Chapter 2 — Echoes of Exile

Kaiden Draven had been standing on the spire for an hour, and the forest had been lying to him for most of it.

From up here Fangshade should have read like a page. He knew its weather: which hollows held mist and which did not, where the deer still went, which stretches had gone over completely and now moved without any wind to move them. Tonight the whole northern quarter was breathing out of time.

He rested his forearms on the balcony rail. Below and away, the trees rolled black to the horizon under two moons — the big one pale and nearly full, the small one down to a red thread, four nights off dark.

The dark of the small moon was when things walked down out of Fangshade that had no business walking.

Something was in there. Not a relic hunter; relic hunters came in daylight and made a great deal of noise about it. This was a single point of disturbance travelling fast on a line that did not deviate, and behind it, spread wide, half a dozen more that did.

Someone was being run.

Then the howl came up out of the trees, and Kaiden closed his eyes.

It was not out there. He had learned that in his second year alone, the hard way, after four nights of hunting a sound through the ruins with his blades out. There was nothing to find.

The pull came at the top of every month and went through him and found nothing that could answer it, and what came back was that — a voice with his own shape in it, arriving from wherever unanswered things go.

He had made his peace with hearing it. What he had not made his peace with was that for six months it had been coming from a direction.

Tonight the direction was north-north-west, low in the forest, and closer than it had ever come.

“All right,” he said to the dark, and pushed off the rail.

The stairs took him down through four hundred years. He had swept them once, early on, when he still believed he was going to restore something. Now he only kept the treads clear, and the rest of Eldwynd went on quietly falling apart around him at the rate it had been falling apart since before his grandfather was whelped.

The main hall was cold and blue. In the middle of its floor, cut into the flagstones by somebody who had known exactly what they were doing, lay the map — the temple and its bones, the tunnels, the sanctum, all of it rendered in lines that lit when the temple wanted him to know something.

The lines were awake. They had rearranged themselves around the catacombs, and they were pulsing.

Kaiden crouched at the edge of the map and studied it the way he had studied it for eleven years. Something was already inside.

He went to the side chamber and armed himself without hurrying: the twin blades across his back, obsidian steel, older than the temple and the only inheritance he had kept. He was reaching past them for the broken ward segment on the bench — a project, a way of filling hours — when he stopped and left it where it was.

The catacombs were colder than the hall. His own repaired wards lit as he passed under them, one after another, a dozen small failures of nerve he had spent a decade patching.

Forty paces in, he found the blood.

It was on the wall first, a smear at shoulder height, and then on the floor in a trail that got wider. Kaiden crouched and put two fingers in it and brought them to his face.

Wolf.

He stood very slowly. There had not been another wolf inside these walls since the day he walked in.

He found the man forty paces further, propped where the tunnel widened, sitting the way people sit when they have chosen the place. He was thin and weathered and somewhere past fifty, with a bad grey beard and a coat that had been good once.

A blade wound had opened him from the short ribs to the hip. He had packed it with moss. It had not worked, and by the smell of him he had known it would not work for some hours.

His eyes came open. They were dull amber.

“You’re not one of them,” he said.

“No.” Kaiden crouched an arm’s length away, out of grabbing range, because eleven years alone teaches a man some ugly habits. “How did you get past the wards?”

“Walked.” The man’s mouth moved in something that had been a grin in better weather. “They’re keyed against mages. I’m not one.”

Kaiden let that sit. “Name.”

“Tobin. Reyes.” He breathed twice to get it out. “Duskrun.”

The word meant nothing to Kaiden, and something in the way the man said it told him it should have.

“Never heard of it.”

“No.” Tobin’s head went back against the stone. “That was the idea.”

Kaiden shrugged out of his coat and pushed it against the wound, and Tobin let him, which said everything about how far along he was.

“There’s a woman in your forest,” Tobin said.

“I know.”

“Then you know they’re running her.”

“I know they’re being careful about it,” Kaiden said. “Their shots go wide.”

Something moved in the old man’s face — relief, maybe, that he would not have to explain the whole shape of it to a stranger with his last air.

“Her name’s Scarlett,” he said. “Everine. Alder’s girl.”

“And you’ve been looking for her.”

“Two years.” Tobin’s hand came up and closed on Kaiden’s wrist, and there was still enough grip left in it to be worth noticing. “Listen. Everyone says the hunters took my pack. Raid. Bad winter, bad luck, wrong valley.”

“And?”

“They didn’t raid us.” His eyes came all the way open. “They counted us.”

Kaiden went still.

“Nine years I’ve turned it over,” Tobin said. “They came in with a list. They took the ones on it. They stood in the snow at the creek and they checked.” He had to stop. “Left two. Me, because I was three valleys over with the yearlings. And her.”

“Left her deliberately.”

“Left her alone.” Tobin’s grip tightened. “There’s a difference and it’s the whole thing.”

Down the tunnel, far off, stone shifted where nothing should have been walking.

“Her blood isn’t like ours,” Tobin said. “That’s the part they’ll tell you. It’s true and it’s not the point. The point is what they took away from her before they put anything in.”

His breath caught and came out wrong. “They want her back. The council. They’ve wanted her back since she was seventeen and they’ve been patient about it, and patient people are the ones that get you.”

“The mage council doesn’t want a werewolf girl.”

“They want the Core,” Tobin said, “and she’s how.”

Kaiden’s hands had gone cold.

He had spent eleven years in this building for one reason, which he had never once said out loud: that if he could find out what the Aegis Core had actually been, he could find out what he had actually been thrown away for. He had assembled it in pieces. Murals, ledgers, a burned book of accounts. He had never assembled a person.

“Protect the Core,” Tobin said. His voice had gone down to nothing. “That’s wrong. That’s what I was going to say to you and it’s wrong.”

“Then say the right one.”

The old man’s eyes found him, and for a moment there was somebody all the way behind them.

“Don’t let her be alone with it,” he said.

His hand slid off Kaiden’s wrist. Nothing dramatic happened. He simply stopped being in the tunnel, the way they do.

Kaiden knelt there for a while with his coat under a dead man’s ribs.

He had seen this exactly twice. The second time was a boy called Ferris on a cart road with an arrow in him.

The first time was the Ironfang — all of them, in one night, in a stockade that had been built for shelter and worked very well as a pen, and the reason he had not been in it was that Malachai had asked him to come to Ravenmark to answer some questions about influence.

Forty-one wolves. He had held all of them, which is what an alpha is for, and he had felt each one go out.

He had come out of that night with a scar along his left cheekbone and a conviction he had never revised: that being held by him was, in the end, a way of dying.

Kaiden closed Tobin Reyes’s eyes with his thumb and stood up.

He went back through the catacombs at a pace that was not quite a run and up into the hall, where the map had rearranged itself again. The lines had abandoned the tunnels. They ran now to the eastern approach, the gravel path, the corroded doors — one point coming fast, six behind it and spreading.

On the balcony the air had turned. He got the smell before he got anything else: a woman, and burnt cloth, and blood that was not from a wound.

And then the howl came up out of the trees for the second time that night, from the eastern slope, close enough now that he could hear the break in the middle of it.

Kaiden had heard that break in his own throat.

He stood with both hands on the rail and understood, for one bad second, that the sound he had been hunting through his own ruins for eleven years had never once been his.

“Well,” he said. “So much for the quiet life.”

He went down to meet her.