‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said flatly.
‘It is our way,’ he told her.
‘The Horse men, will they do what you ask?’ He had nothing to barter with, but she was desperate. If he had told her that he could magic them to obey his will, she would have believed him readily.
‘The Horse Society, yes, they might,’ he agreed, closing his pale eyes. ‘If I can promise them enough profit in the south, they might.’
‘And can you get them to take us away from here?’
His eyes flicked open. ‘I am not ready to leave.’
‘I don’t care. My f—Stone River will be searching every span of Winter Runner land for us.’
‘I came here with a purpose,’ he protested mildly.
‘Then you have failed in your purpose,’ she snapped, scowling down at him as he sat on a stone and fiddled with the bindings about his brow. ‘I freed you so you could help me.’
‘Is it ss-so?’ At last his hands were still, indeed all of him was still: a Snake that might strike at any moment, if only it had teeth.
‘Yes, it is ss-so,’ she retorted, mimicking his mumbled speech. ‘And I swear that, if you betray me now, if you will not take me to the Horse and beg their aid to get away from my people, then I will abandon you. I will leave you for the cold or for the Wolf, whichever finds you first.’
‘Do you even know where you want to go?’ he asked her, still calmly, but the words stung.
‘Yes, I . . .’ And now she must name somewhere, but she did not know where. My mother’s people, but she found that she was almost as afraid of that idea as of going back to the Winter Runners. She had no image of her mother, no connection at all to them save her Tiger soul, and she could not even say for sure that she would possess that for much longer. Perhaps the Wolf inside her would overcome it soon, maybe even before the end of winter, and then where would she be?
‘What about south?’ she asked faintly. ‘Your south?’
‘You have no idea what that is, nor how far away, nor what you might do if you should find yourself there.’ The weight of those words seemed to exhaust him.
‘Take me where I ask or—’
‘I know, I know.’ He sighed. ‘Let us find the Horse Society.’ He plainly insisted on the formal title, however hard it was for him to say. ‘Let us see what my little stock of influence may buy.’ He stood up, wincing. ‘Go, lead on.’
She Stepped to her wolf and ran for the treeline, because the rain was beginning to turn from a few light spots to something fiercer. All the better to hide our scent, she tried to tell herself, but the sheer misery of having to be out in such a downpour outweighed any such advantages.
Whenever she turned, he was even further behind. Sometimes he was a man, stumbling along in her wake. Sometimes she had to hunt back to find the snake winding its laborious way across the uneven ground, half lost amid the grass. It seemed to take forever for him to reach the trees.
‘You need to move faster,’ she told him, when he finally arrived and Stepped into his gaunt, bony human body.
‘Is it sso?’ he got out.
‘As man or as snake. You can’t just hobble along like that. They’ll catch us easily.’ It had all seemed such a good idea before. She had envisaged a swift flight across the night-time country, greeting the dawn somewhere far away from Akrit’s hall. She had not considered how old he was, how pale and ill-looking. He looked like something sent by fate to slow her down so that her father’s hunters would be able to amble along her trail and find her standing over the old man’s frozen corpse. She had never seen someone so ill-suited for travel.
‘How could you even get so far from your home?’ she demanded, almost in tears. ‘How did you not die before I ever saw you?’
‘Warmer clothes and setting my own pace,’ he replied tightly. ‘If you will leave me, leave me now. I cannot go faster. I cannot get warm.’
‘You’ll die here.’
‘It ss-seemss likely.’ He shuddered. Then his head jerked up, his eyes wide and fixed on her. ‘Or perhaps you will trust me?’
She regarded him cautiously. ‘Trust you how?’
‘Your little pack, that your wolf can carry. Let me ride there, between your shoulders, girl. I will weigh sso little, and I will be warm . . .’ There was a dreadful longing in his voice.
The thought made her squirm. ‘You . . . want to ride me like a beast, a horse?’
‘We must be swift. You are swift on four feet, as I will never be.’
‘But . . .’ She remembered his serpent form – slender, yes, but surely too large to coil itself into her small bag. ‘You won’t . . .’
‘I can Step into a shape as thick around as a strong man’s thigh, or slender as a whip,’ he told her. ‘We are not so rigid as you, where I am from.’ His expression was naked, stripped of the wise humour he had pretended to in the pit. ‘Please, if we are to move on . . . Or leave me.’
She recalled that he would not have been fed in the pit – growing weaker and weaker because the Wolf would not care, when he ate the old man’s soul, how thin the sacrificed body had been. Perhaps Hesprec Essen Skese had been fit to wander at his snail’s pace across the Crown of the World, wearing snug clothes and relying on the hospitality of strangers. Now, though, he was at his lowest ebb, with neither strength nor wit enough to save himself.
His life was in her hands, just as it had been when she came to cut him loose. And yet she needed his intervention with the Horse if she was ever to get far enough from her father to be free.
She had abandoned her kin and thrown herself on the world’s mercy, so perhaps mercy was what she should show.
‘Step,’ she told him. ‘Step, and climb into my pack if you can.’
‘I cannot bite,’ he told her, misinterpreting the pause. ‘You need not worry.’
‘Old man, I do not fear you.’
To her surprise, that brought a thin smile. ‘Brave child,’ he whispered, and then he was gone, gathering his clothes close to him and Stepping down into something ribbon-thin, a patterned snake perhaps half as long as she was tall. Even then she thought he must be too bulky to do what he had claimed, but when she opened the bag he slid into it, and on into it, feeding each hand’s breadth of his slender body further in until the delicate line of his tail had vanished inside, and he was gone completely from her sight.
She picked up the bag, feeling his unfamiliar weight, and feeling strange to know that the man she had been speaking to was now entirely tucked within. The thought was an uncomfortable one. She felt that somehow she was giving him power over her, for all that he had put himself entirely in her hands.
When she first felt him move sluggishly within the bag, she almost dropped it. It took her three tries before she could secure the bulky pack on her back. Then she Stepped to her wolf form and contorted her jaws until she could draw the strings tight, still feeling that unwelcome and unfamiliar weight. It was all too easy to imagine the thin lash of his body drawing itself about her neck, strangling her slowly to death no matter what shape she might try to fight him in. Yes, such an action on his part would make no sense, and yet he was a foreigner, and a priest of a foreign god-spirit, so how could she trust him? None of her own people’s stories about Snake were happy ones.
But he had called her ‘brave child’, and she must be brave. Forcing down her qualms, she set off into the woods, passing swiftly as a wolf walks, hearing the rain beat on the overhanging needles above and drip all about her, scenting the complex book of the forest and its myriad denizens, that was written afresh each night and blotted out by the raindrops.
Fasting and drinking were a powerful combination. In the predawn there were only a handful up and out in the rain to witness what Maniye had done.
At first neither Akrit nor Kalameshli had made the connection. The priest had been furious that his prisoner had somehow escaped, storming back and forth and beating the two luckless sentries mercilessly with his flint-studded staff. Yes
, their job had been pure formality, because no sacrifice had ever made it out of the pit before, but, still, theirs were the eyes and they were responsible. He stopped only when he had clubbed them both to the ground and broken one’s arm.
By that time, half the tribe had been awakened, but few felt much like venturing outside.
Kalameshli had stood there with the rain streaking the half-done paint on his face – the start of his preparations for the day’s festivities and ritual. By that time someone had roused Akrit, who could still drink all night and yet be up with the dawn. The chief of the Winter Runners stormed over, wrapped in a bearskin, with a seal cloak over it to keep out the wet. He surveyed the scene grimly, standing at the brink of the pit and noting the absence.
‘How can he be gone?’ he demanded.
Kalameshli did not answer. Whatever thoughts snapped and danced within his mind did not show themselves on his face.
Akrit looked up at the low leaden sky, wondering if any trace of the old Snake’s scent might remain. ‘He was old. How far can he have got?’ He stared at the handful of his people who had braved the elements and Kalameshli’s wrath. ‘Get me every hunter fit to track! He could still be coiled up somewhere in the village.’
‘He’s gone,’ the priest said softly, even as the spectators ran off to do their chief’s bidding.
‘You don’t know that. He was frail,’ Akrit argued. ‘How long could he last out there, with winter coming on? He’ll stay by the warmth.’
‘He wasn’t alone,’ Kalameshli pronounced carefully.
‘What do you mean?’ Akrit’s eyes narrowed. ‘A rescue? Is there a whole nest of Snakes in the Wolf’s Shadow?’
Abruptly, Kalameshli had Stepped, his wolf form lean and strong, like the younger man he had once been, the chains of his years left behind. Without even glancing at Akrit, the beast went padding away, nose kept low, moving round the pit in widening circles. Akrit watched, wondering what the priest could possibly find, and yet the wolf was moving with a purpose, looking for something specific.
A few of his hunters had arrived by then, including the reassuringly loyal presence of Smiles Without Teeth. Akrit had not even begun to think about what this meant, the theft of a sacrifice on the Wolf’s own day. As omens went, it could hardly be worse – and then he needed to think what that meant for his continuing rule over the Winter Runners, and where he would stand when the High Chief died. None of it was good. It was events like this that could break even a strong man like Akrit Stone River.
By then Kalameshli had Stepped again, kneeling thirty yards from the pit, gesturing for Akrit to join him.
He had found some tracks that the rain had filled but not yet washed clear. Akrit himself might have missed them, hunter as he was, but the priest had known. Somehow he had divined the truth as though the Wolf had breathed it into his ear.
‘Tiger,’ he stated, for Akrit’s hearing only.
For a moment the chief was on the edge of the wrong conclusion, picturing some warband of the Shadow Eaters come down from the high places to attack their enemies. Would not stealing the Wolf’s meat be the sort of coward’s revenge they would try?
But then Kalameshli said simply, ‘A very small tiger,’ and Akrit finally understood.
Even then he did not want to believe it. He Stepped to his wolf shape and rushed back up to his hall, headed inside and then up the shallow incline of the ladder to the store where Maniye had made her lair. She was gone, and so was some of her clutter. She was gone.
He raced back to Kalameshli, springing back onto his human feet even as he reached him.
‘I don’t understand . . . she passed the Testing. You . . . you tested her yourself, you made sure . . .’ He was perilously close to accusing the priest, stretching the bonds of their alliance.
For his part, Kalameshli seemed more than ready to pull against him. ‘And you saw what I saw: there was nothing but the Wolf in her after she finished the course.’ His words were hard like stones, quiet enough that nobody but Akrit would hear. ‘But then you called her in when you were in your cups and told her far too much all at once.’
‘Because she was supposed to be ours, then,’ Akrit hissed, but before he could say anything that might strain the space between them to breaking point he held up his hands. ‘You truly believe my daughter has taken the sacrifice and run off with him?’
A single sharp nod confirmed it.
Akrit stared past him for a moment, feeling the wound tear within him. Not a wound of love, no: what he felt for the girl had never borne that name. A wound to his pride, though. For any hunter of the Wolf, pride was a tender organ. Especially for a chief, for a man who would be Chief of Chiefs. Bad enough that Akrit had no sons to strengthen his name. Now even his daughter had turned against him. Who would follow a chief that could not rule his own blood?
Seeing Kalameshli’s derisive expression he snapped, ‘I’ll send Smiles into the Roughback lands to take some of the Boar. They’ve been left alone too long. The Wolf won’t go hungry.’
The priest’s look showed how inadequate he thought the gesture would be.
By then his hunters were up, no matter how hungover, and were ready to do his bidding. His first instinct was to simply send them out immediately to all quarters, without any plan. Even with the rain hammering down, her trail would be out there. Having his people charging back and forth like ants would make him more of a fool, though, and what did the girl know, truly? How long could she really survive in the wild and the wood, either as woman or wolf? But she was cunning, and cunning would lead her to where there were other people. There were villages of the Boar and the Deer, the small homes of farmers and herders, and there were trading posts of the Coyote and the Horse. With or without the old Snake, she would make for somewhere that offered food and shelter.
He delivered his orders, giving each man a destination. His pride wanted to limit word of this disgrace to the village, but such secrecy would only aid Maniye’s escape. He must spread word of the girl, and let everyone know that her return would buy the gratitude of the chief of the Winter Runners, a rich commodity indeed.
As he had promised Kalameshli, he dispatched Smiles Without Teeth and two warriors to attack the Boar, because the Wolf must have something to grind between his burning teeth, even if it was just thralls and farmers. The meal would not be as rich as they had both hoped – neither the antlers of Running Deer nor the skinny body of that foreign trespasser – but Akrit needed to husband all the goodwill he could manage.
And last he turned to Broken Axe, who had been waiting patiently there, never mind the rain. The lean man was already dressed as if to set off into the wilds, cloaked against the weather and with a sack of food tucked under his belt. His cold, pale eyes met Akrit’s stare in that manner unique to him: neither a challenger nor one ready to submit to another man’s will, self-sufficient in all things. And yet a hunter and a tracker without peer.
‘You know what has happened here?’ Because by now the word would be in the ears of every Winter Runner. Akrit had coloured the tale in the telling, saying that the old Snake had freed himself, through magic perhaps, and had enchanted his girl, stolen her away. The truth could look just as convincing when turned backwards and inside out.
Broken Axe nodded. What he believed, or even if he cared enough to believe anything, stayed hidden behind his closed expression.
‘Track them down,’ Akrit instructed him. ‘Find the girl, bring her back here alive. If the Snake is with her . . .’ Akrit shrugged. ‘Use your discretion. But I must have my daughter back.’ He almost said more, because of course Broken Axe would know why the girl was so important. He would remember the mother, and Akrit’s orders all those years ago. But, no, perhaps some things were best left unsaid.
The hunter weighed Akrit’s words, looking away for a moment, and then back with a questioning glance.
‘Whatever you ask, within reason,’ Akrit promised him. ‘Perhaps more than you could ever think of as
king for.’ Because this was still the most advantageous match for Maniye, once the girl was safely back. The girl would bind Broken Axe to Akrit’s plans, just when he might have most need of such a man. Similarly, Axe would no doubt tame the wild cunning in her, even if he had to whip it out of the girl.
At last, Broken Axe nodded, eyes still weighing Akrit and his gratitude against future need. A moment later he had dropped to all fours and Stepped into the shape of a gaunt, pale wolf with dark hackles raised about his shoulders. Without a moment’s hesitation, he was padding off with so much certainty that Akrit wondered if he had already scented the trail out before presenting himself here.
8
After the hunt, only Venater would come close. Nobody needed to ask why Asmander did not Step to his Champion form for trivial purposes. The Laughing Men regarded him with that mix of awe and envy that he was used to, even from his own family. The shape he had been gifted with had no mute brothers in the world; the eyes of men had seen no other beasts that strode on those two sickle-clawed feet. There was something intangible but undeniable that hung about that shape: deep and fierce and demanding of respect.
If only this gift had fallen to Tecumander and not me. Asmander pictured his childhood friend, into whose young retinue old Asman had schemed so hard to place his son. And it had worked: the two boys had been inseparable, no stronger comrades in mischief to be found in all the Sun River Nation. When they had been young, it had not mattered that one was the son of a mid-ranking clan head, and the other was the son of the Kasra – the lord of all the Riverlands.
Had it been young Tecumander singled out by the gods for this honour, then a great many difficulties would never have arisen, and Asmander would not even now be heading towards the inhospitable north.
The Tiger and the Wolf (Echoes of the Fall Book 1) Page 9
