Under the Wolf's Shadow

by A. Katie Rose

  Glancing about, I discovered I lay within the shelter of Kel’Ratan’s arms. Bar peered anxiously down from beyond Rygel’s head, snow wreathing his mane. “Glad to have you back,” he rumbled. “That egotistical wizard does have his uses.”

  I’d no energy with which to reply. Through eyes that wanted to shut, I forced them open and took in the worried expressions of Witraz and Alun, discovered Rannon’s hand at my throat assessing my beating pulse. Left and Right shifted from foot to foot at Kel’Ratan’s shoulders, no doubt wanting to take me from him. After all, they were my bodyguards.

  I glanced down. Silverruff gazed up, his grinning muzzle on level with my hip. I lowered my hand to him, trying in a vague way to tickle his jaw as I used to. His tail fanned the snow and he woofed, his breathing turning the icy air to steam.

  “He said he heard you,” Rygel translated.

  Turning my face in a short circle, I noted all the wolves dancing, tails wagging furiously, leaping about in an effort to get past the humans and offer to warm my face with their busy tongues. Thunder pushed past Silverruff and did just that, his love washing more than just my face.

  “Kip deserves the most credit,” Kel’Ratan said, his voice thick as he turned his body so that I might view Kip sitting on his haunches, impatiently awaiting his turn to greet me. “Silverruff told them to search for blood, but it’s Kip’s splendid nose that found it.”

  I turned my face into my cousin’s shoulder. I didn’t want to feel gratitude. If Kip hadn’t discovered my whereabouts, then I’d be dead now. Raine was dead. I should be with him.

  I felt Kel’Ratan’s and Rygel’s sudden concern fall amidst the silence within the terrible gale.

  “Ly’Tana?” Bar asked. “What is it?”

  “Princess?” Rygel said at the same time. “You’re alive. You’re going to be fine.”

  I didn’t turn my face from Kel’Ratan’s elk-hide jacket. “Raine is dead,” I whispered.

  “What?”

  “What did she say?”

  Though the blizzard had eased in its previous fury, the sharp wind sucked my words from Kel’Ratan’s shoulder and whipped them away. Silverruff, whose hearing no amount of wind could stifle, growled.

  “He says she said Raine is dead.”

  “Dead? Blimey!”

  Rygel’s cold hand, bare of covering, gently turned my face toward him. “Princess? Where’d you get that idea?”

  My mind cringed from the vision, for the vision I’d witnessed was true. Just as Raine foresaw his own death in a dream, I saw it for myself. Somehow, we both shared the sight, the ability to foretell the future. Arianne had it. I didn’t predict it, but I knew my inner sight spoke the truth. Yet, I dared not glance into Rygel’s grinning face.

  “Princess,” Rygel said, his voice soft yet heard clearly over the gale-force wind. “Raine isn’t dead.”

  I pulled my chin from his grip. “He’s dead and I want to be dead, too.”

  “Sucks to be you, eh?” Bar snapped within my head. “You’re not going to die, not for a long while. That idiot gai’tan you love won’t die, either. Unless I kill him.”

  “Princess, look at me. Please.”

  Rygel’s voice forced me to gaze, helpless, into his amber eyes. “I can feel Raine,” he said, snow dusting his eyebrows and the new growth of beard on his jaws. “He’s but a day or so away from this canyon, and in good health. He’s my brother, Princess, and I’d know if he was dead. He’s not.”

  While I didn’t exactly disbelieve him, I didn’t believe him, either. Too tired and cold to argue, I huddled against the wind’s chill and longed for a hot fire and a warm bed. I ached all over, and my head thumped sharply in concert with my beating pulse. Rygel may have dragged my ass from beyond death’s barrier, but I wasn’t entirely healed.

  “What now?” Witraz asked, standing waist-deep in white powder.

  From the shelter of Kel’Ratan’s arms, I glanced around. The furious digging to free me from the avalanche lay strewn about in piles of snow, ice, splintered trees and bared rocks. The lion’s corpse lay at the bottom of a huge pit, a new dusting of snow covering its tawny fur and death-bared fangs. Its dark blood stained the once pristine snow beneath it, with a bare spot where I once lay. The whiteout would soon bury all traces of it, frozen in its grave until the spring thaw.

  Observing the direction of my gaze, Alun returned to the hole and retrieved my sword from the lion’s body. He cleaned my bloody blade on its scraggly mane before climbing from the pit with my blade clutched in his fist. He offered me a quick smile. Or at least what I thought was a smile, rapidly glimpsed through the slashing white.

  “This bloody trap may well kill all of us,” Kel’Ratan rumbled, taking a staggering step forward, uphill.

  The single step was all it took. He floundered past his hips in loose snow before brought to a frustrated and furious halt. Witraz managed another step forward as Shadow reared back to leap–and buried himself headfirst into a soft drift. Snarling his curses, he shook snow from his face and ears before making another try. He managed four whole feet. The smallest wolf present, Kip all but drowned as he tried to swim his way through the mess.

  Frantic need and a downhill slope permitted humans and wolves to flounder through the avalanche to find me. However, during my rescue, the blizzard handily dumped another two to three inches on top of the avalanche. With too much snow and the hill too steep to climb, it appeared Kel’Ratan’s prediction may well come true. We certainly couldn’t wait until spring, when the snows melted, to climb back up.

  Up appeared impossible. Down–deadly. Only the steep drop into the narrow gorge below lay scant rods from the pit and us. My already dry mouth felt as though I’d swallowed sand when I realized how close I’d come to careening violently over its edge, and into the broken rocks and dead trees hundreds of rods below.

  “Cheery thought,” Bar said, shaking loose snow from his wings and mane. “Not so good for you, but I plan to make use of that drop.”

  Swimming through the drifts, Bar spread his wings and leaped into the gorge. Often lazy, Bar made use of many castle parapets in this fashion, dropping into the air from a height. Thus, seeing him vanish into the murk over the edge of a cliff didn’t bother me a bit. Nor was I surprised to see him wing up and out, permitting the howling wind to push him along.

  “I am highly insulted by that thought in your head,” he said, swinging up and over, the swirling snow making him all but invisible. “I’m not lazy.”

  “Lazy is as lazy does,” I replied.

  “Bite me.”

  Before I could launch an invective that included his lack of anything remotely resembling intelligence and an acerbic comment that a moth could outfly him on his best day, a shout from high above interrupted me. Glancing up when Kel’Ratan turned in that direction, I recognized Yuri waving his arms over his head and Yuras cupped his mittens over his mouth to better project his yelling. “Catch the ropes!”

  Ropes? Of course. Tie one end to a pommel and let the horse drag us up the hill. Dead easy, I thought as Yuras threw the rope down, and watched as it hit the snowfall. Except one small problem remained–

  “Too short,” Kel’Ratan said grimly.

  The end of the rope landed a good five rods short of Yuras’s goal. The second line thrown by Yuri didn’t come close to us, and lay half-buried in white like a taunt. None of us could reach those tempting cables. And if we could, then what? I asked myself, eyeing the steep hill filled with broken trees and rocks amid the slivered ice and snow. Tie the end around out waists while a horse dragged us through all that? Perhaps that wasn’t such a good plan, after all. Kel’Ratan reached the same conclusion.

  “Rygel,” Kel’Ratan said, his tone suddenly urgent. “Go dragon. Melt the snow.”

  “Nice thought, m’lord,” Witraz said from behind us. “But unfortunately, that won’t work, either.”

  “Why?”

  Kel’Ratan spun around. We both stared at Rygel, unconscious,
lying face-down on the icepack as Little Bull licked what little skin he could, whining with anxiety. Rannon lifted him, turning him over, until his shoulders rested against a splintered log at the edge of the pit. Rygel’s head lay back against the bark, his skin a waxy pale. I bit my lip. I didn’t like his color. We needed to get him out of this cold wind and ice before much longer or Rygel would die.

  “He brought her back from death itself,” Alun said, his tone soft. “It was almost too much.”

  Damn you, Rygel. You shouldn’t have done it. I was happy being dead. I was home.

  “Enough,” Bar groused. “You’re alive. Deal with it.”

  “Shut your mouth,” I snapped. “Stay out of my head.”

  Before he uttered a caustic riposte, a strange sound filled the gulch and the canyon. Wolves ceased snarling bitterly at one another as they floundered helpless in the deep ice and fresh snowfall. Witraz and Rannon shot alarmed glances at one another, and Kel’Ratan clutched me closer to him as he turned once more to face uphill. We both stared up in astonishment.

  Arianne, her hood thrown back from her midnight hair, stood amid the howling blizzard with her bare hands stretched up over her head. Her voice, magnified by the sheer walls of the gorge, drowned the roar of the winds. Raised in song, her beautiful resonance calmed the tempest. The wind died to a whisper as the snow fell in thick flakes from the peaks high above and drifted like tiny feathers to the snowpack.

  “Glory,” Witraz muttered, uneasy. Kel’Ratan’s hands tightened into painful grips around my waist and legs, but I couldn’t tear my eyes from the sight high above me.

  Arianne’s voice, her song, took on a stronger note. She threw her bare hands toward the grey sky.

  The sky answered.

  Light enveloped the canyon. Suddenly blind, I blinked tears from my eyes and squinted into the sheer white. Shadows moved within its depths, dancing, mesmerizing. Like the heat from the desert, the wind reversed itself. Now blowing down from the sky, its blast of warm, no, hot, air, cascaded down and sent every wolf and human into panting. I wanted to skin out of these protective hides like yesterday, and Kel’Ratan’s skin changed from pale ocher to beet red within a few seconds.

  “She’s a goddess,” I heard Witraz mutter. “I knew it. A goddess incarnate.”

  While I wasn’t so certain Arianne qualified for goddess material, I knew she had power. Power drawn, perhaps, from her divine blood. The blood she shared with Raine, the blood of Darius. Divine or not, she wielded her power as I wielded my sword. Under Kel’Ratan’s boots, under the paws of the wolves, the snow melted. In thick gurgling streams it ran down the steep incline and over the edge of the gorge. Like a waterfall, snowmelt sluiced past our boots and paws and fell far below. Within mere moments, the huge avalanche and new snow ran into small streamlets, poured over the rocky ledge and vanished.

  It left behind a thick viscous mud, broken trees and rocks. Rannon, Shadow at his heel, slipped and slid his way upward until he grasped the end of Yuras’s rope. “Who’s first?”

  “Hallucinations are not visions,” Rygel explained, his tone expressing his weariness far more than the rounded set of his shoulders or the pallor of his cheeks.

  He wasn’t the only one exhausted. From myself on down to Kip, humans, horses and wolves all felt the toll the ordeal had taken. Bar drowsed under his warming elk hides between the fires, while Shardon’s eyes slid shut as he stood, hip-shot and head down as he, too, found sleep. Despite the healing Rygel poured into me, my body still ached as though I’d been twisted like a wrung dish-rag.

  Under Arianne’s song, and power, the blizzard slunk away. Though the clouds rolled over and consumed her light, the blizzard failed to return and plague us. The mud we struggled through froze if not immediately, then quite quickly. We walked, with the help of Yuri and Yuras’s ropes, up the steep incline and to our horses. The wolves all but galloped joyfully up to the trail above and grinned down with tails high and wagging.

  By then, Bar wasn’t the only one who suggested Usa’a’mah was behind the storm, the lion, and the avalanche in yet another attempt to kill me. Yet, none spoke of the miracle that saved not just me, but almost everyone present. Kel’Ratan lifted me to his saddle and, with Mikk following, walked both horses the remaining distance through the canyon and into the shelter of the hills. Darkness fell with a thump, hiding the fingers that made the signs against strong enchantment. For we were, all of us, under a great spell wrought by none other than our slave, Arianne. As the dark clouds blew past the mountain peaks and left the bright stars to shine down through the bitterly cold night air, no eye but slid sidelong toward the tiny girl performing her camp chores.

  Though warmed by blazing fires and the presence of Digger and Thunder all but burying me under their weight, I still shivered. I couldn’t be warm enough. Arianne, the slave again and refusing to speak of what she’d done, warmed spiced wine in cups and skins, carrying all around to the warriors who worked to free me from the avalanche. Kel’Ratan, his heavy arm over my shoulder, drank deep while encouraging me to follow suit. Despite the hot wine, the shivers refused to dissipate.

  “Then what are they?” Tor asked, fresher than the rest. Though he didn’t help dig me from the snow, he, Yuri and Yuras set up camp and fed us as everyone else drooped with weariness and sore muscles. That alone earned Tor the right to feel tired, but he didn’t appear so.

  “Hallucinations are tricks of the mind,” Rygel answered, his own voice broken and slow. “Visions come from the sight, or foresight, if you will. Not at all the same thing.”

  While the sight of Raine stuffing his innards into his belly seemed real enough, I now realized how right he was. I expect that when one lay dying, one’s brain might not function properly. And though, like Arianne, I refused to speak of the experience, I knew I’d crossed death’s barrier and had come back. Though it seemed the ghost of a distant memory, I recalled searching for the presence that spoke from the darkness–‘it’s not your time, Beloved’–and listening to that soft voice echoing within my soul.

  How long before it becomes my time? Usa’a’mah failed yet again in his quest to kill me. How long before he triumphs? How many times can the other deities interfere with his blood-lust before he wins? I’m dead. It’s only a matter of time.

  “Where were the wolves?” I asked, trying to suppress another shiver. “Before the avalanche hit.”

  Rygel glanced down at Little Bull, sprawled half across his legs. “Him and Thunder,” he said, his voice low. “The biggest wolves can, at times, be the weakest.”

  Though I couldn’t straighten and escape from Kel’Ratan’s arm, I brushed my hair from my eyes. A croak emerged from my throat. “What?”

  “When we entered the canyon and the blizzard hit,” Rygel said, stroking his friend’s ears, “the wolves trailed us across an ice sheet. Shardon led us around it, but the pack thought nothing of scampering straight across. Thunder and Little Bull fell into a crevice.”

  My hand crept down Thunder’s heavy neck, past his ears to his muzzle. His warm tongue licked my fingers as tears trailed down my cheek.

  “Arianne and I both felt their panic,” Rygel continued, his voice barely heard over the fires voraciously devouring wood. “But there wasn’t a damn thing we could do. We couldn’t turn around. We couldn’t help. Between the canyon and the blizzard, all we could do was move forward and pray.”

  “Silverruff ordered the others to dig up long sticks,” Arianne said, filling my cup to the brim with hot wine. “Thunder and Little Bull held onto the ice with just their paws, but their weight–”

  “Their tremendous weight almost dragged them down,” Rygel went on, his tone heavy. “Silverruff, Shadow, Nahar and Black Tongue–the biggest wolves left–held the sticks down for Thunder and Little Bull to bite into. They pulled them up, but–”

  “It almost wasn’t enough.”

  Arianne paused in her service to gaze at Little Bull, nearly asleep on Rygel’s crossed legs. I suspect
ed Rygel had no feeling left below his thighs. “Warrior Dog and Digger grabbed Thunder and tried to pull him to safety. Lightfoot and Dire bit into Little Bull’s ruff and kept him from sliding back while White Fang, Scatters Them, Joker and Kip tossed more sticks across the cavern and raised them under Thunder and Little Bull’s rumps.”

  Rygel managed a small smile. “It took a dozen smart wolves to rescue two dumb asses.”

  Little Bull rumbled sleepily, his upper lip curled to reveal a white incisor. Rygel chuckled. “Shut up and go to sleep.”

  Thunder sighed, settling himself into a tight ball while Digger growled under his breath. I didn’t know what he said, but I didn’t care. Usa’a’mah almost killed two of my friends in his quest to slaughter me. Bitter rage rose as far as my throat and got no further. Vowing vengeance against the dark god of war was useless. My protectors protected me, and only me. Those with me took their chances.

  Unless I took steps to change that.

  But how?

  Chapter 11

  Busted

  “You know what you have to do.”

  “I can’t,” I snapped, my fangs biting on nothing but cold air. “He’s my friend, I can’t kill him, I can’t–”

  I heard Tashira groan on his ledge, scented his warm blood on the air when I paced close to the canyon’s edge. Panic teased the edge of my mind. Wind Spirit couldn’t possibly have survived the damage done to her by the Tongu and Brutal’s soldiers. Tashira’s injuries, while bad enough, weren’t immediately life-threatening. I could fix him, heal him, if he weren’t on that rock ledge fifty feet down. Darkhan peered over the edge, his ears perked. I thought he might say something, but he remained silent, staring thoughtfully downward.