Shadowlands (38 page)

“Where did you encounter him?”

“Outside.” I gestured at the window with a hand that had, maybe, started to shake again. “He doesn’t know you’re in here, which I guess is lucky, huh? Only that you’ve been seen here.”

Wolf lowered himself onto the front edge of a wing-backed chair. “If you touch me,” he said, looking up at me, and holding out his hand, “it will save me from having to explain.” Part of me realized that no one else beside Alejandro ever knowingly volunteered to be touched by my talent, and the implication of absolute trust would probably have frightened me a little, if another part of me hadn’t been so pissed off.

“But it won’t save
me
.” I could hear the harshness in my voice and cleared my throat. “
I’d
still have to explain it to Moon, here, wouldn’t I? So why don’t
you
go ahead? Cut out the middle man?” Why should I make it easier for him?

Moon looked at me with narrowed eyes, and then she transferred the look to Wolf without change. She didn’t know what was going on, and she was reserving judgment until she did.

Wolf sat a few minutes longer with his head in his hands. Long enough that I wondered if I would have to touch him after all. Finally, he raised his head.

“As Valory says, I have a brother. And, as she knows but does not say, he is among the Hunt.” Moon made a strange noise and Wolf cleared his throat, sat up straighter, and rubbed his hands along his thighs. “He may be Pack Leader now. Now that I am no longer there.”

“Your brother. You have a brother.” Moon’s voice was as thin as Wolf’s had been. Apparently, this news wasn’t sitting well with any of us.

“Why have you not spoken of this? Does the High Prince know?”

“Which of us can say what the High Prince knows and does not know.”

I wrinkled my nose. “By which
he
means no, at least, he never told her.” I rolled my eyes and sat down on the edge of the hearth, realized what I’d done, and moved to the other chair. Moon came
and sat on the arm of it. The easy intimacy of that didn’t strike me until later. At the time, all I felt was that she and I were on the same side.

“It is not quite as simple as that.” Wolf’s tone had hardened, his eyes flicking back and forth between us. He wasn’t defensive, he wasn’t pleading.

“It never is,” I said to Moon, out of the side of my mouth. I regretted it almost immediately. After all, I was the one who was making him tell the tale, and snarkiness was uncalled for, not matter how irritated I was. “Sorry,” I said. “I know this isn’t easy for you, but honestly, it’s not easy for any of us.”

He inclined his head once, in a sort of bow. “It is not so much that I wished to hide the facts of my life with the Hunt, as it is that I wished to forget them. I did all that I could to put them from me. But memories are not old shoes, to be cast away when desired…” He spread his hands out as if he wanted to grasp something. “When we were with Honor of Souls,” he said, speaking directly to Moon, “the Hunt no longer seemed part of my life. I remembered being a Hound but not the way I remembered the fight on the Stone of Virtue, the transformation of the High Prince, and my fostering with you, Moon.”

“You seemed then to be someone awakening from a dream.” From her tone, Moon was thinking back.

“A nightmare, more like. It is more as though my life in the Hunt had happened to someone else.” He gestured at the window, in the direction of Union Station. “All this world is familiar to me. I have been here as a Hound, Hunting the Prince Guardian when he was in Exile. But I feel rather as though I know it from a Song I once knew well.”

“So you felt that you no longer had a brother?” I could tell Moon was trying not to judge, and maybe finding it harder than she hoped. Something lay behind that, I thought. She had a sister herself, whom it was obvious she loved very much. Was it as simple as that? She couldn’t understand how Wolf could set aside thoughts and memories of his brother.

With a shock that made me blink, I realized that I could have a brother, too, or a sister, and not even know it.

Wolf was shaking his head. “No. I remembered Foxblood. But I
could not remember whether he had returned to the Lands with me. When the High Prince set me this task, I was looking for him…” His voiced died away.

“While you were looking for everyone else,” I said.

Without raising his head, Wolf looked from me to Moon and back again. She was close enough to me that I could smell her floral scent, feel the warmth from her body. If I moved a fraction of an inch, I could touch her.

“I did not shirk my task,” he said, and I believed him. “But I did hope to find my brother. To undo what I did to him.”

“You made him a Hound.” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. Moon leaned away from me, but only to see me better without moving from the arm of the chair. “When I touched Foxblood just now,” I said. “Out on the street. That’s part of what I saw, what I read from him. He follows you. He’s always followed you.” I pressed my hands together, palm to palm, lifted them to tap my fingers against my lips. “He thought you were stuck on the other side of the Portal. Now that he knows differently—is there someone named Running River? River Current?—now he’s trying to find you.”

Wolf shuddered and buried his face in his hands. Moon looked at me, and I nodded. She rose and, kneeling beside him, took him into her arms. He allowed it, I saw, but he didn’t relax into her. No way was he letting himself off the hook.

Moon swung her head to look at me. “Would you do what you require? Would you touch him to see if he has kept anything more from us?”

“That’s a tall order,” I said. “There might be all kinds of things about himself he hasn’t told us. Perfectly innocent things.” But a change of direction often helps to put things in perspective, I thought and, mindful of what I was doing there in the first place, I thought I had the perfect distraction. “I’m not here by chance. Three of the People you’ve found here were also visited by Hounds. Nighthawk thought you might be involved somehow, if only by accident. The High Prince asked him to bring you back to her.”

“He said he would not.” Moon was on her feet. “He said he would…
three
People?” She looked as though she needed to sit down.

“He was looking for more evidence?” I nodded. “And he thought he found some, that’s why he told her. He knows better now, but—”

“She asked for this? She believed I led the Hunt to her People?”

Moon and I looked at each other, and I can only think that my face must have shown the same distress that hers did, maybe more, since I knew just how deep the despair we’d heard in his voice ran. And there was just the touch, just a vibration of anger. After all he’d done for her—that’s what he must have been thinking.

“She wanted you to be safe,” I said. “She did think it was possible that the Hunt has just been following you without your being aware of it,” I added.

“Impossible,” he said, with an abrupt stroke of his hand. “I would have scented them. Hounds are always…” His voice faded away.

“But you’re no longer a Hound.” Moon’s voice was gentle. “You’re a Rider now, and they could not prey upon us, if they were not able to pursue us.”

Wolf was nodding, but almost as if he didn’t want to believe it.

I thought it was time to interrupt again. “The point is, Hawk still thinks you should go back, and I thought…” I swallowed. “I thought you might have other ideas.”

“You could return with
me
,” Moon suggested. “We could go directly to my sister.”

“Is this why you came? To arrest me more sweetly than Nighthawk could do?”

Moon got to her feet, leaving Wolf alone in his chair, and crossed to the far side of the fireplace. Her lips were pressed tight, and her hand was touching the pin she had in her collar. I rolled my eyes. Typical. Here we were trying to help him and, somehow, all this was our fault.

“I came to ask if you could remember anything about the Horn.” The tightness of Moon’s voice showed that her thinking had been much the same as mine. “The High Prince has tasked me with finding it, or making a new one.”

Wolf sat up straighter, drawing his sloe-black eyebrows together.

“The Horn? She would use it? Then I will not be able to help them, to offer them the chance of the cure I was given.”

Had forced on him was a more accurate description, I thought,
but he was happy about it now, so maybe that wasn’t as big a distinction as I thought.

“But do you not see how having the Horn would help you in
your
plan?” Moon’s gray eyes sparkled. They were on the same side again. “I have researched the Songs that speak of the artifact, and have only one clue that may be useful. A fragment of Song. It is a mountain I search for, or a range of mountains. ‘Born of Ice Tor, the caller of the Hunt’ is how one fragment has it. I wondered,” here, her voice softened, “I wondered whether you might know, might remember, some Song from before the time you were a Hound, that might give me some further clue.”

Wolf was shaking his head. “I believe I might have been a Singer, that is true. But of what I Sang…” he shook his head.

“Just a minute.” I got to my feet. “You want to know where Ice Tor is, is that it? And you think Wolf might have known, once upon a time?” Moon nodded, watching me. As soon as I was close enough, I took a firm grip on his forearm, just below his rolled sleeve. His skin was wonderfully warm. [A lyre made from living Wood and
gra’if
and the hair of a Water Sprite; a Starward Rider, impossibly old, listening to him Sing; a new tune, but an old Song.]

“From the Quartz Ring,” I said. “Across the Moor of Ravens, beyond the Sea of
Ma’arban
.” I hoped I was pronouncing it right. “That is where Ice Tor dwells.”

“Dwells?”

I’d taken my hand way. “That’s what I read. I’m afraid I can’t interpret it any further without more context, but it could be a metaphor, right? You know, if it’s a song lyric?”

Both of them nodded, Moon with a pleased smile on her face, Wolf still frowning. I wondered if he now remembered something about the mountain range, or the Song he’d once known.

“So what now?” I asked.

“Now I will go to the Quartz Ring,” Moon said, then her face clouded. “I once promised Lightborn the Griffin Lord I would not go into danger without telling him.”

But he’s dead.
It was the kind of thought I’d learned the hard way to keep to myself. That was why she was wearing his pin on the collar of her shirt. And he was the father of her child, it was his
dra’aj
I’d felt, wrapped around the baby’s.

“Okay, I’ve got it.” I raised my hands, palms out, as they both looked as though they’d like to interrupt. “Wolf’s the one who should go. He bears
gra’if
. Once he’s there, on the ground, he’s bound to remember more. Don’t you see? Think of all the time that would be saved if Wolf brings the High Prince the Horn.” Suddenly, I saw the whole thing clearly. “But I’m the one who should go with him, not you.”

They looked at me openmouthed, and I sighed, stifling the urge to roll my eyes again. Sometimes you can be too close to a problem to see the solution. What I suggested would get Wolf away from his brother, and put him farther on the path to saving him at the same time.

“It is too risky.” Wolf was shaking his head.
You don’t know the half of it,
I thought. My heart was thumping so loudly I could hardly hear myself think.

“Look,” I said. “We’re depending on your knowledge, and I’ve already shown
I’m
the key to that.”

“Then we will all go,” Moon said.

“And who’ll explain it to your sister?” I clenched my teeth. I had to find a way to convince them. “How much time have we got? How long do we have to convince everyone else that this is the right thing to do?”

“But once we are gone…” Wolf began, eyes focused on something far away.

“It’s easier to be forgiven for it afterward than it is to ask for permission first,” I agreed.

Moon still looked worried, but now Wolf was slowly nodding

“If we had the Horn, we could bring the Hunt to be cured.” His eyes refocused on me. “The
dra’aj
they have taken would be returned to the Lands, as you said mine was.” Wolf snatched up his sword from where it was hanging openly in a bracket next to the fireplace. It turned into an umbrella as soon as he touched it. He turned it back and forth in his hand, as if he was examining a blade only he could see. “I had hoped we would not need to force them, but if the time is growing so short?”

Now Moon was nodding, still with a frown, but at least she was getting to her feet.

“Come on,” I said. “We have to hit a drugstore.

Nighthawk came out of the revolving doors, shaking his head. Alejandro drew him down the sidewalk to where they would not be interrupted by offers of service from the doormen of the hotel.

“I saw nothing untoward inside,” Hawk said. “But if they no longer look like Hounds, how can I be sure?”

Alejandro thought back to his own experience in the train station, when he had followed what he’d thought to be a Rider. “You saw no other Riders?” But Hawk shook his head.