Brotherhood of the Wolf (28 page)

A DAY WITHOUT CHOICE

13
THE FOURTH EAR

Even in the shifting winds, Bessahan smelled the smoke of the messenger's fire from three miles down the trail. He was high in the Brace Mountains, in the deep pines. The clouds had scudded in just at sunset, smelling heavy with rain, and in half an hour the rain was pelting down while lightning flashed. The winds shook the great pines, knocking branches down in the roadside. Falling leaves swirled about. His quarry dared not ride in such brooding darkness, and so they had been forced to stop beneath the trees. After an hour, the lightning had abated, and now only brief flashes sometimes lit the northern horizon. But the rain still fell.

He approached the smoke quietly, walking along the road, so that he made no noise, keeping low, until the smell of the wood smoke came strongest.

He had expected to find King Orden's messengers camped by the highway, but after passing the source of the scent, he realized that they were being wary. They'd taken a side trail, climbed up the mountain to a hidden glade. From the road, he could not even see their fire.

So Bessahan got off his horse, tied it to a tree, and strung his bow. Then he pulled out his khivar and inspected it. He'd cleaned the blade after beheading the old woman. Now he took a moment with an oilstone to hone it sharp, in the darkness, working by feel alone.

When at last he felt prepared, he took off his hard shoes, letting his bare feet grip the cold muddy road as he prepared to ascend the hill.

For a Master in the Brotherhood of the Silent Ones, it was not a great challenge. To climb through brush in the
darkness was not difficult, only cold and miserable and sometimes painful. He had to feel his way through the underbrush, letting his fingers and toes search for twigs that his eyes could not see.

So it was that he began his slow ascent. The trail was not hard, he soon discovered. The moss here was thick, and he found himself crawling through a bed of deep ferns higher than a man's chest. The trees here were old, had stood like this for a hundred years, and twigs were scarce on the forest floor. The few he encountered were small, and because they were wet and old and rotten, they snapped softly. The ferns and the pelting rain muted any sounds of breakage.

Only once in his journey did he encounter any difficulty. As he crawled along his palm sank into the moss and hit something sharp, possibly a ragged piece of bone left by a wolf. The wound it caused was small, a tiny puncture that hardly bled. He ignored the pain.

In half an hour, he reached the summit of the hill, topped a small rise, and glimpsed the fire. A great pine had fallen, a tree perhaps twelve feet in diameter, and it rested against the hillside at an angle.

The party was camped beneath the windfall, using it for a roof. They'd peeled off some of the drier bark to build a fire, but it was wet and smoky.

Now they lay in blankets beside the fire, talking to one another. The huge knight, the big red-haired messenger, and a girl child.

“Stop fretting,” the big red-haired messenger said. “You'll get no sleep worrying.”

“But it's been an hour since we heard her. What if she's lost?” the child asked.

“Good riddance, I say,” the fat knight replied.

“It was your fire that scared her,” the child accused the knight. “She's sore afraid of it.”

Bessahan halted, heart thumping. He'd thought he was hunting three people, but there appeared to be a fourth. His
lord paid him for his killings by the ear. He'd want that fourth woman's ear.

If she was looking for them, it would not be long before she stumbled into camp. Even a person without the benefit of a wolf's nose would smell that fire.

Bessahan backed away, decided to wait.

Yet as he eeled backward on his belly, down over the lip of the hill, he bumped against something solid.

He glanced back, looked up. A naked woman with dark skin smiled down at him stupidly. The fourth ear.

“Hello?” he whispered, hoping to keep her from shouting in alarm.

“Hello?” she whispered in return.

Was she a fool? he wondered briefly. Then she knelt on her haunches and studied him. In the dim light that reflected from the branches overhead, he could barely discern her. She was long-haired and shapely.

He'd been too long without a woman, and decided to enjoy her before he killed her. He reached up quickly, slapped a hand over her mouth, and tried to pull her down.

But she was stronger than she appeared. Instead of toppling down on him, she merely grabbed his hand and sniffed, an expression of pure ecstasy on her face, as if she were smelling a bouquet of flowers.

“Blood,” she said longingly, tasting the scent of his wound. She bit into his wrist, and pain blossomed. Her bite snapped clear through the tendons and ligaments, and blood gushed from an artery, spraying up like a fountain.

He tried to pull away, but the woman held him firmly. With three endowments of brawn to his credit, he pulled hard, trying to break free. The bones of his wrist snapped as he twisted, yet she continued to hold him tight. Catching a glimpse of her hand, he realized that what he'd imagined were long fingernails were not nails at all but claws or talons. She was not human!

The woman opened her mouth in astonished delight, watched the blood fountain out of him.

Bessahan brought his khivar up in a dreadful slash, attempting
to rip out her throat. The thin steel blade caught in her skin, but despite his endowments of brawn, the point hardly pierced her. Instead, the blade snapped off clean.

Blood had spurted all over his face and hands. Now the woman knelt down as if to lick it up.

He struggled silently as the woman forced him down and licked the blood from his face with a raspy tongue. As she began chewing at his chin, gnawing like a kitten that has not yet learned to kill the mouse it eats, he fought fiercely. Until the green woman's teeth found his throat. Then he finally went still, although his feet continued to kick and jerk until long after he knew no more.

It was well near dawn when the green woman entered camp. Roland had been asleep when suddenly he felt her touch as she lay down next to him.

Averan spooned against his belly, and the green woman came and tried to lie down at Roland's back.

She trembled from cold; the fire was but a smoking ruin, having gone out. For the last hour, the rain had been mixed with snow.

Roland slept beneath a blanket, and his new bearskin cloak lay over the top of that. He half-woke, took the cloak, and pulled it protectively over the green woman's naked skin, then he urged her with a few whispered words and motions to get under the blanket with him and Averan.

The green woman complied slowly, as if not sure what he desired. Once he had her lying between him and the child, where the body heat of them both would warm her, Roland merely wrapped a big arm and leg over her, to speed the process.

In minutes she had quit trembling so violently, and lay next to him, luxuriating.

In the creeping dawn, Roland could make out the green woman's features. She was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen, even with her odd skin tone, her dark green lips.

She lay next to him, but he became aware that she was
watching the smoking embers of the fire, still terrified.

“Don't worry,” he whispered. “It won't hurt you.”

She grasped his wounded hand, sniffed at the bandage. “Blood—no!” she said softly.

“That's right,” Roland answered. “Blood, no! You're a smart one. And obedient. Two qualities I admire in a woman—or whatever you are.”

“You're a smart one,” she parroted. “And obedient. Two qualities I admire in a woman—or whatever you are.”

Roland smelled her hair. It was odd, like… moss and sweet basil combined, he decided. He could smell the coppery tang of blood on her, too. She was a large thing, as tall as him, and more muscular.

He grasped her thumb, and whispered, “Thumb. Thumb.”

She repeated his words, and in minutes he taught her all about hands and arms and noses and moved on to trees, the autumn leaves, and the sky.

When he grew tired, he drifted back toward sleep, and hugged the green woman tightly. He wondered where she had come from, wondered if she felt lonely. Like Roland and Averan, she had no connections to anyone that he could see. All three of them were terribly alone in the world.

I should fix that, Roland thought. I could petition Paldane to become Averan's guardian. The world is too full of orphans, and she has my color of hair. People will think I'm her father. He promised himself he would talk to Averan about it tomorrow.

Perhaps because he held a woman in his arms, because he craved a woman's company, and because he still remembered a wife who had rejected him twenty years ago, he thought about Sera Crier, and the sense of duty that had sent him north.

He recalled his waking seven days earlier….

As he pulled on the loose-fitting trousers, Roland had said to Sera Crier, “I gave my endowments years ago, to a man named Drayden. He was a sergeant in the King's Guard. Do you know the name?”

“Lord Drayden?” she corrected. “The King let him retire to his estates several years ago. He is quite old—yours was not the only endowment of metabolism he took, I think. But he still travels each year to Heredon, for the King's hunt.”

Roland nodded. Most likely Lord Drayden had been thrown from a horse, he thought, or had met with one of the old tuskers of the Dunnwood. The great boars were as tall as a horse, and skewered many a huntsman.

The thought had hardly passed through his mind when a cry rang through the narrow stone halls of the Dedicate's Keep. “The King is dead! Mendellas Draken Orden has fallen!” And from elsewhere in the keep, someone cried, “Sir Beaufort has died!” Some woman shouted, “Marris is fallen!”

Roland wondered why so many lords and knights were dying at once. It bespoke more than coincidence, more than an accident.

He'd finished pulling on his boot and shouted, “Lord Drayden has found his rest!” Then cries from the Dedicates of the Blue Tower came fast and furious as deaths were reported, too many names, too many knights and lords and common soldiers, for any man to keep track of.

Boars did not slay so many men at once. There had to have been a great battle. And as dozens of voices began to meld together as the fallen were named, he thought, Nay, not even a battle. This speaks of slaughter.

Roland rushed from his chamber into the narrow hall of the Dedicate's Keep, found that his tiny berth stood at the top of a stairwell. A woman staggered out from a chamber nearby, massaging her hands, recently Restored from having given grace. Across a hall, another man blinked in amazement, gawking about. He'd given the use of his eyes to a lord.

Sera Crier followed at Roland's heels.

Shouts of grief rang through the Blue Tower, and, people raced down the stairs, toward the Great Hall.

The Blue Tower was ancient. Legend said it had not been built by men, for no man could have shaped and hefted rocks so massive as those that formed its barrier walls. Many thought the tower had been formed by a forgotten race of giants. The keep loomed thirty stories above the Caroll Sea. With its tens of thousands of rooms, the Blue Tower was a great sprawling city in itself. For at least three millennia it had housed the Dedicates of Mystarria, those who had given their wit or stamina or brawn, their metabolism or glamour or voice.