Wolf-speaker Read Free

took a deep breath. “You’re my Pack, aren’t you? I’ll do my best. I can’t promise they’ll listen to me, but I’ll try.”
    Good, Brokefang replied. He padded to the cave’s mouth and gave the air a sniff. The breezesmelled of grazing deer just over the hill. Looking at Daine, he said, Now we must hunt. We will come back when we have fed.
    They left as Daine was translating his words. She followed them to the cave mouth, to watch as they vanished into the rain. It was getting dark. Behind her was a clatter as Numair unpacked the cooking things. Thinking about the pack and about her time with them, she was caught up in a surge of memory.
    The bandit guard was upwind of a wolf once called Daine. The night air carried his reek to her: unwashed man, old blood, sour wine. Her nose flared at the stench. She covered it with her free hand. The other clutched a dagger, the last human item she remembered how to use.
    He did something with his hands as he stood with his back toward her. She slunk closer, ignoring the snow under her bare feet and the freezing air on her bare arms. Forest sounds covered the little noise she made, though he would not have heard if she’d shouted. He was drunk. They all were, too drunk to remember the first two shifts of guards had not returned.
    She tensed to jump. Something made him turn. Now she saw what he’d been doing: there was a wheel of cheese in one hand, a dagger in the other, and a wedge of cheese in his mouth. She also saw his necklace, the amber beads her mother had worn every day of her life.She leaped, and felt a white-hot line of pain along her ribs. He’d stabbed her with his knife.
    Brokefang found her. She had dragged herself under a bush and was trying to lick the cut in her side. The wolf performed this office for her.
    It is dawn, he said. What must be done now?
    We finish them, she told him, fists clenched tight. We finish them all.
    â€œI think I know why Brokefang changed so much.” she said. “I mean, animals learn things from me, and probably that’s how most of the pack got so smart, but Brokefang’s even smarter. I got hurt, when we were after those bandits, and he licked the cut clean.”
    â€œIt’s a valid assumption,” agreed Numair. “There are cases of magically gifted humans who were able to impart their abilities to nonhuman companions. For example, there is Boazan the Sun Dancer, whose eagle Thati could speak ten languages after she drank his tears. And—”
    â€œNumair,” she said warningly. Experience had taught her that if she let him begin to list examples, he would not return to the real world for hours.
    He grinned, for all the world like one of her stableboy or Rider friends instead of the greatest wizard in Tortall. He had begun to cook supper: a pot of cut-up roots already simmered on the fire. Daine sat next to him and began to slice chunksfrom a ham they had brought in their packs. Kitten waddled over to help, or at least to eat the rind that Daine cut from the meat.
    â€”
This is very nice,
—a rough voice said in their minds.—
Cozy, especially on a rainy afternoon
.—
    They twisted to look at the cave entrance. It shone with a silvery light that appeared to come from the animal standing there. The badger waddled in, the light fading around his body. He stopped at a polite distance from their fire and shook himself, water flying everywhere from his long, heavy coat.
    Daine fingered the silver claw he had once given her. She liked badgers, and her mysterious adviser was a very handsome one. Big for his kind, he was over a yard in length, with a tail a foot long. He weighed at least fifty pounds, and it appeared he could stow a tremendous amount of water in his fur.
    When he finished shaking, he trundled over to the fire, standing between Daine and Numair. Seated as Daine was, she and the badger were nearly eye to eye. She was so close that she