by R. Lee Smith
He could end that, a thought so much greater than himself that he should embrace it without hesitation…and he could not.
“This summer past,” Kruin began. He spoke slowly, scratching out a tangle of half-formed thoughts, clumsily shaping them to words, so intent on this difficult task that he could not open his eyes to see his second’s watchful face. “This summer past, you told me you would not eat plants…even though you knew they could make you stronger…because you were a wolf and this was High Pack. And now…”
The meaning of it clawed at him, but refused to make itself into words. Kruin struggled with it in silence, his claws digging at his palms in frustration. The thought came to him suddenly that Taryn would know exactly what to say, and in that, lay all the argument against the point he was trying to make. He felt like howling.
“If I died today,” he said finally, almost desperately, “you would be chief of High Pack. You would be lord of this Land. Your son would be chief after your crossing. Would you want a wolf of human getting for your lord?”
“I would have one of Nona’s getting,” Nakaroth answered without hesitation. “Would you not have one of Taryn’s? Human or lycan, a heart is a heart. Hers is fierce and I will have her.”
The words rang true. Kruin brooded on them, yet thought of Taryn, indulging himself in a brief and utterly foolish fantasy in which she stayed, chose him, gave him cubs. And would he set his favor on such a cub, mark him to be chief?
He thought about it and he thought the answer was yes. Perhaps it would not be a strong wolf that came of it, but there were indeed many kinds of strength. For all of their fierceness, the lycan were not masters of their land, merely survivors. He had seen true mastery, seen the chiefs of the Valley with their tribes of thousands. He was aware of lack in his Land, and although he knew he could forget easily enough if he let it go to the song of Endless, it was an awareness he clung to, because it was one he suspected could be repaired. With the right blood.
There was much in Nona the same as Taryn. She was strong, she was clever, she was fearless when the Land raged and she was watchful over the ones in her care. But she was angry also, alone and adrift. She was Taryn, perhaps, if Taryn had never found her Cerosan lord and that deep well of love she claimed was her strength.
Kruin eyed Nakaroth closely, and yes, he saw strength. He saw a lycan who knew he was not a wolf. He saw a male who pursued a heart and not just a body to submit to his demands. He saw a good match, a maker of strong cubs, and perhaps a future chief, a future lord. It would be a great and terrible change, one whose repercussions would ripple out until they changed the song of Endless itself, but it was, Kruin thought, a good change.
And after all, seasons do change.
Kruin bent his head. “I will hear you, but I will not give her. Nona must choose you or I recognize no claim.”
“You have my gratitude, lord.”
“Your gratitude.” Kruin glowered at the trees, scratching restlessly at his chest. “I will drown in the swamp of rut-piss the dogs of my pack will unleash when you take your fine mate tonight, but at least I have your gratitude.”
“I should have yours,” Nakaroth replied, tail wagging. “Do you really think the tribute bitches will remain unmated when they see that I take Nona? Ha! They will see that their hunt has failed and they will choose another. Telash for Laal, Metaka for Samatan…perhaps Hova or Denovok for Mika,” he mused, glancing aside as if consulting the shadowed forest. “Dark Water’s children will always run together.”
“Hova and Denovok,” said Kruin, ears flat, “are Fringe-wolves.”
“But good wolves, my lord. Good matches for three fine, fierce bitches who are not flattered by the barking and biting of dogs.”
“And Heather? Shall I thank you for making her a bone for the Fringes to fight over?”
“That is unfortunate, yet unavoidable.” Nakaroth shrugged, the tusker on his shoulder seeming to nod agreement. “I think she knows what she must do and I think she is not opposed, but as you say, she fears us. So she will wait as long as she can and it will get worse the longer she waits. There may be blood. But when it is over, all the bitches of High Pack will be mated and this senseless bickering will end. Is that not worth a little blood, my chief?”
Kruin thought about it, his claws flexing in the snow.
And yes, he realized, growling. Yes, it was.
21. Nona Chooses
The morning after the night when everything changed came just like every other morning. The sun rose. Wolves yawned and shook off the pre-dawn rain. Nakaroth’s cold nose woke her when he stuck it under her fur blanket to nuzzle her and then he took his arm off her waist, rolled over and got up. Gef and Madira came to take her out for slingshot practice and when she got back, Heather was finally awake and Nakaroth was gone.
She thought she’d feel better, not having to face him yet, but if anything, she was even more on edge. Once Kruin and the other hunters had also headed off for the day, leaving Henkel on human-sitter duty, Nona’s restlessness took on whole new dimensions. She sat by the firepit and wrapped herself in her furs, trying to at least pretend she was fine instead of silently projecting to the whole goddamn world everything that had happened last night.
The furs smelled of sex. Sex had a smell. She’d heard that, but this was the first time she’d smelled it. And hers was a puny human nose at that.
Any lycan downwind of these furs probably knew that Nakaroth had fucked her.
She didn’t know why that hit her so damn hard. Dozens of them had actually watched him do it.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” Nona announced, throwing off the furs and bounding to her feet. “Come on, Heather.”
Heather, ‘helping’ Mika tie a brain-cured blackneck hide into a wooden frame for scraping and softening, looked around in surprise. “Where are we going?”
“I don’t care.” Nona raked her eyes over the clearing, but kept coming back to those stupid furs. In desperation, she pointed at the cold firepit. “We’ll get wood or something. Come on. Not you,” she said as Henkel started to climb to his feet. “We’re not going far.”
Henkel sent an assessing stare toward the Fringes. Most of them were off with Sakros and the ones that were left wouldn’t meet Henkel’s eyes. Grumbling, Henkel lay his head down on his forearms again, but did not close his eyes. “Stay close,” he warned. “If I howl, you return.”
Mika heaved a dumb-human sigh and shook her head as they walked away. “Where is your mate, Lura?” she called, never looking up from her hands as they tightened all the laces Heather had just tied.
The white bitch sitting off by herself in the clearing curled up a little smaller. “Where is yours?” she muttered sullenly. “Vru is hunting.”
“Our chief is hunting. Our chief’s second is hunting. Burgash is hunting.” Mika paused to bite off the trailing end of a lace with one snap of her jaws. “Vru is missing.”
“We’ll be fine,” Nona said, walking faster.
“You cannot talk to them,” she heard Samatan say in lycan-speech. “How can they listen with ears so small?”
“What’s wrong?” Heather asked, once they’d put enough distance behind them that she couldn’t hear the bitches laughing.
“Nothing.” She tried to leave it at that and couldn’t. Gritting her teeth, she said, “How’d you sleep last night?”
“Fine.”
Was there a pause before she said it? No. Maybe. God, why had she done it? He’d just touched her shoulder and she’d rolled right onto her knees for him like a…like a…
Bitch.
They looked for wood in silence. So close to High Rock, they’d both picked the woods pretty clean of deadfall, but the good thing about freezing rain was that it coated high branches, making them heavy and brittle. Any sudden gust of wind could them snap off and there was plenty of wind. If Vru really was hunting them—hell, if a wyvern was hunting them—Nona would never hear him approach through all the creaking and groa
ning that was the forest’s winter voice.
So there were plenty of twigs and sticks for Heather to collect, but twigs and sticks were kindling, not firewood. Nona kept looking. When Heather couldn’t pick anything up without dropping something else, she worked it all into a baby-sized bundle and just walked along at Nona’s side, aimlessly circling, passing the same trees, the same stones, never more than a howl away from High Rock.
Hours passed. Maybe. The lycan had no concept of hours. Nona had quit wearing a watch years ago anyway. Who the hell needed a wristwatch when everyone had a cell phone? But the sun had moved, climbing to a point not quite straight overhead and then sinking back behind the tops of the trees. So hours had passed after all. She’d walked half the day away with nothing to show for it. At least Heather had kindling.
There was a fallen tree up ahead, black against the dirty snow. A few dozen branches studded one end of its trunk like nails through a ghetto bat, but they were all too sturdy for Nona to break off. She’d already tried. Still, she headed over and tried again, heaving and swearing and making mud out of the snow as she went from branch to indestructible branch.
Heather stood well back, watching, and finally climbed onto the tree’s bent back and sat, still hugging her bundle of sticks.
Nona fought on for a while, but her determination yielded nothing but frustration and splinters. Once her breath, patience and energy were fully depleted, she staggered over to the smooth end of the tree and dropped sullenly beside Heather. Her hands were red and raw; she picked at them. Her clothes had new holes; she picked at those, too. Her left shoe felt loose; she bent to retie it and the lace snapped.
Fuck this whole day.
“Do I smell smoke?” asked Heather.
Nona raised her head into the punishing wind. She couldn’t smell much of anything apart from her own sweat and dirty hair, but she could see the grey threads of smoke blowing through the barren trees that ringed High Rock. “Guess so.”
“Shouldn’t we head back?”
“If they want us, they’ll come get us,” Nona said and glumly scanned the surrounding bushes just in case they already had. She didn’t see anyone at the moment, but that didn’t mean much. There had been several times she’d thought she was alone, only to have Nakaroth or Kruin or Burgash (and Vru, on one memorable occasion) step seemingly out of thin air within arm’s reach of her. “Why? You in a hurry to get back?”
Heather found something in the kindling she’d collected that need close scrutiny. “They only start a fire when they have something to cook,” she mumbled.
“That doesn’t mean they’re cooking for us. Besides, we can’t let them feed us forever.”
Heather looked at her, then looked away. She kicked her legs for a few seconds, like a child, but stopped when Nona glanced at her.
A howl sounded.
Heather listened with an exaggerated grimace. “Busted!” she said, sliding carefully down from her seat on the tree trunk to the slushy snow below. She took a few steps and stopped when she noticed Nona wasn’t beside her. “Um…that was Kruin’s howl.”
Nona could do better than that: It was Kruin’s call of assembly. He wanted the whole pack at High Rock. It was too late in the day to take the hunters out again. He had something to say, something he wanted everyone to hear.
Another howl.
“I think that’s Nakaroth,” said Heather, listening. “I can’t…quite tell what he’s saying. Something about hunting?”
Nona glanced at her, trying to determine if Heather’s uncertainty was genuine or not. Although distorted by howls, the lycan-speech seemed perfectly clear to her and the meaning was hardly subtle.
See me. See the wolf who stands alone before you. See the hunter. I hunt for you. See the warrior. I fight for you. See the place beside me, empty. Come to me, my huntress. Stand before me. Run beside me. Lay beneath me. My hunt is done. I am for you.
Then Kruin again, repeating his gather-all howl once…twice…three times.
“I think he means us, too,” Heather was saying, leaning forward slightly, as if the extra four or five inches this gave her would help her hear better. “I don’t know what they’re doing, but they really want the whole pack there for it.”
“We’re not part of the pack,” said Nona. Her mind was cold, as faceless and blank as snow over stone. She did not think about Nakaroth…his weight on her back…his breath panting in her hair…his claws digging at her hips, yanking her into his powerful thrusts…
“Okay,” said Heather in a crisp, no-nonsense tone Nona had never heard out of her before. She set down her kindling and turned around, planting her hands on her hips. “We need to face some facts here and the facts are these: We’re marooned on this alien planet and we don’t know of any way to go back to Earth.”
Anger, weak as a matchflame, sparked and guttered. “That doesn’t mean there isn’t one.”
“That’s true, but only because it’s impossible to disprove a negative supposition. From a practical standpoint, that argument is meaningless. And we are not having a debate, we are listing the facts.”
And what could Nona say to that? She shrugged, nodded, and pushed herself off the fallen tree to join Heather on the ground. “Here’s a fact for you. We don’t belong here. This is not our home.”
“Okay, sure. But you know what? We don’t belong anywhere on this world. We don’t have a home. Okay? If you don’t want to stay here, that’s one thing, but I feel like I should point out that the next people we stumble over may not be as hospitable as Kruin, even if they’re humans and especially if they’re not. So, do you want to talk about where exactly you want us to go? And don’t say Earth unless you have an actual plan for how to get there, because I cannot deal with fairy tales anymore.”
Nona’s jaw clenched. She said nothing.
“I’m not saying this to make you angry,” Heather said softly. “I’m saying it because…because realistically, you have to know we’re not likely to find someplace better than this, are we?”
After a few false starts, Nona said, “No.”
It didn’t hurt. It should have. It should have broken in her throat like glass. She should have choked on it. But she didn’t. It was just a word.
“Okay, so what are our options?” Heather continued. “Kruin seems to think we might have a shot with this…Taryn-person who’s attached to the lord of the valley. Well, I’m not an expert on the politics here, so correct me if you’ve heard something different, but this is the lord who became king after he wiped out the army that brought us here?”
“That’s the guy,” Nona agreed and managed a small shrug. “But Kruin says he’s a good guy.”
“I’m sure he is,” said Heather, drawing it out just enough to highlight the irony. “He just saved the world from the evil human army from Earth. And I know this Taryn-person is also from Earth, but…I’m sorry, but that means she’s either the enemy of the army that brought us here or a defector or possibly she could have been their leader, who is now a political prisoner and whose very survival depends on the whole you-defeated-my-entire-army-and-absolutely-no-one-got-away thing. And if so, she’s got more reasons to want us dead than the king does. What?” she said at the end, since Nona was staring at her. “You don’t think I’ve thought about any of this?”
“You never talk about it.”
“What am I supposed to say? You sure don’t need to be told and…” She looked toward High Rock, her expression frustrated and unhappy. “And none of them would understand. I mean, say what you want about all the growling and fighting in the Fringes, but they sure don’t hide their feelings. They’re not perfect. Yes, Kruin’s got to put a guard on us to keep the ones like Vru…you know…off us, but the reason he knows he’s got to is because Vru is completely honest about what he intends to do to us. They may not have a highly developed sense of morality, but they really don’t understand how…bad humans can be. How they hide it.”
“I never had any intention of goin
g to see this Taryn-person. Even Kruin’s quit trying to talk me into it.”
“Good. Because I have to admit, everything about that whole idea scares me.” Heather paused, then quietly added, “I know you think everything scares me.”
Blushing, Nona snapped, “I didn’t say that! I’ve never said that!”
“You don’t have to. And I’m not trying to start a fight. I just want us to be on the same page. And if we’re agreed that we can’t go back and we can’t trust Taryn and we can’t just wander around and hope for the best, what does that leave?”
“Wasn’t it just yesterday that you were freaking out and telling me how you were never going to get used to them? Now you want to just give up and move in?”
Heather blushed. “I was not freaking out, I was…and anyway, what I want doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is how we’re going to survive here. We need to join the pack.”
“It’s not that easy. Some of the Fringe-wolves have been trying to get in for years. Only the best hunters ever get picked.”
Heather uttered a small puff of steaming laughter and rolled one shoulder. “That isn’t the only way in.”
“You need to listen to what you’re really saying.”
“No, you need to listen. I’m saying I’m cold and wet and tired of sleeping outside. I don’t understand how you can just not care about that! I mean…I mean, what are you waiting for?”
“What are you waiting for?” Nona shot back. “If you want a den so bad, go flash that pussy pass and get one!”
She threw it out there like a slap. She wanted it to hurt. But Heather laughed, a little bitterly, but with real humor.
“God, to think I’ve hit the point where I actually wish it was that easy. Besides, none of them would even look at me while there’s still a chance of getting you.” Shaking her head, Heather found a tree to lean up against and tucked her hands into her sleeves to warm them. “You’re the fierce bitch. I’m just your pack. I can’t hunt. I can’t…kill things. I know you think I should just get over it already, but I just…I can’t. The best I can do—and I mean it, the very best—is just stay out of everyone else’s way and pray you don’t leave me behind.”