The Wolf

by Jean Johnson

  It wasn’t that he wouldn’t marry Alys, exactly. It was that he would first have to apologize to her for storming out like that, and the apology would have to be accompanied by an explanation. Wolfer had come to the conclusion that he could forgive her for doing whatever it took for her to survive in her uncle’s so-called care, that he still loved her and wanted her in his life . . . but his anger came in two parts: a twinge of betrayal that she would help her uncle against them, even if it had been a necessity of her survival, and a far greater fury at her uncle. He wanted to rend the man’s flesh from his bones, to snap his teeth around the older mage’s throat. And yet she was terrified of anyone killing her uncle.

  She would also have some explaining to do, Wolfer knew. Such as what spells, exactly, he had cast to protect himself. What magics he would be most likely to use against them. What beasts he had available to send. Where those beasts were kept, too, in case they could somehow destroy his menagerie while his attention was elsewhere. Or, more likely, alert the Mage Council as to their whereabouts, and let them destroy the monsters’ lair for us.

  Provided they could get the Council to cooperate, of course. An anonymous tip might be best. But that only took care of the plague of magical beasts. It didn’t cure the root of the problem: Broger of Devries.

  “Are you going to go to her?” Rydan prodded, drawing his attention back to the reason his darkest-haired sibling had snuck up on him like that.

  “Why? Do you know where she is?” Wolfer retorted dryly.

  “Yes.”

  His sibling’s answer surprised him. Not that Rydan knew where Alys could be found, but that he’d added a lilt to the answer, making it sound conditional. Wolfer leaned back against the altar of Jinga’s aspect as Lover and folded his arms across his muscular chest. “And?”

  “And are you going to ask, or yell?” Rydan countered calmly.

  Oh, so that’s how you’re going to play it, Brother, Wolfer thought. He settled his arms a little more comfortably and crossed his ankles. He didn’t think Jinga would mind him sitting on the edge of one of His altars too much. Kata might, being a civilized Goddess, but Jinga was a bit more casual. “What makes you think I’d do either?”

  The last, pallid rays of Sister Moon vanished from the chapel; the crescent of light had slipped below the horizon. The crisscrossing of the shadows vanished, leaving only the glow of Brother Moon shining down through the glazed central dome of the roof. “She said her life-force was in her uncle’s grasp. That he could steal it from her with a word, before she forged an amulet to counter his magics.”

  “I know.” The corner of Wolfer’s mouth twitched up as—for one moment—Rydan was caught off-guard by his admission. Of course, Wolfer hadn’t known it in that exact detail, but he had known about the amulet, and her uncle’s ability to track her without it.

  The younger man’s puzzled look smoothed over. It was replaced by a sardonic look and an arched brow as Rydan folded his arms across his own chest, echoing his older brother’s stance. “So why are you still here?”

  “I want to talk to her when I’m not angry.”

  The pale moonlight faded as a cloud drifted across their sole source of illumination. “But you’re not angry at her.”

  Wolfer didn’t bother to ask where Rydan got his insight. The other mage’s instincts were better than his own sometimes, for all that Wolfer was more in touch with his inner animal nature. He shook his head. “No, I’m not angry with her. I’m angry with the situation. I’m . . . upset that she did help him, but furious that he made it necessary. That he coerced her. That she still fears him. She shouldn’t have to fear anyone.”

  A pale hand, looking almost disembodied as its sleeve blended into the darkness around them, shoved him on the shoulder. “Then go to her and tell her all of this.”

  “Yes,” Wolfer grumbled, since his brother’s words had an unspoken “idiot” appended somewhere in his tone. “I know; I’m an ass. Where is she?”

  “Western docks.” Rydan stepped back into the shadows, vanishing from sight. Wolfer called out to him as he retreated.

  “You’ll be next, you know. Well, maybe not next . . . but you’re destined to fall in love, too.”

  A soft sound wafted from the shadows. It could’ve been a snort, with more effort. Wolfer touched the braid on his wrist, letting the corner of his mouth curl up.

  “It’s not so bad, you know. Being in love,” the second eldest added. “In fact, I rather like it. I think you will, too.”

  There was no reply. He did hear the padding of footsteps as his brother retreated . . . and something in the distance, a faint rumbling that could’ve been thunder. If there had been the right sort of clouds in the sky for it.

  Wolfer didn’t question Rydan’s wordless retreat, or the source of that subtle, distant commentary; the most reclusive of them hadn’t been labeled the Storm on a whim, after all.

  This time, it was a different set of footsteps that approached. Or rather, that trotted up to her. Alys glanced over her shoulder at the sound of claws clicking softly against the wooden planks of the pier. The wolf noted her movement and stopped for a moment, backlit by the rising light of Brother Moon. She couldn’t see the expression in his eyes, but he padded forward after a moment more, his head and ears lowered. In canine terms, it was an almost apologetic approach, though his tail was raised halfway and wagging a little.

  Apparently he expected her to forgive him, or at least had strong hopes for a reconciliation. Alys knew he had a temper; she had winced from it often enough as a child. But as an adult, he had clearly mastered most of his emotional outbursts. Removing himself from the dining chamber as he had done was just a part of ensuring that he didn’t stay exposed to the source of his anger; even the most placid-tempered man would grow increasingly upset if the source of his irritation remained to abrade his nerves, after all. Her father had been that way, once. A placid-tempered man for the most part, but he had lost his temper a few times.

  Wolfer had managed to temper his emotions, too, it seemed. So, as the shapechanged mage approached, Alys twisted a little farther to face him, opening her arms. The wolf pushed up against her, leaning into her with a sigh as she embraced him. The whuff of relieved breath comforted her. Burying her face in his fur, she squeezed him until he pulled back, then she loosened her grip. A ripple of fur and flesh, of bone and cloth, and her arms now looped around his ribs. Alys leaned into him this time. Wolfer wrapped his arms around her, his legs dangling over the edge of the dock next to hers.

  “I’m sorry I left like that,” he rumbled quietly. “I was just . . . I know you didn’t want to help your uncle. I’m a little upset that you did help him send all those things to plague us, but I do understand. You just did what you had to do to survive because that was the situation you were stuck in at the time. I’m still angry, but it’s almost entirely at him. Which is as it should be. Your uncle is the source of all our troubles, after all, and he shouldn’t be allowed to keep doing these things. He must be stopped.”

  “If you try to kill him, even if it’s a physical attack . . . his magics will punish you,” Alys whispered, gripping his torso a little tighter. “I don’t want him to hurt you.”

  “Every defense has a weakness,” Wolfer reassured her. “We’ll find a way to defeat him. We’ll just have to get together with the others, ask you a lot of questions about your uncle, and toss out ideas until we find a couple of solutions to the problem.”

  “If they’ll let me come back to their home,” Alys whispered. Rydan forgave her, and Wolfer had, too, but that didn’t mean Saber and the others would. Well, Morganen knows, and forgave me long ago for all I had to do . . . and I think Kelly’s on my side, too . . .

  “I think Kelly will keep my twin in line. Between her and me . . . and Morg,” he allowed, doing his best to banish the specter of jealousy over his youngest sibling’s ties to his woman, “I think we can keep the rest of them in line, too.”

  A soft laugh escaped
her. Snuggling closer, Alys breathed in the warm, musky scent of his flesh. Both of them had grown and changed in the intervening years since their childhood friendship, but she still loved him. “I missed you.”

  Wolfer knew what she meant. “I missed you, too. Will you . . . will you still walk the eight altars with me?”

  Heat rose in her cheeks. Lifting her face from his chest, Alys stared up at him. Most of his face was in shadow, but enough moonlight shone behind them to gild the edge of his cheek and catch at the corner of his eye. She could see his anticipation of her answer. “I will, but . . . I think I would like to wait until after, um . . . after my uncle is taken care of. You see, he said some things that makes me think he could . . . that he could tap into the life-force and potential magics of any child I might have, and . . . oh, stop growling!”

  Her hand lightly smacked his chest. Wolfer cut off the sound with a rueful twist of his lips. Rewarding him with a stroke of her hand down the front of his tunic, she continued.

  “I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I do want to be very cautious about that sort of thing. That’s one of the reasons I got myself the birth-control amulet I’m wearing,” she reminded him, sticking out her ankle. It was hidden by her boot. “I don’t want to take any chances.”

  Disappointed at the thought of delaying a family, Wolfer had to concede her point. “If your uncle is evil enough to use the lives of his own kin to augment his powers, without their freely consented permission . . . I could see him doing something like that. I suppose we could put off having any children. But why should we put off our marriage?”

  “I don’t know if he could sink his magical claws into my husband’s powers or not, as well,” she murmured unhappily, looking away from him. “I wouldn’t put it past him.”

  “Then we’ll consider that a possibility, too. Come,” Wolfer told her, shifting out of her arms and rising to his feet. He offered her his hand. “We should go back and round up the others for a discussion of what you know. And if they’re being as stubborn as mules, well, the sooner we know they’re being stubborn, the sooner I can growl at them and get away with it. Since you don’t like me growling without a good reason.”

  Again, she felt her face grow warm as she rose with his help. “Actually, I like you growling when we’re in our bedchamber. It, um . . . makes me think of all the things we do.”

  “Oh.” He processed that for a moment, then grinned down at her. “I’ll take that as permission to growl at you all the more, then!”

  “Wolfer!” She bapped him again with the back of her fingers. He chuckled and shapechanged himself into his stallion form, to give her a ride back to their home.

  It was Kelly who had the wisdom to send someone to fetch pen, ink, and paper to write down everything Alys answered to the questions posed by the brothers. By default, it was Kelly who ended up writing down those answers, to free up the others to ask questions about literally arcane matters that she still didn’t quite comprehend. Having had some time to calm down, the seven brothers had accepted Alys back among them with little reservation, and a few had even apologized to her for any rudeness earlier . . . and then grilled her thoroughly on her uncle’s monsters, magics, and most likely methods of defense and attack, in an interrogation session that lasted until almost midnight.

  It was Kelly who slowed things down a little. Occasionally, she had to ask questions in her ignorance, and though her first few interruptions had been answered impatiently, the mage brothers gave up being irritated and just answered them factually. They even inserted explanations as they continued to ask Alys—and Morganen—questions, but their answers didn’t make the brothers very happy. There weren’t many avenues by which they could get around Broger of Devries’ defenses, and almost all of them wound up with one or more of the brothers either being mortally injured, or killed outright. Capturing him wouldn’t be much of an option; with such active defenses as he possessed, Broger’s captors wouldn’t be able to enforce his captivity. Which left them with the unhappy prospect of finding a way to end their enemy’s life.

  It was also Kelly—and her ignorant outworlder questions—that found their solution. She directed this question at Alys, not at the others. “Well, what about his own magics, Alys? You’re saying that no one else could harm him, but what if one of his own offensive spells was . . . was reflected back at him? Like redirecting a bright ray of sunshine with a hand-mirror to blind an enemy’s eyes? Only in this case, the enemy is the original source of the sunlight.”

  Eight pairs of puzzled eyes gazed at the outworlder in their midst. Three sets of brows drew down in matching, puzzled frowns, four more sets rose in surprise . . . and one set of lashes blinked. Morganen, who had been sitting with his boot heels propped on the edge of the dining table despite Evanor’s glare, dropped his legs and sat forward. “That’s it! It would be his own energies, so the spells would backlash upon him!”

  “I don’t think the wardings would attack him,” Alys interjected quickly. “I mean, I’ve seen him cast spells on himself without any harm. But . . . if it were a lethal attack on his part, or at least something serious enough to wound him mortally, and we just . . . if we just . . . I can’t believe I’m suggesting this,” she muttered, unhappy with the thought but forcing herself to express it. “But if we just keep him from healing himself, and he, um . . . dies on his own . . .”

  “I think the Gods would forgive us, if we were to finish him in such a manner,” Wolfer agreed, eyeing his curly haired future bride.

  Evanor nodded, agreeing. “And though we might be punished somehow for not helping to heal him . . . since we cannot harm him directly, it would be by his own doing that he would be killed.”

  “Defeating him in this way would only work if he were to cast a lethal offensive spell at one of us,” Trevan confirmed, tapping the table with his fingertip. “Which would not invoke the Gods’ Law of Harm against anyone but himself. Unless he were to have a lingering sort of demise. Or maybe just a maiming . . . sorry, Alys, but I’m feeling a bit more bloodthirsty than you. I, too, have been bitten by a watersnake, clawed by a tremor-fiend, and narrowly escaped being the meal for a dozen other things over the past three years, the same as the rest of us. I am not feeling that charitable toward him, even if he is your blood-kin.”

  “I think we all feel a mix of anger, discomfort, and indignation. But . . . if that were the case, if he were only maimed or badly wounded, not mortally so . . .” Koranen shrugged. “Well, it would pin him down long enough for us to hopefully find a way to strip away his protections, and then we could turn him over to the Council. Who would execute him for harboring all those illegal beasts.”

  “Hang on,” Kelly interjected. “He may have harbored these beasties on Katani soil, but he’s been sending them to Nightfall. Which means he falls under my jurisdiction.”

  The others frowned at her. Saber lifted one of his sand-colored brows. “Your jurisdiction?”

  “Hello? Queen of Nightfall, here,” the freckled redhead reminded him, touching her chest with the hand not holding the nib-pen. “I’ve claimed this island, and all who live upon it. His crimes have been committed on Our soil, against Our subjects. If you’ll pardon my use of the Royal ‘We,’ ” Kelly amended, tipping her head slightly. “As the sovereign, it is my duty to declare what the laws are . . . and I say that anyone who sends beasts to attack and harm us is breaking the law. Ergo, if he’s breaking the law, and trying to kill us by it . . . then I say let him die as his punishment, if his own magics don’t do the job for us right away.”

  “Kelly, you cannot—” Saber started to argue.

  “Actually,” a voice stated sharply, cutting him off. Saber allowed it out of surprise, for it was Rydan who spoke; he tended to interrupt even less than he spoke, which of course meant that his brothers tended to listen all the more to the black-haired mage when he did so. “Broger did not commit any crimes on sovereign Nightfall soil.” The sixth-born mage smiled slightly, sardonically at
his puzzled sister-in-law. “We were technically still a part of Katan during his last infestation.”

  Kelly had to acknowledge his point with a nod and a sigh. Her husband looked like he would have said more, but Trevan spoke first. His tone was thoughtful.

  “You know . . . if he comes here again to attack us—which is the most likely course of action, since we’re not exactly free to go and seek him out—then he would be committing crimes against the populace of Nightfall. At which point he would fall under Her Majesty’s laws, and Her Majesty’s judgment,” the other strawberry blond asserted carefully.

  “Kelly, please don’t tell me you’re still going through with this . . . this game of pretending to be our queen?” Saber asked his wife.

  “I don’t think it’s a game,” Alys stated, drawing attention away from the other woman in the chamber. The males seated around the table eyed her askance, prompting her to defend her position. “Well, I don’t! If the Curse of Eight Prophecy comes true, then there are going to be six more women coming here. And with all of those women, there will be children born. And since they’ll all be cousins, you’ll have to bring in more people, so they can wed outside of their own bloodline . . . and their children will need husbands and wives, and theirs, and theirs . . .

  “And there will be people who will want to come here and settle just because they can. There’s miles and miles of room on this island, waiting to be populated by farmers and herders, craftsmen and fishermen!” Alys reminded them. “If we don’t settle how the government will be run right now, when there’s still only a small number of people to govern, then it’ll be all the harder to establish law and order when the others start coming here.”