Scarlet and the White Wolf, #1

by Kirby Crow

  Seeing he was again brooding, Peysho pushed Liall’s leg with the toe of his boot. “Copper for yer thoughts,” he ventured in his atrocious accent, slurping a mouthful of hot soup. He spilled some on his chin and wiped it away on his sleeve.

  Liall shook his head. “Nothing. Only wondering how bad the weather will get up here.”

  Peysho snorted. “Well, ye can’t be worried for yerself, not with that ice water ye call blood in yer veins, so that worry must be fer us.”

  Liall chuckled. Kio and Peysho were often aghast at how little he wore on a snowy morning, when the rest of the krait were piled high with fur cloaks over their leather and deer-hide jackets. It put them in awe of him a little, which was not a bad thing. Leaders needed awe from the men they ruled.

  “Don’t fret over us,” Kio put in. He was better bred than Peysho and had finer manners and speech, yet they made an odd kind of sense together. “The weather’s harsher in Morturii than it is here.”

  Most of the Longspur krait—named after the brown bird that made its nest in the flat plains—were from Chrj and had the look of that people: lean and sharp-faced, their hair ruddy or brown or even a dark gold. Their eyes tended to be green or hazel: unique colors in this land of black-eyed people. Many bore bluish-black tattoos rendered boldly in complex interlocking patterns, the symbolism of which was known only to them. The rest of the krait were Morturii or a mix of swarthy Bledlands outlaws and half-Minh Aralyrin, the spawn of captured slaves, whom the Hilurin would have absolutely nothing to do with. The Hilurin were a little more accepting of their people who had married into Chrj and Morturii families, which made up the greatest part of the Aralyrin population of Byzantur, but they stubbornly lived apart from them in their chaste little villages. A pity, since it made them much easier for their enemies to find, and they had many. One hundred percent of the power in the official government of Byzantur was held by Hilurin politicians and nobles, whose people comprised perhaps two percent of the population. Ancient tradition and religion alone held this status quo together, but it was fraying more every day. The Hilurin power structure could not last much longer, and villages like Lysia would bear the worst of it when it fell.

  “Still,” Liall answered, “I think it best to stock up on staples and firewood. As long as the krait is fed and warm, we’ll have no trouble from within our ranks.”

  “And none from without, so long as we keep our knives sharp. I’ve seen to that,” Kio put in with a touch of smugness. He had been training several of the youths in dagger-play for months. He also taught long-knives, daggers to the men, and the short, stabbing rapier called a sperret, which was wielded in tandem with a small shield for very swift, in-and-out fighting. Very few fighters carried swords in the Southern Continent, and the long-knife was preferred for close work. Byzans in particular, small as they were, never used swords. The standard weapon throughout the Southern Continent was a pair of long-knives, the blade perhaps as long a man’s forearm from his elbow to the tips of his fingers, curved slightly, with hafts of spun wire and no hand guards. The Morturii made such blades from the black ore of the Byzan hills, and they were prized all over the world.

  Liall finished his soup and handed the cup back to Peysho with a nod of thanks. “Well then, it’s back to my cold bed.”

  Peysho waved his arm expansively in the general direction of his women’s yurt. “Why go to bed cold, Atya? Ye can have yer pick.”

  Liall grinned. “I might, if you ever acquire a woman younger than yourself.”

  Peysho laughed. “My wives’re exactly the right age to know how ta take care of a man. What would I do with a young woman?”

  “Not the same thing I’d do with her, I venture.”

  Peysho shrugged good-naturedly. “Go see old Dira, then. He still has a dove or two ye haven’t plucked.”

  Every krait had its prostitutes, but being the atya, Liall was leery of visiting the same girl or boy too many times. Misunderstandings could occur. He would just have to wait until their travels led the krait close to a larger city, one without so many prudish Hilurin.

  “A pox on Dira’s stable of skinny birds and on your wizened hags,” he pronounced, which sent Peysho into more laughter. “But offer again when you get yourself a pretty boy-wife or two.”

  Kio muttered darkly under his breath and poked up the fire with a stick, and Liall laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “I’m teasing, Kio. Peysho only has eyes for you.”

  Peysho caught Kio’s eye and winked, and the younger man subsided, mollified.

  “Right, then.” Liall waved at them, embarrassed at himself. The attempt to stir jealousy in Peysho’s contented yurt was motivated solely by his own bitterness. He did not desire Kio, or not very much, but he did envy them their happiness. “Sleep well.”

  A Restless Night

  LIALL DREAMED OF THE pedlar that night. They were not in Byzantur, but in Rshan, and it surprised him to see the pedlar in his home country, dressed in hunting silks with silver threaded through his black hair. It must have been a snow bear hunt, for the riders were dressed splendidly in much finery and jewels, not the usual type of hunt at all. Sharpened stakes were strapped to their horses’ flanks, but no swords or bows. The snow bear was a quick beast that hunters found difficult to bring down from a distance, even with a crossbow. The white-furred bear blended in well with his surroundings, and even well-seasoned hunters with a ready supply of bolts had the occasional accident. A horse would sometimes trip and snap a foreleg on the ice, and the downed man and his mount would become meat for the bear instead of the other way around. Or they could get caught in a small boat crossing a river or lake that had not yet frozen, which also meant death. The hulking snow bear became an otter in the water; an agile beast armed with eight-inch claws and fangs the size of fingers. Liall had seen it happen before, and it was not a memory he cared to recall.

  In his dream, the pedlar was smiling, happy to be going on an adventure. It made his chest ache to watch the beautiful youth as he waved and laughed, calling Liall by his right name, his old name, and telling him not to be a want-wit.

  Then the dream shifted. They were racing their horses over a snowy field, hot on the trail of the bear, hounds baying ahead of them, the rest of the hunting party shouting and whipping past. Suddenly, the snow bear was there. They had stumbled right into his lair and he was among them, slashing and tearing and biting. Men and horses were screaming and someone was yelling in a high, wild voice for the spears. Liall looked frantically for the pedlar and saw that his horse was down and he was in the center of a massacre, hunters and mounts and dogs torn to bloody chunks around him, the ravening snow bear in the thick of it. Liall locked eyes with the pedlar before the bear took him. The boy vanished beneath a mountain of white fur and claws, and one of the last things Liall saw before he woke up was that slender body covered in blood from head to toe.

  He woke with a gasp, his heart banging against his ribs. Yet it was not the dream that caused him to close his eyes on a spasm of pain, but what he saw in the instant before waking. The haughty pedlar lay in the snow with blood spilled over his body, but his face...

  For a second, the face Liall saw was not the beautiful pedlar’s. It was another he recognized, but could not name: a visage from his earliest childhood dreams. The face was cold and proud, with a clear, high brow and eyes so black they were like living night.

  Who is this pedlar? He wondered that as he lay staring at the rough walls of his yurt. Why does he affect me so?

  He shivered in sudden cold that had nothing to do with the weather, and pulled the fur closer around his body. Could the pedlar be his t’aishka, his immortal one? If so, it would not be the first time in Rshani history that it had happened between a Byzan and one of his folk, but in all cases the reunion of souls had proved disastrous for everyone involved. Byzans had not been welcome in Rshan for thousands of years.

  Liall started when he heard a scratching sound outside his yurt. It was Peysho rubbing his th
umbnail on the canvas wall.

  “A messenger, Atya,” Peysho called.

  Liall glanced at the marked candle burning on a stone pedestal by his bedside. Perhaps two hours had passed since he left Peysho’s yurt. The wind had died down outside, but now it was much colder. He sighed at the feel of the warm furs around his body, briefly wishing he had taken Peysho up on his offer.

  “Ye might want to see this one, Wolf.”

  He got up. There were few people who would send him a formal message. Somehow, he knew it was coming.

  The messenger was an aging Minh lately from Volkovoi, and with the look of that people, being squat and yellow-skinned with wise, narrow eyes and clipped speech. Volkovoi was a harbor city across the Channel in Khet. It was one of the last open ports north before the sea.

  The Minh wore the traditional blue-striped cloak and the silver badge of his office, and he insisted on being paid before he spoke. He was, he said, on his way back to his homeland and had agreed to make a brief, hazardous stop on the shores of Byzantur. He carried a message to the White Wolf of the Longspur krait from a certain Captain Lanak of the merchant ship dal Ostre Nadir.

  The Minh held a small box out to Liall, who signaled Peysho to pay the man yet again.

  “For your silence,” Liall said meaningfully, with a hard look at the Minh. He was surprised that the Minh had agreed to carry the message at all. If the man was caught on land in Byzantur, he would be killed on the spot. The Minh were deadly enemies to the Byzans.

  Curious, but knowing better than to press, Peysho did as he was told and dismissed the messenger, who hurried back down the Sea Road to his waiting ship. Peysho went back to his warm bed and the even warmer Kio as Liall stood frozen in place with his hands locked around the box. He did not open it right away, but set it aside in his yurt until his nerves stopped jangling. The box was wooden and plain enough, but the case was stamped with Sinha letters, the language of Rshan.

  When the great eye of the moon hung over the mountain pass, looking close enough to touch, Liall opened the box and looked inside. He sat and looked at it for a long time.

  I tried to run from it, he thought. A man could try, at the least.

  He had lost so much of himself in Byzantur, drowning his memories in the lonely blue shadows thrown by the crags of cliffs and the jutting shelves of rock, in the last red gleam of the sun before nightfall, or in the first wink of a silver star in the deep, open sky. The weight of all that came before and the chiaroscuro contrast of the life he had now seemed to him like two ships bent on an unwavering course to collision. Now that he was about to lose it, his second life was suddenly very dear to him. The past had come seeking him like a persistent hound.

  It has not all been sweet, he reminded himself. This life could cradle him gently or rend him to ribbons of flesh with its claws. It depended on the day, and how drunk he was the night before, and whether or not the tide that pulled at his mind in an endless crosscurrent of guilt had battered and eroded him enough to weaken his resolve, his promise to himself not to dwell on the past. Not to think at all, if possible. His dreams were not so easily commanded, and they knew no master.

  “I tried to run, Nadei,” he said aloud. “I told you I never wanted it.”

  “Atya?”

  Liall turned, startled. Peysho had not gone back to his bed, but stood on the wooden steps just outside his yurt. Liall rose and thrust back the thick flap. “What are you doing?”

  Peysho shrugged.

  Liall shook his head. “Come in, then. I have no che or anything warm. Will bitterbeer do?”

  Peysho nodded and accepted the cup without comment, sinking down onto a padded ottoman as Liall returned to his place on his bed. Several minutes crawled by, wherein Liall would not speak of the messenger and Peysho would not ask.

  “Kio will be annoyed with me,” Liall observed.

  “With me, more like.” Peysho supped his beer. “He’s not used to sleeping alone.”

  “You should go back to him.”

  Peysho nodded agreeably but made no move to get up.

  Liall looked at his knotted fist resting on his knee. “Do you have dreams, Peysho?”

  Peysho shook his head. “Nah. Not that I remember, anyways. What’s the use of ‘em? I got everythin’ I want right here.”

  He probably means that, Liall realized. “Well, I do dream,” he sighed out. “No one knows who I am here, my aman,” he said, naming Peysho friend for the first time, for he had become aware of a deep sense of loneliness surrounding his spirit. “Not even you know, and you would not believe me if I told you. I never thought I would be in this rustic place, chieftain of a krait of unwashed bandit Kasiri. I am the foreigner here, with not a single soul knowing my true name. In my dreams, they do not call me Liall.”

  “What do they call ye?” Peysho asked, but Liall only closed his eyes, recalling how deeply it had wounded him to give up his name. It was a pain he had long suppressed.

  Nazheradei, echoed a boy’s voice in his mind, entreating, and he could never answer for the shame that clung to his skin. The crime that he committed in that other life haunted every step of his feet, every breath, every word spoken or promise uttered.

  I will never be clean of it, he confessed silently as he watched the embers of the brazier dying down to pale ash. Never clean, nor free.

  “It is of no consequence,” he answered. “All that matters is who calls me. His name is... is Nadei,” he stuttered, faltering over it. “Every night in my dreams, Nadei calls me, but not to his arms. When I go to him, I see that he carries a knife. I am not frightened of him or the promise of ending in his hand, and that is a great comfort to me. I go willingly, because in death there are no dreams.”

  Peysho was regarding him with grave worry, and for a moment Liall believed he had been very foolish to confide his flaws to a subordinate who would be justified in presenting his doubts before the krait warriors. In accordance with krait law, weakness was not tolerated in a Kasiri atya.

  But when Peysho reached out and covered Liall’s clenched hand with his own, Liall felt ashamed. Among the curiosity and doubt, there was genuine sympathy in Peysho’s eyes.

  “What c’n I do? Just name it and I’m yer man.”

  “Do?” he echoed. He smiled very sadly. “Go to bed, Peysho. This is the past I speak of. There is nothing anyone can do.”

  Peysho hesitated. “The pretty pedlar,” he said. “Does he remind ye of this Nadei?”

  Liall regarded him with surprise. That was too astute, he thought. And then: He knows me better than I realized. He tried to recall how many years he had known Peysho. Kio had been barely a man when they joined his camp and began traveling with them. That was five summers ago.

  “Perhaps,” he allowed. “He has the same fire in him, the same temper and pride. But I do not wish to speak of it. The pedlar is gone.”

  “He’ll be back,” Peysho said, very certain. “That will be an interesting meeting.”

  He clucked his tongue, shaking his head. “Watch out ye don’t regret him, too, Wolf. The past has a way of playin’ over when ye least expect it.”

  Liall paled. “Good night, Peysho.”

  After Peysho had taken his leave, Liall put the box away. Sometime in the night, he took the two items from it, dumped the box into the campfire, and walked away so that he would not have to watch it burn. There was no one on the path to the Sea Road and no yurts camped that far over. It was a good place to stand and clear his head, where he could just make out the glimmer of waves in the distance.

  He folded his arms in his cloak and watched the moon traverse the sky in the hushed silence of the heights. Beside him was a shattered pine that was perhaps a thousand years old, yet still carried a few straggling needles on one crooked limb. When the moon trespassed on the limb outlined against the indigo sky, the twisted hand of the pine seemed to reach beyond her to trawl for a handful of stars. The wind chattered through the dry branches like laughter. Liall closed his eyes a
nd felt a pang of longing he had not allowed himself to feel in half a century.

  In the dark places, the dream-boy called his name again, and he turned his mind away quickly before the sound could break him. You cannot haunt me forever, Nadei.

  He could almost see Nadei smiling that cold smile of his, his hair like frost, his eyes the exact shape of Liall’s own. Oh, can I not? The more you run from me, the closer I draw near. The knife he held never wavered, though there was blood on his feet.

  Liall shuddered and looked at his hands as if searching for meaning in their lines. There was no written message within the box, only two tokens: a ring made of rare platinum and precious filiri sapphire, and the single white feather of a swan. The ring was for his safe passage, to prove who he was and to open doors. The feather was different. In the folk tales of his people, a white swan feather had only one meaning.

  Come home.

  LIALL WOKE TO PEYSHO scratching at the wall of the yurt again, then the flap moved aside and Peysho thrust his head in. The angle of the moon behind him told Liall it had been only an hour or so since he had fallen back asleep. The feather and the ring were tucked safely under his mattress.

  “There’s a matter, Atya. Ye’d best come.”

  Grumbling, he pushed aside his blankets and furs as Peysho retreated. So much for sleep. There were few reasons he tolerated being roused twice from his bed: raid, flood, fire, or the soft skin of another nuzzling his side. None of those were in sight when he exited the yurt and stepped close to the circle of warriors huddling close to the campfire. Then the circle opened up and Kio flung the black-haired pedlar at his feet.

  The pedlar’s hands were tied behind his back and his white skin was dirtied with ash. His dark eyes blazed with fury as he struggled uselessly with the ropes binding him. “Let me go, damn you! Kasiri dogs!”

  Liall laughed and drew his cloak closer around him. This, at least, was a happy diversion. The wind was frigid. Inwardly, he felt a tinge of admiration toward the youth for venturing out into the dark, cold forest in an attempt to sneak past his men. He watched as the pedlar attempted to rise and Peysho grabbed him by the neck and flung him back to his knees in the snow and dirt. The boy looked fierce as a wolf, squatting on his heels and baring his teeth in the orange light of the campfire.