Darkwood (29 page)

From a distance the men's muskets looked like a crop of sick, leafless plants. The men looked like sticks themselves, hardly better fed than the wolves. They were miners, she realized, miners from the Drop.

The wolves erupted in victorious barking. They had broken through the thawing earth to the pit beneath, the hole just wide enough for Rinka to slip through. He reappeared in a matter of seconds, dragging Brisa behind him by the scruff of the neck. Her muzzle was tied shut with a piece of cord and blood had dried around her nose and mouth. Her eyes were open but she didn't seem to recognize Rinka. Annie looked over her shoulder. The fastest men had almost reached the fence.

“Keep digging!” she cried to the wolves. Then she, too, squeezed through the opening into the pit.

Right away, she felt the darkness as a kind of relief. She could see better down here, here in the black element. The air was humid and thick, almost muddy. The pit was smaller than she remembered, too. For a moment, Annie wondered how much she'd grown in these last few months. But of course not. After she found the tunnel Gibbet must have moved the ringstone and filled in the cave, so now the dirt wall extended a few feet farther into the pit. Poor Brisa. The pit felt more like a
tomb than ever. Then again, a tomb was just what Annie needed.

The fence was no more than five feet high, but the first men who tried to climb over it fell back, yowling. The top bar of Chopper's fence was covered with broken glass. One man began to cut at the rope she had tied around the gate, his companions egging him on with shouts and curses.

She would have only a minute to get this done.

“Stand back!” Annie felt the wolves' many eyes on her, suspicious and interested. She coaxed Baggy backward until the rear of the wagon was even with the edge of the pit, then pushed the lever that controlled the wagon bed. At first the rabbits stuck to the wagon bed, the poison working as an adhesive. Then they began to peel free and fall. The bodies dropped by the dozens into the pit.

Rinka looked up from tending Brisa to address his pack. “This is the victory supper Gibbet promised us,” he said.

With a chorus of shouts the men pushed through the gate, then stopped abruptly in the middle of the lawn. They could see now that the wolves had not attacked Annie. The aggression in their faces slackened into confusion, then fear. Mira, who seemed to have been the leader in Rinka's absence, saw her opportunity and seized it. The wolves reached the men before their muskets were even halfway to their shoulders.

A wolf dipped her head, teeth bared.

“No!” The command came not from Annie, but from
Rinka. The wolf obeyed immediately. Rinka looked at Annie as if to say,
Do whatever you plan to do, but do it quickly
.

She grabbed Baggy's bridle and ran with him to where the first man lay splayed on his back. She reached for his musket, and the wolf guarding him stepped politely aside. The man gasped. He had freckles on his forehead and the sparse beginnings of a moustache on his upper lip. For a moment his eyes locked with hers, full of fear and something else she wouldn't recognize until later: awe.

Annie moved on to each man in turn, until all the weapons were heaped in the back of the wagon. Once more, she backed Baggy up to the pit. With a clatter, the muskets slid into the hole. A muffled popping sound rose from the pit, followed by the bittersweet smell of gunpowder. She nudged a clump of dirt toward the hole with her foot and watched the darkness swallow it.

Free of her bonds, Brisa turned her head to the side and lapped frantically at the snow. Rinka hovered over her, nuzzling her head and back.

“You'd better stay with her,” Annie said over her shoulder as she cut away the last of Baggy's makeshift harness.

“But you'll need help, a wolf to vouch for you.”

“What about Mira?”

“Mira is … yes. But even so …” He barked an order and Mira ran over to him. The man she'd been guarding remained just as he was, thoroughly terrorized.

“Mira, go with the girl. Do as she says. She is one of us.”

Annie felt her face grow hot. She kept her back turned,
pretending to fiddle with the horse, so she did not see whatever Mira did to make Rinka say, in a sharper tone, “You will do as she says.”

“I will.”

He approached Annie and, to her surprise, touched his muzzle to her palm. They looked at each other for a moment, Annie struggling to find words for the queer sensation around her heart.

“I'm sorry about your leg,” she said.

He cocked his head to the side. “I think I got off rather easily, considering.”

As she rode out of Chopper's yard, Annie turned and saw him watching her, and knew that he would watch until she disappeared among the trees of the forest.

Mira did not slow or turn around for several miles. She would run ahead, double back, run off again. Gradually the gap between her and Baggy increased, until Annie could see her only intermittently through the trees. Quite suddenly she appeared at Annie's side. She spoke in the clipped tones a parent might use with a fretful child.

“The camp is deserted. He's already sent the second wave. They'll have a good start on us already, but a pack never travels as fast as …” She looked doubtfully at the horse. “I hope we catch them before they reach the king's army.” She started to trot away.

“Mira, wait! Rinka called Brisa queen. Is he your king?”

It seemed an innocent enough question, but the wolf's expression turned positively ferocious.

“Yes, he is our king! Some may choose not to honor him, but he is no less a king because of it.”

Annie hesitated, but she was curious. “Who does not honor him?”

“Fristi and her followers. They wait for another, some figure of legend. They cannot accept the power already in our midst. She was with him the night he fought that old traitor, Sharta.”

“Why do you call Sharta a traitor?”

“He abandoned his own son to serve a human. Who could forgive such an act?”

Several miles passed before Annie had the courage to speak to Mira again.

“What do you know of the apothecary?”

Mira's ears stiffened.

“The dark feeder.”

“Why do you call it that?”

“That's what it does. We also call it witch, shape-changer, spell-caster. It does all of those things.”

“Is she—is it an animal?”

“Human, animal. It is ancient and has many forms. And many children.”

“It has
children
?”

“Why not?”

Annie decided to try a different tack. “When you say it feeds on darkness, do you mean instead of food?”

“Judging by the teeth, I'd say it eats meat. But the dark makes it strong. Light makes it weak. We have a legend that tells how the witch cast a spell to hide the moon, but that would make it very old indeed.”

“Seven centuries,” Annie murmured.

“In any case, I'd keep clear of it. It can't do much to you unless it can see you, and then it can do anything it wants.”

Uneasily, Annie looked around her. The apothecary was everywhere and nowhere: a hand with long, dirty nails turned out to be no more than a branch full of twigs, the black tips bare of snow; the hunched shape of a shoulder nothing worse than a boulder; the glint of black teeth only the sun striking off a tree trunk slick with ice. Annie's eyes grew tired with looking. Her eyelids drooped. Baggy's rolling gait felt strangely soothing, and she found herself thinking not of the apothecary but of her own mother, and whether she had ever rocked her like this in the brief time that their lives overlapped.

“Wake up. We need to make a decision. The tracks split in two here.”

“Is it part of the battle plan?” Annie struggled to remember everything she knew about warfare, which was nothing.

“I don't know.”

“Which way did Gibbet go?”

Mira tossed her head. “If you can pick one man's scent out of all this, you have a better nose than I do.”

Annie looked around. Hundreds of wolf tracks had turned the forest floor into a muddy slough. Tracing an individual scent would be as difficult as tracing a single set of footprints.

“Perhaps we should split up?”

Mira looked delighted.

But Annie was uneasy. Why had Gibbet split the army in two here? She peered through the trees ahead of them, but all she saw was more trees. She wished she could cut them down, just for a second, just to see.

And then she smiled, really smiled, so that Mira asked sharply, “What is it? Are you ill?”

“The cutting fields.”

“Explain yourself.”

“The fight will be in the cutting fields. Gibbet needs an open plain to see the battle, but he'll want the wolves hidden from view as long as possible.”

“How does that explain his decision to split the pack?”

“I'm not sure.” Annie closed her eyes, trying to remember. Her uncle and Chopper had approached the field separately from the east and west. She had had a clear view from where she stood … Her eyes flew open.

“There's a hill overlooking the fields from the north. You can climb down the wash, but it's steep and very narrow. The field is open in the other directions. They'll see the wolves coming from the west, they'll turn to fight … they'll turn their backs to the hill, and”—she pointed to the path branching north—“the wolves using that trail will drop down on top of them.”

“Clever,” Mira said.

“You take the northern branch. Like I said, the path down the hill is narrow. Block it with your body if you have to.” She hesitated. “You'll be all right?”

“Certainly.”

“Good-bye, then.”

The wolf's expression softened, and in that moment she reminded Annie of Aunt Prim. The moment passed. Mira turned and ran swiftly along the tracks left by Gibbet's army.