Storm runner, p.22
Storm Runner, page 22
He shook his head. “You cannot decide, alone, how to help them. It is not your job to do so—nor your obligation.” He stopped her automatic protest. “What is your obligation is helping the council understand what is going on so that the resources of our county can be used to help.”
“But I do not even know what is needed,” she burst out. “I cannot reach the wolves myself—not those on the other side of the river. Sobovi has had no more luck than I. And their pain is growing, Aranur.”
“One ninan, Dion, that is all we need.”
“Nine days? How much more pain will they suffer in that time?”
“Have we a choice? No, we do not,” he stated, answering his own question. “You are not ready to run trail again, and neither is Sobovi. The only other wolfwalkers that have bonded this year are neither scouts nor fighters—they could not do this even if they wanted to. Give yourself a ninan to heal. Give us a ninan to plan.”
“What if one of the wolves dies? What if they have already died for the raiders?”
“You sound like Moira talking about her people,” he returned wryly.
She gave him a strange look. “The Gray Ones are as much my people as the Randonnens of my own county.”
He regarded her for a long moment. “Yes,” he acknowledged. “But what would you do for them? How do you want us to proceed?”
She shrugged helplessly. “I know you are right, Aranur; I just feel that we have to do something—anything—now.”
“Something—anything—could get us killed,” he said shortly. “It could also do more harm to the wolves than good. We need to think about this, Dion. And you need time to rest before you can act.”
She bit her lip. “Perhaps not…” Her violet eyes grew dark with her frown.
Aranur watched her through narrowed eyes. “What is it?”
“Sobovi and I are in town tonight, but what about the other wolfwalkers? ” she asked.
“One lives in the town; the other two live north and east of here—too far to travel in time to the meeting at such short notice.”
She chewed thoughtfully at her lower lip. “What if…”
“Yes?” he prompted.
“What if we Called the wolves to us?”
“Hishn and Gray Yoshi? You said you could not find your answers through them.”
She shook her head. “I don’t mean just those two. I meant, Call the pack.”
Puzzlement etched his features. “But why? Hishn runs with a pack, and you said just yesterday that a few more wolves did not make a difference in the lack of an answer. What will change just because they come to the town?”
Dion licked her lips hesitantly. “I do not mean call just one pack, Aranur. I mean, Call all the packs. Call them as the ancients did, and read their images as if it were plain as a painting.”
“Call them to council?” Aranur was startled.
She nodded. “When there are so many in one place, their images are stronger, and we could read their memories as if they were our own.”
Aranur shook his head. “A Call has not been made for hundreds of years. No one knows how.”
“Eight hundred years,” she agreed. “But, Aranur, it was never a matter of not knowing how. Moonworms, there is little enough to it.” She almost laughed at his expression. “All it takes to Call the wolves,” she explained, “is a strong voice, a strong identity to hold against the weight of their senses. It has not been done because there was no need. The wolves have their freedom as they always did; nothing threatened them that they needed our help.” She sobered. “Until now.”
But Aranur shook his head. “Dion, a Calling such as this— you are talking about the weight of all the wolves in the county. The energy of all of them—focused in Ariye, focused in one county—what will it do to you? To Sobovi? To the other wolfwalkers? You go deep in the wolves when there are only ten or twelve of them. What would you do if there were more?”
“I was not myself then. I was weak, tired. I will be rested and strong when we call them.”
“I don’t like it,” he said flatly.
She gave him a helpless look. “How else can we reach them? Close as I am to Hishn, I could not get her to understand what I asked about when I questioned her at the rim. But if we Called the wolves, brought them to the council, asked them to speak for themselves…”
Aranur glanced at the forest, wondering if there were wolves even now listening to them talk. “You think they would come?”
“I don’t know.”
They fell silent, the impassive expression on Aranur’s face hiding a deep worry that, the more he thought about, began to gnaw more hungrily at his peace of mind.
In Bilocctar, when the winter ice still stretched its fingers between the roots and weeds…
When they found the woman, the resistance fighter called Usu threw up at the sight. She stood in the clearing with a head in her hands. She stared down at it while its body lay at her feet, limp arms making a circle in which she stood as if bound. Her front was covered in blood. Her face was disfigured—her left cheek swollen out as far as her nose, and the one eye unseen in the folds of flesh. The siker barbs strewn on the ground explained what had happened. If she was lucky, he told himself objectively, trying not to heave again, she would keep her eye. She was breathing strangely. It was not until he dismounted and looked into her eyes that he realized she was screaming. They tried to soothe her, but she cringed and breathed her noiseless screams until everyone but Blein left the clearing. Blein untied the woman’s hands from the hair on the head and laid the…
thing beside its body. The woman did not step away, just stood like a doll, staring at the two pieces of the man and screaming silently as if it were her mind, not her voice, that was gone.
It took two hours for Blein to wash away enough blood to find her wounds and treat her. By the time Usu and the others came back, the woman was no longer cringing. She looked at them dully, as if she did not really see them, and turned and walked and sat obediently, ignoring the pain that must have racked her body. She did not even wince at the crude stitches that Blein used to close her wounds. They had no healers to fix what was wrong—Blein had barely been apprenticed to the healers when she had been bundled from her home and sent to Usu for safety. Blein was young for what she did, but she had seen enough in the seven months she had been running with Usu to know how to treat a gash. This woman, though… Blein watched her with worry. Blein had seen that look before. The shock was on this woman deeply. She took the food they gave her, but did not eat until they put it in her mouth. She did not drink until they held the bota bags to her lips. The group Usu led was the resistance— they did not dare bring this woman close to a town to get better help. Neither would she be able to go by herself. If they left her, she would simply stand in the trail until some predator discovered her. Which might be the best thing they could do for her, Usu thought bitterly as he watched young Blein at work. Raiders had done this to the woman—there were no others in this county who knew such barbarity. But to bind two mates together and then kill one was a monstrosity he would have thought beyond even them. He cursed silently, motioning for one of the men to help him drag the decapitated body to the brush. One of the women followed with the head.
Usu came back to stand in front of the silent, battered woman. “Come,” he told her gently, nodding at the dnu they had brought forward and offering his hand to help her mount. She obeyed unresistingly. Her filthy clothes had been traded for some like his own, but where his men and women stood straight and wary, this woman was stooped and blank. His people looked like the fighters they were. This woman looked like a beggar.
““We are taking her with us?” Blein’s question was more of a statement.
“We cannot leave her here.”
Blein nodded. “What about…” Her words trailed off. The woman they had found had no voice left. Even when she saw what Usu’s group was up to, she could not scream to give them away.
Usu touched her gently on the shoulder. “She would not warn them even if she could.”
They mounted and rode forward, Usu far ahead of the others, his eyes watchful and wary beneath the trees. It took them two hours and three rainstorms to reach their destination, and when they did, they dismounted carefully, leading their dnu far back into the brush and covering their traces with moss pulled from underneath the ferns far back from the trail. There were small gullies all along here, and the riding beasts were led to one of these. They were too precious to risk the raiders’ warbolts.
“Hei-chu-chu, hei-chu,” one of the watchers called in the cry of the chunko bird. The cry was passed down the road, and on all sides, dark figures bellied down or crouched in the brush, their bows taut and their arrows steady between their fingers.
Closer rode the raiders. Eight, then ten of them in view. Usu was tense. This was a larger group than he had expected. Wait, he told his people silently. Wait… He could smell the dnu, hear the creak of the saddles, the soft slapping of the reins on the dnus’ neck as they stretched their heads toward the fresh greens on the side of the road. Wait…
Now! The lepa cry startled the raiders, but the warbolts were already flying. The two raiders across from Usu toppled from their dnu. The one ahead of those two crumpled over his saddle but stayed mounted, his dnu panicking and racing ahead. A woman screamed. Someone fell and was kicked by his own dnu as he writhed from the arrow sticking in his kidney.
Usu ran out of the brush, his sword in hand. He stabbed the raider who was crawling to flee into the forest, cutting through his kidney and wrenching his blade free again. The raider’s dnu stomped, shying its middle legs away from its rider’s body. Usu dodged its nervous kick, grabbing the reins and running it forward, away from the blood, where he could calm it. Behind him, others did the same. It was short, fast, and the only noises were the grunts and screams of dying men. Usu looped the dnu’s reins to a tree and looked back.
“By the moons…”He stared. Moving among the writhing bodies like a sleepwalker, was the woman they had rescued. She had a knife in her hands. A raider weakly raised an arrow-pierced arm to cut at her legs with his sword, but one of Usu’s men sliced his own blade across the raider’s back. The woman did not notice. Instead, she knelt beside the still-writhing body of another raider and, before Usu could shout, slit the man’s throat with two quick strokes.
She looked up, stood, and moved on to the next raider, and Usu began to run. Her hands dripped red, and her tunic was wet where the raider’s blood had spurted. She was oblivious to the fighting. Another raider was down, and the knife was slicing across the throat; and Usu dodged the body that still kicked the earth in its throes. She moved on. A dnu, stampeding past, shouldered her aside and knocked her to her knees. She did not rise, but crawled to the next raider, who, his spine severed and his arms paralyzed, watched her with rising horror. She took his hair in her hands and stared at it for a moment, then cut again.
Usu slowed to a halt. The fighting was over. His people were gathering the dnu, stripping the weapons from the bodies, stealing the boots and jerkins where they were not too torn, and there this woman moved, unaware of her surroundings, going from body to body and slitting throats. Even the raiders already dead did not escape her blade. And when she was done, she stood and walked back through the bodies, stooping and marking each face with the siker barb she pulled from her pocket.
Blein came up beside Usu. He said nothing, and Usu shook his head. “Look at her,” he said softly. “She is death.”
Blein shuddered. “That siker barb…”
He nodded. “She is marked with it herself.” He tried to ignore his chill as the woman moved closer, pressing the barb into the dead raiders’ cheeks. Three movements, three holes. Usu frowned. There was something about this systematic mutilation… He leaned forward, regarding the woman with a new expression. “Blein,” he said softly, “we will keep her with us.” He nodded, growing more certain with every second.
The younger woman looked at him in surprise. “Is that wise? We know nothing about her.”
“She hates raiders.” He gestured with his chin. “And what she does here will send a message to them. We have used their own tactics against them in the battles; now we use their terror. That woman, for us, will be a symbol—a figure that will strike fear back in the hearts of the raiders themselves.”
Blein stared at her, watching the woman puncture another cheek. “And her name?” she asked harshly. “What will we call her?”
“She is fragile, like a flower,” he said softly. “She is venomous as a snake. We will call her after what she does. We will name her… the Siker.”
When Aranur and the others reached the center of town, the sky was still overcast, the sun a pale shadow of what it would become in summer. The afternoon shadows were long, and evening had already begun to chill the air around them. When they swung down, Dion’s legs refused to work for a moment, and she clung to the saddle, waiting for the circulation to return. She grimaced. With circulation came the ache of muscles too long in one position. She snagged her gear from the back of the saddle, letting it slide into her hands as the stablegirl took the reins and led the mount away. She glanced wearily toward the council circle.
“Dinner first,” Aranur said from behind. ‘ “The meeting starts at the second moonrise.”
Tomi straggled after Dion, his blanket roll awkwardly in his arms, and Dion glanced back, taking pity on him. “Tomi, you look worse than I do. You are asleep on your feet.” She started to help him, but Aranur checked her, taking the boy’s gear so that he could stumble after them without losing anything in the twilight.
Food—hot food and warm drinks. Dion’s mouth watered at the smells coming from the home toward which they made their way. Ahead of them, Aranur’s uncle had already entered, greeting his boarders and telling them that they would have another guest for the meal, albeit a young one.
The meal was short. Gamon followed his nose to the kitchen, where he found plates for himself and the boy. It took only a minute to fill them with slabs of roast pig and the crusty, black-edged roots that made the boy’s mouth water. Tomi burned his fingers, then his tongue, on the roots. “It will be here when it cools,” Gamon said gently, seeing Tomi’s eyes water with the burn. The boy stiffened and dropped his hands from the plate. Gamon frowned at him, but said nothing more.
Dion did not sit while she ate, her buttocks still feeling warped by the saddle, and her legs stiff. She stood, pacing back and forth with her plate in her hands, until Aranur put his arms around her and drew her onto his lap. “Relax,” he whispered in her ear. “You make me tired just watching you.”
She made a face at him. “Your thighs are hard as my saddle. I can hardly relax on your lap when my behind feels like it has been dented by that dnu.”
“If you want tougher buttocks, do more riding and less running.” He grinned at her indignation. “Besides, if you scouted from the back of a dnu, you would cover the same ground in twice the time. We could see each other every day instead of every other.”
She leaned across him and set her plate on the table. “Fat chance of that,” she retorted, struggling to free herself. “If I rode a dnu on the trails, you would just have me cover twice as much ground.”
His gray eyes crinkled as he shrugged elaborately. “Would you have me let you grow lazy? I would never survive the ribbing from the other scouts. A weapons master of my stature cannot be giving special privileges to a lowly scout like yourself—” He broke off with a laugh as she shoved hard against him and scrambled to her feet. She put her hands on her hips.
“Lowly scout?” She glared at him.
“Did I say lowly? I meant lovely,” he returned with a grin.
She raised her eyebrows.
“Truly. Lovely. You are.”
Dion would have retorted, but there was a knock on the outer door. They sobered abruptly as a woman named herself politely, then poked her head inside and called them to council. A few minutes later, wrapped in her cloak and settling her healer’s band firmly on her brow, Dion walked out between Aranur and Gamon. Tomi trailed their shadows without a word.
The council circle was an outdoor amphitheater. It sat in the center of town, worm-carved out of bedrock so that it dipped deeply below the surface of the earth. Copying the design of the ancient domes, gas vents from the mountains had been channeled beneath the carved tiers so that the stone seats were hot and the circle radiated warmth. In the summer, the channels were closed. Since this was spring, and a wet chill was in the air, the channels had been left open. The rain that had fallen earlier had not lingered on the seats, but dried with the mountain’s heat as if it were summer. Had it still been raining, they would have met in the covered theater that was worm-carved out of one side of the cliff that bordered the town on the northwest side.
There was already a crowd in the amphitheater when they arrived. Looking down, Dion saw that the Lloroi was seated with the other elders, and that the refugees were seated near them. Except for the elders, the people took whichever seats they preferred, looking for spots near friends or family. It did not matter where they sat; the acoustics were perfect. One could hear a child’s whisper from one end to the other, and a dropped coin was a sharp sound that could not be ignored.
The crowd gathered and settled, shifting as children clambered and fidgeted to be near their mothers or fathers or friends. Parents looked worriedly for their young ones while the small, quick bodies flashed in and out of sight in the bobbing mass of taller heads and shoulders. While they settled, the elders spoke to people in greeting, waving at some, gesturing for others to join them for a short discussion. Dion and Aranur hung back, but the Lloroi caught sight of them and motioned for them to come down to the center. Aranur shrugged at Dion, then made his way down the stairs. Reluctantly, Dion followed. Tomi trailed doggedly after, his thin hand gripping the edge of her cloak when the mass of people shifted thickly around them. The Lloroi, who regarded them as he spoke to the elder beside him, almost smiled at the wariness Dion projected. Her steps were lighter even than Aranur’s, and her movements as soft in the shadows as if she were a wolf herself. Where others climbed the stairs, she glided; where his people sat, she faded into the stone. But the moons were rising, and the people waiting. With an imperceptible sigh, the Lloroi stood. Council had begun.
