The Dog Master (29 page)

“Hardy? No, I never told him.”

“I am not sure what I am feeling, Mother,” Calli said honestly.

“I wanted you to know that it is not unheard of, what is happening between you and Palloc. I know how it is. And I know the temptation of the other man, the strong and powerful one. What Albi said … I will never tell another of you and Urs, never.”

“Are you saying you believe Albi, that Mal is not Palloc's child?”

“No, Calli, I am saying I know that even after Urs and Bellu were promised, you would sneak off with the hunt master. And I do not care to know how long that continued. Because someday Palloc might change his mind, and come back to your bed, and it would no longer be as cold and empty as mine.”

Calli took a deep breath. “You misunderstand. I do not want him to change his mind, Mother. I want things to remain as they are.”

Coco's expression turned mournful. “I am so sorry, Calli. Perhaps I should have attempted to prevent your wedding. I thought I was doing what was best for you.”

“No, Mother. Albi is formidable. She wanted me to agree to leave her leadership unchallenged for five years, so she brokered a deal using her own son. Just as she now uses Mal to attack me.”

“All you say is true. I feel so stupid. You mean the world to me—you, and Dog, and Mal.”

Calli hugged Coco. “It was Albi,” she said again, but she was thinking of something else entirely.

Hardy was her father.

*   *   *

There was but one wedding that harsh, frigid winter; a couple who waited impatiently for the damp cold to lift so the ceremony could be held. When finally the long-anticipated break in the weather came, there was scarcely the morale for a celebration. People were exhausted.

Something curious happened when the circle finally gathered to bless the marriage: a little girl joined her voice to the traditional song. She was daughter to Valid and Sidee, a couple who had lost two children to disease but had a son, Ligo, who was Dog's closest friend. The little girl had been born during Mal's first summer, and thus she was not named because she had not yet had three full summers.

The men were stamping somewhat listlessly and the women were humming with similar hesitance when the little girl, full of childish excitement, starting singing
words
. “Wedding! Happy!” she cried in her tiny voice. “Happy!”

No one had ever thought to chant words in a song before.

Everyone was so astonished that for a moment all went quiet, and then the Kindred roared with laughter. Valid picked up his daughter and kissed her, and in that moment, the wedding ceremony seemed to find its authenticity, its power to pull the Kindred into celebration.

They were Kindred, superior to all the northern creeds. They would survive.

Year Nineteen

“Are you sad, little girl?” Mal asked the pup, who was sniffing intently at the place where the mother-wolf had spent nearly all of her time in the cave. It seemed to Mal, too, that the odor of the adult wolf still hung in the air—or at least, Mal sensed something, as if in some way the mother-wolf were still there. He sighed. “I know that I am sad. I miss the way she would tap her tail in the dirt when I climbed down the crevice. I did not fully know it, but I had come to love her.”

Mal took a deep breath and reached for the puppy, gathering her into his arms. She wriggled and squirmed around so that she could lick his face, and his sadness lifted instantly. They play-wrestled until she tired. She lapped up some water and then lay down with a sigh. He put a hand on her head.

“I do not know if you will be upset when I am finished with your mother's pelt and bring it back in,” Mal said after a time. “I am using the mixture made from tree bark to cure the skin now. It bakes in the sun. I hope you understand that I did not kill your mother. The lion did that, though your mother was like stone inside, and fought death as fiercely as she fought her killer.”

Mal thought of the vow he had made to protect the wolf cub. The lion was still out there somewhere, and thus Mal cowered in the den, venturing out only to meet his mother for food, his heart pounding the whole time.

The little girl-wolf depended on him.

What would happen when winter came?

 

THIRTY-FOUR

Year Twelve

Sometimes Calli would stare into still water, looking for some sign of Hardy in her own face. Of course, she could not really tell what Hardy's face would look like without the mass of scars disfiguring him. And Calli simply was unable to remember the tool master before the lion attack that nearly killed him.

She was gazing into a small pool when Valid and his daughter came across her.

“Calli, good summer,” the girl greeted shyly.

Her name was Lyra, because she was the child who had sung at a wedding and then, at her father's insistence, sang almost every time the Kindred gathered together. The songs were mostly just lilting words and tended to repeat “happy” and “summer” a lot, but the beaming expression on Valid's face indicated he thought the melodies were sheer brilliance.

“Good summer, Lyra.”

“What are you doing?” Valid asked curiously, peering over Calli's shoulder into the water. “I see nothing there.”

Calli was embarrassed. “Does your wife never look in still water?” Calli knew she did.

“Look in the water? For fish?” Valid replied, baffled.

Calli regarded the spear master with a bemused expression. “Have you not noticed that when you gaze into water, your own face is there gazing back?”

“You look into water and see my face?” Valid responded.

Calli laughed. He was teasing.

“I want to see, I want to see!” Lyra chimed.

“Then come here, Lyra. Lean down.” Calli guided the little girl's head until it was positioned over her reflection. Lyra's mouth opened in astonishment. “See?”

“That is what I look like?” she demanded.

“This would be a good subject for a song, I think,” Valid noted.

Lyra frowned. “I do not like my hair.” She gazed up at Calli. “Would you teach me to braid it, like yours?”

“Of course.”

“Well,” Valid objected, “maybe when she is older. I do not want my daughter wearing the hair of an adult woman.”

“Please?” Lyra begged, turning solemn eyes on him.

Calli smiled as the man visibly wilted under his daughter's pleading. “All is good,” he grunted. “I will just have to explain it to your mother.”

So Calli pulled Lyra close to her and started to work on her hair. The little girl, at her father's urging, sang a quiet song.

This its what it would be like to have a normal family,
Calli thought to herself.
A husband who loves his wife. A father who speaks to his daughter. A little child in my lap who everyone loves and no one sees as anything but a joy.

She smiled at Valid and he smiled back. Conventionally a Kindred woman would glance demurely away after a moment, but Calli let her gaze linger on the man until he blushed.

She was not sure why she did that.

*   *   *

Silex made sure that no one in the Wolfen suspected, no one knew. To all appearances, Silex went to his wife's fire and slept with her and the two of them might someday have a child. They did not know that when Silex gazed at Ovi's sleeping form he felt dead between his legs, and in his heart there was no joy or longing.

He and Ovi rarely discussed it after their wedding night. He caught her crying once and raised the subject, asking her if raising the adopted boy Cragg and her own son, Tok, Duro's child, was enough. Did she want more than just the two children?

She assured him that her tears were just because she was sad, that day, and had no specific cause. She was willing to make the attempt for more offspring, though, which was part of the problem for Silex—Fia had come to him
wanting
him, her excitement stirring up his own. Ovi gave him none of that.

But Silex liked sleeping next to his sister—near enough to feel her body heat, but not touching her. It reminded him of easier times, when they were very young children and their parents took care of them. Those days, those long ago days, when he had no responsibilities and spent his time running and running with no particular destination in mind. Lying next to his sister, thinking of his childhood, gave Silex comfort in the night.

*   *   *

Mal was eight summers old when things started to change.

He was too young to remember his best friend Salu, Bellu's son, who died the winter after his naming from a sore that puckered and oozed and eventually rotted like a log despite his mother's constant care. He understood only that Bellu was council mother and a sad woman who spoke constantly about wanting to have another baby. No, for him his best friend in the world was his brother Dog, so that was the first change, his eighth summer: Dog no longer wanted to play every day. He suddenly wanted to be with older children.

At eleven summers, Dog was as thin as a flower stem, but oddly strong, as if his muscles, stretched taut to keep up with his growing bones, got their power not from mass but from length. His brother was growing in precisely the opposite direction—though three years younger, Mal already carried heft to his shoulders and arms.

Mal ran with a pack of boys around his age—literally ran, his bad leg giving him a stuttering gait, and no one seemed to mind he was slower than the rest. They ambushed tree trunks and dirt mounds with spears. They tested their literal boundaries, daringly crossing the Kindred Stream when no adults were watching, sharing the thrill of breaking the rules.

Dog and his friend Ligo, Valid's son, wanted to be spearmen to the hunt, which is all any boy wanted to be. Stalkers were important, they knew, but it was the glory of the spear they craved. To let a weapon arc through the air and bring down a massive elk, its rack of antlers as big as a man, or kill a winter mammoth, the earth shaking with the impact as it fell—they all lusted for it and talked of nothing else. They felt bonded, almost as if they were a hunt, all by themselves.

And then the boys began looking at him differently, that eighth summer. The good-natured teasing they gave each other seemed to carry a touch of malice when it was turned on Mal.

Vinco had always been Mal's best friend, but lately had started spending more time with Grat, who was a summer older than they were. And it was Grat whose derision cut the sharpest, telling the others that Mal's leg stank, or that when Mal was alone he walked in circles until he fell down. Mal laughed along with everyone else, but there was a dark light in Grat's eyes when he loosed his mockery on the boy with the cursed leg. Grat was a handsome boy with heavy eyebrows and, because he had lost a front tooth, a grin that always resembled a leer.

Mal had spent the morning impatiently helping gather firewood for Bellu, a job that rotated among the children, boys and girls alike. Bellu managed the fire for the Kindred, a good assignment for her, everyone agreed, because she was still so heartbroken over losing her only child.

Finally released from his chore, he tore off in pursuit of the boys, finding them trying to catch some mice that lived among the rocks in the woods. Mal's heart sank—the activity took nimble feet, so his leg would impede him every time he tried to dart after one of the rodents. He had often fallen among the rocks.

Markus, who had been named the same night as Mal and Vinco, held a dead mouse in the air as Mal approached. “Got one!” he shouted.

“And here comes the cripple,” Grat advised, noticing Mal.

“Good summer,” Mal replied cheerfully as he walked up. “That is a fierce beast, Markus.”

Markus grinned. “I think I will make a robe out of its fur,” he proclaimed. The boys laughed.

“We should make the cripple boy eat it,” Grat suggested.

“Delicious! But I would share the feast with everyone,” Mal replied jovially.

“Only if we cook it, first,” Vinco laughed.

“No, we would hold him down and make him eat it,” Grat repeated. Everyone dropped their grins.

Swallowing, Mal looked away. He had been held down and forced to eat things before, but always by older boys—not by his friends.

“Why not come hunt with us, Mal?” Vinco invited after a moment.

“Yes, we love watching you fall in the rocks!” Grat hooted.

This time, everyone laughed. Mal forced a smile. “That does sound like fun. I was thinking instead of throwing stones at the stream.” It was a game they all enjoyed: a piece of wood was tossed in the water and then the boys threw rocks at it as it floated past. “Vinco,” Mal said to his friend, “would you like to throw stones at the stream?”

“No, he does not want to throw
stones at the stream,
” Grat replied in a mocking baby voice. “We are hunting mice. You should leave—when we have enough to feed you a good meal, we will find you, cripple boy.”

Mal felt his hands curl into fists. Grat, a bigger boy, looked delighted at the anger on Mal's face. Then Mal blinked it off. “Well,” Mal observed, “if this is our hunt, I suppose we should follow the rules of the hunt.” Members of the hunt were prohibited to fight. Mal glanced at the other boys and saw them nodding at his words—this was not the first time he had reasoned himself out of an altercation.

“This is not
our
hunt, because we started without
you,
” Grat countered. He had lost support, though, and bit his lip angrily.

“We should go back to hunting,” one of the other boys remarked, turning over a rock to look for rodents underneath.

“Well, I am going to throw stones at the stream,” Mal announced. He raised his eyes at Vinco, who did not happen to be very good at catching mice, either. Vinco glanced away.

At the Kindred Stream, Mal told himself that he was having more fun by himself—all of the shots that hit the floating sticks were definitely his, so there was none of the credit stealing that went on when other boys were there. But he was fairly listless about it.