Rule my flesh, rule my soul. The currency is the same.
She had no time for scholars and their sophist games. And no time for poets, either, who seemed obsessed with obscuring hard truths inside seductive language. Their collective gifts were ones of distraction, a tripping dance of entertainment along the cliff’s edge.
A sudden blur in the grainy gloom. A high-pitched scream intended to freeze the prey. Iron blade, serpent-twined, rippling out beneath the swirling stars, like a tongue of Vitr. Piercing scream, the thrashing on the ground of a mortally wounded body. A hissing growl, paws scrabbling behind her. Lunging motion***
Faror Hend straightened, holding up a hand to keep Spinnock silent. Another eerie cry sounded in the night, distant and to the west. She saw Spinnock draw his sword, watched him slowly rise to his feet. Finarra Stone was late — half the night was gone. ‘I hear no other voice,’ Faror said. ‘No heghest or tramil.’
‘Nor that of a horse,’ Spinnock said.
That was true. She hesitated, breath slowly hissing out from her nostrils.
‘Still,’ Spinnock went on, ‘I am made uneasy. Is it common that Finarra remain out so late?’
Faror shook her head, and then reached a decision. ‘Stay here, Spinnock. I will ride out in search of her.’
‘You ride to where those wolves do battle, cousin.’
She would not lie to him. ‘If only to ascertain that their quarry is not our captain.’
‘Good,’ he grunted. ‘Because I fear for her now.’
‘Build up the fire again,’ she said to him, collecting her saddle and hurrying over to her mount.
‘Faror.’
She turned. His eyes glittered above the first lick of flames from the embers. The light made his face seem flushed.
‘Be careful,’ he said. ‘I do not want to lose you.’
She thought to say something to ease him, to push him away from things lying beneath his words. To push herself away. ‘Spinnock,’ she said, ‘you have many cousins.’
He looked startled.
She turned back to her horse, not wanting to see more. Her tone had been dismissive. She’d not meant it to be, and its harshness seemed to echo in the silence between them now, cruel as a cut. She quickly saddled her horse, mounted up and lifted her lance from its sheath. Heel-nudging her mount out from the shelter of high, craggy boulders, she guided it towards the verge.
More wolves were keening to the night. Against small prey, the packs amounted to but three or four. But this sounded like a dozen, perhaps more. Too many even for a heghest. But she could hear no other cries — and a tramil’s bellow could knock down a stone wall.
It’s her. Her horse is dead. She fights alone.
Beneath the swirl of starlight, Faror urged her mount into a canter.
The memory of Spinnock’s face, above those newborn flames, hovered in her mind. Cursing under her breath, she sought to dispel it. When that did not work, she forced upon it a transformation, into the visage of her betrothed. Few would claim that Kagamandra Tulas was handsome: his face was too thin, accentuating the gauntness that was his legacy from the wars — the years of deprivation and hunger — and in his eyes there was something hollow, like emptied shells, haunted by cruel memories that shied from the light. She knew he did not love her; she believed he was no longer capable of love.
Born in a Lesser House, he had been an officer in Urusander’s Legion, commanding a cohort. If nothing else had ever overtaken Tulas in the wars, his station would have been of little value to House Durav. A lowborn of the Legion was no prize for any bride. Yet if love were possible — if this bitter, damaged man could earn such a thing, and learn to reciprocate in kind — then few would have opposed the union. But glory had found Tulas, and in that moment — when he saved the life of Silchas Ruin — the cohort commander had won the blessing of Mother Dark herself. A new High House would be the reward of this marriage, the elevation of Kagamandra’s extended family.
For the sake of her own bloodline, she would have to find a way to love Kagamandra Tulas.
Yet, as she rode through the night, she could not find his face — it remained blurred, formless. And in those dark smudges where his eyes belonged, she saw glittering firelight.
Obsessions were harmless, so long as they remained trapped inside, imprisoned and left pacing the cage of firm conscience; and if temptation was a key, well, she had buried it deep.
The lance’s weight had drawn her arm down, and she decided to seat the weapon in the socket riveted to the saddle. The wolf cries had not sounded for some time, and there was nothing on the bleak, silvered landscape before her to mark their presence. But she knew how far those cries could carry.
Faror willed her mind blank, opening her senses to the verge. She rode on for a time, until some instinct made her slow her mount. Hoofs thumped a succession of double beats as the beast dropped out of its canter, jostling her as she settled her weight into the trot. She now listened for the sound she dreaded: the muted snarls of wolves bickering over their kill.
Instead, a fierce shriek sliced through the night, startling her. Unseating the lance, she half rose in her stirrups. Drawing tight the reins she forced her frightened horse into a walk. The cry had been close. Still, before her she could see nothing untoward.
There.
A humped form, a trail of blood and gore, black in the grey dust. Beyond it, another.
Faror brought her mount up alongside the first dead wolf. A sword thrust had impaled the soft tissues of the belly, ripping open its gut. Fleeing, the savage creature had dragged its entrails behind it, until stumbling in them. Now the wolf huddled in a tangle, like a thing pulled inside out. Blood sheathed its scaly hide and the lambent eyes were ebbing.
The second beast lying a dozen paces further on had been hacked almost in half, a downward chop through the spine and down between ribs. The ground around it was scuffed, criss-crossed with ragged furrows. Wary, she guided her horse closer.
No boot prints in the dirt, but the gouges of claws and kicking limbs could well have obscured such signs.
Blood still poured down from the deep wound, and, leaning over, she could see the beast’s labouring heart. Alarmed, Faror pulled back. The wolf’s baleful eyes tracked her and the head tried to lift.
She set the point of the lance into the soft sack of the creature’s throat, and then punched the blade deep into the neck. The wolf tried biting at the long blade for a moment, and then fell back, jaws gaping, eyes fading. Straightening, tugging her weapon free, Faror looked around.
The edge of the grasses was a broken wall off to her left, perhaps sixteen paces away. Most of that barrier had been battered down, chewed by the passage of many beasts. Random sprays of blood made dark sweeps in the grey dust. Her searching gaze fixed on one path, where it seemed the passage had been at its most violent. The root bundles flanking the gap were thick with gore. She saw stalks sliced clean, blade-cut.
Halting her mount, she listened, but the dark night was again silent. Faror eyed the mouth of the trail. If she set out upon it, she suspected, she would come upon a grisly scene — the wolves feeding on a corpse. She would have to drive them off, if she could, if only to recover Finarra Stone’s body. It was clear to her that the fighting was over.
She hesitated, and not without some fear. It was not a given that she’d succeed in defeating the naked wolves; more packs would have been drawn to the kill site by the scent, and the eerie howls she had heard earlier. Somewhere in the high grasses there was a clearing, trampled down and bloody, and around it circled rival packs. There could be as many as fifty of the animals by now, and they would be hungry.