Wolf Captured

Table of Contents

Title Page
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
XXVI
XXVII
XXVIII
XXIX
XXX
XXXI
XXXII
XXXIII
XXXIV
XXXV
XXXVI
XXXVII
XXXVIII
XXXIX
XL
XLI
TOR BOOKS BY JANE LINDSKOLD
GLOSSARY OF CHARACTERS
Copyright Page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As always, I must thank my husband, Jim Moore, for providing a sounding board, responding with incredible patience to questions that often began with “I don’t want to go into all the details but, if …” Jim’s services as my first reader are also valuable beyond compare.

Thanks also to Bobbi Wolf and Mort Kahl for their comments on the manuscript.

My editors, Teresa Nielsen Hayden and Patrick Nielsen Hayden, were, as usual, a great help. My agent, Kay McCauley, provides me with encouragement as well as sound professional advice.

Finally, I’d like to thank all the readers who have taken the time to contact me and let me know they’re enjoying the Firekeeper books. You can find information about these and other projects on my Web site:
www.janelindskold.com
.

I

DERIAN CARTER AWOKE WITH HIS SHIRT front wet with blood and his head pounding. The floor on which he lay was damp and reeked so strongly of piss and vomit that his stomach roiled. The rough board planks also seemed to be rising and falling—an impression he was willing to dismiss given how the rest of him felt.

Derian had experienced his share of hangovers, but this one was the worst by far. His last coherent memory was of dancing with that pretty girl from Bright Bay. She’d suggested they go for a walk along the riverbank. Something in how she phrased her invitation hinted that she had activities in mind more interesting than merely strolling on the springthick sward. She’d been very pretty, the neckline of her gown cut very deep. Derian had followed with slightly tipsy alacrity.

How had he gotten here?

A husky voice broke into Derian’s efforts to sort fragmented impressions into order.

“Fox Hair? You wake?”

The voice came from a short distance away, and for the first time Derian registered the dimness of the room. There was enough light for him to see his hands and the dark stain on the front of his shirt, but the light was diffuse, leaking into a chamber imperfectly sealed, rather than being shed by sunlight or lantern.

Where was he?

The voice, forgotten almost as soon as heard, came again.

“Fox Hair! Derian! I hear you move. Talk.”

The words were gruff, urgent, words spoken from a mouth struggling to give shape to the sounds, struggling against panic that would drive away the words and leave nothing but whimpers and howls.

A deeply ingrained sense of responsibility for the person who used that voice gave Derian his first breath of stability. He clung to it, grabbing his aching head between the curved fingers of his hands, forcing himself to remember. He found a word.

“Firekeeper?”

The sigh of relief that answered held a soft whimper, but when the voice spoke again there was no hint of tears.

“Firekeeper. Is.”

A remembered image came with the voice, a woman, a few years younger than he. Dark brown hair slightly curly, cut unevenly, as from necessity rather than with any sense of style. Eyes very dark, figure slim, but no longer starvation skinny. Neither tall nor short, but somewhere in between.

Firekeeper, the woman who thought herself a wolf rather than a human. Firekeeper, whom he had taught to use the words she was in danger of losing. Firekeeper.

Memory almost sucked him from reality. The voice brought him back again.

“Fox Hair. You bleed. How bad?”

Derian touched his shirtfront, registering cold dampness there, stinging pain, but no fresh flow of blood. He’d already forgotten the wound until Firekeeper had reminded him. He wanted to forget it again now, but he forced himself to focus.

“I’ve been cut,” he said, and heard the surprise in his voice. “Several times. Long, shallow slices. With a … knife?”

Despite himself, the last word came out as a question.

Firekeeper answered from somewhere in the gloom. Derian wondered a little that she didn’t come closer now that she knew he was awake, but then Firekeeper saw far better in the dark than he did—than any human he’d ever heard of did.

“Yes. A knife. They cut you to bring me here. To bring me and Blind Seer.”

“Blind Seer?”

Impressions were flooding back into Derian’s mind now, competing with the ache, making the space behind his eyes feel crowded.

Blind Seer, an enormous grey wolf with blue eyes—named for those eyes, which his parents had thought meant he was blind until the staggering explorations of the pup had proven them wrong. A wolf with parents, not merely sire and dam. Born of beasts with sufficient intelligence to worry about a damaged pup, beasts possessed of the inhuman resignation to accept the handicap and the early death it promised for a pup Derian knew this meant as much to them as did any child to human parents.

“Blind Seer,” Firekeeper’s voice repeated. “He sleeps. They give us all to drink.”

Derian processed this, enlightened by his throbbing head.

“We were drugged?”

Firekeeper snorted. Derian could almost see her toss her dark brown hair from even darker eyes. She was rarely patient with the human tendency to repeat what to her was obvious.

“Firekeeper,” Derian said, and made his voice as stern as he could. “I feel like shit. My head wants to split open down the middle. Tell me what happened. Tell me slowly and carefully.”

He heard a soft laugh.

“My head hurt, too,” Firekeeper admitted. “I try to tell what happened, but keep voice down. We not want them come.”

“Them? Who?”

“Not know.”

“Why don’t you come sit next to me?” Derian felt almost frantic for physical contact.

“I no can. They have me in …” The pause came that meant the wolf-woman was struggling for a specific word. “A cage. Blind Seer in cage, too. Not you, I think. Can you move?”

Derian tried, felt something tug at his ankle, tested and found a length of chain cuffed around it. By now he was hardly surprised.

“I’m chained,” he reported. “What’s going on?”

“I tell what I know,” Firekeeper promised, her voice soothing. “We were at the night dancing. A man come to me in the dance. He say ‘Derian needs you.’ I am not sure, but think maybe it is a king thing so I follow even when the man takes us from the bright spaces to the fields by the river.”

Mentally, Derian fleshed out Firekeeper’s words. She and Blind Seer had been participating in one of the large public dances being held to celebrate the naming of the firstborn son of Crown Princess Sapphire and Crown Prince Shad. The celebrations had been extensive, for not only was young Sun the first child born to the royal family of Hawk Haven for many years, but through his parents he was destined to unite Hawk Haven and Bright Bay, sibling kingdoms that had been rivals for over a century.

Sun of Bright Haven, a name filled with promise and hope.

Normally, Firekeeper would have shied from such loud and noisy gatherings, but among all human achievements she loved music and dancing best—and at the royal celebrations where she was welcomed, the finest of both were to be found. So she had joined in the festivities at the castle, and when these had spilled out into the square in front, doubtless she—like Derian—had followed.

Blind Seer would have paced her, unseen in the torchlit darkness, never far from his human pack mate.

“I wonder some at the man,” Firekeeper went on, “for he is not one I know and he stink of fear, but,” she added a touch complacently, “many is feared of me and Blind Seer.”

Derian grunted. Bragging she undoubtedly was, but it was a brag rooted in truth. It was commonly known that Firekeeper had been raised by the wolves west of the Iron Mountains. In the two years since she had come east to learn about her human heritage the only thing more incredible than the stories told about her was, quite possibly, the truth.

“And,” Firekeeper added, and Derian heard the sorrow that roughened her voice, “I was happy and thought good of everyone.”

After a long pause during which Derian knew Firekeeper was swallowing her bitterness at this error, the wolf-woman went on.

“The man take us to place on river where is not so easy to see water, the bank goes down sharply. We see a boat of the river type, hiding in branches. There is no other boat near and this boat is not such as king would have, so I am about to run and Blind Seer with me.

“Then the man who leads us raises his arm. He points and I see you. You are on the boat, a big man holding you against the wall, but you are not standing strong. I think maybe they have tied you there. As I look, the big man takes a knife and cuts you, long, across the chest. Blood comes, so I know you live, but I am not happy.”

It took a moment for Derian’s aching head to follow this last. Then he realized that what Firekeeper meant was that his blood flowing had confirmed he was alive. Dead things don’t bleed, but certainly she could not have been happy to find him alive in such a circumstance.

Firekeeper went on, “Then the man with me say, ‘You come and the wolf, too, or we’ll let out all of Derian Carter’s blood, and we’ll do it slowly and make sure he’s awake to feel it.’”