Heart of the Wolf

by Saranne Dawson

  She dined that evening in the commander’s quarters with her host, several local Balek officials, the captain, and Tanner, their guide. The commander suggested a few days’ rest before they proceeded into the mountains, but Jocelyn shook her head.

  “If you are right about winter coming early, then we must go as soon as possible.”

  The guide agreed. "I returned only two days ago, and I know that snow has already fallen in some of the higher passes.”

  "How will we find this man Daken, Tanner—or any of the Kassid, for that matter? Do you know where they live?”

  "No, milady. I don’t know where they live. But they’ll find us when it pleases them.”

  She didn’t much care for the sound of that. She was beginning to envision them wandering about in those mountains for days or even weeks. “But what if it doesn’t please them?"

  "Then we won’t find them," he replied bluntly. "But if we go far enough into the mountains, they’re sure to make themselves known.”

  “So you’ve never actually seen any of their villages?” the captain asked Tanner. His concern mirrored Jocelyn’s.

  The guide shook his graying head. “No, but I figure we’ll just follow the trail up 'til it gets us somewhere. Haven’t much choice anyway. Far as I know, there’s only one trail through the higher

  passes."

  "That should make it easy for them to guard their villages,” the captain remarked.

  "Who’d they need to guard them from?” Tanner scoffed. “Nobody’s fool enough to mess with them."

  "Have you seen them often, Tanner?” Jocelyn inquired.

  "Often enough, milady. Like ghosts they are— not there one minute, then sitting there on their ugly horses the next. That’s how I know when it's time to turn around."

  "But they’ve never harmed you?”

  “No’m. If they’d wanted to do me harm, I wouldn’t be here now."

  "Have you ever spoken to them?" ,

  "Only once. I got caught up there late in the season, y’see, and there was a lot of snow. I was tryin’ to find my way back down when they suddenly showed up and led me back. Prob'ly saved my life.”

  "My father says that Daken speaks Ertrian. Do any of the others?"

  "One of the ones who found me did,” he nodded. “Spoke it about as well as I do, I reckon.” He grinned.

  "I wonder why," she asked, more of herself than of the others. Why would any of them speak the language of a people they’d left several centuries ago?

  She raised the issue of their government, and Tanner said that he’d heard the same stories that the captain had told her earlier—but not directly from the Kassid.

  "But where could such stories have come from?” she asked. "Is there anyone else who has had more contact with them?”

  The guide shook his head. "They’re just stories. Been around for years.”

  "Have you ever seen Daken, their leader?” the captain asked Tanner.

  "No, sir. I always asked if he was with them. Just curious, you know. They’re a strange lot, they are. Wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of them."

  Jocelyn went off to bed with the uneasy feeling that the closer she came to the mysterious Kassid, the less she knew about them. It didn’t bode well for her mission. She'd seen enough of diplomacy to know that understanding your opponent was more than half the battle.

  But how could she hope to understand a people who might not even be fully human?

  Chapter Two

  Jocelyn got her first close look at the Dark Mountains the next morning as she stood in bright sunshine atop the garrison wall. It was a moment she would never forget.

  The highest mountains she’d yet seen were the Balek Hills through which they’d just ridden—and those hills had dwarfed the hill at the edge of the city where the palace stood.

  "The name for them in the Balek language means 'touch the skies’,” the commander told her when he saw her expression. "When I first saw them, I thought even that was inadequate. They don’t just touch the skies; they tear a hole in the heavens themselves."

  And so they did. They were an unending series of successively higher peaks which, instead of being rounded like the hills of western Ertria and Balek,

  were raw and jagged. They looked so sharp that she fancied she would prick her finger if she could touch them.

  And they were black—a much denser black than they’d appeared from a distance. The color of pure evil, she thought with an involuntary shiver she hoped the others would attribute to the frosty morning.

  Atop the very highest peaks, there was white— the ever-present snow she’d been told about— standing out in sharp contrast to the black below and the blue above.

  But what she felt most of all was the sense of an immense, brooding presence that dominated everything around it—even the huge stone garrison perched atop its hill. They felt like the very end of the world, a monstrous barricade that made an unequivocal statement: Go no further.

  “I don't see how we can possibly go there,” she said, following her thoughts.

  Their guide wasn’t present, so it was the captain who responded. "I spoke at some length with Tanner last night. He says that there is a narrow pass through the mountains—so narrow that we will be forced to travel single-file much of the way. And he’s certain that some of them will be snow-covered already.

  “I don’t wish to alarm you, milady, but he told me there are places where the drop at the side of these trails can be many hundreds of feet—perhaps even thousands.

  "I must speak bluntly, milady. I don’t want to go in there myself—and I especially don’t want to take

  you up there. I fear that I cannot provide adequate protection for you."

  Protection? she asked silently. The gods themselves could afford no protection against that place. And then she remembered that, according to old legends, the Dark Mountains were the home of the Old Gods, from whom the Kassid claimed direct descent.

  Strangely though, the captain’s candor had the perverse effect of strengthening her resolve. "We have no choice, captain. I appreciate your candor and your concerns, but we must gain an alliance with the Kassid—and that means going to them, not asking them to come here."

  "I agree,” the commander stated. "Although I share the captain’s concern for your safety. And Hammad was right to order only a small force to accompany you. The Kassid will know that you come in peace.”

  "Do you believe they are men of honor, commander?”

  “That is a difficult question to answer, milady. I have seen them only once—and then very briefly. I can say only that they made a powerful impression upon me. I was struck by their pride of bearing. I believed then—and continue to believe—that there is nothing they could not do if they chose to do it. I've spent much time since thanking the gods that they aren’t our enemies.

  "As to honor, who is to say? If they are sorcerers, and not wholly human, perhaps their very minds are different from ours. It is certainly a fact that without them, the Ertrian Empire could not have come into existence—and yet they chose to walk away from it when they might well have chosen to have it for themselves, or at least to demand a great share of it.

  “And in all these years, they have never made war against us, even though they surely know the riches to be gained."

  He smiled at her. "The question I continue to ask myself is whether they have left us alone out of some sense of honor—or because they consider us so beneath them as to be not worth the trouble."

  Although she’d been listening carefully to all the information she could gain about the Kassid, none of it had impressed her as much as the words of the commander, who clearly had spent much time thinking about them as he lived beneath their mighty shadow.

  It was time to leave. If she lingered here any longer, she would surely convince herself that it was madness to go there and seek to awaken what she could only think of now as sleeping giants.

  After one last, lingering look at the Dark
Mountains, she turned and descended the stairs into the garrison yard, where their horses and men awaited. A short time later, their party rode out into the foothills, led by the guide, Tanner.

  The land through which they rode that day was far hillier than any they had passed through earlier, with tall, steep hills and deep, narrow valleys where swift-flowing streams twisted through forests of dark fir, and the few broadleaf trees were already displaying the golds and reds of autumn.

  This was still Balek, but a place where no one

  lived. Here and there, they passed the huts that hunters and trappers used as temporary shelters, but there were no permanent homes. And despite the bright sun, the temperature remained low enough that the horses’ breath steamed in the clear air.

  And always ahead of them, looming ever larger, were the Dark Mountains. By late afternoon, the sun had dropped behind the peaks, and the land shifted abruptly into the shadows of coming twilight.

  They made camp in one of the little valleys, where Jocelyn would have the use of a hunter’s hut, while the men made camp around it. The food was good, since they’d been freshly provisioned by the garrison, and she slept that night beneath heavy quilts that were carried by day on fresh packhorses also provided for them.

  Jocelyn was warm enough and felt safe inside the tiny hut. But Tanner had warned her that this was the only night she could hope to spend with four walls around her and a roof over her head. No one had ever dared to build huts on Kassid land.

  Tanner had also been regaling them with tales of his wolf hunts. If Jocelyn had been secretly hoping that wolves couldn't be as big and vicious as those portrayed in her old storybooks, that hope had been laid to rest. And yet, as she lay beneath the quilts waiting for the welcome oblivion of sleep, she clung stubbornly to a new hope—that their talkative guide might be exaggerating.

  And she clung to this hope even though she knew that her brother and his friends—all of them experienced hunters—had been killed by wolves in these very mountains.

  When she finally did fall asleep, it was to nightmares of huge, red-eyed, fanged creatures like the ones pictured in her books. They were chasing her and howling ferociously as she tried desperately to climb a sheer cliff of black rock.

  Then the dream shifted, and the creatures pursuing her were the half-human, half-wolf monstrosities from other stories. They alternately howled and cried out to her in a guttural version of her own language.

  She awoke with a start, certain she’d heard something. Only when a guard called out to her from just outside the door of the hut did she realize that the sound must have been her own cry. She told him it was nothing more than a nightmare—but it took a long time for her to convince herself of that.

  She lay there under the heavy covers, drenched in sweat and shivering at the same time. Her throat ached, and she began to worry about the consequences of those rain-drenched days on the road. But she'd always been extraordinarily healthy and so couldn’t believe that her body would betray her now.

  When she awoke again, it was to the comforting sounds of the camp coming to life—men calling out to each other, horses whinnying. She lay there for a moment, longing for the peace and quiet and comfort of the palace. How far away that all seemed now, both in distance and time. It felt as though she’d been on this journey all her life.

  She thought too about her father and worried again that the physicians might have lied to her under his orders.

  What she did not think about were the Kassid. She refused to let herself dwell on them, lest she lose her nerve and insist that they turn back.

  For two days, they rode over and through hills that grew ever higher and darker, while the Dark Mountains themselves loomed over them like great giants waiting to devour them. She felt dizzy and disoriented when she tried to look up to the peaks now, and there were times when her breathing seemed constricted, when it seemed that her lungs could not draw in enough of the cold air that pierced her like a knife.

  She learned to keep her eyes fixed on the trail ahead, not looking up at the mountains or even to the sides, where the trail often dropped away into increasingly deep abysses.

  And at night, she lay awake listening for the howl of wolves, until finally, on the third night, she heard a faint, distant sound. She lept from her pallet and grabbed a cloak, then hurried outside to find others awakening as well.

  "Was that a wolf?” she asked the nearest Guard.

  "Yes, milady, it must have been. But .. .”

  He broke off abruptly as an unearthly howl split the silence of the night—far louder than the sound she’d heard before.

  "Calling to each other, most likely," the man said. "The sounds came from different directions, I think—but it’s hard to tell up here.”

  She hoped he was right. Tanner had told them that the mountains could distort sound and even bring back echoes of one’s own voice. She saw him come out of his tent briefly, then disappear into it again and she felt better. Obviously, he wasn’t concerned, so they couldn’t be close.

  Late the next morning, they came to a high plateau, the closest thing she’d seen yet to the plains of home. It was largely devoid of vegetation except for tall grasses that had already turned to a golden brown. A cold, damp wind blew down from the black peaks and the skies were beginning to cloud over once more.

  "We’re in Kassid land now,” Tanner said, tilting his head to stare up at the sheer black walls surrounding them.

  “It feels like snow," the captain remarked, pulling his heavy, fur-lined cloak around him.

  “Right you are, Cap’n. Before tomorrow, most likely." Tanner squinted up at the changing sky.

  “How much snow could there be at this time of year?” Jocelyn asked, aware of the dangers but still thinking about the lovely, gentle snows that occasionally fell at home.

  "In winter, it gets deep enough to bury a man and his horse,” the guide replied. “But it’s not likely to be more’n a few inches this early." He paused, frowning.

  "What’s worryin’ me is a Big White."

  "What's that?” the captain and Jocelyn asked simultaneously.

  "Snow that’s comin’ down so fast and blowin' around so much that you can’t see past your horse’s nose. Doesn’t take a lot of snow, either—not with the winds that can come up in these mountains. All you can do is wait for it to blow over.”

  "And how long can that take?” the captain inquired uneasily.

  Tanner shrugged his thin shoulders beneath the wolfskin jacket. "Maybe hours—maybe a day or two.”

  But there was no Big White. Instead, the snow came that night, falling in big, soft flakes that left a coating of several inches over everything. Then the sky abruptly cleared again. For the first time, Jocelyn saw the beauty of this place. The snow clumped thickly in the dark firs, weighing down the branches. It lay in crevasses in the black rock of the surrounding mountains. The brightness nearly blinded her as the sun rose behind them, and the cold air had a wonderful smell. She thought that if she were here under different circumstances, she would truly love this wild, strange country.

  By late afternoon, when the sun had once again disappeared behind the tallest peaks, they had reached the beginning of the narrow trail that wound around walls of black rock. She tried to keep her eyes averted from the increasingly precipitous drop beside her, but again and again she found herself drawn to that frightening vista where she could occasionally catch a glimpse of a section of trail they had traveled earlier.

  Although they had actually been in the Dark Mountains for the past day, she felt it for the first time now, as she realized there was no longer any distant vista of jagged black peaks. She could see nothing but the black walls that had closed around them.

  When they rested for a time at a wide spot in the trail, she walked over to examine the rock closely. It was the same stone that she’d seen in that secret room at the palace; she was sure of it. The rock she touched now had that same surprisingly smooth but dull surface, and looking at
it produced that same sensation of staring into eternal, overwhelming darkness. But how did such stone get all the way to the palace—and for what reason?

  Jocelyn considered telling the captain about it. But that room had been her secret for all these years, and somehow, to talk about it now with him seemed a sort of betrayal. She decided to wait and discuss it with her father when she returned home.

  When they stopped to make camp on a wide ledge overlooking a ravine they’d traversed earlier in the day, Tanner announced that this was as far as he’d ever come into the mountains. This, he told them was the spot where a group of Kassid had suddenly appeared to let him know that their tolerance of intrusions had come to an end.

  Jocelyn and the captain exchanged glances in mutual acknowledgement of the fact that they would really rather not have heard this. The others heard as well, and the captain took the opportunity to remind them that if they encountered any Kassid, they were to keep their weapons sheathed and take no action that could be deemed provocative. The warning was necessary, but it did little to ease the growing tension within the party. Despite the fact that guards were immediately posted, they all began to scan the trail and the dark forests regularly, mindful of what Tanner had said about the Kassid tendency to appear seemingly out of nowhere.

  Jocelyn retired early to her tent, fully expecting to have her sleep disturbed again by howls or by nightmares—the two had become much the same to her at this point. But the night passed peacefully. She awoke only once, shortly before dawn, drenched in sweat again and shivering in the cold despite warm coverings.

  Her chest ached as she lay there breathing in the chilled air. The others were all complaining about breathing difficulties as well. She’d asked Tanner about it, since he alone seemed unaffected.