The Black Wolves

by Kate Elliott

  How badly she wanted what these people had: a sense of comfort within a loving group. Many times she had begged to be allowed to meet her brother Aram, but always her uncle refused.

  Her face faded from the mirror’s surface. In its place she saw like half-worn shadows a young Ri Amarah man seated in a courtyard with a laughing young Ri Amarah woman beside him. She had a baby on her knee while he was swinging a child around by the hands. He set down the child and touched the cloth that covered his hair. The woman spoke a question as he frowned with disquiet and, hand still on his head wrap, glanced around as if he felt he was being watched.

  The same moon shone on them as on Sarai.

  Stunned by this vision, she dropped the mirror and would have lost it to the river if she hadn’t secured it with an extra cord to her belt. With a tug she fished it up and raised it, although her hand shook. Yet all she saw now was only her dull reflection.

  One of the sailors laughed, and replied to an ongoing conversation that had nothing to do with her. In haste she tucked away the mirror.

  A mule kicked, hoof impacting wood, and a man soothed, “Here now, here now, Steadfast.”

  “I’m hungry, Mother,” whined a child.

  A woman of an age to be Sarai’s mother joined her at the railing. Her eyes were hollows filled with grief, and like Sarai her gaze remained fixed on what they had left behind. But she spoke in a kind way. “Greetings of the night, verea. What do you know of where they are taking us?”

  “To Nessumara,” said Sarai. “Thence by ship to Salya.”

  “What is in Salya besides a mysterious commander and whispers of revolt against the king?”

  “You know as much as I do. How are you come into this, if I may ask?”

  “My son is dead and laid on a Sorrowing Tower that we built in the forest. My daughter we have left behind now, too, for she has an eagle and thus she is valuable. Maybe more than we ever understood. Not that it matters. She came to us because the gods brought her to our hearts.”

  “That reeve was your daughter? But you’re all Hundred-born people and she…” Sarai bit off the words and hung her head, thinking of how her mother’s people had never counted her as fully theirs. “My apologies, verea. I spoke without thinking. May your gods bring you peace in all things. May your daughter remain well. I am sorry to hear about your son.”

  “My thanks for your kindness, verea. You are also bound for Salya, into the service of the Black Wolves?”

  Sarai did not answer, nor did the woman press her further. For a long while they two stood companionably watching the boat leave a tail of consequence in the opaque waters. Every action leaves its wake. Even the slightest of people makes a whisper within the world, if only you pause to listen for a soft breath on your cheek.

  When she touched the mirror hanging at her belt, when her fingers brushed her belly and her lips tingled with the memory of Elit’s last kiss, when she recalled Tsania’s final words to her, she understood at last that she had been running away to the wrong place all along.

  She knew where she had to go.

  52

  The contours of the land seen from on high tell a different story from what folk see who travel along the ground. Plum Blossom Clan had built a loft for eagles in a clearing that lay at the end of their narrow dead-end street. Since there was also a small loft down at the assizes hall in Salya town proper, according to the normal custom, it was an odd quirk to have one here, too.

  But the clearing with its loft wasn’t what Dannarah took note of as she circled.

  Plum Blossom Clan was the third compound from the end of the street. Two walled compounds lay between Kellas’s household and the hillside clearing. From the ground, on the street, every large compound in Salya looked the same, with long entrance verandas used for entertaining and gates for deliveries. From above she saw what the outer walls hid.

  The connections weren’t as obvious as paths running up to one wall and resuming on the other side. Clearly whoever had landscaped the three compounds in recent years had considered that unfriendly reeves might fly over. Yet a suspicious reeve looking closely could identify interior gates and disguised walkways linking the three compounds.

  In Plum Blossom Compound a woman and a child worked in the garden while dogs lolled in the shade. In the compound next door a gracious house covered half the area, with four courtyards tucked into pockets and a flower-and-herb garden ringed by mulberry trees. In one courtyard a man sat on a bench in the sun. He had no right arm below the elbow, no left hand, and wore a patch over his right eye. Two small children sat on the tile at his feet, playing a game with counters on a circular board. At once she recognized the playing pieces’ zigzagging path: She and Atani had loved the game of Circles when they were that age, but these days people rarely played it.

  A woman with silver-white hair stepped down off the porch, apparently calling to the man because he turned his head in the way of people who cannot see well, orienting himself to the direction of her voice. Then the woman glanced up, saw Terror, and vanished inside.

  Inside the third compound evergreen blue-spear trees grew right around the walls to create a towering wall of dense branches reaching above the regular wall. This compound backed up directly against the hillside clearing with the eagle loft. A small gate screened by bushes opened onto a path that wound up the steep hillside onto the clearing, separate from the wider and quite obvious path that led from the street to the clearing. The instant she identified this hidden path she realized that the night she had seen the demon it had come not from the street but from the third compound.

  Most of this compound was given over to a wide grassy space ringed by fruit trees. The only structure was a long and narrow warehouse with a wraparound porch and a stable at one end. In front of the building about fifty people drilled in formation with staffs and sticks, pacing in unison through the martial dance once observed by the ordinands of Kotaru the Thunderer before the Beltak priests had closed down Kotaru’s temples in every city and major town.

  Women and men drilled together, no distinction. Two horses grazed off in one corner, rumpled white blankets thrown over their backs.

  Terror tilted her head, catching sight of something higher up in the hills, and veered away from the compound just as Dannarah realized the horses did not have blankets.

  They had furled wings.

  Terror abruptly headed south along the low ridge of hills, but once the compound was behind them the raptor began aimlessly circling on the updrafts. Dannarah spotted nothing of interest, no plump deer, no skulking demons, nothing to explain why Terror had so suddenly flown away. Reeve lore taught that the presence of demons often stupefied eagles. She swung Terror in a wide loop over Messalia Bay and this time guided her in directly to the loft.

  Alone and suspicious, she left Terror unhooded on a perch. In dangerous situations she had a habit of rolling the leather cord that held her bone whistle through her fingers, testing its strength, and she caught herself doing it now as she walked down through the clearing toward the street. She drew her baton. Its weight in her hand always gave her confidence.

  Instead of walking all the way to Plum Blossom Clan she mounted the steps onto the veranda of the middle compound, the one with the huge multiwinged house and the children playing Circles, and rang the visitors’ bell. No one came to the door. Drifting over the wall from the neighboring compound came the sounds of feet stamping and the “hu! hah!” of collective voices.

  She rang the bell again. Its melancholy tone shivered on the air longer than seemed normal.

  The door of Plum Blossom Clan opened and Hari emerged. After a pause he left the veranda of Plum Blossom Clan and trotted over to the veranda she stood on.

  She distrusted his cheerful smile at once.

  “Marshal Dannarah, how may I help you?” he asked while he climbed up onto the veranda as if he had every right to guard the door of a house not his own.

  “That is a question, is it not? Who is th
e man in the garden?”

  His habitual smile faded.

  “No answer, ver?”

  He folded his hands and waited.

  “Is it my brother? By some demon’s magic did you revive Atani and bring him here to live broken and blind?”

  “Marshal Dannarah, I beg you, calm yourself. Atani is dead.” He extended his hands, palms up as in supplication. “He does not live hidden in a garden. He lives only in our hearts.”

  “You seem a reasonable man, ver, and yet you spout such rubbish. If he is dead he does not live in our hearts or anywhere else. If you knew him, then he must have known you although he never told me we had another brother. Someone hid you here who did not want you involved in the palace. Was it Atani? Was it my father?”

  The door slid open. A woman stepped onto the veranda. Although much older than Dannarah, she had the straight posture and vigorous aspect of a much younger woman.

  “Mother, I was going to take care of this,” said Hari with all the exasperation of a son.

  “This must be Lady Dannarah,” said the woman in a voice so kind and sympathetic that Dannarah instantly took a step back. “I am Mai. Greetings of the day to you.”

  Youth flowers with beauty because it is fresh and new, but age unveils a longer story: Mai had a face marked with age spots and wrinkles but these were inconsequential, held within the bones and clarity of a woman at peace in herself. This old woman dressed in a taloos of ecstatic sky-blue silk had been beautiful once; she was beautiful still in the way stone can be worn down by wind and rain but hold strong and never lose its core. Dannarah’s mother had not been a beauty. If a man made an arranged marriage to a bride he did not respect or love, then beauty like this might tempt him until he had to put her out of the way together with her son, who must never trouble the palace with misplaced ambition.

  Dannarah tried to imagine her father in love with this woman. Had he smiled at her, a man whose smiles came rarely? Had he felt not just sexual passion but true affection?

  “Please come in. We have tea to refresh you. A meal if you are hungry.” She had the Mar accent with its slow a’s and sharp s but also the brush of an outlander’s accent to match her outlander’s looks with her eye-folds and round face.

  “Red-nut rice, like that found in outlaw encampments?”

  “Red-nut has such a rich and complex essence, does it not? It would be our honor to serve you.”

  “Who is the crippled man in the garden?”

  Hari glanced at his mother but her smile gave away nothing, like a woman in the market who, as you pick through her wares looking for the choicest fruit, never changes expression so you can’t gain any advantage in the coming negotiation.

  “Why are you here, Marshal Dannarah?”

  “Were you my father’s lover? Did you give birth to his son?”

  “If I say I was, and I did, will you please sit? If you will forgive me for being so bold as to remark on it, you look agitated and unsteady, as if you have sustained a shock. I can have tea brought out here on the veranda, if you prefer not to enter the house.” She turned half around and gestured to someone unseen.

  “When my father discarded you, did he order Captain Kellas to marry you? Is that how he took care of you? By handing you over to one of his loyal captains?”

  Her smile did not waver, but Dannarah read pity in her gaze. “I fear you may not have known your father very well, Lady Dannarah.”

  “I knew him as well as anyone did! He raised me. He taught me. Everything I am comes from him.”

  “Yes, you saw the best in him.”

  “Is that what you are? The worst of him? Did you want something from my father that he wasn’t willing to give you?”

  Her pleasant expression did not change but a harder emotion flickered in the narrowing of her eyes. “I wanted my freedom and I took it.”

  A flutter of anger closed Dannarah’s throat. “My father never enslaved anyone!”

  “Only the Hundred.”

  “He saved the Hundred.”

  “Rescuing the Hundred from the conflicts and troubles of those days took the efforts of many working in concert. It was not the victory of one man alone.”

  “He had the vision. A wise king brings peace and order to a land. Under his steady and forceful hand, all can flourish.”

  “A peaceful land is built on law and justice, Lady Dannarah, not maintained at the point of a sword. Here is the tea. Will you sit?”

  “Now you are mocking me.”

  A woman carrying a tea tray stepped onto the veranda. By the cut and color of her silver hair she was the woman who had spotted the eagle from the courtyard. Dannarah recoiled, stunned by seeing a woman she had at one stage in her life spoken to almost every day but who was now as old as herself. After all her efforts to track down Atani’s household, they had been here all along.

  “It has been many years since we last saw each other, Dannarah,” said the woman.

  “Eiko?”

  How had Atani’s lover gotten so old? Once the three of them had laughed in the palace garden, all so young with the whole world blossoming.

  Eiko set down the tray and arranged the pot, a pretty celadon in the shape of a dragon whose mouth became its spout. Thirty years ago Dannarah had often sat down to tea poured from this exact pot into green cups glazed with stylized waves.

  “Is Queen Yevah here, too?” she demanded.

  “She is unwell today,” Eiko said in the tranquil voice she had used to protect skittish, painfully shy Yevah from the buffets and storms of the palace. Dannarah had always marveled that Atani, Eiko, and Yevah lived together in the same household for over twenty years with never a whiff of burning.

  She burned now, the memory gone to ash on her tongue. “This is where you originally come from, isn’t it, Eiko? This house. Atani found you here in Salya when he was sixteen.”

  “I am part of what he found here.” Eiko glanced at Mai—Kellas’s wife!—who watched as from a lofty height like an eagle as it scans the ground with eyes sharper than human eyes. “I was very young when we met, only sixteen, like Atani. It was calf love. But he and I never got over our infatuation, as you know. How many years did we spend together? How often did you visit us, and we would swim in the ocean, or get drunk on plum blossom wine, or recite poetry although you never really had the patience for that because you always wanted to be up and doing something.”

  Dannarah clutched her bone whistle, for if there was one thing she could count on it was the jess that bound her to Terror. “Atani came to this place when he was sixteen. He found you, and he found our half brother Hari, and he found this woman, who was once our father’s mistress. And Atani changed. Not in obvious ways but in subtle ways that most people could easily overlook. Even our father didn’t see it. Especially our father didn’t see it.” She confronted Mai with a glare. “Did you make Atani become a demon?”

  The old woman studied her, a faintly sad smile on her lips. “He was always a demon, Lady Dannarah. His demon-nature was a quiet one, hard to perceive and easy to hide. So he hid it because Anji could only see demons as threats to his power rather than as part of the land, as we each are part of the land.”

  “Demons are corrupt.”

  “Every person can become corrupt, Lady Dannarah, whether human or demon, blind-heart or demon-heart. You may be the humblest of fruit sellers in the market or the most powerful king, and still you may do harm to others or you may help them, or you may both harm and help at the same moment.”

  “I pray you, spare me your piecemeal bits of wisdom. I can only conclude you and your clan have allied with the demons who seek to overturn everything my father built and return the Hundred to chaos. Is it after all true that Captain Kellas betrayed the king and became part of the conspiracy that killed Atani?”

  “You still do not understand, Lady Dannarah. Atani was part of the conspiracy.”

  She paused to let the words sink in, then went on as if she knew Dannarah would be too stunned
to reply.

  “Atani was part of the conspiracy. Demons did not kill him. They were his allies, his comrades, and therefore the last people who would have wanted him dead.”

  Dannarah braced herself on the railing and took several breaths to steady herself.

  At length in a hoarse voice she said, “Yet he kept all his plans secret from me.”

  “You are your father’s daughter, Lady Dannarah.”

  “Proud to be so!”

  “Your loyalty was always to Anjihosh.”

  “It still is. The hells! What proof can you give me that Atani was a demon? The priests of Beltak tested him for the ghost-sight, as they did all of us in the palace school. He wore no demon’s skin. Rode no winged horse. He could not look into a person’s mind and see her thoughts.”

  “It’s true he did not have the ghost-sight or any of the ordinary talents of demon-hearts. To become a Guardian—”

  “A cloaked demon!”

  Mai began again in a patient tone. “To become one of the nine Guardians, those whom your father also called demons, you must die in the pursuit of justice. Then the land restores you in the form of a Guardian with cloak and horse so you can continue to seek justice as a judge in the land.”

  “That’s an old children’s tale, all superstitions and lies.”

  “No, Lady Dannarah. The story that is a lie is the one told by Anjihosh and the Beltak priests. The story that is a lie is the one told by the foreigners who came from Sirniaka to impose their god and beliefs on the Hundred. Guardians are no more or less corrupt than anyone else.”

  “We both know Atani was not a Guardian, if you must insist on that word.”

  “He was not a Guardian but he was touched by the demon’s coils nevertheless. His bones and flesh became permeated with the threads of living magic that live within the coils, the creatures we call firelings. He has been a demon from the day of his birth, when the firelings kissed him in welcome.”