Lord of the Wolfyn

chapter 11

With Dayn’s voice ringing in her ears, Reda blinked awake to find herself hanging weightless, surrounded by strange, shifting fog that was white in some places, while in others it sparkled with rainbows, lit from above with shafts of light that seemed random, yet not. She was wearing her bow over her shoulder and clutching three sad-looking arrows.

“Hello?” she called. “Dayn?” Her pulse thrummed in her ears. Part of her wanted it to be him, another part not. Maybe someday she would be able to think about him without hearing the sickening crunch of flesh and bone, the shivering howl. Not yet, though. Not by a long shot.

She had thought distance would help, time home alone.

But this definitely wasn’t home.

What was going on?

Nerves prickled beneath her skin, not freezing her, but warning her that this wasn’t good. She hadn’t been conscious for the trip to the wolfyn realm, but based on Dayn’s description this wasn’t the way the vortex was supposed to work. It was supposed to suck her up and spit her out, no detours. This was most definitely a detour.

Stay calm. You can handle this. Making herself breathe evenly, she pictured her apartment kitchen in minute detail, right down to the dishes in the sink and the book on the counter. Then she said her mother’s spell. But instead of her kitchen, she got a man’s voice.

Your work is not yet done.

It sounded in her head, but it came from the fog, from nowhere and everywhere. It chilled her to her marrow, though not because it was a scary; it was deep and well modulated, with an abundance of that formal, faintly stiff tone that crept into Dayn’s—

No. She wasn’t going there. Not when it made her eyes well and her stomach heave, and filled her mind with the squish-crack of a broken neck, the howl of a vicious beast that was part predator, part murderer.

Aware that the voice seemed to be waiting for something, she said softly, “Please let me be done. This isn’t my work. It’s not my fight.”

Are you so certain?

Her mind filled suddenly with horrifying images of stone walls destroyed by dozens of club-wielding ettins, armored guards cut to pieces by giant scorpions with razor-tipped tails and claws, a woman carrying a baby, racing across a flagstone floor only to be snatched up from above by a giant spider.

You are a guardswoman of the blood. You would let this happen?

“What blood? Who are you?” When there was no answer, her voice sharpened. “For God’s sake, what do you want from me? I got him to the arch.” She tried to spin in place, but failed. Her heart was hammered with a mix of fear and frustration. “Will you answer a direct question already, damn it! What do you want me to do?”

Help him reach the castle by tomorrow night. And help him remember his true self or all is lost.

Her stomach twisted at the dread and dismay that came with the thought of following Dayn to Elden. “And then what?”

Go home.

She flashed on the image of a rounded hill very like the one near Dayn’s cottage, though without the stones. The spires of a castle were visible in the near distance beyond some trees, and there was a small shrine off to one side. And damned if it wasn’t carved with a simplified version of the cover of Rutakoppchen: a girl traipsing through the woods while eyes watched from the darkness.

“Do I have a choice?” Her voice cracked miserably and she didn’t care. She was crashing off the wolfs-bene, beat-up, brokenhearted, and didn’t want to have to do this.

There is always a choice, even when there seems not to be.

“Great. A frigging fortune cookie,” she said.

Then she stopped, hearing her own words echo in the fog, realizing that she was snarking off at a spirit voice she strongly suspected was at least the essence of Dayn’s father, the vampire king. More, she was thinking, planning, reacting, having an opinion. She wasn’t paralyzed, wasn’t leaning back into Dayn’s reassuring presence as she had done too many times over the past few days when the going got tough.

She wasn’t freezing. She was dealing. New strength flowed into her at the realization and, with it, came a fierce sort of joy.

You are stronger than you know, Alfreda.

A shiver ran through her. “How did you know my real name?”

Will you help him?

A few days ago, it would have seemed ludicrous for her to think she could help a man like Dayn. Even a few hours ago, blinded by her enthrallment, she wouldn’t have thought he needed her help with anything save for mutual pleasure. Now, though, she was seeing things more clearly. She supposed shock could do that—either numb her out or wake her up. And now she was awake.

With clearer eyes, she realized that Dayn wasn’t as evolved as he wanted to think. He had spent two decades beating himself up for having been distracted by a woman when he should have been focused on his duties the morning of the Blood Sorcerer’s attack, only to fall right back into the same pattern with her. Their…relationship? flameout?—she wasn’t sure what to call it—had been a distraction, a way to keep himself from focusing on the harder things. She didn’t think he had been entirely dishonest with her, either…more that he had lied to himself.

She saw herself differently, too. In the rainbow fog, she suddenly saw a woman who too often waited for other people to take care of things. Granted, her childhood had shaped that, as her father and the therapists had—well meaning or not—blocked off her imagination, her initiative. But that was then and this was now, and she needed to quit being afraid, not just of danger, but of making a mistake, making a choice. Back home, she had stopped moving forward, and her soul had begun to wither. In the wolfyn realm, however, she had started doing, thinking, moving, deciding.

Maybe she had made a huge mistake falling for Dayn, had almost made an even bigger one by blindly following him to Elden as his lover. But the first mistake had burned her but not killed her, and the second one wasn’t going to happen. If she followed him to Elden, it would be by her own choice, and not as his lover. And if that brought a stab to fresh wounds, heartbreak wasn’t fatal, after all.

“Okay,” she said to the waiting voice. “I’ll do it.”

Good.

The fog rose up around her, curled toward her and touched her here and there, tingling where it landed. And then it started moving with more purpose, sluggishly at first and then faster and faster, she found herself hoping to hell that this wasn’t going to go into the “mistake” column. She drew breath, but before she could say anything—or even really decide what she wanted to say—the world lurched around her, the fog turned dark and ominous, and whoomp! She suddenly found herself standing on a grass-covered hill in the middle of a dense, ominous forest.

Dayn wasn’t there. In fact, she was completely and utterly alone. And in realizing that, she became aware that it was the first time she had been alone in days.

She stood for a moment, testing for signs of panic. But while she was tense and most certainly on alert, she wasn’t terrified, didn’t want to stand still and wait for something to happen.

Let’s get moving, her instincts said. Daylight’s wasting.

Overhead, she glimpsed a sky that was a far deeper blue than that in the wolfyn realm, making her blink at the difference. The trees, too, were strange; they were twisted and stunted-looking, though they stretched high overhead to knit their branches into a high canopy of dull brown leaves. The sunlight that filtered through those leaves was a dingy brown color, making her feel oddly dirty.

“Welcome to Elden,” she said under her breath. “Doesn’t look much like I expected.” Both her mother and Dayn had made the kingdoms sound like lush and fertile paradises, like something out of a fantasy movie. But maybe it would get better once she was out of these woods.

Given that realm travel wasn’t known in the kingdoms, it stood to reason that the access points would be hidden away, forgotten.

Thinking she’d do best with a good defense, she unslung her bow. And stared.

What before had been a plain but serviceable hand-carved bow was now a slick, high-tech compound bow of the type she had favored in the human realm, but made of a springy, unfamiliar wood and strung with a natural-looking fiber of the proper tensile strength. Her arrows, too, had transformed; she was wearing a sleek quiver that contained a dozen perfectly balanced shafts and offered hooks where she could secure the bow fully strung.

“Upgrades,” she said to herself. “Nice.” Better yet was the small purse of gold she found in her pocket.

Feeling more optimistic than she had moments before, she struck out in the direction where the light seemed brightest up ahead. She would find herself a village, get her bearings and go from there. If nothing else, she knew where Dayn would be tomorrow night: Castle Island.



Dayn awoke in a darkness so complete that he might have thought he was still unconscious except for the ammoniac smell of guano. It burned his eyes and si-nuses and had him holding his breath as he pawed in his rucksack for one of the small wolfyn hand lamps.

It lit, but only partway, emitting a bare and fitful glow even after he dialed it to full power. Too much science and not enough magic in the gadget, he thought, not daring to say the words and risk inhaling.

A quick scan showed that the vortex had dumped him in the dead end of a cave. He thought there might have been paintings on the walls, but the smears of guano and the tears blurring his vision made it tough to tell for sure. With only one way out, he didn’t have to debate his escape route; shouldering his rucksack, he beat it for thinner air.

The cave curved and curved again before he saw reflected daylight up ahead. He paused short of the last bend and tucked the light away. And then he stood a moment longer, because after twenty years, the next step was a big one.

“Elden,” he said softly.

He was finally home. He could finally make things right. And if there was a deep ache within him because he was stepping out of the cave alone, there was nothing he could do about that now. He had made his bargain and his sacrifice. The spirit realm had let him save Reda and send her to safety, and in exchange he had given up any chance for them to have a future. And maybe, probably, that was the way it was supposed to have worked all along.

He took a deep breath and borrowed a particularly fitting human idiom: “Here goes nothing.” If he was lucky and the spell had his back, he would find himself relatively near Castle Island. Better yet would be to find Nicolai, Breena and Micah camped out waiting for him. Gods, Micah would be grown now.

Trying not to lock too hard on that hope, tempting though it might be, Dayn shrugged the rucksack higher on his shoulder and set out, rounding the corner and striding out of the cave into the daylight. And stopped dead.

“Damnation.” Another fitting human saying, and one that was unfortunately all too apt.

The sight that greeted him wasn’t anything like what he’d been expecting, and was nothing he’d been prepared for. The forest that stretched out before him wasn’t green and lush, wasn’t chockful of hiding places for the forest creatures. It was brown and thin, with no groundcover and only sparse, yellowed leafy patches that hardly seemed sufficient to sustain life.

Worse, he couldn’t even pretend he was at the edge of one of the southern kingdoms, near a stretch of badlands or desert. Because as his eyes adjusted to the painful sight, he recognized the downslope in front of him, the rise of rocky hill behind him. He even knew the cave now, though he had never before been all the way to its end due to the foulness of the air.

He was in Elden, less than a day’s march to the castle. But gods and the Abyss, what had happened to his land? His forest?

Unfortunately, the answer was an easy one: the Blood Sorcerer had happened. This was what two decades of dark sorcery had done to his once-gorgeous kingdom, two decades of neglect. It had killed the land.

“No.” Heart sinking so hard his stomach hurt, Dayn took two stumbling steps, then went down on his knees beside a waist-high boulder, where there was a tiny scrap of green struggling to grow in the shade. It was an Elden glory—or it should have been. But instead of producing brilliant blue flowers the exact shade of Reda’s eyes, this one had only a single weak bloom in a pale, sad hue.

“I’m sorry.” He didn’t even realize he was crying until a drop hit the dirt. It dried quickly, sucked into the parched earth so suddenly that he might have thought he imagined it, save that he found moisture on his cheeks and felt the tears in his soul.

He didn’t stay there long; he couldn’t. But part of him wanted to.

Any faint hope he might’ve had that this was a localized blight withered as he reached the edge of the forest and saw rolling hills of dusty brown leading to a yellow-hazed horizon, and his last few shreds of optimism died utterly when he hiked himself up into a nearby tree, climbing into the high, swaying branches to get a longer view.

From there, he could see other forests, scattered farms, several villages—though fewer than he remembered—and a dark smudge where he judged Blood Lake to be. And throughout it all, there were patches of brown, green, black, even some furry-looking white and bilious yellow-green, as if the land had died and been taken over by mold and rot.

“Gods help us,” he whispered, soul going hollow at the confirmation that it wasn’t just the forest that was blighted and dying. It was all of Elden.

And although he had already hated the Blood Sorcerer for the attack on the castle, now that rage dug deeper, grew hotter, became even more personal at the realization that the bastard hadn’t just taken power, he had ruined the kingdom, leeching its energy to fuel his dark, twisted magic.

Dayn’s forests, his family’s people, were suffering, and from the looks of it had been for some time, and he had let it happen. If he had known he would have… The thought process ran aground there, because he couldn’t have done anything differently, nothing that would have mattered to Elden. He’d had to wait for the magic to send his guide and bring him home.

Only this wasn’t home. Home didn’t exist anymore. Elden had become a war zone without a real war, a casualty of the royal family’s abandonment, though they hadn’t voluntarily abdicated.

On some level, he wished with all his heart that the spell hadn’t been corrupted; that he and the others could have come together long before this to take their revenge, sparing the kingdom its torture. On another, though, he knew that it was pointless to wish history changed; he needed to deal with the matter at hand.

Right now, it wasn’t about not looking back, wasn’t about moving forward. It was about what happened next, about righting the course of an entire kingdom, gods willing. It wasn’t about him, wasn’t about the things he’d wanted or the people he’d lost.

He shimmied down the tree, feeling its inner rot in the faint slickness of its bark. Then, shouldering his rucksack once more, he hit the road.

And, as his feet carried him down the dusty track, he knew two things for certain. One, he would do whatever he could to set things right in the kingdom, even if that meant giving his life for it. And two, it was for the best that things had happened as they did in the wolfyn realm, because he never would have forgiven himself for dragging Reda into this horror, not just because there was no beauty or magic in his homeland anymore, but because there was no way he could be with her and be what he needed to be.

He couldn’t be Dayn the man when Elden needed a prince so badly.



Moragh’s new gnome, Destin, tapped on the door-frame of the seedy room she had rented at a grubby inn on the shore of Blood Lake, preferring to not yet be under the sorcerer’s roof given that she hadn’t yet told him about the possibilities of realm travel, instead keeping that gem to herself as both an exit strategy and a bargaining chip.

“Mistress?” he inquired softly.

“Yes?” she asked without moving, without even opening her eyes. It had taken her nearly an hour of careful preparation to get this far, and she didn’t want to have to start over.

“I have spread the word. If the prince returns—”

“He’s already here. I can feel him.” The spell had reactivated an hour earlier, warning that the wolfyn hadn’t managed to take care of business. She hadn’t really expected them to, though, not once she learned what Dayn had become, and saw how the archaic wolfyn society worked. They were hidebound, hampered by their own foolish traditions. She had used that to her advantage, though, coercing the pack into slowing down her prey, buying her the time to come back through the stones, recover the Book of Ilth and start making plans for his return.

And the plan she had was a damn good one. It wouldn’t just take care of the prince, it would announce her new prowess far and wide. The scholars who had once laughed at her would bow in awe, and the sorcerer…well, the delicious images made her smile and wet her lips with her tongue.

“Shall I send to the castle and have the beast master ready your ettins?”

“No. I’m not going out after him. I’m going to let him come to me.” The ugly rumors and hints of a bounty she’d had Destin spread through his network of thieves and cutthroats might take care of the prince for her, but if not, it would slow him down long enough that she would be ready for him.

“Will that be all for now, mistress?”

“Yes. No, wait.” She drew satisfaction from his hiss of indrawn breath and the sudden tension in his stillness. But lately his struggles had diminished all too quickly, his revulsion dulling to a placid acceptance that flattened her pleasure to a mere glow. She had been planning an exciting new game to play with him, but now wasn’t the time—she needed raw blood energy and didn’t want to have to work for it. “Send to the dungeons for a prisoner, one that nobody will miss.”

He exhaled softly. “Yes, mistress.”

When he was gone and the door closed, shutting out the stupidity prevalent in the corridors and common areas of any village inn, Moragh cleared her mind and cast about herself, checking the positions of the candles and lines drawn around her with a variety of powders and unguents. Then, satisfied that she was protected, she opened the Book of Ilth, turning past all the realm-travel spells to the final section, to a title page that bore a single word.

Feiynd.



Dayn reached the village of Einharr late in an afternoon grown gray from an incoming storm. The warm air was charged with thunder, heavy with moisture and felt strange on his skin after so long in the relatively dry and cold wolfyn realm. Or maybe the strangeness came from the land’s sickness; he didn’t know.

All he knew was that as he walked through the open gates of the heavy wooden palisade surrounding the village, his skin felt slick and oily, and his gut churned with the deep sorrow that had only grown through the day.

He had walked past roadside ditches filled with bones, most from livestock, but some human, and of the human skulls, a too-high proportion had worn secondary canines. He had been assuming his inability to connect to anyone through mindspeak meant that the wolfyn magic he’d had thrust upon him had fouled some of his purely Elden powers. But the sight of the skull piles had made him consider that he might be the only mindspeaker in range. And that was a damned depressing thought.

He’d passed deserted farms, some burned, others just sitting there, rife with signs of a hasty exit; he wanted to believe that the farming families had fled to other kingdoms, but didn’t hold much hope of it. And as he’d gotten in closer to the village proper, he’d passed clusters of small houses and seen signs of habitation, but such poor signs—a few weedy chickens scratching list-lessly in the dirt, a thin dog slinking in the shadows, head down, ears flat to its skull—that his heart had hurt anew.

So now, as his boots scuffed the dirt track through the center of the village, raising no dust in the heavy air, he wasn’t entirely surprised to see that Einharr, once a thriving community well known for its singing halls and honey beer, was a squalid and run-down version of its former self. Hollow-eyed children peered at him from behind doorways and around corners, flinching away when he made eye contact, and older men and women skulked in windows or on overhung porches, watching him with dull, uninterested eyes.

Twenty years ago, when last he had ridden through here as part of his parents’ retinue, the villagers had packed the main street, cheering and jostling to touch the horses and carriages. Now, as he made for the third block in, where the tavern district began—or used to begin, at any rate—his presence seemed to have gone entirely unnoticed. “Seemed” was the operative word, though, because as he continued onward, his nape prickled and his instincts said someone was watching him, that he needed to be careful. Which was a nobrainer, but he needed information, and there was no place better to get it than at the local watering hole.

Picking the one with the most worn-looking steps, as had been his habit when investigating as a Forestal, he stepped up onto the slatted porch, his boots ringing hollowly as he crossed to the heavy, windowless door.

Movement blurred in his peripheral vision; he spun in a crouch, lifting his short sword, but it was just a kid, a skinny, gray-eyed boy wearing ragged homespun and grime behind his ears where he had missed washing. He didn’t duck away like the others, but rather stopped dead, eyes widening in shock and fright.

For a second, when the boy did the deer-in-headlights freeze, Dayn flashed on wide blue eyes and similar moments of fear. A searing bolt of grief rocketed through him, warning that he might have submerged his thoughts of Reda, but they weren’t gone. Not even close.

Then the kid broke from his paralysis, drew breath and screamed at the top of his lungs, “Wolfyn!” He spun and bolted, screeching, “Mama, Papa! The wolfyn’s here!”