Wolf Justice Read online

  WOLF JUSTICE

  Doranna Durgin

  Blue Hound Visions

  Tijeras, NM

  “Wolf Justice will delight fans... Well-rounded and widely appealing, this one comes highly recommended.”

  —Hypatia's Hoard

  “Durgin has a magic touch for creating rich fantasy.”

  —Rochester Democrat & Chronicle for Touched by Magic

  Copyright & Dedication

  WOLF JUSTICE

  Copyright © 2012 by Doranna Durgin

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-532-8

  Published by Blue Hound Visions, Tijeras NM, an affiliate of Book View Café

  May 2015

  Cover: Doranna Durgin

  Original Copyright ©1998; first published by Baen Books

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously — and any resemblance to actual persons, business establishments, events, or locales is purely coincidental.

  License Notes:

  This efiction is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This efiction may not be re-sold or given to others. If you would like to share, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this efiction and it was not purchased for your use, then you should purchase your own copy. Thank you for helping the ereading community to grow!

  ~~~~~

  Author Note:

  This edition of Wolf Justice has had some scrub and polish — but it hasn't been changed from its first incarnation with Baen Books. If you read and loved the first edition, then you're not likely to notice anything different with this one. If you're new to the book, then have a good read! It was such a delight to come back and spend time in Reandn's world — I hope you have as much fun as I did!

  Without readers like you, I wouldn't be able to write these books. I appreciate your letters, emails, blog comments, and FaceBook posts more than I can ever express, and I love your reviews. It's amazing to be a part of such a large circle of friends through a mutual love of books!

  Dedication:

  To Ann: Thank goodness for Free Fridays!

  To Judith: First Reader Extraordinaire!

  ~~~~~~~~~~

  ~~~~~~~~~~

  Answers Questioned

  Rethia dreamed of unicorns.

  Their hooves evoked thunder, the flash of their horns begat lightning. Dust swirling through bright sunlight, musky sweat filling the air, thick currents of magic drifted on the breeze of their mad dance. Unicorn winds...

  Amidst it all sat a young girl, afraid to watch and terrified not to — and so she saw the unicorns leaving her world for some other place. Tired of being hunted, captured and killed for their fierce, wild beauty, they simply left her Keland behind, taking their magic with them.

  Almost gone. They were almost gone...

  Blue eyes huge with awe and suppressed panic, that little girl stood her ground as the last of the unicorns approached. Rhythmic huffing breath, huge round hooves, a giant muzzle of crisply dark walnut points, nostrils open wide with exertion, wider yet to inhale her scent...

  Boldly, she reached up — far up — to touch the beast’s muzzle.

  Even in sleep, Rethia knew what would happen next — after she saw herself crumple, bespelled, to the ground. She’d had this dream often enough, and she’d lived it before that. Later, half a day and a whole night later, the little girl would open eyes that never looked at the world the same again.

  From the inside looking out, she would struggle to gather her thoughts past the faint inner call she could never quite hear and never quite ignore.

  From the outside looking in, those eyes had gone deep brown around the outside edge of the blue, and never quite seemed to focus on what stood before her.

  And Keland’s magic was gone. Gone, except for the quiet heart of it left to dwell within a confused young girl.

  ~~~~~

  Rethia woke feeling like there was something she’d forgotten to do and she couldn’t quite remember what; she waited in the thrall of the dream, lying in the quiet loft of her father’s house and healing clinic.

  The night’s noises pressed in on her like a muffled lullaby. Kacey, moving quietly around in the main house, tidying as she was wont to do on a sleepless night. An owl hooting in the woods tucked up close behind the house, and the rattling of the cold, late winter wind in the trees, slipping through her shutters.

  Not that long ago, there would have been other things — snow in the winter, insects in the summer — slipping through those shutters as well. Back when Keland had lost its magic, leaving the wizards of the land mystified — and searching for something else to do with themselves. Back when the people had learned to live without the convenience of messaging spells, protection and healing spells... and insect perimeter spells.

  Back before Rethia had finally followed that mysterious and distracting call to find the unicorns... and to open the door for them — and their magic — to return home. But only after a generation had lived without magic, and the generations before that had experienced nothing but a diluted echo of that which now swirled through the land.

  Rethia often thought that learning to live with magic again was turning out to be much more difficult than learning to live without it.

  She herself had gloried in the unicorns’ return two years earlier, finding herself completely whole again for the first time since that day in the meadow. Though she still drifted easily into a vague and contemplative state, she also had moments of preternatural clarity — and she often had an intuitive understanding of magic that no wizard could hope to learn.

  And though the unicorns did not often deign to show themselves to others, Rethia had memorized the soft feel of their muzzles, the coarse, thick profusion of their manes, and the smooth, cool and curious feel of their horns.

  It didn’t seem so simple to the other people in her world. Older wizards were expected to step into their old roles as though they hadn’t lost a day of practice — as though they still numbered as they once had. New wizards unexpectedly felt magic thrumming through their souls — and now struggled to control their abilities without the lifetime practice and childhood experience that would have made doing so second nature.

  There were, in larger numbers, people who didn’t feel any difference at all. Some of them eagerly accepted the new resources and magical services; some of them rejected it utterly. And yet others wanted it banned and gone.

  It made for an uneasy mix.

  Especially for the man who’d tried to stop it.

  Reandn.

  Dangerously reactive to it, dangerously resentful of it. He’d watched his wife die by dark, stolen magic; he’d lost a son to it before that. He had, in the end, lost an entire way of life.

  Reandn, too, struggled to adjust to the magic. It seemed to her he was finally gaining ground in his fight against the bitterness and anger once permeating his every move, but Rethia still wished his transition had been as joyful and painless as hers.

  Lying in the overwarm loft, glad for the draft of cool air from the cracked shutters, she tried to imagine her life if she’d never recalled the unicorns, if she’d never understood what had happened to her that day so many years ago — that which made her so different. A child touched by unicorns...

  So alone.

  Wasn’t she?

  But what if there were others? What if she’d simply been the last of them? The unicorns were unfathomable and deadly and full of beauty — and they were wily. They knew what they wanted... and they’d wanted an option to return.

  What if she hadn’t been the only one? What would they have done if she’d died young as so many children did
, or if she’d simply failed to open that door when the time was right? What if those others were still out there, still unfulfilled and confused about their own otherworldliness?

  She needed to know. She needed to not be alone — she needed them to not be alone.

  She needed to know.

  ~~~~~~~~~~

  Chapter 1

  Teya dove behind a bush in panic, cringing as an arrow rattled through its bare outer branches. Ardrith keep me for her own —

  Another arrow hit the tree beside her, imbedding with a solid thwack. Teya screamed, flattening against damp groundcover — a wizard unprepared for physical battle.

  When the Hells had this gone so wrong? When she’d felt her unfamiliar partner falter, bobbling the threads of the protection he’d woven for the Remote Wolf Patrol? When the first arrow had found its suddenly vulnerable mark, and the Wolves, caught exposed in the dip between two hills, had been rushed from above by the outlaw leader’s men?

  Or maybe their crushing defeat had begun the moment Teya realized their wizard opponent was at least as strong as she. This wasn’t her specialty, this sparring with magic. She was expert at truth spells and detection spells, at the subtle forms of magical defense and at spinning her magic so quietly she caused no alarm in a citizenry just becoming used to having magic to spin. More than anything, she was adept at protecting others from the stir of magic her spells created, and it was this skill that had earned her the position of Patrol Wizard — not her ability to trade magical barbs of hate between two hills.

  Across the battered slope, her comrades cried out in agonized death throes. And still she hid, because she’d barely been a yearling in her wolf training before magic’s return snatched her away to wizard schooling in Solace. No spell would help the dying patrol now, no physical bravado could turn the battle their way... it was way too late for that. Hide, hide and hope to live. Hope the outlaws got bored and went away while some remnant of her patrol still lived.

  Oh, goddess, this is my fault!

  But not entirely. She hadn’t put the patrol out here; the Wolf Leader had done that — he and the Keep Prime, when they’d given Minor Arval the temporary authority to override Reandn’s commands.

  Reandn had fought this assignment, he’d railed against its heavy reliance on magic, as he always railed against magic, even hers. He wouldn’t have let the minor’s man position his wolves into such physical vulnerability, relying only on magic for their safety. Teya was certain of it, even though she didn’t really understand the man, didn’t really know him after only six months of service with him.

  She wasn’t even sure if she merely disliked him, or if she intensely disliked him.

  But with the Resiores struggling more than ever against the yoke of Keland’s sovereignty, and inner Keland still in social turmoil two years after magic’s return, King’s Keep needed Highborn support from minors like Arval. And they needed Keland’s people to believe that the Keep could guide them safely through this chaotic time.

  So when a wizard-driven band of ruthless outlaws started plundering Arval’s hills, no wonder Saxe and Ethne — Wolf Leader and Keep Prime — had decided a fully cooperative effort to destroy the band was more important than heeding Reandn’s well-known aversion to magic.

  No wonder she was in this mess.

  Teya risked a peek through the bush. Downhill, there were only bodies, ill-concealed by the leafless trees. A gasp caught in her throat as she recognized Apalla collapsed over the body of her partner, one hand loosely wrapped around the arrow that had killed her. To the side she discovered Sannat and Kessin, and below them, half-hidden in the trees, three other bodies in quick succession.

  No one else moved.

  Teya slowly stood, feeling a scream stuck in her throat that might just kill her when it exploded free. Her new vantage point revealed a number of other bodies in wolf colors, and one feebly thrashing form. “Oh, Tenaebra,” she whimpered, but none of the sound made it past that trapped scream. “Oh, graces...”

  A rustling behind her splintered grief into terror. She whirled to face it, and found herself gaping at the enemy. An outlaw, blood dripping from his hands and smeared in his untrimmed beard, his knife covered with —

  Teya stood frozen in shock. The man grinned at her. “Giving ’em all the death stroke, I was. Didn’t expect to find a whole one amongst you. Must be a magic-user, ey? All used up, ey?”

  It wasn’t until he reached for her, until his bloodied hand closed around her arm, that her body woke up and reacted. The trapped scream erupted at full volume, and she snatched at her belt for her knife, finally falling back to unfinished Wolf training.

  He reacted before she had the weapon fully unsheathed, pulling her downhill a step or two and then using the momentum to swing her against the tree. Teya slipped through his bloodied grip, whiplashing around the tree with her shoulder as the fulcrum. The joint gave way; she cried out more at the sound of it than the pain, crumpling beside the tree. The knife! Frantically, she patted the ground around her.

  His foot came down on her hand, pinning it; she whimpered as he shifted his full weight onto it. “Please...” she said, looking up at him.

  It seemed a very long way.

  “I think we’ll keep you,” he said. “You’ve got just enough fight in you to make it fun.”

  Fear turned to horror. She tried to force her injured arm to move, to find that knife — and couldn’t. She tried to muster the grit to fight him, at least to force him into killing her, and couldn’t do that, either. As if he saw the conflict within her, he laughed.

  But the laugh choked in the middle, turning into a grunt of amazement. He clawed awkwardly at his own back. Teya jerked her hand free as he swayed, and scrabbled to get away from him as he fell heavily and slid a short distance down the hill. She stared at the arrow protruding from his back and tried to understand it herself, for the fletching was undyed quill, the same as the outlaws had been using.

  “Teya!”

  Dakina. Dakina lived!

  Dakina emerged from cover and scrambled along the hillside, limping badly as she tossed an enemy bow aside. “Teya! Ardrith’s graces!”

  I’m not alone. I’m not the only one alive!

  It seemed a good occasion to faint, and when the world greyed out, Teya didn’t fight it.

  ~~~~~

  Reandn paced the length of the minor’s great hall, scowling at the lavish use of wood and thinking darkly that Arval would have done better, much better, to have thickened the walls of his keep with additional stone. He 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 that poor corner ever done to you?”

  Reandn kept this scowl on the cornice rather than transferring it where it belonged: Arval. Oh, this wasn’t stone-bound King’s Keep, with its thick defensive walls and towers, but it didn’t need to be. And wood was plentiful enough in this part of Keland.

  “We should have heard something by now,” he said, moving to Arval’s raised table. “You’re sure your 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 — an indication of just how critical the Keep considered Arval’s support. Reandn knew only that Arval had planned to snare a local magic-using outlaw while Teya and the minor’s own wizard flung prodigious magic around in support.

  Amiable was far from his reaction to it all.

  Tenaebra’s Tits, he’d fought the idea of having a wizard in his patrol, even a fledgling one. But Teya not only had a taste of Wolf training, she excelled in shielding Reandn’s 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 ar
ound, and she never ignored it when he felt the whisper of magic before she did.

  And 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.

  But Reandn knew better than to trust magic.

  As long it existed, there was the potential that someone would wield it as a weapon, just as the wizard who had killed Reandn’s wife and son had done. And he’d learned quickly enough that even when this half-trained new generation of wizards used magic to help, it was bound to go awry. Best to depend only on what the Wolves knew best — a quiet foot, a quick hand, and the wits they’d been blessed with.

  “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, eyeing the man’s girth. He dropped off 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 footsteps approached the entrance at the far end of the hall. Arval shot a quick glare at him. “Sit —”

  Reandn raised a hand to cut him off — from the pure effrontery of it, to judge by the strangled noise the man 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 — and then 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 a heavy-footed stride. Reandn stiffened as Teya — why Teya, out of all of them? — came up from behind the boy, not waiting for permission to approach. She ignored Arval and fastened her eyes on Reandn, stumbling forward — 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.