by Claudia King
The sound of pattering paws echoed through her mind, like a beast scampering down an empty passageway. Through her haze of consciousness, it seemed the crispest, clearest thing she had ever heard. A fox took shape before her, watching the den mother with anxious eyes.
Her brow furrowed, and she struggled to remember. A pinprick of clarity pierced the murky veil.
"I am in the spirit world," she breathed, following after the fox as it hurried away from her. She remembered little else, but she would never forget the fox. She had trained herself for years to recognise it. Every time she came to this place, it was her guide. Her signal to remind herself where she was, and that nothing here was ever as it seemed.
But this was not the spirit world as she knew it. She was dying here, and this time it was no trick. There was something inside her still working its deadly magic. She grappled with her broken thoughts, trying to piece together the memories that would tell her what had happened, but it was like trying to catch smoke on a foggy day.
The fox threatened to disappear into the darkness, yet Adel refused to let it go. She kept the animal in sight, knowing that she might forget again at any moment if she lost her way. She was running, and yet she was not on her feet. The hard ground pressed into her side, and it shifted as she twisted her body back and forth. Something tickled her cheek. She could smell the scent of her furs.
In an instant of understanding, she snatched a handful of her bedding, fingernails digging into her palm as her eyes widened. The firelight danced off the cave wall in front of her. People were speaking nearby. They were her seers.
The clutches of the spirit world dragged her back down, but she clung on to her furs for dear life. If she let go now, she might never escape that dark realm. She refused to give in.
It was no use. The spirit world sucked her down, dulling the cave wall into blackness, turning the strands of fur between her fingers into writhing tendrils. The light was still there. The light of the fire.
Focusing on the one thing she could remember, Adel let go and rolled over, her mind reeling as the world spun around her. She felt that her eyes were spilling from their sockets, her body turning to water as she fell apart. Hands clutched at her, the screeching voices of demons growing loud in her ears. They tried to hold her back, but she kept the last of her consciousness fixed on the light. The white-hot blaze of the fire. It was inches in front of her now.
Without hesitating, Adel thrust her hand into the flames.
Searing pain shot up her arm, drawing a horrendous scream from her lungs as the smell of burning skin filled the air. Her mind might have been lost, but her body still understood pain. The wolf inside her still understood survival.
The sensation of her flesh blistering shocked Adel back into the physical world. Perspiration rolled down her face. Sounds rang too loudly in her ears, colours bled across her vision more vividly than they should have, but she could make out the cave around her once more. She did not have long. The poison was already pulling her under again.
Nightwood berries.
There was no time to think on how it had happened, but she recognised her symptoms in an instant.
"Lie down, Den Mother, your hand —!" an elderly voice bellowed in her ear like thunder. The seer tried to tug Adel away, but she shoved her aside with a snarl.
The stinging, throbbing pain shooting up her arm was incredible, but she clung on to it, clutching her injured hand to her side as her fingers twitched and trembled unresponsively. She staggered to her feet and pushed past the small crowd that had gathered in her chamber, the world spinning with every step. Her seers tried to pull her back again, and once more she threw them off with all the strength she could muster.
"Leave me, you fools! Get me— Get me..." her thoughts trailed off before she could recall the name of the medicine. It did not matter. She knew what she needed. Relying on instinct and the memory of a task her body had carried out a hundred times before, she made her way to the pouches of herbs, struggling to unfasten the bundles one by one with clumsy fingers. She cried out again as the pain of applying pressure to her burned hand shot back up her arm, but it tightened her focus, giving her precious moments of concentration.
The others had stopped trying to hold her back, but she paid no attention to what they were saying. There was no time for her to do anything but prepare what she needed. The berries were still inside her body, still seeping their poison into her veins.
The contents of pouch after pouch spilled across the cave floor as the world darkened around her. Refusing to give in to panic, she searched on until she found the one containing the precious white crystals she needed. Pouring them out into her palm, she scraped up several small brown seeds she had spilled a moment earlier and added them to the handful. Her mixing bowl was still by the fire, and, if she was fortunate, her seers would have boiled water by now.
She was running out of time. The salt and seeds rattled in her hand, and her vision swayed and drifted, threatening to detach from her body. The figures around her became shadows again, and old spirits returned to join them.
Adel grit her teeth, fighting through the pain spreading from the heel of her palm as she gripped her knife and ground the ingredients together with the dull flint handle. As the seeds split open their bitter scent made her shudder, her eyes watering as she reached for a bowl someone had left heating in the fire. Half the contents spilled as the hot edges burned her fingers again, but she managed to drag it in front of her with a gasp of exertion.
The cave was gone now. Dark spirits whispered to her, threatening to make her forget the world she knew. Worse than the spirits, the memories returned with fresh clarity. Hope drained from Adel as the bowls slipped from her hands. She looked for her fox again, but it was nowhere to be found.
The dark figure, the one who awoke all of her bittersweet longings, appeared to her once again. If she had never known love, the world might have made a very different person of her. Life had burned Adel, blackening her on the outside, but there was a part of her it had never reached. That part awoke at the memory of the man standing before her in the shadows. For the first time in many years, she allowed the tears in her eyes to fall.
"Stay with me," she croaked, her voice like ash in her throat. She held out a hand to the shadowy figure, but he turned his back on her, melting away again into the land of the dead. Was that where he dwelt now? She would never know.
Collapsing to the ground, Adel heaved out an anguished sob, beating her burned palm against the stone until the pain forced her back to her knees. Another man towered over her now, but this presence evoked no feelings of longing. She glared up at him, not wanting to remember his face. In her whole life, he was the only person she had ever wished dead.
Alpha.
The grey in his beard billowed like smoke. Did his spirit now dwell among the dead too? If it did, she had no desire to join him. Many years ago, she had been afraid of this man. Now, she only hated him.
Father.
She did not wish to believe that her spirit had in any way been born of his own. He had no right to haunt her in death. The apparition smiled down at her. She imagined the pain in her palm spreading, turning to fire, engulfing him and charring his bones to ash. She willed every dark spirit she knew of to consume him.
Adel's hands tightened around the bowls she held. They were still there. She would not follow this spirit back into the land of the dead. She poured the salt and crushed seeds into the water, swirled the contents together with her burned hand, then lifted the bowl to her lips and swallowed as much as she could.
The purging mixture hit her body within moments. Adel doubled over on the cave floor, retched, and vomited the lingering poison from her stomach.
—38—
A Love Lost
Caspian only managed a few fitful hours of sleep after sunrise. When he returned to the outcrop at dawn, he had been greeted with the news that the den mother was hovering between life and death, poisoned by Netya, wh
o had been missing for hours. He refused to believe it. Had Khelt not insisted on him resting, he would have headed straight back out to search for her, despite his exhaustion. He even fancied he could smell her sweet scent lingering there in his lodge as he tossed and turned, and it tormented him until he could stand it no longer.
Rising from his furs, he fastened his belt and slid his arms into a loose hide jerkin, then strode outside to look in on the den mother. The breaking of any serious news would have awoken him already, but he checked with the others to see if there had been any word of Netya. There was still no sign of her, and none of the hunters sent out to search had returned.
When he made his way to the seers' cave, however, he was relieved to learn that Adel had survived the night. Whether she considered him a friend or not, he was still fond of the den mother, perhaps more than he had realised. The prospect of losing the only two people he felt able to share his innermost thoughts with in one night had been a dreadful one.
The elders minding the antechamber seemed reluctant to share more, but Caspian was used to their stubbornness. Much to their protest, he pushed his way past the drapes and stepped into the inner chamber. He needed to see Adel with his own eyes. He was done with waiting.
Half a dozen seers were clustered around the fire, and in their midst sat a very pale, haggard-looking den mother. Relief rushed through Caspian at the sight of her. She looked terrible, with her long black hair tangled and limp, and a sickly pallor to her skin. Her left hand shook as she sipped from a steaming cup, and her right was clutched tight against her side, bound from palm to elbow with a dressing of plant leaves.
Caspian might have believed she was still on the verge of death, had her blue eyes not darted up to accost him the moment he walked in. Her gaze was as fierce as ever, burning with the life that her body had yet to regain.
The young seer Selo seemed to be tending Adel directly, and she hurried forward to try and usher Caspian back out.
"The den mother is still very sick, she needs rest and quiet."
"If I was going to die I would have done so by now," Adel called, her thin voice still holding a note of command. "Let him come. And the rest of you, leave us in peace for a moment. I am tired of you all fussing over me."
Selo's lips pursed in concern, but she bowed her head and sat back down at the den mother's side as the others dispersed. Caspian stepped forward and took a seat beside the fire, but he stopped short of reaching out to take Adel's hand. Had there been fewer eyes present, he might have.
"Sit still," she said, closing her eyes for a moment and taking a long sip of her tea. "The spirit world still lingers in my head. It is difficult for me to focus."
"Tell me what happened," Caspian urged, trying not to let his concern for Netya overcome him.
"I was poisoned. Whoever did it used enough nightwood berries to kill me. I may have been dead by now had I not prepared the purging medicine I needed for myself."
"We tried to make her take some," Selo said, "but in her spirit trance she would not swallow more than a few drops, and it did no good anyway."
"Then your medicine was not strong enough," Adel snapped. "You should have pried open my jaws and forced it down my throat."
"But the elders thought it best to—"
"Nevermind, it is done now." Adel gestured with her injured hand impatiently, her features contorting with pain at the effort. She looked back to Caspian and lowered her voice. "Selo and the others I have helped to train are loyal, but I question whether some of the elders did all they could to save me."
"Do you suspect it was one of them?" Caspian said, in equally hushed tones.
Adel shook her head. "No. Those who cling to the old ways may not be fond of me, but each and every one of them respects their den mother." She grimaced. "And they all know of deadlier and less obvious poisons than nightwood berries."
"Everyone thinks it was Netya," Selo said.
"That isn't true," Caspian responded in an instant, the conviction in his voice plain to hear. "The pack are letting their fears get the best of them. I know Netya, and she would never do something like this."
"He is right," Adel said. "I do not believe for a moment that she was responsible."
"She was the only one who visited your chamber. She even brought food," Selo said.
"Anyone who has been in my chamber knows there is another way in from the top of the outcrop."
"Has anyone else been absent since last night?" Caspian asked.
Adel shook her head and gestured to Selo.
"Everyone comes and goes at this time of year," the girl sighed. "Half the pack are away from home right now."
Caspian fixed the den mother with a sincere look. "I need to find her." Already he was envisioning what might happen if someone else tracked Netya down first. The alpha had given instructions for her to be brought back alive, but wolves could be unpredictable when passions were running hot. It was not difficult to imagine an overzealous young hunter exacting some personal vengeance on a traitor before dragging her back home to face the alpha's judgement.
His fists clenched at his side. Caspian was not a violent man, but he could permit his wolf's savage impulses to take control in the name of justice. If any of them harmed Netya, he would make sure they thought twice about doing so again.
Even in her debilitated state, Adel did not miss a beat. "Selo, brew me more tea, will you?" she said, handing the girl her cup. Once they were alone Adel leaned forward, her fingers tightening around Caspian's arm. "The others are searching all over, but you and I know there is only one place Netya would go if she thought the pack had turned against her. Take people you trust. Do not wait to ask the alpha's permission."
"I will want Khelt's help, especially if we are heading toward the territory of the Sun People. He will listen to me."
Adel pressed her lips together. "If you love that girl, you cannot share her with him forever."
Her words struck a tender chord in Caspian's chest, and he was forced to grit his teeth to fight through the unwanted feelings it provoked. "Let us find her safe and well first before worrying over matters of love."
"She was never meant for a man like Khelt."
"Enough of this." He pried her fingers from his arm. "Stay here and regain your strength, Adel. I will find your apprentice for you."
The den mother curled her lip in disappointment, but she did not say another word as Caspian rose to his feet and hurried out of the seers' cave.
"I am as worried as you," Khelt said, his right heel drumming in agitation against one of the log seats as he sat perched on the edge of his table. "I thought you of all people would approve of me being patient. The hunters will find her."
"You do not sound convinced. She has slipped past them somehow. We need more people looking for her," Caspian replied.
"And if there is still a murderer in the midst of our pack?" Khelt growled, shaking his head. "I need to be here. The alpha's place is with his people at a time like this, not searching for his lost love."
His words triggered another painful rush of emotion in Caspian. How would the pair of them ever resolve this? No matter what happened, someone would end up suffering for it. He shook his head, fighting past the worries. He could not allow himself to be preoccupied with thoughts of love. Right now, Netya's safety was what mattered most.
"This is not the day for you to be a reserved alpha. Adel is recovering. She and Oke can take care of the pack in our absence. I need your speed and strength out on the plains."
"Some part of me still wonders whether this is all just one of the den mother's schemes," Khelt murmured, glaring at the cave floor.
"That is a foolish thought and you know it!"
"Do I?" Khelt turned his angry gaze on his friend. "What makes you so sure you understand the wickedness inside that woman's head? She has tried her hardest to keep Netya away from me, and now the girl may be gone for good! If I find out Adel is responsible..." He trailed off, slamming a fist into the t
able beside him.
Caspian's heart sank. "Do you really hate her more than you care for Netya?"
Khelt averted his eyes, saying nothing. His jaw was clenched stubbornly, his shoulders tense and unmoving. There was no reasoning with him when he was like this.
"I am going east to look for her," Caspian said. "I cannot waste time arguing over it." He gave Khelt one last chance to respond, but the silence sat heavy on the alpha's lips. True to his word, Caspian wasted no more time attempting to convince him.
As he left, he was almost thankful for his worry over Netya. It prevented him from dwelling on whether his friend had finally passed a point from which there was no coming back.
Few of the hunters were lacking in eagerness to join the search for Netya, but eagerness was no good to Caspian. He needed level heads around him, those who had experience venturing into the lands of the Sun People. More than that, he needed wolves he could trust with restraint.
"What do you think the alpha will do with her?" he overheard someone say as he hurried through the centre of the camp.
"I know what I'd do. Vaya was right, her kind were never meant to mix with ours."
"I would be more concerned about the den mother when she gets her hands on her," another voice chimed in. "I heard Adel's pack burned those who wronged their seers alive."
Caspian grimaced, resisting the urge to waste time silencing the unsavoury gossip. It did not take him long to gather his group, but their numbers were smaller than he had hoped, especially with Khelt being absent.
Fern had been an obvious choice. She had been just as worried as Caspian ever since her friend went missing, and it took no more than a few words to convince her to come along. If not for his leg, Erech would have been another great help, but even with a wolf to bear him he would only slow them down. Many of the slightly older, more reliable pack members were away with Tal chasing down a herd of aurochs, but a quiet conversation with Hawk persuaded the seasoned hunter to lend his aid as well. He had always spoken respectfully of Netya, and despite having dismissed her from the great hunt, Caspian knew it had been a difficult decision for him to make. In some ways, it seemed as if he wanted to make amends for denying the girl her chance at joining the ranks of the hunters.