The Warden and the Wolf King

by Andrew Peterson

Late as it was, the boys decided to sleep in the berth of the ship, and the next morning, while Biggin set out to find volunteers and supplies, the boys followed the smell of hot porridge to Olumphia’s food tent.

  “Back already?” Olumphia said.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Kalmar licked his chops. “I need to take care of some things.”

  The boys devoured their breakfast and walked up the hill toward the Great Hall. Janner felt Olumphia watching them go while she stirred the porridge. It seemed that all the Hollowsfolk looked at them differently now. Conversations paused as they approached, then resumed in hushed tones when they had passed. Now that the war was over, and the boys had reclaimed Anniera as their home, Janner felt detached from the Ban Rona and its people. He also suspected that the Hollowsfolk were leery of Kalmar’s protection of the Fangs. When the brothers arrived at the keep and the Durgan guards all but scowled at them, his suspicions were confirmed.

  “You’ll have to wait for Guildmaster Clout,” one of them said. “We’re under strict orders not to open these doors without his permission.”

  “What a mess,” the other one muttered.

  “What do you mean?” Kalmar asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  Clout arrived a few minutes later, his face as stern as it had been on their first day of class. “Your Highness,” he said gruffly. “Throne Warden.”

  “Is something wrong?” Janner asked.

  “Yes. Something is definitely wrong.”

  “Is it the Fangs?” Kal asked.

  “These Fangs? Hardly. They’re locked up tight. It’s all the others I’m worried about.”

  Clout’s voice simmered with anger. “They’re all over the Hollows.”

  90

  The Coming of the King

  We went out to the Field of Finley yesterday morning to tend to the dead,” Clout said. He stood in front of the dungeon door in his Durgan cape, his hand resting on the pommel of his sword, looking as if he had no intention of letting the boys in. “When we got there, we found a whole mob of Fangs gathered around the pile of Gnag’s dust. Green ones and Grey ones and Bat ones, too, all standing around like lost children. None of them attacked, I’ll give you that, but they did plenty of hissing and howling. I thought we were going to have another battle on our hands, but after a while all they did was stand there and watch us while we buried our comrades.”

  “How many were there?” Kalmar asked.

  “I don’t know.” Clout curled his lip and looked away. “Hundreds. Maybe a thousand. The point is, we don’t want them here. We don’t want them in the dungeon, or in the hills, or in the harbor. We want them toleave, do you understand?”

  The Hollowsfolk wanted their quiet lives back, and Janner didn’t blame them. The Wingfeathers had more or less brought the war to their land, and the poor Hollowsfolk had paid a terrible price.

  “We’ll take them,” Kalmar said.

  Clout and Janner both looked at him like he was crazy.

  “Son,” Clout said, “I know you’re the king. I respect your position. But you’re also a boy. I’m not sure you know what you’re saying.”

  “Their ships are still out there, past the Watercraw. We’ll load them up and take them away.” Clout narrowed his eyes with suspicion, but Kalmar met his gaze. “Do you want them to leave or not?”

  “I suppose I do.” Clout looked from Kalmar to Janner and back again. “You don’t actually think these monsters can be controlled, do you?”

  Janner didn’t understand any better than Clout what Kalmar planned to do. He couldn’t imagine life on the Shining Isle with a multitude of Fangs, even if the fight had gone out of them. But he also knew that Kalmar had walked with the Maker in the Fane of Fire; if this was what the Maker wanted, then Janner knew better than to argue.

  Clout grunted. “Fine. You can have your Fangs, and good riddance. But if there’s any trouble we’ll fight, do you understand? I’ll not suffer another drop of Hollish blood shed by these beasts.”

  “I understand,” Kalmar said. “But I think they’re done fighting. Most of them, anyway.”

  Clout gave the boys two houndricks, and they rode out to the field. Countless mounds of dirt dotted the grass where the Hollowsfolk had buried their fallen. But further up the hill, where Gnag had crumbled to dust, a congregation of Fangs had gathered. Some sat on the ground and stared at the horizon, while others milled about aimlessly.

  “It’s like they’re waiting for something,” Janner said.

  Kalmar drove his dog team ahead and called over his shoulder. “Maybe they’re waiting for us.”

  The brothers dismounted their houndricks and greeted the Fangs nervously. The houndrick dogs whined and flattened their ears, which was exactly what Janner would have done if he were a dog. But with Gnag disposed of and Kalmar so confident, he found his courage.

  The Fangs made no move to attack, but they turned their full attention on Kalmar.

  “Fangs of Dang!” Kalmar said, climbing atop Gnag’s ash heap. “My name is Kalmar Wingfeather, High King of the Shining Isle. I’ve come to offer you peace.” The Fangs only stared at him as if he were speaking a foreign tongue. “Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  “Peace?” one of the Green Fangs hissed, as if it were a word it had never heard.

  “Yes. No more fighting.” Kalmar waited while the Fangs puzzled over the idea. “And that’s not all. I’ll give you new names if you want them. Gnag convinced you to trade your old names for power. This,” he said, kicking at the ashes, “is where that ends. I’m asking you to trade your power for new names. Some of you want that, don’t you?”

  A Bat Fang hobbled forward and said, “I do.”

  “But where can we go?” the Green Fang asked. “Throg is empty. With no lord to feed us and lead us, we’ll either starve or be bored to our bones, and with no Stone Keeper to meld anyone, there’s no point in kidnapping more humans. There are no more Jewels to seek out.” The Fang shrugged sadly. “We don’t know what to do.”

  “What about building? Or, um, farming?” Kalmar asked.

  “Kal, are you serious?” Janner whispered.

  “What’s farming again?” one of the Grey Fangs asked from the back. “I kind of remember that word.”

  “We’ll teach you,” Kalmar said. “You can come with me to Anniera. But you have to sing the song again—this time for peace and not power.”

  Whispers fanned out among the Fangs and many heads nodded.

  “But listen,” Kalmar continued, “if you don’t come with me, I can’t help you. The people of the Green Hollows have the right to protect their land. The way I see it, you have three choices. You can stay here and deal with the Hollowsfolk. Or you can go back to the Castle Throg and stay there. Or,” Kal said, sweeping his eyes over the Fangs and taking a deep breath, “you can lay down your weapons and come with me.” He allowed this to sink in, then he climbed back into the houndrick and sat down. “Think it over. If you want peace, meet me here in three days and we’ll sail to Anniera.”

  Kalmar nodded at Janner, snapped the reins, and drove the dogs—but not in the direction of Ban Rona. He headed east. Toward the Blackwood.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” Janner asked when he had caught up. His head, as usual, was brimming with questions. “Is this what the Maker told you to do? Where are we going?”

  “Clovenfast,” Kal said without looking back. “To bring our people home.”

  Janner raised his eyebrows and asked no more questions. Whatever Kalmar was doing, he was determined to do it.

  They drove the dogs hard and reached the Outer Vales by nightfall. They made camp near a stream, tended the dogs, and spoke little. Janner woke the next morning to the smell of roasted wexter and two diggles Kalmar had caught sometime in the night.

  They fed and watered the dogs, then harnessed them to the houndricks and pushed on, arriving by nightfall at the border of the Blackwood, near the place where the toothy cows had chased them into
the forest. They made camp and spoke of Oood, wondering how he was faring on his long journey home and laughing about the trollish poem he had promised to write about their adventures. The brothers fell silent in the light of the fire, and Janner detected another flash of sadness on Kalmar’s face. He wanted to ask about it, but was afraid to.

  When the sun rose, they rode to the edge of the Blackwood and called out for Pleaders. No one answered, so they unharnessed the dogs and walked cautiously into the trees, ducking under branches and listening for toothy cows and cloven.

  After an hour they heard a garbly voice in the trees. “What you want?”

  “We seek Elder Cadwick!” Janner shouted.

  Out from the brush stepped a tall, skinny cloven with a cat-like face and crumpled wings. It might have been beautiful if not for the insect legs jutting out from its torso. “He’s been expecting you.”

  They followed the creature through the brush, encountering more and more cloven that scooted, loped, and squelched as they passed. At last the wooden wall of Clovenfast loomed above them, and the gates swung wide to reveal a mighty throng of cloven. A cheer shook the treetops when the Throne Warden and the Wolf King passed through the gates. Elder Cadwick trotted out to greet them. His flanks were bandaged and his arm was still in a sling, but he appeared otherwise healthy. His children clung to his horse legs and peeked out at the boys.

  “My friends,” he said with a warm smile. “My king.”

  “Elder Cadwick,” Kalmar said. “If the cloven hadn’t come to our aid, Gnag would still be out there flying around.”

  “And we’d probably all be dead,” Janner said.

  “We thank you, boy,” Cadwick said to Janner. “Your arrival here began a great unraveling of our bonds. There was pain, but peace followed closely on its heels.” Cadwick placed a hand over his heart. “For only when we left Clovenfast for the field of battle did our better memories rise to bless us. We returned only to discover that it was no longer our home.” Cadwick leaned forward and smiled. “But that’s not all. I want to show you what we found upon our return.”

  They followed Cadwick through the whispering throng of cloven and between the rows of dwellings. Shimrad was still there, admiring his fenceposts. The backwards bear stood near a firepit, warming his face and his rump at the same time.

  Then the brothers drew up short at the sight of a multitude of ordinary humans—men, women, and children—gathered in the yard, looking hopeful and afraid, like a rabble of lost orphans. Their faces were filthy. Many of them hung their heads in shame.

  “Who are they?” Janner asked.

  “We saw you,” said a man at the front of the crowd. “In the melding room. After you fought back, the Stone Keeper and the Fangs just left us there. And when no one returned for us, we left.”

  “We figured that if you could get in,” said a young man about Janner’s age, “then maybe we could find a way out.”

  “Where are you from?” Kalmar asked.

  “All over,” the man answered. “The Outer Vales. Yorsha Doon. A few of us are from Skree.”

  Janner couldn’t believe these were the same people who had been so eager to be melded. He knew that if he allowed himself he might feel some superiority, some righteous judgment of their behavior in the dungeon—but the peace the Maker had breathed on him was a gentle reminder of his own despair, his own bitterness just before he had happened upon them in the Deeps. Would he have done any different, given enough time in all that darkness?

  Janner’s gaze fell on a woman whose muddy face was streaked with tears. “We want to go home,” she said.

  “As do we all,” Cadwick said. “We have longed for our king to come.”

  “Then—youwant to come with us?” Kalmar asked. “To Anniera?”

  “It is our fondest hope, my king.” Elder Cadwick bowed. “If you will have a broken people.”

  “I thought I was going to have to convince you.”

  Cadwick reared back and laughed. “We thought the same of you.”

  A murmur began at the rear of the crowd and washed forward, then the shimmering green of Arundelle’s leaves appeared over the heads of the cloven. Her roots snaked their way across the leafy ground till she stood beside Cadwick, her strange and lovely face aglow with hope.

  “Will you have us, my king?” she asked.

  “Of course!” Kalmar said, laughing. He stepped closer to her and lowered his voice. “And I think I know how to heal you.”

  Arundelle’s smile vanished and she stared at Kalmar for so long that Janner feared he had offended her somehow.

  Kalmar cleared his throat. “If you want it, that is. You have to want it.”

  “This is the Maker’s will?” Arundelle asked with a look of wonder.

  “I think so,” Kalmar said. “Though I don’t really know what I’m doing.”

  “Elder Cadwick, will you tell them?” Arundelle whispered, her leaves quivering.

  Cadwick trotted to the center of the congregation. “Clovenfast!” His gaze swept over the crowd, from his children and wife, to Mother Mungry, to the most bizarre cloven perching on the rooftops. “Your king has come with the hope of healing. Will you follow him to the Shining Isle?”

  The joyous shouts sent flocks of fendril and gulpswallow bursting from the treetops.

  Janner and Kalmar feasted with the cloven in Arundelle’s courts as the sun smiled on the greening trees. While the cloven prepared to leave, Kalmar and Janner ducked into Esben’s den. They read their names, saw their faces sketched on the flat stone, and stared long at Esben’s carving of the Annierans at work in the harvest fields. Janner wished he could unearth the boulders and bear them all the way to the island where he could look at them every day. He ached to feel his father’s arms again, to hear that warm, bearish voice speak his name. The brothers lingered there until Cadwick’s shadow darkened the entrance.

  “My lords,” he said quietly, “we are ready.”

  Janner and Kalmar bade a silent farewell to the last images their father ever drew, then joined the cloven at the gates of Clovenfast. Kalmar gave the signal, and the city of the twisted and broken was emptied in the strangest procession the epochs of Aerwiar had ever known.

  When Janner and Kalmar rode their houndricks away from the forest with Cadwick and Arundelle on either side, the trees swayed and rattled behind them. Out poured hundreds of odd creatures, men and women among them, smiling in the afternoon sun as they traveled west toward the sea.

  91

  The King’s Offer

  The next morning, Kalmar issued the order for Elder Cadwick to rouse the camp, then he led the multitude to the Field of Finley. They marched hard over hill and hollow all day, driven by the promise of Anniera’s white shores, and arrived at the field under a dusky sky.

  Janner was stunned when they crested a hill and looked out on the battlefield to behold what appeared to be all the Fangs in Dang, waiting on the hillside. The Grey Fangs howled—respectfully, somehow—when the houndricks rolled over the crown of the hill, but when the cloven poured into the valley, the Fangs drew back and tightened their ranks. Kalmar rode ahead and spoke to the Fangs, while Janner ordered the cloven and humans onto the field.

  When they were all assembled, Kalmar motioned for everyone to sit, and the throng obeyed without hesitation. Janner was astonished by the strangeness of it—and not only by Kalmar’s commanding presence. The cloven were scarytale monsters that had haunted the forest; the Fangs had been the wickedest brutes in Aerwiar; the humans with them had been ready to give themselves over to the Stone Keeper’s bidding. Yet now they all sat together like obedient schoolchildren, waiting for a word from the only person in Aerwiar to whom they would listen.

  “You don’t have to be afraid anymore,” Kalmar said, standing on the seat of his houndrick. He smiled at the Fangs who had congregated on his left. “You have a choice now. Just as you had a choice when you sang the ancient song and melded. Then, you didn’t see much hope.” The cloven an
d humans nodded, but most of the Fangs looked confused. “When the Stone Keeper gave you a new name, theyou that existed in your blood and bones—died. And it left a hole.”

  Some of the Fangs poked at their arms and legs, as if they might discover a cavity they hadn’t noticed before.

  “What about us?” one of the digtoad cloven belched. “She never gave us no names.”

  “But you sang enough of the song to begin the melding. Maybe, like my father and my Uncle Artham, you changed your mind and stopped singing before the change was complete. And now you’re stuck in the middle, torn between animal and human. Neither fully melded nor named. Just . . . twisted.”

  Janner was as intrigued and confused by his brother’s words as everyone else on the field.

  “But you can be healed,” Kalmar said. “If you want it.”

  The cloven nodded and whispered excitedly among themselves. The Fangs, however, were divided. Some cried, “Heal us!” while others narrowed their eyes and growled.

  “What if we don’t want to change?” one of the Green Fangs hissed.

  “Aye, what if we like being mean and flappy?” screeched a Bat Fang.

  Kalmar cocked his head and shrugged. “Then I guess I’ll leave you here. I’m not Gnag the Nameless. You can do what you want. But you’ll have no place either here in the Hollows or on the Shining Isle. You’ll have to contend with the Hollowsfolk—and trust me, they would like little more than to turn you all to dust.” Kalmar pointed east. “You could always head to the Blackwood, to Clovenfast. Or to the mountains again. But you won’t have the ancient stone to restore you when the madness comes. And when it does, it will only get worse. You’ll die out there.”

  Kalmar stepped from the houndrick and moved among the Fangs. “I’m offering you a life on the Shining Isle, with fields to plow and homes to build. I’m offering you beauty and music and peace.”

  “Ugh,” said one of the Grey Fangs.

  But another stepped forward. “What do we have to do?”