Scarlet and the White Wolf, #1 Read online

  Scarlet nodded. Hilurin families were being hounded and murdered all over Byzantur. There was no sense in worrying them with report of yet another disappearance. He bit his lip. The family had had two small boys, playful as bear cubs.

  “I hear tell there’s a felon charging a toll over Whetstone Pass,” he remarked while tamping the herbs into the pipe bowl with his thumb.

  Scaja’s tone was resigned. “So they say. Polite enough, I suppose, for a robber chief.”

  “You’ve met him?”

  “No, but I got an eyeful of him in Jerivet’s shop. He came in to buy an iron rim for a wagon wheel.” Scaja nodded. “To carry away the goods they extort from the travelers, no doubt. A big fellow, biggest I’ve ever seen, and white-haired like an old man, but with a young face and body.”

  “Shansi says that they’re all armed like Morturiis,” Annaya chimed in from the kitchen as she carried bowls to be washed.

  Scarlet’s eyebrows went up. “Shansi?”

  “Cousin of Jerivet’s from Nantua,” Scaja muttered aside to him. “He’s courting your sister. A good lad, apprentice to the blacksmith, who is his uncle as well.”

  Hilurin bloodlines were tangled as nests of yarn and that did not bother Scarlet. The news that Annaya was being courted did. He stared at his sister, but she had grown up during his months away. She cast a sloe-eyed look over her shoulder at him as she carried the iron pot back into the kitchen, her silky black hair falling to the pit of her back. Suddenly, Scarlet had to admit that she was no longer a grubby little girl with skinned knees.

  “I will have to visit this Shansi,” he said, still a little stunned.

  “As is right and proper,” Scaja said.

  “But she’s only—”

  “The same age you were when you left with Rannon and his caravan,” Scaja interrupted mildly, refusing to be drawn into an argument.

  From the kitchen, Annaya hooted again. Scarlet scowled. I’ll have to have a talk with this Shansi, he thought. Hilurin daughters were prized, and some things never changed, such as lustful apprentices.

  He ignored Annaya. “Well, anyroad, I’m minded to see what kind of toll this gypsy king charges to pedlars.”

  “No, that you won’t,” Linhona said firmly, striding in from the kitchen. “Traveling the roads is one thing. Thumbing your nose at the Kasiri is another.”

  “Who said anything about thumbing my nose? I was just going to—”

  “Go up and see. I heard. And the minute this Wolf gives you an answer you don’t like, you’ll wind up in a fight with him, like always. Avoid the mountain until he’s quit of it.”

  Scarlet began to think he would never get a full sentence out in earshot of his parents. “And when will that be? From what I’ve heard, he’s been there for months already. I can’t spend the rest of my life traveling back and forth to Patra.” She did not answer and he got up and went around the table to her. “Linhona, you worry too much.”

  “And I don’t have reason?” She was alarmed and trying to hide it with anger, twisting the damp dishcloth in her hands. “All the scrapes you got into when you were little, the fights and the bloody noses and elders rapping on my door because you sassed them. Now you want to go tangling with Kasiri. Didn’t Kasiri kill my family?”

  “Those were Minh raiders,” he reminded her gently.

  “Raiders, Kasiri, all the same. Bandits and nomads.” She waved his answer away impatiently. “Ai, but you won’t listen. You’re too reckless.”

  He was stung. “That’s not true. I’m careful as I can be, what with who I have to trade with and where I have to go. We’d starve if I stayed home, and that’s the truth.”

  “That’s not why you became a pedlar.”

  “No,” he agreed. “It wasn’t. But it’s the truth anyway. I had a choice before. Now I don’t. When was the last time a wagon came through Lysia, or a horse needing shoes or tack? There’s barely any work here at all for Scaja, and for me, nothing.”

  She sagged a little, and then reached out and hugged him fiercely. “I can’t lose another child, Scarlet. Promise me you’ll be careful. You’ve just come home and here you are talking about leaving again.”

  He kissed her cheek, a little unsettled by her worry. “I won’t go today or next week. I’ll stay and help Scaja fix the roof and the fence before I wander off into more trouble.”

  She smiled and wiped her hands on her apron and shooed him away, and that was the end of it for a while. He sat down with Scaja, who had grown silent and sad, and finished his che.

  IT WAS HIS SECOND NIGHT home. He had gone with Scaja to survey the broken fence earlier, as an excuse to stroll and smoke a pipe or two while they caught up with each other. In the late afternoon, when the brassy sun turned the last drying stalks of hay to golden spikes in the fields, Scaja insisted on visiting the family templon to give thanks for his son’s safe return. Scarlet stood beside him while he addressed the little stone shrine that was chipped into the shape of a turreted castle no higher than his shoulder. Inside were two paper gods, Deva and Her Consort, He who is never named, dressed in red and yellow paper gowns. It was Scaja’s job to clothe the gods and care for their symbolic house, and also to make periodic offerings of incense and fragrant oils. As a chill wind blew from the Iron River, Scaja lit the sticks of incense, placed them carefully in the holders, and then bowed his head over his clasped hands, nudging Scarlet to do the same.

  “On danaee Deva shani,” Scaja intoned, and Scarlet followed lead.

  The prayers were short and simple and he had learned them all while he was still toddling. He repeated the cantos after Scaja, made the customary low bow before respectfully backing several paces away (never present your back to a god), and after that they made for home. On the way, Scarlet mused in his head how strange it was that in Heaven a woman should rule, but on plain earth she always chose a man to see to her realm. There must be something to that.

  Thinking about the Flower Prince reminded him that he still had not spoken to Scaja of Masdren’s invitation. “Masdren has offered me a place in his shop,” he said carefully, broaching the subject as delicately as he could.

  Scaja was surprised. “And do you have a mind to apprentice with him?”

  “I might,” Scarlet hedged. “That depends.”

  Scaja stopped walking. They were on the muddy path bordering Imeno’s field, and the rich, loamy earth under their boots was nearly black. “On what?”

  “He wants you to leave Lysia. Linhona and Annaya too, of course. He says he’ll find a place for us in Ankar.”

  Scaja was shaking his head before Scarlet got the last words out. Scarlet sighed and crossed his arms over his chest as he stood facing his father.

  “Not Ankar,” Scaja declared. “Never.”

  “Where then?” Scarlet demanded. He was beginning to understand Masdren’s exasperation. “It’s only a matter of time before the Aralyrin get around to burning us out, too. How much longer are we going to wait?”

  “It’s not all their doing,” Scaja protested. “It’s the Bled and the regular army that’s—”

  “That’s full of Aralyrin soldiers!” Scarlet finished. “Wake up, Scaja. The Flower Prince isn’t going to stop them. No one is.” He watched the lines on Scaja’s face rise up into ranks of worry before settling into their old, familiar pattern of stoicism. Hilurin denial, solid as rock. Scarlet knew he was defeated.

  “It can’t go on forever like this,” Scaja said gruffly. “Mark my words, son: there will be an end to it.”

  Scaja would speak no more of leaving and forbade Scarlet to mention it to his mother or sister, and he had no choice but to swallow the angry words that arose and submit.

  THE HOUR WAS LATE AND Linhona had cooked a meal to feed nine men his size. Scarlet was still trying to recover from it when Annaya came in from the small sitting area set aside from the kitchen.

  “Tell us the story, Linhona.”

  “Sister,” Scarlet warned.

  The lo
ok she cast his way was scorching. “I like to hear it,” she scowled.

  “It’s late.” He shifted a quick glance to Scaja. “And it upsets your mother.”

  “Why’s she keep telling it, then?”

  That was an answer Scarlet did not have, except to say that storytelling was in Linhona’s blood and perhaps telling such a terrible tale lessened the pain of it for her. She told a story better than anyone he ever knew, even the skilled bards in Morturii and the lads from the Hyacinth Court in Rusa, where the Flower Prince lived. Yet, no one ever benefited from Linhona’s gift except her family, because she would not do it for anyone else, and her oldest story, her best story, was the reason why.

  He sighed as Linhona got up and moved her chair until her back was to the fireplace. Annaya found a place at her feet. It was no use trying to talk Linhona out of it. Whether it upset her or not, her daughter had asked for a story. The story.

  She always began the same way: “I was told by my father, who was a man much like your dad,” and she smiled at Scaja as he sat in his overstuffed chair, teeth clamped around the stem of the pipe that filled the room with fragrant smoke, “that one must have a few words before a book to frame the story for the reader, much like a painting is framed. Consider this story as the words before my life began, for this is the thing that happened that shaped all the things yet to come.”

  Linhona clasped her hands loosely in her lap, and Scarlet marveled how beautiful her hair was, how pretty she remained for a woman twice his age and then some. Her voice was steady and warm and familiar as she began to tell the story.

  her words turned very formal as she shifted into the High Speech, the one used for prayers and prophecy and eulogies to the dead, and spoke softly of how there was still ice on all the roofs and spring was not yet in the frozen ground when the raiders of the Minh came out of the east, blown in like the last vengeful wind of winter. She told them of her infant daughter killed that day, and how they had taken Gedda, her strong, gray-eyed son, as a slave. Her voice became muted as she spoke of the rape of the village women and the murders of the Elder and the levyman and their families, and how her best friend, old Maba the baker, had been knifed in the breast because she cursed them fearlessly, and how one pretty Aralyrin woman had been set free because she had the mark of Om-Ret branded on her thigh. Last of all she spoke of Jorlen, her half-Hilurin husband who had tried and failed to defend them, and how she herself and only a handful of others had escaped with their lives.

  The fire crackled and Linhona’s hand stroked Annaya’s hair steadily. Annaya leaned against her leg and was still, her eyes closed. Scarlet thought she might have fallen asleep, were it not for the wince she gave when Linhona mentioned the dead baby: how the squat, parchment-skinned Minh had thrown the infant into the town well with the others, and how Linhona had walked for days afterward not knowing where she was headed, only that she must keep moving or die.

  Scarlet cast an uncomfortable glance at Scaja, because he never knew why Linhona must tell this part, or why she spoke of her own survival and freedom in such a tone, as if she had not deserved it. The raiders might have chosen otherwise and taken her with her son back to Minh, and then they would never have known her. Could she have regretted that? How could she possibly?

  Scaja had tried to explain it once: “She thinks she brought it on them,” he said in his stolid voice. “Bad luck from her reading and writing. Her husband allowed it. He was not of the blood,” he always added, as if that explained everything. Not of the blood meant that Linhona’s first husband was Aralyrin, that his Hilurin heritage was diluted, and so he did not have the Gift and could not kindle the fire by dropping a withy-thought into the sticks or make healing tea by breathing on the water or whistle fish up to the surface to be sung to sleep and caught in the hand. These things and much more Linhona taught her children of the Gift, which occurred only among Hilurin families and certainly not among everyone and was a closely guarded secret, but she had flatly refused to teach either Scarlet or Annaya how to read.

  “The next morning it was over,” Linhona continued. “We could see the Minh from our hiding place. They were a long line of straggling black against the purple hills. We went back to town, but it was ruined: the well polluted, the fountain shattered into bits of marble, and the mill and the grain barns in cinders. Half the houses were burned. I felt like I walked in a dream. You know how it is in dreams, Annaya? When you seem to move and walk but don’t really get anywhere?”

  Annaya nodded, mute with interest but also sleepy.

  “I went home to our cottage. When I got there, I took things blindly and stuffed them into a sack: a cooking pot, a bowl, a blanket. I tried to leave the cloth doll that Gedda used to play with, but I could not. I put on Jorlen's new boots and took his coat and long-knife and whatever else I could find of value, and I left. I did not know which direction to go. It was cold and I could not think well. My head seemed to be wrapped in layers of wool that muffled my very thoughts. When I was many leagues outside of the village, I sat down by a tree and went to sleep, and during the night it snowed.”

  It was that image that haunted Scarlet the most from Linhona’s story. The thought of her sleeping on the bare ground, dressed as a man, snow covering her in her weariness, like some doomed wanderer from a fairy tale who would soon be set upon by the Shining Ones and taken into the Otherworld. Scarlet shivered a little and Scaja patted his arm, the earlier argument between them already forgotten. It was not so easy for Scarlet.

  “I had a fever when I woke,” Linhona said, “but it seemed to help me think. I found I was on the west road to the Channel. It was as good a road as any and less traveled, which was well with me. That night, I tried to burn Gedda's doll. I used my Gift to whisper up a fire and threw it in. I watched it catch and flare. The little yarn curls on its head began to smoke, and suddenly I had the thing out of the coals and was beating at the flames with my bare hands. I spent most of the night stitching the scorched cloth together with scraps torn from my hem, and my hands were blistered, but I was comforted when I laid my head on a bed of evergreen and held the doll to my breast. I did not turn east to follow Gedda, for he would have forgotten how to speak Bizye by the next spring, and would not know me when I saw him again. If I ever saw him again. He would be forbidden to speak of his home, forbidden to utter our names, and we would be so long mute on his lips that our memories would turn to dust in his mind. Such are the methods of the Minh. This I told myself as I turned west, as Deva led my feet to Lysia.”

  With the dark part over, Scarlet could breathe again. Often, Linhona illustrated her tale with the many things that had happened to her on the western road, such as wolves and foul dreams of her baby crying out from the well, all rotted and green, but thankfully she left those out this time. Scaja passed his pipe over to him and he took a long puff of the sweet-smelling herb, holding it on his tongue to get the taste before blowing it out in a smooth line. Annaya was awake still, her eyes narrowed to slits and her body curled against Linhona’s side.

  “I came to Lysia,” Linhona repeated, smiling at Scarlet, the darkness fading from her voice and her eyes glistening in the light. “At first, I did not believe a people could be so calm and happy. They knew of the Minh slaver ships, but seemed to know nothing of their bands of raiders. I learned later that the Minh warriors never journey this far in their land raids. It is the Nerit, you see. The Minh fear the mountain just as the Shining Ones feared it. I should have known about the raiders, for certainly there was no shadow on these people as there was on me. They seemed happy and fed and unafraid of what tomorrow would bring. All the usual sorrows were here: misfortune, cold marriages, stillbirths, disease, and old age. But there were no Minh with blood on their spears, and no children in the well. I should have been thanking Deva for her mercy, realizing that she tempers all things, but instead all I could do was resent these good people for their peace. There was no sense in my feelings, but it was the way I felt, and I told myself that
I would not be able to live here.”

  Annaya stirred. “And then you met Scaja,” she chimed in.

  Linhona laughed and switched back to Bizye. “And then, I took a job at Rufa’s taberna clearing tables and serving bitterbeer. One night, just about this time of year, a man walked in. He had shoulders like my father and was plainly of pure Hilurin blood. He had a boy with him, a little thing no bigger than my thumb!”

  Annaya giggled and Scarlet rolled his eyes. “I wasn’t that small.”

  “Oh, but you were, and loud, and demanding, kicking the table for attention. Your poor father was beside himself.”

  “So instead of bringing him ale...” Annaya coaxed. They all knew the story by heart, line for line. It never offended Linhona, and she seemed pleased.

  “Instead of serving him, I went over to his table and picked up the struggling, fussy, thumb-sized boy, and gave him a big kiss.”

  “And he quieted right down,” Scaja put in softly. Scarlet had given him back the pipe and he clenched it between his teeth and looked on Linhona with gentle eyes. It warmed Scarlet to see it, their love, and he thought to himself of how seeing two people you love also love and care for each other is a kind of rare peace. The world makes sense, then.

  “And I quieted right down,” Scarlet added, joining the story at last. “And you helped Scaja carry me home that night.”

  “And you never left again,” Annaya yawned, more asleep than awake.

  “True as rain,” Linhona said, ending the tale in the Byzan way.

  Scarlet thought about that later as he went to his bed, sleepy with food and with the sureness of being safe and surrounded by familiar things. It was good to be loved in the world. He had never known a life without love, and hoped never to learn that lesson, having seen the folks who could not tell love from lichen, how their eyes were hard as bits of flint and their hearts like stones. He remembered all the times on the road when he had felt frightened, how many times he had almost been robbed or worse, or when the weather had turned so foul that he actually feared for his life.