The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3)
Read The Living Throne (The War of Memory Cycle Book 3) Online
Authors: H. Anthe Davis
The Living Throne
Book 3 of the War of Memory Cycle
by H. Anthe Davis
To Deb, for your patience.
Chapter 1 – The Hospitality of Wolves
Chapter 7 – A Conspiracy of One
Chapter 22 – The Sense of an Ending
Part 5
Anamnesis
Chapter 1 – The Hospitality of Wolves
He felt them approaching across the softened snow: a dozen separate heartbeats, stealthy paw-steps muffled by the fur between their toes, muscles tight with predatory intent. They came from all sides, and as he sat with his fingers sunk in the dirt, he caught a dim echo of their interactions through the Guardian's senses—the flick of an ear, the whisk of a tail, a shift of rough-furred shoulders. In his mind's eye, he could almost see the scene. Hunters and prey.
As they stepped into his territory, he smiled and reached out through the earth.
Not much grew here in the Garnet Mountain highlands, especially not in winter, but he had been urging the ground to life since he first sensed them, and now they were in his trap. He heard yelps as his grasses unfurled through the snow to snag at paws and lowered tails. The more wary ones skittered away from the green sprouts, only to tread on the gnarled roots that riddled the landscape—now repurposed as snares. Most were too slow to do more than startle his hunters, but that was enough.
Teeth snapped against old wood and new grass. In response, he drew his senses up from the dark soil to the muddied snow and ice. Harnessing water—even frozen—took less effort than moving rock or growing plants, letting him keep part of his attention on the skittering wolves as he bent it to his will. The soft snow shifted beneath one set of paws, then surged upward, locking hard around furry limbs and eliciting a whine of terror. He moved on to the next.
Easy enough. He had done this before, outside the Mist Forest and again at Akarridi, and a third time in the courtyard of the ruined manor...
Another wolf in his icy grip. Another yelp, another scrape of teeth against cold shackles. The others rounded on him, their fear of the heaving plant-life ebbing, and in response he pushed his attention into the soil again to try to snag unguarded limbs as they skulked closer.
Too late, he realized his mistake. They were fast learners; teeth sheared through grabbing grasses and paws danced aside from roiling roots, and when he switched back to ice, they continued dancing, too many and too agile to catch. And as their advancing ring tightened around him, he lost track of which footfalls belonged to which wolf—the sense of pack suddenly so strong that he saw them as one entity. A great red-mawed beast.
He grimaced and raised a circular ridge in the snow, then shoved it outward. It broke into chunks as it spread but still forced several wolves back and knocked one off its feet in surprise. The pack-sensation snapped, allowing him to sense them all again, and he took the opportunity to bind the fallen one to the ground then grab at the others.
Still not fast enough. Paws moved an instant before his ice-traps closed; bodies blurred in his tactile vision; older snares shattered as he tried to form new ones. And then the wolves were upon him, all claws and teeth.
Soil tore from his black armor in long gouges, but he had more: an inch-thick layer of it plus bark below. The impact of their furry bodies felt like being tackled by toddlers. Still, it annoyed him that he couldn't keep up with them—not with snow, not with grass, not even with the muddy tendrils he extruded to grab at their paws when they clawed. Too reactionary, no use against their hit-and-run tactics.
Teeth scored enthusiastically at the mud and bark on his scalp, and he grabbed after the offender but caught only thin air. Another wolf clamped jaws on his antlers and yanked his head to the side, and when he reached for it, it danced away to let the opposite wolf bite for his shoulder. His retaliatory swipe hit nothing, then yet another wolf tried to chew on his neck.
He had to be missing something.
By this point in the exercise, he would have expected the former Guardians—particularly Erosei—to be haranguing him about his technique, but they had been quiet since the breaking of the bonds two days ago. He didn't want to dwell on his last glimpse of them, staring down indifferently at him as he hung from a broken beam, but their absence made it impossible.
They hadn't abandoned him. But what in pike's name were they up to?
A tooth pierced the bark layer to score his skin, and he cursed and flung the offending wolf away like a feather pillow.
Concentrate
, he thought.
Don't get distracted.
Another tooth punctured his shin. His return strike hit only air—then snow, then dirt as it plowed four inches into the ground—and as he wrenched his fist free, he sensed a change in the wolves. A roil in their energy, a sudden edge to their moves.
Not fear, not quite hunger. But they were pressing in again.
Shifting on his knees, he sank his thoughts into the earth. Soil and rock flowed up like liquid to replace the damaged pieces, and in the sudden swaddle of solid darkness, he felt secure. Embraced. The scratching of the wolves became dim and distant, and there were—
—cold arms around him, cold breath whispering against the back of his neck. No earth but night-black water and the heaviness in his heart, drawing him down slow and deep as all the world dissolved into—
Light. Squinting against it, he raised a hand and saw the mud dripping from his knuckles, bark falling apart beneath. His solid helm had been breached from nose to brow, releasing his senses from their self-imposed restriction.
A huge silvery wolfbeast stared down at him from above, features in shadow.
Arik
, he tried to say, but the faceplate still sealed his mouth shut. With a snort, he pulled it away, and a thick sheet of rock sheared from his throat and chest along with it.
“Arik. I'm fine,” he managed.
Thick brows furrowed over wolfish blue eyes, then the muzzle spasmed and crunched backward in its change, teeth shifting and fur receding to reveal the familiar rough charm of his friend's face. After stretching his jaw, he gave a grimace of concern, still-lupine ears tucked tight against his hair.
Cob braced himself for a scolding, but all the skinchanger said was, “You scared them.”
Glancing aside, Cob found himself in a ring of naked people, so he fixed his gaze on a tree instead. It was hard to evaluate the merits of Arik's words like that, but he had glimpsed the dirt on their faces and hands—not unexpected, considering how they had been chewing on him.
Except...
Looking down, he realized that the ground beneath him had gone from rock and snow and grass to a vast, jagged circle of freezing mud.
Did it again
, he thought, his stomach a lead weight.
Did it again and I didn't even reach for it. Pikes, it's like wetting the bed.
Then he remembered the breath on his neck, and clamped a hand there to quell the rising hairs. Once before, he had fallen into that black sea and felt that presence, too familiar, too painful to forget. He wanted to believe that it was just a mirage, but when he had asked his father, Dernyel had not answered. None of the Guardians would.
For the past five years, he had carried the fear her death had instilled into him. In that one moment, it had been rekindled into a horrible certainty:
His mother was in the Dark.
And it's my fault. My actions that drove her there, my betrayal—
“Cob,” said Arik, very close.
He flinched back, sliding in the mud. The skinchanger's big hands clamped on his shoulders to steady him, and for a moment he wanted to grip them, to hang on until the knot of agony in his heart unwove.
“I'm fine, I'm fine,” he mumbled instead, jerking from Arik's grip and looking away before the hurt on the skinchanger's face could register much.
Up the hill that bordered the makeshift training yard, a small crowd had gathered to spectate. Most were wolves or wolf-folk in their well-made leathers, but four oddballs sat in a tight cluster among them: his friends. He cringed at the thought that they had seen it all.
Lark, at least, didn't seem bothered. She waved Arik's bundled-up chiton like a flag and called, “Another round! One-on-one!” She was wearing every garment she owned plus half a dozen borrowed furs, and grinning in a way he found oddly disconcerting. Maybe it was the red Corvish war-paint she used as make-up, causing her dark features to look more fearsome. Or maybe it was the gleam in her eyes and the fact that Arik was naked again.
Next to her, Fiora tried to swat down the chiton. “Stop it, can't you see he needs a rest? For the wolves' sake, at least.” As Lark huffily lowered the garment, Fiora turned her attention to Cob and called, “Are you all right? You look...weird.”
Cob stared up at her, then decided to take the comment in the spirit of concern. Still, he didn't know what to say. Her expression was easier to read than Lark's: the crinkled brows, the worried moue, the forward-leaning pose as if she was unsure if she should come down to comfort him or leave him be. With her armor off, that slight tilt was enough to show rosy-tanned curves through the loose neck of her tunic, and the way her curly dark hair fell across her collar made him want to come up and brush it back.
And then do away with the tunic, and...
Even in this low mood, he blushed. They hadn't had any proper alone-time in more than a week, and he doubted they could steal any here. The wolves never left.
He wasn't even sure what he felt toward her. Love? She was still basically a stranger. And he was the Guardian vessel, with a self-imposed mission that he couldn't set aside for the luxury of intimacy. If she minded that, she hadn't said so—and she had a mission too, for her Trifold Goddess. It dovetailed with his right now, but that didn't mean it would forever.
If love was that fierce joy he had felt in Enkhaelen's nightmare, that all-consuming fire fixated on his wife... Then no, he didn't love Fiora.
He didn't know if he could.
“Cob?” she said.
“I'm fine, I—“
“Are you done? If so, you should get out of that armor and come sit with us.”
He blinked, then nodded slowly and dug fingers into his black Guardian armor. Its teeth-scarred chunks and plates disintegrated into loose dirt as they separated from his skin. Before the manor, before the freeing of the Guardian, the armor would have fallen apart the moment he lost concentration on it. He supposed its persistence was an improvement.
The wolf-folk crowded past him as he brushed soil from his sleeves, many in furred forms but some still nakedly humanoid—though with tails. He averted his eyes as they angled for the piles of clothes by the cave mouth on the hill. Being surrounded by people with as little regard for propriety as Arik discomfited him, but at least the humanoid ones wore trousers or loin-wraps when they ambled about. Though considering the adjustments that had to be made for their tails, sometimes it hardly helped.
And the women only seemed to wear their vests to keep from bouncing wildly as they bounded between tasks. He wished they would all just stay as wolves.
As usual, Arik tucked behind him as if he was a shield against the other skinchangers. Though taller and bulkier, he had spent their whole time here with shoulders hunched and eyes averted, tail tucked and ears flat, while the smaller wolf-folk stared at him fixedly with every pass.
It was some kind of wolf-hierarchy thing, Cob knew, and it annoyed him. He wished he could ask Haurah—the wolf-woman Guardian—but she was as silent as the rest of them. So instead he had made a point of staring back at the wolves every time he caught them staring at Arik, because they invariably turned away when they realized he was watching.
He hoped he was doing the right thing. For the past month and a half, he had bemoaned the Guardian's presence in his life, but now that it had gone quiet he realized how much he'd come to rely on it for clues, for context—for grounding in this weird new reality he'd been thrown into. He was no longer the boy who had fled the Crimson Army camp, but he wasn't ready to be free. Not yet.
A bitter admission, but one he clung to. He'd spent too much time with his fingers stuck in his ears, refusing to hear the truth. He wasn't going to be that fool anymore.
Discarding the last handfuls of dirt, he looked up the hill again. Lark and Fiora were arguing over Arik's chiton, which Lark was attempting to drape around Fiora's neck like a delicate scarf. The wolf-folk kept a reasonable distance from them, but strayed closer to the others: the faint shimmer of presence beside Fiora that was Ilshenrir—under veil as usual—and the pile of furs that was Dasira.
From within the furs, he caught the gleam of her eyes. All else was hidden except for the tip of one boot, but from that evidence he gathered that she was sitting cross-legged, hunched forward like an old woman, and probably glaring. That had always been her default expression.
Metal glinted, then he saw her raise a slice of something toward the shadow of her hood. That was good. If she was eating, she was mending.
“Food. Right,” he said, and clapped Arik's arm to draw him from his cower. The skinchanger tensed but did not shy away, and mustered a strained smile.
It made Cob want to punch some bully-wolves.
“But first, clothes,” he said.
