The Black Wolves

by Kate Elliott

  With every gaze fixed on the couch, Dannarah saw her opening. She slid sideways into the servants’ passage, mercifully empty at this moment, and ran along the narrow corridor to the entry into the bedchamber she shared with her sisters. Normally an attendant worked in the spacious chamber at all times, sewing or cleaning or ready to run errands, but the emergency had torn everyone’s attention to the queen for once. At fifteen, Dannarah was allowed a single small locked chest, a privacy her younger sisters had not yet earned. Mostly she kept her schoolbooks and writing implements there, away from the disapproving gaze of her mother and the other Sirni women. In Sirniaka, noblewomen did not learn to read and write, but Papa had allowed her to be tutored alongside Atani despite Mama’s endless complaints that such masculine learning would make Dannarah unsuitable for an advantageous marriage in the empire.

  As if she wanted to get married, hauled off like a cow to be bred to some tiresome bull of a man!

  She lifted out the books, then opened the cedarwood box nestled beneath them where she stored a set of exquisitely carved ivory playing pieces. She traced the tiny bows and ribbons and filigrees as her tears dripped onto the miniature animals she and Atani had once spent so many hours playing with. With a hard sniff, she roughly wiped her cheeks with the back of a hand and was about to close the box when she spotted a black braided cord wrapped around one of the carved horses. A flush warmed her cheeks. It was one of three cords that had come loose from Kellas’s formal uniform last year when he was making an official report to the king in the King’s Audience Hall. Papa had reprimanded Kellas for sartorial laxness while Dannarah, allowed to sit with Atani when Papa heard reports from his officers, had managed to sneak her slipper over one of the cords and slide it away with no one the wiser.

  No one but Atani, of course, but he knew everything and would never tell.

  She doubled over as if she had been kicked in the gut, her head coming to rest on the rim of the chest. She couldn’t find a way to breathe. If he had been kidnapped by demons she would stalk the Hundred until she had torn his murderers to pieces and scattered their bones to the four winds.

  Calm. Find calm. Draw a lesson from those who accomplished their work to her father’s exacting standards.

  She picked up the braided cord and touched it to her cheek as if it carried the essence of Kellas in its threads. But after only a moment, grimacing, she set it aside, angry at herself for having such a stupid infatuation with a man who never even looked at her except because he served Papa.

  A full set of servant’s clothing lay folded at the bottom of the chest together with one of the special brass tokens only the palace servants were allowed to carry. She stripped out of the long embroidered jacket and belled silk trousers that were everyday wear for palace women and pulled on the light servant’s garments: baggy cotton trousers and a knee-length muslin shift over which she bound a vest fitted for a woman that she was just beginning to fill out. She wrapped her hair under a scarf and kept its ends loose over her shoulders in case she needed to conceal her face.

  She picked up a hand mirror from a side table to look at herself, but a glance was enough to make her hastily set the mirror back down. At the last minute she looped the black cord onto her belt, like a woman might who was carrying a memento of her lover. She could pretend just for now, couldn’t she?

  After layering everything else back into the chest she locked it and hurried out the servants’ passage past the indoor kitchen, the outdoor kitchen, the weaving house, and the grain storage. Here she grabbed a basket from an unattended shed and stuffed it full of random items. Because she was dressed as a servant and few men ever saw the faces of the palace women, she had no trouble flashing the token and walking out the palace servants’ gate as if she were a commonplace girl about a commonplace delivery. Servant women could walk about as they wished. Down in the city women went about just like men. No one remarked on it at all. That was the custom of the Hundred.

  Everything was different in the palace because the women had to abide by Sirni tradition even though they all actually lived in the Hundred, not in the empire.

  After her father had saved the land known as the Hundred from the terrible demon war that had almost destroyed it, he had established his palace and thus his base of power atop the famously unclimbable Law Rock. Bounded by cliffs on all sides, Law Rock was a rocky promontory at the confluence of two rivers. Its flat plateau had long housed the city of Toskala’s Assizes Tower, council house, emergency grain warehouses, the actual rock stele on which the old laws of the Hundred were carved, and a reeve hall from which a chief marshal administered the six reeve halls spread throughout the land.

  The sun shone hot on the wide, dusty plaza at the center of all the buildings. Striding across the open space with the wind in her face and the sun in her eyes made her spirit swell. The air smelled better out here, fresh and new instead of dense with spicy fragrances that got into her nose and made her sneeze.

  In the distance, toward what everyone called the “prow” of the promontory, workmen were laying in stone patios and walkways in preparation for erecting a formal Beltak shrine, Papa’s gift to placate Mama. Over toward the broader “stern” end, near the gate to the Thousand Steps, a company of one hundred Black Wolves drilled, but she didn’t dare pause to watch for fear of drawing attention to herself. It wasn’t that she wanted to be a soldier, but every morning she woke up with a yearning. Why was it too much to ask that she be allowed the same choices Atani had? He trained, and in private showed her the drills he’d learned. How she hated living her life secondhand!

  As she approached the huge double gates to the reeve hall she gripped the basket more tightly against her hip. Her breathing came faster, and she bit her lower lip. She had sneaked out of the palace numerous times with Atani but never alone. Everything was easier with him because he knew how to smooth things over with people, how to guess their intentions and nudge them along the path he wanted them to go. Even Papa underestimated Atani’s skills because he was so quiet and thoughtful. A boastful, arrogant brother would have been unendurable on top of everything else.

  “Verea?” A guard at the reeve hall gate gestured to her, asking a question in the lift of his fingers.

  She smiled—that was simple!—and showed the token and the basket.

  “Delivery,” she said in the language people spoke in the Hundred, which she had insisted on learning even though Mama could still only speak Sirni after sixteen years living in the Hundred.

  The guard chuckled as at a shared joke. “Pass through, verea.”

  Victorious! She sauntered under the massive wooden lintel with its carved eagles and immediately cut right to a little passage she and Atani had discovered the second time they had sneaked into the reeve hall pretending to be servants. She ditched the basket in a closet and climbed a dusty ladder to a niche in the wall where she could crouch and look over the reeve hall’s parade ground.

  Several eagles circled high overhead. At least four reeves flew sentry duty at all times during the day. They soared so effortlessly, the way she wished she could, if only she had wings.

  Fortune was with her. Just as she settled more comfortably onto her haunches, prepared for a wait, one of the giant eagles descended for a landing. The speed with which the raptor dove caused the hairs on the back of her neck to stand on end with excitement. At the last possible instant it spread its wings to brake and thumped down on a huge perch.

  Its reeve—a woman!—dangled below the eagle’s body in a harness that wrapped hips, torso, and shoulders. The reeve unhooked and dropped to the ground with practiced confidence. Fawkners—the brave people who helped care for the huge eagles—approached with whistles and signals from their batons, so the eagle wouldn’t be surprised and strike.

  The reeve had a pouch of dispatches buckled on her harness, bumping against her back beside a quiver packed with signal flags and reeve’s baton, and she hooded the eagle and traded words with the head fawkner before hur
rying off to make her delivery to the hall marshal.

  “They are impressive creatures,” said her father in a low voice, settling cross-legged beside her where Atani usually sat.

  She jerked so hard he grabbed her arm reflexively, then let go.

  He went on. “But I believe the fawkners are the bravest of all. Reeves have a bond with their eagles—”

  “They are jessed to them,” she said eagerly. “That’s what they call it.”

  “I have seen enough of eagles and reeves to believe it is true some kind of intangible thread binds the one to the other. Fawkners have no such jess. They do the work even knowing an eagle might turn against them. It’s dangerous, as anyone can see by the scars most fawkners bear.”

  “Eagles never kill their reeves,” she added, forgetting her surprise over her father’s presence as she leaned forward to get a better look while a big door was shoved open in one of the tall buildings called lofts.

  Was there a hooded eagle at rest inside?

  “Sometimes eagles do kill their reeves, but it’s rare. Could you risk that, Dannarah?”

  “I want wings,” she breathed. “Can you make me a reeve, Papa?”

  When he did not reply she glanced at him. The way he wrinkled his brow made him look pensive, and that surprised her enough that she shifted, and accidentally bumped his knee with hers, and he shook himself.

  “Alas, no, little eaglet. Some things even the king cannot command. If an eagle jesses you, you will be a reeve. If one does not, then nothing I do can change that.”

  She sighed with a great heave of her shoulders. “How did you find me here?”

  He copied her sigh, and that made her smile just a little, and only when he saw the smile did he go on. “Dannarah, do you think I don’t know everything that goes on in the Hundred? What do you think my Wolves are for? I know about all the mischief you and Atani get up to.”

  “You didn’t know about the secret way Atani and I made into the roof of the women’s wing.”

  “That I did not, and I wish I had. I’ll have to be more alert.”

  “Did I outwit you, Papa?”

  His rare smile flashed. “That you did, little eaglet. Now I think we need to get back before your mother thinks you have also gone missing. She has enough to weep over.”

  “She doesn’t care about me!”

  “You are quite wrong about that, Dannarah. It’s just you are so different from her that she struggles to understand you.”

  “How am I different? I’m like you, Papa!”

  “Yes, you are.”

  He did not move to leave, though, instead watching the fawkners’ careful examination of the eagle’s feathers as they shucked the raptor out of its harness. So she did not move, either, savoring the unusual opportunity to sit with him alone, to be the sole center of his attention. He could bide in perfect silence, thinking about what she could not imagine, although right now by the frown that kept tugging down his lips she supposed he was thinking of Atani.

  In a low voice she said, “Maybe it would have been less cruel to refuse me all these things you’ve given me, Papa.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you had agreed to Mama’s strictures in all their measure then I wouldn’t dream of things I can’t have. Like you taking Atani on a circuit of the Hundred next season while I, as always, will be left behind and stuck here. I mean—”

  Suddenly she realized what an awful thing she had said. A miasma of dread seized her. She tried to swallow but it was like choking down rocks.

  “I mean … Atani … if Atani isn’t…”

  Dead.

  Instead of replying his eyes narrowed with a look that always indicated his displeasure. He reached out and between two fingers caught the braided cord, tugged on it just hard enough to note how it was looped to her belt, and finally raised his eyes to meet hers.

  She flushed, a blaze of heat in her cheeks.

  He released the cord. “I’ve already let your mother know, and now I’ll tell you. I’ve sent Captain Kellas to track down Atani.”

  She clapped both hands to her chest. “Captain Kellas will find him!”

  His eyes were still narrowed. “If anyone can, he can, yes.”

  “Do you think he’ll find Atani?”

  He shrugged one shoulder. “Let us never tempt fortune by claiming we know what the future holds. But I think it likely.”

  She covered her face with her hands so he wouldn’t see her tears, and he allowed her the silence to compose herself. But when at length she lowered her hands and sniffed, he did not wipe away the tears as Mama would have done. He considered her gravely.

  “Dannarah, never forget that a king wields many weapons, and some of them are men. The soldiers I command are sometimes kinsmen but most, however valuable, are expendable in the service of victory. Do not deploy them lightly, or incompetently. Do not waste them, because the best ones take far more time to train than they do to die. But never mistake them for something they are not. Do you understand me?”

  She stared at her hands and wondered how red her face was and if he was going to take the braided cord away and embarrass her even more.

  Instead he coughed slightly, as at a change of subject.

  “As for riding a circuit of the Hundred, yes, I think after all I will take you and Atani together. How would you like that?”

  “Papa!” She grabbed his hands and surprised another smile from him, then hated herself for being happy at such a time.

  “When Atani returns,” he added.

  Even her brave father would not say the word they all feared.

  If Atani returns.

  If.

  5

  Even traveling at speed, carrying an official pass that allowed him to trade off for a new mount whenever he needed one, it took Kellas twenty days to ride south to the province of Mar. None of the way stations or village inns along the route revealed any trace of the prince and his guardsmen, but he collected stories of a solitary foreign traveler with a taciturn disposition and plenty of coin who might be Lady Irlin’s agent. Kellas was running seven, then six, then five days behind the man.

  Upon arriving in the port town of Salya, Kellas scouted the many inns along the waterfront. He wanted the agent to get wind someone was asking after him; it might flush him out or impel him to act precipitously and thus clumsily. By the time he had worked his way up and then down the main street, called Drunk’s Lane in honor of the sailors who frequented the town, he had identified and dismissed several suspects. Finally he settled on the spacious veranda of an inn overlooking the scenic harbor, considering his next move.

  The view over the Bay of Messalia had such a calming beauty that it distracted him when he ought to have been most alert. The wide waters shone with the vivid blue-green facets of a molten jewel. Scraps of clouds hung like tantalizing wisps on the horizon where they piled up over the outer islands, too far away to see with the naked eye. He had run his first assignment as a silent wolf here, eight years ago. Together with his senior comrade Esisha, he had paddled and swum across this bay to an island, unseen from here, where lay the reeve compound known as Bronze Hall. Then, after he had stolen a dispatch pouch and Esisha had murdered the marshal of Bronze Hall, they had swum and paddled back. Afterward on this very street he had noticed a woman…

  As if thoughts could summon substance—or as if his mind had registered her presence and caused his memory to alert him—she appeared.

  She wove confidently through the bustling crowds of people moving up and down the main thoroughfare that ran from the harbor up into the higher hill terraces of the town. Because she was an outlander her features stood out, but it was her striking beauty—the astonishing symmetry of her features, the perfect bow of her eyebrows and lustrous darkness of her eyelashes, the slim pillar of her neck—that fixed the eye.

  A passing string of pack mules cut her off from his view.

  Setting down his barely touched mug of ale, he passed a c
oin to the server, pulled a faded laborer’s cap low over his head, and descended steps from the veranda onto the street. King Anjihosh had given the mysterious woman no name; he had refused to give any details at all, only that he was certain Atani would by one means or another end up at her household, called Plum Blossom Clan.

  Until this unexpected glimpse of her Kellas had not fully put together the obvious fact that the woman he had glancingly met eight years ago was the same woman the king and his mother had been talking about, the finest and most valuable treasure Anjihosh had ever possessed if his claim was not merely an exaggeration meant to annoy Lady Irlin.

  When he considered his relationship with his own demanding mother, Kellas felt a fair bit of sympathy for the king. He’d been scalded by his mother’s blunt assessments of his failures more than once. No wonder he’d developed a habit of reckless risk taking.

  The treasure had been in the center of the street, headed uphill, and because she was walking with four companions who included two children they weren’t moving fast. Falling neatly in behind a man pulling a cart loaded with bolts of cloth, he got a better look at her from behind. Her thick black hair curled like a shell onto the back of her head, adorned with a cleverly woven five-petaled wheel of plum-colored ribbons. She wore the typical dress of Hundred women, called a taloos, a length of cloth wrapped with cunning twists and folds around a body to best emphasize the curves of the female form, or so he always thought. Certainly her hips twitched side-to-side in a pleasing way as she climbed the steepening avenue. The spectacular quality of the weave and its rich emerald-green hue suggested a woman who had the taste and coin to dress herself in expensive silk even for an everyday expedition to the market. Given the net bags filled with fruit and vegetables she and her companions carried, they had just been buying food for the day’s supper. With her walked a taller woman midway through pregnancy, and a boy and a girl each about eight years of age. The boy had curly black hair and an eagle’s nose; except for the laughing smile on his brightly cheerful face he looked a lot like Dannarah. The group was so cursedly vulnerable, walking along without the least idea someone was stalking them. Lady Irlin’s agent could leap out from the middle of the crowd and easily stab the boy.