by Claudia King
She found herself almost wishing that the food was not so delicious, for it was another uncanny distraction from more pressing thoughts. The honeycomb was as sweet as any she had ever tasted, the meat roasted perfectly and edged with a deliciously salty crust. Even the grains were different from the ones she knew. Everything here tasted as if it had been cooked with herbs and oils for extra flavour, creating tastes so complex that Kiren's mouth felt confused. She ate until she could eat no more, then slid her platter back across the table and began to wipe her fingers on the sides of her sleeveless leather jerkin.
“Wash yourself properly,” Atalyn said, gesturing to the northern wall of the chamber. Several clay basins were set out on another bench beneath the narrow windows, each of them full of water. “There will be time for you to bathe later. I expect it shall be a relief after your travels.”
Marvelling at the ease with which food and water seemed to appear within this house, Kiren stood up and went to wash the grime from her hands and face in one of the bowls. Behind her Adel began speaking again.
“You mean to keep us in comfort, then.”
“Of course,” Atalyn replied. “All guests of my temple live as only chieftains dream of living. My guards will watch you, of course, but you will be touched by no one. It is my hope that we can learn a great many things from one another, Seeress.”
“Your men seem very loyal. Are they loyal enough to tolerate beasts like us sleeping alongside them?”
“They won't know who you are,” Jarek said. “Passing for one of the Sun People is not so difficult when your wolf stays hidden.”
“What about the pilgrims who brought us here, and the warriors who came to the river? They must have guessed.”
“Thakayn assures me they will not speak a word of this,” Atalyn said.
“Does he?” Adel shot the Dawn King a glare. “How can he be certain?”
“My cousin is not a man of many virtues, fair though he may be, but he has a shrewd mind and he understands the craft of leadership. I am sure you must have similar men you trust to enact your will, Seeress.”
It was hard to tell whether the answer satisfied Adel or not, but she moved on to her next question. “Kiren does not speak your tongue. How will you explain that to your followers?”
“It is not uncommon for travellers to come here from distant lands. Not all of them know our tongue, and few of us recognise the Moon People's way of speaking. If your companion is quiet and patient, she will learn some of our language in time.”
“It was much the same for me when I arrived here,” Jarek said.
This time Adel seemed a little more satisfied. Once Kiren had finished washing she lifted one of the other bowls and brought it over to the table for the den mother. She'd not expected any words of thanks, so it shocked her when Adel flashed her a weary smile and placed a hand over hers. Kiren drew back somewhat abruptly, disconcerted by the den mother's glimmer of affection. It confused her the same way the food had confused her mouth. No one else seemed to notice, however, and now that the meal was finished Adel seemed desperately weary again. She washed her face, then set her elbows on either side of the bowl and leaned over it, bathing her brow with handfuls of cool water.
“I should take them to their domicile,” Jarek said, stepping forward.
Atalyn nodded. “Yes, yes, I think the night grows too long for us to continue this today. We shall speak properly in the morning. One last thing before we part ways, Seeress. As I understand it you are a woman of great authority. A leader of your clans.”
Adel opened her eyes and lifted her head. “I am.”
“It is... strange to meet a female leader. Among my people it is known that women are not well suited to leadership.”
“In what manner do you lead?” Adel replied. She sounded very tired indeed. “Like a hunter commanding his warriors? Then yes, if that is the only way you see leadership, most women may be ill-suited to it.”
“Yet you are not. You are one of those women who has some of a man's spirit in her.”
Adel gave the Dawn King a long, unblinking stare. “What of a mother who tends her family, or an elder sister who corrals her siblings? What if that was how you understood leadership? Then men would be the ones you thought ill-suited to it. There are many different ways to lead, Dawn King.”
A glimmer of excitement filled Atalyn's eyes. “And I see there are many great leaders I have yet to meet. I will look forward to speaking with you greatly, Seeress Adel.”
Jarek moved to the side of the table and placed a hand on Adel's shoulder. This time Kiren noticed how the den mother seemed to startle at his touch, subtle though the reaction was. She'd not thought to look for it before, yet now it seemed obvious. Even though vulnerability seemed like another emotion Adel was incapable of feeling, this was the closest Kiren had ever seen her to it.
“Before we become lost in talk of fate and leadership and spirits,” Jarek said, his voice hinting at playful mockery. “What the Dawn King meant to explain is that women hold a different place in these lands.”
“I am used to tribes ruled by men,” Adel said.
“I know, but a woman like you... you are different from the others here. Perhaps Kiren is, too. Our women may learn to listen for the voices of the spirits and tend simple ills, but they are not true shamans.”
“Why?”
“Questions for another time,” Atalyn said. He rose to his feet and gestured for Adel and Kiren to do the same. An alpha's firmness had seized him again, brooking no room for argument. “Jarek is right. This talk will consume men and women like us if we allow it. He has a way of reminding me of these things. All I will advise for now is that you be cautious in what you say and do. Try not to speak with anyone until our next meeting.” He bent to fill three cups with water from a long clay vessel. Like everything else, it was ornate and smoothly shaped in a way that seemed almost otherworldly to Kiren. “And please, before you sleep, drink the herbs that keep your animals slumbering.” Atalyn gave them an apologetic smile. “For an old man's comfort of mind.”
“I'll see to it, Dawn King,” Jarek said. “You must be weary yourself. Leave them with me, I shall see to it that they reach their domicile.”
“Thank you, Jarek. I am grateful you were there to stay my cousin's hand today. This meeting was destined by the spirits, I know it.” Atalyn gripped his high priest's arm and bent forward to whisper something to him, then placed a palm over his chest, bowed to Adel and Kiren, and departed the small chamber through a set of plain drapes on the opposite side.
Kiren stood up and carefully slid Adel's staff off the table, offering a hand to help her up. The den mother remained seated, staring at the cups of water as Jarek began to crumble handfuls of herbs into them.
“What is that plant?” she asked.
“It comes from the farmers in the northeast. For the Sun People it makes their food taste sweeter and settles upset stomachs. Some think it even makes water cleaner.” Jarek shrugged. “A shaman must have shared it with the Moon People one day. Our wolves run from the taste like it's wildfire.” He placed one of the cups before Adel.
“I'll not drink for your Dawn King's peace of mind.” She lifted the sleeves of her gown to reveal the red sores the ropes had left on her wrists. “I need my wolf's help in healing this.”
Jarek stared at the wounds, looked to the cups, then drank the contents of all three by himself.
“Thank you,” Adel said under her breath.
“Kiren?” Jarek said. She acknowledged him with a nod. “I will trust you because I trust Adel. Letting your wolf free in this place would be very, very unwise.”
“I understand.”
Jarek gave her a strained smile, then the pair of them helped Adel to her feet.
Though Kiren struggled to maintain a stoic outward demeanour, she could practically feel the wolf squirming with glee in her belly. Soon it would be free again. By the time she awoke the next morning she might even be able to change shap
e. Despite Jarek's warning, she longed to feel her old strength surging through her limbs, sharpening her senses, dragging her leathers into a thick coat of fur. Her wolf would fill her in the same way the Dawn King's rich food had filled her belly. And for the first time since Liliac had taken them captive, she would have the strength to challenge her captors.
—17—
Silent Steps
Though the people and lands here were different, Netya found herself doggedly pursued by memories of her little forest village. It was a weight in her throat every time she spied a thatched roof or the dry stone walls of a farmstead. This place felt like home in a way the wilderness never had, she realised. Home had come to mean two different things for her; there was the place, and then there were the people. The Moon People were her family now, Caspian and Adel and Fern. Wherever they were, that was where her heart would lie. She knew that without question. She'd let go of the painful memories binding her to the past to embrace a different kind of belonging. Those thoughts kept her going as they travelled through the lands of the Sun People, reminding her that it was the realm of the spirits—the realm of the heart—that mattered to her more than where she had come from.
Yet Netya was still a woman of flesh and blood. Wise, but not yet old, and the memories of her childhood hung on like the grass seeds that clung to her gown. Home was a place as well as a people. A place of comfort and reassurance, where the world's dangers grew small and sleep came easily at the end of the day. She had left that childhood comfort behind in a place very much like this, so similar that she almost expected to see the face of her mother every time they passed by a group of people on the path. Those eerie memories, the ghosts of forgotten home, troubled Netya more than the other dangers surrounding them.
Despite knowing that they were monsters to the people of these lands, she and Kale travelled easily and without suspicion. To the eyes of the farmers they were simply a pair of travellers, albeit bedraggled and poorly equipped ones. They spoke the native tongue naturally and with familiar intonations, and when questioned there was no need for them to lie about their places of birth. Kale was a young man from one of the southern villages, and Netya a woman from the forest.
At first they stayed close to the river, following a worn dirt path on its northern bank, but when they attempted to sleep in the long grass they were awoken abruptly by shouts and flickers of torchlight on the opposite side of the water. Anxiously they had watched as a group of shadowy figures emerged from a walled farmstead on the far bank, some of them moving along the shore while others paddled a canoe. It was hard to tell in the darkness, but it looked like those without torches were carrying spears. They seemed to be searching for someone. Netya told herself it could not possibly be them, but as the canoe came nearer she began to worry. She did not know what kind of oracles these Sun People had. What if a shaman had somehow glimpsed their passing the way a wolf picked up scents? When she heard one of the canoe riders yell something that could have been “Moon People” she grabbed Kale's hand and fled into the darkness.
From then on they tried to keep the river at a distance, sleeping in turns so that someone was always on watch. At first they tried to go around the settlements they encountered, but with few trees or hills to conceal them their passing was always conspicuous. People called out to them and waved in their direction, or else watched nervously as they went by. One time a group of menacing figures gathered with spears in their hands, following Netya and Kale at a distance until they were well past the farmstead they had been skirting.
After a couple of days hunger finally got the better of them. Without their wolves they could not hunt, and any forage that might have been found near the paths had long since been claimed by other travellers. At Kale's insistence they began walking through settlements rather than around them. A farmstead here, a cluster of houses there, and even the occasional village. No one paid any attention to them once they started behaving like normal travellers. A farmer's wife, seeing Netya's bare feet and torn deerskin gown, invited her in to stay the night, though she insisted that Kale stay outside, for she did not trust strange men around her daughters. Netya left the following morning with the stitching of her gown re-sewn, and a pair of tight but well-made moccasins on her feet. The farmer's wife had been kindly and generous, and Netya wished she could have repaid her somehow.
“Could you have told her future?” Kale asked once they were out on the path again. Despite his night outdoors he looked better rested than he had been in days.
“I did not want to frighten her.”
Kale nodded, then asked, “Can you tell ours? I think we need a seer's sight now more than ever.”
“If the spirits show me something in my dreams I will tell you, but the future rarely reveals itself in that way.” Netya wondered whether she should be sharing this knowledge with Kale, though at this point the secrets of the seerhood seemed like a distant concern. “We can search our visions for wisdom we think will help those around us. The better we know someone, the more easily we may find it.”
“Have your visions told you anything about me?” Kale looked nervously hopeful.
Netya's first impulse was to tell him no, but she spent a moment in silent consideration nonetheless. As little attention as she had been paying to her dreams as of late—most of which were dark and feverish—she owed it to her companion to at least try. There were so many scattered fragments of worry in those dreams, nightmares of rushing water followed by aching memories of home. If the spirits were trying to tell her anything about the future, their message was a fraught and troubled one.
“The spirits of this land remind me of the time before,” she said.
“Before we were Moon People?”
“Yes. They want me to remember things I have decided to forget.”
“Perhaps they want us to go home. My dreams have been the same, too! The spirits of this land must be calling us back.”
Netya shook her head slowly. It was a grey morning, one of only a few that summer, and mist clung to the long grass around their feet. The plains, golden and bright up until that point, were suffused with a pallid, melancholic dampness. Netya held out her hand to feel the brush of the grass, then licked a few scant dew drops from her fingertips.
“It can be easy to confuse the wisdom of the spirits with the pull of our own hearts.”
Kale did not ask her anything else that morning.
Whenever they had the opportunity they asked about the canoes that had come down the river ahead of them. At first they received mixed answers from the Sun People they met. Some talked of wood rafts being taken to craftsmen, others of warriors returning from the edge of the plains, but eventually the story of Liliac and his pilgrims found its way to their ears. A band of returning pilgrims had come down the river a few days ago, and pilgrims all headed to the same place. Just as Kale had suspected, they would be going to the centre of the heartlands, to the village of the Dawn King. That was to be their destination, and that was where Adel and Kiren would be found.
In the preceding days Netya had begun to lose hope of catching up with Liliac once it became clear that travelling in the shapes of their wolves was no longer wise, but now that they knew where they were going she felt determined again. Each subsequent interaction with the Sun People made her more confident that she could travel this land without arousing suspicion. More than that, she had realised that she might even be able to find allies here. When the people of her village had cast her out they had known she was an abomination, but here she appeared no different from anyone else. Perhaps a little paler of skin and darker of hair, but that was nothing unusual. So long as no one suspected the truth, she could ask questions and beg favours in a way she never would have been able to in the wild lands of the Moon People.
When there were no wild berries or untended crops to pick at, they tried to find meals in the settlements they passed. Through their conversations they gathered that the warm summer had ripened many crops early that
year, resulting in a bountiful harvest for the farmers. While few gave away their food for nothing, most were happy to share meals with Netya and Kale so long as they helped with the preparation or assisted in some other menial chore. According to Kale it was custom for each farmstead to send a tribute of food to the Dawn King every year, and bigger harvests meant larger tributes. Many farmers complied with this begrudgingly, trying to eat through as much of their excess bounty as possible before the Dawn King's servants arrived to determine what they were owed.
The longer they walked the more people they encountered. They were drawing close to the heart of the plains, Netya realised, with the paths and settlements becoming more densely clustered, like the threads at the middle of a spiderweb. Kale's keen eyes spotted the great hilltop temple first, pointing it out to Netya when it was little more than a dark lump on the horizon. As they drew nearer the lump took on definition, revealing the houses packed at its base and the angular, step-like formation of halls that made up the Dawn King's temple. It was impressive, Netya had to admit, but ever since she left her forest village she'd witnessed many things that had awed her: the great gathering of the Moon People, Khelt's cave of alphas, the night Adel had set their den ablaze with violet fire to drive back Alpha Miral. She no longer regarded such things with the wide-eyed astonishment she once had. The Dawn King's temple was a grand sight to behold, that much was true, and it spoke of a man who projected his power far and wide through such extravagant displays of status. Like the shining blade Liliac had presented to Adel, it was the work of a people who had riches of craftsmanship in excess.
“What will we do when we get there?” Kale asked.
Netya had thought about this, though she knew much of their plan would still need to be decided upon after they arrived. “We must tread carefully. Liliac and his men may still be here. I do not know if they will remember us from the riverbank, but it would be wise to assume that they shall.”