The Blood of Ten Chiefs (30 page)

At length, one rose to address the assemblage. It was the father of the boy who had been taken that day.

"Why do we babble like frightened women?" he demanded. "We have no choice. If nothing else, today has taught us that the forest demons are evil and cannot be trusted. We have tried to live in peace with them, to appease their thieving with gifts, and they show their gratitude by taking our children.

"Now they tell us that if we go, they will leave us alone. I ask you, can we believe them? My son trusted one, and now he lies in our hut with a wound on his face. I say whether it's here or at another camp we must take a stand against these demons, so why not here? We must guard ourselves and our families, and if that means attacking first, then so be it. That is the lesson I've learned this day, as has my son. We will never forget it. Tell your sons, and your sons' sons, that they will not have to learn it as painfully as we did!"

The group rose to their feet shouting their approval and spears were shaken at the surrounding woods.

Thus it was that two groups raised their voices that night, one in howls, the other in shouts, commemorating the lessons they had learned, lessons on which they would base their futures.

Pike sat cross-legged on the rock, his lower lip stuck out as far as his unruly thatch of bangs. **I don't want to,** he sent unnecessarily.

"You agreed when I showed you where the dreamberry bushes were and when I showed you how to dry them so they wouldn't lose their flavor or their power."

"That was then, this is now."

Longreach drew his brows together, giving a hint that he hadn't always been everybody's friend; that he had, in Freefoot's day, run as wild and stubborn as any Wolfrider could imagine; that he had not been the dreamberry guardian until after Bearclaw brewed up his first batch of dreamberry wine and scared poor Brightwater out of her wits.

"Now is what I'm talking about. Now is when you learn to do something beside earing the dreamberries. I'm not going to do this forever and I've chosen you to take my place."

"What about Skywise?" The lower lip didn't stick out quite as far now.

"A dreamkeeper is like a chief and Skywise—" Longreach hesitated as images of the deep-thinking young hunter played through his mind. "Skywise doesn't go where the other Wolfriders go. No one but he, himself, can follow the dreams he keeps."

"They could follow mine?" The young elf sat straight, eyes wide and eager for now.

Anyone could have followed Pike's dreams. Pike—the most ordinary of the Wolfriders—a rarity among Bearclaw's tribe, as he had been born to lovemates, not lifemates—Rain's son outside of Recognition. His eyes he'd gotten from his mother but the rest—well, they all saw a bit of themselves in Pike.

"They'll follow once you learn to lead them."

Pike gave a tug at his cheek-tuft, pulling it back from his face. The hair came untamed as soon as he nodded his head. "I can always try, I guess, for now."

"Think of it as another reason for the dreamberries," Longreach said, hiding a smile as Pike's face turned red as the berries themselves. "Now it's always best to start with a tale that you know."

The lower lip flared out for a heartbeat, then retreated. "Bearclaw, then," Pike said, grabbing a heaping handful of berries. "And ... and ... Joyleaf's favorite necklace."

"You're learning fast. Don't give anything away."

The beast moved nearer to the cave mouth. Even the fires crackling softly could not dissuade the tug of a stronger instinct. The smell of blood made feral nostrils flare, and the beast's eyes narrowed in anticipation. Only the sky was angrier.

But this was not the anger born from having been threatened, nor fear of any kind; rather, it was born of indignation and the boiling struggle between thought and instinct. The beast knew in her intelligent mind that death waited here, but not the natural death to which she would someday submit in a cuff of sleep. Death in this place, because of its violence, would make her fight and bring to the surface every reflex of survival. The suffering, then, would last much longer. She would feel these creatures' claws, feel her flesh rip between their teeth, and even though she knew death was coming, she would fight all the harder. Nothing like going to sleep in the coolness of her own den.

She smelled the object of her quest. Her heart thumped rapidly inside the rough, gray coat. Through the dark cave mouth she homed in on the blood—not the scent of butchery. This was the scent of need and she meant to answer it.

She moved forward, more like a cat than her own kind, only her lower legs and shoulder blades moving. As though to scoop up the scent, her head hung low. The aroma became succulent and drove her mad. She hardly blinked at all now. Behind her, the yellow glow from the campfires ended abruptly at a line of large rocks, which kept the breezes from moving inside the den. It was here ... here, and very close.

Pausing as her eyes adjusted to the blackness, the beast picked out shapes on the cave floor—long rolls of animal skin, wooden receptacles full of fruit, a stone-lined cavity that had recently held fire but now was cool and ashy.

The beast moved in. Her own gray fur remained flat against her back instead of ruffled up in a crest as it might have been were she not the intruder here; this danger was of her own making. She hesitated only once, crouching back as one of the bundles on the floor groaned, rolled over, and settled down again. Still crouching, she crept forward and reached a wooden tub with a small roll of ravvit fur inside. She trembled violently now, in waves brought on both by tension and by the insurmountable drive she felt. Here was the source of the blood-scent—a pool of desires and needs and warmth.

She pulsed within herself. Her kind did not fully understand possession, but she had to have the bundle of ravvit fur.

So she took it. Suddenly. Quickly. Before the fear closed in. And she dragged it toward the cave mouth. When the long bundle behind the rocks stirred, the beast took the ravvit fur in her teeth and lifted it awkwardly, expecting it to fall apart. When it remained intact, she got a better grip and scrambled out of the cave, her paws scratching at the hard ground. Behind her the noises of panic arose to chase her out of the cave. They were awake. And they were shouting with their strange, cutting voices. The night was her friend and it hid her well. Soon she was gone.

The cave dwellers were all awake within seconds. When they pieced together the tragic bits of evidence, they came out of the caves and hunted along the ground until they found the beast's paw prints.

Then they began to light the torches.

Night over the holt felt wrong.

Upon low-hanging clouds flickered an unexpected patchy glow. The undersides of the clouds went orange, then gray-black, then orange again where the trees were thin. There was very little noise. A footfall ... the rustle of hands pushing aside boughs and branches ... quiet voices, very rare, worried.

Worried or something. Bearclaw tried to decide. The words could not be understood from this high up, this far away, but he heard the voices and their tremors and tones. He stayed hidden. It was his art.

Beside him, Strongbow's silence felt different tonight too. Not even the mild sensation of question crossed between him and Bearclaw, and Bearclaw felt stiff in that isolation. Both tall for elves—and Bearclaw even a bit taller than the archer— Bearclaw and Strongbow had to dip down slightly to see through the separation in the leaves before them.

The torches continued to move, slowly, across the forest floor. Tall hunters moved beneath them, each bearing a torch. They moved randomly, their only pattern being to spread outward, step by step, expanding the scope of their—

"What are they doing?" Woodlock crowded in beside Bearclaw in the privacy of their heavily-vined vantage point, unable to bear the tension.

**Hunting,** Strongbow decided, but only because it comforted him.

Bearclaw immediately said, "They're not hunting."

"Then what?" Woodlock asked, quietly moving a stray branch from his thick gold hair.

"I don't know," Bearclaw grumbled. "But I don't like it."

**They've got to be hunting,** Strongbow sent. **There's no other reason for it.**

"Humans don't hunt at night." Bearclaw watched only a few more seconds. "Those walking hairballs are afraid of the dark. Both of you stay here. Tell me if anything changes. I'm going back to the holt. I want to talk to Rain."

He traveled back to the Father Tree overground. The forest floor was unsafe tonight and Bearclaw had to have answers. The five-fingered hunters were predictable, and he disliked it when they decided not to be.

Tonight Bearclaw saw none of the holt's mythic beauty as he approached, saw nothing of the flickering fireflies against the dark tree shapes or the indigo patches of paler blue where moonbeams slanted through the canopy of leaves overhead. He missed entirely the prettiness of the holt's skirt of wildflowers and the brush of common weeds that added a cushiony comfort to the ancient trees. The great trunks flared out into tangles of roots as thick as Bearclaw's whole body, but tonight he used them as stepping-stones, without a thought of how important they were. He hopped over the thin brook that trickled through the center of the holt, and headed for the central tree.

Both above and below him twisted the snarl of timber and leafage that was home for the Wolfriders. Treeshapers had made other trees grow into the Father Tree ages ago, creating a great knot of branches and trunks and tunnels and hollows. Thus, the holt had its own underground and overground systems, each tunnel or hollow carved out and weathered to smoothness by time and use. Bearclaw could hardly remember anymore which of the hollows had been created by tree--shapers he had known personally and which had been made by Goodtree herself. All he knew as he approached the embracing clutch of huge trees, nestled as they were in their cool evening cloak with its milky belts of moonlight, was that the holt looked particularly vulnerable to the bite of flames.

The Father Tree's usual mossy coolness closed around his shoulders as he slipped into the big opening that led to all the hollows. To his left was a stepway of chunks of wood carved out of the inner trunk. It led to the thick hollow branches where young Skywise lived, high up in the next tree, in a place where the stars could be watched. Bearclaw ignored it and headed down a packed slope, deep into the ground, to the hollows between the ancient root system there. Rain's hollow was the deepest in the holt. Here, in the earth's cool belly, Rain's healing herbs could be stored, and his lichens and mosses and mushrooms grew freely.

The walls were lined with animal skins, trapping in the warmth from a small fire glowing in a pit at the hollow's center. Few of the Wolfriders were comfortable with fire other than the little chunks of tallow Rain prepared for them, which they used to light their hollows, but Rain kept the small flame glowing both for warmth and for melting ingredients for the remedies he used. Tonight Bearclaw approached the opening to Rain's hollow as a cat approaches the water, seeing the fire more than anything else. For a long time he stood in the shadow of the opening, while Rain obliviously plucked seeds from a collection of nightbloomers he'd gathered. Rain's bushy sideburns and short chipmonkish features gave Bearclaw less comfort than usual. The coneshaped leather headpiece with its long tails made Rain's ears seem extra large, and his orange hair glowed unnaturally in the firelight. He went about his grinding, humming sweetly. He was always happiest while tending his herbs.

Bearclaw stood in the shadows, listening.

Rain reached for a jar of murrawort with one hand and popped a dreamberry into his mouth with the other, then went on humming. But when he brought down the jar, his eyes caught a shadow in the opening of his hollow—and he flinched.

"Oh ... Bearclaw, are you hurt?" He buried his surprise in concern. Though they had already spent a long life together, he would never get used to the chief's blade-boned, blade-eyed face any more than he would get used to dealing with Bearclaw's imperishable will.

That face, bracketed by a triangle of whiskers, moved slowly into the hollow. Rain gathered in Bearclaw's rough, lean appearance, noting once again how the chief's eyes were nearly hidden by thick bangs. The fawn-brown hair was poorly cut and climbed down around his features like vines around a jutting of rocks. With the bound-up lock that marked him chief mounted high and shaggy, Bearclaw's wild mane seemed patterned after the turbulent mind it sheathed. Rain absorbed all that with some difficulty, as always.

"Why should I be hurt?" Bearclaw asked. His words were blunt as the thoughts of the wolves he ran with.

Rain shook off the effects of the ungracious entrance and moved toward him, proving to himself that Bearclaw had some other reason to be here. "I've never known you to come in from a night hunt without the others."

Bearclaw came fully out of the shadows. "Have you ever known the tall ones to hunt at night?"

Rain's narrow eyes grew narrower still. "A strange question." His voice was barely a whisper. He spoke so softly, the other Wolfriders sometimes wondered why he didn't just send all the time, like Strongbow.

"It's a strange night," Bearclaw said. The firelight played on his features, but it didn't like him and avoided his eyes.

Rain continued, "Are you telling me the humans are moving in the forest and hunting?"

"They're moving," came the chiefs verbal shrug, "with fire. But they're not hunting. They're not beating the bushes or tracking or anything."

"Hmm ..." Rain clasped his hands together as he did when there was nothing to do with them. "Are you sure they aren't just doing one of their night things? Rituals, I mean. After all, Crest just ... just left the pack—"

"You can say she died. My wolf-friend is dead," Bearclaw snarled. "You don't have to pretend."

"Died ... maybe they found her."

"When a wolf dies, there's nothing left to find," Bearclaw grumbled. "The pack took care of Crest. Those oversized greengrubs couldn't find her any more than we could."

"Well, then," Rain said, "to answer your question—no."

Bearclaw spat out a few choice expletives—something about the mating preferences of humans—then turned and angled back into the shadows.

Once more alone, Rain simply sighed.

Bearclaw slipped through the maze of hollows, once again embraced by comforting coolness. **Joyleaf.**

**Here, beloved,** the immediate answer came.

As he slipped into his own hollow, Bearclaw steadied himself with the firm courage in his Iifemate's sending. There he found her, a glorious opposite of himself. Her hair was as sunny as his was muddy, as curly as his was shaggy. She was female, entirely. Her blue eyes made his seem hardly eyes at all, but sharp stone lances shooting toward whomever he looked at. And where his was the pale skin of a night creature, Joyleaf's cheeks always held the memory of flowers. He found her in the light of a single lamp, nursing a tiny infant at her breast. He strode up, almost as though to pretend nothing was wrong.

**How's our little cubling?**

Together they gazed at their newborn son, a thing so tiny that Bearclaw hesitated even to touch him sometimes. The baby was asleep, his tiny mouth working against Joyleaf's breast, a crown of wheat-pale hair already hiding his eyes. His little fists were barely the size of acorns as they pressed his mother's fountain of life.

Joyleaf turned her curled smile up at her lifemate. **What've you done?** she sent. **Have you stolen another human cub and given it to the wolves?**

Her plan worked. Bearclaw hunched slightly and said, "You know I don't really do that anymore. I just like to say I did."

"Then what frightens you?"

He wasn't entirely surprised that she already knew something was amiss. That was part of being thoroughly Recognized. "I don't know yet. The humans are in the forest tonight and I don't know why. Until I do, I want you to go deep into the Father Tree. Go into the rear hollows with Clearbrook so you can get out the back way if you have to."

"It's that bad?" she asked, her mouth straightening into a pink ribbon.

Bearclaw gazed down and felt he could fall into her huge blue eyes, rounder than was usual for elves. He had fallen into them once, and never climbed out. "I don't like to take chances. Not with that herd of belches. And they're acting strange as mad bats tonight."

Joyleaf nodded. "All right." She slipped her forefinger between her infant cub's tiny mouth and the skin of her breast, breaking the suction and releasing the cub into Bearclaw's arms. The baby slurped discontentedly, then settled immediately into deeper sleep, smelling the distinct scent of his father against him. Bearclaw held the impossibly small bundle between his shoulder and his neck, soaking in the vibrance of new life, wishing he could continue holding their cub for the rest of the night. Usually he didn't like to hold cubs so young, but tonight felt ... different.

Joyleaf rearranged her clothing, gathered what she needed, and took the cub back into her own arms. "You should tell the others," she mentioned as they left their hollow and parted in two different directions.

"When I know more," he said.

Joyleaf paused at the top of the rise. "Tell them now, beloved. It's their right to know."

He knew she had him cornered with his own conscience. He shook his shaggy head and muttered, "Hairballs ... all right. I promise."