dirt. Karn understood.
“I, too, have been judged,” he said. “By dagger and fang.”
Blood bared his canines and growled.
The Forsaken snarled, charged forward, broke Karn’s wrist, dagger falling. Karn spat and howled, drove his left heel into the ground for support. The Forsaken forced Karn backward into a tree. Karn snarled, struggled, dodged as the Forsaken tore and missed, gouging bark from the tree. The Forsaken pinned Karn by the throat.
Blood leaped, breaking the Forsaken’s hold on Karn. The wolfs jaws ripped, tore at the Forsaken’s throat, finding arteries, finding veins and tearing them loose. The Forsaken staggered, holding the wolf upright, the two stepping sideways, backward. Blood’s muzzle was covered, dripping, from the Forsaken’s wounds. The Forsaken raged, slowed, stumbled, toppled backward.
Blood breathed heat into the Forsaken’s face. The Forsaken growled at the wolf, did not move. Blood’s chest heaved with breath. Waited.
The Forsaken wept. Growled, snarled and clawed the air.
Karn sank to the ground. “Why, wulfbunde?” he asked Blood. “Your judgment was made.”
Karn heard the Forsaken laugh, choke around the blood flooding his throat. “In the Age of Might, the Dark Queen brought us the word of Canus. Canus brought us the Bond between wъlfbunde and master.”
Blood backed away from the Forsaken, turning to Karn. The wolf walked slowly to Karn, shuffled, put his head in Karn’s lap, forced his head beneath Karn’s hand. Karn tried to brush his fingers against Blood’s fur, but could not make his fingers move. Blood moaned, brown eyes meeting Karn’s.
Blood’s ears twitched. He lifted his head, coughed, lowered his head again. Karn listened. The patrol was nearby. He could hear the other wulfbunde leading their masters to where he lay.
The Forsaken tried to move, lay still. He said, “The Bond is the bond of love. The Dark cannot break the Bond. Above all things, a man loves his wolf.”
Karn looked into Blood’s eyes and understood. “The Dark cannot break the Bond,” Karn said. “Above all things, a wolf loves his man.”
A twist of the knife
The snow came at her in a blur-icy shards stinging her face and hands, turning her skin a hurtful pink and chasing her farther into the folds of a tattered woolen cloak. She had no hood or hat, and her long hair whipped about, spun silver dancing madly with the keening wind.
She didn’t have to be out in this weather. She could have stayed in the goatherds’ village, claiming a spot by a cozy hearth and eating her fill of something warm and reasonably tasty. But she was driven this night, like the snow was driven, and so she struggled to pick up the pace along a narrow path where the drifts were a foot deep in places.
It was the onset of winter in Neraka’s Broken Chain Mountains. In the foothills and in the rest of the country there was likely only a dusting of snow-and perhaps no snow at all in the southern parts of the Dark Knight-held land.
But this brutal storm is not so bad, certainly not as bad as others face, she told herself, as if her thoughts might somehow soften the wind’s vicious bite. People she knew in Southern Ergoth, where the white dragon Frost held sway, faced weather like this-or worse- every day of the year. Word was they had blizzards so fierce that no man could last outside for more than a few minutes, and she was lasting-and walking- making headway toward the next village.
She didn’t see the man against the rocky outcropping. He held his breath and listened, hearing the wind. To him it sounded like a chorus of mournful ghosts. Her boots crunched on the snow as she passed by his hiding spot. He waited, silently counting, then stepped out, an inky shadow against the stark whiteness that stretched in all directions.
Shiv was taller than the woman, but only by a few inches, putting him a bit above six feet. His back was straight, his shoulders broad, and the rest of him was oddly narrow, a gaunt man whose silhouette resembled a dagger stuck into the drift growing at his feet.
He was dressed in a smoke-gray jacket and trousers made from the hide of a worg and lined for winter use. A knit cap hugged his hawkish face. Unlike the woman, Shiv did not wear a cloak; he knew it could lash about in the wind, entangling his arms and flapping noisily and perhaps giving him away. He had a pack on his back, padded so it would not rustle, and a purse at his belt-nearly empty, as it had taken practically every coin he owned to find this woman. But his purse and his pockets would be splitting at the seams soon enough, filled with steel and gems. Before the month was out he would be happily doling out some of his riches to the most exotic, perfumed ladies for hire he could find in Jelek’s colorful foreign quarter.
Shiv held thin-bladed knives in each gloved hand, smeared with an oily black substance so they would not reflect any gleam off the snow. He’d bought them two years ago from an expert weaponsmith in Bloodspring. Their metal was as hard as the set of his jaw, the edges so keen he hadn’t yet needed to resharpen them. Worth every coin, these tools of his trade.
He intended to kill the woman with them.
He would do it quickly, effortlessly, stepping close and slipping the right blade across her throat while plunging the left into the center of her heart. He’d done it so many times before. Afterward, he would drag her off the trail, take her body a little higher into the mountains where the wolves would catch the scent and devour the evidence.
But he wouldn’t do it here. It was too close to the village she’d just left, too risky that someone following after a stray goat might-despite this damnable storm-glimpse the deed.
And he wouldn’t do it tonight.
It was too soon.
He’d only just managed to find her, late this afternoon. He didn’t know her yet, didn’t have her walk down, hadn’t looked into her eyes. He didn’t know how strong she was, and, most importantly, he had no clue about her contacts in these mountain villages. This last crucial bit could take a few days to ferret out, perhaps longer.
So he followed several yards behind her, gloved hands reflexively closing on the handles of his weapons before sheathing them, dark eyes squinting against the frenetic snow as they trained on her back.
It was work to keep her in sight, his chest burning from the exertion, his legs aching from slogging through mounds of snow. Twice he dived into a drift when she turned to check her bearings. Were it not for the whirling snow she might have spied him or his tracks. His teeth chattered, and he muttered a silent curse that perhaps he’d been a fool to take on this job at this time. Couldn’t her assassination have waited until spring?
He guessed it took them nearly two hours to reach her destination-a ramshackle assortment of wood and stone buildings wedged into a mountain overhang. He made out on a sign partially buried by a drift: KETH’S CRADLE. More like the Abyss’s Cradle, he thought.
She hurried toward the largest dwelling, a turtleshell-shaped affair that was busily belching smoke into the sky. He watched her for a moment more, then quickly began to circle the tiny community, which by the malodorous aroma that hung in the air, and the pens he barely made out, declared it another village of goatherds.
She rapped firmly on the door.
“I am Risana,” she stated.
“Risana,” she repeated, as the door finally opened. “Risana of Crossing.” Her voice was musical and held no trace of the tiredness she most certainly felt. “You sent word that you needed me.”
“Yes!” came the breathless reply. “The Solamnic Knight.”
“I-”
“At last you’re here, dear woman. Please.” Without another word she was ushered inside, and the heavy door slammed shut behind her.
