Wolf Justice

by Doranna Durgin

  “He’ll be back,” Reandn responded, not much thinking about his words, not much thinking about anything — except maybe of the many explanations yet to come, and how very far away he was from home.

  Home. Yes, that felt right.

  “Danny.” Rethia knelt beside him, laden with rags and ointments and bandages. “You’re scaring Kacey. Let me see.”

  “I’m all right,” he said. “Or, I will be.”

  “I know,” she said, pulling his shirt out from beneath his belt and lifting it to peer underneath. After a moment, she put it back down again. “Not bleeding anymore. I’ll leave it for Kacey, if you promise to stay here.”

  As if he was going to hop up and start ordering people around. This wasn’t his game anymore; it never really had been. Just a role he’d slipped into for a little while.

  But Rethia was still there, and looking at him. Studying him. “You know what you did, don’t you?”

  He didn’t have to ask what she meant. He thought of the moment Elstan’s half-woven spell had started slipping around him instead of through him. “Yes,” he told her, and then changed his mind. “No. I suppose. I don’t really understand. Me, working magic.”

  “You didn’t.” Rethia’s short braid slipped over her shoulder as she tilted her head, watching him; her hand crept up and fiddled with the end of it. “You just made a place where it wasn’t.”

  Reandn snorted; his back twitched against it. “Ow, dammit. No, never mind. Don’t try to explain. I’ll have to work it out for myself. How’s Teya? Will she lose that eye?”

  “She already has,” Rethia said, standing up. “But like you, she’ll work it out.”

  One of these days she was going to make complete and total sense, and he’d expire from the shock of it. For now, his attention drifted away.

  He thought about Teya without an eye, and whether she’d still have a career with the Wolves after quietly defying both Saxe and Farren. He thought about why he’d gotten involved with this assignment, and his own place in the Wolves — and he wondered if, after all of this, the Keep would still offer him the Remote.

  And then he wondered if he would take it if they did.

  ~~~~~~~~~~

  Chapter 20

  One day out of Norposten, Reandn found a small clearing and made several torches.

  One for Damen, who wouldn’t get to tell his children stories of the spoiled Resioran ambassador after all. One for Nican, who had taken the antics of his odd wrangler with as much forbearance as could be expected of anybody.

  He had promised them he would get Kalena to the Keep; she was nearly there. And he had promised them a Binding. In saving Kalena, he’d had plenty of help. This, he did alone.

  He held the torches high for Tenaebra’s dark eyes, and then he wove them together with cord. Find each other, he told them silently, in place of the usual, spoken words, while the oil-soaked torches hissed and sputtered into the darkness. Don’t walk her Hells alone.

  Then he jammed them in the dirt together and watched the flames. Properly done, there would be more people here. Properly done, the torches would be in a frame, and not awkwardly wrapped together. Properly done, the right words would have been spoken.

  But all that would happen when the Hounds had their own Binding. This one, though... this one had the heart of someone who had been there.

  And to judge by the noise in the brush behind him, he was no longer alone. Noisy steps were only a prelude to the snap of someone running into the dead lower branches of a pine. “Ouch, dammit!”

  Teya’s voice. And, a moment later, Teya beside him, muttering, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt like that.”

  “You shouldn’t be out here,” Reandn said, not looking away from the torches. He knew well enough what Teya’s face looked like of late — pale, with thick padding held over her eye by rakish strips of linen. From below the padding peeked the end of a stitched wound, where the throwing dart had hit the flat of her cheek and skidded up into her eye. And as much as Kacey and Rethia tended it, there always seemed to be something weeping down her cheek, as though pale serum had taken the place of the tears that eye would no longer cry.

  “I know I didn’t know your Hound friends —”

  “Shouldn’t be out in woods, I meant. After dark. Until you get used to the one eye.”

  “ — but I had to talk to you, and I just haven’t found the right time —”

  Reandn snorted gently. Not the right time, no.

  “At least you’re alone. I need to talk to you alone.”

  And that, Reandn had to concede, would have been hard to accomplish in these last days. “You’d better take the chance, then.” The torches guttered; Teya shifted from foot to foot until they diminished into quiet flames licking around the edges of cooling wood.

  Then she said, “I just... wanted to say... I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?” Reandn said with some surprise.

  “I tried... I really tried. I’m just not good enough to depend on in a fight.”

  He didn’t say anything. He didn’t know quite what to say. She was right. She couldn’t think fast enough, couldn’t pull up the right spells at the right time.

  As if she’d heard his thoughts, she said, “Back at the Knife camp... I know you said not to masquerade as Kalena, but they were about to find you, and it’s all I could think of — I just wanted to distract them —”

  “Teya,” Reandn said firmly, hearing the rising note of despair in her voice. “Teya, it did distract them.”

  “But I lost it. I couldn’t hold on to it. And I couldn’t follow it up with anything.”

  He looked at her directly now, his vision readjusting to the darkness. “We’ve pretty much decided some of that was my fault, I thought.”

  She was silent at that, and she turned her head away. He waited. Eventually she said, “They won’t want me back. The Wolves, I mean. Even if I hadn’t taken that horse. What’re they going to do with a one-eyed patrol wizard?”

  Reandn took a breath. A deep one. And he let it out slowly. “I don’t know that they will. But I also don’t know if that’s really your question.”

  “What do you —?” Teya broke off, as though she knew both what he meant and what her answer was, and couldn’t face it.

  “Because you’re right,” he said. “You’re not at your best in a fight; you can’t think clearly when you’re crowded. You probably won’t be a truly good combat wizard no matter how hard you try.”

  She stiffened. Surely she hadn’t expected him to soften the words.

  He moved around in front of her, into her direct line of sight. “You’re good with the subtle things, Teya. I like having you at my back, and if you don’t think it pains me to say that then you don’t know me very well.”

  She didn’t quite gape at him.

  He was silent a moment, trying not to let his own decisions rub off on the things he said about hers. “The question isn’t will they take you back? The question is what do you want? And sometimes, knowing who you aren’t helps you define who you are.”

  She took a step back and gave him a skeptical look. He only grinned at her. “Too thoughtful? You’d rather I just went ahead and made some kind of decision for you?”

  “Well,” she said, “maybe not. Maybe I’ll just think about this on my own for a while. But success on this assignment is supposed to get you back into the Wolves... isn’t it?”

  “Define success,” Reandn said dryly. “I’m not sure this was it.”

  Teya grumbled at him, reached up to touch her bandage, and lowered her hand with a self-admonitory sound. “Evasive,” she accused him.

  He thought again of why she’d been on that road in front of Malik’s dart in the first place, and he thought just maybe he owed her an answer. “I think they’ll offer me Wolf Remote again,” he said, and made his own exasperated sound, rubbing the bridge of his nose with his finger. “I don’t know that I’ll take it.”

  She looked at him w
ith shock, and then slow comprehension. “The things you said at Madehy’s. About being true to what a Wolf really is.”

  “To what that’s always been for me.” Reandn looked back at the extinguished Binding torches. He’d always been bound to the Wolves, to what they were, and what they did. And most of it hadn’t changed... but it seemed to him that somewhere, something had. Something was missing.

  He thought it might be time to go looking for it.

  ~~~~~

  Kacey dreamt. She dreamt of feeling safe, and of lying in someone’s arms, quiet and happy and feeling loved. She dreamt of being kissed, long and unhurried — a tender thing. The kiss of a lover, with the taste of mint and an odd overtone of bitter tea. She woke slowly, happy to carry the feelings to her sleepy wakefulness.

  Reandn sat not far away, his back to a tree and a sprig of something in the corner of his mouth. “Hello,” he said, and she thought he looked just a tad... smug. Yes, that was it. Smug.

  “Hello,” she replied, somewhat warily. “You look like you’ve been up for a while.”

  “Long enough.” Not only smug, but suspiciously cheery. He took a nibble out of the sprig and removed it from his mouth, letting it dangle from the hand he rested over his knee.

  “What’s that?”

  “This?” He glanced down at the little green thing. “Spring mint. Rethia found it.”

  Mint. She narrowed her eyes at him, but he only smiled back. She pushed the dew-covered blanket off her legs, finding refuge in brusque. “Breakfast?”

  “The inn’s still serving.” He nodded at what seemed to be nothing more than a particularly scrubby patch of woods. Just beyond it sat a Highborn inn — the one at which they’d all chosen not to stay.

  They’d been just outside Norposten for a handful of days now, as close as Reandn could get to the Keep and its constant buzz of spelled magics — for he’d already learned that the effort of diverting magic was nearly as exhausting as that of enduring it. That, as much as blood loss, had caused his shakes after their clash with Malik and his men.

  But the cut on his back had scored his ribs, sliced into the muscle of his lower back, and then jammed short against his belt, leaving him sore and unable to ride. Like the Dragons, he’d walked his way back from the north, stopping here to camp outside the inn with Kacey and Rethia.

  The news of Kalena’s arrival preceded them, creating a festival atmosphere and packed inns. Kalena already held forth in the Keep, impressing the Highborn with her poise in the aftermath of her terrible experience.

  Kacey found she was just as glad to be in the woods with Reandn — although she’d attended several Highborn fetes just to say she had. And once she’d heard a minstrel, thinking himself alone behind the inn, fashioning a highly imaginative song around Kalena’s brave confrontation with the Knife.

  None of it mattered, not really. Their provisions were paid for, their horses well-stabled, their needs seen to — and one of the Keep’s best wizard healers watched over Teya. Under other circumstances, Kacey might have resented losing her patient to another healer... but just now, she had plenty of other things clamoring for her attention.

  She’d have preferred to have had a long talk with her sister, whom she’d hardly seen at all; Rethia and Madehy spent their days together, working on Madehy’s self-protective skills. Reandn, too, had been hard to pin down — restless with the constant threat of active magic around him, unsettled about his future with the Wolves, waiting for Saxe to break away from the Keep. In the meantime, he was seldom to be found around their little camp — always off on the prowl, or taking Sky for such short rides as he could. And Kacey — frustrated, tied to the camp by the slowly healing sprain — ached for reassurance that the things Reandn had said and done had meaning beyond the desperation of the moment.

  Except... now she looked at him, and at that withering spring mint dangling from his fingers, and she ran a thoughtful finger over her lower lip.

  Maybe she had her answers already.

  Reandn grinned again. “You want help getting to the inn?”

  “No,” Kacey said, affecting a Highborn tone. “It would please me if breakfast was presented to me here.”

  He tossed the mint away and got to his feet, though not with the natural effortless movement that made watching him so easy; that was his strength, she’d learned, that mark of the intense energy that lay hidden inside him. Now it was hobbled by the scabbed wound on his back, but it would be back.

  Kacey wondered where it would take him next.

  “And would you be wanting the Highborn setting, or what the rest of us commoners had to break fast?” he asked.

  “I’m sure I’d become ill from whatever fancies the Highborn ate,” she said, waving her hand in a dismissive gesture closely imitative of Malik under stress. “Let’s have a real breakfast.”

  “Will eat,” Reandn said, expression stern. “If you’re going to be Highborn, get it right. None of them are up yet.”

  Kacey said promptly, “Then I’m going back to sleep.” She gave an extra-haughty sniff. “I can’t imagine what woke me in the first place.”

  He looked down at her with laughter around his mouth, and something more serious in his grey eyes. “I’d be glad to show you.”

  “Umm,” Kacey said, her eyes widening.

  “Or is it breakfast you want?”

  “I don’t —”

  He grinned. “My choice, then.”

  ~~~~~

  Kacey missed breakfast.

  Over lunch at the inn she learned what she had truly missed during the early hours of that morning — that Saxe had arrived in Norposten late the night before, and sought out Reandn in the dew of dawn.

  She sent a truly cross look his way over the luxuriously appointed table. “Saxe was here? How could you not tell me?”

  Completely unrepentant, he tore a piece from the small shared loaf of bread. “I was busy. Thinking about other things.”

  Kacey coughed and pretended she hadn’t. “Well, then, tell me now — will they let you back in the Wolves?”

  “Yes.” Reandn spent an inordinate amount of time dribbling honey over the buttered bread, spreading it, and then studying the damned thing. Finally he allowed, “But I said no.”

  Kacey slowly lowered her spoonful of sweetly marinated rabbit and rice. “You... what?”

  “Said no.” He took a bite out of his bread, as if his statement had been the most ordinary thing in the world. Reandn, Wolf down to his bones, Wolf in every gesture, Wolf to the death, defiant of anything else. After a moment, he reached out and wiped some imaginary bit of something from her chin. “It’s the right thing, Kacey.”

  “How can it be?” she blurted out, tempering the rest of her words only at the last minute — although the dining area was all but empty, as most of the inn’s residents had just finished breaking fast.

  “Things have changed. I’m not meant to dance with the Highborn. That’s what the Keep needs right now — someone who puts the dance over all.”

  “They wouldn’t ask you back if they didn’t —” Kacey said, but stopped, still stunned.

  Reandn shrugged. “Maybe I’ve learned something about keeping temper, maybe not... but I’ll never stop short of looking for justice.”

  “Well,” Kacey said, and took another spoonful of her lunch, suddenly calmer than she’d expected of herself. “I guess they’re fools if they don’t know that.”

  He grinned, and she suddenly realized that he’d been tense — waiting for that reaction. Good, she thought, gladdened to know her words had that power over him, after so much watching him make sure that they didn’t.

  Reandn pushed his rice around with what was left of the bread, perilously close to fidgeting. “Saxe isn’t convinced.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Kacey said. “After what you went through to get the Remote back...”

  “If he’d paid attention these last two years, he’d know that the same things that once drove me to be a Wolf no
w drive me away. I want to do it right... and I can’t do that with them anymore.”

  She just looked at him a long moment. “I didn’t know if you’d ever realize that.”

  “I’m slow sometimes.” He looked at her with that same grin. “There are a lot of things you probably figured I’d never realize. But when I get there, I do it with feeling.”

  Kacey cleared her throat. “So I noticed.” She ate in quiet thought, savoring the delicate flavorings of food made for a Highborn palate — until she realized just what he’d said.

  Reandn, without the Wolves... doing it right?

  She shoved her bowl aside, jumping only a little when a server materialized to replace it with a pastry sweet. “You won’t have the Wolf authority behind you anymore,” she said. “You won’t have Wolf Rights.”

  No more replenishing supplies at the Keep’s expense; no more Keep authority... no more Keep protection.

  So she added, “If you knock down another minor, you really will end up in trouble.”

  “Then I’ll have to stay away from minors,” Reandn said evenly. “Kacey... there are a lot of people in Keland who don’t like magic, and they can’t tell when it’s being used. They worry about their livelihood, about being cheated or even attacked by magic.”

  Kacey took a cautious bite of the pastry, discovered it far too sweet, and pushed it aside. She looked at Reandn just as warily. “And?”

  He sat back in his padded and ornate chair, shifting a little to ease his back. “And I’m the one who can feel spelled magic before most wizards do. I’m still what I was, Kacey — still a Wolf. But I’m more, too. I’ll do fine on my own.”

  Kacey folded her hands around the fine linen napkin in her lap and stared at them. Reandn, on his own, without the patrol to back him up.

  “Teya wants to work with me,” Reandn said. “For a while.” He cocked his head slightly, watching her.