by R. Lee Smith
“And Heather,” said Nona, stirring Vru’s teeth around in her palm with her forefinger. So small. So round. One of them had stabbed into her neck, but none of them looked sharp enough now. “Don’t forget that part. Don’t forget that you left me with him and came back for Heather. It was supposed to be both of us.”
“You…” Ararro took her arm off Heather’s shoulders and stood, all her fur spiked out and quivering at the tips. “You crawling thing!”
“It’s a lie!” Lura cried. “Humans lie!”
“All the days they have been here, you have never left your place or come to offer a single word of greeting to either human, but today?” Ararro turned to Kruin, chin up and eyes snapping with fury. “Today, she comes crawling on her belly and three times—three!—asks my co-mate to walk with her!” She turned on Lura, who cringed into a smaller ball. “And I would have let her! I took pity on you, wretch! I thought you begging for favor from one who did not know what a poisonous, loathsome bitch you are! I would have given you a chance to earn her trust and you would have fed her to that…that…!” Words failed her. She lunged as Heather shrieked, and Burgash caught her, struggling to restrain his much larger mate as she roared, “I’ll have your throat, betrayer!”
“No,” Alorak broke in, voice raised to carry over the scrabbling of claws on stone and Burgash’s grunts of effort. “You should bare your own in thanks to your mate, who knew to keep his mates where they belonged, in High Rock, under his watch.”
Nakaroth’s head cocked. He gave Nona a last pat on the shoulder and stood up, stepping in front of her. “Do you direct those words at me, pup?”
“I do not,” Alorak said quickly, but after an assessing glance at his supporters, his ears snapped up and he stepped forward. “But perhaps I should! That creature you defend killed a lycan! There is no honorable way by which any human could kill any lycan, but Vru? Is there anyone here fool enough to think that—” He sneezed in Nona’s direction.
Nakaroth’s hackles stiffened and slicked down, like a ripple in still water. Otherwise, he did not move.
“—could best Vru in fair challenge?”
“It wasn’t a challenge,” said Nona, ignoring Nakaroth’s silencing glance. “It was an ambush. I defended myself.”
“I should like to see the defense that left you largely unmarked and him, dead on the ground,” Alorak scoffed as his mini pack of lackeys growled agreement. “A blooded hunter! A trophied wolf of High Pack, well-proven!”
Nakaroth’s ears folded flat. “Proven a threat to High Pack’s females.”
“A bitch who knows better than to act like prey is not preyed upon,” Alorak declared. “If there was danger, she put herself there. If there was a trap, she went willingly.”
All this time, his mate, Acala, had been sitting off to one side with her shoulders tucked and her eyes fixed on the ground, but now she raised her chin and said, “Would you say so if it was me?”
Alorak threw her a swift, censuring glance, plainly more embarrassed by the interruption than the question. “Sit and be still. This does not concern you.”
Acala started to tip her chin up, but didn’t finish the gesture. After a moment, she stood. “And if it did?”
“It never would,” Alorak said and glared at Nakaroth. “Even if you were stupid enough to wander out of High Rock, I would not allow it.”
“Then you acknowledge the danger…and still condemn the defense?”
Alorak did not respond, but his supporters were already bristling on his behalf, which made ignoring her impossible, and at last, he turned on her and growled, “I tell you sit and be still! Do you not see me speaking?”
“I do,” she replied in a faintly wondering tone. “And I hear your words. I hear you telling me no bitch is forced unless she invites it. I hear you calling the…the beast who preys on bitches a trophied hunter and the bitch who defended herself, an honorless creature.”
Alorak took a swift breath as if he planned to sneeze again, but thought better of it and let it out as short, exasperated sigh instead. “You don’t understand these things.”
“No, I do not. But I’m learning.” Acala lowered her head, shook it, raised it again and softly said, “I chose you. Gods give witness, I had a choice and I chose you. So you are in part correct. We bitches deserve that which we invite.”
The irritated angle of Alorak’s ears slowly shifted and lowered. “What are you saying to me?”
“I have made a terrible mistake,” she said, speaking every word clearly. “I take it back. I will not den with you. I will not have my Heat with you. I will not be your mate.”
“You can’t do that,” Alorak said and his father looked at him.
“Then I will leave this pack. I would rather be in exile than be your mate.” And with that, she turned to go.
Kruin stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. “You stay,” he said, nodding toward the den shared by the unmated bitches. “Stay and choose a better mate. And you…” He looked at his son without speaking as the wind blew snow between them and finally shook his head. “To my shame, I have harbored a dog in my pack. To my greater shame…I have sired one.”
“Father—”
“You will leave now.”
Alorak’s brow furrowed and his ears flattened. He tipped his head up, showing a baffled sort of submission, and tried again. “My chief—”
“I think I will not look at you for a time.”
Alorak recoiled. His mouth worked, speechless.
“When I see you by the light of another moon,” Kruin mused, “perhaps I will see my son. If I do not, be warned, if I still see a dog, I will drive you out with my teeth.”
After a short, stunned silence, one of Alorak’s supporters eased away from him. Another followed and another, and soon he stood alone. He hardly seemed to notice. The only one he watched walk away from him was Acala. When she had seated herself with stiff pride among the unmated bitches, he looked dazedly at the emptiness around him and then at his friends, none of whom would meet his gaze.
In his unguarded eyes, Nona saw the exact moment he knew himself to be alone.
Sinking to his knees, head fully back and throat fully bared, Alorak stammered, “My lord, I—”
“I do not hear your words, Fringe-wolf. Remove yourself. You have no place in this pack.” Kruin turned his back on his son and came to Nona. Like Sakros before him, he placed his hand on her head to keep her from looking up at him until he had lowered himself before her.
“Don’t,” Nona said, trying unsuccessfully to squirm out from under his hand. “Don’t forgive me. It wasn’t…Whatever you’re thinking, it wasn’t like that.”
“Nona—”
“He didn’t have to die,” she insisted. “He couldn’t even fight back at the end. I could have just run.”
“And let him live,” said Kruin, nodding once. “Live…to take his vengeance. Because you think he would come for you, don’t you? As I was sure he would come for me. He had to die, Nona. Never doubt it. He had to die.” He took her hand and looked at Vru’s teeth for a while in silence, then folded her fingers over them and made her clasp them firmly. “Keep them. Wear them with honor. If not as the trophy you have well-earned, then as a warning to others, who may be tempted to follow the old ways in a land whose lord has finally and forever forsaken them.”
Kruin’s hand stroked once over her hair and then he turned to look at Lura. After a long moment, he sighed. “I remember you, how you came to me. That young bitch shivering under my stare…I took her in and made her highest, because she was pretty. She was pretty, so I let her be cruel. She was pretty, so I let her be lazy. That sorry bitch…what potential she might have had…but I gave her no reason to achieve it and so it is lost. And see what has become of her.”
Lura, still hiding in her arms, began to cry.
“I will own a part of your making,” said Kruin, “and your unmaking, yes, I will own that also. I did badly by you when I set you at my side and w
orse when I sent you to the Fringes…but I will own no part of what you have done this day. I will not defend you now against the consequence of your actions. If you are a bitch of High Pack, if you are a lycan at all, then stand and face her who you have wronged.”
Lura cried harder and curled up smaller.
“So be it,” said Kruin. “Nona, the right of vengeance is yours. What would you have me do?”
Oh God.
“What are my options?” Nona asked warily, because she hadn’t yet seen a lycan tribunal, but she’d seen a lot of bad sci-fi movies and if this ‘right of vengeance’ included a fight to the death, she was ready to forgive and forget. Nona had done enough killing for one day. As for what else it could mean—ritual scarring or exile or even name-calling—without having done any of that at all, she’d already done enough. She wanted nothing except to get out of these clothes, wash off the blood, and go to bed.
But all Kruin said was, “Speak.”
“What does that mean?” Nona pressed. “Does that mean anything? I can ask for anything?”
Lura wailed.
“Speak,” Kruin said again, unflinching.
She considered it. As the seconds drew out and tightened into minutes, Nakaroth put an arm around her. She leaned into him again without realizing it, deep in thought.
“Okay,” she said at last. “Then here’s what I want you to do. Nothing.”
Growls of disapproval rumbled through the clearing.
Nakaroth put his mouth close to her ear. “This was an act of willful treachery, my mate. You cannot simply forgive it.”
“Forgiveness is the last thing I’m feeling right now.” She shrugged him off and got up, advancing on Lura under Kruin’s watchful stare. “But I can put it behind me. Because you had no choice, right? It was him or starve, that’s what you said. That’s what you want me to believe. Fine. I believe it. I believe he made you believe it, anyway. So here’s the deal, Lura. I can move past what happened today, but tomorrow, things are going to change. Tomorrow, you’re going to learn to hunt.”
If Nona had pulled a knife and threatened to cut the last seven words into Lura’s skin, Lura could not have reacted with more horror. “I can’t!”
“You’re going to ask Madira to help you make a slingshot and teach you how to use it.”
“She never will!”
“Then I will!” Nona snapped without even passing the question on to Madira. “And you can say whatever the hell you want about how I can’t hit anything yet, but you’re going to be saying it right out there with me, every morning and every night until you can use the damn slingshot! If we end up friends, fine. Unlikely, but fine. I really don’t care what you think about me. What you don’t get to think is, ‘It was him or starve.’ Never again! From now on, no excuses! Whatever you do, you did it because you wanted to!”
She stopped there, a little too late, and took a cooling breath. “But if we end up friends, that’s fine,” she said, calm again or at least able to say it in a normal speaking voice and without clenched fists. She offered her hand.
Lura stared at it, then over at Kruin, her frost-blue eyes wide and shiny with unshed tears. Nona looked that way as well, belatedly showing a little throat as she waited for his final judgement.
It was a long time coming, but in the end, he lifted his chin in a lycan nod and said, “I am content,” in a deeply troubled tone.
Nona offered her hand again, bracing herself to accept a lick if one was coming and one probably was. The pack was watching. A certain amount of show was necessary if she wanted to put this day completely behind her, and right at this moment, there was nothing in the world Nona wanted more than that. Except maybe a hot shower and clean clothes fresh from the dryer, some strong coffee and food she didn’t have to kill…and Nakaroth’s arms around her.
“You are content,” said Lura, bringing Nona roughly back to the moment. Ignoring Nona’s outstretched hand, she rose and took a step toward Kruin, her voice rising to a whine. “You are content to see me made low under this…this human? To see me lick up her pity and…and make a fool of myself throwing stones at shrillits when I was your mate once! Your highest! And what did I do that was so wrong? I fed her to him, did you say? How shall that be wrong when you did it to me?” she finished in a shout. “You fed me to that pack of dogs while you played mate-games with a human!”
Kruin did not deny it. The wind sent a silvery ripple through his fur. He remained silent.
“Now this one.” Lura sent a sullen, hateful glare over her shoulder at Nona. “She beats me, she scolds me, she humiliates me! And yet you are content. Are you mounting this one too? Is that why you indulge this…this…”
“Man-bitch,” suggested Nona while Lura sputtered through the limited lycan vocabulary for an insult. “Prey-piss. Milk-mouthed, shivering fawn.” She glanced at her hand and let her new trophies spill out onto the stone beside her—a happy tapping little sound. “Toothless. I don’t care what you call me. I’ve been called worse. In fact, I think I can honestly say I’ve been called things you can’t even imagine. The days when a little name-calling could make me mad are long gone, Lura. You think if I don’t like you, I won’t take you hunting? Because you’re wrong,” she said, showing her teeth in something that was almost a smile. “You can hate me, if that’s what you want, but at dawn and at dusk, every goddamn day until we both get it right, we hunt.”
“I won’t!”
“You will,” said Kruin quietly. “You will be blooded before I hear a claim on you.”
Lura’s incredulous laughter was indistinguishable from a yipe of pain. “Is this the choice you offer me? To be devoured by wyverns or to be…to be laughed at as the oldest cub in High Pack? I won’t stay here to be humiliated! I won’t!”
She paused, but if she was waiting for a throng of people to rush over and reassure her, she was disappointed. Some of the lycan laughed at her. Ararro sneezed and kept right on sneezing, louder and louder, as Burgash escorted her to their den. Nona knew she should say something to defuse the situation before it got any worse, but funnily enough, wearing the dried flecks of Vru’s brains, blood and ball-meat had a way of interfering with the little compassion she might have otherwise been able to dredge up. All she could think of to say in this moment was, ‘Stop being such a drama-whore,’ and she had just enough sympathy and self-control not to say it, and no more.
After a few tense moments, one of the Fringe-wolves rose and beckoned.
Lura looked at him, then at Kruin, her eyes round and bright with despair. “Is this the life you would have for me?” she asked tearfully. “Exile?”
“It is your life,” said Kruin, unmoved. “You will own its making from this moment on.”
Lura stared at him, trembling, then looked back at the Fringe-wolf.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me!” Nona exploded as Lura went to him. For a moment, time looped back on itself and it was June walking away across the snowy valley to the waiting army. She would have followed, as she’d followed June that day, but Nakaroth caught her and would not be shaken off. “Let go of me!” she hissed, pulling at him. “Do something! Stop her!”
“She is as free to leave as you are,” Kruin told her, but his eyes were dark with unquiet thoughts as he watched Lura offer her throat for a token bite.
Nona shook her head, shook it again, then looked at Lura. “It’s not worth dying for,” she said. Her voice cracked, came back in a broken whisper. “I know it feels like it’s all you have, but your pride…is not worth dying for.”
Lura hesitated, there at the very edge of the clearing, while the Fringe-wolf stood further out on the path, half in shadow, impatient to be gone.
“Lura,” Kruin said and sighed. “Will you not stay?”
She lifted her chin, her ears lowering. “As your bitch?”
“As your own.”
Lura turned away.
The waiting Fringe-wolf took her hand, avoiding High Pack’s collective stare. Lura b
egan to cry again, but she kept walking. The sound of her tears lingered a little while after the two of them vanished into the trees and then that was gone too.
30. The First Breath of Spring
Time, uncaring Time, moved on. The Land of Tooth and Claw, driven relentlessly under by those marching feet, succumbed to snow and ice and death. And waited there.
The moon of Arcadia waxed and waned according to its season and its cycle. The many peoples of the nearby Valley would see the faces of their honored gods in the moon, and named each at its fullness to celebrate. There were great feasts and revels for the Valley, where those who called it home were still giddy with the ease of their victory over an enemy that had seemed untouchable, but the lycan of Kruin’s Land saw only the moon. A light in dark hours, perhaps, but as someone had once said, only one moon.
The turn of the year was a gradual thing, heard before it could be seen and seen before it could be felt. The sound of melting ice drummed itself into every brain until it could not even be heard any more. The dead tips of branches budded. Blades of grass stabbed up through melted holes in stale snow. Furs began to be shifted from atop sleepers to beneath. Small game emerged from hibernation and birds unseen since the autumn began to return. The love-calls of tree-horn reverberated through the daylit air and the screams of mateless wyverns split the night. Life wakened. The land of the lycan renewed itself. And High Pack ruled over all.
In the first greening of the spring, one young huntress stepped out of the Wyvern’s Wood and stopped at the borders of the Ashen Stretch. Alone at the edge of a steep hillside, she looked out over the treeless slope of some ancient and unremembered eruption to the dark foothills of the Dragon’s Domain.
Nona in the springtime was as far removed from the Nona of winter as the Nona of winter had been from the Nona of Earth. Her hair had grown longer and winter’s sun had bleached its dull brown color to a dark honey hue. She hadn’t quite mastered the art of comb-making yet, but she was able to keep it under control most days, if the wind wasn’t too bad. Her body had filled back out, become toned and strong; her skin glowed with radiant health. Nakaroth often said she was beautiful—his golden huntress, his glorious one, his trophy—and although she rolled her eyes and sighed at him, sometimes she found herself looking into the rippling water of the pond, trying to make out her reflection and see whatever it was he saw.