HE WAS JUST A SECRET WOLF

Chapter Six: The First Change

Kael lost count of the hours.

He ran until his legs shook, walked until they steadied, and ran again. He kept to the trees, off the roads, as Orin had told him. When the sky paled he crawled under the roots of a fallen pine and lay there with the cloak over his head, listening to his own heart and trying not to think about the fire.

He slept badly. Every time he closed his eyes he saw the cottage roof folding inward in a shower of sparks.

At dusk he ate a strip of dried mutton without tasting it and moved on. The country rose into rough, wooded hills, all bracken and black stone and the dripping dark of old oaks. The pack grew heavier. The sword banged against his thigh. Twice he stopped to touch the pendant under his shirt, and each time it was warm, as if something inside it were still alive.

West, he told himself. Eight days. West.

On the second night, the dogs found him.

He heard them before he saw them. That much, at least, the strange new ears were good for. A long way behind, on the ridge he had crossed at dusk, came the deep, patient baying of the war-hounds, and between it, thin as wire, the sound of horns.

They had his scent. They had picked it up at the cottage and followed it, mile after mile, as steady as a tide.

Kael ran.

It was a different kind of running now, not a boy's panicked flight but something narrower and faster, a clean line through the trees. The ground flew by. Branches parted. He could feel his own breath, hot and rough, and under it a rising pressure, as though something large was pacing back and forth just behind his ribs.

Heat comes from the wrist, Orin had said. Let it rise and let it fall. If you chase it, it will chase you back.

He tried to let it fall. He really did. But the baying grew louder, and the horns came closer, and somewhere behind him a man's voice shouted, There! The ravine!

He broke through a wall of brambles and the ground vanished beneath him.

He fell a short distance, a dozen feet, maybe less, and landed in a streambed with a jolt that knocked the breath out of him. Cold water soaked his boots. He scrambled up and tried to run, and found the ravine's far wall rising in front of him, slick with moss, much too steep to climb.

Behind him, at the lip of the ravine, torchlight flared.

"Got him," said a voice, almost lazy with satisfaction. "Hounds, loose!"

Kael turned.

There were nine of them in the light, hunters in the gold-and-blue of the Emperor's guard, spread along the lip with crossbows leveled. Below them, straining at their chains, stood the war-hounds: huge, slab-shouldered brutes, grey as wolves, with jaws that could break a calf's leg. The chains dropped. The dogs poured down the slope.

Don't, he thought. Please don't.

The pressure in his chest burst.

It did not feel like pain. He had expected pain. It felt like a door being thrown open in a house he had lived in all his life without knowing it had a cellar.

Heat roared up his arm. His spine bowed and stretched with a long wet crackle, and the world tilted as his shoulders broadened and dropped. His jaw ached, then lengthened. The sword fell off his belt. The jacket burst at its seams, the stitched coins scattering. His hands hit the water and they were not hands anymore.

And the night turned bright.

Every drop of the stream stood out like a scattering of jewels. Every hunter on the ridge shone with warmth, outlined in red and gold. He could smell the fear on them, thin and sour, and under it the hot salt of blood in their veins. And the hounds, rushing down the slope, suddenly slowed and went flat-eared and silent, their tails clamped between their legs.

They knew what he was. Every one of them.

Kael heard himself make a sound, a low, rolling note that was not a word. It rose from somewhere under his ribs and filled the ravine, and the hounds yelped and wheeled and fled, scrabbling up the slope in a tangle of chains.

The hunters stood frozen. Someone dropped a torch.

"Gods," a man whispered. "Gods, it's true."

Then one of the crossbows fired, and the bolt took Kael in the shoulder.

After that, he remembered almost nothing.

There were pieces. The sting of the bolt, swallowed at once by a rage so large and sudden that the pain seemed trivial. The slope under his claws. A man's face, wide-eyed and white, framed in the torchlight, and the strange hot delight of seeing it come apart. The taste of copper. A scream cut off. Another. The screech of steel against fur and bone.

He remembered that it felt good. That was the thing he would never be able to forgive. For a handful of moments, whatever he was became the easiest, most natural thing in the world, and every rule Orin had ever taught him, every careful breath, every quiet word, simply fell away. There was no Kael in it. There was only the hunt, and the heat, and the red joy of the kill.

He remembered the last man.

He was young, barely older than Kael himself, with a smooth boyish face and a scatter of freckles. He had dropped his crossbow and fallen against a tree, and he was not trying to run. His hands were up. His eyes were full of tears. And he was looking straight into Kael's face, and what he saw there made him whisper, very softly, "Please. Mother."

Kael stood over him with his jaws open and his claws raised.

On his chest, under the shreds of his shirt, the silver pendant went suddenly, shockingly hot.

It burned him. A small, clean, ordinary pain, like a spark landing on skin, and it cut straight through the red haze. Kael stumbled back as though struck. The heat in his wrist stuttered. And for one clear, awful moment he saw what he was looking at: a frightened boy, a rotting log, a pool of firelight, the bodies lying around him in the dark.

He ran.

He woke at dawn, in a hollow beneath an overhanging rock, curled naked on a bed of leaves.

His body ached from skull to heel. His mouth tasted of blood. For a long time he lay still, listening to the birds and the soft chatter of a brook and the slow beating of his own heart, and he told himself it had been a dream. A fever dream. Some terrible night-sickness he had picked up in the cold.

Then he looked at his hands.

They were stained brown to the wrists. Dried blood crusted under the nails and in the creases of his palms. There was a half-healed wound in his shoulder where the crossbow bolt had gone in, already knitting, the skin pink and puckered. And a few yards away, spread across the hollow where they had fallen, lay the shreds of his clothes, the empty pack, the sword.

He crawled to the brook and washed until the water ran clear. He scrubbed his face and his arms and his hair until his skin was raw. It did not help. He could still taste it.

When he could stand, he dressed in what remained: torn trousers, a ruined jacket, the cloak, which had somehow survived. He buckled on the sword. He gathered the scattered coins from the lining one by one with fingers that would not stop shaking, and he counted them twice, because counting was something to do.

Then he went back.

He did not want to. Every part of him said to go west, to keep moving, to put as many miles as he could between himself and the ravine. But there was a boy who had said Mother, and he needed to know.

It took him an hour to find the place.

Even from a distance, he smelled it. The ravine lay silent in the thin morning light, the stream running pink over the stones. The hunters' torches had burned out where they had fallen. Eight bodies lay scattered along the slope in the stiff, strange postures of the dead, and the war-hounds lay among them, torn and still.

Kael stood at the lip and did not look at their faces. He looked, instead, for the freckled boy.

He was alive.

He lay against the same tree where Kael had left him, one arm clamped across his chest, his breath shallow and quick. A long ragged gash ran down his side, and the leaf-mold beneath him was dark and sodden. His eyes were half open. They found Kael and widened, but he did not scream. Perhaps he was too weak.

"You," he whispered. His lips were grey. "You didn't. You stopped."

Kael knelt in the mud, hands raised, careful, as one approaches a wounded animal. "I'm not going to hurt you."

"You killed them." No accusation in it. Only wonder, and a kind of exhausted horror. "All of them. I watched. You were so big."

"I know."

"My mother says the wolves are gone. All of them." A bubble of blood on the boy's lip. "She said the stories were only stories."

"Your mother was told the same lie as everyone else." Kael tore a strip from his own cloak and pressed it against the wound. The boy hissed. "Hold this. Hard. Do you have a name?"

"Joren."

"I'm Kael." It felt strange to say. "Joren, listen. There's a village a half day south. A hunter's cabin, maybe closer. You can't ride and you can't walk far, but you can crawl to the stream and drink, and in a few hours someone from your column will come looking."

"They'll kill you."

"They'll try."

Joren stared at him, searching his face. He was very young. In the thin light he looked like any boy of the village, and Kael felt a kind of grief he could not name, for Joren and the dead men on the slope and for Orin and for himself.

"You could have finished me," Joren said.

"I know."

"Why didn't you?"

Kael looked down at his own hands, the dried blood still ground into the lines of his palms.

"I don't know," he said honestly. "I almost did."

He stood. His knees felt like water. He took the pack, and the sword, and the cloak, and left the boy with the water skin pressed into his hands and the torn cloth over his wound.

He did not look back. But as he climbed out of the ravine, the pendant lay cold and quiet against his chest, and he understood one thing so clearly that it frightened him more than the dogs or the crossbows or the Emperor's whole army.

He could not be trusted with what he was.

Not yet. Perhaps not ever. Orin had taught him to breathe, to hold the heat and let it fall, and Kael had thought that would be enough. But the fire did not care about breathing. When it came, it came like a flood, and the only thing standing between the world and what lay inside him was a scrap of silver on a cord, and a frightened boy who had said Mother.

He turned west and walked on, alone, with eight dead men behind him, and the first true weight of the crown he had not asked for settling quietly on his shoulders.