The Tiger and the Wolf Read Free Page B

house claimed the
two highest mounds. They were the twin seats of a power that
reached out through the dark between the trees to all the tributary
villages Akrit had brought within the curtilage of his influence:
the Winter Runners’ contribution to the greater domain they
called the Shadow of the Wolf.
    The temple’s grand mound also held the training ground
where the hunters would cast their spears and loose their arrows,
and the growing young would practise Stepping until they could
pass fluidly from man to wolf and back to man as swift as
breathing. Maniye did not want to think of the training ground.
The Testing was coming and, just as Kalameshli had reminded
her, her fellows were up there already, in their exclusive camaraderie, practising at being wolves.
    There were seventeen others from the Winter Runners due to
be Tested alongside her, and it was supposed to be something of
a celebration, something of a game, something of a chance for
the elders of the Wolf to laugh at the inadequacies of the young.
Nobody failed the Testing. That was a point of faith.
    Except that Kalameshli Takes Iron did not seem to have that
faith, and he himself should have been an expert on the subject.
Kalameshli had dogged Maniye’s steps these last two moons
and croaked out his warnings, like ravens circling overhead. At
first she had thought it was just his cold dislike of her: that constant pushing and needling, the disapproval, the disdain. That
was her due from the priest, so why should it be any different
over the Testing?
    But of course, Kalameshli and his priests oversaw the Tests.
She had not thought of it that way until recently, but each Testing was set by the priests of the Wolf, and so Kalameshli could
make them as hard or as easy as he wished.
    She understood now that he had been biding his time,
through fourteen years of loathing her and taunting her, until
now when she would fall briefly, but totally, under his power.
    Nobody ever failed the Tests, but everyone knew what would
happen to someone who did. Exile, or worse – torn apart by the
pack, or even given as an offering to the Wolf. It was the
common stock-in-trade of her peers’ conversations, each outdoing the last with their lurid stories.
    Even if those going into the Testing did not believe they could
fail, none wanted to look a fool before the Wolf and the Wolf’s
people. As the priest said, they had been practising all this last
month, a motley mob of them charging around the circuit of the
training ground, under every eave and between every hall, a
constant annoyance for their elders and yet a source of fondness
too. All the adults remembered their own Testing; a little rowdiness could be forgiven.
    Maniye trained also, but alone and out of sight. She avoided
the other youths, who mocked her, and whom she despised in
turn, with not a hand’s span of common ground between them.
Her own training took place after dark or in secluded corners, or
even in the forest looming beyond the fields: forbidden places,
abandoned times, where she would not be spied on. But all of it
would be for nothing when Kalameshli gave her an impossible
challenge, set her a course nobody could have run. If she was
lucky he would merely humiliate her, earn her another beating
from her father. Otherwise . . .
    There was a herder’s hut that lay unused at the foot of the
mound. Come winter, the sheep would shelter there along with
their guardians, but in these last days of fall she could creep
there unseen and practise. Rat bones were piled like brittle sticks
in the corners, older than the spring and with no sign of living
descendants for her to hunt and take as minuscule trophies. She
ranged the ten feet of dark space enclosed between the walls, no
room to run and nobody to fight. Instead she practised her
Stepping, fighting to master this uncertain new instinct that had
only come to her during this last year.
    Essential, for this, that there