Diplomacy of Wolves: Book 1 of the Secret Texts

by Lisle, Holly

  The parnissa shouted back, “Do you offer mercy or pardon?” Kait thought if there was any hope of mercy or pardon, the men shouldn’t have already been tied to the horses . . . but the crowds, who wanted their spectacle, didn’t seem bothered by any qualms about the fairness of the proceedings they witnessed. Immediately they began to shout, “No mercy! No mercy!”

  The paraglese raised his hands, and the crowd quieted. “No mercy!” he shouted. The roar of approval from the mob covered the order that sent all twelve horses lunging in opposite directions.

  Kait clamped her jaws so tight the muscles in her face ached; she stared with outward impassivity as all three men tore apart.

  She became aware of a hand on her wrist, and glanced at her uncle to see her own anger mirrored in his eyes. Realizing that she wasn’t the only one who did not revel in the public sacrifices lightened a burden in her that she didn’t even realize she’d been carrying. In something, at least, she was not alone.

  Servants were cutting loose the pieces of the three Gyru-nalles; the guardsmen, meanwhile, had gone to the second cage. From it they drew a lone boy. He was no older than five or six, and he was beautiful, with a sweetness and an innocence that seemed to radiate from him. His clothes marked him as a merchant’s son, and suggested that his family was well off. His cleanliness and the care that had been taken with his grooming suggested, further, that he was well loved. He twisted toward the people in the second cage, and Kait could hear his thin, terrified wail of “Maman! Papan!”

  She swallowed hard, fighting back the tears that she could already taste. Several of the parnissas took the boy from the guardsmen and dragged him to the center of the dais. The head parnissa drew a great jeweled dagger from within the folds of his robe and shouted, “Paraglese, behold the monster!” He slashed the dagger down one side of the child’s face, and a red line gaped open in the blade’s wake. But not for long. The child screamed, and Kait felt his terror as strongly as if it were her own. And she felt the response, too—the scream that became a growl, the pain that set free the red-eyed, always-waiting rage, the sense of power as blood began to sing and bones began to flow and re-form and skin and muscles leaped to the glorious promise of Shift.

  Then fingernails dug hard into her wrist, and Dùghall’s voice in her ear murmured, “Steady, girl,” and Kait drew back from a brink she had not even known she’d stood upon. Thank one and all the gods that she had Shifted the night before, or not all the calming voices in the world could have kept her from betraying herself. As it was, the rage surged through her, refusing to be leashed, as she stared down at the beautiful little boy who was no longer a little boy. His own Shift had thrown him partway into the four-legged form the Karnee curse bestowed, but only partway. His captors must have kept him hurt enough and frightened enough that he would have spent much of his time in a state of Shift; by doing so, they exhausted the fuel that fed the fire of Shift. He was a small boy, but he would have been dangerous for them to handle in a fully Karnee state. Half-Shifted, unable to go either forward or back, he merely proved to the paraglese that he was what they said he was. A monster. A beast.

  The crowd rippled with excitement. This was better than pulling thieves apart, more thrilling than bear-baiting; one of their respected neighbors had hidden a monster among them, and the monster had been revealed, and with it the dirty secrets of a family that had become criminal. The head parnissa shouted up to the paraglese, “The child is Marshalis Silkman’s son, and each Gaerwanday for his first five years, another child was presented in his place to the god Abjan and the parnissas, so that his monstrous nature might be hidden. Paraglese, on this first true day of the year of My Glorious, Enormously Fat Pig Abramaknar, I ask you what you say to the Silkman family.”

  “I say these things. For the breaking of oaths and the hiding of monsters in our midst, for the deceiving of both gods and men, for the endangerment of the public good, and for conspiracy against the Families of Ibera and the people of Halles, I find guilty by means of physical proof the Silkman family, and sentence every living member of the family, by either birth or marriage, in all generations, to death.”

  It was the sentence Kait had dreaded for her own family; not her Family, for the Galweighs as a whole were immune to summary justice, but her family—father, mother, sisters, and brothers—because no single branch of the Family was so valuable that it could not be cut off if doing so appeased a mob or maintained the power of the Family as a whole.

  “Do you offer mercy or pardon?”

  “The gods themselves have judged this beast and his family. There can be no mercy, and no pardon.”

  The boy wept. The family begged the gods to intervene. The guardsmen bound the boy to the horses. The mob screamed its delight.

  The horses leaped forward.

  Chapter 9

  Half a dozen young men leaned elegantly on pillars or draped themselves across the white stone benches that decorated the tavern courtyard. A single barmaid, her face flushed and her eyes worried, brought them trays of ale in flagons and platters of fried pork strips and fried bread, but her mind obviously wasn’t on her customers, or on the sizable tip she might reasonably hope for; every time she heard cheering in the distance, she cringed. When she had delivered the last of the refreshments Ry Sabir had requested, she asked, “Will you be needing me for anything else?” She was a typical peasant, her mind on the religious festivities she was missing.

  Several of the men laughed coarse laughs, but Ry silenced them with a wave of his hand. “No. Go. Enjoy your festival. Give my regards to the gods,” he added as she slipped through the arches of the breezeway and vanished.

  “We could have had fun with her.” The man who spoke wore two vertical scars on his cheeks like badges of honor. His shirt, of the sheerest and most expensive red silk, was so transparent it served only to emphasize the powerful, lean lines of the torso beneath; his leather pants, oiled to a shine, limned the rest of him in equally sharp detail. His black slouch boots and wide-brimmed scarlet velvet hat and the careful weaving of cloth-of-gold ribbons through his long blond braids declared him a dandy, but only a fool would mistake him for a weak one. His name was Yanth, and he was rich, and a member of one of the cadet branches of the Sabir Family, and for most of his life he had been Ry’s best friend and closest ally.

  Ry shrugged. He was so tired he ached, and was still starved and testy as he always got after a Shift. If it hadn’t been for the festival, he would have spent the day in bed, demanding the servants bring him food. But the festival gave him the chance to speak alone to his lieutenants, away from the Sabir Embassy and also away from any spies that might listen in a place like the pleasant outer courtyard of this small public tavern and inn. “True. But then we wouldn’t have been alone.”

  “What fun is being alone? You have something better for us than a pretty girl?”

  “I need your help.”

  Ry’s five lieutenants glanced at each other with expressions that ranged from curiosity to surprise to caution.

  “You know you have it without asking,” brown-haired, green-eyed Valard said.

  “Not this time. What I want goes against the Family’s orders. You have to decide whether you’ll help me or not; I’m not going to tell you that you owe me this, because this could break me with all of them, and maybe you, too.”

  Now he could tell they were really curious. He’d never gone against anything his Family told him to do, and they knew it.

  Yanth stopped leaning against the pillar trying to look like life bored him, and sat on one of the stone benches. Just sat; didn’t drape himself, didn’t worry about presenting his best profile to the passageway in case some lovely young thing might come in. He leaned forward, elbows on thighs, frowning. “I can’t speak for them, but I’m still with you. Not because I owe you, even though I know I do. Because you’re my friend.”

  Valard nodded. “Same for me. You lead, I’ll follow. Doesn’t matter where or why.”

 
Broad-faced, pale Trev spoke up. “I suppose I want to know that we aren’t talking about an overthrow first. I can’t put my family at risk with something like that.” Trev had two younger sisters for whom he would have moved the world. And while Ry knew that in all other ways he was as loyal and as devoted as either Valard or Yanth, he also knew that Trev would never do anything that would put his sisters into the slightest disfavor. He was of a lesser family, and hoped to see them both marry well.

  “Not treason,” Ry said. “But not something that will make you beloved in the House, if your role in it should be discovered.”

  Karyl, Ry’s cousin and older than all the rest of them by a few years, gave Ry a thoughtful look. “If you’re about to do something stupid, I suppose I ought to be along, if for no other reason than to pick up the pieces and return them to your mother when the worst happens. So count me in.”

  Ry laughed. Leave it to Karyl to maintain the darkest possible perspective.

  He turned to Jaim, who had said nothing so far. That was typical of Jaim—slow to commit, but even slower to concede defeat once he had committed. Ry felt if he could enlist Jaim’s assistance, he would guarantee his own success. “How about you?”

  Jaim smiled his slow smile. “I want to know what we’re going to do before I say yea or nay.”

  Ry chuckled. So typical of Jaim. He was their voice of reason, the one who advised caution, the one who always saw weaknesses in plans before anyone else, and who usually already knew how to find a solution before anyone else had defined the problem. Ry wanted Jaim with him.

  “I’m going to steal a girl that the Family wants killed.”

  Now the eyebrows did go up. “A girl? Whatever for? The Family is always throwing them at you, and you never want to catch,” Karyl said.

  “This one is special.”

  “She’d have to be. You’ve refused most of the beauties in Calimekka.”

  Yanth was grinning. “We do have to wonder what makes her so special.”

  And that was the question Ry couldn’t honestly answer—not because he couldn’t trust these five friends with the truth, but because he didn’t know what the truth was. How did he explain to them that the Galweigh woman he had met the night before had moved into his mind, and that even though she was nowhere near him, he could still feel the heat of her body pressed against his as they ran together after the fight; how could he admit that his thoughts were no longer his own? How could he make them understand that somehow he sensed where she was if he closed his eyes and thought about her; that he could feel her anger at that moment at some injustice which, in ways he couldn’t quite fathom, was linked both to her and to him? He sighed. “She’s . . . like me. And she’s Galweigh, which is why they won’t let me have her. And it’s why they want her dead.”

  Now they were frowning at him, not so amused by the idea of his risking his relationship with the Family over a woman. Yanth said, “Like you in what way? Reckless? Bullheaded? Stubborn?”

  “Karnee,” Ry said.

  The silence that followed that blunt reply stretched, while Ry’s lieutenants stared at each other. It kept on stretching, as one by one they turned from each other to look at him.

  “Karnee,” Yanth whispered.

  The silence fell again.

  Finally, Jaim sighed. “It won’t be like catching a normal girl. If we do anything wrong, she’ll destroy us. I’d hate to stand against you with a dozen armed men; I don’t imagine she will be much weaker. Considering that she’s survived this long.” He sucked in a breath, then blew it out. “One moment of carelessness is all it will take . . .” He looked down at his hands. “And I’m guessing that you mean to grab her when we take Galweigh House.”

  Ry nodded. “I thought that in the confusion we would have the best chance to get her out without anyone realizing what we were doing. I can’t steal her before then without risking the Family’s plan to take the House, and if I wait and try to find her after, she’s likely to be dead.”

  Yanth said, “So we’re going into the House during the invasion, just as we’d planned, but instead of rounding up the Galweighs and taking them prisoner, we’re going to search through that whole enormous place for one woman.”

  “Right.”

  “One woman who knows the lay of the House, who isn’t going to want to come with us, and who just happens to be one of the more efficient killing nightmares we’re ever likely to meet.”

  “Right.”

  Yanth nodded. “I only wanted to be sure I understood.”

  Jaim sighed. “Well, put that way, I don’t see any way that I can refuse. Without my planning, none of you will live past the first rush. So I’m in, too.”

  Everyone laughed. Laughing came easy, Ry thought, when all the danger and all the trouble lay in the future, when the six of them had nothing to do but drink and eat in the pleasant shade of the palm trees, with the sweet scents of jasmine and roses in the air. But all five of his friends had just volunteered to die for him, if dying was called for, and he couldn’t allow himself to forget that, or to overlook how much it meant.

  “She’s staying at the Galweigh Embassy right now. They’ll move her back to Calimekka before the wedding, of course, along with all the rest of the noncombatants. Before then, we have to find out who she is.”

  Yanth groaned. “You don’t know her name?”

  Jaim sighed. “And if we don’t know her name, how are we to find her?”

  “I’ll show you what she looks like.” Ry was nervous about doing so—the showing was only a small magic, and nondestructive, but until now, not even his best friends knew of his involvement with magic. They knew of his Karnee curse; he’d Shifted in order to save Yanth’s life once, when both of them had been younger, and reckless, and woefully outnumbered. The magic, though, he’d kept hidden, afraid that there were some heresies so grave that not even best friends would forgive them.

  Which only proved to him how mad he had become. He was going to betray the one secret about himself that he had kept hidden at all costs, and he was going to do it to try to save the life of a woman who had been born his enemy. Who was still his enemy. A woman he had every reason to hate.

  Why didn’t he hate her?

  He wished he knew.

  He sprinkled caberra powder on the ground in a circle, and his friends all stared, bewildered. He murmured his incantation, and sliced the palm of his left hand with his dagger, and dripped the blood into a tiny circle within the circle. He called on the link he felt inside of himself, and summoned the only image of her that he had—bleeding and half-exhausted and covered with blood, still in her Karnee form. He closed his eyes and drew the image close, recalling as he did her scent, the sound of her voice, and the incredible, impossible way her mere presence made him feel. He did not call last night’s image into the circle—instead, he called on the inexplicable bond he felt between the two of them, and focused on her as she was at that moment.

  He heard a gasp, and opened his eyes, and drank her in. She stood in the center of the circle he’d cast, staring at something in front of her while she leaned against the parapet of the tower in the center of Halles; the black carved stone monster glowering just beneath her was unmistakable. Her straight black hair blew like a silk pennant behind her. She wore a deep blue silk gown, elegantly cut in the Calimekkan style that had not yet come to backwater cities like Halles. She looked the highborn and delicate daughter of power; she did not look like a woman who had killed an alleyful of murderers and thugs the night before. In his first glimpse at her in her human form, he fell more completely under her spell. He knew he had to have her, or die trying. She was exquisite, beautiful . . . forbidden. But not so forbidden as the manner in which he had conjured her image.

  His friends—his lieutenants—seemed frozen in time; silent as ice statues, they stared at the shimmering image, their eyes huge and shocked. Slowly, one by one, they pulled their gazes away from the bewitching, ephemeral, softly glowing image of the woman and
looked to him. Ry looked for their rage or for signs of betrayal, but instead he saw only wonder.

  “How . . . ?” Yanth whispered.

  For the longest time, none of the other four said a word. Then Jaim added, “I don’t care how. Could you teach me?”

  That broke a dam, and his friends’ words rushed out. They wanted him to do more magic; they wanted him to show them how to do what he knew; they wanted to be a part of this beautiful, forbidden world that he had revealed to them; and they didn’t care that the knowledge he had was knowledge men had died to rediscover, or that it had been lost for a very good reason, or that they would be executed in the public square if they were ever caught. They didn’t intend to get caught, and in the meantime the wonder of it held their imaginations and promised them secrets and a world beyond the everyday. They wanted that world. And they were willing to overlook any sin, any crime, were willing to promise almost anything, to gain access to the door that would take them there.

  “We’ll help you get the woman,” Yanth said, summing up for all of them. “But promise that you’ll teach us magic in return. As a favor to your loyal friends and your unquestioning allies, just give us that boon.”

  For what they were offering to him—their lives, their honor—he had to offer suitable recompense. He had thought of land and additional titles . . . but they had the right to request the favor they wanted most. And he would not refuse them. He agreed.

  * * *

  “I didn’t think I was going to make it through that.” Kait paced from one end of the narrow library to the other. Numb and sickened and still enraged, she fought the demon inside her that begged for a chance—just one chance—to destroy the monsters who had ordered that nightmare slaughter of innocents.

  All through the ceremony, Dùghall had said nothing. He’d stayed by her side and headed off anyone who seemed to want to talk with her, though he didn’t seem to be doing anything at all; he’d kept her calm and he’d gotten her and Tippa back to the Galweigh Embassy at the earliest possible opportunity. When he brought her to the library alone, though, Kait knew he wanted to talk. “You did make it through,” Dùghall said. “Now you have to let it go. You still have a part to play, and the Family needs you to play it without stumbling. Especially . . .” He stepped into her path and brought her to a standstill, and stared into her eyes. “Especially since your information checked out exactly. The Dokteeraks and the Sabirs are plotting against us, exactly as you told me. You have certain . . . talents, should I say? . . . Yes, talents . . . that make you irreplaceable to your Family.”