The Dragon Hammer (Wulf's Saga Book 1) (26 page)

Chapter Thirty-Two:
The Night Flight

“Lord Wulf, allow me to present my daughter,” said Earl Keiler. He motioned to the redheaded woman with freckles to step forward. “This is Ursel.”

She was about Wulf and Ravenelle’s age. She wore a green dress with red trim and was a hand shorter than Wulf. Her red hair was drawn back with a green scarf. Her hair was nearly as curly as Ravenelle’s.

She made a curtsy. “M’lord,” she said.

Wulf bowed to her. “A pleasure, Lady Ursel,” he said.

“It’s Ursel, m’lord. Only Ursel.”

“All right,” he replied. “As you say, mistress.”

She shrugged “It’s just that I’m a foundling,” she said. “We bears are very particular about our titles.”

“You really don’t look like a bear.”

“Ursel is my
adopted
daughter,” Earl Keiler said with a chuckle. “She is as much one of the clan as any of my people, though, and I’ll tear apart anyone who says different.” Earl Keiler’s tone softened. “She is family. I have settled a grand dowry on her.”

Keiler fell into a fury of doubled-over coughing, and everyone waited as politely as they could while he dealt with it and stood back straight.

Wulf tried to take up where he’d left off. “Pleased to meet you, Mistress Ursel Keiler.” He turned to Ravenelle. “This is Princess Ravenelle Archambeault,” he said. “My cousin.”

“Princess.” Ursel Keiler curtsied very deeply this time, and Ravenelle looked pleased.

“Your father must think very highly of you to bring you to law-speak,” Ravenelle said.

For a moment Ursel seemed tongue-tied when confronted with a princess, but then she recovered and answered Ravenelle in a firm voice. She had a heavy Shwartzwald County accent. “I try to be of service to Papa. He says I’m good at keeping up with details.”

“She’s the lady of Bear Hall and my best self now that Hilda is dead and the boys are grown. Ursel keeps the books. She never misses anything,” Earl Keiler said. “And she never forgets. So don’t slight her. She’s a bear in that way. She knows how to strike back.”

“I’ll try to avoid that,” Wulf replied with an uneasy smile.

Ursel turned her gaze to him. “Papa exaggerates,” she said.

Ursel smoothed the fabric of her dress, rumpled from the curtsey. When she bent an arm to straighten her sleeve, Wulf saw that she had
very
defined muscles.

Archer’s muscles, Wulf thought.

It took years of practice to get them. This meant she was probably also a crack shot.

Ursel saw where he was looking and smiled shyly. Her green eyes sparkled with amusement. She finished tugging down the other sleeve, and Wulf found he could not take his eyes from her.

He didn’t until Ravenelle kicked him in the shin to get his attention.

“Let’s get out of here, von Dunstig,” she said in a low voice. “Bear Hall still gives me the creeps.”

Nagel didn’t know if she even
was
a person. There were Tier who looked much more like animals than humans. The beaver people and, especially, the mice people were like that.

But they all had some distinguishing feature that marked them as people and not just animals. She didn’t. She looked just like any screech owl. She had been raised by owls. Not owl people. Owls.

When the falconers took her as a fledgling, she’d been wild beyond imagining. She was completely unaware she had the ability to talk. She had discovered that she was far smarter than her siblings. But she didn’t feel better than them. Her parents knew things that she did not. They knew how to locate a mouse by sound alone, and how to find the best currents for soaring. She had tried hard to learn. But she had seen early on that the intense love she felt for them was not returned. They fed her. They taught her. But they would never love her. They didn’t understand what it meant.

So she had come to live in the mews. It was there, with fauns and men speaking around her, she had first understood language. It had taken her many months, but finally she’d learned how to make the whistling air that passed through her beak when she exhaled into understandable Kaltish words.

It excited her when one day she discovered that she could easily understand what the fauns and men wanted her to do. Hunting came naturally to her. They had tried her as a “make owl,” and she knew she’d done amazing work. The eagles were easy to anticipate and to lead. She might be able to talk like a human, but she could definitely also think like a raptor.

She had felt that she was waiting for something. The love she’d felt for her parents she’d buried so deep she hardly knew it existed any longer. But then the boy had come, and everything had changed.

He was her boy. Hers. And she was his. It wasn’t mating. She didn’t want that. She wanted another kind of love, the fierce love she’d once felt and had seemed to lose. She wanted to be able to devote herself to a being who was capable of appreciating her, who maybe one day might come to love her.

It was a harsh love. A fierce bloody love. Often it came across as dislike, but she didn’t mean it that way.

Now she had something to do. She had information to deliver that might make a real difference in a world she’d always thought she was too little to affect.

Flying to the castle was familiar to her. She’d sometimes been released in nearby fields and expected to return to the mews herself, so she had flown there several times. Nagel never forgot a landscape.

She came in at night.

When she landed in the castle mews, she was in for a shock. They were empty. Most of the birds had been taken out on the hunting trip to the Dragonback Mountains. The birds that stayed had not been fed or watered. Most were dead. Those that were alive were famished and thirsty.

Here she could do more. She did not have hands, but she was clever with her beak, and she worked the mews doors open. The survivors could get out. Not that they would thank her. Raptors didn’t feel gratitude.

She took a moment to get back her sense of direction, then headed for the castle itself. She was almost stabbed by a guard. He saw her, reached up with the tip of his poleax. The ax tip cut across her belly.

But it was only a small wound. Her strength returned. She waited, sitting quietly on a gargoyle above the main door until a Sandhavener opened it from the inside. She ducked through the small opening, feeling more like prey than hunter at the moment.

Now she could make her way inside the castle.

She doubled back several times to avoid notice. But by listening and following a guard on watch, she discovered where the bedchambers were.

The heir was not present. She had expected not to find him. But neither were any of the others Wulf had told her to look for. The older sister. The elf woman. The warrior boy who was Wulf’s friend. Even the mother.

In the end, Nagel had to deliver her message to the little sister. The one named Anya.

After considering, Nagel realized that this was not a terrible plan in any case.

Anya was a little girl, but not too young to understand. She would maybe be unguarded. Even if Nagel could find him, approaching the eldest boy seemed out of the question. He would just shoo her away or, worse, he or one of his men would cut her out of the air with a sword for bothering him. Even if she had found the sister, the mother, or the elf, they were
old.
She would have to take a lot of time convincing them she could be trusted.

And even though she was Tier, they were not used to Tier who looked
exactly
like the animals they were paired with.

No, the little girl was the one who would listen to a talking owl who only had a little time to deliver her message.

Anya was a human. She could then get the other humans to believe her.

So it would be Anya von Dunstig.

The only problem was, she’d never seen Anya.

Then she heard someone call out Anya’s name, and saw the little blonde-haired girl slip into her room. This had to be Anya. She looked very much like a young Wulf.

She had to approach and not be seen by anyone else. This was dangerous.

Nagel loved living, but she wasn’t afraid of dying if she had to.

But first she had a message to deliver.