The wolves tried to warn me.
I didn’t voice that. Instead, I spoke of the real, not the unreal; of facts, not fears, of what had transpired to a nine-year old boy. I didn’t speak of the strange voices of wolves that woke me. If anyone knew I omitted that tidbit, none voiced it. Not even Darius commented, much to my surprise.
“I rose hours before dawn,” I said, “unable to sleep. I dressed and went to the barns with only the palace guards for witnesses. My own personal bodyguards didn’t know I left my rooms. I didn’t even saddle my horse, I just bridled him and rode out bareback. I was the King’s son and heir. The guards opened the city gates for me, never daring to question me.”
I took a few more laps of wine, Ly’Tana’s hand caressing my muzzle. Her faith, her love, more than the wine, gave me the sand to continue.
“The strong gallop for an hour didn’t do much to help my jitters,” I said. “I rode back, my gut still churning, to find fighting in the city streets and the palace on fire.”
I gulped and panted, finding the dark woods far preferable to watch as I spoke than my many companions. My ears tensed, pointed backwards, my tail stiff, my hackles rising on their own accord.
“I won’t go into all the details of the fighting I witnessed. I kicked my horse into a run, dashing past the Ja Mata barbarians slaughtering my father’s soldiers. The barbarians outnumbered them five to one. The citizens of the town were either murdered, or raped and taken prisoner.”
For a moment my words stuck in my throat and I couldn’t go on. My people, those who looked to my father and me for protection, or offered us loyal service, died. I remembered how I galloped past, hardly sparing them a glance. My folk suffered and all I could think of was my family.
Choking, I continued. “The palace burned in places, the dead and dying littered the courtyard and parade grounds. The Ja Mata made games out of the killing. Throwing small children into the air and catching their bodies on spears, laughing. So busy raping women, I could have killed hundreds without their noticing me. Men, boys, citizens, serfs, the common people, the innocent, I saw, were impaled on long stakes, to die in agony.
“I ignored the massacre. I ignored all of it. Only the welfare of my family mattered. At a dead run, I leaped from my horse and ran into the palace. I found them in the great hall.”
I shut my eyes against those that stared at me, against the memory of what my nine year old eyes had witnessed, haunting me to this very day.
“The fires reached the throne room, but only licked at the walls and the many ancient tapestries. Smoke covered the oak beams above, but the air was breathable. The barbarians killed most everyone they came across. A few men and several women lay on the floor, bound hand and foot with heavy rope. Before his own throne, my father knelt, his hands tied behind his back.”
I paused to lap more wine, my heart pounding in my chest. I drew in deep, ragged breaths, but still my tight lungs failed to fill. My head spun from the lack of air. Had I been human, tears might have filled my eyes and dripped down my cheeks. Wolves don’t weep. My tears in my throat choked off all breath while my eyes remained dry.
“To one side lay my mother’s dead body,” I said, fighting to get some, any, air into my chest. “They raped her repeatedly, forcing my father to watch. As I entered the great hall, Metavas took a dagger and cut his brother’s throat.”
“Monstrous!” Corwyn gasped, half-rising in outrage.
What I didn’t tell them was of my father’s courage and fury. My uncle, my father’s sworn liege, wore Camlach’s crown and laughed, his dark hair flowing about his shoulders as he faced his captive elder brother, his king. The barbarians roamed the hall freely, looting and stripping it of anything of value. I heard my father cursing his brother, fearless, when Metavas yanked his head back by his hair and sawed through the tough tendons of his throat. With his last gasp of air, blood pouring through his cut jugular, the King cursed his murdering kin.
“He is of my blood also,” said Darius, his tone, for the first time since he’d been in my head, dark and grim. “I have plans for him. He will pay for what he has done.”
“I lost my head,” I continued hoarsely, not acknowledging Darius. “I attacked, one against the fifty or more that roamed the blood-drenched hall. Despite the element of surprise on my side, I stood no chance. A blow against the back of my head knocked me senseless. When I woke, I lay bound with rope in a wagon full of prisoners. Arianne, not tied, crouched in a corner, sobbing. I took her to me, offering what small comfort I could.”
“Enslaved?” Silverruff asked.
“Yes,” I breathed, managing small trickles of precious air into my aching lungs. “I don’t know if Metavas knew or cared that two of his brother’s children were alive and taken prisoner. The Ja’ Mata captured many people and sold them to Khalidian slavers who stood by, waiting with gold coin.
“The wagons started east. Though my hands were tied, I kept Arianne with me for those long months on the road. Many Connachti prisoners died on the way, of starvation, of sickness, of the slavers’ brutality, their bodies tossed out of the caravan to rot by the side of the road. If there wasn’t enough food to go around, I gave Arianne my share. I went hungry, but she, never. I made sure she had food, water, what scant comfort my arms could bring.”
I shut my eyes again. “At the slaves market, they tore her from my arms. I heard her screaming. I fought them, but with staves and whips they beat me back. Bleeding, almost unconscious, I watched them take her from me.”
I swallowed hard, forcing the lump in my throat down into my belly. “The rest, they say, is history. I learned to fight and became a gladiator. I rose to become the High King’s personal champion. I craved nothing but my own death until one strange day.”
My gaze met Rygel’s across the blazing fire. “I met a certain young wizard. One who gave me a new reason to live.
“Because my Slave Master owed me a debt,” I said softly, finding Corwyn’s outraged, tight-lipped expression. “I learned Arianne survived as well. I saw her last when I was but nine years old. Her screams echoed in my soul every day for all those long years.”
I felt her eyes on me, shining in the dark. “Until that precious night, in the house of Adhas.”
Rising to her feet, Arianne left her two lovers and walked around the fire. Tears tracked down her cheeks, but she smiled. Her pale cheeks curved in a smile just for me, her only kin, her brother.
Ly’Tana made way for her, leaving room for Arianne to wrap her tiny arms around my immense muzzle.
“I love you,” she whispered, her face against my jet, furry cheek. “You are father, mother, brother to me. You’re all the family I have. I never told you before. I love you.”
I shut my eyes, taking in her sweet, innocent scent. “You survived treachery, death, slavery, little cat,” I murmured. “You’re the sole survivor of the Barjlek name. Through it all you maintained your innocence. Raine Barjlek died. Only the Bloody Wolf survived. A nine year old boy died that awful day.”
“No, he didn’t,” Elder said, his grey muzzle rising from his son’s massive shoulders. “He survived to win the hearts and loyalty of both men and wolves.”
“The wolves need me,” I said bitterly. “Need and love are mutually exclusive.”
“They may need you, yes,” Elder went on, his brown eyes warm in the firelight. “You are correct. They don’t have to love you. Yet, they do. After you free Darius, they will always be there, ready to fight for you. Or die for you. You are worthy.”
Arianne’s hand, not Ly’Tana’s, caressed my muzzle, found the comfortable, itchy places behind my ears.
“You said the wolves protected my family,” I said, opening my eyes to glare at Elder. I couldn’t help the growl that started low in my chest and grew louder. “My family died that day. Where were you?”
Elder met me glare for glare, his formerly warm gaze now the eyes of a much younger wolf. A wolf in his prime. A huge wolf strong enough to take down an
elk or a wild bull alone, with jaws capable of snapping a horse’s spine. Hackles rose on his shoulders in feral challenge.
Suddenly, so quickly I blinked, that wolf suddenly subsided, and Elder’s quiet, peaceful mien returned.
“You cannot possibly remember,” he said softly. “You were unconscious.”
I lifted my neck from Arianne’s arms, alert, wary, my eyes on the grey-muzzled old wolf lying beside his silver-ruffed son.
“They left you to burn,” he said. “Those humans. Your uncle, also of Darius’ blood, left the building to burn, his people all around him. The fire spread, filled the place, consuming all. Wood, corpses, any humans still alive and lying on the floor. The fire cleaned all, burning everything.”
Compassion and sorrow filled his warm brown eyes.
“I myself pulled you from the flames.”
Stunned, I sat up. Arianne drew away from me. With one last kiss to the side of my huge muzzle, Arianne crept back to her lovers, Rygel and Darkhan, who welcomed her back into their embrace with kisses and licks. Somehow, she knew what transpired that day. A tiny girl on that dawn of death, she remembered nonetheless. She knew I must face Elder alone.
Ly’Tana hung tight. She nestled back beneath my paws, legs crossed, holding my sleeping son in her arms, listening as Rygel interpreted our speech. Her love and strength poured out from her and into me, warming my soul.
“Many of Darius’ line heeded the howling in their dreams,” Elder said. “They recognized that such meant danger, disaster, death. Unfortunately, most did not. Your father was one. Despite the howling in his sleep, King Camlach ignored the warning. He heeded not his blood’s song.”
He paused, lapping more water before continuing. “Your smallest sister, however, followed the voices in her night’s visions. She rose from her bed before dawn, obeying the distant howls, running to open her chamber door to the wolf standing there. My brother.”
My throat closed up on me entirely. My lungs burned from the lack of air, but I couldn’t inhale. My head swam. If not for Ly’Tana’s hands on my fur, I’d faint dead away.
“She feared not the huge wolf who might break her in half in one bite,” Elder went on, his brown eyes warm. “She greeted him with moist kisses and childlike laughter before the barbarian army broke through the gates.”
Arianne smiled at Elder, her eyes bright and shining in the light of the fire and the moon. Elder’s voice brought forth the memories Arianne had long-since forgotten. He pulled them from her as a fisherman reels in his hooked trout. Despite her tender age, she now remembered the events of that morning, while I did not.
“Her attendant, her nurse, screamed when she found the door opening onto a wolf,” Elder said quietly his eyes on Arianne. “My brother carried the royal offspring out. Even then she was a tiny mite. She was but a whelp in his jaws. He died, an arrow in his heart, carrying her to safety.”
“His name was Rock,” she said, tears flowing, unchecked, down her cheeks.
“Yes, it was,” Elder replied. “He was named thus because he was as stoic and unmovable as a block of granite.”
“He kissed my face, made me laugh,” Arianne went on. “He told me he loved me. He said bad men were coming and I must go with him. He’d take me away and keep me safe.”
“Thus he tried.”
“I screamed when they killed him,” Arianne said, her voice soft. “With his last breath he told me one day I’d return to avenge him.”
“And so you shall, tiny wolf,” Elder said.
Arianne’s voice turned low and thoughtful, her glorious eyes on the fire. “I remember him,” she said softly. “That man who killed Rock.”
It wasn’t her childhood memory that suddenly sent shock waves through my gut. ’Twas her tone. Her voice wasn’t that of a cowed slave, a tiny woman afraid to eat a meal for fear of punishment, but of a warrior. I stared at my sister who spoke with all the iron of my father.
“I marked him,” she went on, her voice as cold and deadly as the winter’s ice. “He had pock-marked cheeks and a gold hoop in his ear. He had one eye that stared straight, and another that drifted to the right. I remember him. I will kill him.”
Silence pervaded the camp. Every eye, human and non-human, lay on her. Unmindful of the silence or the regard, she gazed serenely into the flames. Dreaming, no doubt, of the day she would avenge the wolf who loved her.
“I’ll be at her side when she does,” Darkhan growled, his hackles rising.
His voice broke the spell. Arianne blinked, once, twice, glancing around. At last discovering she held the silent attention of everyone, she blushed. She immediately retreated into the midnight depths of her hair.
Elder’s eyes returned to me. “You galloped in on your horse, having saved your own life by listening to our warnings. You heard the call, heeded the howling and rode away. Your love for your family brought you back.”
Elder’s voice sounded prim, amused. “Very wolfish of you.”
His voice turned sorrowful. “We could not save your other sibling. Like your father, she heeded not the howling in the dark. She closed herself in her rooms and died at the hands of the barbarian soldiers.”
I shut my eyes against the grief. “I understand,” I said. “Abba believed in what she could see, touch, taste, hear and smell. Very much like Camlach. Anything else was the stuff of nightmares.”
“More than two dozen wolves died that day,” Elder said slowly. “What the men thought of wolves in the city, fighting, slaying, we’ll never know. Perhaps they thought we were there to clean up the dead, like vultures, or ravens. I took an arrow to my shoulder dragging you out of the burning palace.”
He glanced to his useless right leg. “It never healed up right, either,” he murmured. “When I woke, only the dead remained. You and your sister were gone.”
“How’d they get in?” Kel’Ratan asked, his incessant need to know the why of things forcing him to interrupt. “Can wolves climb walls?”
“Of course not,” Elder replied, his tone prim. “Some entered through an underground tunnel that lay deep in the woods. It led for nearly a mile before opening into the deepest dungeons below the castle. Most, of course, loped through the open gates.”
I swung my head up, my ears perked, a rumbling growl in my chest. “Open gates?”
“Metavas posted his own men on the city gates,” Elder said. “They opened an hour before the dawn, waiting for their Ja Mata allies. We loped in, before their startled faces, and raced into the castle. What they thought, we cared not one jot.”
“I remember,” I said slowly. “I didn’t recognize the gate guards. It meant nothing at the time, but now—”
“They dared not stop you, the king’s own son,” Rygel said. “They probably had no standing orders should you demand to exit, and knew not what to do when you showed up.”
“Thus they let me by.”
“They dared do nothing else,” added Corwyn. “Had they arrested you and you raised a fuss—”
“The entire invasion might have collapsed.”
“Wolves could not help you in Soudan,” Darius’s voice continued. “With you both as slaves, in a big city, we could do nothing.”
“But you began to plot,” I said aloud, glancing once more at Rygel.
“Yes. I had some influence on you.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“Your strength, your skills, your will to survive were all yours. I watched, with no small feeling of pride, as you fought like the wolf you truly are. You are my son in truth.
“I found Rygel, weak, addicted, yet strong in heart and unswerving in his loyalty. Through his devotion, you would find new will to survive. In saving each other, you forged a bond that can never be sundered this side of the world’s breaking.”
Elder, without mine or Darius’ consent, translated Darius’ words aloud. Rygel, that unflappable, arrogant, and insufferable bastard, flushed to his hairline. All present saw Rygel as he truly was: steadfast, loyal,
devoted. My tongue lolled in a quick grin. He’d never live that down.
“I despaired of my task,” Elder went on. “Of having failed to protect you. Darius assured me I’d live to see you again.”
His warm eyes rested on me with a fatherly pride and a fierce, savage love. “So I have. Had I raised you myself, no father could have more pride in his son. I am most pleased with thee.”
I thought Silverruff might object to such talk from his father to a stranger. His mellow gaze rested on me with the same light of love as his sire.
“Elder, forgive me,” I said.
“There is nothing to forgive, my son,” Elder returned quietly. “You did not know. And humans can be incredibly short-sighted.” The humor in his voice would have had me blushing had I been human at that moment.
“You were better than your circumstances,” he went on. “You were a slave, yet you kept your mercy and your compassion. You never lost sight of what was important: life itself. As the lowest of the low, you maintained your dignity. All, and any, wolves are proud to call you leader.”
“I am such,” said Silverruff, raising his head from his paws. “I would call you leader and follow you. Straight into the jaws of hell.”
“As am I,” said Darkhan.
“And I, Joker, would call you leader,” chimed in a big grey wolf, lying on his back with all four paws in the air. I remembered him as the wolf who laughed with Tashira. I had noted he had imbibed more of the wine than all the wolves present.
Other wolves broke the stillness of the night, added their voices in quiet declarations of loyalty.
“Count on me, Little Bull,” said the huge dark grey wolf who had first faced Ly’Tana.
“And me, Nahar,” chimed in a light grey wolf.
Other wolves joined their voices, calling their names: Digger, Shadow, Black Tongue, Kip, Scatters Them, White Fang, Warrior Dog, Dire, Thunder, Lightfoot.
Ly’Tana suddenly stood up. With her hand on her sword hilt, she gazed around at the collection of humans and wolves gathering about the roaring fire. The talk, both amongst wolves and men, slowly silenced, one by one, as she glanced about the camp. Her gaze lingered on each individual, as though assessing each for worthiness. When she had gathered all eyes, sober and not so sober, she turned to me. With the stiff-backed attention of a soldier under inspection, she saluted me, Kel’Hallan fashion.
Catch a Wolf Page 54
