Requiem for the Wolf

by Tara Saunders

  The streets were empty except for the occasional swift-turned shoulder or fluttering headscarf. The only person nearby was a girl-child, about ten years, carrying a well-filled basket and holding a small boy's hand. They scuttled past Breag without meeting his eye, the youngster chattering to his sister without a wasted breath.

  "I'm glad it's market week, aren't you, Dara? Do you think Mam will let us go today?"

  The girl murmured something Breag didn't hear.

  "Did I tell you what I'm going to do with the copper Uncle Ardal gave me? I'm going to buy myself a goat. I'm going to call it Whitey, or else Brownie if I get a brown one."

  "We best get home, Gerud. Mam'll worry if we take too long, and you know what she's like when she's worried." Dara managed to squeeze a handful of words past the chatter. The pair ducked into an alley, behind a rope that curved under a dripping weight of shifts and shirts, and through a half opened door.

  Breag stopped, feet planted wide. Market week; that explained why the streets were empty. Maybe the Lady did still smile on him. Market would give him a chance to watch and listen, to take the measure of a town. He tried to guess where its field might be.

  Although the main street bent in every direction but true, it was short enough that he could see along its entire length. The meat of Dealgan spread east and west, along twists and turns he wasn’t stupid enough to try without a guide. Nothing in any direction looked like a market field.

  Breag would have to make himself pleasant to the townsfolk.

  First to pass along the road was a farmer dragging a handcart mounded high with turnips. Too many for the old man to pull comfortably, and Breag caught him just as he lowered the padded handles to catch a breath.

  "Can you direct me to market?" Breag tried a harmless smile, but it didn't sit well on the bones of his face.

  The farmer shuffled backwards until his shoulders connected with the solid boards of the cart, his grizzled hair swinging forward to hide his face. A girl Breag hadn’t noticed, looking enough like the farmer that she had to be his daughter, straightened on the cart’s other side. The pair’s sour expressions matched in every particular.

  "Is it close?" Breag tried again, his words dropping into the silence without a ripple.

  "Milis has a fine market." The girl moved around the cart to stand by her father. "Three days walking will take you there."

  "I need the market here." Breag planted himself in their path. “Can you direct me?”

  "We can’t help you." The old farmer spoke finally, bending again to the cart’s handles, his body turned away from Breag.

  "My thanks." Breag’s words followed them as they scuttled into the distance out of town.

  A boy in baker’s whites watched them too, from an open doorway opposite. The bands at his sleeves marked him apprentice.

  “You, boy.” Breag crossed towards him, pitching authority into his voice. This time the fit was better. “Can you point me towards market?” He allowed the glitter of coin to show through loosely curled fingers.

  The boy ignored the coin and fixed wide brown eyes on Breag’s face. “Have you travelled far?”

  Such clumsy probing should have amused Breag. Instead it made him tired.

  “Just from Treal, son. No further North than that.” Not this time.

  “Is it wild there, like in the stories? Are there blue-wing nathair killing whole towns with their poison breath, and bean gruaige stealing babies in the night?” The boy’s voice dropped. “Have you ever seen a Lupe?”

  A Lupe. That hate-filled term for the Daoine stuck in Breag’s craw. Nothing he could do about it, now or ever.

  “It’s never like the stories tell it, boy. Now, can you point me to the market?”

  The apprentice nodded, and glanced around to see if anybody had marked his conversation with the stranger. “Take the last turn on your left,” he pointed southwards, out of town. “Follow it until it bends back on itself, then take the next fork left. Ten minutes’ walking will see you there.”

  “My thanks.” Breag pushed the coin into the boy’s hand and followed his directions, feeling eyes hot on his back as he walked.

  * * *

  The market lay exactly where the boy had said – south of the town and to the east. Breag had expected it to be as chaotic as Dealgan herself, but it was laid out traditionally, in the Wheel of the Year. Pens and wagons radiated in clean lines from a central hub, where the Harvest-fire burned.

  Men and women swarmed along its spokes like ants on sugar-beet, hiving most thickly around the bonfire at the centre of the field. The hum of excitement in the air soaked through Breag and settled in his bones.

  Although the sun shone, a night’s heavy rain had left its mark. Muck pulled at his boots, forcing him to concentrate on every step, and the awnings sagged fat-bellied with collected water. His ears cringed under the bellow of oxen, the nasal rattle of goats and the shrill of haggling farmwives. Fried chicken, baked applecake, animal dung and the stink of unwashed bodies filled his nostrils with confusion. Everywhere men and women laughed and argued and shopped and ate.

  Any of these might be Lost: pedlar, farmwife, the child giggling over a mug of spiced apple. What better place to hide than in plain sight?

  Breag's chest tightened under the press of so many people. A lifetime on the road – eight long years – taught a man to watch his back. He could feel people behind him, darting at the edge of his vision. The muscles in his neck and shoulders tightened with the promise of a headache to come.

  He needed the Lost One to be here. He hungered to catch a glimpse of the corpse-face and reddened eyes of a Bliss addict. To hunt it, and find its den, and to end it. Breag flexed the fingers of his knife hand and moved into the thickest part of the crowd.

  Here at the market wheel’s centre the Harvest fire roared. Burnished piglet turned on spits in half a dozen places, and near-grown boys roasted chestnuts and potatoes in barrels of Harvest ashes. An old woman, face as wrinkled as a springtime apple, tossed chicken pieces in spiced flour and fried them in a cauldron of spitting oil. Here was the heart of noise and movement and chaos.

  And a rumble, so low that it seemed more vibration than sound. Breag turned, sweat prickling under his arms and along the ridge of his back.

  Through the crowds, on the other side of the fire, he could see a wagon piled high with furs: rabbit and beaver, badger and winter fox, great bear and spotted lynx. A man in hunter’s leathers stood by it, body loose-limbed and lanky, face open and crinkled with laughter.

  Standing by him, shoulders high as his waist and broad as his own, a black-pelted gadhar rumbled a warning, her eyes narrowed and fixed on Breag. Muscle bunched at her hindquarters and along her rounded muzzle her lips peeled back from a too-wide mouth packed with blades.

  Step by careful step he backed away, not stopping until his back slammed into something hard. The scent of herbs, tangled with an old man’s complaining whine, told him his back had found one of the stalls that shaped the wheel’s hub.

  The gadhar kept her eyes fixed on him and her teeth stripped. Behind her, a pile of furs below the wagon stirred and parted. Two small black heads poked from between the pelts, noses raised to taste the air. A third followed, not the black of its dam this time but a brindled mix of chocolate, tan and gold.

  Cubs. Definitely time for Breag to be gone.

  Gadhar had a shape somewhere between cat and bear, but smarter than either and with a hatred of Daoine born into them. Breag had been cornered by three wild ones in a blind valley once, deep in the Corcra Mountains. He had been lucky to survive, savaged but living. Now was not the time to try his arm against a dam with cubs.

  “Not seen one before, is that it?” The voice came with a hand on Breag’s shoulder and a bitter whorl of bergamot in his nostrils.

  Instinct brought him around, knife-hilt in hand.

  “It’s a baneling, that’s what the old-timers called them. They can sniff out a Lupe quick as you like, though they’re h
ard to manage if you don’t have the knack of them.”

  The old man had no more than seven blades of hair plastered crossways on a flat head. His hand clamped firm on Breag’s shoulder, tightening against any attempt to move away.

  Breag turned his head, checking to be sure that the gadhar and its cubs stayed on the other side of the fire.

  “I know what you’re thinking. ‘tisn’t decent to allow that abomination to live.” The old man spat towards the hunter’s wagon. “It wouldn’t have happened in my day, that I can tell you.”

  The brindle cub, he meant. The gadhar’s growl, which had been gentling, rumbled louder.

  “I was surprised to see it.”

  Breag had tangled paths with a brindle once before, in that blind valley in the Corcra mountains. It led the attack against him, more intelligent and more hate-filled than the others, and came within a breath of ripping out his throat. He hadn’t expected to find one in the Tiarna, where every boy heard the story of Murchu and the Bean Sidhe at his Granda’s knee.

  “People complained about it, is what I heard. That hunter there said if the Black Hunt comes for his cub he’ll take the pelts off every damned one of them, and he’ll have the time of his life doing it.” The old man spat again. “But can’t blame folks for wanting to stay on his sweet side with what’s been going on.”

  Breag turned to face the old man. “What could be bad enough to make people hush up about the cub?”

  The herb-seller lowered his voice to a whisper. “It was bad as it could be, so I hear. Cattle all chewed to bits and a lad ripped to flinders on his way home from his sweetheart’s one evening.” His whisper dropped lower, so that Breag had to strain to hear him over the market’s noise. “Lupes is what they’re saying. Not a wonder they keep that baneling close.”

  Worse than Fallen, then. This Lost One was warg, deep in madness and dangerous to everyone. Breag needed to find it fast, because if a whisper of this found its way into the Brotherhood’s ears they would all pay the price in blood.

  “Appreciate the warning. Maybe it’s time I put this town at my back.” And maybe the herb-seller would pick up on the hint. One less body to work around.

  The old man spoke in normal tones again. “What you need, young man, is this.” He fumbled in his wagon a moment and turned back with a double fistful of mistletoe. “Guaranteed to keep your person and property free from Lupes. They can’t come within fifty yards of it, the bastards.”

  Breag declined, politely.

  “Garlic, then. Does the same job, just harder on the nose.”

  In the end, Breag spent a begrudged silver on a sprig of mistletoe heavy with berries, along with a copper pin to fix it to his shoulder. Protective colouring, same as any animal, especially when he noted how many of the men and women who passed wore sprigs just like it. The herb-seller must be worth a Slaidh mint.

  Time to put an end to this quickly and quietly, although it scorched Breag’s chances of finding one of its kin to take back for judgement.

  Maybe the next one would allow him to keep his promise.

  * * *

  The nearest spoke of the market wheel was home to coopers and tanners, tinkers and metal-workers; their labour scorched Breag’s nose hairs with heated tin and molten iron.

  At booths and wagons on either side, townsfolk stopped to buy or simply to see. On his left, a well-fed farmwife examined a shiny fire-grate with capable hands; on his right, a small boy clutching a sweaty copper swooned in front of twin ranks of bright-painted tin soldiers. Ahead, a tall young man in military blues haggled over a belt buckle shaped into the head of a ten-point buck.

  Awkward in the morning and plain dangerous in a fight.

  Just like the length of blue-dyed leather that held the soldier’s hair out of his face. The fashion had become more common the further south Breag travelled. But it wasn’t Breag’s place to tell the military their business. He shook his own thick black braid and moved on.

  More lookers than buyers here. When the Brotherhood and their new-minted army had swept the Tiarna clean of Daoine, that cleansing had somehow redistributed horses out of common hands and into pockets that held more golds than coppers. Ordinary people used oxen or, more often, their own backs. A smith in a town like this one, so far from the King’s Road, would be lucky to shoe a horse once in his lifetime.

  They lost their riding beasts. My people lost everything.

  Breag stopped where a red and yellow-painted wagon, hung with pots and saucepans, sat alongside a more sombre handcart selling scythes and hoes. Likely both stalls were owned by the same man; a travelling tin pedlar often chose to swap his bright motley for a more serious face when he dealt in ironwork. Appearances mattered in the Tiarna.

  Each stall stood just far enough from the other that a man could slip through to find more useful company on another spoke of the wheel. With luck, the next from this might trade in flour and apples, and in gossip.

  A croak from the wagon-top announced the rattle of dusty wings, and a raven flapped its way lazily into the sky. It skimmed along the line of wagons in the direction of the Harvest fire.

  A good omen. Maybe.

  The ground between the wagons showed a boot or two's imprint to tell Breag that he wasn't first to step through. Three paces took him past the tinker's cart and into the space between it and the wagon behind.

  Tightly knotted against the opposite wagon, four men stood frozen in the moment before violence. Three soldiers ringed a single grey-uniformed guard, pinning him so close against the wagon's wall that Breag caught no more than the occasional flash of copper-coloured hair.

  Flanked by two taller soldiers, a squat boulder in military blue spoke to the guard in staccato bursts too low to overhear. The rigidity of his back and the arms fisted stiff by his sides told their own story.

  Breag halted by the wagon's shoulder, unwilling to take even the smallest part in the scene. Guard and military were uneasy bedfellows at their best, and only a born fool got himself tangled between them. Better to face the gadhar.

  The soldier opposite Breag was first to realise they no longer had their corner to themselves. He shoved his elbow into Boulder's side and hissed a warning. Breag found himself pinned by four sets of unfriendly eyes. Boulder swung around from the shoulder and advanced, his brow knotted. He stood about Breag’s height but twice as broad, and the tang of anger thickened the air so that Breag could almost clench it between his teeth.

  "What's this?" An authoritative voice shattered the tableau.

  A fifth man stepped into the space between the wagons, his grey guard’s uniform worn with a careless ease that hinted at long years between its seams. Breag slipped back into the wagon's shadow.

  "Is there some difficulty?" Iron-coloured eyebrows raised.

  "Just some words a long time due." Boulder's swagger shifted towards the newcomer.

  "That's good. Always best to clear the air." The older guard stepped sideways, a wave of his hand directing the others back towards the market.

  One by one the soldiers filed by him, none meeting his eyes except for Boulder, who flashed him a look that boiled with promise.

  The younger guard, Breag could see now, was striking. Perfectly arched brows topped long-lashed eyes of a soft, moss green. Sharp cheekbones gave his face definition and sculpted lips curved a mouth that any girl would envy.

  Perfection was ruined by the twisted scar that began above his hairline and curved to the corner of his left eye, bisecting his cheek and pulling the left side of his mouth into a permanent, humourless smile.

  He noticed Breag watching and turned away with the flick of a neat, flame-coloured braid. He murmured a word as he passed the older guard and was gone.

  “Come for market, did you, laddie? I don’t believe I know your face.” The older guard shifted his feet slightly. His pale blue eyes flicked to the mistletoe sprig and back to Breag’s face.

  "Just passing through. I’m travelling towards Milis. Hoped to pick up a day
or two’s work on my way." Breag held himself motionless under the older man's scrutiny.

  After a long minute the guard nodded. "You're welcome here. Name's Tarbhal, and I know a man might need a hand."

  Breag wasn’t short of coin, but a reason to stay in town would allow him to ask questions and maybe find some answers. This was a better chance than he had expected.

  “Take your time to think about it. If you stay around here, I’ll find you.” No bones in the old man’s warning.

  Tarbhal grunted goodbye and headed towards the bonfire. He favoured his right leg, but it didn’t slow him much.

  For such a small town, Dealgan had more than its share of soldiers and guard. Conflict between the people’s Guardians and the army new-built during the Purging was a constant simmer throughout the Tiarna, but a man didn’t expect it to boil over in so public a place. Didn’t expect and didn’t welcome, not with power balanced so delicately between the two.

  Breag seemed to trip over the unexpected around every corner here in Dealgan. Something he would think about after this Lost One was safely in the ground.

  The next spoke of the market wheel dealt not in food but in livestock; Breag would have guessed it if he had used his nose. A glance right and left showed him clustered knots of men, preoccupied with talk of early calving and how much the price of goats had fallen since last season.

  Here, he felt the icy tingle of Bliss. Madness, in the company of all these people. Even for a warg. Breag had thought he was hunting a Fallen addict, not a Daoine so far lost that it would stay saturated throughout the business of its daily life. The constant rush of sensation was too intense; the mind couldn’t hold together. And that was when trouble started.

  This Lost One would be easier to find than he had expected, but so much more dangerous when he did.

  Breag moved through the people of Dealgan, hand on his Fiacal Knife, guided by a tingle that filled his mouth with saliva. It drew him outwards, towards the northern edge of the market field, where the crowds were thin and only knife-sharpeners and rag-men called to the occasional passer-by.