The Tiger and the Wolf

Shadows of the Apt
Empire in Black and Gold
Dragonfly Falling
Blood of the Mantis
Salute the Dark
The Scarab Path
The Sea Watch
Heirs of the Blade
The Air War
War Master’s Gate
Seal of the Worm

The usual suspects, of course: my agent Simon, Peter Lavery,
Julie Crisp and the rest of the crew at Tor, without any of whom
this book would not have come to pass.

Also, having worked at some places that treated being a writer as
akin to contracting leprosy, I am very grateful to Blacks Solicitors
of Leeds for being both supportive and flexible.

Finally, I am also enormously thankful to the many, many
people who have supported my writing thus far. Sometimes
writing can be a very lonely business, and someone just saying
hi on Twitter or posting a humorous insect video on Facebook
can take a lot of the gloom off.

The sound of the chase confirmed he’d been right: they were
heading his way. No doubt the quarry was flagging by now, but
still keeping ahead of the pack. Akrit was not as young or swift
as he once had been, but strength came in many forms, and raw
speed did not decide success in a hunt like this.

A big, broad-shouldered man was Akrit Stone River: weather-beaten skin like old tanned leather and his hair starting to
grey. He had led the Winter Runner tribe of the Wolf for twenty
years, and each one of those years had made his people stronger,
extended their reach, brought more hearths into the Wolf’s
Shadow. If he showed weakness though, some challenger would
step from the pack to face him. On days like this, he knew they
were all waiting for it.

Akrit was sure that he could beat any of them if ever that day
came. But he was not as sure as he had been five years ago.
If I had a son . . .
and that
was
a weakness of his body, even if
it was not one that slowed him in either the chase or the fight. If
he had a son, then he would be unassailable.
But just a daughter
. . . Am I less of a man? A daughter’s better than nothing, isn’t it?
He scowled, thinking of that.
A
daughter, maybe.
His
daughter? He recognized little enough of himself in her. The fear that
had grown in him, as the girl had grown, was that she was too
much her dead mother’s child.
There is still time.
Aside from the girl’s mother he had taken
three wives, but none of them had borne him anything but
excuses. This year, perhaps, he would find a fourth.
There must
be a woman born within the Jaws of the Wolf who is strong enough
to take my seed.
As he crouched there, listening to the music of the chase, he
thought of his daughter’s dead mother, the one woman who had
been that strong.
I should have kept her. I shouldn’t have had her killed like that.
But, once she had given him what he wanted, she had become
too dangerous. A daughter had seemed ideal: from her a girl
would serve his purposes better than a boy, and he had been
young then, with plenty of time to sire a few sons to be true
heirs. Who could have known that he would get no other issue in
all those years since? Just that sullen, close-featured girl.
He could hear a shift in the baying as the chase neared – telling him exactly who had taken the lead, and who had exhausted
their strength and fallen back. The quarry was giving them fair
sport, that was plain: a good omen. The Wolf appreciated a good
run.
Ten years before, Akrit Stone River would himself have been
in the pack, keeping a moderate, confident pace, taking his turn
to snap at the heels of the stag and then fall back. Nobody
would have berated him that he was not at the fore when the
quarry was brought to bear.
Now, though . . . now he was ten years older.
He heard the eager throats of his warriors as the quarry
started to weary, imagined them coursing, a river of grey bodies
between the trees with the stag’s heels flashing before them.
There was Smiles Without Teeth, Akrit’s war captain and a man
who would be his most dangerous challenger if he were not so
loyal and devoid of ambition. There, too, was Bleeding Arrow’s
high call, jaws closing on air – no, a hoof delivered to the snout
as he got too close. Then Amiyen Shatters Oak was next at the
fore, the fiercest of his huntswomen. She was near as old as
Akrit, but still as strong as ever, and if she had been a man she
would have challenged him long ago. Impossible to take to wife,
though, and that was a shame. Surely she would have made a
good mother of many sons.
Too fierce to share a tent with
, Akrit decided. No pairing could
survive the conflicting ambitions of two strong hunters. So it
was that Amiyen bore sons for another man, who tended her
hearth while she went hunting.
He braced himself, hearing the chase draw near.
All this struggle for a few more moments of life, and still I knew which way you
would come.
The land spoke to him, its rises and falls, its skeins
of little lakes and streams, its hard ground and its soft, the very
pattern of the trees showing him where the quarry would turn,
where he would leap, where the pack would turn him aside.
And the Wolf is with me for another year
. He ran forward and
Stepped onto all fours, his burly human frame flowing into the
wolf that was his soul, his second skin. Bones, flesh, clothes and
all, turning into the grey hide of the beast. Now he was building
up speed, claws catching at the turf, bolting from the undergrowth almost under the hooves of the fleeing stag.
The quarry reared, panicked and turned aside, just as Akrit
knew it would. Smiles Without Teeth took the chance to lunge
for its haunches, tearing a gash with his claws but failing to catch
hold, and the deer was off again, staggering slightly, and Akrit
had shouldered his way to the front of the pack, fresh and strong
and laughing at them.
They had no words between them, but he heard their
thoughts in the snarls and panting as the pack fell in behind
him. Smiles Without Teeth was chuckling, Bleeding Arrow was
angry at being out-thought – but then out-thinking Bleeding
Arrow was no great feat. Amiyen Shatters Oak was pushing
herself harder. She wanted to show that if any woman had been
allowed to challenge for leadership, then it would have been her.
The joy of the chase, and feeling the pattern of the pack shift
to accommodate him, whether they liked it or not, was taking
hold of him. Even Bleeding Arrow was moving to his will, falling
out towards the flank to head off the quarry’s inevitable questing
there, bringing the stag back in line – and now they were forcing
the beast into the denser forest, where their own lithe forms
would slip more easily between the trees.
A good spread of antlers on that head
, Akrit noted approvingly.
If the quarry fulfilled his part then this would be a good year,
with that fine tribute to place between the jaws of the Wolf. No
need for a priest to read omens as fine as that.
One of the many lessons a warrior must learn was held in the
great span of those antlers:
Do not let your strength become your
weakness
. How proud was the stag of that
broad spread of points, how he must have strutted before his
women, and yet in the chase they were a weight that slowed him
down, an encumbrance constantly in danger of being caught by
briars or branches.
Akrit gauged his moment, then spurred himself forwards,
snapping at the flanks of the stag, driving it sideways to where
Smiles Without Teeth was waiting to rip his fangs across the
beast’s path. The quarry turned more quickly than Akrit would
have expected, but the pack was closing in on him from all sides,
offering a set of jaws wherever the stag turned: the only path left
was deeper into the forest, to where the trees grew close.
There was a glade there that Akrit knew well, its bracken and
moss long fed on old blood. The pack was already spreading,
those hunters who had been hanging at the back regaining their
strength were now drifting out to the side, and with a swift burst
of speed began to move ahead.
The stag burst into the glade, ready to gain some ground over
the open space, but the pack was already there before him, and
he wheeled, rearing high, those mighty antlers clashing with the
trees overhead: brought to bay at last.
The encircling wolves snapped and bared their teeth at one
another, excitement running high between them, but they were
waiting for Akrit’s move. He had them for another year at least.
The stag lowered his antlers, threatening them with those
jagged tines, wheeling round and round, trying to hold all quarters against the grey tide. Akrit waited for his opening, bunching
himself to spring. There was still a very real chance of getting
this wrong if he was too impatient—
And there went Dirhathli, a boy out on his first hunt, unable
to restrain himself, trying to earn a name. The antlers flashed,
and the boy yelped and fell back, twisting to lick at his side, and
then Stepping entirely from thin wolf to thin boy, holding his
wound and crying out in pain.
No hunter’s name for you
, Akrit
thought sourly.
Or, if you’re unlucky, you’ll earn such a name as to
make you regret this hunt all your life.
Another two of the pack made abortive lunges at the quarry,
more to drive it back to the centre of the glade than to harm it.
They were still waiting for Akrit.
Then the quarry Stepped, and a moment later there was just
a long-limbed man crouching in the centre of the clearing, one
leg bloodied where Smiles Without Teeth had gashed him, his
face twisted in fear.
A shudder went through the circling wolves, one of disgust
and horror.
‘Please,’ said the quarry, hands held out in supplication, and
Akrit felt a stab of anger, and fear too, for this was surely a bad
omen unless he could turn matters around somehow.
He growled deep in his throat and Stepped too, a man
amongst wolves, aware of the pack’s eyes on him.
‘Running Deer, this is no proper tribute. You know how this
is done.’
‘Please . . .’ The man’s chest was heaving with the exertion of
the chase. ‘I can’t . . .’
‘You know what this price buys your people,’ Akrit told him
sharply. ‘You know what your cowardice will cost them. I give
you one chance to face death as you should, Running Deer.’
‘No!’ The trembling man cried out. ‘My name—’
‘You are Running Deer from the moment you were chosen
as tribute,’ Akrit shouted at him, incensed that this wretched
creature should flaunt the traditions of the hunt. ‘Your family I
will see torn apart. I shall feast on them myself.Your village shall
give its children and women as thralls. I offer you this one last
chance to avoid that. You know the rules of tribute.’
But the man – such a proud stag, and yet such a wretched
human being – only begged and pleaded, and at last Akrit tired
of him.
He gave the signal, and the pack descended. For himself, he
would not sully his fangs, and none would blame him for not
lowering himself. There would be no trophy of antlers for the
Wolf, and no doubt Kalameshli Takes Iron would have dire
warnings for the year to come. All of the hunters would have to
be cleansed of the dead man’s ghost. The entire tribute hunt had
become a travesty.
Akrit had an ambivalent relationship with omens. He was
quick to make use of them, but well aware that they were a knife
with two edges. So far, in his rule of the Winter Runners tribe,
he had been able to ride out whatever the fates had in store for
him, turning each year’s predictions to his advantage. The priest
Kalameshli Takes Iron was his friend of old, and their partnership was a long standing and close one, but a year’s forecast of
bad omens might change that.
Akrit walked away from the kill, because there was no glory
to be found there. He was already trying to think how this day
might somehow be seen as anything other than a disaster.

The people of the Wolf, and those of the Boar and Deer, considered themselves denizens of the middle world. Their dominion
was over the wet, cold lands. To the north lay frozen uplands
shouldering their way ever northwards until they were eaten by
the mountains’ glacial tongues. South, the land dried slowly into
the vast, temperate plains whose peoples had all the warmth
they might desire but of water, other than the river, almost none.
If there was yet a south beyond that, known of only from travellers’ tales and myth, it failed to skew their sense of centre. They
dwelled in the very heart, the perfect place, the Crown of the
World, studded with lakes like gems, and filigreed with silver
streams. Theirs was a land of thick woodland that went on forever, of rich but stubborn earth that the winter months froze,
but the spring always thawed. A land of vast forests where
dwelled the beasts that were their ancestors, their kin, their prey
and, after death, their rebirth.

In Maniye’s great-great-grandfather’s day, the Winter Runner
tribe of the Wolf people had been driven from their haunts further north, where they had been forced to snarl over scraps with
their brothers the Moon Eaters, and where the Bear came down
in the worst of winters and took what it liked, leaving everyone
hungry.

The Winter Runners had found a land already sewn tight
between Deer and Boar and Tiger, and they had fought their
battles, and spread the Shadow of the Wolf wherever they won,
and licked their wounds where they had lost. But the time of the
Wolf had since been in the ascendant, and more and more they
had won, and now that Shadow lay thick across the entire land,
and had not lifted in a generation.

Her great-grandfather – her father’s grandfather – had raised
this mound that now stood at a crossroads of others, and what
had been uncut forest back then was now speckled with herders’
crofts and the huddled villages of the Runners’ thralls.

Here was the ancient longhouse of that long-ago great-grandfather – for though the roof was re-turfed each year, and the
walls re-daubed, and even the timbers sometimes replaced, still
all knew it to be the same house that the old man had raised. As
the village was the Shadow of the Winter Runners, so this hall
was the Shadow of her father and his forebears. Outside it
seemed almost a part of the mound, built right up against the
edge so that the slant of its roof might have been a continuation
of the steeply sloping bank of earth. Inside, the cavernous space
was dark and warm with fire’s trapped heat, grand enough for
pillars to prop up a floor overhead that created a close, lofty,
slant-walled space where food was stored and meat was hung
and the rats could not reach.