Wolf's Blood (41 page)

Bryessidan started to speak, but Gidji stayed him with a raised hand.

“Queen Iline’s children are so accustomed to squabbling over who will win Hearthome’s throne that they view each other as enemies. When Iline sails across the seas to her final port, they might be convinced to accept another solution, that of inviting an outsider to take the throne, especially since inviting another to rule would mean none of them would need to bow to brother or sister.

“Pelland has become decadent. Half the court—or so I hear from my brother, who visited there recently as aide to our father—is suffering from withdrawal because they no longer have ample supply of the white pollen from Tishiolo. Do you think they will stop craving it once the gates are reopened, and acquisition becomes simple once more?”

Bryessidan nodded slowly, seeing the vision laid out before him. He heard his voice speak with dreamy thoughtfulness.

“I believe the king of Pelland has a daughter not too far apart in age from our elder son. We might arrange a marriage there. The throne would become ours without need of conquest, especially if the girl shares her people’s addiction.”

“My father would support the idea,” Gidji said. “He thinks well of our son, and of you, while his recent experiences with Pelland have lowered his never too high opinion of that people.”

A servant knocked, and when Bryessidan called permission to enter, the servant asked if he might come in and clear away the plates.

“Also, Your Majesties, several messages have been delivered while you were dining. Also, the nanny asked me to pass on the word that Prince Vahon has fallen and is likely to need his knee stitched. He is crying for his mother—or father.”

Queen Gidji pushed back her chair and rose.

“Rolf, have my messages sent to me at the night nursery.”

She curtsied to Bryessidan. “Your Majesty, if I might have your leave to attend upon the prince?”

Bryessidan grinned at her, hearing affection where once he would only have heard mockery.

“You are free to go, my queen, and be assured that I will think deeply over what you have told me. There is great wisdom in your words.”

After she had left, even as he was leafing through the sheaf of messages Rolf had handed him, Bryessidan couldn’t help but think about Gidji’s lovely vision of the future.

My father’s dream fulfilled. I had never realized how I ached to vindicate him until Gidji spoke of it. I had thought to come out of this coming war only with what we had held before, and a bit more because the Once Dead of the Nexus Islands would no longer be so free to dictate terms to us. But Gidji is right. Pelland could be reunited. I am young yet. Rather than merely King of the Mires, I might go to the Ancestors as Emperor of Pelland, and ruler of who knows what other lands besides? The gates go many places. My father told me that. Many, many places, and the New World was said to be very, very rich.

XX

  THE MOON HAD turned her face full around since Firekeeper and Blind Seer had left the Nexus Islands. Then it had been a quarter of the way to full, curved but not yet filled in. Now it showed that same face again.

“What is it the humans call this moon?” she asked Blind Seer idly as they eased their way through scrub growth and tangle. “The last one was Horse. I remember that because Derian placed much importance on the name. I can’t remember this one.”

“Puma,” Blind Seer said. “I don’t know why. Maybe because a puma would be quite happy to chase a horse.”

They laughed, and continued on in the steady, distance-eating trot they had adapted for their purposes. Although not a run, it was faster than most humans walked, and they could maintain it for the greater part of the day without tiring. Sometimes the unevenness of the terrain demanded slower. Sometimes a verdant meadow invited them to run, but mostly they moved at this one steady pace.

Beneath the waxing moon and the waning, Firekeeper and Blind Seer had moved west from New Kelvin. Their overnight stop with Grateful Peace and Citrine—although it been an unwelcome delay then—had proven very useful. Peace’s maps had shown them what roads would take them most directly north, and he had written on a piece of oiled cloth the symbols that would mark the signs the New Kelvinese had erected where roads crossed, so they would not take the wrong route. His maps had shown some of the mountain passes as well, but, like most human maps, they faded to fanciful conjecture the farther west they went.

Firekeeper remembered with some satisfaction how complimentary Peace had been regarding her increased ability both to read and to see the usefulness in written signs. Citrine had been pleased, too, so much so that Firekeeper had felt she must confess that Blind Seer was more skilled than she. Wolves bragged, but only when the brag was worth fighting over.

They had left New Kelvin’s marked roads behind them before the moon’s face turned dark. As Puma Moon waxed, they were finding their way through mountain passes, huddling together to sleep in the daytime, moving at night, for the nights this far north and at great heights were cold and one might fall asleep and never awaken.

During their journey, they had seen many Cousins, but few Royal Beasts. Those that they had met up with seemed not to know them, or even the tales Firekeeper knew were told farther to the south. Because of this, Firekeeper felt that she and Blind Seer had come to a land as strange as Liglim or even the Nexus Islands.

She was not so vain that she expected everyone they met to know them, but wolves were social creatures and enjoyed howling stories far and wide. Wolves loved tales of the strange. Firekeeper well knew how very strange she was, and how strange Blind Seer was for having chosen her company when he might have led a pack on his own.

True, those Beasts they had encountered thus far—most notably a very bad-temperered wolverine, and some pumas—had been of solitary kind. True, the more social Beasts would have moved their herds and packs to areas away from this cruel high country. This was the season when calves and pups and fawns tottered about, equal parts unsteady step and curious spirit. Even the winged folk would be occupied more with feeding their voracious nestlings than in scouting the area.

Even so, Firekeeper wondered if she and Blind Seer were being avoided, and if so, were they being avoided because their reputation had preceded them even in these northern highlands or because it had not, and so she was taken as human, and humans were to be avoided if at all possible.

The latter thought was distasteful in the extreme, and Firekeeper did not speak it aloud. To do so would be to admit her insecurities at a time when she and Blind Seer were being very careful with each other. He had not spoken further of his experiences beneath querinalo’s fever, and she had not pressed him, not really knowing what answer she wanted from him. Blind Seer with the power to make magic work for him would not be the Blind Seer she knew—or would he be, for that power must have been in him all along? Firekeeper puzzled over this as they moved farther and farther west, as their trail gradually began to slope downward, as the air began to smell of green growth and wet, and the nights become less cold.

DURING A MOONSPAN’S long, hard travel, Firekeeper had developed some conjectures as to what she and Blind Seer might expect to find when they arrived in the general vicinity of where Virim had made his lair.

She and Blind Seer had made a study of ruins during their time on Misheemnekuru. Their residence on the Nexus Islands had added to their knowledge, so now the pair were as adept at finding human sign as most wolves were at finding that of deer or elk.

Moreover, although querinalo had initially touched human populations over a hundred years before, the Meddler had given them reason to believe that Virim could have lived long after that time, so the indications might be even newer.

Despite Blind Seer’s hallucination, Firekeeper did not think that Virim could possibly have survived to the present day. His appearing in Blind Seer’s fever dreams was no proof, not when one took into account creatures like the Meddler.

The Meddler had been killed long before querinalo seared the magic from the minds and bodies of those—or the descendants of those—who had made him prisoner. Yet Firekeeper had ample proof that the Meddler had maintained a life of sorts. Then, too, she had seen the strange spaces where lives could hover between living and dying, eventually becoming entrapped so that their bodies died, but their spirits could not move on.

This is what she thought might have happened with Virim. From what they had been able to learn about him, Virim had been a strong-willed individual. A man who could contemplate designing a curse that would wipe out all those who he saw as a threat to his view of what was right and proper would not give in easily to death.

Probably scraps of his spirit had lingered in one of those weird, undefined, indeterminate spaces between life and death, and somehow Blind Seer had drawn those fragments to him.

Probably
, Firekeeper thought proudly,
because Blind Seer’s way of dealing with querinalo was like nothing Virim had ever seen. Most of his victims have been human, and humans are as self-absorbed as baby birds. Among the yarimaimalom who crossed to the Nexus Islands. only one that I know of shares Blind Seer’s ability for spellcasting. Enigma is a puma, and. if anything, great cats are worse than humans for turning in to themselves. Doubtless Enigma’s battle was fought—like Truth’s—between himself and some aspect of himself. Only Blind Seer ran, refusing to let the fires have anything of him, so only Blind Seer drew the attention of this fragment of Virim.

It was a good theory, one that covered most of the information. She would have liked to present it to Blind Seer, so the wolf might worry and shake it, looking for weak points and flaws. However, Firekeeper could not do this without returning to a matter that, but for the one confession, Blind Seer had pointedly refused to address.

The wolf was deaf to hints that Firekeeper would like to know more about the ability he did or no longer had, even to the point of ignoring the few direct questions Firekeeper had asked. Finally, she had given up. They had a long way yet to travel together, and she was not about to alienate her one ally—and her dearest friend.

Once they had crossed into the western foothills of the Iron Mountains, Firekeeper and Blind Seer began to scout for indications of human habitation, past or present. They found a few. There was a segment of a stone wall, bits of mortar still clinging to the interior edges of the rock. A stand of second growth forest, the trees solid and well developed to any but eyes that saw how they did not fit in with their surroundings, marked where land had been cleared for field or pasturage.

Once their search intersected the remnants of an old road. This road had once been big enough to permit a large wagon passage, and was identifiable by the straight ranks of now gnarled apple trees planted along its edges. The road was gone, scrub brush and young trees interrupting its course, and nothing but birds, bears, and raccoons had harvested the apples for many years past.

“This road is our best sign so far that humans once laired in these western lands,” Firekeeper said, “but roads stretch two ways. Which way should we go?”

Blind Seer had been sniffing along the vanished verges, but now his head snapped back, ears pricked, angling to catch what the wind would bring.

Although her own less acute sense had caught no sign of danger, Firekeeper swung her bow around and had it strung, arrow to hand, before she knew what had alerted the wolf.

The small birds, the seed and insect eaters whose spring territorial battles and courtships had been background to their journey, had fallen completely silent. Now a ruckus of disharmonious complaint arose from the dense forests somewhat to the south. Crows and jays led the chorus, but the littler birds joined in, and by this Firekeeper knew that whatever had stirred them to such furor was a solitary creature.

Although the birds did not speak a flexible language as did the Royal Beasts, still, as the notes of the multilayered cry grew more distinct, Firekeeper knew what the birds were saying.

“Hawk! Hawk!” the little birds screamed.

The jays and crows were rougher in their address. The songbirds spoke in panic, but the corvid-kin rejoiced in threat.

Firekeeper expected the cry to die down, for no hawk would remain where the hunting was certain to be poor, but the cries remained loud and, if possible, became more frantic.

“The hawk must have flown directly over some nesting ground,” Blind Seer said, “or perhaps has designs on some carrion the crows and jays have marked for their own.”

“Any hawk to alarm so many crows and jays,” Firekeeper said, “must be of the larger breeds. The kestrels and merlins would not cause such a reaction.”

“True,” Blind Seer replied, “and this thought has led you somewhere.”

“The larger the hawk,” Firekeeper said, slipping her arrow back into her quiver, and loosening her bowstring, “the more likely it is to hunt over open ground. Humans also like open ground. Perhaps we would do better to find where this hawk is hunting, and see if there are indications of humans having been there at some time.”