Scarlet and the White Wolf, #1

by Kirby Crow

  Scarlet saw the wide gash on Shansi’s forehead, healed a day or so, and his gut twisted in sympathy. Poor Jerivet, and poor Shansi, too: alone, underground, cornered.

  “I don’t remember much after that. Just darkness and the smell of smoke,” Shansi said. His voice faltered but he forged ahead, and Scarlet realized that the words had been trapped inside Shansi since Lysia burned, and now they must come out, the poison must be drained. He settled back to listen, every bit as shaken as Shansi.

  “The bastard must have rattled my brain for me, for when I woke up I didn’t know where I was or what had happened. The cellar was empty. After they thought they killed me, they took everything and fired the building above me. The roof collapsed and that must have saved my life. It was pure luck I’d pulled away some of the side door built into the hill to repair it the day before, else I’d have had no air and be dead, too, like my uncle is.”

  “I’m sorry,” Scarlet told him. He swallowed hard. Shansi had come to Lysia to become a blacksmith and instead had seen a massacre. At least he still had his parents, safely tucked away in Nantua. “We lost both Scaja and Linhona.”

  Shansi gave him a look of deep sympathy. “So Annaya has said. I’m so sorry. They would have been my family, too.”

  Scarlet took a deep breath, willing back tears. He had cried enough. “How did you get out?” He settled down closer to Annaya to hear the rest of Shansi’s story, his heart thumping rapidly. Shansi’s face had brought everything back to him: his first sight of the village, the smoke and ash rising from the pyre of bodies, his home, and somewhere underneath, Scaja and Linhona...

  He shook his head to banish the images, trying to focus on Shansi’s voice.

  “I dug my way out,” Shansi said, his hands combing through Annaya’s hair. She had quieted and was holding on to him like he was a treasure returned to her, which Scarlet supposed he was. The smith’s fingers were black with soot and earth and there were patches of raw flesh showing through.

  Shansi saw the direction of his gaze. “Some of the timbers were still smoldering,” he explained. “I lost a few fingernails, but I knew if I didn’t get out right then, that cellar was going to be my tomb. The first place I looked was the smithy, but there was nowt left but ashes and bricks, so I went by your dad’s place on Wainwright’s Lane.” He paused for a moment. “Ah, Scarlet...”

  “I’m glad Deva saved you,” Scarlet said bravely. “Annaya, at least, has someone returned to her.”

  “Deva saved all three of us, it seems.”

  “That wasn’t Deva,” Annaya said, stirring. She wiped her cheeks with the backs of her hands. “That was Liall, the Wolf.”

  Shansi blinked. “But... you mean he was telling the truth? I thought it was some bandit’s boast, saying he had rescued you.”

  “That much is true,” Annaya interjected when Scarlet would have spoken. She gave her brother an unblinking stare. “He did save me, him and the Morturii with the red eye.”

  “Peysho,” Scarlet informed her. “And Kio and a few more, from what I hear.”

  “Scarlet, we’re in their debt now,” Annaya said, amazing him. Just yesterday, he had doubted her will to survive, yet now her strength had returned along with her sense of Hilurin honor. Her voice shook and she needed a bath and a long sleep, but she was again in command of herself.

  “I know that,” Scarlet said reluctantly. He owed Liall a life twice over, but he no longer had any way to pay him, now that he had Annaya to take care of. “But how can we—”

  “We honor our debts,” Annaya went on. She turned and hugged Shansi fiercely, unaware of how he winced in pain and his shredded hands fluttered on her shoulders. “Oh Deva, to think I almost... but no, you’re both alive, and we won’t talk about that now. As long as there’s life, there’s hope.”

  Scarlet was highly unsettled. “I’ll pay our debts, Annaya, even if he is a Kasiri,” he promised. “If Scaja and Linhona were here, they’d be grateful even to a demon for saving us.”

  She smiled before she began to weep again, holding on to her young love.

  LIALL WAS WAITING FOR him outside the yurt. Scarlet descended the short steps and faced west, filling his lungs with damp, chilly air. An early afternoon storm was gathering to the north, pushing a wave of steel-gray clouds before it. “You heard?”

  “Not everything. I am pleased that your sister again wishes to live.”

  “More than that,” he admitted. “She’s reborn.”

  “It is good, Scarlet.”

  “I owe that to you,” Scarlet said slowly, thinking it over. It was true enough. No matter how much he disliked this bandit, he owed him a great debt.

  “I did not save the young man,” Liall reminded him. “That was his doing.”

  “But you saved Annaya, and you saved me from Cadan.”

  “Only because I was there,” Liall disagreed. “I could just as easily have been twenty leagues away.”

  “But you weren’t,” Scarlet persisted. “Deva put you there, and so Deva places the debt on me.”

  Liall tilted his head to look down on Scarlet. His tone turned subtly mocking. “Ah, so it was the will of your gods. Why thank me at all, then?”

  “Because you had a choice,” Scarlet returned plainly. He was unaccountably annoyed with Liall’s logic. “You could’ve turned away, but you chose to help. You did. The gods had nothing to do with that part of it.”

  Liall grunted, eyeing him skeptically. “I do not believe in gods. If they exist at all, they do not answer my prayers, so what good are they?” He spat over the edge of the platform. “I piss on all of them.”

  This was such blasphemy that Scarlet gaped in shock. “You should not say such things,” he whispered, scandalized.

  Liall laughed and the skin around his eyes crinkled in merriment. For a moment, Scarlet was angry. Liall put his hand heavily on Scarlet’s shoulder.

  “Your goddess Deva commands you to remain chaste and to do good in the world, to be charitable to strangers, generous to travelers, kind to children, and respectful of all beasts, yet she fills her world with cutthroats and slavers and rapists and foulness of every sort. She looks on and does nothing while you Hilurin are beset on all sides by animals. Om-Ret converts more and more followers in Morturii and even Byzantur, and meanwhile you and your kind, faithful worshippers of Deva, are a pitiful minority slowly being swallowed alive by the world.” He removed his hand. “No, boy, I fear no god’s revenge. I am far more afraid of the cruelty of men.”

  Liall’s words were like whips cutting into Scarlet’s wavering faith. “Still,” Scarlet muttered, “I owe you a life debt and I will pay it somehow, on my honor.”

  Liall shrugged and looked at the sky, squinting as he assayed the clouds. “Honor does not concern an atya, only sky and wind and keeping his krait fed and an open road in front of them. You have nothing now, either way.”

  “One does not pay such a debt in coin alone,” Scarlet said primly. “There is also service.”

  “Service?” Liall’s pale eyebrows rose and his interest returned. “Do you wish to be my servant? To wait on me like Peysho’s women, fetching and carrying my food and laundry. Is that it?”

  “No!” he snapped. Gods, was the man totally ignorant?

  “Then you will have to demonstrate this odd notion of service to me. I have no doubt it will be interesting.” Liall turned suddenly sober. “But now, I have something to show you. Come with me.”

  Liall strode off, expecting to be obeyed, and Scarlet had no choice but to follow. They walked quickly through the camp with many eyes on them, but Liall spoke to no one. Scarlet saw that they were headed toward the atya’s red platform, and his boots slowed. Liall ascended the short steps and looked back over his shoulder to see Scarlet still on the ground.

  “Are you coming?”

  Scarlet did not want to follow him inside. Sleeping in Peysho’s yurt was one matter, being alone with Liall was quite another. Yet, as he was in the man’s debt, he did no
t wish to offend. Liall looked at him steadily for a long moment, then opened the flap and ducked inside his yurt, leaving him to follow or not as he chose.

  Feeling the eyes of several curious Kasiri on him, Scarlet went haltingly up the stairs and into the yurt. Liall was standing by the small, smoking brazier. A large, hinged box rested on a table beside him, and Liall had his hand on it. The box was painted in many colors and had a crimson vine crowned by a white flower inscribed on the lid, the Byzan symbol of the Flower Prince.

  “I have this for you,” Liall said as Scarlet let the canvas flap drop behind him. Liall’s face was troubled and he patted the lid of the box before withdrawing his hand. “But I confess I do not know what to do with it.”

  Scarlet studied the box and stepped forward and would have touched it, but Liall seized his hand.

  “Do not open it,” he said gently.

  Scarlet stared at him, utterly at a loss. He shook his head, wondering if this was some new game, and if the old Wolf was back.

  “I thought... it did not seem fitting to leave them there,” Liall said.

  The box seemed to loom darkly on the table. “What is it?”

  “The bones of your parents.”

  It was a long moment before Scarlet was able to speak. “How?”

  “Even in such a fire, something remains,” Liall said. “I had my men sift the ashes of your father’s house. This is the result.”

  Words failed Scarlet. He shook his head, aware that Liall still held his hand. Scarlet did not pull away. “Why?”

  “I know how it feels when those you love suddenly die, and there is no opportunity to bury them or say farewell.” Liall cleared his throat, embarrassed of his confession. “There are many Byzan customs of burial, but I am ignorant of Hilurin tradition. I did not know what to do with them.”

  Scarlet gazed at the box and had absolutely no desire to open it. Liall looked at him with pity.

  “Please tell me how to honor them.”

  Scarlet’s voice shook. “We take the bodies of our dead to the priests of Deva.”

  “If there are no priests?” Liall prompted. They had all fled the raiders and were safe in Patra or Khurelen. “What then?”

  “They’re buried deep in the fields to nourish the soil. Scaja’s father and mother are buried in the wheat field we sow every spring, the field where the family templon is.”

  “Shall we do that?” Liall asked, his voice uncommonly gentle. “Shall we bury them?”

  THE HEAVY RAIN CLOUDS were perched over the valley by the time they made it on foot down the mountain path to Lysia. Peysho and Kio went with them, and Kio offered twice to carry the box, but Scarlet would let no one else bear it. He still could not bring himself to open it.

  Liall was surprised that Annaya did not come with them. “She’s a girl,” Scarlet said, which explained nothing to a Kasiri. “Her business is bearing, not death. You can’t expect her to do both. What kind of people are you?”

  The matter was beyond Liall and he said so, but declined to argue the point. Out of respect, Scarlet supposed, and marveled.

  Liall and Peysho had brought shovels, and together they dug a hole in the earth as deep as a man, just a few feet from where the fence used to be, now trampled into the ground like everything else.

  A chilly, stinging rain started up just as they were finishing the hole, and Scarlet handed the box down to Liall.

  “I will just open it and place it in the bottom of the grave. Is that well?” Liall asked. His bright hair was spattered with black mud and his face was filthy.

  Scarlet nodded. It was a poor funeral, but he could think of nothing else. It seemed impossible that this man helping him put his parents to rest was the same man he had cursed as a brigand and murderer.

  Scarlet helped Liall out of the grave, and thankfully Kio was shoveling rocky earth back into the hole before he got a clear look at the open box. Scarlet took up a shovel and joined Kio in his task, and Liall stood aside with Peysho, who watched the pedlar sympathetically with his strange, fractured eye.

  When the grave was filled, Scarlet knelt on one knee in the mud, his head bowed as he carded through his memories: Scaja laughing as he taught him to seat a horse for the first time, Linhona waking him in the morning for breakfast, Scaja’s soft eyes as he handed him his pipe in the evening, the feel of Linhona’s warm hand on his cheek.

  “Do you want to say something?” Liall asked, rousing him from the dark well of memory. The rain was cold on their heads and their clothes were soaked through.

  “What is there to say?” He knew he sounded defeated and morose. “I’m not a priest. I only know the cantos that Scaja taught me to sing to Deva.”

  “Sing it,” Liall urged.

  He thought about it for a moment in the fading light, then looked up at the gray sky and began to sing in a pure, clear voice:

  “On danaee Deva shani,

  You brought us here,

  You take us home

  On danaee Deva shani

  Noe drashen mor Anshali.”

  It was a simple song and he did not consider himself to be much of a singer, but Liall was staring at him.

  “That was beautiful, Scarlet.”

  He shook his head and got to his feet.

  Liall touched his arm as the rain drummed on their skulls, little needles of cold. “Come. Your sister will be waiting.”

  There was nothing to do but follow him. They marched back up the hill in silence. Finally, when they were about to turn the last bend that would take the field out of his sight, Scarlet stopped and looked back at the shallow depression in the earth. The raked soil was rapidly returning to mud. Soon, heavy rains and spring weeds would erase all evidence that they had disturbed the ground there. For a moment, it felt like Scaja and Linhona had never lived at all.

  Liall was beside him. His hand was surprisingly warm on Scarlet’s neck. “Would you like me to find a marker for their grave?”

  Scarlet shook his head, shaking raindrops from the ends of his hair. Liall ducked his head a little to look Scarlet in the eye. His hand moved on Scarlet’s neck in a soothing caress, his fingers kneading the tired, clenched muscles there.

  Scarlet did not push him away as he would have a day ago, but he suddenly felt disturbingly vulnerable to that seductive alien countenance. In pure self-defense, he turned his face away and stared blindly at the summit of the Nerit. “All of Lysia is a grave.”

  TWO DAYS PASSED BEFORE Annaya and Shansi were well enough to make the trip to Nantua. The previous night, Shansi had made known his plans to take her to his father’s house across the river, far from where the Aralyrin raids were occurring. Scarlet had argued with him briefly, nurturing a forlorn hope that life could continue in Lysia.

  “Scarlet, the place is a tomb,” Shansi said gently. “Let it rest in peace.”

  “It’s our home,” Scarlet insisted. “Scaja wanted to see his grandchildren grow up there.”

  “That’s not the point, now.”

  “Linhona wanted the same.”

  “Linhona had no love for Lysia, she only wanted us to stay close by,” Annaya said. “She was no more happy about me going to live with Shansi than she was with you going off with the caravans.”

  “Still,” he argued. “It’s what they would have wanted.”

  “I’m not going to live in a slaughterhouse out of guilt,” Annaya declared, putting an end to the debate. “I’ll never go back to Lysia.”

  Scarlet saw from the set of her chin that it would be a battle to cross her. He gave in and went to sit with Liall and Kio on the steps of Peysho’s yurt. There he sat quietly and twirled a stick in his hand as the two men conversed in an unknown dialect, some patois of Falx and Qaha that he could follow if he listened carefully, but he did not.

  The sun was setting and the Kasiri camp was in a shambles. All the oxen and horses had been brought out of their shelters and were tethered to half-filled wagons as the Longspur krait pulled up stakes and made rea
dy to move on. Men cursed and trudged through the camp with heavy trunks and boxes on their backs as the last of the winter snow and ice slowly churned to gray slush under their boots. Not only had Lysia—the only nearby village to pressure tolls from—vanished into smoke, but the Aralyrin had genuinely hurt the Kasiri. Scarlet was ashamed to realize that he had not even asked Liall the names of the Kasiri who had died with Lysia.

  “None who will not be mourned,” Liall answered shortly. “How is your sister?”

  He asked about her every day. Scarlet tried to wipe the glum look from his face as he snapped the stick in two. “Much better. Shansi will be taking her to Nantua.”

  “And do you approve of her choice?”

  He shrugged. “She’s got to marry someone, I suppose. Shansi will find another blacksmith to finish out his apprenticeship, and a smith makes good wages. A sensible lad and a sensible match.”

  “And will you go with them, make your new home in Nantua?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t think so.”

  “What will you do, then?”

  “I hadn’t thought that far ahead.”

  “Yet, you must do something,” Liall pressed, and for a dizzying moment, Scarlet believed Liall was going to ask him to remain with him and the Kasiri.

  “Masdren is going to teach me leatherwork and tanning in Ankar,” he said quickly. “He’s got a shop in the souk.”

  “Masdren,” Liall repeated oddly.

  “Friend of my father’s,” Scarlet explained, then was angry at himself for explaining. What did he care what Liall thought? “He’s old enough to be my dad.”