The Tiger and the Wolf (Echoes of the Fall Book 1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Asmander was gone now. She had no sense of when, just that something had dragged him away. Then she was battling her way through denser trees, swerving and scrabbling, knowing that Broken Axe was off to her right and getting more distant. In a sudden panic, surrounded by that peopled darkness, she Stepped to her tiger shape to climb and leap, hoping to make better time through the tangle, trying to break out into the open where her wolf speed would count.

  It was a mistake. In that moment of change her souls clashed inside her, ripping at one another, and she tumbled over, shocked onto two human feet, jarring hard off a tree trunk and landing on her knees.

  When she looked up, she was not alone. The sight of the woman who had come so far to kill her hurt like a wound inside her, one that would not close.

  Joalpey, Strength In Moonlight. ‘Mother.’

  The Tiger Queen looked down on her. The curved blade was in her hand, but for just that moment she made no move to use it. Around them the woods seemed abruptly quiet, as though both of them had been abandoned by their allies.

  ‘I will not go with you,’ Maniye told her.

  Joalpey nodded, and then one foot slid back and she was in her fighting stance, ready for the dance of tigers. Maniye felt herself fall into a mirroring pose, but there was a cold blade of fear in her, because to fight she needed her souls, and she could not say if either would answer her call right then.

  Joalpey was moving as soon as she had made her stand, bronze edge flickering forwards in curved paths through the darkness, so that it was more an idea in Maniye’s mind than a sight in her eyes. She let the shape of her mother’s body tell her where the knife would go next, slipping aside into a crouching pose and bringing her own blade up in an arc that would have driven it into the other woman’s armpit if she had stayed still. Joalpey made the smallest shift to her footing, Maniye’s point missing her by an inch that might just as well have been an arm’s length, while Joalpey’s own blade drew a long red line down the girl’s arm.

  And even as Maniye stepped back, stabbing at throat height with a hand slick with her own blood, her mother became a tiger, springing even as she Stepped. She launched herself under Maniye’s strike, knocking her smaller prey off her feet and slamming down on her.

  The bruising pain of it seemed to knock Maniye’s mind askew even as the breath was driven from her. She was clawing and biting furiously at the big cat atop her, snapping with a wolf’s yellow teeth, digging in hooked tiger claws, digging in with the point of her blade, even as she fought to keep Joalpey’s own jaws away from her. She Stepped and Stepped, swift and uncontrolled as a spring flood, her fluid form denying her enemy a target.

  Then her mother was knocked away with a yowl of surprise, as another of her people bowled into her, his fur bloody. Venater’s reptile shape uncoiled from the dark in chase, saw-tooth jaws tearing open the injured tiger’s entire flank. Then the pirate had bloated into his human shape, kneeling over the Tiger hunter with hand upraised before driving his razor-edged blade down, three hacking blows to butcher the beast with no mercy given. When he stood again, gory implement in hand, his eyes were on Joalpey. His grin looked like death.

  Maniye fled, though right then she was not sure who she was fleeing from. She hit the ground on wolf paws, hoping that her mother would take up the southerner’s challenge.

  She did not. Instead, she was pounding after her true target, and Venater, for all his fearsome skill, could not keep up with them.

  But Maniye was faster: allow her twenty breaths of clear running and she must pull ahead of Joalpey. Ten breaths and no more conflict within her or even—

  All of that was tangled in her mind when Joalpey leapt at her and caught her a raking blow down her haunches. The pain seared through Maniye and she stumbled, losing her speed, lurching desperately to get back onto her feet again. The tiger was off balance too, her lunge overextending her. One more time, Maniye fled.

  Then there was a new shape coursing alongside her – Broken Axe keeping pace with effort, with blood in his teeth and down his sides.

  Something passed between them, an understanding, and if she had the time to take human shape she would have told him not to do it. But he was already turning, Stepping into a man with his axe drawn back. She heard the hissing scream of a woman as the iron blade bit, shocked out of her tiger form by the sheer pain. Not her mother, which meant that . . .

  She had slowed without meaning to, waiting for Broken Axe, and that was when Joalpey caught up with her. Maniye saw only a flurry out from the dark, and then she had thrown herself aside, a leap the wolf was not capable of, so that she landed on her hands and knees, rolling and kicking to try and get up, her knife lost, even as her mother approached.

  The hot breath of the tiger was on Maniye and she froze, reaching for any other form but the helpless, naked one she had been born to. The Tiger Queen was a shape of fire-splashed darkness, her eyes seeming to glow from within.

  Then she was a woman once more, her knife levelled at Broken Axe as he returned.

  ‘Why?’ Joalpey asked him.

  ‘For the same reason I saved you from the Wolf. Because it is right. Will you not honour my judgement?’

  There was a battle on Joalpey’s face just then, but she lost it when another pair of Tigers slunk out to stand beside her, one limping and the other with a torn ear.

  ‘For all I owe you, you were too late,’ she told Broken Axe. ‘You cannot heal the scars they left. And she is just one more scar.’

  Something stayed her though. Her history with Broken Axe allowed Maniye two more breaths. The Tiger was fierce behind Joalpey’s eyes, but the eyes were human still, somehow penning it in. Not for Maniye; she would not defy her god for something as trivial as her daughter. She wanted Broken Axe to flee now though. She did not want his blood on her claws, his soul in her teeth.

  Then Asmander stepped out, a shadow from the shadows, smudged darker with blood here and there, and his sword jagged with missing teeth.

  ‘We’re leaving now,’ he announced to the world, his voice ragged with weariness, but still trying to sound light and mocking. ‘Let the Tiger fill its belly somewhere else.’

  Joalpey’s face twisted and she Stepped, snarling, but Asmander met her shape for shape. The ear-splitting screech of the Champion tore through the forest, sending the Tiger Queen skittering backwards.

  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!’