Diplomacy of Wolves: Book 1 of the Secret Texts

by Lisle, Holly

  Another pause, pregnant with the distress of all those present. General agreement followed, but became a confused babble as those present tried to press their recommendations for dealing with Luercas on each other. Finally, everyone calmed down enough that Dafril could ask for suggestions again.

  We should destroy him when we find him, Mellayne suggested. We should obliterate his soul line.

  Werris disagreed. We should force him through the Mirror of Souls into a mortal body incapable of responding to him. He will be trapped while he lives, and when he dies, he will be pushed through the Veil. But the death of his soul will not be on our consciences.

  Vaul found even that excessive. Perhaps banishment would be sufficient.

  Others offered other suggestions, all of them contradictory, varying in severity and duration. Some only wanted to find the missing Luercas in order to try to bring him to reason through discussion; others wanted his soul destroyed without any question or trial—his absence, they thought, was condemnation enough of his motives. None could think that his absence from this first meeting of the Star Council in over a thousand years was irrelevant. All wanted to take action immediately, but none could agree on the action to take. The babble rose again, and threatened to break into heated argument, and Dafril could tell that her colleagues would accomplish nothing further on the issue right then. Their hypothetical determination of punishment for Luercas remained pointless until they found him, in any case. So she changed the subject.

  Have all of us chosen suitable avatars among the mortals?

  Everyone had.

  Excellent. Dafril shared a feeling of delight with her colleagues. My avatar is on her way to rescue the Mirror of Souls from its resting place. Events worked into my hands very nicely—she didn’t require much pushing at all to undertake the journey.

  Sartrig said, Mine follows her, in case she cannot complete the mission. He would follow her whether I prodded him or not—he is under other compulsions besides mine. But these compulsions, which come from within, are to my benefit. They allow me to remain in the background, where most of the time he is not aware of my presence. Just as well—he could banish me from his mind if he chose to do so; his magical training has progressed already to that point.

  Other reports followed in quick order: a paraglese encouraged to pursue a path away from the interests of his Family and toward the broader interests of the Star Council; a princess of the Gyru-nalle royal line of Feelasto led to speak of making an alliance with the Families of Ibera; a Dalkan pirate-king just beginning to think of suing for peace with the Iberan Families.

  With such encouraging reports to buoy them, the Star Councillors separated to return to their avatars, agreeing before they parted to watch for Luercas and to think until they met again on what should be done about him.

  Chapter 22

  Hasmal refused the chair Kait offered him; instead, he sat on the floor of her cabin and insisted that she sit across from him. When they were settled, he added to the shield he’d cast around the two of them. He spun through it the “don’t notice us” spell he had prepared so carefully in advance. Kait watched his finger tracing through the powder he scattered on her floor and said nothing. More interestingly, her face gave away nothing that she was thinking. He almost smiled then—her years of training in diplomacy might serve him almost as well in what he needed to do as if she had been brought up from childhood to be a Falcon.

  When the shields were strengthened and he was sure the activities in the room would not draw any attention from anyone on the ship, he brushed his powders into a neat pile, scooped them into one hand, and scattered some on himself and some on her.

  Her expression still didn’t change, but when he’d finished, she did ask in an even, polite tone, “Religious ritual?”

  He shook his head, and now he did smile. “No. Something that would get both of us condemned to death anywhere in Ibera, and probably here as well, for all of Captain Draclas’s liberalism in other areas. The completion of a magical spell.”

  He did see a flicker of expression cross her face then, but it never touched on fear. Instead, in the brief instant before calm neutrality removed that tiny spark of visible emotion from her eyes, he thought he saw resignation.

  And he thought, Resignation? What a bizarre response.

  “It seems that I am born to be a heretic,” she said, and gave him a sad smile that he did not understand. “No matter how pure my motives or how dire my need or how great my love of Family, every road I travel takes me further from the True Path.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Now one of her eyebrows arched and the start of a smile quirked at one corner of her mouth. “You don’t understand that if this wall of peace you build is built with magic, and if I desire to learn how to build it as well, that doing so will make me a heretic? Please. How long did you live in Ibera? And how did you keep from being drawn and quartered in the public square?”

  He shook his head. She’d missed his question. “I understand that what I do is . . . heretical. In Ibera, in most places in the world, to most people. I know that. What I don’t understand is why you act as if this is only the latest heresy for you.”

  “Ahhh. My heresy.” She glanced around her cabin and shrugged. “The walls listen, Hasmal, and the keyholes watch, and I would be doubly damned if my secrets got out. Even here.”

  “The spell I cast around us protects us. No one will notice you; no one will listen. You and I are alone.”

  That eyebrow flickered upward again. Then she smiled and shrugged, and said, “Are you a brave man, Hasmal?”

  “No.” He didn’t even have to consider the question. “I am the basest of base cowards.”

  Her smile grew broad, and hinted at merriment. She leaned forward and rested a slender, long-fingered hand over his, and said, “You are honest, and I can’t remember the last time I met an honest man. We’re all cowards, I think. Those who would deny that are simply liars into the bargain.” Her hand squeezed his. “I’ll show you my heresy, and that way we’ll be even. You’ve given me the power to have you hanged aboard this ship, if I ever wanted to betray you; now I’ll return the favor, so that you’ll be able to sleep at night.”

  And then she added, with a final, gentle squeeze, “I won’t hurt you. I promise.”

  While he still wondered what in the world that enigmatic statement could mean, a surge of dark, wild magic erupted from her and her body began to twist. Her smile became a feral beast-grin as her mouth and nose and jaw stretched forward and tapered into the lean, muscular muzzle of a killing machine. Her eyes, their rich brown unchanged, moved back in her skull and apart; her forehead angled backward, growing deeper as it flattened. Ears stretched upward, pointing and belling into wolfish erectness, though that was the only part of her face that made him think of a wolf. Her body altered, too, so that she went from being two-legged to four-legged, and the breeches and tunic that had fit her so fetchingly in human form hung weirdly on her in this other shape, stretched almost to bursting across the rib cage and haunches, hanging slack at waist and wrists and ankles.

  “We all have our secrets, you see,” she said, and she still spoke in the cultured accents of a woman of Calimekkan Family. Her voice, though, was the voice of a creature of nightmare, one that stalked through the endless forests of sleep.

  Sweat broke out on Hasmal’s forehead and his upper lip, and when he said, “So I see,” his voice broke on the word see, squeaking as it had when he was fourteen and not since.

  Her reversion to human form took longer, though the process he thought of as melting began the instant she spoke.

  When at last she sat before him as a human again, he said, “What are you?”

  She closed her eyes and sighed. “I was born under a curse. We are called Karnee, my kind . . . though I have met only one other Karnee in my entire life, and he pursues me even now.” She shrugged. “I’m a monster. A heretic. An evil beast that most times masquerades as a w
oman. If my parents hadn’t hidden me and taken another baby in my stead before the parnissas on Gaerwanday, the Day of Infants, I would have been slaughtered in an offering to the Iberan gods. As it is, my survival was a threat to them every day that they lived. Had anyone ever discovered what I was, not only I but every member of my immediate family and most—if not all—of the household staff would have been killed in one of the public squares of Calimekka. My existence threatened the lives of every person I ever loved, and I didn’t even have the courage to destroy myself so that I could know that they would be safe.”

  Her smile was bitter. “We’re all cowards in one way or another.” She shrugged it off. “Now that you and I have traded our awful secrets, tell me why you suddenly needed to talk to me, when you’ve been avoiding me since I came on board.”

  “I’m to teach you. I’m supposed to . . . to initiate you. Into the Falcons. Make you a Warden.”

  “Initiate me? You’re supposed to?” Kait looked intrigued by that news. “Who told you that?”

  “I consulted spirits.” He felt his face flushing as her eyebrow twitched upward in almost-concealed disbelief. “I did. It’s part of the magic that I must teach you. I have to introduce you to the Secret Texts, and train you to Ward, and—”

  She held up a hand. “The Secret Texts of Vincalis?”

  His jaw dropped, and for a moment he could find no words. “You’ve read the Secret Texts?” he asked her at last.

  “My uncle told me he’d give me a copy when we got back to the House. After the wedding. He couldn’t, because he and my cousin and the pilot were killed when we landed, and I escaped. He was going to teach me that wall trick you do, too . . .”

  She quickly described the events of that day, finishing with her escape from her uncle’s House.

  That explained much. “They’re still coming after you,” Hasmal said softly.

  “Coming after me? I know.”

  Perhaps that shouldn’t have caught him off guard, but it did. “You knew your uncle and the Wolves of his House were after you? I’m surprised. You were marked by Wolf magic, but it was very subtle. I blocked their marker with a spell of my own.”

  At that, she did look surprised. She shook her head. “No. The Sabirs are following me. Not my Family.”

  “The Sabirs? No. I found no sign of that.”

  They stared at each other, confusion on both their faces. Then Kait said, “You’re certain my Family is after me?”

  “I stake my life on it.”

  “And I know that a man named Ry Sabir and his men pursue us by ship. I know this as surely as I know I breathe, or that you and I sit on this floor.”

  “Both Sabirs and Galweighs after you. Why? Of what importance are you?”

  She stared down at her hands. “You must know something else. The spirit of an ancestor of mine came to me when my Family was killed. She told me that I could bring them back to life if I obtained the Mirror of Souls. So I am going after it.”

  Hasmal buried his face in his hands. The Mirror of Souls. The Ancient artifact that the Secret Texts promised would be linked to the return of the Reborn. Kait Galweigh, his doom, was on the ship that had been intended to take him away from her, and she was a monster, and they were seeking the Mirror of Souls, and the world as he had known it would be coming to an end at any moment.

  He wondered, if he jumped into the ocean, how far he would have to swim to find land. Then he wondered if finding land even mattered; drowning might be preferable.

  “You don’t want to find the Mirror of Souls,” he said.

  She arched an eyebrow. “I do. I want to have my Family back.”

  Hasmal shook his head. “That isn’t the way it will work. Listen. You and I are linked together. Spirits told me that you would be a danger to me, and that by being together we would somehow effect the return of the Reborn, so I did everything I could to get away from you—thinking that you would be coming for me in Halles—and terrible things happened to me but I managed to survive, and I thought I was well away from you on this ship that would sail to the ends of Matrin. Then you show up on this very ship, of all the places where you could have gone. And now I find out that we’re going off to retrieve the single artifact mentioned in the Secret Texts in reference to the return of the Reborn. This has nothing to do with bringing your Family back, Kait. The gods have their hand in this, and if we keep going, we’re going to die.”

  Kait tipped her head to one side and stared at him. “You’re actually quite a nervous man, aren’t you?”

  He almost wept. “No. I’m the most sensible man in the world. I had work I liked. I spent time with my parents. I knew what I wanted; I was going to take over my father’s shop when he wearied of the work, as he did from his father. I was a Falcon because my father taught me, but I didn’t expect to have to do anything except pass on the teachings to my son or daughter. I never wanted to be one of the tools Vodor Imrish used in returning the Reborn to the world. The tools of the gods end up broken. And I don’t want to die, and I don’t want my parents to die, either.”

  She patted his leg. It was a condescending little pat. A “don’t worry, silly man” pat. She said, “I’m not doing anything for the gods, Hasmal. And I don’t even know who the Reborn is—but I’m not doing anything for him, either. So this terrible future you foresee isn’t going to happen. No death, no destruction, no horror. I’ll get my Family back, and you’ll go back to your shop and be a shopkeeper like your father and his father before him.” She smiled when she said it.

  He gritted his teeth. “I only wish that were true. You keep your optimism because you don’t know what is happening. The Reborn,” he said, speaking slowly and clearly, as if he were dealing with a particularly stupid child, “lived during the time of Vincalis, more than a thousand years ago. The Reborn was a wizard of tremendous talent and perfect goodness named Solander. He created the Falcons to stand against the evil wizards commonly known as Dragons, who used magic as a weapon and people’s lives as fuel. He did his best to prevent the Wizards’ War, but the Dragons captured him and killed him as a dissident. Vincalis, who was a prophet for the Falcons as well as Solander’s student and biographer, put aside the plays and poems he wrote for his living, and cast oracles for one thousand one hundred days. Each day, he wrote the future he saw in the Secret Texts. He correctly predicted the Dragons’ self-destruction, and the falling into disfavor of magic. And he also predicted that the Reborn would return when the Dragons rose from their own ashes. And that the Mirror of Souls must be found and taken to the Reborn to prevent disaster. And that only after terrible destruction and a second Wizards’ War would the golden age the Reborn had promised come.”

  Kait finally looked like she understood the danger. “But magic is still forbidden, and forgotten.” She thought of her dead uncle Dùghall, and his claims of magic, and sighed. “Well, mostly forgotten.”

  Hasmal laughed. “You don’t believe that, surely. The Falcons kept the Reborn’s magic alive for all of the thousand years after the Wizards’ War. Your Family’s Wolves and the Sabirs’ Wolves have been scouring Ancient cities for the texts and artifacts of the Dragons for more than four hundred years. In the Wolves, the Dragons have risen. And now the horrors begin.”

  “I’m working for the return of my Family. Not for your god and your wizard.”

  Hasmal shook his head. “The gods use who they will. And they never ask for volunteers.”

  “Fine. So you come to me and you tell me that you have to speak to me, and this is because you want to commiserate with me, that you and I have been chosen by your god as . . . sacrifices? Is that it? Well, you’ve told me. Now you’ve done your duty and you can leave. Forgive me if I don’t choose to go along with your god’s plan.”

  She was an exasperating woman. “I came because I need to give you the Secret Texts to read. You need to know what we face. And I need to teach you the magic of the Falcons. I need to make you a Falcon.”

  She snorted. “Y
ou didn’t want to have anything to do with me, and now suddenly you want to be my mentor? How fortunate for me.”

  “I don’t want to be your mentor. And I don’t want to have anything to do with this destiny, any more than you do. I never fancied myself a hero. I want to teach you so that I’ll have someone who can back me up if we get into trouble.”

  Kait shrugged. “Well, teaching. That’s a different matter altogether. I won’t serve your god—I’m not even sure who Vodor Imrish is. But learning is never a mistake. Teach me whatever you know.”

  * * *

  Anwyn Sabir rubbed one clawed hand along his horns. They’d gotten longer since the abortive attack on the Galweighs. He crossed his legs and glowered at the twin cloven hooves, flat and broad as dinner plates. His human leg—the last thing he’d had to remind him of the time when he’d been a man instead of a monster—had vanished in the backwash of magic and the simultaneous overflow from the Galweigh attack. He missed the leg; missed the smooth flesh and the foot that, if he looked at it, reminded him of the days when he looked into mirrors readily and with pleasure. Walking was easier, though, with legs that matched and that both bent the same way.

  “Aren’t you ready yet?” he growled.

  “Quiet, unless you want me to shift the damned rewhah to you. Maybe next time you’ll grow a tail.” Crispin glared at him. Andrew gripped a girl-child of about five under one arm; Crispin held her hand over the little fire he’d started in the cauldron on the stone table. He slashed across her palm with his knife—blood spattered and the girl shrieked and managed to kick Andrew solidly in the shoulder.

  Anwyn laughed, but didn’t say anything out loud. He was still recovering from the effects of his last Scarring, and didn’t want to find himself in the way of any more rebound magic for a while.

  Crispin let go of the child’s hand and focused on the spell he was casting. It was a tiny spell, really—not one that would require the girl as a sacrifice. Anwyn thought he’d probably use her as a sacrifice anyway, both as a precautionary buffer—they’d all gotten leery of unexpected magical rebounds since the disaster—and because he took pleasure in the suffering of his sacrifices. But if he wasn’t greedy, they might be able to get another use or two out of her before she died.