SHADOWS SLITHERED ACROSS the mud. The Luathi had not cleared the underbrush, nor stowed the supply train. In the steep dark before dawn, when the sentries were cold and weary, the whole moor seemed to creep and seethe. But no one was looking.
A fight had broken out between Fallough’s men and Andrael’ knights. It was a senseless brawl, an occupation of time riding high on the tension of their lords, with no perception of the true cause. By the time the cinders were stamped out and the men driven off to their own quarters, the promise of dawn lay light upon the east, kissing the eastern peaks. The third watch would end soon, and then their cover would be gone. It was only a matter of time before some fool wandered from his tent to let his morning water and noticed the killers converging like a garrote around the camp.
Culrann knew the time was near. He squatted out of sight beside one of the heel-beaten roads that ringed the Luathi grounds.
So far, they were true to the lady’s word: they slaughtered none of the few sentries they came across, but bound and gagged and passed them backward while the others streamed around, knives clenched in their teeth and swords at hand.
Fifty paces separated the wulvere from the border of the camp now. A scream, and a charge, and the entire Luathi force could be laid low. The battle would be a stillborn, but that suited Culrann. He hated battle; it was too loud, too wild. He was a hunter, and here lay his prey, slumbering and unawares.
His wolves were close. No need to spread them out, for a thousand of the Lion’s men crouched among the trees and growth. A grin spread across Culrann’s grizzled face. Three hundred here, but five thousand rousing and marching in the cold dark, assembling beyond the hill that overlooked Ennon’s Field.
This he understood; the feint and the ambush, one or two fangs driving a larger beast into the blind where the others hid in waiting.
Men knew the way instinctively, but armies did not. They had too many brains, too many mouths, to follow the way of the wolf. Culrann had spent most of the night arguing with the lords who pretended to the Lion’s favor, particularly the Nuadi, for whom war and bloodshed was an uncouth thing. Yet it was the Arthoni lords who nearly broke his effort to rescue the king. They loved their horses too much, and their intricate shield-walls and battle formations.
“No armor,” Culrann insisted, slamming a fist down on the table in Ulrem’s tent. They stared at him, shocked at his fury. “We go silently. And no killing. Not until we’re sure he’s dead.”
At that, a great clamor rose. He watched them veer on the edge of the path. But slowly, they grew to understand. To strike early would put the king’s life in danger. In the fray, who knew what might happen to a man trapped behind the enemy lines?
“How do you know they have him? How do you know he is alive?” The question came from one of the eldest of the Arthoni lords, a castlemaker with a gray face and long beard.
Culrann ground his teeth. “A witch came to me. She bid me tell you these things.”
“And what else?” It was Donnoth who spoke, Donnoth, Captain of the Right, with the blond hair and heavy muscle. He was a Nuadi, whose father was one of the first to join the Lion’s ranks. His eyes were flecked with gold, of which he was vastly proud, and he swaggered with the pride of three men, for he had nearly wrestled the king into submission, once. “What else did she say, half-blood?”
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“That a third part will be joined to the two.” Culrann hesitated, seeing their distrust. He swallowed, and said, “I smelled the truth of it on her. It terrified me.”
Uncertain eyes shifted back and forth. Donnoth was first to pledge his men: a hundred fighters of his father’s tribe. Rann, the Captain of the Left, dark of hair and thin where his companion was broad, pledged two hundred. And that was enough; though the others offered, Culrann forbade them. They would be raiders tonight: hunters, stalkers, wild-men crawling out of the mist to take what was theirs.
But not soldiers.
Donnoth and Rann, speaking in Ulrem’s absence by the authority of the gold in their eyes, commanded the remainder of the army to be readied and brought along behind.
Now the three hundred pledged to Culrann were spread around him. He could feel their eagerness, tight and sharp like a bowstring drawn past the cheek. Yet they waited in silence, moving as gradually as the dawn, which was now a bar of gold above the furthest peaks.
A drumbeat picked up from the heart of the camp, sudden and wicked. The wulvere knew that sound, for those drums had once played for him. Death-drums, the crow-summons. Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. A heartbeat, played out for all to hear, and then cut short.
Luathi emerged from their tents ahead, many in little more than loincloths. A few tied cloaks around their shoulders against the morning’s early chill, and fewer still belted on swords. None saw the raiders. They were distracted, eyes drawn to the heart of the camp.
Culrann closed his eyes and sent a command to the black-faced wolf. It was a thought, a fragment of a shared dream, in the silent way of wolves, but the beast obeyed. Culrann saw through its eyes as his pack-brother slid forward toward the tents. A few drunkards still sprawled between tents, snoring and dead to the world.
“Come,” Culrann said to the men behind him. They ran forward hunched, closing the last fifty paces to the edge of the tents. Without armor, they moved through the tents as quiet as a whisper, and still the ba-dum pounded out its tattoo ahead.
The black wolf was near the gathered men. There were a few hounds among the camp, and they took wind of the wolf, whining and shying back. The black-faced wolf thought of them as weak-bloods, though they were hardly distinguishable from the black-faced beast itself, for they were still long of limb and broad of head. It ignored them and pressed closer, between the legs of men who cursed it as one of their own common curs.
Culrann compelled it on despite the fear. So many men unnerved it; to walk so brazenly among two-legs was unnatural. He grit his teeth against its flagging courage, spurring it on, until he saw what lay at the center of the gathering: a man on his knees, hands bound behind his back by thick iron. Other men in flowing robes stood around him, raising their hands and shouting at the crowd.
“They have him,” Culrann said, recalling his brother.
“Where?” Murder in the men’s voices.
Culrann sorted through the jumble of thoughts. Not only his own, but the wolves’, and, more dimly, the dogs’. He closed his eyes, and the men watched in strained silence.
Anger. Hate, at the humiliation the black-faced wolf had witnessed. Wolves did not cage one another; they were, or were not, of the pack. Such cruelty as men afflicted on one another was alien to them. They knew Ulrem as a steady hand, a man apart from other men, like Culrann. And they knew Culrann followed him. That was enough to raise an appetite for blood.
“Come on, man! Speak!”
Culrann shook his head. He did not like this. Men were too impatient. “In the camp. Two of them have swords. I think it is an execution.”
One of the men surged to his feet, sword in a white-knuckled grip, but Culrann grabbed him by the back of his tunic and hauled him to the ground.
“Fool!” he snarled. “Not yet.”
The man fought, but Culrann was the stronger, the fiercer, and soon he went limp in the wulvere’s grasp. Eyes glittering with flecks of gold, he fixed them all in a stern gaze.
“He was grinning,” Culrann said. They didn’t understand. They didn’t know Ulrem the way Culrann did. They saw the King, the Conquering Flame, the Lionborn. Some of his men called him an Inheritor, and others had begun to offer prayers in his name, though Ulrem never spoke of the ring on his finger, and he was moved to rage whenever those prayers were mentioned.
But he was first, and foremost, the Slayer. His grin was a lion’s: a baring of fangs. The thunder before the strike.
“Spread the word,” Culrann said, holding a hand up. “We wait until the king makes his move.”