Wolf's Head, Wolf's Heart

by Jane Lindskold

  "I shall spare you the details," Opulence Rosen added hurriedly, sensing the less than patient mood among his listeners. "What is essential for you to know in order to understand the place of the assassin slave in our society is that we place so great a value on human life that each person is accorded a monetary worth. Slaves who wish to acquire their freedom may purchase it or earn it. In this way, the estate is not diminished in value.

  "However, not all slaves have the means to earn their worth in coin. Our wise founders felt there should be other means for them to earn their worth. Taking a risk of one kind or another can provide one of these means."

  "Such as killing someone," interrupted Baron Shark.

  The diplomat smiled in a thin facsimile of geniality.

  "Yes, that's right, or building dams, or any number of other dangerous jobs that—since they create the risk that the owner might lose his or her entire investment—need to be compensated for in coin."

  "And your point," King Allister prompted dryly, "is?"

  Opulence Rosen flushed, though whether in anger or embarrassment was difficult to say.

  "What I wish your people to realize, Your Majesty, is that the owner of an assassin slave may choose not to use that slave for his or her own needs. However, in all fairness to the slave, we believe that the slave should be permitted to employ its complex and exhaustive training before it becomes useless through age or injury. Thus, the assassin slave's services are often hired out to another contractor.

  "I mention this most particularly because I wish you to understand that discovering the owners of these slaves who acted here during the wedding may not lead you to whoever set them on the good prince and his bride. They may have been contracted out to another party and the original owner may be innocent of any complicity."

  Duke Oyster snapped out, "Tell me, Your Opulence, do you hire these assassins to foreign contractors?"

  "I," Alt Rosen answered carefully, "do not currently own any assassin slaves, nor, given my earnings as a foreign representative for my nation, would I think it wise to hire them abroad. However, there are in Waterland who do so, who even prefer to do so since such contracts have fewer domestic ramifications."

  Red-faced with fury, Duke Oyster surely would have said more, but King Allister hammered once again for silence.

  "Thank you, Opulence Rosen, for clarifying the place of the assassin slave within your society. Let me further inform those gathered here—since Your Opulence has already assured me upon this point—that you and your associates will be assisting us in every way possible as we work to track down the original owners of these slaves. Indeed…"

  The king permitted himself a humorless smile. "Indeed, Opulence Rosen will be remaining with us in Bright Bay indefinitely while other members of his party return to Waterland to undertake the necessary research. Since we are greatly concerned for Your Opulence's safety in these troubled times, we will be assigning guards to follow you wherever you go and to remain close to you at all times. In this way, your safety will be assured."

  King Allister stopped, sipped his watered wine. He didn't need to actually say the word "hostage" to make his intent clear to everyone present. To the man's credit, Alt Rosen concealed his dismay quite well.

  "I thank Your Majesty for your concern for my person," he said.

  Bowing stiffly, he resumed his seat.

  King Allister nodded graciously, then resumed addressing the general assembly.

  "That concludes my remarks regarding the current tragic happenings. If there is some rumor I have failed to address, I have some few moments remaining before my next appointment during which I may attempt to answer your questions."

  Taking this opportunity, Duchess Pelican asked about the possibility that the canceled festivities—a ball and several banquets—would be rescheduled. The king regretfully announced that the events would not be rescheduled out of respect for those who had died in defense of their monarchs.

  This decision was well received. The next question was less easily dealt with—all the more so because it was raised by young Derian Carter, who was apparently unaware that he was treading on sensitive ground.

  "Your Majesty," the red-haired youth said seriously, "what puzzles me is why the assassins chose to strike during the wedding. Surely there would have been better times and places. Did your interrogation reveal anything that might help this make sense?"

  Had King Allister believed the young man was playing at politics he would have given some bland answer, but that wouldn't do in the face of Derian's evident sincerity. Brushing him off would raise more questions than the young man's query had brought out into the open.

  "A bit, Counselor Derian," the king replied. "The ceremony enabled them to get near to all of their targets at one time. Even at a banquet or ball, the parties in question would have been more spread out.

  "The targets," Allister went on, anticipating the question, "were first of all the bride and groom—preferably as one. Then myself and/or King Tedric, followed by my younger son Tavis, my daughters, and, if the assassins' luck extended so far, any ranking nobles within reach. Since the queens are not in line to either throne, they were relatively safe. Since successful assassination would have thrown one or both of our allied nations into chaos, it is impossible to deduce from those orders who the contractor for the assassinations might have been."

  A sort of guilty thrill went through the audience as all the members realized that they had been in at least some danger. Earle Peregrine of Hawk Haven, representing her quite elderly father, asked:

  "And have measures been taken to protect the targets?"

  "Considerable measures," King Allister assured her, "including plans for the dispersal of this noble company so that we will not remain so vulnerable."

  That provided an ideal note upon which to end the meeting. Suddenly, everyone was eager to get out of the crowded room. As they left, Allister overheard anxious discussions beginning as to how soon it would be polite to take leave of both castle and city.

  Allister retired alongside King Tedric. Once they were vanished into a more private area, the old monarch looked at his nephew and smiled sardonically.

  "You put the wind up them nicely, Allister. You have the makings of a fine king."

  "I put the wind up, all right," Allister agreed, "but I must wonder how that wind will fill their sails and to what harbors it will drive them."

  Chapter V

  Once again, Firekeeper and Blind Seer sat upon the parapet, but this time instead of facing the bay they faced inland. This time, instead of watching the roar and crash of the seemingly endless waters, they watched a receding stream of humanity as most of the wedding guests departed the castle at Silver Whale Cove.

  As before, the young woman sat with her arm flung around the neck of the great grey wolf, and those who looked back upon the castle and chance glimpsed the sight shivered in themselves, remembering her bloodied hands and gown, and the rumors that she had attacked an assassin with her teeth. The fact that these rumors were true did nothing to stop them from being enhanced.

  Despite the numerous persons who had witnessed the attack, more than one forwent the evidence of his or her own eyes in favor of the lurid tales that told how the wolf-woman had ripped out the assassin's throat with fangs suddenly as sharp as a wolf's own. Never mind that the man had been taken from the Sphere Chamber alive and walking—albeit somewhat stiffly—under his own power. Enough dead men had been carried away to "prove" the tales.

  Firekeeper knew something of what was being said and, far from being troubled by it, was amused. Had the tales been told about Blind Seer she would have been infuriated and worried, for the wolf could not speak to defend himself. She, however, could do so and would do so, confident in not only the protection of two kings and their heirs apparent but in her own strength.

  Firekeeper, still in her teens and already the slayer of several powerful men, remained rather innocent. She did not realize how little the streng
th of a single person mattered against the tides of politics or how little the protection of kings and their heirs might count when fear came alive.

  But this afternoon two days after the wedding of Crown Princess Sapphire and Crown Prince Shad, Firekeeper wasn't thinking about fear and its consequences; she was more concerned about the immediate question of who had tried to kill two people she rather liked. She had not had time to meditate on the question in privacy, though she had listened to several heated discussions of the matter. Now, taking advantage of the fact that no one needed her to sit with an invalid or threaten a prisoner or any other of the many tasks that had enlivened these past few days, she took the time to think about what she had learned.

  Wolves regularly attacked their rivals in power, so the idea of killing to gain position was neither alien nor repulsive to her. The use of assassins she had filed as yet another of the curious tools—like swords and bows—that humans created to make up for their lack of personal armament. What she still had to puzzle through was the subtle strategies involved in killing those who were expected to inherit power rather than those who held the power itself.

  It had been explained to her by Derian and Elise that Shad and Sapphire were not only people themselves but emblems of the truce between their nations, that killing them might devastate that truce, that at the very least the confusion and backbiting that had reigned in Hawk Haven in the months before King Tedric had chosen Sapphire as his heir could be expected to begin again, that…

  It had all been explained and when explained made sense, but to Firekeeper's way of thinking, which was still rather direct and inclined toward personal violence when frustrated, the sense was in violation of everything she wanted to believe about how things should be run. The human way of doing things seemed far too complicated and had a tendency to end in foul actions like wars.

  "Of course," she said to Blind Seer when her thoughts had led her this far, "in the wolf way a wise old One like King Tedric would fall prey to the first young pup with spring-hot blood. That would be a pity."

  "True," the wolf replied, "for as I see it where wolves need strength and hunt-wisdom in their Ones, humans need something else, a type of wisdom that touches on things other than whether the prey can be safely taken."

  Firekeeper mulled over this for a time. "You're right, but humans wouldn't need that different wisdom if they weren't always biting at each other. Once wolves decide who are the Ones and where each is placed within the pack, then they are wolves together. Humans don't seem to understand that they are a people."

  "I think," Blind Seer replied, narrowing his blue eyes against a sudden gust of wind, "that is because they are not. Even wolves challenge each other when one pack crosses the territory of another."

  Firekeeper sighed and said in the tone of one making an admission much against her will, "You are refusing to let me make simple and comfortable generalizations, dear heart. As much as it tastes of gall in my mouth, I must admit you are right."

  The wolf huffed out his flanks in a deep laugh, which the woman shared, but, even as she shared Blind Seer's laughter, Firekeeper wondered if he could understand how much her desire to see the wolf way as a better way than that followed by the humans came from her deep desire to continue believing as she had until that previous spring—that she was a wolf.

  To believe otherwise was unsettling; more than unsettling, it left her uneasy, prey to nightmares in which fires and almost-forgotten faces played too great a role. Only when she calmed herself with the repeated refrain that no matter her shape and what others might call her she—Firekeeper—was a wolf did those uncomfortable memories (for when she was asleep she knew them to be memories) leave her alone.

  Moreover, and this was something that Firekeeper had hardly admitted even to herself, as she watched her friends and acquaintances dance their courtship dances she wondered at how indifferent she was to human ideas of beauty and suitability. It never occurred to her that she was young to have such feelings, since by wolf years—even those longer years lived by the Royal Wolves of which Blind Seer was one—she was quite mature.

  Firekeeper had always seen herself as a pup to the wolves of greater strength, stealth, and speed, but now among humans she could judge herself—never seeing the incongruity of using those same qualities as her basis for judgment—as a great wise One. Even a man in armor and bearing a sword might fall before her—as she had proven when she had battled Prince Newell, the traitor of Hawk Haven. Conveniently, she chose to overlook how severely wounded she had been in that battle and how had it been a battle fought wolf to wolf some third challenger would have finished her before she might howl her victory before the pack.

  Saying nothing of this confusion of thoughts, many hardly shaped into words, Firekeeper merely hugged Blind Seer harder and said as she had so often said before:

  "I will never understand humans."

  Blind Seer, though not quite four years old, was already wise enough to know that nothing he could say would be a suitable reply to that statement. He thought, however, that as long as Firekeeper continued to think thusly, she would indeed never understand humans.

  "Why," Firekeeper said, raising a question she had meant to ask for some time but had continually put off in the chaos of the preceding two days, "did you howl me warning during the wedding?"

  "I caught a scent upon the wind," the wolf replied directly, "a scent of one who might have borne you or the others ill-will."

  He did stop speaking then, dangling the information just out of her reach as he might have a bone. Wolves, like humans, were fond of teasing.

  "Who?" asked Firekeeper, tugging the short fur behind one of his ears in mock threat.

  Had they been somewhere less precarious than on the edge of a castle parapet, doubtless the wolf would have pounced her and they would have wrestled for a while until one or the other won temporary dominance. Blind Seer, however, was not one to risk himself or his beloved packmate for a game. He surrendered graciously, folding down his ears to protect them from further pinching.

  "It was the scent of the woman they now call Queen Valora," Blind Seer replied, "she whom they called Gustin IV when we first met her. The scent came to me over the waters as I sat out on the parapet over the bay where we had sat that first day."

  Firekeeper sat up so suddenly that her balance might have been threatened if it had not been schooled by sleeping in the treetops on many a lazy afternoon.

  "Valora! Was she in the castle?"

  "I don't think so," the wolf said, "for her scent was faint and mixed with the salt scent of the waters. When I looked out, I saw many ships. I think she was there on one of them, out on the waters, waiting to see if the killers did their work."

  "But you never scented her inside the castle?"

  "No fresh scent," the wolf assented, "and I have checked as we have gone hither and yon these past days. Her scent lingers in a few accustomed places, but it is all old and dead."

  Firekeeper's first impulse had been to leap down from the parapet and head inside to seek out someone—perhaps King Tedric—and tell him what she had learned. However, between the motion and the thought she paused.

  Derian now believed that Firekeeper could understand what Blind Seer said to her, but he had long experience of her company. Also, though he might not realize it, there were times that he himself came close to having ears to hear such speech. His hearing was best with horses and their ilk, but even that came closer to an uncanny understanding of their needs and motives rather than spoken words.

  Derian's special perceptiveness, however, was more a handicap than an advantage in Firekeeper's current dilemma. He alone seemed to realize how clearly she understood Blind Seer. Elise seemed willing to grant the wolf greater than usual intelligence and perceptivity. Most of the rest of Firekeeper's human circle simply took comfort in their belief that the feral woman had greater than usual control over her unusual pet.

  "Someone," Firekeeper said, pausing with one leg
on either side of the parapet on which she had been sitting, "should be told what you scented, but who would believe us?"

  "Derian," the wolf replied, some of her own doubt in the cant of his ears, "might believe us, but could he get anyone else to believe?"

  "And what good would that belief do us?" Firekeeper added. "You yourself say that Queen Valora didn't come into the castle. Perhaps she merely wished to observe the festivities from a distance. Humans often like to look upon what gives them pain—consider Doc's mooning over Elise."

  Blind Seer sighed agreement. In this, at least, he was willing to assent that humans were incomprehensible, even by one who wished to comprehend them.

  "Still," Firekeeper said reluctantly after a further pause, "I should at least tell Derian. It is possible that Queen Valora knew of the assassins—perhaps they were even her tools—and hoped to come into the castle when the killing was done."

  Without further discussion, they left their vantage point. Some of the departing guests, looking upward and seeing the vanishing blur of grey fur and brown leather, hastened their paces without conscious volition, glad to be leaving a place where wolves and wild women walked unchecked and unchallenged.

  Derian Carter set down the quill with which he was writing a letter to his parents when Firekeeper and Blind Seer walked into his room unannounced. The young woman's expression was lit from within with a strange intensity, an intensity he fancied he saw mirrored in the gaze of the blue-eyed wolf.

  "You alone, Fox Hair?" Firekeeper asked.

  The query was no mere politeness, Derian realized. Blind Seer was sniffing as if to catch any intruder's scent, and Firekeeper moved to check behind the window hangings.

  "I am," Derian assured her, "though I might not have been. You really should learn to knock. I could have been entertaining."

  Firekeeper wrinkled her brow for a moment. "Oh, you mean you could be with someone I shouldn't see you with like the kitchen maid at West Keep, right?"