by R. Lee Smith
But if it rained or snowed, if the wind bit too deep, or if it meant leaving Heather alone, Nona stayed behind with the other bitches (it never failed to amuse her just a little, how simply and unemotionally that word was used by lycan). As bitches went, they weren’t bad bitches, although if Kruin wasn’t there to correct them, they frequently lapsed into their own language and stayed there. Nona didn’t mind. She sat close and kept quiet and day by day, she learned to hear more words in their growling speech until the morning some magical mental switch finally flipped over and she knew it all.
“More hides for the humans?” Samatan called as black-furred Mika came down the slope from the den all the unmated females shared, her arms laden with thick furs. “What do you mean to sleep with when you have given them all away?”
“Our pack’s second,” said Laal coyly and even Burgash, crouched close to Heather and making a point of ignoring the bitches, let a dry laugh escape him.
Nona found something in the firepit to stare at, pretending she did not hear anything more than the wolf-mutters and whines she’d heard all this time. She listened, more fascinated by understanding than by the content of the speech itself. Or so she told herself.
“High Pack’s second will never take a mate,” Samatan declared and sighed. “You will run that hunt forever.”
“If he wanted you, he would have you by now,” Laal agreed, coming to join them and hunching, as she always did, in self-conscious embarrassment of her size the closer she came to the daintier females. “You cannot lure him to you with fine furs.”
“The bitch he wants has no fur at all,” murmured Samatan. She did not look at Nona when she said it.
And Mika did not seem offended to hear it. “What wolf would not have her?” she asked reasonably as she spread the dry furs over the ground under the tree where Nona and Heather slept. “After this summer past, when the Valley Lord’s bitch dwelled here and killed her wyvern—”
“With a dead branch, they say,” said Laal wonderingly, and looked back over her shoulder at Burgash, who did not return her stare but who did raise his head briefly in a lycan nod.
“—who would not at least be curious, no matter how naked and ugly she is? And who has not heard the tales of Taryn’s littermate and the battles she fought in Rucombe? For that matter, are there not humans enough here in our lord’s land as fierce as any lycan? It is only natural that he should cast his eye upon one when she stands here in our midst, but to claim her for his mate? No, Dark Water’s children will always run together,” Mika said decisively. She looked at Nona, her long mouth gaping open in a canine smile. “But she is a strong bitch, worthy of High Pack. She will make a fine mate for a strong wolf, perhaps even for our lord.”
“And perhaps for Vru,” Samatan said meaningfully. “She is fierce and brave, yes, but she is reckless and toothless also. Her foolish wanderings will take her too far from our lord’s watch one day. I think no other wolf will have what Vru has claimed.”
Nona decided she really did not want to hear where this conversation was going. “Are you talking to me?” she asked loudly.
“No,” said Mika in her thickly-made English. Her tail wagged in a friendly fashion. “I smell fresh snow in the wind, so I am making leathers for you and your packmate, to shape into new coverings.”
“Great.” And because that sounded so ungrateful, Nona tried again. “I need to learn how to make them myself. Could you teach me?”
Mika hesitated, then turned back to her packmates—her bitchmates?—and said in their own tongue, “She’ll ruin them.”
“You don’t know that,” Sangar said, still working with her herbs. “She is no distractable cub to listen with half an ear and slip away at the first wandering of your eye. She wants to be schooled. She’ll listen.”
“Everyone ruins their first hides,” Mika argued. “And the hunting has been poor lately. Good hides are too hard come by to let them be ruined for her pride.”
“Tell her so,” Samatan said with a pragmatic shrug. “She has wit enough to understand that…if only just enough.”
Sangar glanced their way, frowning. “She isn’t foolish.”
“She isn’t clever,” Samatan countered. “She has her pick of warm beds and stupid males who would happily fill her belly for the mere hope of someday climbing her furless back. There are even some who would take her for a mate and keep her all her life. She chooses to be cold so she can complain about it.”
“That is not true,” said Sangar, her ears flat.
“I can’t think of any other reason she would ask,” Mika said dubiously. “She still insists she will leave in the spring. How does she think she will cure hides as a roving bitch, lost in the Wyvern’s Wood? She’s only asking how to make them because she doesn’t want to simply ask for more furs. Humans are stupid like that,” she added with a delicate little sneeze in Nona’s direction, a lycan gesture of disrespect Nona had come to recognize as roughly on par with an upturned middle finger. “They have a thousand, thousand words, but they never say what they mean.”
“I say to teach her,” Laal argued. “If our chief’s second is not impressed by your skill in making furs, at least he will see how patient you are at training humans to do tricks.”
Nona felt her eyebrows twitch together. She smoothed them out again in the next instant, but Burgash was looking at her. He glanced at the bitches, frowned, and said, “Human-speak, our chief says, while they are with us.”
“With our lord’s permission, I will teach you to make leathers from the hides of your own kills,” Mika said to Nona, and added in lycan-speak, “That should be an end to it. She’ll never ask him and she can’t hit anything with her stone-thrower anyway.”
“Can you?” Madira asked frostily.
Mika pretended not to hear her.
“Even if she does manage a kill,” said Samatan, tail thumping, “we will still have the fun of watching her try to make leathers from bird-skin.”
They all three laughed until Ararro, silent at her mate’s side all this while, bristled and swung around to face them. Her ears were flat to her skull and there was a growl in every word as she said (also in lycan-speak), “Taryn made leathers here. She made leathers every bit as fine as yours, bitch of Dark Water, and she did not do it to lure a mate or to humiliate a brave bitch trying to provide for her pack.” She stood up, clutching her baby/puppy in her arms and said, now in English, “Come to the pond, Heather, and hold Basharo for me.” She gave the three quiet bitches a contemptuous stare. “I need to shake the dirt off.”
High Pack’s single ladies accepted this in good-natured quiet, tipping back their heads and holding that subordinate pose until Ararro was gone. Then Mika very quietly sneezed and the other two giggled.
Burgash flipped over and hit the ground hard right in front of them.
“My nose itches,” Mika said quickly, as her friends shied back.
Burgash swung and slapped his hard palm full against her muzzle. She yipped and dropped so fast that the tears of pain shocked out of her actually flew out into the air above her…and froze on the way down. One of them landed on Nona’s arm. It melted when she picked it up—a little bead of hurt, absorbed into her own skin.
“Did that clear it?” Burgash inquired darkly.
After a moment, Mika whispered, “Yes.”
Burgash growled as he leaned back, looking at her, looking at all three of them. “You were a chief’s daughter in the pack that bore you,” he said at last. “But here in High Pack, you are an unblooded hunter, a motherless cub and a mateless bitch. You are fed, sheltered and protected by our chief’s sufferance. You have earned none of it. Remember that the next time your nose itches.”
Mika rubbed her muzzle and kept her head back.
Burgash growled again, glaring, but ultimately returned to his place on the raised rock and hunkered down, ignoring them.
A few minutes went by.
“You okay?” Nona asked, stirring up a little more hea
t from the fire.
Mika rolled her eyes and rubbed her muzzle. “Yes.”
“It was a stupid thing to do,” Laal added and Samatan hushed her.
After that, they stopped talking entirely, and finally the three of them got up and went up the slope to their den where they could no doubt continue the bitch-session without fear of consequence.
The wind blew harder as they walked away. Nona watched them, shivered, and pulled one of her blanketing furs up to wrap around her shoulders. She was a little surprised to find that she was sorry to see them go. Listening to them debate how it would improve Mika’s odds at catching Nakaroth if Nona were waylaid by Vru was not the sort of talk to warm a girl’s heart on a cold winter’s morning, but it was better than nothing.
The quiet gnawed at her.
She told herself to get used to it. It would be quiet like this all time when it was just her and Heather again.
Just her and Heather…
That made her think of Leila and then of Tanya, frozen in the snow. And of June, for the first time in days. Had she ever found her way back to the toy soldiers and their corral? But no. Kruin said the war was over, so it was unlikely the camp was still there. Nona found herself uncomfortably struck by an image of June sitting alone in the muddy leavings of that abandoned camp…and then by the far more likely picture of June’s tattered, bloody clothes strewn over the snow where some hungry fellcat had surely fed off her. Staining it…like Leila’s blood stained the rock under the furs where Nona slept.
Nona stared at the heap of furs for a long time, not thinking, then reached out and flipped them back until she came down to the ground.
It was stained. It really was.
She smoothed the bed back down before Heather could come back and see it, but no matter what she did, it looked rumpled. Tampered with. Which was ridiculous because she knew the furs had just been dropped there to begin with. And Heather never noticed anything anyway.
Now she could smell it, that coppery rotten-meat stink that had been clotting up Nona’s nose the whole time she’d been cutting. She told herself that was psychological and it was probably even true, since she was sure she hadn’t been able to smell it five minutes ago, but she could smell it now.
For the first time, and for no logical reason, she found herself wondering just what the hell had happened to Leila’s arm after she’d cut it off. She could remember holding it in her hands—so much heavier than she thought it would be—and she could sort of remember pulling flaps of skin over the sawed blunt of bone she’d left so that Sangar could stitch it all together. After that, she couldn’t remember much of anything…except Leila.
‘It’s still here,’ she thought, staring at the furs.
And it wasn’t, of course, there was no damned way, but she still had to fight the urge to pull the bed apart and look for it.
‘And do what with it?’ some part of her demanded. ‘Give it a Christian burial? Dip it in gold and make it a little shrine of personal guilt? Maybe tie it around your neck and carry it with you so you can spend the rest of your life being dragged down by it!’
No, of course not.
She had Heather for that.
Nona threw off her fur wrap and stood up, walking fast toward the pond as if she were trying to outrun that thought, or maybe just the truth inside it. Burgash rose at once…then hunkered back down and let her go. She actually thought he was giving her and her unstable temper a little space until she passed Heather and Ararro on the path and saw the lycan’s chin nudge up.
She stopped, swung around, and there was Nakaroth well back on the path, following her.
Neither of them moved until Ararro and Heather were gone (Heather, shivering, never even gave Nona a backwards glance). She’d been with the lycan long enough to know that locking eyes like this meant a challenge to them and that he, as Kruin’s second-in-command, would never tolerate it from another lycan, even if it was a bitch, but Nakaroth seemed perfectly content to stand there all day and let her glare at him. If it was a deliberate ploy, it was a damned good one; stillness was a weapon she’d never known how to fight.
“You’re supposed to be hunting,” Nona snapped.
“I am.” His teeth flashed. “You are supposed to be with your pack at High Rock.”
“No, I’m not.” She turned her back on him and kept walking. The space between her shoulderblades itched, as if waiting for a bullet. “I’m supposed to be a whole fucking world away. I’m supposed to be in my apartment or maybe at work or, hey, maybe even at the movies, but I am not supposed to be with any pack at High Rock. I don’t belong here. I will never belong here. You can’t make me belong here!”
He did not try to argue with her. That was probably the most irritating response he could have had. They walked, and although she went fast, it wasn’t long before he was keeping easy pace at her side.
She didn’t tell him to leave her alone.
She didn’t want him to leave her alone.
Stale snow crunched under their feet, soaking into her shoes until the numbness wore off and every step ached with cold. Through the branches, she could see patches of brilliantly blue sky, cloudless, perfect. Not much sunlight made it to the forest floor, but what there was sparkled on curtains of icicles hung over winter trees. The wind that stirred up such playful falls of frosted leaves stung her face, chapped her lips, choked her lungs. Everything was deadly here. Even beauty.
“Mika says it’s going to snow again soon,” she heard herself say and wanted to slap herself. Jesus Christ, really? Making small talk about the weather?
He sniffed at the wind. “Yes.”
And how much longer could they really sleep outside? A cave was about the most miserable bedroom Nona could imagine, but at least it would get them out of the worst of the weather. Thoughts of waking up beside Tanya (not Tanya Casatelli, she was fairly sure of that now, but somebody’s Tanya all the same) frozen and dead in her miserable huddle were never far. It had happened once because they couldn’t help it. She couldn’t let it happen again for the sake of her pride.
Defeated, Nona said, “Did you mean it when you said Kruin would let us stay in his den?”
“He may.”
“What’s the catch?”
“Catch?”
“Will it mean something? Something more than just, ‘Hey, you look cold. Come on in and sleep over there somewhere.’”
He gave her a meaningful look. “What does it mean on your world when a male takes a female into his den?”
“Sometimes it just means he wants help paying the rent,” she said stubbornly.
“Sometimes. And the other times?”
They walked.
“What if I…I don’t know…if I asked to move in with Mika and the others? Do you think he’d let me?”
“Perhaps.” He glanced at her, almost but not quite smiling. “But there is a catch.”
Nona scowled, but nodded. “Let’s have it.”
“Once our chief brings you into a den, any den, he brings you into High Pack. You are no longer a traveler.”
“You mean I can’t leave.”
“High Pack does not cage its own. You are always free to leave. But you will be an unmated bitch of High Pack. You will be courted.”
“More than I already am?” she asked caustically.
“Yes. Much.” He left the specifics to her imagination.
She learned she was imaginative.
“Apart from that, you must no longer expect to be fed from the hand of any wolf who cannot claim you for a mate. It is not a gentle time. Prey is scarce. Our chief will soon be forced to choose who he will feed and who must go hungry. His hunters, his mates, and perhaps Gef, his only life-bearer. All others must feed themselves. If you have no mate to run for you, you must rely upon the other unmated bitches.”
She frowned at him. “And they don’t hunt.”
“They do, when Sakros schools the unblooded.” He shrugged, still not looking at her. “They are fa
r from ready to run their Full Hunts, but they have managed to sniff out and scratch up enough sleeping prey to keep themselves fed, if thin. Too thin, I think, to share out with another two mouths, but perhaps I am wrong. You and your stone-thrower will surely be welcome soon enough. If they feed you now, you will feed them later.”
But Heather wouldn’t. Heather had yet to join the Slingshot Brigade on a single morning hunt. She sat with Sangar sometimes and helped grind dried seeds or whatever Sangar did, and she kept the fire going and fetched water to make tea and did whatever she could do to be helpful around High Rock, but she was no hunter and had no wish to be. Heather would always be a mouth to feed. As for ‘soon enough,’ Mika was right: Nona couldn’t reliably hit a stump yet, much less the skittish birds that Gef and Madira used as target practice. She didn’t think Mika and the others would refuse to share the little meals they were able to run down on their infrequent hunting sessions out of selfishness…but she didn’t think they’d starve themselves just because Heather felt like being helpless and Nona couldn’t even figure out a stupid slingshot.
“So long as you choose the open rock as your den, you are not truly of High Pack,” Nakaroth was saying now. “If you were lycan, you would be among the Fringes. You are not lycan, and so it is for our lord to decide how you are received. He chooses to feed you. Both of you. He can do this to strangers outside of his pack because he is the lord of all this land and he is obligated to protect you. But when you take a den, you come into his pack. He becomes instead your chief and you are obligated to follow our laws.”
“Maybe it’s time those laws changed.”
“Perhaps. But there have been many changes in too little time. With each old law broken, Kruin risks challenge. Would you have him challenged over you?”
“No, but…seriously, are those really my only options? Freeze to death in the open or starve to death in a cave? Or leave,” she reminded herself with a short, bitter laugh. “Then I can do both, freeze and starve. Hell, maybe I can cut myself and get gangrene, too, so I won’t be able to fight the next fellcat off. Or the next wyvern. Or, knowing my luck, the next swarm of man-eating rabbits. Everything on this goddamn planet wants to kill us.”