Bones of the Empire (29 page)

“Oh hells,” Estin sighed. He ran, trying to get out of the way as Feanne rose to her feet, letting loose another loud cry of challenge to the other lycanthropes, who had slowed and appeared less certain of themselves.

At her full height as a were-fox, Feanne stood almost ten feet tall, full of rippling muscle and anger. Despite her eyes still being blue after the change, Estin could see the bright green glow of magic from them. She raised her head to the sky to howl again, but that cry was cut short as Arella crashed into her hard enough that Estin fell when the ground shook. As soon as he came down, Estin flattened out as the rest of the werewolves ran right over top of him, trying to aid their high priestess. Heavy paws dug into his back but kept going, leaving him to curl into a ball to avoid further trampling.

For her part, Feanne was holding her own, fighting with a ferocity Estin had only seen a few times, even when she had shape-changed. She spun and kicked, clawed and bit, turning and moving as fast as she could with group of werewolves and their pack-leader trying to get a hold on her. She towered over all of them, using her size and strength to toss one or more werewolves aside at a time, stepping on those that had fallen to keep them down while she fought.

On the far side of the fight, Estin could see Rishad sitting up, his arm cocked at an odd angle. As he watched, Rishad’s arm snapped back to its normal position and he looked at the ongoing fight with the same frustrated and scared expression Estin probably had on his face.

Estin managed to find Turess lying in the snow with one hand on his side. Blood in the snow around him told of a deep wound, but Estin had to hope he could tend to his own injuries.

A shrieking cry startled Estin, and he ducked as a shadow passed overhead. Peeking, he stared as a werewolf crashed into the wall of Jnodin, scattering the archers who had been watching from the battlements. The wolf fell from the wall to the ground and struggled to stand before falling again. Its wounds might heal, but it would take time to recover enough to fight again.

When Estin looked back at Feanne, he saw she was actually using one of the werewolves like a club to bash its companions, knocking them aside and scattering them when they tried to overwhelm her. Behind her, one of the wolves tried to attack her back, but Feanne kicked out and raked the werewolf, tearing open his chest and stomach with her claws. Even those deadly wounds looked to be healing as the werewolf dragged itself out of the fight and collapsed into the snow nearby, trying to hold its intestines in.

“This is insane,” Rishad said, stumbling and nearly falling as he came to stand near Estin.

A moment later, Turess headed their way, the white underrobe he wore stained red on his left side. “This is beyond me.”

Estin groaned and got to his feet, then ducked again as another wolf was thrown against the city walls, cracking the stones with its impact. Before he made it more than a few steps, he saw one of the werewolves—Arella, he had to assume by her fur coloring—began snarling and taking swings at the other wolves, driving them away from Feanne. Soon only the two females remained in a blood-spattered section of the plains, panting and glaring at each other.

“They have this under control,” Estin said, stopping before he got too close the battlefield. The wounded and battered werewolves backed out of combat until they were standing near Estin and the others, watching. “We need to stay out of this or they’ll kill us first.”

The werewolf and were-fox circled slowly, their remaining wounds closing as they moved. Neither looked quite ready to yield, but Estin wondered if there would ever come a point where the two were so exhausted that they would be willing to. For a long time, they seemed content with watching each other.

Howling and cries from the north drew the attention of everyone, including the werewolves. From the snow-covered hills, a horde of dire wolves, more werewolves, a group of smaller animals, and even a towering bearlike creature came running straight toward the two females, who were still circling.

All around him, the werewolves backed away from the group of animals and other creatures that more than tripled their numbers. The approaching group stopped, maintaining a comparable distance from Feanne and Arella to that of the werewolf priests. Rather than watching the two combatants, the animals and newly arrived lycanthropes watched Arella’s fellow priests challengingly.

Estin had seen enough battles in his short life that he recognized reinforcements when he saw them. Arella might have a pack of werewolves, but Feanne had somehow brought a massive group of monstrous creatures from somewhere in the Turessian wilderness. Whoever or whatever they were, they were ready to fight the priests to keep them from Feanne.

Turning one way and then the other, Arella surveyed the groups around her. Letting her hands drop to her sides, she looked back to Feanne and growled again, hesitantly backing away. Arella looked around one more time, stared at Rishad for several long seconds, then focused her attention to Estin. Baring her teeth one more time, she shifted her paws, adjusting her weight as though debating whether to stay or run. She dropped to her knees as she returned her attention to Feanne. Slowly, Arella lowered her head to the snow in a humble bow.

Snarling, Feanne loomed over Arella, eyeing her foe with unadulterated hatred, clearly trying to decide whether to strike. She looked past Arella toward Estin, watching him for a long time before relaxing her stance. Feanne then raised her muzzle to the sky and howled again, this time joined by all of the nonpriest werewolves, the dire wolves, several bears, white foxes, and other animals Estin could not even identify. There were easily a hundred creatures out there, with still more coming, and all of them joined Feanne’s cry, their howls echoing across the whole of the northern border.

“Welcome to Jnodin,” Rishad told Estin, walking past him toward the open gates, where the two werewolves who had hit the wall were shifting back to their human shape.

*

An hour later, Estin stood over Feanne, tying off a bandage on her arm where one of her wounds had not healed fully before she changed back. Across the temple, Arella was being similarly tended to by Rishad, who had wrapped a chunk of ice in a cloth and held it to an ugly bruise across her neck and shoulder. Both women were wrapped in blankets, since their clothing had been destroyed, and once they had returned to their normal shapes, they shivered uncontrollably in the cold weather. Estin knew it to be a side effect of exhaustion from the changes, at least in Feanne’s case. Neither woman appeared willing to admit their own weaknesses.

“Do we do this again when you have caught your breath?” Feanne asked, sounding more than a little angry yet. She pushed Estin’s hand away from her arm. “Keep your pups out of my way, and I’ll leave mine in the woods.”

“No, I think I am done challenging you.” Arella winced as she tried to adjust how she was sitting. Almost as an afterthought, she lifted the edge of her blanket and eyed a nearly black bruise that covered much of her lower leg. “Does your regeneration ever fully heal you?”

“Never,” Feanne admitted, rubbing her knee. “I always return to normal with bruises or cuts that require more mundane healing.”

“And here I thought that was just us,” Arella said, shooing Rishad away. “When were you planning to tell us what you are?”

“It was not and should remain none of your business. Walking into a city should not require that I strip naked and howl to announce myself. If that is how your priests are expected to behave, I am happy that I was raised in the wilds.”

Arella laughed and then whimpered, holding her shoulder. “Trust me, if I could have made that a law here, I would have. Would make it far easier to identify allies and challengers.”

“I am not your ally. You made that very clear already,” Feanne snapped, and Estin quickly put a hand on her shoulder in case she was about to start another fight. Her ears flattened back, but she said nothing.

“Where did you gain your gift?” Arella asked, putting the ice back on her own shoulder. “I have been raised among wolves my whole life and studied our so-called curse since I was a child. Never have I seen a were-fox, let alone any lycanthrope that can call to anything but their own for help. Wolves call wolves. Bears call bears. Nothing calls dire wolves.”

Feanne gave Estin a pleading look he knew all too well. She hated talking about her past, let alone anything to do with her transformations. All of her bluster was gone and she abruptly looked ready to run.

Squeezing her shoulder to let her know he would take care of things, Estin said, “Go with Rishad and get some new clothing. Turess will go with you. I’ll be right here when you come back.”

Putting her hand over his and smiling at him, Feanne groaned as she stood, keeping one hand on the blanket she wore. With the other, she pulled Estin close, hugged him, and nuzzled his neck. “I am sorry for taking that fight from you,” she whispered near his ear. “You asked me not to.”

“In hindsight, thank you.”

Feanne giggled quietly and nipped his ear before walking away with Rishad and Turess, heading toward the back stairs of the temple. From what Estin remembered of the place, there were rooms where the priests kept clothing there, along with a natural spring they used for ritual bathing.

“She is ashamed of what she is?” Arella asked once the others were gone. “There is no reason to feel shame over a gift of Kerrelin such as—”

“No god gave her that gift,” Estin said quickly, sitting on one of the chairs near the temple’s altar. Sighing, he looked up at the sky above the temple. The ring of walls around him blocked out the city, but not the stars. At the top of the stone wall, where archers had stood during his first visit, he noticed a faint line of carvings. They were impossible to make out clearly at a distance, but they seemed quite different from the etched pictures of trees and animals elsewhere. “A fae gave it to her. It didn’t tell her what it was doing or the implications until she accepted. She was young and scared, craving the ability to avenge her sister’s death. Now she can’t get rid of it.”

“The fae are nature spirits, Estin. Some revere them as gods, though we see them more as embodiment of the power of Kerrelin. He was born out of their power and rose to be greater than them. A gift from nature is no curse.”

“She was little more than kit when that thing forced this on her. It turned her into a killer for most of her life, hunting down furriers, loggers, and anything else that it thought threatened the woods. Feanne has more scars on the inside from that creature’s meddling than she has on her skin, and that is saying a lot.”

Arella nodded sadly. “The way of the wilderness is not one that leaves us as whole as we would like. Pain strengthens or destroys us. Your mate is strong, without equal among my pack. I have done things that I regret as well, but we all must make such choices.”

“All we wanted to do was talk to you about helping us. Was that too much to ask that it had to come to this?”

“No. This was a misunderstanding,” Arella admitted. “I saw the two of you as trying to force us to break our vows to wait until Kerrelin called us to serve. You were a threat, in a sense. No one threatens my pack or my city.”

“We wanted help, not to threaten you.”

“I know, Estin, I know. Your mate beat that understanding into me today, along with the reminder that I should not strike at another female’s mate if I intend to walk away in one piece. May I ask one other thing about her, though?”

Estin got back up, paced briefly, and shrugged. “Ask whatever you want. Just ask me, not her. She hates this topic.”

“Do you know why her eyes glow green?”

Thinking back over his years with Feanne and the fight with the werewolves, he realized she was the only one whose eyes glowed at all. The others gleamed in the light, but Feanne’s emitted a light of their own. Most fights where she had transformed had been at night, and the glow had illuminated the creatures she ripped apart. It was distinctive and frightening, even after seeing it as many times as he had.

“I have no idea,” he confessed. “I honestly thought all lycanthropes were like that when I first met her. Now I’ve been around her long enough that I hadn’t given it further thought.”

“It is not normal among our kind. Not hardly. I have never seen another like that, myself.” Getting up with another whimper, Arella limped her way over to the altar, where she picked up an old book. Carrying it back with her, she walked up to Estin and dropped it on the floor in front of him. “I won’t tell you what I think. You tell me.”