Darkwood

by M. E. Breen

“Oh, thank the dawn!” Annie cried. “My employer would have skinned me alive if I’d lost this.”

  “Lost that?” the captain asked.

  “Oh, yes. He’s a very cruel man, my employer.” She raised her eyes in what she hoped was a pathetic expression. “He’s a butcher.”

  The captain looked taken aback.

  “I’m wondering why she ran when she saw us, Captain,” said the turtle.

  “Specialty meats!” Annie blurted. “This here is, is … barn owl, bellaphel, bittern … Bittern! Bittern meat, imported from Brineland. Worth its weight in ringstone. That’s why he makes me travel so early. So we won’t be robbed. I ran because I thought you were robbers.”

  The captain looked over at his fellows, who shrugged.

  “We still need to see her permit, Captain,” the turtle said. “We can’t let her go without seeing that permit.” He was nearly standing in his stirrups with eagerness. Annie wrinkled her nose. The men smelled of sweat, leather, ale, horse, and, from one of them, an unmistakable, tinny sweetness. Annie took an involuntary step back, only to find her cloak still caught in the captain’s grip.

  He turned on the turtle impatiently. “I’m more than capable of conducting this interview myself, Remo.” Then to Annie, “Your permit, Miss.”

  Annie shook her head.

  “You’ll have to come with us then, I’m afraid.”

  “But why? I told you, my employer …”

  “Strict orders from the king himself.” As he spoke, the captain leaned down and hooked his free hand under Annie’s arm.

  “No! I won’t!” But she had barely started to struggle when a black shape hurtled toward them.

  “Kinderstalk!” one of the men yelled, and everything burst suddenly into chaos.

  “Run!” Rinka snarled, just before his teeth closed around the captain’s arm.

  Annie ran, slipping and stumbling in the snow, afraid to look back. She heard shouting, a horse’s frightened whinny, and then pistol fire.

  Rinka, Rinka. What have you done?

  She burst into the shelter of the trees and dropped to her hands and knees. But someone was behind her, drawing close. She scrambled up, ready to run again. Rinka’s teeth nipped her shoulder.

  He moved fast on three legs. At last they stopped.

  “You are safe?” Annie panted. “No hurt?”

  “No hurt.”

  “The others hurt?”

  “The soldiers?” Rinka looked surprised. “Nothing serious.”

  Annie nodded, relieved. “They know now, about us. They tell the king.”

  “Certainly.”

  “But my sister! They say, ‘a girl and kinderstalk.’” She said the word in her own tongue but Rinka’s flattened ears showed he recognized it. “The king think Page and Sharta.”

  “What of it?”

  “I do not know.” Annie said. “But I fear … he look hard now for Page. And I think Gibbet man hide with soldiers. How say—spy?”

  “Yes. More danger.”

  A crashing noise from the trees made Annie start. “Someone comes!”

  A moment later Baggy trotted into view, still hitched to the cart shafts and trailing an uprooted bracka bush behind him. Prudence and Isadore slipped between his legs and came to rub against Annie’s ankles.

  “Poor Baggy!” She couldn’t help smiling. Then she glanced at the path he had torn through the wood. “Men follow?”

  Rinka bared his teeth in a grin. “Men forget how to count when it comes to wolves. One becomes four. Four become twenty. ‘The monsters were everywhere!’ they will tell the king, and they will believe it.” His expression grew thoughtful. “This is what Gibbet understands that other men do not. Those soldiers you fear have fears of their own. He will give those fears form.” Rinka shrugged. “Even if they do follow, it no longer matters. We will reach my pack long before they reach us.”

  Annie nodded, though Rinka’s words were not quite what she’d call comforting. She finished unhitching the horse and planted a kiss in the middle of his long nose. Then she stooped and gave each of the cats a good scratch around the ears. Scattered, then reunited.

  “I feel happy we …,” she began.

  But the wolf had already moved off.

  It was slow going, this walk through the woods. Snow filled Annie’s boots with every step. Baggy, accustomed to the world of roads and fences, followed her so closely that his chin nearly rested on her shoulder. Annie practiced questions in Hippa to take her mind off her cold feet.

  Where do we find the pack?

  Do we go to Finisterre?

  Do we look for Gibbet?

  This last she must have spoken aloud. Rinka’s ears swiveled toward her and he barked a reply.

  “What do you say?” she asked carefully.

  “I said yes. Gibbet and the wolves will be together.”

  “Do we look at the Drop?”

  “No.”

  “At Chopper’s farm?”

  “No. Not there.”

  “Where do we go?”

  “Follow me.”

  “I will follow you!” Annie skipped a few steps in the snow. It seemed to her that they weren’t so much talking as collaborating in a magic trick. The wolf language, once a confusing tangle of sounds, had assumed rhythm and logic. She looked at the cats thoughtfully, and at Baggy. Surely if you could learn the language of wolves, you could also learn to speak to cats, to horses, to bugs even. Walking through the woods then would be like walking through a crowded market, hundreds of conversations going on at once. But perhaps ignorance of other species’ languages was what kept things running smoothly. Would a wolf eat a rabbit, or a man shoot a deer, if they could speak to one another?

  And now that she could speak to the wolves, would they listen? Would they believe her when she told them that Gibbet wanted to mine the ringstone at Finisterre? She had to try.

  “Rinka! Slow down. I have something to tell you.”

  He stopped so abruptly she nearly tripped over him. They had reached a dense thicket. Bracka bushes strangled the oaks and reached their knotty fingers across the spaces between them, twining together until they formed a wall of brambles. The wolf looked different here somehow, wilder, rougher, as though he had grown out of the earth from the same dark roots as the bushes that surrounded him. Annie felt her heart beat a little faster.

  “Rinka?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Rinka? What is happening? What are we doing here?”

  Abruptly he turned on her, snarling.

  “What are we doing here? I have come home. I am going to lead my pack into war. As for you? I couldn’t have gotten here without you, and for that I won’t tear out your throat. But this”—he jerked his head toward his damaged leg. “For this I have you to thank, so don’t test my patience.”

  The cats backed away from him, hissing.

  “Rinka, what—”

  “‘Rinka! Rinka!’” he sneered, imitating her. “Do you want to be a wolf, is that it? Looked around the human world and found you didn’t have much of a pack?”

  Tears burned in Annie’s throat. She shook back her hair.

  “And what sort of pack do you have? I see no one here but me.”

  The fur rose at the back of the wolf’s neck. “You don’t know anything.”

  “I know more than I did. I know now why your pack left you, why they never looked for you. I know what kind of—”

  “Person I am?” he finished for her.

  “Wolves have honor,” she spat. “Sharta had honor.”

  “Sharta loved a human girl. There is no honor in that.”

  “And yet you would trust this human who is no more than a monster! Why?”

  “Gibbet wants the throne and he needs us to secure it. In exchange he leaves us our little plot of land. How he treats his fellow men means nothing to me.”

  As they spoke, Rinka began to circle her slowly. With a kind of wonderment, Annie felt herself crouch, then drop to all fours. S
he lifted her nose to the air, suddenly aware of a tumult of smells. What is happening to me?

  Rinka moved gradually inward, tightening the circle. She moved with him.

  “Gibbet only cares about ringstone. Two things stand in his way: the king, and the wolves who guard Finisterre. He wants to destroy you both, Rinka. He will use you to destroy each other.”

  Nothing changed in the wolf’s face. He made no sign that he had even heard her. But almost imperceptibly, his tail lowered.

  She plunged on. “You know honor, Rinka! You didn’t have to help me when the king’s guard came. Show me that Page was wrong about you, Rinka.”

  “Stop saying my name.”

  “Rinka,” she said again. “Rinka. Rinka. Rinka.”

  The wolf’s muzzle pulled away from his teeth. His ears flattened against his head. Annie felt a creeping sensation at the top of her own skull, as though an invisible hand were pulling her hair back.

  She smelled fear, rage, something that might have been regret. And then something else. Onions.

  A man’s voice reached them through the veil of brambles. Just two words, but his odor, the sound of his footfalls, the particular wheeze of his breath, all identified him as clearly as if he had been standing beside her.

  “Their condition?” Gibbet asked.

  “Starved, sir.”

  That was Chopper. Gibbet and Chopper. Blindly Annie reached out and found Prudence, close and comforting as always. Beneath her soft fur the cat’s body felt tense as a bow.

  The men stopped just beyond the hedge of bracka bushes.

  “Then we’re ready to send the first wave,” Gibbet said. “No more than two hundred.”

  “So few, sir? The king’s standing army alone is four times that number. As for mercenaries—”

  “Two hundred kinderstalk, Chopper. It’ll be the worst thing these men have ever seen. But the king’s army is well trained. They’ll stand and fight. They’ll cut down the two hundred fast enough. Weary but triumphant, they’ll begin to collect themselves. And then the second wave.”

  “The full eight hundred?”

  “All of them. The king’s troops will fall. Then it’s up to the mercenaries and the farm boys used to shooting at the sides of barns.”

  “I underestimated you, sir.”

  “Not at all. You’re just thinking like an old soldier. But we don’t want this battle over with quickly, do we?”

  Annie could hear the smile in his voice, could imagine the face split in two, the awful teeth.

  “’Mass the dead, sir,” Chopper said.

  “’Mass the dead.”

  After a beat Chopper asked, “Assuming there are survivors among the kinderstalk?”

  “That’s a dirty job. Pip can do it.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Now catch me up on the movements of our good King Terrance III.”

  “The king rode out three days ago. Apparently he plans to lead his own troops.”

  Gibbet laughed. “Better and better. How many men in his personal guard?”

  “Can’t say for sure. The Royal Guard is split up and riding all over the west, looking for his sweetheart that’s run away with the blind kinderstalk. Couldn’t have timed it better if she’d asked us.”

  Gibbet grunted. “And our own little runaway?”

  The hair stood up on Annie’s neck. For the first time, Chopper sounded nervous.

  “Remo says the Guard had her but she got away. Says she has a kinderstalk with her, too.”

  “Two sisters, Chopper, light and dark. And neither comes to harm by the kinderstalk. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

  “The dark girl—you’re sure she’s Jock’s younger daughter?”

  “Not daughter, Chopper. The girls are orphans.”

  “Either way, sir, we found no mark. You said the child we wanted would bear a white mark.”

  Gibbet’s voice turned ruminative. “Orphans, Chopper. Orphans belong in an orphanage. But Jock’s wife said no, insisted on raising them herself. Fine, I told Jock, but you’ll have to pay for the privilege: two stones at the end of every month, one for each girl. The older child kept to the house, but one day I saw her through the window. All that white hair. I wondered, could it be the mark? But we lost her. And then the younger one, just a child like any other child, easy to ignore, easy to forget. I should have drowned them both like a pair of kittens the day their father died.” He paused. “It was a mistake, Chopper. A bad mistake.”

  “What was, sir?”

  “Small greed. It rarely serves a man’s larger ambitions. Remember that.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tell the fool I’m ready to see him.”

  They heard the scratch and flare of a match. Smoke rings rose above the hedge and broke apart on the lower branches of the trees. Through the bloom of tobacco Annie caught a new scent, mingling with Gibbet’s stale odor of onions. Blood, and not human.

  A sudden instinct made Annie turn to Rinka. He was gone. And then she saw him, creeping along the base of the hedge, searching for a break among the branches.

  He is going to kill Gibbet. So let him, part of her said, even as she lunged after the wolf. Then Page’s voice, a clear bell of warning: Gibbet is not like other men. Her fingers closed around a bony knob, a fistful of rough hairs. She had him by the tail.

  To Rinka’s credit, he didn’t cry out. He moved forward a few steps, dragging Annie behind him. She relaxed her body into dead weight. For a moment they continued this strange, silent dance, Rinka advancing, Annie hanging back.

  The wolf turned then and deliberately, in perfect silence, took Annie’s leg between his teeth. There was no pain at first, just four clear points of pressure on her calf. He bit down. She pinched his tail. They both froze.

  The footsteps were those of a tall, heavy man.

  “You sent for me?” said Uncle Jock.

  Chapter 15

  If she hadn’t been so close to Rinka, if their very teeth and nails hadn’t connected them, she might have run. As it was she lay there and listened to her heart race on without her. The cats pressed against her back.

  “You’re a man who loves his weapon, aren’t you, Jock? A good shot?”

  Uncle Jock must have nodded. She could picture him, sly and afraid, nodding his head right off his shoulders.

  “You see that bird with the red tail? Can you hit it?”

  “The hawk? Sure.”

  The report came swiftly, then the bird’s cry. Annie felt Rinka flinch.

  “Wily bird. But close enough. Your girls can’t fly.”

  “My girls are dead.”

  “Is it ghosts, then, bringing the king my news? Making friends with the kinderstalk?”

  Uncle Jock didn’t answer. He smelled damp: sweat and whisky.

  “Girls, ghosts. It won’t matter much longer,” said Gibbet. “You owe me this, at least.”

  “But where do I find them? They could be anywhere in Howland! They—”

  “The king will find the older girl. Why not start with her?”

  “You mean the battle. You want me at the battle.”

  “You’ll make a fine sniper, Jock.”

  “And that’s all, that’s all you want from me? The two girls?”

  “Proof of kill. Then we’re finished.”

  Annie forced herself not to move for a full minute after they left.

  She sniffed the air. “They’re gone.” “They’re gone,” Rinka said at the same time. He sprang at her, not fierce, but frantic.

  “What did they say? What has happened to the pack? That blood, that blood on his hands! My mate, Brisa. That is her blood.”

  Annie told him what she had overheard. She spoke without quite looking at him, afraid her face would betray what she was feeling. Sharta was right. Page was right. Why didn’t you believe us?

  At last she met his eyes. “We must track the first wave of wolves to the battle. We must try to stop it.”

  “No. First we find Brisa.�
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  “Two hundred lives, Rinka! And my sister. If the king finds her she will be in danger.”

  “You may go alone. I won’t stop you. But I must find my mate.”

  She had never thought of him as either old or young, and now he seemed both at once. Hopeless, full of hope.

  “And when we find Brisa, you’ll help me? You’ll help me try to stop this war?”

  “I’ll do everything I can.”

  As far as she could see in either direction, the bracka hedge ran dense and toweringly high. Rinka sniffed along the base, looking for a way through. Annie snapped off one of the black-green leaves. It shriveled in her hand. This hedge was no accident of nature. Even here, even in the forest, Gibbet worked his potions. But the hedge gave Annie an idea. She broke off a bit of stem crowded with thorns, then tore a strip from the hem of her white petticoat. Then she pricked her thumb and, with blood as ink, wrote a message on the cloth.

  King danger hide love

  She clicked softly with her tongue. The cats appeared before her, their eyes fixed calmly on her face. She tied the strip of cloth around Prue’s neck.

  “Go find Page. Do your best to warn her. Tell her … tell her I’ll come as soon as I can.” Prudence rubbed her cheek against Annie’s palm. Izzy flicked his tail. Then they were gone.

  Annie stood abruptly, squinting against tears. Rinka was waiting for her perhaps fifty yards away. A small gap showed in the hedge. Through it she could see the flickering lights of Gibbet’s camp. The lights multiplied as she watched—they were lighting the torches. Dark would fall soon.

  Rinka plunged through the hedge. Thorns tore at his coat. Annie knew what they would do to her skin, but there was no other way.

  “Baggy.” She laid a hand on his neck. “You stay here, or go home, if you like. I’m sorry we can’t—” Dark fell in the middle of her speech. Annie gasped and tightened her fingers in the horse’s mane. And the horse, it seemed, had no intention of being left alone. He pushed past her and straight through the hedge. Brambles broke off in his mane and raked his sides. But Baggy was a workhorse and his hide was tough. Annie followed him through the gap, now wide as a door.

  She could see the camp plainly now. Wolves, hundreds of them, milled around, their black bodies moving in and out of the shadows. A group of armed men stood near a cluster of tents. Torches blazed in a circle around them. As she watched, a wolf moved close enough to the circle to be seen by the men; one man gave a shout and another fired his pistol overhead in warning. “Stay in tight, men, stay in tight,” someone said.