Wolf's Blood (11 page)

Kalyndra had learned to speak a little Liglimosh, even before the destruction of her home had driven her to find sanctuary on the Nexus Islands, for the language had been one of those adopted in common by the residents of the Islands. Since her coming, she had learned a bit more, but the notes of her native language accented it so that Firekeeper often had a bit of trouble understanding her.

Fortunately, today’s business did not require a great deal of conversation.

“Going back to your forests, Lady Firekeeper?” Kalyndra said.

Firekeeper nodded. “Going there. Will come back in three days. Not today in count. Three days after this one.”

“About what time?” Kalyndra asked.

Firekeeper frowned. When alone, she and Blind Seer kept wolf’s hours, avoiding the heat of the day, traveling when it pleased them.

Blind Seer suggested,
“Tell her dawn of the fourth day. That will give us a little more time without inconveniencing them.”

Firekeeper translated this, and Kalyndra seemed to understand.

“Someone will come and wait for you,” she promised. “Probably Enigma. He’s not bothered so much by weather.”

Firekeeper understood this. The gate into the New World, the only one they had opened thus far, had its end point in a ruined stronghold that had once belonged, as humans saw things—and technically still belonged—to Tiniel and Isende, the last remnants of the family who had been given the land by other humans.

In reality, the stronghold belonged to the bats that roosted in its rafters and the little creatures who laired beneath the broken floorboards. It was a place much open to weather, as humans saw things, but Enigma was not human. Enigma was a puma, one who had demonstrated repeatedly in the past few moonspans that if someone set up the basic forms he could work spells as easily as any sorcerer.

Assured that they would be able to find their way back to the Nexus Islands, Firekeeper and Blind Seer watched as Kalyndra made the now familiar traceries. The only difficult part for them was supplying the blood to power the spell, but that they must do. There was one new, nearly inviolable law on the Nexus Islands: No one would work magic or benefit from it without supplying at least part of the blood necessary to make the spell work.

Nodding their thanks to Kalyndra, Firekeeper and Blind Seer walked side by side into the shimmering stone. They emerged into weather much warmer than that they had left behind. This was evident even in the relatively cool shadiness of the interior courtyard of which the gate was one wall.

This courtyard was much changed since Firekeeper and Blind Seer had first seen it. The vegetative detritus that had accumulated over the many years that the stronghold had stood empty had been swept away, the vines trimmed to order. The gnarled apple tree had been shaped and pruned, and was now coming into both leaf and flower. The well had been cleaned and a solid oak cover built. A new rope and bucket waited for use.

Firekeeper pushed back the well cover and pulled a bucket of fresh, crystalline water. She and Blind Seer drank lightly, for one does not travel comfortably with water splashing about inside.

The tending to this little courtyard had been done for more than cosmetic reasons. The garden beds had been planted with a variety of perennial herbs, plants that would flourish in this protected space in the relatively mild weather of the southlands, but which were much more difficult to grow on the colder, windswept Nexus Islands. The repaired well provided a backup for the sometimes brackish springs on the Nexus Islands.

Ynamynet and the others who had moved to the Nexus Islands after the parting from the Kingdom of the Mires had rapidly learned one thing about their new home. The rocky islands would support life, but only just. A bad storm that tainted the wells or stripped the carefully tended garden beds could mean disaster. Reliable connections to other areas assured survival.

Firekeeper used the surplus water from the bucket to water the herb bed, remembering as she did so Holly Gardener, the first person to teach her how food could be reliably grown. In her younger life, Firekeeper had known starvation often enough to find garden lore more wonderful than any magic. To the surprise of many of the Nexus Islanders, all of whom thought of the wolf-woman first as the stranger who had challenged their powerful rulers—and had won—Firekeeper had been among those who spent hours weeding to prepare this courtyard for spring gardening.

When they were done inspecting the gardens, the two wolves went out through the stronghold. The large building was still mostly in ruins, but here and there efforts had been made to strengthen chancy floorboards or shore up roof timbers. More importantly, at least when preserving the secret of this place was considered, Ynamynet had taken time to reinforce the illusions that hid the stronghold within the seeming of a grove of trees.

The horrid bracken beasts that had guarded the copse were gone now, their role as defenders assumed by various yarimaimalom who had shared the island dwellers’ desire that the gate’s secret not be casually learned. However, the blood-briar vines still grew freely, taking occasional toll from Cousin-kind, but never from the yarimaimalom now that they knew the danger the innocent-appearing vines offered.

Firekeeper and Blind Seer carefully avoided the blood briars, exchanged news with the lynx and the crows who were watching over the copse that day. Then, with afternoon giving way to the long shadows that heralded evening, they considered where they would go.

“Onion and Half-Ear both,” Blind Seer said, speaking of two of the local wolf pack, “share too much of the Liglim’s beliefs to be any more help to us than was Eshinarvash or the other yarimaimalom. I was thinking we should run west, angling south when the land will not let us go west, and see what other Beasts we might encounter. If we are lucky, we may find some who are more Royal than Wise in their outlook.”

Firekeeper nodded, thinking how odd it was that the rough term she had invented when first trying to explain to Derian that the wolves who had reared her were something more than the wolves he had known cast of the Iron Mountains should have become a means now of differentiating wolf from wolf. The “Royal” wolves were no such thing, but at that time her vocabulary had not included many words to indicate the abstract concept of exceptional ability.

The Liglim had done better, for their use of the word “yari,” or “wise,” indicated the thing that most separated beasts like Blind Seer or Eshinarvash from their Cousin-kind, the intelligence that let them bridge the gap between themselves and other bloods, whether those moved on two legs or four or, as in the case of some of the sea beasts, on none at all.

And I,
Firekeeper thought, as so often before,
am a two-legged wolf, uncrippled, yet crippled. Still, the evening is fair and fine, and the western way is open. I am no broody bird. Let me run.

She matched thought to action, stretching limbs that somehow always felt cramped on the Nexus Islands where she was too aware both of people and of ocean bordering around, though the islands themselves were not so small. Blind Seer felt her wish, reading it in the first intake of breath, the first lifting of bare foot from damp soil. Such was much of the language of the beasts, an awareness of things that humans had learned to forget, forgetting so they could learn many other things, things so peculiar that Firekeeper often wondered if knowing them was worth the exchange.

Firekeeper and Blind Seer ran through the evening and into the night, stopping from time to time to visit with various friends. They were yet within the range they had run throughout the winter, an area of meadows and woodlands with good hunting, and not overpopulated.

Usually, they would ask for stories about the coming of the Fire Plague, but as Blind Seer had expected, the tales they were told were so heavily colored by the theology of the Liglimom as to add nothing to their understanding. When the sun rose high and hot, the pair lay up in a thicket. Firekeeper made a small fire and set a duck packed round with wet mud to slowly bake while she and Blind Seer drowsed. Later, the greasy meat went well with the raw greens she dug from the verges of a snowmelt-chilled brook.

They moved on again with the long shadows through the new-leafed forest where the songbirds squabbled their territorial claims or sang defiant love songs. The ground underfoot was damp and soft, pleasant against Firekeeper’s bare feet after the rock and sand of the Nexus Islands. Rains just past had awakened little flowers in every hollow: white and pale pink, mostly, not needing the gaudier hues of late summer to attract the attention of slow-moving, newly awakened butterflies.

Now the pair were in lands they did not know as well, but when they chanced upon one of the woodland’s inhabitants they found news of them had come before. There was no wonder in this. The Beasts are at least as curious as humans. Blind Seer by himself, a wolf from far, far to the north and west, would have been interesting all in himself. Firekeeper was the rich marrow that made the bone worth cracking.

Moreover, the tales told of them told as well that strangers, strange though they were, Blind Seer and Firekeeper both were proven friends of the local Beasts, friends even to the eaters of leaves and grass who otherwise might have shied away lest they find themselves prey.

So the pair did not need to seek the inhabitants of the regions they crossed. Many sought them out. Winged folk came first, feeling safe in the high branches of trees. Then came the local wolves, glad to welcome these far-ranging kin, and even trusting them with the location of their dens, where the little puppies still huddled beneath the earth, mewling for their mother’s milk, not yet strong enough to be trusted out in the sun.

None of these wolf packs were large, consisting perhaps of a mated pair, some of their pups from earlier litters, maybe an outlier come seeking variety, perhaps an elder too old to lead but not too old to teach. Usually there would be no more than six or so adults of varying ages.

Firekeeper had been astonished by how humans—even those who claimed to admire wolves—envisioned wolf packs as traveling, ravening hordes. She supposed the humans were imposing their own way of living all heaped up upon each other in towns and cities upon their images of wolves. If wolves lived in such large groups they would strip the land in short order—as humans would do, if they did not grow food both from the ground and on the hoof.

When the game animals gathered, then more than one pack might come and share the hunting—Firekeeper supposed some such sight might have given humans the source of their tales—but most of the time wolf packs were smaller. Come summer, when the hunting was easier, the pack might even fragment for a time, rejoining when winter approached and the kill would come more easily with the joining of six or seven hunters.

So in their night of running, Firekeeper and Blind Seer crossed the territories of several packs and visited with them. These western wolves were more like the ones Firekeeper and Blind Seer had known from their homeland. Some had heard the beliefs of the Liglim, but they had not adopted them for their own, as the Wise Wolves, did.

The local wolves were pleased to hear tales from along the trail the pair had run—and not just the trail of the last few days, but of all of Firekeeper and Blind Seer’s wanderings. They were even more pleased to counter with their own stories, for wolves delight in besting each other.

In this mood of friendly competition, Firekeeper would have come right out and asked for tales from the days before the Fire Plague, tales that might give hint as to where the plague first arose. However, Blind Seer wished to be more indirect, and she followed his lead. In years she was the older, but wolves do not spend a full two hands and more of years simply growing to maturity. Although only eight years old, Blind Seer was in many ways her elder.

Firekeeper also never forgot that Blind Seer’s keen nose shouted to him things that she heard only as whispers. If he sensed reason for caution, she would walk softly, watching where he set his paws, and taking care to break not even a twig.

But when they had left the second pack behind them and were alone in open country, Firekeeper could hold her question no longer.

“Blind Seer, why do you not simply ask what it is we want to know? You did when we were farther east, but now you dance around the question like the pack cutting a slow runner from the herd.”

“Farther east I asked more openly, and now I do regret it. I think rumor of our interest has run before us.”

Firekeeper started to ask how he knew, but Blind Seer snapped at the air—or perhaps merely at the gnats that were worrying his eyes.

“Hear me out,” he said. “Remember how the tales we heard when we were small went back and back, reaching to stories that must have had their source in the days before human ships ever touched the shores?”

“I do.”

“Do you remember when our mother told us the story of the songbirds? How she was unhappy to share with us such a dark tale, one that spoke so poorly of our kind?”

“I do.”

“When I herded the tales to the days when humans came, preparing to ask our question, I scented an odor I had not caught since that day. A sour odor of troubled bowels and uneasy stomach. At first I did not make the connection, but memory brought it to me. Then I noted that the One Male who was then our host was shedding rather more than the season might merit, and the One Female had slid back into her den, although to that point she had been eager enough to meet us.”

“I remember. I thought the puppies must have wakened, although I had heard nothing.”

“Their whimpers came after. I decided to hold my question, and when I let the One Male take our talk elsewhere, the sour smells ebbed.”

“And the One Female returned to see us off,” Firekeeper added.

“The same happened at this last pack,” Blind Seer said. “Similar scents, this time from the Ones and the elder who we were told had been a One in his time.”

“So something is being hidden from us,” Firekeeper said.