One - Welcomed Wolves at the Door

The old man died rambling about eyes in the dark. Tormented to the end, a death of gnawing fear that pursued him even in his sleep and stopped a heart that had seen too many winters to bear the strain. The last kindness of the local folk was to give him a warm bed to die in and someone there to hold his hand when he went. “Eyes in the dark,” he said. “Watching.” His last word came out like the whine of an old hunting hound gored by a boar it was too slow to feint, a confused sort of pain. Not a good death, one point to weigh against want to live to old age.

The problem came when other people who weren’t dying old men started seeing the eyes in the dark.

The smith’s apprentice saw them first, but she was rounding off a hard day of work with drink and smoke; she had accounted them as keeping company with the tall purple crows and reel-dancing people-shaped flowers she was seeing before she took a header into a horse trough and ruined her insobriety. They were gone by time her head was out of water. This was not the case with the Seer of the local kirk, who upon wondering why the stars were shining so brightly through the upper window drew back the drapes and found themself eye to many eyes with the malefactor. Faith would see them through their fright, but the faint from shock meant the humble godfolk would have a visible bump atop their holy head for quite some time.

From then on nightly, it was some different poor fool’s turn to see and be seen. But always the same eyes, the same eyes that glowed as bright silver stars.

This was a problem, the sort of problem that would make ordinarily stout country danan feel more mortal and squishy than they typically do. This is the sort of problem that would make such stout country danan seek to reinforce themselves with more stout wolf-folk, the sort of wolf-folk that travel with their own steel.

That is how the banner bearing the mark of the Smoking Wolf came to the village where the woods meet the river called Nactesbourg. That’s what we came seeking bounty for.

The people came to see us arrive, carefully. We were east of Dir Liefenweald, in country where there was blood hotter than most between wolf-folk and danan. Something my uncle had at the time explained simply as “they tried to burn down our Weald, so us and the World Wolf burned down their towns.” This is the nature of my culture, that much of its history can be consolidated with pointed notes of violence, with much of the depth coming from matters of “who against” and “on whose behalf.” So much so that however many ages had passed, there was still caution in these people eyeing outsiders, two with tails, two with furred and pointed ears, one with claws and all of us with the eyes and fangs of a wolf.

My uncle, however, was unwilted by their stare. Marching out ahead from us as the picture of my mother’s words for her brother, “Nature’s Greatest Fool,” he greeted the nervous and expectant with a confident wave and swagger. I had always thought of that name as her way of putting little brother in her place. Having travelled with him since my 15th year, as of this time in my 16th, I’d learned that was her best compliment for him. He was a man who knew his limitations of skill and manners, but had two glaring talents: one was his ability to remain socially acceptable despite rarely washing and barely speaking his own tongue through an uncanny charm; the second was that there didn’t seem to be anything living that he wasn’t able to kill, utterly and finally. Both in conjunction is the sort of things that lends a confidence to people, so despite him having been the effective cause of the most terrifying moments of my young life, I’d come to trust him. That he did what he did for the pack and had lived long enough for his red hide to show its first gray was what I needed to know about him, regardless of how utterly untested I was when I chose to walk with him.

And after all, it was my idea in the first place…

But I felt the pressure from the people. My aspect was never something I had a full grasp of, no comfort in. I confided to my mother once that I felt more man than wolf by even our people’s standards; she just told me that I was actually a boy, and the pup was late to grow with him. She meant well I know, because she said to me that I had more to come and my story was still in mind, not on paper. But with those eyes on me, it was only boy and pup, two beings with pieces of one that felt as though the other was only wearing them. I reached within and concentrated, and my primordial voice came out as a shameful little whine.

“Uncle, I hate this already,” it said.

His big ears pricked once and folded back toward me, but he didn’t turn and the smile in his voice didn’t fade. He sighed and shrugged; I thought he’d be a severe mentor, but I’d soon learned he dosed out his ferocity carefully.

“People will be how people are, Ekil,” he said, speaking plainly. No matter how soft or harsh his tone, the beast in him growled beneath his man’s voice. “Probably think we want to burn things down, right? We did it before.” He chuckled. At that, I became acutely aware of the mother with two little ones under her arms in the window we had passed by, who had very rapidly drawn her shutters.

“That isn’t helping,” I said, equally as plain.

“The bourgmeister wants to meet us first, and I agree that’s a good idea. Better to show ourselves in daylight rather than give these good people-” and at that, he raised his voice near to shouting and gestured like a pack Dominant addressing the moot “-a terrible fright that their woods have become full of wolves with steel by nightfall.”

“Then perhaps tell them we aren’t here to pillage them, Skarson,” Blink said from behind me. She was my uncle’s second, and I never truly understood why. Their rivalry was older than I was, and it had long turned bitter; my uncle would never say if it was about her missing eye, and I had killed my first danan more readily than I could find the courage to ask Blink about it myself. In moments I had scratched through her stoicism, she simply told me that she had to beat him, and beat him utterly. That she would, someday, and then she would move on.

My uncle always said that she joked about killing him and taking his place as First Errant, and I found that hard to believe. Blink never made jokes.

“This is also an excellent idea, Blink,” my uncle said with a wide smile, “and much appreciated.” She ruffled, and spat.

“I just wish I knew what it was that was afflicting you good people,” he continued. He had given me a book of lost civilizations, and I knew from watching him then he he had read it himself before, as he was aping the illustration of a Phyrmacaen Senator addressing the general assembly. “All I was told was that you were afflicted with eyes that watch you in the night. What kind of eyes, I’m not told, just eyes in the night. So I said to my good fellows here, ‘fine, we’ll go, easy enough to help the folk up Nactesbourg-way. I’m good at poking eyes out!’”

“Me as well!” Freikya suddenly piped up beside me, eyes alight from the sheer prospect of a fight with a maiming. Freikya was my uncle’s banner, a woman strong of arm, wild-eyed and touched from having been born on the eclipse. My uncle told me that he chose her to carry the banner of his Errancy simply because he didn’t want to come up against another Errant group that had her in it. To even this day I am unsure of Freikya, but her loyalty and effectiveness in her walking with us has outweighed any nervousness in me over her fascination with mayhem. The only time my uncle ever took a proxy in a call to combat was when he would send Freikya in his place. He said it tended to send a message, and also, he found it very funny.

The four of us, for a moment, held a village at cautious bay as we went. I started to get the distinct feeling of being flayed alive by the gaze of many staring eyes.

I realized why these people were so on edge.

---

“Now knowing what we know, we should have listened to Urich,” said the bourgmeister, a man younger than I was expecting named Erik. “But his mind had picked up habits in his age, you know? Didn’t know if he was indoors or outdoors sometimes, figuratively speaking. Thought it was nothing more than an old man living his last days half-asleep, and we provided for him as such, and now we know better.”

The village’s hall was really more of a sheltered firepit with an undercover, a humble place made with many hands and much care. It was a good place to dry up the wet chill of mornings in early autumn, and a safe enough place to the townsfolk that the less timid of them joined us, cautiously gathered at safe distance.

“And what do you know, personally?” my uncle asked him.

Erik grunted lowly, and his face twisted. Fear, but resolve. “Only that I saw them and my daughter didn’t. They were watching her.”

Blink exhaled sharply out of her nose. She was still, otherwise.

“She is alright?” Uncle asked.

Erik nodded, bitterly. “One or two stories is drink and tall tales. More is cause for my concern. That? That was entirely more than enough. But word travels only as fast as it does, and now I think everyone in this village has been seen in the time it’s taken for you all to arrive. Not meaning offense, I should say, I just mean for anyone at all to arrive.”

“No cause for offense,” said my uncle. “Anyone else here to speak?” He beckoned to the crowd, low and underhanded. Shared wisdom from him to me, imparted to him from the rabbit-folk that live to the south of our homeland- a taking predator reaches overhand, a gentle helper reaches underhand.

No one answered at first. It could be read in what their bodies said, people unsure of what they saw, what they felt, called to describe it to outsiders. They looked to one another for strength, and found it in a young woman who was half as wide at the shoulder and waist as she was tall, with arms that looked as though they were part stone.

“Reia Stout-Hand, apprentice to our smith,” Erik announced her.

Reia looked to us first. For a moment she met eyes with me and I felt small in front of her obvious strength, but I also saw she was looking for it in me.

Then she turned to my uncle, sighed, and shrugged. “I thought I was drunk. I mean, I was. Far-gone and drunk, seein’ as I was seein’ all sorts of other things t’wernt there.” She pursed her lips and shook her head. “But then I heard screamin’ the night after and came about with my hammer, and I saw it up there, o’er the Reynolds’ orchard house. It was towerin’ over them, legs like spears and eyes lit like stars. Nothin’ that can be real that has that many eyes in that many shapes is made of any sort of goodness, friend-wolves. Nothin’ good is watchin’ us.”

“The master holds his apprentice’s word as the truth, strangers,” a small mountain said, pushing from the back, hands made of scars and burns, a gray mane of hair-scraps and eyes like iron. “Girl mixes her poisons too much for her own good, but she’s honest and she made for the Reynolds’ defence as she said. But an iron hammer’s no good for any sort of monster as I saw there with her.”

“Ulfbert is as good as representative of Nactesbourg’s fibre as any who have lived here, hunters,” said Erik, “if any are fit to speak for all of us, it’s him.” The smith grunted with a dismissing gesture; hold your flattery, boy.

“The Reynolds’ themselves?” my uncle asked.

“Stranger, it was well over the roof, and it was like the stars had came together as a mob on us,” Larissa Reynold, the cider-mistress, said.

“Never seen something quite so tall. Don’t know that I have the heart to step on slugs having been on the opposite now,” said Luth, the stableboy.

“I took one look at it and I ran to my cellar,” said Henway, the mushroom grower. “I needed to pray.”

“I laughed at first, but wolf-friends, I’m at your call to get my neighbors as far away from that thing as I can, as many as I can at once,” said Laika, the carriage-hack. “I only saw one corner of it and that was enough for me.”

“I’ve traded for strange things in my life, books and sketches of the far and dark places of our world, and hunters, I don’t think we are far from such places now,” said Hechter, the purveyor.

My uncle held up a hand to those gathered; he was gentle in the motion but made sure they could see his claws. He scanned his eyes across the crowd; he let them see they were soft, but they were of a beast, not a man. When he spoke, the growl was there, but it was a growl that spoke in defence.

“I don’t know what it is that threatens you good people, as I’ve never heard of anything with quite the features you’ve described. Still, the Smoking Wolf fellowship is undeterred; we deal in blood of any colour and degree of wickedness. I, Skarson, like I’ve said to you before, am a peerless eye-gouger.”

Blink ruffled and spat.

Then my uncle drew his sword. It was as though a tarnished and stained cleaver had aspired to greater things and longer lengths, single edged, flat pointed, with two grips, one vertical that allowed him to swing and blunt with it, the other horizontal that allowed him to shear and wheel with it. It was a wulfgram, my people’s ancestral weapon, the first thing we beast-mortals forged when we learned iron. It would be a very sorry excuse for one, too, as my uncle had found it in the woods, uncared for unknown years. But some wolf-folk have a sense of scent for magic, myself and my uncle among them, and his battered blade stank of it. He held it aloft, straight, the glow of the firepit showing its imperfections like facets. Ugly, brutal and as magnificent a sword I even now have ever seen.

“And Backbiter here has yet to meet flesh, bone or metal that can turn him aside. So eyes should be easy for him.

“But I am one Errant, and I’m nothing without the company I keep in my packmates. So I give you Blink, dark of disposition and who never misses, and Freikya, sunny in opposition and who never hesitates. I don’t need to tell you they together can hold back a small army, because I think you can tell that yourself.”

Blink nodded, thumbing the string of her bow, Totunsdottr. She wore her colours over her destroyed right eye, a band of crimson cloth as a patch, parting night black hair and making the ice blue of her remaining left all the more freezing. She was the sort that could accept respect while holding a grudge. Freikya was Freikya, a being of frantic energy and smiles that could make the banner wave even standing on a windless day. Here, it hung from Hybbe, her barbed harpoon, one of her weapons too big to be hiding.

Then my uncle turned to me. I stiffened in place. I never knew what he was going to say, only that I would have to live to demonstrate it. At least, in retrospect, I had resolved to hold myself to that…

“Ekil, the boy there? He only looks meek. He’s a killer wolf, to be sure, but he’s more clever than most of us tend to be at his age, and full of surprises. Spirited, too. I give you word he’ll show his quality to you given time”

I breathed easy. Words that were equal parts encouragement as an introduction; I could handle this.

“Plus he went cunning a few seasons back. Said the campfire started talking to him, and now he’s started working all sorts of tricks with flames since!”

Skarson, my uncle. You are a bastard and my mother is correct in her physical intimidation and continued dominance of you. You must be crushed.

A buzz went through those gathered. A wolf-boy had come to town that day, but now he had become a witch-boy. The feeling of being flayed resumed; it felt as though my hide had come loose and it was now working on my various fatty bits. The only thing worse that he could do to me was to ask me to demonstrate.

Which he then did.

Skarson, my uncle. One day I pledge to lead you over a high cliff someplace far from our homeland. I pledge to place your body in a silly pose before I deny your passage to the Eternal Hunt.

“Young Master,” said Erik to me, and my stomach sank. I never needed to be called master by someone my senior, especially for something that became a part of me before I could even think to reject it. “Would you show us?”

My magic is born of the Light. At that time, it had only come to me through flames, a voice that spoke between hisses and pops and cracks. It asked me questions of the nature of the world, from a perspective from what I at first thought was beyond my grasp. But I answered, each time it spoke to me, and sometimes my answers were enough to deem me worthy of learning its secrets. That’s how I learned I can strike sparks with snapped fingers; that’s how I blew up the campfire that burned up my den and started my path as an Errant.

Which is why I, a mighty and self-sure flame-mage of sixteen years and about a year and a half of experience, decided that I would perform something definitive, yet less than drastic. I raised a hand and let my mind go to places beyond mortal thoughts, into the knowledge and the secrets I had learned from the light of candles and torches, from the heat of stoves and forges. I closed my palm to a fist and bid that the flames of the firepit lower.

They turned near fully to cooling embers, and I reared back mentally as though the rug beneath my mind had moved. I maintained, and so did the flames. Those gathered inhaled and I felt their gaze even more. Fine. Good. Not perfect, but I was handling it.

Then I opened my fist and spread my fingers, that the flames may heed my call to grow brighter and more intense.

There was a whoosh, then a bang; the firepit exploded.

The crowd drew back, sheltering from the wood splinters, embers and ash. Erik was slow to drop his guard, but then kicked one of the still-burning logs back in before it could mark the floorstones. I couldn’t bare to look at the crowd, though I recall a glance from the smith Ulfbert that at that time I felt was scorn; I think then I missed his little nod that turned it to stern approval. Even so, this may have been my new personal best for earliest ruined days.

“So you see,” my uncle said to all gathered, “you can imagine what he’ll do to your monster, then!”