by R. Lee Smith
8. Nakaroth
No visiting chief or battle-scarred hunter was ever given the welcome shown to those three humans that first night. Kruin watched from the flat rock where he lay brooding after council as Mika, one of the unmated females so hoping to catch the pleasure of High Pack’s second, produced many of the furs she had brought with her on coming to High Pack to make beds for them on the open ground where Fringe-wolves and travelers were allowed to sleep. They were fine furs, as worthy a tribute as the bitch herself, and it sent a powerful message indeed that she could cast them off so freely. Few lycan had the creativity or skill to make things, few but the wolves of Dark Water, as Mika was. And Nakaroth.
Yet if his second remained oblivious to Mika’s scheme, the other unmated bitches were not. Samatan quickly retrieved Green Bank’s tribute of leathers, not as fine as Dark Water furs, yet perfect to wrap fragile human feet. Laal gave a hollowed ice-strider horn from Snow Peak to be Leila’s cup. And Madira, not understanding the connivance behind all this generosity, asked Kruin if she might give some of Taryn’s things, left untouched in the back of their den since her leaving. Kruin’s dark mood lifted somewhat at the thought. Taryn had left only a few crude tools she’d crafted for her stay—fire strikers, hide scrapers, cutting edges—and he thought nothing would please her more than to know they had been of use to these humans, who were so far from home.
Nona received Taryn’s goods politely, although she was obviously confused by the reverence with which Madira presented a handful of stones and coming to the end of her patience for these constant interruptions. Her nerves further frayed when the males began to offer up tokens of their own—mostly low wolves seeking to impress the unmated bitches or curry favor with Kruin himself, but a few ranking wolves as well, their attentions focused on Nona alone. Vru even gave meat, a mate’s share of his hunter’s portion, but he did not know human ways. Presented with a wad of bloody entrails, Nona’s increasingly cool demeanor cracked and the fire beneath erupted.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” she shouted, then slapped her hand into the stone and bounded to her feet, nose to nose with scowling, resentful Vru. “I don’t want it. I don’t want anything from you! Get the fuck away from me! Leave us alone!”
And still Vru did not move. He stood his ground, blood dripping from his fist onto the rock, until Kruin rose and, as if it were a signal, Sakros, Burgash and Henkel rose also. Then and only after a long moment’s thought, he backed away and turned around.
Kruin was not placated. “Face your lord, low wolf,” he snapped in lycan-speech.
Vru halted, breathed, then threw his crude courtship offering at his waiting mate and swung around. He showed throat, not submission. “Forgive, my chief,” he snarled. “I thought any wolf had the right to pursue any bitch.”
“Yes, from among the pack,” Kruin stressed. “Pursue who you will. Pursue even my own mates if you wish to taste my teeth, but these humans are visitors only and soon they will be grieving. What animal are you that I must command you to show respect for one in Anu’s shadow? You shame yourself! You shame this pack! You shame me!”
Vru kept his head back and throat bared. His breath blew in short, wet snorts, steaming in the chill air. His claws flexed, blood drying on his fur.
“Leave my sight until I call for you,” Kruin growled. “Go. I will mark you if I see you again this night. Let this be your last warning. For all of you,” he added, glaring at the faces surrounding him, now avoiding his gaze. “How dare you force me to even say these things! Are you wolves of High Pack or beasts in rut?”
Low wolves withdrew, some embarrassed, some sullen. The Fringes skulked away into the lengthening shadows. Henkel and Burgash resettled close to their mates. Vru tipped his chin minutely and went growling to his den, signaling to Lura, who had done nothing, yet shared his shame.
Kruin watched him go, waiting until the low wolf’s den had swallowed them both before beckoning Nakaroth to him. “I must have eyes on the humans,” he said disgustedly and pointed at Leila (Nona’s eyes narrowed). “Even that one.”
Nakaroth nodded. “Easy enough if they are content to be held here, fed and furred and tended.”
Kruin’s teeth wanted baring. He conquered the urge. “You do not think they will be.”
Nakaroth cocked an ear. “I do not think they should be. They are as cubs. They have no knowledge of this world. They will never survive if they are not made a part of it.”
If he’d been in a better mood, he might have laughed. He sneezed instead. The humans did not deserve the insult, he knew, but they wouldn’t recognize it either.
Nakaroth did, however. His ears set with stiff reproach. “That was unworthy of you, great lord. They did not escape an army of butterflies to reach us. They did not cross the Valley of Flowers and Honey. Their chief is strong.”
“Yes. A strong human. And I respect that strength, enough to offer refuge through the winter, but the strongest human is no wolf.”
“Taryn—”
“Is no wolf,” Kruin said with finality. “You saw that for yourself well enough. She honored our ways, she did not learn them.”
That should have been an end to it, but rather than show throat and withdraw, Nakaroth said, “You would have had her.”
Kruin was, if anything, even more irritated than before, but he did manage a laugh at that. “Do you think so? She is strong, yes, and while she was my mate, she made me seem stronger. If she had been lycan, ah!” Kruin laughed again, then sighed, then shook his head, throwing off those fantasies like rain. “But she was human, with human ways and human foolishness, and I could not keep her safe in my pack. Had she stayed, my Land would have killed her. I did what was right, for she belongs with her true mate, but I did what was best as well. And I will do what is best now. I will keep these humans as safely as any can be kept in this Land and I will use the time I am given to try and convince their chief to meet with Taryn. She will know better than I…or you,” he added pointedly, “how to teach humans to survive in this world.”
Nakaroth did not sneeze, not to his chief and lord, but he did exhale rather roughly through his nose. “The Valley Lord will not allow humans to live free. Even Taryn could not convince him otherwise. What makes you think you can?”
“The Valley Lord is king, a chief of lords. I will not convince him. I will counsel. He will choose. And that is law.” The words were sour in his mouth, for all that he knew them to be true. He tried again. “And he does not cage them. He allows them to live under the eye of those he trusts. The horsemen. The satyrs.”
“You.”
To his annoyance, Kruin found himself considering that. He shook his head again, but this rain was not so easily cleared. “This is not the land for humans,” he said firmly.
“Yet humans dwell here.”
“Not as wolves do.”
“Perhaps they would, if they were raised right. Look at them,” Nakaroth said, flashing throat again to soften what was nearly an order. “Toothless. Clawless. Furless. Unfit to survive in any land and yet we cannot unroot them from ours. They have made themselves masters over entire worlds. They are not wolves, but they are not weak.”
Kruin glanced at the humans. Leila slept. Heather watched the fire. And Nona stared back at him, her gaze intent and frustrated, aware that they spoke of her and unable to understand them.
‘She will learn our words in time,’ he thought. ‘Whether we mean to teach them to her or not.’
It felt like a warning, yet what he said was, “Even if I were convinced of the need, and I am not, we would have only until spring to teach them. If they stay so long.”
“And if they wish to stay longer?”
Kruin frowned, trying to think of such a future, and saw only Taryn. Taryn in his den, underneath his arm, underneath his body.
Taryn’s belly round before her…
He shook his head, dislodging these ghosts, and growled. “I will hunt that wyvern when it shows itself. But if they were to
say such a thing to me tonight, my answer would be to find a pack more suitable to host them.”
“That one killed a fellcat,” Nakaroth said quietly, tapping at Nona with his eyes alone. “This is her pack.”
“She means to leave it,” Kruin countered.
“She will change her mind.”
“How do you come to that conclusion?”
“I will change it for her,” Nakaroth said.
“Ha! Just to prove that birds can learn to swim? And humans learn to howl. Ha,” he said again, less a laugh than a pant. “Take them then. Teach them what you can of our words and ways. At least you will have eyes upon them and who knows? They may even surprise me.”
“I think so might I,” Nakaroth said after a moment. “I will watch over them all, at your command, but there is only one I mean to take.”
Kruin looked at him, then at Nona, still watching them.
“You are my lord,” Nakaroth said quietly. “And I am no beast. I will not chase her. She will come to me. She will choose me. You will hear her shout my name.”
His confidence was an unsettling stone in Kruin’s heart. In all the years that Kruin had been chief of High Pack, Nakaroth had been his second for every year but two. Throughout that time, he had taken no mate and had mounted few females, but whenever he had determined to hunt a thing, he had felled it.
“Have you forgotten?” Kruin asked. “The wolves of Low River claim our two kinds can breed.”
Nakaroth smiled. “I have not forgotten.”
How could he be so calm? How could he smile? Kruin had thought of Taryn many times, yes. He had imagined the cub he might have put in her, when imagining did not come with consequences. Lycan cubs in human bellies, human blood coursing through wolf veins, human voices in the song of Endless itself!
‘Her name was already in the Endless,’ Kruin thought suddenly and frowned.
Nakaroth was waiting; Nona, watching.
“I cannot give you my consent tonight,” Kruin said, troubled. “But neither will I deny you. I think I will not look at this matter again until I can see it by the light of a full moon. Tonight, I tell you only to watch them. Let them rest and let them be.”
Nakaroth showed throat without complaint. His ears were still high, unconcerned. “I have another matter to put before you, my lord. Have I your ear?”
“Always. Speak.”
“I see the tribute sent by your loyal packs have settled in your shadow, yet they remain strangers to the Wyvern’s Wood, to its prey and to its dangers. When bellies are empty is not the time to take young wolves on long walks with High Pack’s finest hunters, but these may be the gentlest days of winter and the only time we have to take young wolves and make hunters of them.”
Kruin nodded. These had been his own thoughts, before the humans appeared to throw their stone into the quiet pool of his mind. “Just so. I will speak to Sakros and begin their schooling.”
“I will school them.”
The young wolves who had been politely pretending not to hear these words now reacted, sitting up and staring around in rude, if understandable surprise. The second of any pack, let alone the highest, did not often condescend to notice newcomers until they had done something to earn his eye…and that was rarely a good thing.
Kruin, too, was surprised. It was Sakros who taught the young of High Pack hunting ways, who had done so for as many years as Kruin could easily recall. He himself had learned to recognize bladeback sign and the difference between treehorn tracks and blackneck from the old wolf. Nakaroth was a strong, skilled hunter, but to hunt a thing and to teach others to hunt a thing was not the same. Kruin knew this. So did his second, surely.
“Their first lessons,” Nakaroth amended, perhaps realizing the full scale of the task he had just set himself. “To show them the Wood at least. And to give those among the Fringes who think themselves worthy of a place in your pack the chance to impress me, eh?” He flashed his white teeth in a grin, lowering his voice to a barely audible growl of good-natured lechery. “And give our new wolves a chance to impress our fine new bitches.”
Kruin scratched moodily at his heart. They sounded like good words. He could not see the flaw in them. And yet some part of him urged a warning. He did not doubt Nakaroth’s loyalty, but his mind was like the lake from which Dark Water’s wolves took their pack-name: only calm on the surface, deep and fast flowing beneath. Kruin did not know what he was thinking, but he thought he could guess. “And the humans?”
“I propose nothing,” said Nakaroth and that was true, he had not.
Kruin thought some more, biting around the edges of his misgivings, but tasting only bitter truth. It would be a long winter. High Pack needed good, confident hunters, not a low scrawl of timid and reckless strangers, unblooded, whining to be fed. And while Kruin had his doubts that any of them could perform well enough on a single outing to take the hopeful eyes of the new females off Nakaroth, there were some among the Fringes who were fit and strong and handsome enough in a coarse way, and they might. Ha, there would doubtless be a thousand Fringe-wolves on this schooling walk, showing off their superior skills; why impress Kruin when they could simply court and claim a mate as a means to enter High Pack? And if nothing else, whatever Fringe-wolves were there would not be here, sniffing around the humans.
“Agreed,” said Kruin and turned away. “Tomorrow at dawn.”
“Yes, lord,” Nakaroth said again. There was a smile in his voice.
Kruin did not look around to see it. Nodding to his mates, he went to his den and there lay awake between them long into the night, wondering what he had just set in motion.
9. Women Among Wolves
Nona didn’t think she’d sleep. It wasn’t that she wasn’t tired—she was exhausted in every fiber, exhausted down to the roots of her hair—but she couldn’t remember what it felt like to really rest. After weeks of walking cold and hungry through this alien hell, sleep had surpassed the realm of memory to become a thing of fantasy, no more real than fairies or unicorns…or werewolves.
Except they weren’t, really. At least, they weren’t magic any more than the toy soldiers who had taken Nona off the sidewalk had been. They weren’t shapechangers and they didn’t launch themselves into frenzies of bloodlust or howl at the moon when it rose. They were, in their own way, perfectly ordinary.
Lycan, they called themselves. Not hulking, drooling, mindless and bloodthirsty monsters, but lycan. The wolves of High Pack. Yes, they howled. They crouched naked around the fire and tore at meat with their fangs, but they talked while they did it. They laughed. They even flirted, the coy glances and bold posturing easily translating the dissimilarity of their two kinds. Nona heard the mother among them crooning to the furry baby that kicked and giggled and grasped for its father’s arm. She saw the clutch of apparently single ladies draw off to moon over the grim second-in-command whenever he stalked by. She saw touches pass from hand to hand, saw smiles exchanged as often as licks and nuzzles. She heard names falling easily from mouths that spoke English, surely for no other reason than to make the humans among them more comfortable, and the names humanized them more than anything else.
Of course, she also saw the carcass of the animal brought in by the hunters ripped open with wolf-claws, eviscerated in what seemed like seconds. She saw innards scooped out, saw a kidney licked casually from the claw it had been snagged on, saw bones cracked for the marrow. She saw the dark wolves they called ‘the Fringes’ snapping and fighting with each other over the bones left at the end of the meal, saw blood beading in whiskers, heard snarling barks and yelps of pain. She saw the big one, Vru, push his white-furred female onto her belly so that he could fuck her, right there in the clearing in front of everyone, as he stared across the fire into Nona’s eyes. And she heard the growls and wolfish mutters of speculation as she and her two companions bedded down, saw a very different and very feral hunger in their many watching eyes.
No, she didn’t think she’d sleep, but she w
as not surprised when Leila and Heather dropped off seemingly the instant their eyes slid shut. The furs that the one called Mika had brought them felt like goosefeather beds after weeks of frost-hard ground and dead branches, but only for a minute or two. Then she felt the rock digging up at her, felt the chill creeping in, felt the pinch of hunger her few bites of meat hadn’t cured. This wasn’t heaven. It wasn’t home. It was a pack of wolves in the very darkest part of the forest, and they just couldn’t stay here.
They couldn’t leave, either. Not yet. Heather was done in and Leila was so sick. But Nona thought they should, once they’d had a few nights of sleep, a few steady meals...and time enough for Leila to…go where she was going. Kruin said they could stay until spring, but she didn’t want to wait that long. Just long enough for things to start to warm up would be enough. A few weeks, two months at most, and they could move on.
‘Where?’ she heard Kruin’s voice ask dryly. ‘To the Southwilds? West, to the Dragon’s Mountains? East, to the Serpent’s Marsh?’ English words, but ominous names; like the moon staring down at her now, their familiarity only served to leave her feeling more isolated, more alien.
Home. They had to go home.
How?
Nona rolled over a little closer to Leila’s sleeping form, her arm creeping around the solid mass of Leila’s body, pressing down through inches of fur until she could feel the rise and fall of living breath. It made her feel better and worse all at the same time.
“Nona.”
She wasn’t asleep, but she didn’t respond. She supposed it was rude, but she couldn’t care. Leila was dying. The heat coming off her fevered body was like a second fire and her breath was fast and shallow. That was what Nona focused on. Werewolves were just not as important.
A furry hand nudged her shoulder. She shrugged it off irritably. The lycan crossed in front of her and crouched. “Are you warm enough?”