Books
Wolf Justice
Baen September '98ISBN 0671878913
Sequel to Touched By Magic
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Reandn paced the length of the minor's great hall, scowling peevishly at the lavish use of wood and thinking just as peevishly that Arval would have done better, much better, to have thickened the walls of his keep with additional stone. He stopped and favored an ornate cornice with an especially grim look.
"Come now," Arval said from over his afternoon snack, his voice booming across the all but empty room. "What has my poor hall ever done to you?"
Reandn didn't respond, at least not outwardly. There was nothing wrong with the keep, he realized. Oh, it wasn't stone-bound King's Keep, with its thick defensive walls and towers, but it didn't need to be. And the wood was cheap enough, in this part of Keland.
No, his building anger was more properly aimed at the minor himself. "We should have heard something by now," he said, moving up to Arval's raised table. "You're sure that little keepmaster's apprentice can receive from your wizard?"
"He's not precise," Arval said, amiably enough, "but he manages the job."
Well he might be feeling amiable, given how quickly the Prime had jerked Reandn's authority over his patrol and handed it to Arval instead. Amiable was far from Reandn's reaction to it all. But Saxe had warned him to keep a tight rein on his mouth--Reandn could almost smile, remembering the look on Teya's reddened face when she'd had to relay that message--and Reandn, well aware of the Keep's need for Arval's confidence and support, had done his best to remain respectful.
It was getting harder by the moment. His patrol was out there under someone else's command, and his wizard was paired with Arval's, under the orders of someone who knew little of her personal strengths and weaknesses. Tenaebra's Tits, he'd fought the idea of having a wizard in his patrol, even a fledgling one. But the Prime had insisted--and found him one who'd not only had a taste of Wolf training, but who excelled in shielding Reandn and his allergies from the very magic she worked. She bided by his rules and tried to hide her resentment at them, she never forgot to protect him when there was magic around, and she never ignored it when he felt the whisper of magic before she did.
And she was in his patrol, dammit--like the regular Wolf pairs, she was his to protect from the little stupidities that kept an already dangerous job from being unnecessarily life-threatening. And the big stupidities, too, Reandn thought, shooting a covert glare at the table. He had no idea what Arval's final strategy had been. He knew only that the man had planned to use the wolves to snare a local magic-using outlaw while Teya and the minor's own wizard flung prodigious magic around to ensure the ultimate success of the mission. That's all it had taken to get his hackles up and ensure his initial refusal to cooperate.
Reandn knew better than to trust magic. As long as there was magic around, there was the potential that someone would try to use it against you, just as Ronsin had used it to kill his wife and son. And he'd learned quickly enough that the newest generation of wizards was only half-trained; even when they were using magic to help, it was almost bound to go awry and make things worse. Best to depend only on what the Wolves had always used--a quiet foot, a quick hand, and the wits they'd been blessed with.
They should have been back by now. Arval's wizard--Reandn had never even learned his name--should at least have sent word.
"Would you sit down?" Arval said, irritation creeping into his voice. "You're upsetting my digestion."
Might do you some good, Reandn managed not to say, thinking of the man's girth. Ah, well, there was a reason he'd rarely entered the main keep when he was Wolf First at King's Keep. Even when he'd kept his mouth shut, his opinions of some of the Highborn leaked out through the expression in his grey eyes.
He dropped of the dais and hooked the end of lower table bench with his ankle, pulling it out to sit as Arval asked--but ended up right back on his feet when he heard someone approaching the entrance at the far end of the hall. Arval shot a quick glare at him, snapping, "Sit--"
Reandn raised a hand that cut Arval off--from the pure effrontery of it, to judge by the strangled noise he made. By then the young keepmaster's apprentice was in the vast doorway, out of breath and struggling to maintain the appropriate dignity. "Meir!" he said, starting off well enough, though the rest of the words simply tumbled out of him. "One of the wolves to see you, meir, right now, she says, meir, and it don't look good, meir--"
Arval came to his feet, rounding the main table and coming off the platform with his heavy-footed stride. Reandn was way ahead of him, though he stopped short when Teya--why Teya, out of all of them?-- came up from behind the boy and around him, not waiting for permission to approach. She ignored Arval and fastened her eyes on Reandn aiming herself straight at him, stumbling on the way. She was bruised and battered, her torn clothes grimed with blood and dirt. She held her right arm protectively against her body, and winced at the sight of Reandn's hand reaching to steady her elbow. He let the hand drop.
"First," she said, and got stuck there, unable to do anything but hold his gaze, her light brown eyes full of so many unspeakable words that he got stuck there right along with her. "Reandn--"
Arval stepped up beside Reandn and demanded, "Where's Yanwr? What are you doing here?"
Yanwr. The other wizard. Reandn gave Teya a fraction of a nod and she told Arval, "Yanwr's dead. I tried contacting the apprentice. . . I couldn't. So I came." She looked up at Reandn and her voice broke. "I'm the only one left who can ride, Reandn. Hells, I'm practically the only one--I mean, the rest are. . . most of them are--"
Reandn closed his eyes. Dead. They were dead. It didn't matter that she couldn't say it. He'd been on that hillside; he knew it. In his mind's eye he saw them there. In that instant, the grief that always lurked in him, the black chasm from Adela's death, loomed big enough to swallow him whole. His wolves were gone, led into death by Arval's man. His wolves, his responsibility--only Ethne had made it impossible to keep them out of magic's way.
He should have gone anyway. He should have done something, should have--
"What happened?" Arval demanded, barely garnering Reandn's attention. "Come on, woman! Tell me!"
"Seveyga sent them out ahead, down between the hills. . . they were supposed to outflank the outlaws, and Yanwr was supposed to keep them unseen." She stopped, and gulped a hesitation. Reandn didn't have to open his eyes, to look at her expression; he heard what she wasn't saying clearly enough: because otherwise there was no cover at all. Seveyga had trusted the magic, magic alone. "I was supposed to keep the outlaw wizard's attention, but he was strong--he was so strong. . . he felt what Yanwr was doing anyway, and he stripped the spell away." Her voice fell to a whisper. "They didn't have a chance, they were caught at the bottom of the hill--"
Her voice broke off in a cry of pain as Arval shouted, "You let the outlaw past your defenses? It's your fault?"
Reandn's eyes snapped open; his grief flared into temper. Arval had a cruel grip on Teya's injured arm, and she had gone grey, unable to do anything more than clutch at the pain. Reandn clamped down hard on Arval's forearm, digging his fingers into the clenched muscle there. Voice low and gravelly, he said, "You sent my wolves out to a slaughter."