“Help me make that luck,” Payne said softly.
Proving’s hand arrested, then he took a deliberate sip, got to his feet, stretched stiffly, and disappeared into his wagon.
Payne glanced at One For Brandy.
“He’ll go,” she replied to his unspoken question.
Payne’s voice was flatter than he thought as he thanked her and reined away.
VII
Run fast, for night runs with you
—Randonnen saying
Nori ran loosely now, well into her second wind.
Wolfwalker? Rishte called out faintly as the wolves picked up her scent.
They were moving fast, and in spite of her fear, in spite of the need for safety, a flash of joy hit with his voice. The bond she had tasted so faintly through other wolfwalkers, it could be hers now if she wanted it. The grey was almost leaping at her, stitching itself into her mind.
The yearling caught sight of her and howled. Wolfwalker!
She grinned ferally. It wasn’t the title Wolfwalker that she heard from him, but an image of the Noriana half of the Nori–Rishte bond. It was a pulsing thought, filled with a human–wolf power. It was tentative, but it was feeding on their fear and urgency like a starving man on bread. Every kay the two of them ran, the yearling’s voice was stronger.
She sent her answer: The worlags should be crossing downstream by now.
The rest of the wolves flooded out of the trees and turned to flank her. She tried to think as they ran. With raiders, she’d have to go around the Bell Rocks camp and hope she wasn’t seen. It would add time, too much time. The worlags would not be limited to those trails. They could cut right across to get her. She needed a distraction. The wolves, perhaps, to rouse the raiders? Or something else instead? She gripped that thought. Go around or . . . go through? They were raiders, after all. Men who murdered, maimed, enslaved.
Men like her uncles.
The thought hit with a harder fist. She couldn’t turn on her own kind. But the thought remained. The men at the camp were raiders.
Still human, her mind whispered back. What right did she have to lead the worlags into them like a stampede over a sleeper? To let others be killed in her place? Her uncles had been raiders once, when they ran the counties with her father. Now they were better men, men with ideals and convictions, or at least men and women who lived within law. That last thought caught. The elders of the trial block might send raiders to death for murdering messengers, but Nori was not an elder.
Cold, slitted yellow eyes seemed to flicker in the back of her mind. Bile began to roil in her stomach, and her gut clenched hard to quell it. The men at Bell Rocks had murdered, even if they hadn’t murdered her. The wolves saw the trail clearly from corpse to copse, from ring-runner carcass to raider. This close to the source, it was sharp in Rishte’s mind. Death, fresh death, right under her feet, all the way up to Bell Rocks. Another wolf pack had traveled this way hours ago, fleeing the gathering worlags. The odors had clogged the packsong. Rishte growled his agreement, and Grey Vesh echoed it hard. The one thing a predator always knew was the scent of death on another.
The cubs, Vesh sent urgently.
Nori shook her head. The choice didn’t matter. There were only two ways past Bell Rocks: around the raiders or through them. If the wolves had made a mistake, if they were wrong, they would tell her when they reached the camp. If the men were other scouts like her, she could still call out the warning and wake them to shoot at the worlags. If not, if the odors of torture and death were on their clothes and gear, if the kill sense was in their minds, then the men at the rocks were raiders. Killers. Murderers. Not her kind, not even like her uncles. Scavengers, like bihwadi.
She made her decision and felt her stomach twist. “Moons forgive me,” she whispered.
Rishte didn’t understand the guilt she tried to swallow, but her sense of purpose was clear. He raced ahead on the trail.
She figured her speed, the worlags’ pace; the distance to the raiders. Not far. Not too far. Just two kays now. She could do that. Only two more kays to run.
Black trees rose out of blackened ground. Night did more than blind her: shadows taunted, branches grabbed. She used her own fear as leverage.
Speed. Urgency.
She hadn’t realized that she’d slowed. She tried to pick up the pace again, but her legs were breathlessly numb. What strength she had caught from her rest by the creek was gone again like wind. She could use the bond to pull strength from the pack, her mother had told her once. But Nori wasn’t yet bonded. The beginning of the bond was there, aye, between she and Rishte, but it was just a thread of grey. It took time to build the kind of link over which she could focus the grey. Time to learn to interpret the packsong, time she didn’t have.
The wolves had no such problem. Rishte felt her need, felt the weakness in her legs and the threat to the pups. He howled into the pack. Grey Helt snarled back, and the wolves closed in around her. Grey energy surged. It hit and flushed through her body like angry blood that suddenly boils.
“Rishte,” she gasped. She didn’t question why he’d done it. She simply ate the wolf pack’s strength as a starving man sucks at a broth-soaked crust of bread.
A dip, an open stretch, a tangle of vines, a washout. The trail turned, this time south around a small, crumbling ridge. South, toward the worlags. In the wolves, tension spiked and Vesh snapped, and Nori put on speed. The trail would turn north again, but not for half a kay.
Hurry. The pups. The voices of the other wolves were a steady, blinding rhythm.
She didn’t answer. She just sprinted toward the beetle-beasts. In the gloom, she imagined she saw them: leathered arms in the shadows, purplish claws in the brush. She couldn’t feel where they were, couldn’t tell how close. Twigs snapped to her left. Gods, they were right on her—She jerked, stumbled. Sucked in air to scream—
It was only a pair of jackbraw. The scrawny birds were locked in their three-day mating tussle, and they scuttled away like a two-headed crab, staring in all directions.
Closer, every step took her closer to the beetle-beasts, while the worlags raced up the trail. By all nine moons, by all the Ancients, she prayed without conscious thought. If she didn’t reach the turn in time where the trail forked back north . . .
Her legs burned. The water-weight of her trousers dragged on her legs and stuck sloppily to her skin. She sucked in gnats and choked and spat, and the sixth moon broke over the eastern ridge. She was counting the trail in tens, not hundreds of meters now. Her hand clenched again instinctively, empty of her blade, and she barely noticed the clumps of fireweed that began to line the trail. Her only thoughts were of the armed men camping out at Bell Rocks and the worlags racing toward her.
By the moons, they had to be close. She could hear them underneath the howling wolves, the rhythmic pulse of beetle-beasts where their limbs struck the packed earth sharply. By all the idiots in the first silver hell, she was running straight toward their jaws.
There—movement, just at the edge of that hill. She caught it through lupine eyes, not her own. A moment more and she saw the leathered beasts for herself. Now her own vision could clarify the bone-and-black contrast of wolf-sight. She could see the beetle-beasts through a gap in the trees as clearly as could the wolves.
Wolfwalker, hurry—
Somewhere in muscles she thought were numb, she found more speed to burn, but the stitch in her side stabbed baldly. Rishte gathered the snarls of the packsong, shoved them toward her, filled her with more speed. The tenuous bond became sharp. The turn, there, where the fireweed ended at an old shale slide. Where the trail forked back steeply north, away from the beetle-beasts.
The wolves flashed ahead. Like a black tide, the worlags swept forward. Nori judged their speed and kept her pace to a steady sprint. She didn’t dare panic, not yet. There was still one kay to the camp. Six, eight minutes. That’s all she had to go. She didn’t even hear herself curse as a wet boot turned loosely beneath
her.
She hit the turn with a skidding run. Caught a green branch and used it to sling her body around like a whip. She threw one wild-eyed glance over her shoulder, half bounced from the force of the branch whipping back, and flung herself up the trail.
The camp. A ring of boulders. Some scrawny barrier bushes. Safety.
Rishte felt her relief and snarled in her mind. Death-scent. Blood-scent. Danger.
Were the men killers or just scouts who had found the bodies? She tried to shout the question into the grey. She didn’t understand the answer.
The worlags gained. Wolves seethed around her. She felt every inch, every dip, every rock and puddle as they did, before her own feet touched it. The stinkweed patch—she jumped it before she realized it was there. That hanging vine, she ducked before it grabbed her hair. A forest cat hissed from an overhead branch, and she snarled so savagely as she charged its tree that it leapt back and fled in the darkness.
How far? she gasped out to Rishte.
The wolf’s answer was urgent and sharp: an eerin, wounded, running, staggering, going down.
Half a kay? Less? She skidded down a tiny cut in the earth, vaulted a boulder, felt another branch snap on her ribs. She charged up the other hill. The wolf cubs whimpered helplessly as she pressed them too hard to her chest. Gnats stuck to her sweat-slick skin and gritted like grains of sand.
Two wolves now ran behind her. Rishte was ahead like a grey guide in her mind. Half a kay, maybe less. She kept that goal in her head as her father had taught her: Focus. Never give up and you’ll never lose. Never slow, and you can’t be caught. Don’t stop and you’ll never die. But he was Aranur of Ramaj Ariye, and he’d brought his mate back from the moons themselves. Nori was only his daughter.
Worlag claws snapped like ticks behind her as they clipped through the shrubs with ease. She put on another burst of speed. Half a kay. Less. She couldn’t see the campfire yet, but it was there; she could smell the wood. Idiots, she thought in the back of her mind. A fire at night was like a calling bell to a venge. To her, it was a beacon.
Her boots burned on her feet. Her arms were streaked with blood from shallow weals and scratches. One end of the sling flapped loosely, and she grabbed it in her fist before the pups could slip out. The camp was almost visible.
A tiny rise, a knee-deep creek, a patch of mud, a tree.
Danger, killers, Grey Vesh snapped into her mind. Not-pack. Lobo. Protect the cubs.
I hear you, Nori returned. Are you sure? Are you sure?
Helt’s voice cut across Rishte’s with the territory scent. Nori almost gagged. Urine. He’d smelled the raiders’ urine, and the kill sense in their minds. Blood-scent, decomp, urine, sweat—it was all there. She felt as if she’d licked a dead body. Her stomach heaved, and she staggered two steps, clenched her jaw like stone, and found a tiny burst of speed. Killers. They were the killers. There was no doubt of that in the wolves.
Light flickered. Rishte snarled. Instinctual unease, learned terror. The light, the blaze, the heat, the burning that could eat the bones of the forest. Fire.
I see it. Go. The Grey Ones obeyed like a shot. They raced away into the dark, leaving her with their young. Deep in her mind, behind her fear, the alien yellow eyes flickered. Call out, warn them, the thought rose up. We don’t turn/attack our own kind. She bit it back with her teeth. Danger, death-danger running behind her. She didn’t cry out the warning.
Worlags closing. Eighty meters. Sixty. She bolted toward the small patch of light. The wind shifted, and the smoke-scent was suddenly stronger. It was a banked fire, a small fire. They were upwind, and they didn’t know she was coming.
She sprinted now without thought. The yellow eyes narrowed beneath her mind. Her stomach clenched. She could see the flickering ring of the raiders’ camp, the circle of rough stones. Years ago, a ragged line of barrier bushes had been planted along two sides of the camp. Thin logs now created a rude corral to the left. A trail of sparks coiled up between trees. The man on watch was alert, not dozing, and another man sat nearby, working on some papers. Two others were down in their sleeping rolls. A pile of supply bundles, a stack of message tubes, some nondescript packs, an open pannier . . .
She flung herself toward the circle. She had no breath to call out, and didn’t realize how silently she still tried to run.
Slitted eyes glared in the back of her mind. (Warn/call) them. (Death/death) follows you. Warn them.
Nausea twisted the edge of her stomach. Fear punched through her gut. But still she did not cry out.
Behind her, the chittering fell silent as if the worlags, too, saw the men and saved their breath for the kill. Or else the sounds of wind and fire and fear filled her ears and blocked out their hunting.
Ahead, the riding beasts in the corral shifted restlessly. One dnu jerked its head and chittered. The guard raised his bow and stood in one fast movement, nocked a war bolt, and stepped close to one of the boulders. The other man thrust papers under the edge of a sack and did the same. All the dnu were chittering now, and two of them stamped their feet. The first man murmured to the other. The second one shook his head.
Like a demon, Nori burst from the shadows. For the barest instant, the two men were caught by the sight of her violet eyes glinting in the firelight. Then the first one shot instinctively. The bolt missed by a hairbreadth and was snatched up by night behind her. She leapt a boulder into the ragged circle. “Incoming,” the guard shouted. The other man lunged for Nori’s arm. The two sleepers woke instantly.
“Worlags,” Nori screamed, letting fear take voice. She almost wrenched free. The raider heard the unmistakable terror in her voice and flung her toward the others. Both guards whirled to face the beasts, and Nori staggered into the bags and papers. The woman raider threw off her covers, snatched up a bow, and grabbed for Nori with her other hand. The other man leapt wildly out of his own sleeping roll, tangled for a moment, and missed Nori’s arm. She scrambled across bags and bedding. The raider woman was right behind her. A bony hand caught her ankle and yanked. Hard fingers dug into her knee and threw her expertly to the ground. Loose papers scattered like leaves. Nori rolled, jackknifed, and slammed a hard-knuckled fist into the back of the woman’s wrist. The raider’s hand spasmed open. She kicked the side of the woman’s jaw and tore free, but tripped on the edge of the fire. Sparks seared her arm. One moccasin crushed coals. Wet leather sizzled. The other raider caught the edge of her jerkin, and she skidded on sheets of paper. Her fist was a blinding hammer on the man’s elbow, his ribs, his kidney. He stumbled, caught himself, and the first worlag sprang into the circle. Nori didn’t wait. She grabbed what she could in her fist—a handful of notes, half torn, no more, lunged up and, clenching the papers, threw herself through the smoke. She jumped a saddle pack and fled as the beasts turned on the raiders. She was into the shadows, back in the night, when the first man screamed behind her.
VIII
You think you can see threat?
Search where you will,
You’ll never find it.
It’s always where you forget to look,
Behind you, right at your heels.
—from Stealing Time, by Lansa neHoare
Wakje wasn’t surprised by the news of the search. The older man simply tossed the reins of his dnu to Payne, then murmured to his driver and climbed back into the dinged-up wagon. A few moments later, he emerged fairly dripping with weapons. His sword was belted on. A double quiver of war bolts was slung across his shoulder, and a compound bow was slung beside it on a tipstrap. Like Payne’s father, Wakje preferred the maneuverability of the compound bow to the draw speed of the recurve. It was one of the first lessons the ex-raider had taught the boy. When shooting in close quarters or in the forest, it was the ability to shoot from any position, not the speed of the draw that mattered. There was no advantage in shooting a faster bow if one had to spend seconds positioning its length before getting off each shot. With worlags, badgerbears, and raiders, the difference
between the recurve and the shorter compound bow could be the breath between life and death. The other debates, of distance shooting and careful releases—those discussions were for competitions and lie-and-wait hunting, not for fighting worlags.
Kettre watched warily as the older man slapped a war cap on his greying head and plucked yet another knife from a rack behind the driver. The ex-raider already had two knives—one long, one shorter—sheathed at his belt. There were two more strapped onto his thighs. The fifth he tucked into the slot in his left boot. Kettre wouldn’t have bet that there wasn’t a sixth blade down the back of the man’s collar. With the pouch of throwing stars at his belt, Wakje could have stood off a pack of raiders by himself. He added a travel kit and two small botas, then stretched his arms twice as if that would loosen his body sufficiently for any action.
Payne watched Wakje adjust his sword, and didn’t even feel like smiling at the wealth of weapons as Wakje stepped neatly from seat to saddle. At a glance, the only sign of the man’s past life was the long scar that ran from chin to cheekbone on the left side of his face. But with a thread of fear tightening Payne’s gut at the absence of his sister, he had never been more grateful that his uncles had lived a different, darker, more violent life before they had joined Payne’s parents.
Like Wakje, Ki was already geared up. Kettre nodded to Ki’s two sons, also ready to ride. Payne threw an absent, worried smile at Ki’s daughter, who was to remain behind with their driver. “Nori’s been uneasy since this morning,” he told his uncles, and both men gave him a sharp look.
Kettre couldn’t quite keep the accusation out of her voice. “She didn’t tell me that.”
“It wasn’t anything she could pinpoint,” he explained. “Just a feeling.”
Ki’s voice was sharp. “Here? Among the cozar?”
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