The Tiger and the Wolf Read Free Page A

from them will win their love,
then? Will it so?’
‘Then perhaps I don’t need their love.’ Bold words, she knew,
for a girl who was working her shoulder blades into the wall to
get further from him.
‘ Wrong! ’ he snapped, and she flinched away from his tone. ‘If
the pack despises you, you will die . Or do you fancy yourself a
lone wolf. Perhaps you would walk in the footsteps of Broken
Axe, hmm? You’d like that, would you?’
Because he knew that there was one man she feared more
than himself or her father: Broken Axe, who had killed her
mother. Her father had ordered it done, and Kalameshli had
begged the blessing of the Wolf, but Axe’s hands bore the blood
and everyone knew it.
‘What will they dare do to me, to Stone River’s daughter?’ she
hissed, although her voice shook.
When his face swung towards her, away from the window’s
view, she knew he had been waiting for those words.
‘If you are to be Stone River’s daughter, you must be within
the Jaws of the Wolf. Or you are nothing. Or you will be meat ,
and perhaps it will be Broken Axe following your footsteps. You
must be of the Wolf or nobody will care whose get you are.’ His
spitting anger, like storm clouds from a clear sky, was no surprise to her. It lurked beneath his cold surface always, and most
especially when he spoke to Maniye.
She did not answer. In those flashpoints of temper any words
of hers would be provocation, but his rage came and went as
swift as hunting, and now he was calm again.
‘Some of the hunters said that they found tiger tracks near
our walls,’ he remarked.
She held herself very still, waiting.
He was looking out of the window again – no, he was examining the edges, with hands and with eyes, seeking for scratches
and marks. ‘I told them there are no tigers here any more, and
that I wanted to hear no more of it. But I went to see for myself.
They looked very like tiger tracks to me.’
‘You should set traps then,’ she told him.
His hard features turned towards her again. ‘They were very
small tracks.’
‘Then set very small traps.’ She knew her expression admitted to nothing.
For a long time he stood there, half lit by the window, trying
to force his way past her guard. She had been working on that
innocent face of hers since she was five years old. She had
learned quickly that anything the world discovered about what
she thought or felt was a knife at her throat.
At the last, Kalameshli Takes Iron sighed and turned away,
before creaking his way back down the steps in a shiver of
bones.
    Wherever the people of the Wolf claimed as their home, they
raised their mounds, whether it was a low heap of soil that bore
some shepherd’s croft, or the vast steep-sided hills that marked
their villages in those places where they had grown powerful.
    The Winter Runners were one of many tribes, not yet the
greatest but far from the least.Their village was a loose scattering
of artificial mounds that dominated the surrounding landscape.
If those hills marked your horizon, then you stood within the
shadow of the Winter Runners and were subject to their law.
    Maniye slunk sullenly from the longhouse of her father, doing
her best to avoid all eyes. She was a small, strange child, friendless and different. It was a difference as deep within her as her
bones. The other children had sensed it from an early age, as
though they had the noses of wolves even then.
    She skulked down the paths running between the mounds.
Each hill that reared above her bore the dwellings of a family,
their store-houses and their workshops, timber-frame and mud
wall and heavy peat-clad roofs whose eaves slanted down to the
heaped earth. On another reared the effigy of the Wolf, into
whose burning jaws Kalameshli sent offerings, and the windowless longhouse that was the temple, its walls made with heavy
stone because of the rituals of fire and hammer Kalameshli
enacted there. The temple and her father’s