before she arrived, he needed to pack his belongings and leave. He dared not say goodbye to his parents—his father would demand an explanation when his solid, dependable, decidedly unadventurous son suddenly decided to pack a kit and hare off to destinations unknown. And if the old man ever suspected his son was fleeing his sacred duty to die for the Falcons, he would probably turn Hasmal over to the Dokteeraks, then nail himself and his wife to the Great Gate in penance. The elder Hasmal wouldn’t approve of running away from destiny—especially not a destiny that furthered the aspirations of his beloved Falcons.

  Hasmal the younger was neither so dedicated to that ancient, secret order, nor so sanguine about his portended demise in its service. He packed a few necessary belongings, his magic kit, his copy of the Secret Texts, and what little money he had, and wondered not how he could serve, but where he could hide and how he would get there.

  Chapter 6

  In her sleep, Kait heard breathing not her own and felt eyes watching her. In spite of her dreams—dreams of running and Shifting—she became aware of a stranger who entered her domain. She fought against the pull of sleep, knowing that she had to awaken, feeling that while she lay unprotected someone was discovering her secret, but she could not break free of the tenacious depths of the Shift-fueled dreams.