The Red Wolf (The Wolf Fey #2) (13 page)

Then one day – if indeed it was a day – Delano came to see me in my dungeon. He looked me up and down, sneering as he took in the full implications of my degradation. I was covered in wounds – some festering, some merely bleeding. My hair had grown long and matted; my beard too was don to halfway down my chest. I certainly didn't look like a brave hero any longer. I looked like a miserable, filthy beast. Only my eyes – the piercing, defiant glare I gave him – displayed any hint of my true rebellion.

“I really should have you killed,” said Delano softly. Yet as he spoke his voice shook, and my ears pricked up. How strange, I thought, that Delano should seem so affected by Breena's loss. This was not the mere thwarted power of a defeated ruler – a hunter who had failed to catch his prey. This was deeper – sadder.  His yellow-green eyes were wide and almost vulnerable. “You have failed to serve me as you ought to have done. You have failed to be of any use to me. And no amount of torture or deprivation has made the slightest dent in your resolve to cross me at any turn.” He sighed. “I ought to have you killed – and yet I cannot help but admire your tenacity. You must really love that girl.”

I said nothing. What was Delano thinking?

“Of course, perhaps I have been going about it the wrong way. It is true, of course, that right now the Summer Castle is impregnable: I cannot march on it and capture Breena as I wished to have done. No, I will need to do it another way....” Delano was musing out loud. “I will have to convince her. She is mad about that fairy boy now, but I have no doubt that in time I shall be able to change her mind. You were right, Wolf. She is not a woman to be conquered by force.”

“Damn right,” I muttered.

“No, my friend – she must be seduced. In this, at least, I hope you will consent to help me. I will be kinder to you. A new deal – a new round of negotiations, if you will. You must tell me what kinds of things amuse the Princess. What sort of things she found romantic.”

“If I knew that, I wouldn't be here,” I couldn't help saying. “And she wouldn't be with Kian.”

Delano smiled sadly, and although I hated to admit it I almost felt sorry for him. He seemed weaker now, more ready to admit his pain. He too had fallen in love with Breena; he too felt what I felt: that longing for her, that need. That desire to cradle her, to hold her, to caress her, to touch her, to kiss her...

I could bear the longing no longer. “Well, first of all,” I said at last, “you might try treating her as something more than a piece of meat. She's a strong woman, an independent one, and you're not going to win her over by simply
forcing
her to love you.”

“It has worked before,” breathed Delano.

“Well, not on someone like Breena.”

“She is special,” Delano mused.

“Yes,” I said sharply. “She is.”

“Pixies have always hated fairies. They are our mortal enemies. But this fairy princess...” Delano's face took on a tragic expression. “She is not like the others – so determined to shun us and our kind.”

“You haven't exactly given her a reason to trust pixies.”

Delano nodded.

“You will have some bread tonight,” he said. And then he turned on his heel and strode out.

Chapter 17

A
nd so my dreams returned. Delano's seeming kindness to me did not extend beyond proffering me a mere extra loaf – a loaf I devoured as ravenously as if I were a beast set upon carrion. For I was a beast now; that much was clear. My human nature was slowly being subsumed into my animal one. I was the Wolf that I had always been, only more so. I was a dog – just as my captors said I was – caged, beaten, tormented. Exhausted. My stomach was full, but that only exacerbated the pain, for as the food brought me out of my delirium, each sting and ache of the wound was all the sharper to me for its clarity. At last, I was convinced that I could bear it no longer.

Yes, I thought, as I lay upon the floor, the cold soaking stone pressing against my cheek, my only corrective for the fever that was burning up my body. I was dying now. This was death. My thirst was so great that I had taken to licking the stones, hoping to lap up some funneled rain-water amid the filth. My shame and my thirst warred for survival. What would Breena think if she could see me like this, I wondered? Brought so low. Fighting for my last ounce of survival like an animal? I nauseated myself.

How long had I been here, in this darkness, in this misery? While Breena returned home resplendent to her family, to her destiny as Queen. I had never felt further from her than I did right now. How could I even bear to think of her and her pristine beauty amid the stench and horror of these dungeons?

But my visions were returning. Connell once more was calling to me. The Red Wolf. Perhaps he was beckoning me to join him in the afterlife – perhaps as I lay in that dread state between life and death, between resurrection and despair, he was helping me by easing my crossing to the other side. I had heard tales of this, of course, as a child: spirits who came to Wolves on the verge of death to lead them to the mysterious paths and labyrinths of the beyond. I just never thought they would come to me – at least not for decades and decades.

But here I was, lost in Connell's dreams. The vision of the Red Wolf. I was dreaming once more of those battlefields, of the Dark Hordes spread out like a cloud of locusts over the once-pristine fields and flowers of Feyland. I dreamed of the desolation that they had wrought, traveling like a disembodied spirit across Feyland. I visited wintry tundras where the snow had been melted by the flames of dark, black-eyed phoenixes. I visited beautiful springtime gardens, once lush with blossoms and early sylvan fruits, that had been laid to waste by banshees. Silver-stained bodies covered bushes that had been plucked by their roots, those tendrils of life dangling aimlessly in the air. The very air itself smelled of smoke and oil, rot and death.

This was Feyland as it was on the eve of the great battle, the battle in which the Midnight Knight and the Red Wolf sacrificed themselves in order to save Feyland. For all had come to pass as Connell had predicted in his visions. No sooner had he returned with his men from the island where the Queen Panthea had slept than he returned to a Feyland made desolate by despair. In his absence, the first wave of Hordes had been awakened from the underbelly of the underworld, just as he had predicted. No longer was he mocked by tavern-keepers, laughed at by wenches. No longer was he dismissed as just another crazy visionary whose mind had gone to blazes after too much fire whisky. No, they knew his prophecy was a true one.

But it was too late for so many of them. Already thousands and hundreds of thousands had been slaughtered.

And Connell had wept when his ship touched the blackened shore, the port now little more than a collection of cinders and ash. Wept for his poor disbelieving countrymen – wept for all the creatures of Feyland. The pixies and the fairies, the unicorns and the phoenixes, all the civilizations now lost forever. The centaurs had almost all been killed; whole cities had been ravaged in a single day. All that was beautiful about Feyland was lost.

All this Connell knew as he stared down the Dark Hordes. This was his last chance, his best chance, to save Feyland. The land he called home. The land he loved. And so, with the Midnight Knight at his side, he raised high the banner of Feyland in one hand, and his sword in the other, and in a great, booming voice that echoed across all the moors of Feyland he cried aloud:

“Charge!”

And charge they did – thousands of them, Wolves and fairies alike, to their certain death. For there was no hope for the first few ranks of soldiers – it would take many kills before the Hordes were worn down enough to be beaten, if even. But the front lines were made up of those who had specifically volunteered for the post, those who were willing to die so that their friends and comrades and families might all live.

The fighting clanged and clashed all around them. The sound of sword on sword, flesh on flesh, was deafening; Connell's ears rang with the sound of death. The screams were the worst part. Both the screams he did not know – the anonymous echoes of the endless dead – and worse still, the screams he did know. The voices he recognized with a pang as they died out for the last time, screams still on their lips as they died. He swung his sword at a banshee, her cruel cry making his ears bleed red.

Her head was severed neatly from her body; her cold, black eyes stared up at him, boring into his soul.

You know you will not survive this
, she seemed to say.
You know it is all over.

No, thought Connell to himself. It was not over. He would not allow it to be over, not until every last droplet of his now-red blood had gone to water the earth and bring forth rich fruit from its fertile seeds.

It was the best and the worst of Feyland. For all around him, Connell saw things that made him shudder; things that brought vomit to the top of his throat. He saw men slaughtered like beasts, their innards trailing on the ground like tangled rope. He saw his comrades lying dead upon their ground, their bodies misshaped and misaligned, bones broken and lying at right angles from the rest of them. He saw the most beautiful landscapes in the world transformed into corridors of nightmares: he swallowed down his terror and his grief as he saw his cousin Falador fall at his feet, his eyes bulging in pain until the light in them went out forever.

But he saw, too, great heroism. He saw men run to certain death in order to save a companion; he saw a group of soldiers hold hands and create a barrier to a marauding giant, allowing themselves to be crushed beneath the giant's massive boots rather than let the army advance further. He saw wolves rush into the midst of battle and risk their lives to grab the wounded and pull them to the sidelines so that alchemists could heal them.

What brave men and women, Connell thought fondly. What courage!

Perhaps one day they would remember him – remember all those who fought and died for Feyland. If Feyland survived...

If it could only survive.

Chapter 18

M
y dream continued. Night after night I followed Connell into battle. I fought as he fought; I felt the blows that fell upon his chest and arms. I wielded his sword; I killed with him. I looked down at the bodies of giants and banshees, phoenixes and witches, and felt as if it had been I who killed them. Sometimes their faces melded with the pixies I remembered slaughtering in the woods: faces of pixies that would never leave me. Hundreds of anonymous soldiers I had been forced to kill – and yet for whom I still felt a certain measure of responsibility. I was a warrior now – and this is what being a warrior meant. Watching those you love fall severed in pieces at your feet. Watching those you hate look up at you as they take their last breath – knowing that you are responsible for those that loved them, too.

Knowing that every faceless victim of your rage, every necessary death that war has so cruelly made necessary, had people who loved them, too.

I thought of the pixies I had slaughtered in the forest. Did they, too, dream of women the way I dreamed of Breena – did the face of a beautiful woman flit across their dying eyes as they fell? Did women mourn them, or men – brothers, sons, wives and husbands? Guilt rose up within me like vomit in my throat.

And then I slipped back into the dream, and instead of killing pixies I was killing banshees, the members of the Dark Hordes.

And the Midnight Knight was riding up alongside me.

“Connell,” he said sharply. “It's not looking good, my brother. Half of my regiment has already been slaughtered and it hasn't been two days' time. In another two Feyland will have fallen to them. We need to start thinking about evacuating the civilians – sending them out to sea. To the far-off islands – perhaps the Dark Hordes will not seek them there.” But his voice shook, and I knew that even he didn't believe it. The Dark Hordes had shown no signs of stopping or showing mercy before – what made us think that they would stop at the sea borders of Feyland? No, they would build ships, they would swim through the ocean – they would do whatever it took in order to kill as many people as possible. They made no exceptions for women or children; they made no exceptions for the old, the sick, the infirm.

“If only we could,” I heard myself say softly in Connell's voice. “But we know there is no help for it. We won't stop them – we'll never be able to stop them. If we fall, they fall.”

“And Feyland will become a desolate wasteland,” the Midnight Knight finished my sentence for me, speaking the words I least wanted to hear.

“There's only one option...” I said. “We Fey can't do this on our own. We need to build an alliance – send for reinforcements. The pixies...”

“The pixies will never fight for us,” the Midnight Knight snapped. “We have expelled them from Feyland to the far North – they hate our kind.”

“But do they not hate the Dark Hordes more?” I argued. “As much as they hate us...”

“For centuries the pixies and fey have warred with each other. They would never fight as brothers. Never die for us. And our men would never die for them.” The Midnight Knight shook his head.

“But would they die for Feyland?” I asked.

“A Feyland that they believe doesn't even belong to the Fey,” the Midnight Knight snapped. “Surely they are rejoicing in the Dark Hordes' arrival. Perhaps, for all we know, it was the pixies who summoned them from the depths of the underworld!”

For none of us knew from whence the Hordes had come. What dark magic it had been that opened the hole between the two worlds.

I sighed. “It can't hurt to ask,” I said.

The Midnight Knight nodded. “If we joined forces with them,” he said gravely, “our magic might be able to hold them back a while longer....and if we've gone so far into desperation as to need the pixies, I imagine it's time to summon the others, too.”