The Blood of Ten Chiefs (13 page)

**He will die.**

**He never should have gone.**

**The humans will pay!**

**They are evil...**

**What will happen to us?**

**The high ones are right. That fool halfling will get us all killed one day.** This last thought from Swift-Spear's sister Skyfire. Graywolf pushed his way through the crowd, Moonfinder padding behind. It was too much, too much...

**Forgive me for leaving your side, my brother, but if I stay I will kill one of these tame dogs who have no time for your pain. And surely it would be your own sister my fangs would seek first!**

Swift-Spear struggled to wake up, his mind treading strange paths of nightmare that neither Talen nor Willowgreen could follow or understand. Even as the elf-woman's power knitted the terrible wounds together, she looked for something else, something not found in flesh alone. She searched for his name, his secret name, the one he held from all others.

**Concentrate on the healing, girl,** Talen sent to her, breaking off her futile search. Even now, near death, Swift-Spear kept his true self from her.

Tears of exhaustion blinded her. She was so tired, she only wanted to sleep, to curl up somewhere in soft warmth, she had not strength enough—

Rellah bent and touched her shoulder, only that, and it was like a wash of wind and rain, cold and clear. Strength went through her and a mind went through her mind, sorted through the thoughts, discarded the doubts with a disregard of her weaknesses so thorough that she felt dismissed and insignificant.

But Swift-Spear himself did not accept the high one. It was Willowgreen he reached for with his mind, it was her he would not let go. His powerful spirit, trying to help her heal his battered body, moved within her magic, wild and passionate, like the rolling of thunder before a terrible storm. He was strong, the strongest of all the elves. She shuddered at an unbidden memory of those powerful arms about her. He would not die, but he would—as he seemed destined constantly to do—change; and with him, change all of them.

And he rejected the high one, a rejection so strong it was Talen who retreated; it was Rellah who gave back, frowning, and left Willowgreen clasping Swift-Spear's hand to herself with all her strength.

"It is done," Talen said to the crowd of waiting elves. Willowgreen could feel their relief, a warm current riding the sweet summer air; and Rellah's anger like a cold wind. And another: Skyfire pushed her way to the fore and Willowgreen, still wrapped in her healing magic, perceived her lover's sister as a thick cloud of dank and foul smoke.

"We must go! The humans will come after us now!" Skyfire brandished the spear she always carried even though she was not yet one of the hunters.

**Peace,** Talen sent. Aloud, he continued: "The humans will not dare to come so deep into the forest, not for a while, anyway. And your chief must rest."

"When he is better, we must leave, go far away," Skyfire insisted.

"That is for the chief to decide." Willowgreen, still holding Swift-Spear's hand, looked up at the young elf, struggling with exhaustion and with anger. "He has lost his wolf-friend. What have you lost?"

"And what would you know of wolf-friends, healer?" Skyfire shot back.

"I know he loved Blackmane as he loved nothing else." Willowgreen rose to tower over the elf-woman. "And I know if it was you who had been hurt he would be more concerned with your pain than with any fear of the humans."

Skyfire said nothing to that. She just turned her back and walked away.

"She is hot for her womanhood." Talen touched Willowgreen with a pale, thin hand. "She is jealous of your stature in the tribe, that is all. She will come around."

"She is hot for the chieftainship," Willowgreen muttered. "She disagrees with everything Swift-Spear does. It is a pretext, an excuse."

"Perhaps this time," said Talen, "it would have been right to disagree. It was so foolish of him to think the humans would fight him fair."

Willowgreen said nothing as she stared at Skyfire's retreating back. She reached up and wiped the tears from her eyes. And from Rellah there was only cold comfort.

**Go,** Talen's thought came, soothing and quiet. **Go, my child. There is nothing more you can do here.**

Willowgreen looked down at the sleeping form of Swift-Spear, watching silently as Talen knelt down to take up a gourd of water, a handful of moss, to wash away the dried blood from the Wolfrider's chest. She knelt down too and took Swift-Spear's head in her lap.

"My place is here," she said, "with him." **And I, I will protect him from anything that dares try to hurt him, human or elf...**

Graywolf slid down from Moonfinder's shoulders and kept a firm grip on the brindled fur—tugged at it slightly to focus the wolf's attention on the place below them in the twilight.

Now was the wolf-time. Moonfinder lowered his head and turned and nosed Graywolf's arm, quick, anxious gesture. And in the way of wolves another of the pack came ghosting through the brush, a loner who disdained the elves; No-name was all he answered to, and he was grudging and suspicious, living on the fringes and showing up unpredictably. Moonfinder bristled up when he came up onto the rocks and slunk into shadow, high-shouldered, flat-eared silhouette in the fading light above the human camp.

No-name was scarred with battles, more than a little crazy. He was a disease in the pack, one that Blackmane had not tolerated—but he would not leave them alone, refusing to leave the pack, refusing to accept the pack's allegiance to unwolves. No-name was a wilder thing, and more than once taunted Blackmane himself, knowing that the pack-leader, being elf-ensorceled, would not execute him. Too much peace. Too much soft living, perhaps. Graywolf knew this one, read his attitude in that surly slink into the fading light as he caught the ghostly, wordless thoughts of a hostile wolfish mind. Joy that Blackmane was dead. Satisfaction. And Moonfinder, second-leader, supporting the dead pack-leader with a tenuous hold on the pack as yet unchallenged, felt a fear that no human ever put into him; he bristled, and bared teeth, and growled his uncertain displeasure, so that No-name slunk a little less and let his tongue loll.

He infected the air itself with unreason; and Graywolf licked at his own not-quite-elvish teeth, and the hairs lifted at his nape and his smooth hand knotted on Moonfinder's fur to prevent him from violence. **No.** Now was not the time for challenges, least of all challenge when his own chief lay wounded and diminished in his authority. They were alike, he and Moonfinder, two pack-seconds equally desperate in their attempt on a situation that had defeated their chiefs; and this came, this hateful killer, radiating satisfaction in the prospect of bloodshed. That was what brought the loner: a project to No-name's liking—No-name was eager to help, would take pack-second's orders; that was in the wolf-thoughts.

Moonfinder growled and snapped at No-name's closest approach; and the loner skittered aside and slunk back again, bristled all down his lank shoulders; but when Moonfinder started to go farther, Graywolf clamped his hand down on the wolf's muzzle, hard, dodged teeth and held him a second time till Moonfinder gave him the throat, a little twisting of his head to be free: Peace, that meant, my leader. But not too much humility; and not too much of standing still; that was against the wolf-nature. And the twilight was coming down in which wolves and a halfling elf saw very well indeed.

**Come,** Graywolf said, and slid down among the rocks, hardly more conspicuous in taking that line of half-lit shadow than the two wolves which skirted the rocks, one on a side. He did not ride, now. He would not tire his wolf-friend for a retreat which might well be in desperate haste. Now it was stealth he wanted; and he had as lief be without No-name, but no thrown rock would shake that shadow, Graywolf knew that from experience; not even Moonfinder's teeth might drive him farther than around the hill and a few moments back—he knew No-name's tactics. So he tolerated the loner himself, who trotted along the hillside like a trick of the eye for any human watching from that place below.

Beside him, Moonfinder glided—not easy at all to spot a wolf in deep dusk, in the scattered scrub and rock of the slope that led down to the stone camp. Less easy to spot an elf with a wolf's instincts and a mind that thought in past and future.

Wolf-boy, the high one had called him, and driven him away with a force of mind that he could not put a name to nor describe nor even remember. That was the way of the high ones: subtleties so tissue-thin that one could never catch them on the wind or smell or taste them, or accuse them in words. They just were, and that was the trouble with them, they were, all in the past and the power that they never used on enemies—

—only on their own kind, a force that had made the hair stand up at his nape; and the animal had risen up in him and shamed him and driven him from his friend and from the council.

Therefore he went to redeem himself—and Swift-Spear. It had been no fool's act to challenge the humans. It had only given the humans too much credit. And wolf-blood and wolf-instinct hated that mewling retreat of the tribe, that milling in confusion once the chief was down. Wolf-blood understood it very well; and knew what to do about it—

But there were the high ones, whose power sapped the will out of the tribe, and left only the confusion apt to their kind of guidance, which was chaos, and leaderless.

To which Skyfire and her little band ascribed—only Skyfire had her own motives, like No-name, the loner on the fringes. It was power for which Skyfire had her appetite, and if it took her brother, if it took the tribe, if it demanded ducking the head and mewling soft answers to the high ones who might disavow her brother in her favor—to all these things she was apt.

Graywolf chose his own allies. He aimed to prove the humans vulnerable, as Swift-Spear had said. And most of all he meant to do what wanted most doing, so that Swift-Spear would not have to do it—because he knew his cousin, that he could not rest or forget or delay for his healing. What had broken in him was too profound and too close to the spirit, and lying defeated and within the high ones' nebulous disapproval—no, Swift-Spear would not bear that. He would go against the humans again. And Swift-Spear, having less wolf and more of high blood in him, would dwell too much on immaterial things like pride and honor. Graywolf s intentions were simple and direct: do the deed and nip the flanks of the intruders and tell them they were fools to stay near the woods and greater fools to enter another's hunting range, greatest fools of all to make their tents under the sun, of stone that could not be moved.

Then a cold doubt came not to wolf-mind, but to the elf in Graywolf. Could not be moved. Wolf-fights were skirmishes, ending in retreat for one, territory for the other; elves fought sharply and keenly, and retreated when it was time for retreat, carrying all they had, in this age when elves, like wolves, had no possession which could not be moved.

But this, Graywolf thought, frightened, halted for a heartbeat where the gardens began, before the tall wooden walls, over which the tops of stone huts showed; and human stink wafted on the wind, mingled with the smell of grease and smoke and water. They cannot carry away the stone, can they? Or their food-gardens. They expect to win all their fights. They do not think of moving.

Dim light and the whisper of trees. Swift-Spear blinked, unable to reconcile this with the dirt and the flash of weapons and the ring of human faces where he had, he thought, died. **Blackmane,** he sent hopefully, in the thought that if that were not true, then perhaps the other were not—it was that hard to give up his friend.

But when he moved in the next moment and felt the twinge of healing wounds, and when he turned his head and saw Willowgreen bending down to kneel with a cup in her hand, when he saw how wan and worn she was and felt the pain everywhere, then he knew that the time was after and not before the fight at the wooden wall; and that somehow he had lived—

Graywolf, he thought. He had not come alone to the human camp. He had only gone alone to the challenge.

"Graywolf is alive," Willowgreen said, having caught that fear spilling from his mind; and lifting his head into her lap she gave him the cup to drink and showed him in that quick way of a weary and powerful mind how Graywolf had come riding in with him, how she had healed him.

There were other impressions, quickly snatched away, but not quickly enough: the memory of Skyfire with her spear. The two high ones, Rellah and Talen, his own face through Willowgreen's eyes, bloody and pale and senseless as he lay in her lap, her hands pouring strength into him, the great fear—And anger then, indignation, as the high ones dealt with Graywolf, as Graywolf walked away, head bowed, shoulders tense with anger—

**I tried to tell them—** she began.

**Tried. Tried.** His heart ached. There was pain behind his eyes and in his throat. **Tell him I want to see him.**

But the figure in Willowgreen's eyes only walked away into the woods, began to run, and he knew that direction, he knew the dread in Willowgreen's heart, though no one else would have seen and no one had noticed or turned his head: it was Graywolf's talent, such a silence—only he could not trick the eyes.

"He has gone back," Swift-Spear murmured, and sought to get his arm under him. He thrust himself up to sit, and flung off Willowgreen's protesting hand. "Ah!" The pain surprised him.

"Lie down, be still!" **Do not think of going after him; he is no fool, he will not—**

Unfortunate word. I ache; could she do no more? Do not think of going after him? Fool. Maybe she is right and I am that; but better a fool in courage than wise in cowardice. But she had tried to hide her fear for him: that and her fierce protectiveness warmed his heart—nor could he forget the power in her healing. In her own way, he realized, she had strength like his; and she would never betray him.

He gained his feet. She stared at him in shock, thinking first that he was her chief and then that he was her lover and that she never mattered to him half what he mattered to her.