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FALCONWOLF

BOOK TWO

by R.M.Meluch

FALCONWOLF BOOK TWO R. M. Meluch

Chapter One

Coming home was bittersweet.

When Aidan started out on this journey, his mother had been alive. She had come with him.

She died here in the woods, right here, on this side of the forested ridge. Aidan was coming home

alone.

Not entirely alone. His falconwolf, Fala, was still with him. Aidan forgot to think of Fala as

another being. Fala was a part of him, not a separate soul. The falconwolf couldn’t read Aidan’s mind,

but Fala understood Aidan’s heart.

Aidan and Fala had both grown since they’d been away from the Chandler’s Valley. Both of them

had filled out since their flight into exile. Now, almost a year later, Fala was a sleek and majestic adult

falconwolf. He’d grown into those big ears of his. Once goofy, Fala’s look now was majestic. He was

big as a draft beast, but proportioned like a wolf.

With those broad, powerful, black-feathered wings Fala could easily lift himself into the air with

two full-grown riders on his back.

The snow-white fur of Fala’s body glistened now in the late sunlight.

With Aidan on this journey also was Bess, his mother’s young apprentice. Bess had made the long

trek with him. Now she was a warm presence riding behind him on Fala’s back, her arms wrapped

around Aiden, her cheek pressed against his back. Aidan had always thought of her as a sister. Riding

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together on this long journey home, Aidan had become uncomfortably aware that little Bess was so not

his sister.

Anxiety pushed aside all warm thoughts.

Aidan had thought he might send a message ahead to announce his return to Chandler’s Valley

and his intent to reclaim his mother’s village, but he was all out of messenger doves. And who would

he send a message to anyway? A lot had happened in the months since he’d left home.

Aidan didn’t know who was managing the village of Chandler’s Valley in his absence. Aidan’s

return might not be welcome news to whoever was controlling the village in the interim. Aidan had

already killed one pretender. It had been a long perilous journey from the Capital City in the south

back to the northernmost village in the Northern Province of the Falconwolf Kingdom.

Best not announce himself at all.

Fala’s slow powerful wing beats kept them aloft over the wild forest. The final ridge loomed up

ahead. Their ordeal was almost done. Just there, on the other side of that rise, was home.

Sara Chandler had been a well-loved master of her village. Aidan need only close his eyes and he

could picture her walking through her orchards and clover fields and her beehives. He envisioned the

neat, honey-colored cobblestone cottages dotting the valley with their thatched roofs where his

mother’s tenant farmers lived, and he could not wait to be there again.

Mastery of the village had been restored to Aidan by Royal Writ of the Falconwolf King Gyrreg

himself. On the long journey home, Aidan had time to wonder what in creation ever made the

Falconwolf King think that he could just take Sara’s land and turn it over to his minion, Lord Osso.

And how King Gyrreg could ever have allowed Lord Osso to take Sara’s life without any retribution

whatsoever. It had fallen to Aidan to avenge his mother.

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And he had done it. The evil Lord Osso was dead. Chandler’s Valley had been restored to Aidan

Chandler by Royal Writ.

But coming home without Sara was an unsettling prospect. He knew that in the natural order of

things, a man is supposed to lose his mother. That was only right and expected. The other way around

was unthinkable. No woman should ever need to endure the loss of a child.

Sara had died frightened, afraid for her son, afraid for her life.

Aidan’s throat stung to think why she wasn’t travelling here with him now to reclaim their home

together.

Sara had been murdered here, right here, on the leeward side of the ridge.

She had taken an arrow in her back.

It was bitter solace to Aidan that he had since killed Sara’s slayer in a duel. Aidan got to see the

horror and disbelief on that smug aristocrat’s face, losing the match and his life to a lowborn bastard

son of a madam like Aidan Chandlerson.

Aidan hoped Sara got to watch that duel somehow from the afterlife.

Aidan didn’t have a father. Well, obviously he had one, but there were too many possibilities to

know which man actually planted the seed that became Aidan. And no man claimed him.

Aidan wouldn’t believe any man who came forward now, and it didn’t matter. Aidan was fully

seventeen and, by rights, master of his late mother’s village.

Aidan’s throat thickened. His eyes stung. He was sad. He was proud. He was returning to take his

place as master of Sara’s village.

A sweet sad pang of homesickness filled his heart.

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The harvest would have started. He hadn’t missed it. The fiddler and the drummer would make

light work of the labor. With music, the harvest became a joyful dance. Aidan hoped he wasn’t too late

for the last of the dancing. He could picture the place. Smell it.

It smelled like ash.

Fala sneezed. Aidan’s skin roughened.

That sharp scent that reached them here in the forest had just better be from hearth fires.

He already knew that it was not.

Aidan’s heart thudded in his throat as Fala carried him up—

And over the rise.

The black scars gashed into the green rolling hillside were scarcely recognizable as the hollowed-

out wreckage of cottages. The blackened cobblestone walls were still smoldering. Their thatched roofs

had burned utterly away.

No one had warned Aidan to expect this on his journey home from the Capital City of the

Kingdom of the Falconwolves.

Perhaps someone had killed the messenger dove that was meant to bring him the word of this

horror.

Aidan’s mouth felt to be full of pins. His breaths came shallow. He’d thought the nightmare was

over.

It had got immeasurably worse.

Smoldering scars in the land were all that was left of his mother’s village. Folk wandered among

the burning ruins, looking lost.

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Aidan was slow to piece together the pattern of destruction. It was eerily specific. They—who

ever they were—had preserved the money crops—the hives, the orchards, the big storage jars of honey

—things that brought income.

But anything that enabled the people to thrive here—their homes, their springs, their gardens, their

shelters—those things had been ruined or stolen away.

When Fala touched down, Aidan dismounted.

Fala folded his wide black wings against his snowy white furred sides.

Aidan swallowed down the lump that rose in his throat, and fought to contain his tears.

An elderly man—Cobb, Aidan remembered his name, Cobb—Cobb marched right up to him with

heavy, stomping steps and flailing arms. “You left us!” Cobb railed. “You and Sara left us! How could

you do that! Just up and left! It’s not right, Aidan! We don’t have falconwolves! We can’t fly away!”

Aidan let Cobb shout himself raw. Aidan couldn’t explain to him why he hadn’t been here to

defend his village.

Aidan had not imagined for a moment that anyone would do this thing while he was away.

Many months ago, men had come from the Citadel, the governmental seat of the Northern

Province. They’d come with their winged falconwolves to murder Sara and Aidan. They got Sara.

Aidan had buried her deep in the forest where she would never be disturbed.

Sara had been master of the village then. In her villagers’ eyes now Sara had abandoned them.

Sara was their master. It was Sara’s duty to be strong for them, to be here for them.

Being dead was not an excuse when so many folk depended on you.

“Why’d you burn us?” Another man rasped.

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“You know I didn’t do this, Mardon,” Aidan said. What a feeble answer that was. “I confess I

should have seen this coming. I should have come home quicker. I should have put a stop this before it

started. You are right about that. This is my fault.”

Jealous lords always destroyed what they could not control.

The man, Mardon, was inhaling to unleash a tirade, but the bald admission of guilt took some of

the fury out of him. Now he just wanted help.

“Everyone! Everyone!” Aidan shouted. “Find your families! Find your friends! Are we all here?

Quick now! Is anyone missing? Is there someone we should be looking for who might not be able to

answer for himself?” And immediately Aidan started calling each villager by name. They warmed to

him with every name.

“Jasmine Seel! Are you here? Jasmine! Does anyone see Jasmine?”

“Yes! Yes!” Jasmine waved her arms from across the vineyard. “I’m here, Aidan! So are my

Lonnie and Jessa!”

“Thank you, Jasmine. And can someone find old Aspetong? You know he can’t hear for skak.”

“I’ll find him,” Jasmine called back, and she set her sons to finding the old man.

Aidan strode across the valley, calling names and noting each smoldering house. When he turned

to cross again, something high up on the opposite hillside caught Aidan’s gaze. He blinked at the

unexpected sight.

“What is that?” he cried.

That thing hadn’t been here when Aidan, Fala, Talionis and Sara left the valley. The building was

new, it was huge, and it was the only dwelling left standing on the hillside across from all the

smoldering ruins in the valley.

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The house was far grander than anything else in Chandler’s Valley—overly fine, and too

pretentious for this place. It was sided with elegantly finished wood. Its roof was made of cedar

shakes, not thatch like the rest of the dwellings. Around the mansion grew ornamental trees that

produced beautiful barren flowers that yielded no fruit and gave no fragrance. The manor house was

untouched by the fires that destroyed everyone else’s home in the village.

“That is the Steward’s house,” a man said, approaching at a lurch. Gernter. Aidan remembered the

man’s name was Gernter.

Gernter’s left knee would not bend, so that Gernter lurched rather than walked.

“Ah,” Gernter said, resentful. He clasped Aidan on the shoulder. “You’ll be wanting the house,

then, Master Aidan.”

And Gernter spat at Aidan’s feet.

Aidan’s face felt hot. His blood rushed behind his eardrums. His heart hammered. The Steward’s

grand mansion filled him with so much rage that he could scarcely speak. He wanted to strike Gernter.

Instead he spat, “Take it, Gernter!” Aidan pointed at the grand house. “Take it or burn it, I don’t much

care.”

Many faces turned his way. Gernter’s face went slack. Another man—Vind, his name was Vind—

Vind asked uncertainly, “Master Aidan?” Not sure if Aidan could possibly mean what he’d just said.

“If Gernter doesn’t want it, then burn it!” Aidan said loud for everyone to hear.

On the second command, the villagers were quick to swarm at the grand house. They took embers

and firebrands from the remains of their own smoldering homes and coaxed the rich wood of the

Steward’s mansion to catch fire.

As the blaze got going, there was whistling, cackling, and cheering. Some folks were dancing as

the flames leapt higher.

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A lone protest shouted, frantic, outraged, “Stop! Stop those men! Put that out! No! What are you

doing!”

Aidan didn’t recognize the voice but he knew this man had to be the Steward, whose vast house

this was, catching fire.

Aidan picked him out quickly from among his own folk. The Steward was the well-fed, elegantly

dressed man mounted astride a sleek, grand, high-stepping chestnut stallion arrayed in aristocratic tack.

“You are in charge here?” Aidan asked the Steward.

The Steward inhaled deeply to expand his chest and make himself appear bigger. He looked down

on Aidan. “Yes, I am, you peasant dog!”

Aidan gave a brisk nod. “Good. Then you put this fire out. No, don’t expect my people to do it.

You’re on your own.”

The Steward’s house was quickly ablaze. Its flames licked the sky.

From the savagery of the villagers’ glee, it was obvious that the Steward had been cruel to these

people during Aidan and Sara’s absence. More than cruel.

When Aidan and Sara lived here, most folk had been kind and sharing. That was before men from

the Citadel drove Aidan and Sara out of the valley, running for their lives.

Sara lost hers.

Aidan was here now to reclaim his home and his village. The village was in ruins. But at least the

people could dance. They were not crushed. They were angry.

Aidan reached for his bow and strung it. “Can someone spare an arrow?”

Several townsman offered. Aidan nodded at one arrow that was already lit with a fiercely flaming

head. He took burning arrow gingerly and sent it flying through an elegant window of the Steward’s

mansion.

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The flaming arrow flew true. The sound of the breaking glass carried. Fire leapt inside the

mansion. All of villagers around him applauded.

A boy asked if Aidan would light one of his arrows and shoot it at the mansion for him.

“What’s your name?” Aidan asked.

“Quint,” said Quint.

Aidan lit an arrowhead, drew back his bow, and let the arrow fly.

“This one is for Quint!” Aidan shouted the firebrand on its way.

“In over your head I see.”

The voice that sounded behind Aidan made his skin roughen.

Aidan turned slowly to face the broadly built, richly dressed man, twice Aidan’s age. The man’s

thick coppery hair was laced with silver threads. His beard was darkest black. Aidan knew him well.

Loathed him. A man of great power who used it cruelly. Fire shadows made his face demonic.

“Who did this, Ysah?”Aidan demanded. It was insolent to call the Archos by his name, not his

title. Aidan intended every disrespect to the Archos Ysah.

Ysah was the Archos of the Citadel, Master of the Academy, and Governor of the entire Northern

Province of the Falconwolf Kingdom.

Ysah was responsible for training the aristocratic young men of the Northern Province to serve in

the Citadel’s standing army, which was maintained to insure the safety of its citizens.

That was what the Archos was meant to do. Nowadays the Archos and the knights of his Citadel

fleeced their flocks. The knights feasted well.

“Who set these fires?” Ysah demanded back at Aidan. “You! Obviously you did this, Aidan

Whoreson.”

10


Aidan was meant to rise to the insult, whore’s son. But he didn’t. Sara had actually been a madam,

not a whore. She was never ashamed of it, so Aidan tried not to feel shame.

“No, Ysah,” Aidan said. “I only burned one house. That one.” Aidan pointed at the inferno that

had been the Steward’s mansion. The heat of its blaze spoke to the rich spices that were horded inside.

“That building has no right to exist here,” Aidan said. “And you had no right to destroy my

mother’s village!”

The Steward arrived at his flaming house, stomping. He stalked past Aidan as if Aidan were air.

The Steward drew himself up tall to face Ysah, the Archos of this northernmost province of the

Falconwolf Kingdom.

The Steward was incensed. “Where is my protection Ysah! This is not what I was granted! You

are the Archos! I demand to be made whole!”

“Just wait till Osso gets here,” Ysah said to the Steward with soft bitterness. “You will have

satisfaction.” The Archos’s smile was smug, secretive, and cruel.

“Yeah. Do that! Wait for Osso!” Aidan said. “Osso is coming back in a box. But there’s no place

for him here in my village, so I’ll just have his ashes delivered to your Citadel, Ysah.”

“Ratskat!” Ysah spat. “You sorry little creature! What do you mean by that? ‘Osso is coming in a

box?’”

“Are you that thick? I clearly mean that Osso is dead!” Aidan said. “I thought my words were

plain enough.”

“You sniveling little liar,” Ysah said. “You forget! I was in the Court of the Two Kings. I saw you

there. And I saw Lord Osso very much alive when I left the Royal Court!”

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“Well,” Aidan gave a sideways nod. “Osso got to be very dead after you got yourself chucked out

of the Royal Court, and no, his death wasn’t murder. Osso lost the duel. You should have stayed to

watch it.” And just so there could be no misunderstanding, Aidan told Ysah, “I won.”

Ysah tried to laugh. The sound came out a cough. “Osso cannot lose a duel! Osso is a peerless

swordsman!”

“And he looked really disappointed when I killed him!” Aidan said.

The voice in head—Sara’s—warned him not to gloat. Pride kills.

“Surprised the skak out of me,” Aidan confessed.

“You? You? Kill Osso?” Ysah burst out laughing. “You stupid little boy! That’s it! No more lies.

I’m in charge here now!” Ysah turned away, shouting. “I’m in charge! I’m in charge! I claim this

village by Royal Writ!”

Aidan barked a mirthless laugh. “You faker! You don’t have a Royal Writ! I do. This land and

everything on it is mine by birthright, as son of Sara Chandler.”

“You’re a bastard,” Ysah said. “A bastard cannot take real estate.”

Aidan coughed, genuinely astonished. “Is that a bluff, or are you really that stupid? You know, I

actually did study the books when I was at that Academy of yours. There is no such rule regarding

bastards. You know it. I know it. And anyway, I have an actual Royal Writ that confirms my

inheritance.”

“What Royal Writ? You must know that any scribblings from the Ravenwolf King have no weight

here in the Falconwolf Kingdom.”

“My writ is from Gyrreg, King of the Falconwolves,” Aidan declared.

King Gyrreg had granted the Royal Writ against his will, by demand of the Ravenwolf King, but

the land officially belonged to Aidan Chandlerson, and Aidan now had the paper to prove it.

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“Get off my land, Ysah.”

“You have a writ?” Ysah smirked. “I call your bluff, Aidan Whoreson. Let’s see your little

scribbling.” Ysah beckoned for Aidan’s scroll holder.

“Fine,” Aidan said, ducking out from the strap that held the document tube. He opened the top.

Pulled out the scroll and unrolled it to show the signature lines. “You know this seal?”

“I know a forgery when I see one, Ysah said. “And you will see straightaway that your forgery

doesn’t have—” Ysah’s voice stopped. His face froze for a moment, then went slack. His eyes looked

dead. Apparently there was some definitive mark of authenticity on Aidan’s scroll that Ysah had not

expected to find.

“Apparently it does have,” Aidan said taking the scroll back. He returned the document to its

holder and went on the offensive. “Now let’s see your Royal Writ, Ysah!”

Ysah’s mouth opened and shut.

“Ah. You don’t have a Royal Writ!” Aidan said.

“Gyrreg would not do this to me!” Ysah said.

“Oh but he did,” Aidan said, and he turned around and shouted with an outstretched palm,

“Quint! Gimme another arrow!”

Young Quint hastened to light an arrow’s head, while the Steward mounted a horse and galloped

back and forth before his flaming mansion. The Steward flapped his arms at anyone and everyone,

trying to herd the villagers toward his burning mansion. “Bring water! Bring earth! Put this fire out!

Everyone! Over there! Man the buckets! Put that fire out! Not that shack! The house! Leave the

hovels! Save that! That one, you idiots!”

The Steward reined his steed around toward the Archos. “Ysah! What are you doing! Help me!”

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Aidan answered before Ysah could speak. “Don’t look to Ysah for help here. This isn’t Ysah’s

land. It’s mine. This is my village. Everything that is here is mine. That burning house is mine. Go,

now, you imperial lap dog, before I claim your horse. Wait. On second thought—” Aidan grasped the

Steward by the tunic and one trouser leg, and pulled him down off his grand horse.

The Steward landed in an ungainly heap.

“I claim this horse,” Aidan declared. “It’s on my property. You brought it to me. I accept it.”

The horse trotted away from the Steward’s blazing house.

Aidan’s travelling companion, young Bess, chased after the horse. Bess was good with beasts. She

loved them, and they loved her back. She quickly brought the grand horse under control without reins.

The Steward was scrambling to get himself up from the ground. Aidan pushed him back down

with a booted foot. Aidan locked gazes with an elderly barefoot man and nodded sideways at the

Steward sprawled on the ground. “You want those boots?”

The elderly man stared, confused, hesitant. Was Aidan talking to him? The boots were already

filled with the Steward’s feet.

“You should have them,” Aidan answered himself quickly.

Aidan made his falconwolf sit on the Steward while Aidan liberated the fine boots and gave them

to the old man. “Those fit okay?” Aidan asked.

The old man, a bit dazed, nodded. He left the scene at a crooked run before someone could change

his mind about the ownership of the boots.

Sara would have known the old man’s name.

Only when the old man was well away did Fala allow the Steward to get up to his stocking feet.

A crowd had collected around Aidan by then.

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Aidan told them all, apologetically, “I should have seen this coming. I caused this. The greed

didn’t die just because I got a ruling in my favor from the Two Kings.”

And he declared, “I will make you all whole.”

Folks tentatively smiled. The words were all fine and wonderful, but no one dared to believe there

was any force behind the words. The trust of these folks was smoldering on the hillsides of their

valley.

The sky darkened with the setting sun. Fleet little swifts appeared like dancing arrowheads in the

dusky sky.

The villagers were trying to retrieve usable things from the rubble of their homes, and to keep the

fires from reviving and spreading to the fields and orchards.

Just when the sky grew very dark, the clouds broke, and bright moonlight shone through.

An icy ring glistened around the full moon.

A mad thought entered Aidan’s mind. He cupped his hands around his mouth and announced,

“Anyone who has ever dreamed of riding a falconwolf, come with me.”

“Where to!” someone shouted. Aidan knew him. John, the smithy’s son.

“Into the woods,” Aidan called back as he walked backwards toward the forest.

“The woods are dangerous!” someone else cried.

“They can be,” Aidan said. “You don’t need to come.”

“Then what are we going in there for?”

“Falconwolves,” Aidan said.

There was a collective gasp.

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If Aidan was guessing correctly, this walk would prove that falconwolf pups did not choose only

young men of noble birth to bond with. In the Citadel the choosing by falconwolf was a foundation of

a man’s noble status and his right to rule his holdings.

The lords of the Citadel had laid waste to Aidan’s world. Now, Aidan would kick the foundation

out from under theirs.

He told the villagers, “Falconwolf cubs impress on their future riders under the light of the full

moon.” Aidan pointed at the moonrise on the horizon.

A buzz of excited murmurs erupted from the group, along with a harsh shushing from others who

wanted to hear more of what Aidan had to say.

“Falconwolves only bond with nobility,” someone said sourly.

“That’s what the nobles tell you,” Aidan answered. “They are obviously wrong.”

“Maybe you’re wrong,” someone else said.

“Am I? I got chosen.” Aidan spread is arms. “Do I look noble to you?”

Several young men snorted.

“My mother got chosen! How royal is that?”

One answered, “Can’t say that you do, Aidan.”

“Right then,” Aidan said. “Does this guy look like a hummingbird?”

Fala had come up behind him and butted him in the back, then snuffled Aidan’s hair.

Fala shook his snow-white coat, and spread his black-feathered wings wide and then folded them

again. Aidan’s audience made a collective sound between wonderment and a sigh.

“These guys want us as much as we want them,” Aidan said.

Fala whuffled out a breath against Aidan’s hair.

No one was challenging Aidan’s familiarity with falconwolves now.

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There was a buzzing of excited murmurs.

“How does that happen?” someone demanded out loud. “How do you bond with a falconwolf?”

“I can’t tell you how or why, just what I’ve seen and felt,” Aidan said. “That lot in the Citadel

claim to know all the secrets. They don’t know skak, and honestly, I don’t know much more. But

here’s what I do know. If you find a falconwolf pup in the woods, pick it up. You found it because it

wants you. It feels like falling in love. No, screw that. It’s love. It pulls. Right here.” He put his hand

over his chest.

He heard a dubious cough that said not likely.

“There’s gotta be more to it than that,” someone else said.

“No,” Aidan said. “No more than that. Except the full moon part. The choosing only happens

under the full moon.”

“What if it’s cloudy?” someone asked.

“Falconwolf pups don’t care about clouds. Or rain. It just makes them real hard to see. On the

darkest nights, the pups still come out. They don’t need to see the full moon to know it’s there. Tides

still rise and fall in the dark.

“So look sharp now. The pups don’t look anything like this guy,” Aidan nodded back at his

imposing falconwolf behind him.

People ducked and gasped as Fala flared his wings full spread.

Not counting his wings, Fala was the size of a mule but built like a wolf, with all the proportions

of a wolf. His wide, falcon wings attached to a second set of shoulder blades set above his shoulders.

He was colored like no falconwolf Aidan had ever seen. Fala’s body was snow white, his wings jet

black.

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A falconwolf’s wings stemmed from a second pair of shoulder blades set between his natural

shoulders. A falconwolf saddle was fashioned not to interfere with the falconwolf’s wing muscles. A

rider crouched over his falconwolf as they flew. The rider’s shins fit into the saddle’s sheathes which

distributed the rider’s weight evenly. Aidan’s saddle was old and used. It was a gift from an

aristocratic friend.

It was a little early for this lot to be worrying about saddles.

“The pups are only this big, so watch your step.” Aidan formed his hands as if holding a small loaf

of bread. “But don’t panic if you do happen to step on one. They’re real tough. Questions?”

“How do you get chosen?” someone asked immediately.

Aidan let out an exasperated breath. “I don’t know. It just happens. A falconwolf pup will choose

you or it won’t. But I can tell you for certain that it only happens in the woods under the full moon. So

come on then. The window for impression isn’t that long.”

Aidan left Fala at the tree line and he led the hopeful ones at a quick trot into the forest, in a

direction away from the Citadel. Aidan didn’t want to run into a troop of cadets from the Citadel out

here, who would also be searching the woods for falconwolf pups this moonlit night.

Aidan secretly worried that maybe the Citadel’s forest might be the only breeding ground for

falconwolves. He just didn’t know for sure. It was common knowledge that pups only imprinted on

worthy sons of quality, and that the Citadel’s woodland was the only place where falconwolf cubs

were found.

Common knowledge was wrong. Aidan knew that. Fala had not impressed on Aidan in the woods,

and Fala had not been a pup when the bonding happened either. Fala was already half-grown when he

imprinted on Aidan, and he’d done it inside the Citadel. Inside the library in fact.

Libraries had their own special magic.

18


Maybe sons of knights and lords of the Citadel were the only men who ever rode falconwolves for

the simple reason that only noble born cadets ever went on scouting trips like this one under the full

moon.

So of course only sons of nobles had ever been chosen. The falconwolf pups had been offered no

other choice.

Until half-grown Fala broke into the Citadel library and chose Aidan.

That choosing upended the laws of nature.

And then—heresy on heresy—a pup imprinted on Aidan’s mother.

Not noble at all, Sara Chandler ran a brothel. For a falconwolf to choose the likes of Sara

Chandler to be its rider was an outrage. It was unacceptable. It must not happen.

And so the Falconwolf King had sent an assassin to remove Sara Chandler from existence.

Sara was dead. But the unwanted truth was already out. Falconwolf pups did not choose their

riders by any kind of merit. The pups would choose just about anyone.

Ysah’s lot had murdered Sara for nothing.

It seemed to Aidan that the only criterion for a falconwolf’s choosing you was that it loved you.

Now, Aidan led a cadre of commoners to hunt for impressionable falconwolf pups in the woods

above Sara’s smoldering village.

Moonlight cast a silver-edged glow to all things. Aidan and his troop searched for falconwolf pups

in the tricky shadows.

Aidan would have thought Fala, for his bright white coat, would stand out in the woods. But amid

the tall trees and tangled underbrush Fala appeared only as flashes of moonlight glimpsed through the

dense stands of trees.

19


Aidan was getting annoyed with the girls, who wouldn’t stop talking, and with the young men

who would not stop sniggering about trying to bond with the young women.

“Are there any female falconwolves?” a girl asked.

Snorts of derision met the question. Of course there must be females, they told one another.

But Aidan didn’t snort. “You would think so,” Aidan said. “But. . . .” he ended in a shrug. “No

one has ever seen a female falconwolf.”

A young man blustered. “Well, skak, where else would little falconwolves come from?”

“Yeah. Obviously there must be female falconwolves,” Aidan said. “I’m just telling you that no

one has ever seen one. Most people assume the females look just like male falconwolves, so you

wouldn’t know one if you looked at one. Females never present themselves to us. Now can everyone

please just shut up, be quiet, and spread out.”

“Wolf!” someone whispered loud and urgent.

Aidan froze, then slowly turned.

He saw the amber eyes before he saw the beast itself.

Low to the ground, those were not the eyes of a falconwolf. This wingless animal was a natural,

wholly wild, man-sized fearful, fearsome she-wolf, her hackles up, her teeth bared.

The hunting party halted.

And everyone stopped breathing.

The she-wolf stalked forward. She lifted her pointed muzzle up at Aidan with a deep guttural

growl. Her lip curled back, her snout wrinkled. Her amber eyes filled with fear and hatred.

And now that Aidan saw her sagging underside he understood her fear. The she-wolf was nursing

a litter. Somewhere near here, this natural she-wolf had cubs to protect. Mama wolf wanted Aidan and

all his companions gone from here, or dead.

20


Aidan had to get this clumsy lot away from her.

He spoke softly, lightly, without alarm. He might have been speaking of the weather. “Okay.

Guys? This is not good. No. Don’t turn around. Do not run. Ignore the wolf. Back away slowly,

calmly. Nothing wrong here.”

Aidan took a step back from the she-wolf. Then another step.

“We’re good,” he said in a near sing-song. “We’re good. There is no wolf. Look at the size of this

rock,” he said lightly.

Speaking nonsense, he backed up his troop as softly and quickly as he dared.

As soon as there was more space between them, the she-wolf turned tail. She loped away into the

dense forest, her heavy milk-laden tits wagging under her.

Aidan started to exhale relief—

When a wild yell sounded from the back of the troop.

Aidan cringed. He was about to roar at someone for being a bloody twag.

But that sound was not fear. It was exultant joy. Aidan knew that sound. He hadn’t really expected

to hear it on this hike, but it was a marvelous sound.

Someone in Aidan’s troop had come upon a falconwolf pup.

Or two of them, because there was another joyful shout in a different voice. And another ecstatic

yelp. And then the gushing squeals of a doting girl.

Aidan was astonished.

Ysah, the Archos at the Citadel controlled all information that got out about falconwolves in the

Northern Province of the Falconwolf Kingdom. Did the Archos know this about falconwolves? That

they would bond with anyone?—Boy, girl, old man, anyone. Did the Archos know that?

21


Aidan had not found anything in the library about rogue bondings. He supposed that particular

information could have been purged as dangerous, if such texts had ever existed to begin with. Aidan

doubted that his own rogue bonding with Fala had been recorded in an official log.

Apparently Aidan wasn’t an exception—his being chosen by a falconwolf despite his lack of

noble breeding.

Being chosen by a falconwolf was not a mark of nobility after all.

The hunt continued, expectant now, excited. And in what felt like no time at all, the bright full

moon was sinking toward the western horizon.

Aidan and his troop headed back to the smoldering ruins of their village in the early light.

There they met with scowls.

Aidan stepped forward before one of the outraged villagers could say it: “You think we abandoned

you.”

“We think that, because that’s what you did!” Tanner said. “Did you find boards and nails out

there in those woods? Did you find tarps? Tools growing on trees? We could really use more shovels!”

These folk had been hard at work keeping the fires from restarting. They had put up tents and

lean-tos to provide shelter this night. They had found few intact vessels to hold water—all this while

Aidan Chandlerson took able bodies out on a snipe hunt. The workers frowned at Aidan’s small troop

on their return.

“I’m sorry I took people away from the work,” Aidan said. “The moon was full, I didn’t know this

would even happen.”

“You didn’t even know!” Darnas said. “Hell of a time to be experimenting with our time! Grab a

shovel, if you can find one. The north end is getting hot again.”

22


“You need a shovel?” Aidan asked. “Here, show Fala what you want shoveled. I mean it, Darnas!

Fala can move dirt like twenty men.”

Darnas didn’t answer. When Darnas saw that three of Aidan’s hunters carried tiny, winged pups,

Darnas got angrier still, because everyone else abandoned their tasks and surged in to marvel at the

amazing little creatures.

“Maybe we wanted have a chance at bonding with a falconwolf!” Darnas told Aidan. “Ever think

of that?”

“I didn’t really know there was any hope at all,” Aidan said. “You’re right I was gambling. And it

turned out to be true. The pups come out under the full moon, and it looks like anyone can bond with a

falconwolf—bloodline, status, age, sex be hanged.”

The choosing was wild and untamed. The bond was absolute.

“The wanting grabs you here and it doesn’t let go.” Aidan pressed his palm to his chest. “You’re

stuck. And you want to be stuck.”

The three chosen ones of his troop were nodding, their eyes misty, their hands gently cradling

their little winged pups.

The choosing lifted them up. Aidan was only disappointed that there were so few of them.

“Did you get chosen, Aidan?” someone asked.

“No. I wouldn’t,” Aidan said. “I already got this guy.” He stroked Fala’s big wolfy face.

Hard to believe Fala had ever been so small as these infant creatures. But Aidan hadn’t met Fala

until the adolescent falconwolf was the size of a baby moose. Now, just Fala’s head alone was bigger

than a whole litter of falconwolf pups.

“Do you think they know this at the Citadel?” someone asked Aidan. “That you don’t need to be a

nobleborn son for a falconwolf to choose you?”

23


“Or that you don’t need to be anyone’s son,” Gretchen, the chosen girl, added.

“My mom kinda taught me that last bit,” Aidan said, coldly. This smug proud girl acted like she

was the only female ever to impress a falconwolf. “My mom got chosen,” Aidan told Gretchen. “Sara

wasn’t exactly noble.”

Murmurs rippled through the gathering. Everyone knew Sara Chandler’s profession.

“But that’s not information ever given to cadets,” Aidan went on. “I can’t really tell you if that lot

in the Citadel just doesn’t know or they’re deliberately hiding that information. Wouldn’t surprise me

if they do know that falconwolves will choose female riders. I’ll bet you money that our Archos Ysah

knows.”

The provincial Archos, Ysah, kept a tight grip on his secrets. Secrets were power, and Ysah

always strived to be the most powerful man in the province.

And then a dark and bitter thought struck Aidan. Had Sara been murdered because a falconwolf

pup chose her? Had Ysah and the powers who appointed themselves to control such information

forbade such a bond ever to form? Aidan felt immediately ill.

Then his own falconwolf, Fala, nosed him from behind and whuffled his hair. Fala never let him

wallow in black thoughts.

Aidan turned his small troop around and headed back to the smoldering valley.

When everyone in Aidan’s troop had returned from the forest, Aidan called out to all the people in

the valley who had not come with him on the hunt. “Listen! Darnas? Idry? Everyone who stayed

behind here to make sure the fires are out and who arranged food and shelter for your neighbors!

Please listen. Don’t think you missed your only chance to bond with a falconwolf pup. You have done

needful things here tonight, and we are all grateful. Know that there will be other full moons. You will

have other chances to bond with a falconwolf pup, assuming that’s what you want.”

24


He saw some of the resentment drain out of the helpful ones who had stayed behind to arrange for

shelter for their neighbors.

“What do I feed my pup?” Gretchen asked, sounding panicked.

“Milk if we can get it,” Aidan said. “There must be goats and mares and bitches in the village.”

Darnas was quick to tear into that suggestion. “And there are people in this village who need that

milk! We’ve been burned out, Aidan. Do ya see that? How are you going to feed all those mouths,

Aidan?”

Aidan snarled inwardly. Yes, all three of these tiny little mouths. It’s gonna be a sacrifice, Darnas.

Aloud Aidan said, “If there’s no milk to spare—”

“There is none!” Darnas shouted.

“Then Fala can feed the falconwolf pups,” Aidan said, forcing his voice to sound reasonable even

though he really wanted to land a fist in Darnas’ face.

“Uh, Aidan?” Gretchen said, hesitant. “Fala is a boy falconwolf. He doesn’t have milk.”

“Thank you, Gretchen. I think I knew that,” Aidan said. “These pups can get by without milk. The

other way of feeding them is just a little disgusting. But you get used to it.”

All the way back from the woods to the smoldering village, Aidan’s falconwolf, Fala, had been

snagging rabbits and possums, pheasants and squirrels, and gulping them down as if he were starving.

Aidan knew what that was all about.

Fala was going to feed the newly impressed falconwolf pups.

And it started. Aidan heard the gagging.

Up came the half-digested stuff from Fala’s throat. Fala’s jaws opened wide, his head bowed over,

and he let the vomit spill to the ground.

“What’s wrong with your falconwolf?” Gretchen cried.

25


“Nothing,” Aidan said. “Nothing is wrong with him. Listen! Everyone who has a falconwolf pup!

Get over here. Fala has food for your pup.”

Gretchen’s winged pup had already fluttered in for itself. Then there were two more.

In all, three pups gathered around the predigested stuff and lapped it up from the leafy ground.

“Let the villagers have all their milk,” Aidan said. “Your pups can live on this stuff just fine.

“Can’t I feed mine milk?” Gretchen asked.

“Sure. Go down to the village and ask for milk for your falconwolf.”

Gretchen gave an irate cough. “You don’t need to be rude, you know.”

“Today?” Aidan said. “Yeah, I do. I’m trying to keep folks alive.”

And because jealousy was a dangerous thing, Aidan assured all the others who had failed to attract

a falconwolf pup on this night’s hunt that there would be more choosings the next full moon, and all

the full moons after that.

When the new pups were fed and comfortable, Aidan called for attention. “Okay. Everyone?

Everyone with a falconwolf! Tell me: Are your pups boys or girls?”

“Boy,” three voices sounded at once.

Three? There were still only three bondings? Aidan hadn’t expected so few. His throat stung.

Maybe that lot in the Citadel really did know some secret to attracting falconwolf pups that he did not.

“Any girls?”

“Me,” Gretchen said.

“Girl pups,” Aidan asked again, “Not girls chosen by pups.”

And he waited.

There were some murmurs. But no voices answered with a yes.

26


“Big coincidence, you think?” Gretchen asked Aidan.

“What do you have there, Gretchen?” Aidan asked.

“Boy,” Gretchen said.

“I don’t think this is a coincidence,” Aidan said. “No one in the Citadel has ever seen a she-

falconwolf either. All the falconwolf pups we’ve ever found are boys. They’re always boys.”

“But there must be female falconwolves somewhere, obviously,” Getchen said. “Right?”

Aidan hesitated.

“Before I can guess something not very bright, I’m just gonna say I don’t know,” Aidan told her.

There had always been guesses of what the female falconwolves looked like.

“Do female falconwolves have wings?” Gretchen asked.

Aidan rolled his eyes to heaven. “I’m telling you no one has ever seen a verified female

falconwolf, so most people assume that females look just like males. That would mean yeah, they have

wings. So you could look right at a female and not know it. The pups all very furry, so you can’t really

see what kind of equipment is hanging down under there unless they let you get close. I’ve never seen

a female falconwolf. I don’t know anyone who has.”

All eyes moved to see what they could see under Fala’s undercarriage.

They saw a great lot of white fur.

Zareg the potter’s son said, “Maybe there just aren’t any females.”

Qender the miller’s son repeated Zareg’s words back to him so he might hear his own absurdity.

“That’s it,” Qender said. “Right. Of course. There aren’t any female falconwolves. Sure.”

“I mean it,” Zareg said. “It’s why we’ve never seen a female falconwolf. Simple. There aren’t

any.”

Aidan, who didn’t like to embarrass anyone, commended Zareg on his creative thinking.

27


“Where is your mother’s falconwolf, Aidan?” Qender asked.

Someone gasped, and asked in an awed whisper, “Your mother has a falconwolf?”

“She did.” Aidan didn’t want to talk about it, but the questions were out there. Best get it over

with. “My mother is dead.”

Not offering any condolences, Qender demanded, “Was her falconwolf female?”

“No,” Aidan said. Sara’s falconwolf is a boy,”

“Is!” Gretchen cried. “Where is Sara’s falconwolf now?”

Aidan hesitated. Sara’s falconwolf, Talionis, was no longer a pup.

“Sara’s pup went to a special home,” Aidan said.

Sara’s falconwolf, Talionis, was a monster.

28


Chapter Two

At the edge of the high forest that overlooked the pass to Chandler’s Village nestled in its broad

valley, Aidan watched Hector Xanderson leave the path and advance toward him with a purpose, as if

Hector knew that Aidan was lurking precisely here, in these woods.

Leading a packhorse, Hector hiked up the hillside, then he threaded the path to a glade just inside

the woods where Aidan and Hector had met in secret several times in the past.

This time, Hector had come alone, without even his falconwolf, Zephyr, for a companion.

“Are you here?” Hector asked the shadows. He stopped and listened for the rustle of leaves.

When Aidan was certain that Hector was alone, Aidan showed himself.

“Your father took you back,” Aidan said. The words came out like an accusation.

“Yes,” Hector said.

Hector, a nobleman’s son, had left his grand elegant estate in defiance of his noble father to

accompany Aidan on his perilous journey to the Court of the Two Kings. Aidan owed Hector

Xanderson a debt beyond any ability to repay.

Hector had grown since their journey. Strong, tall, well-muscled, elegant, Hector moved with

aristocratic grace. Hector was true nobility, a young lord who cared for the subjects of his domain, not

a tyrannical leech, like the provincial Archos, Ysah.

The distant flames from the Citadel’s armory and stables cast an orange glow on the forested

horizon. They were visible all the way out here on the ridge outside Sara’s village. Aidan could hear

29


the distant pops and booms of ordnance exploding as the armory burned. Orange firelight reflected in

Hector’s dark eyes.

“You had to do that, didn’t you?” Hector said, disapproval in his voice. “You had to burn

something.”

Aidan denied nothing.

“They burned my village,” Aidan said. “They stole our harvest. I need to identify the innocents.

The rest must pay.”

“I think you’re addicted to vengeance, Aidan,” Hector said. “You like the taste of anger.”

“It feels better than whining and wallowing in helplessness,” Aidan said. “Yeah! It’s a better

taste.”

“Well, here,” Hector stomped to his packhorse, then marched back to Aidan, to drop two large

seed bags at Aidan’s feet. “That one’s barley. That’s wheat,” Hector nodded at one bag then the other.

“They’re for planting your next crop. But if you just mean to burn them, I’ll have those seeds back if

you please.”

“No,” Aidan mumbled. “I recognize their worth. We need these desperately. I thank you with all

my heart.”

“Don’t make me regret helping you.” Hector said, and he turned to go.

Aidan spoke at his back. “Something you should know.”

Hector stopped. “What?”

The silence stretched.

Aidan shook his head. Hector was his friend, but Hector’s family was not. Aidan decided to keep

his secrets for now.

“Nothing,” he said.

30


Aidan’s bonding with his half-grown rogue falconwolf, Fala, a year ago had been dismissed as a

one-time fluke. But after this night, the truth was clear that falconwolf pups would choose just about

anyone to bond with. That secret would come out in time. And Aidan didn’t want to be near the

Citadel when that truth saw daylight.

Falconwolves chose their life companions not by worth, not by breeding, not by status, but by love

and love alone. That a falconwolf should choose a harlot was unthinkable. That unacceptable truth had

cost Aidan’s mother her life. Those lofty men who guarded their privileged rank determined that such

a bond must not happen. Sara the Madam could not possibly be of the same worth as any of the nobles

of the Citadel.

So they had made Sara cease to exist.

The full moon was sinking toward the western horizon. The eastern horizon lightened. Aidan

gathered all the townsfolk to what was left of their village green, and he waited for the voices to quiet

down.

“Listen. Everyone who didn’t find a pup this moon, don’t be discouraged. It can take a whole lot

of full moons before the right pup finally finds you.”

“Easy for you to say, Chandlerson,” Rob Wainwright said. “The way I hear it is the pups were all

over you from the very first.”

“Yeah. Well. About that,” Aidan hedged. “No one, including me, knows what the falconwolf pups

saw in me. Maybe they knew I needed a whole lot of help. Any other questions?”

“Have you ever seen a Ravenwolf?” someone asked.

Aidan gave a startled snort. “Yeah,” Aidan said. “Sure have.”

“I hear they stink.”

31


“Do they ever,” Aidan said.

“I hear that the Ravenwolf people have their own king,” Krisn said.

“That’s a fact,” Aidan said. And before he could stop himself, Aidan heard himself saying, “Their

King’s better than our King.”

A shadow moved across the assembled folk.

Zareg looked straight up. Aidan followed Zareg’s gaze to where a large black bird circled.

“Oh skak!” Aidan breathed.

“What? The crow? Is it bad?” Zareg drew his sling from his belt. “I can kill it.”

“That is not a crow,” Aidan cried. “And for all love, do NOT hurt it, Zareg!”

Aidan moved apart from his mates. The high-flying raven tilted its wedge-shaped tail to move

with him.

Then the bird dropped a weighted scroll from its thick, hooked beak.

The scroll landed on the ground in front of Aidan.

Zareg moved to retrieve the message, but the raven swooped low and flapped its broad wings in

Zareg’s face. Its beak parted and it croaked at Zareg, then launched itself off of Zareg’s head back into

the air.

“Let it go,” Aidan told Zareg. “The message is not for you.”

“What makes you think it’s for you?” Zareg demanded sourly, rubbing the top of his head.

Aidan picked up the scroll from the ground. He said without looking at it. “It has my name on it.”

The raven flapped away, not waiting for an answer.

“Did somebody say they wanted to see a ravenwolf?” Aidan asked the villagers as a shadow came

unstuck from the forest blackness.

A great black shape stepped out from among the dense trees.

32


There were gasps and soft cries from almost everyone.

Striding into the fading light appeared a giant, pure black ravenwolf.

“Put your sling away, Zareg,” Aidan said, and he hiked up the rise with his own falconwolf, Fala,

to meet the hulking ravenwolf at the forest’s edge.

The ravenwolf’s name was Midnight. He was proportioned much like a natural wolf except that

Midnight much bigger.

Like a falconwolf, the ravenwolf’s wings were set in between its natural shoulder blades.

Aidan’s falconwolf and the Ravenwolf King’s ravenwolf nodded to each other with civil growls.

“Hey there, Midnight,” Aidan greeted the great royal beast with a sense of defeat. He had lost

control of his village. And he hated to need rescuing. “Your boss here?” Aidan wearily asked the royal

ravenwolf.

Even as he asked it, a figure, dressed all in black and gray, appeared from out the forest’s depths.

Carn the Ravenwolf King strode past Aidan and into the open with long steps. Then Carn stopped,

propped his fists on his hips, and surveyed the devastation of Aidan’s village.

With pinched brow, Carn turned sourly to Aidan. “You didn’t think to send me a message?”

He sounded offended.

“I just got home,” Aidan apologized to Carn.

The journey home from the Dual Capital had taken months.

“And I couldn’t get another dove to go into your forest, Carn,” Aidan said. “Your trees keep

eating them.”

“Ah. There’s that,” Carn allowed, mollified. “I shall give you some ravens.”

Normally Carn the Ravenwolf King looked rough and ready for action, always dressed in black

flying leathers decorated with silver studs. But here, now, Carn appeared very fine, polished and regal.

33


His shirt was crisp gray, his breeches black satin. Because Carn was always gloved, Aidan had

imagined that Carn had talons instead of fingernails, but here he carried a pair of soft kid gloves in one

nicely manicured, completely normal hand.

His hair was clean and drawn back in a neat tail held with a silver clasp. He had strong enough

bones to get away with shaving his face and not looking ridiculous. He looked good. Smelled like

death as always.

Aidan moaned. “Oh skak, I’m taking you away from a state occasion, aren’t I?”

“No,” Carn said tightly. “I had a date. And you’re not keeping me from it. I got stood up. My

evening is screwed. May as well see what Aidan Chandlerson got himself nostril deep into this time. I

smelled smoke.”

Carn moved past Aidan and spread his hands at the valley below and the ruins of the Chandlers’

smoldering village at the far end. “This is amazing.”

“I didn’t do this!” Aidan said. Felt dull for saying it.

“You didn’t do it, but it would not have happened without you,” Carn said. “Aidan Chandlerson,

you are a magnet for disaster.”

“Thank you, Carn. I feel ever so splendid now,” Aidan said.

“So who did this to you?” Carn asked.

“Ysah.”

“Ysah? Your own Archos? That man is criminally stupid.”

Aidan blurted out a question. There had never been a good time to ask. It still wasn’t a good time,

but Aidan spoke it anyway. “Carn? What do female ravenwolves look like?”

“Don’t be thick,” Carn said irritably. “There are no female ravenwolves.”

“What?”

34


“Just like there are no female falconwolves,” Carn said.

“That’s what you think just because no one has seen one,” Aidan guessed.

“I know that because there are none,” Carn said.

“You’re playing me,” Aidan said, almost a scold.

“Not my sport,” Carn said.

No, Aidan conceded inwardly. Carn was never a games player.

“So where do little falconwolves come from?” Aidan asked.

“Same place little ravenwolves come from.”

“Now you are playing with me, Aidan said bitterly.

“Didn’t intend to. Has no one told you?” Carn asked. “Truly?”

“No one seems to know,” Aidan said. “Have you seen ravenwolves mating?”

“No, of course not.”

“Of course not?” Aidan echoed, all at sea.

“I haven’t seen it, because they don’t do it. There are no female ravenwolves to mate with,” Carn

said.

Aidan coughed. He could hardly get the question out. “Then how do ravenwolves reproduce?”

Carn’s brow furrowed. “You actually have no idea? Not one of your lot knows?”

“No!” Aidan cried.

“Then I believe I will keep that as a state secret.”

“Carn!” Aidan cried, exasperated.

“No! Knowledge is power. If I give away any more information to you, I shall feel compelled to

annex your village to my Kingdom.”

Aidan felt his eyes grow huge. “You wouldn’t!”

35


“Don’t want to,” Carn said, glancing around. “There’s nothing to eat here. Give me a dove. I need

to get a message to your wretched excuse for a King.”

“A message to my King? Why don’t you use one of your own ravens to carry your message?”

Aidan asked.

Ravens were the preferred couriers for carrying messages between the two kingdoms. Ravens

were fast, and they could defend themselves, whereas doves were slow and lamentably tasty.

“I don’t want Gyrreg to see this coming,” Carn said. “He tries to dodge my messages even on the

best of days.”

It unsettled Aidan how casually Carn called the Falconwolf King by name. Aidan pulled from his

messenger pouch the dove he’d been hording and he now offered it to Carn.

A motion in the forest caught Aidan’s eye, made him flinch. Something enormous and forest-

colored moved in the woodland depths. He made to draw an arrow from his quiver, but Carn placed his

hand over Aidan’s, and gently, irresistibly, moved it down. “Don’t.”

“What is in there!” Aidan cried, trying to make out the shape of the giant creature. “What’s that

behind Midnight?”

“You know who that is,” Carn said.

“That is not Midnight!” Aidan cried.

The thing in the shadows was even bigger than Carn’s great ravenwolf, Midnight.

“No,” Carn said easily. “It is not. But you are your mother’s son, and that is a falconwolf. A very

large falconwolf. He will never, never hurt you. He doesn’t normally come out before dark. It might be

the fires drawing him out here.”

The glimpses that Aidan caught made the creature look like a monster.

“Tal!” Aidan strangled out a whisper. “That’s Talionis?”

36


On hearing its name, the creature’s head went up. The hulking dark shape bounded through the

trees, snapping branches and crushing wildflowers as it came. It lumbered out into the open like a

storm cloud, all gray and black with flashes of white. It reared on its hind legs and spread its vast

wings and bugled happiness. The beast was titanic. It closed on Aidan in a few galloping heartbeats. It

knocked Aidan to the ground with its mammoth forepaws and licked Aidan’s face off.

That was what it felt like anyway.

“Aidan is being mauled by a ravenwolf!” someone cried.

“That is not a ravenwolf. And that falconwolf is not mauling anyone,” Carn said as he deftly lifted

the pitchfork out of the hands of one of Aidan’s would-be rescuers.

And it was quickly apparent from the monster’s franticly wagging tail and puppy-like whining

that this was a joyous reunion. Aidan was not prey. He was family.

“Whose falconwolf is that!” several of the villagers asked at once.

“Sara Chandler’s,” Carn said.

One man sputtered. “The whore?”

“The madam,” said Carn.

Carn walked the length of the valley with Aidan and the villagers, looking out for hot spots that

could flare up again. The Falconwolf and Ravenwolf Kingdoms shared a border very close to here.

The Ravenwolf King had a fortress in the woods, right at the Kingdom’s edge, so Carn took a personal

interest in any fires on his border.

“Aidan, do you know who your father is?” Carn asked softly as they walked.

“Oh skak, I don’t think my mother knew who my father was,” Aidan said sourly.

“Don’t be stupid,” Carn said. “Sara Chandler was a professional. She knew exactly whose spawn

went into her body and when.”

37


Aidan blinked. Blinked a few more times. Then he coughed.

What Carn said had to be true. It was blindingly obvious. Aidan had preferred never to think of it.

But now he needed to know.

“Do you know who is my father?” The question stumbled out without Aidan meaning to speak it.

“Safer I not answer that question,” Carn said. “I am out of my realm here. And I see your brain

churning, Aidan Chandlerson. Stop right now and know this: I am not he.”

Aidan tried to mask his disappointment. It had been a ridiculous thought to begin with. The people

of the Ravenwolf realm ate carrion and smelled like decomp. Aidan was not one of those people.

Aidan couldn’t digest ravenwolf food. Then to imagine himself the son of a King? Any King. What

was he thinking?

So what man had Sara Chandler allowed to settle his seed in her? There was no nobleman that

Aidan could see himself in. He imagined that Sara would have chosen someone handsome. Aidan had

grown to be rather handsome.

Then again, Aidan was assuming that Sara had consented to the union. To think otherwise was a

disturbing thought. Buy Sara would know how to get rid of the bastard if she didn’t want it.

Aidan wasn’t going to go guessing down that road.

He walked toward his mother’s house. He could see it smoldering at the far end of the valley.

Until Aidan actually saw it he imagined that her house might have escaped the torches, but the black

charred remains of Sara’s house stood gutted like all the other hollowed out blackened stone ruins in

their village. The ashes of its thatched roof had burned away entirely.

“I leave you here,” Carn said.

“Can you not stay awhile?” Aidan asked. Afraid he was pleading.

“No. This is not my realm,” the Ravenwolf King said. “Come to me only in your darkest hour.”

38


His darkest hour. “This is not it?” Aidan cried.

“No,” Carn said. “And when it comes, you know where I live.”

Aidan stayed silent. It used to be comforting to know just how very close the fortress of the

Ravenwolf King was to his mother’s village.

A whole lot of good that had done him!

Carn and his ravenwolf, Midnight, disappeared back into the black forest with its man-eating

trees.

As soon as Carn and Midnight vanished from sight, the hulking young falconwolf Talionis turned

toward the wreckage that had once been Sara’s and Aidan’s house, as if Tal knew by some instinct that

this way was home.

Aidan looked all around him, searching for his companion who had come home with him on this

long journey— his mother’s apprentice candlemaker, Bess.

Where was Bess?

Aidan had lost track of Bess again.

The girl tended to wander.

But it was easy to spot Bess’s falconwolf, Talionis. Tal had stepped out of the forest and started

out at a cautious walk toward the house that had never been his home. But it had been Sara’s home,

and Tal somehow knew the way there. He picked up his pace to an eager trot. Then Aidan needed to

jump onto his own Fala’s back to catch up with galloping Talionis, whose broad wings gusted across

the charred grasses of the wide valley.

Sara’s house lay in smoldering ruins at the far end of Chandlers Valley, but Sara’s workshop was

still standing. And something very large was inside there.

As Aidan neared the workshop, he jumped down from Fala’s back and advanced at a walk.

39


After Sara’s death, Sara’s orphaned falconwolf pup Talionis had formed a bond with the

Ravenwolf King’s royal Ravenwolf, Midnight. But Talionis himself was no Ravenwolf.

Tal was a giant Falconwolf.

As a tiny pup, Talionis had chosen Sara to be his rider. The arrow that killed Sara had brushed

close to infant Tal while nestled in his baby pouch on Sara’s back. The horror of Sara’s murder had left

her tiny pup Talionis lost and angry.

Since then, vengeance on his mother’s slayers and companionship with the royal Ravenwolf

Midnight had taken much of the savagery out of young Talionis. But on their long journey home from

the Court of the Two Kings Aidan often worried about Tal dwelling in the sunless realm of the carrion

eaters. Falconwolves were not made for so much darkness.

As Aidan neared his mother’s workshop he heard Carn’s voice sounding from somewhere. It was

hard for Aidan to tell exactly where the sound came, because the shop was filled to the rafters with

hulking Talionis.

“We have misplaced a very large falconwolf,” Carn called in.

Aidan didn’t know if Carn was speaking in royal plurals or if Midnight was meant to be part of

that “we” who was missing a falconwolf. Aidan was just glad that Carn had turned around to help him

after all.

Haltingly, Aidan answered back from the crowded space that was Sara’s workshop. “Yeah. I um,

have him—part of him—in here.”

A giant fluffy tail was wagging out the front doorway of Sara’s workshop.

“We noticed that,” Carn said, climbing in through a rear window. Carn nodded to little Bess, who

had gone ahead of all of them. She crouched inside Sara’s workshop, trying to make herself very very

small.

40


“M’lady,” the Ravenwolf King nodded to Bess when he saw her.

Bess squeaked. “Oh no, sire. I’m no lady!”

“Don’t call me sire,” Carn said. “I have not sired anyone yet”

“Yes, sire! I mean—No sir—I mean—

“Carn. I am Carn. You were devoted to the lady, Sara.”

“Y-yes, sire,” Bess stammered, who had never heard Sara the madam referred to as a lady.

“He knows that.” Carn nodded sideways at the hulking falconwolf Talionis, who was trying to

turn his giant self around in the small workshop. Sounds of huffing and blundering carried from

within, until Tal straightened up and lifted the thin-sided little building up from its foundation and

sneezed one wall off.

“Carn!” Aidan cried at the Ravenwolf King’s approach.

A man at the height of his strength, Carn advanced at an easy commanding stride, dressed all in

black riding leathers as was his custom.

“Thank any god, you came back! Aidan welcomed Carn the Ravenwolf King. “Can you help us?”

“No,” Carn said.

Aidan was so stunned that he could only blurt, wounded, “No?”

“These are not my people,” Carn said. “This is not my Kingdom.”

“Then why are you here, Carn?” Aidan said, bitter.

Even after all Carn had done for him Aidan couldn’t help but feel let down.

“I’m here to return your mother’s falconwolf to his own kind. Tal’s stay among us has been good

for him, but he does not belong in the dark. It’s time that Talionis came home.”

“Home to what!” Aidan cried, throwing his arms wide to the smoking ruins of his village.

“The home you will make for yourselves,” Carn said.

41


“No. Seriously. What would you do? If all this was yours.” Aidan gestured back the valley with

all its charred houses and its stunned villagers wandering about, lost.

“Myself?” Carn said. “I would put out the fires and take the battle home to the enemy.”

* * *

At the calls of alarm, Ysah, the Archos of the Northern Province, ran to the ramparts of his Citadel

from where he could see the lands that lay beyond his fortress’s impenetrable walls on the wide

northern plain.

Ysah could clearly see that the armory outside of the Citadel was ablaze. So were the stables.

There was no sound of screaming horses, so those beasts must have all got out before the fire was

started.

Of course Aidan Chandlerson would see to the safety of the brutes before anything else. The

peasant had no such regard for the property of his betters.

The Archos Ysah had no doubt at all that this arson was the work of the Chandler bastard. The

little worm just did not know when to stay underground.

And where were all the noble knights of the Citadel with their falconwolves flying into action

here? Why were there not whole companies of knights flying to the Citadel to fight these blazes?

Any moment now the armory was bound to explode.

And so it did.

The concussion rocked the ground.

As red and black cinders floated down from the sky, the Archos remembered that this was the day

of the week and the customary hour when most knights left the Citadel to take their favorite cadets out

to the fields to shoot game birds.

42


Aidan Chandler would know that ritual. Aidan used to tend the pack animals that carried the rifles

and bows and ammunition and refreshment for the noble hunters and their pages.

The scheming little weasel had taken advantage of his familiarity with the routines of his betters to

make his strike.

And Ysah’s lords had let themselves become predictable, vulnerable. Stupid.

The Archos fairly flew down the stairs. He ran alongside a panicked horse that was escaping the

blazes. Ysah gripped the brute by the mane, sprang, and hauled himself astride.

The horse had no bridle or saddle, but the Archos never met a beast he could not bend to his will

with his own hands.

Not sure if he was more angry with that lowlife Aidan Chandlerson or with his own careless

nobles who let this happen, Ysah lashed his horse to a full gallop out to the wide meadow that was the

nobles’ shooting ground.

At the meadow, the Archos Ysah leapt down from his steed and roared for his knights to stop what

they were doing.

He ordered most of them to go fight the fires at the Citadel’s stables and the armory.

And to Lord Entis he charged the burning of Aidan Chandler’s village. “Raze it to the ground!”

“Can’t,” Lord Entis said languidly, not looking at the Archos. Entis was intent on lining up his

shot at a quail.

Wroth, the Archos strode forward and pulled the barrel of Entis’s rifle down.

Mortally offended, Entis glared at the Archos. Angry breaths jetted from Lord Entis’s nostrils.

The Archos asked Entis with soft menace, “You cannot or will not?”

“Cannot, my lord Ysah,” Entis said, lifting his rifle, his words clipped and precise. “You already

ordered that village burned. It’s already done. I did my part. You owe me a quail, sir.”

43


* * *

“Where are all the people?”

The Archos, Ysah, posed the question to any nobleman within the sound of his voice.

Most of the fires in Chandler’s valley had been snuffed out by now. Little birds winged in the

darkening sky as they caught insects rising on the heated air.

A gentle breeze turned over the tall grasses in the few small pastures that had escaped burning.

Missing from the valley were all of the villagers.

The residents had to have gone somewhere. They had not come running out through the high pass

to take refuge in Ysah’s Citadel, where they were meant to go in an emergency. And they were not in

their own valley. There was only one place they could be.

“They must be in the forest,” Lord Manard said at Ysah’s side.

“Oh! Good place for them!” the Archos Ysah barked happily.

“How is that good?” Lord Manard said, crossly. We can’t reach them in those woods, Archos.”

“Don’t need to go in there,” Ysah said. He was laughing outright now. “Did you know that Carn’s

trees eat people?”

“They what?” several of his lords said at once.

“I am dead serious.” Ysah chortled at his men’s dumbfound stares. “So some commoners decided

to hide in the Ravenwolf forest, did they? Lord Carn is going to have some truly fat trees after this

day!”

Lord Manard demurred. “I’ve heard that the Royal Road actually runs through the Ravenwolf

forest.”

“So? What of it?” Ysah said, vexed.

44


“The existence of a Royal Road suggests there must be a safe passage through those trees,”

Manard said.

Ysah strolled to where Manard stood. He said softly, “Are you volunteering to try that theory out

and report back to me?”

Manard paled. “Myself? No, Archos!”

Ysah’s eyebrows lifted skyward. “No?” the Archos asked, softly threatening.

Manard trembled. “Archos! No! Please!”

“Do calm yourself,” Ysah said with a smile and a lazy wave of his hand. “I am not in the habit of

blindly sending my knights into an unmeasured danger. What do you take me for, Manard?”

“I do know better,” Lord Manard said with a low bow. “What I said was insulting. I apologize,

Archos,”

“Apology accepted,” Ysah said. He clapped his hands together. “So! Does anyone have a page

they are willing to sacrifice in the quest for scientific discovery regarding the appetite of ravenwolf

trees for human flesh?

Twilight found Aidan assisting his villagers in clearing the wreckage so that they could begin to

rebuild their homes.

A dove arrived in Chandlers’ Valley. It wore the imperial plumage of a King’s messenger.

Aidan had no use for any message from the Falconwolf King, Gyrreg, but the fancy bird fluttered

about Aidan’s head, insistent, demanding a perch.

Aidan turned away at the dove’s every attempt to push its parchment scroll at him.

Old Aspetong nodded upward, and told Aidan in his raspy voice, “Best let it land on you, Master

Aidan. Bird won’t let you rest wit’out him givin’ you that message.”

And there was really nothing for it. At last Aidan had to allow the bird to deliver the scroll.

45


No sooner was it in hand than Aidan crushed the scroll and threw it away from him.

He rubbed his palms against his pants as if they’d been soiled by simply touching the King’s

message.

Old Aspetong picked up the parchment scroll from the ground, smoothed it out, and whistled.

“Well look at that!”

The scroll bore the imprint of the Royal Seal of the Kingdom of the Falconwolves. The royal seal

was the image of a falconwolf rampant against a starburst. The scroll contained a formal invitation

from Gyrreg, King of the Falconwolves for Aidan Chandlerson to dine with the Falconwolf King at his

hunting lodge.

Old Aspetong announced to everyone, “Our Aidan is dining with the King ‘imself. How about

that!”

Aidan bellowed louder to anyone and everyone within earshot. “I can’t accept this invitation! King

Gyrreg ordered the murder of my mother!”

Aidan seized the parchment scroll back from Old Aspetong and crushed it, then spat on it. Then he

pissed on it, and tied it to the unhappy dove’s jesses. He instructed the bird, “Take this back where it

came from. And just in case King Gyrreg is perfectly thick, tell His Majesty that my answer to his

invitation is No! Not ever! Tell him to make himself dead!”

* * *

Aidan Chandlerson was delivered bodily by harpy to the Falconwolf King’s far northern hunting

lodge precisely at noon on the designated day.

Kings never took no for an answer, and harpies never failed to deliver on a royal summons.

46


King Gyrreg welcomed Aidan into his rustic woodland retreat with the customary goblet of wine

at the door.

Aidan threw the wine, goblet and all, into the bushes, though he really wanted to throw it at the

King’s false smiling face. Some inner voice—maybe Sara’s—stayed him.

“I have offered you hospitality,” Gyrreg said. “You cannot deny me. Come in.”

Hospitality was a sacred rite. And Aidan really should not refuse the invitation. That would

provoke the ill will of the gods. And the harpy that brought him here still hulked over him, making

sure that Aidan crossed the King’s threshold before the monster could confirm delivery of the King’s

guest.

The Falconwolf King had aged since Aidan last saw him in court.

Never a handsome man, now in advancing age, Gyrreg was becoming truly ugly. His skin was

paper white, paper-thin and mottled. Blue veins stood up prominently like maps of rivers on the backs

of his gnarled hands. His nose was growing longer as old men’s noses often did.

The log walls of the King’s hunting lodge were hung with the heads of mightily antlered stags—

trophies to show off Gyrreg’s great prowess in killing things. Skins of many animals covered the

timbered floor.

There was no one else present at the hunting lodge for this meal except for the cook and some

mute slaves, who were apparently also deaf, because they conversed by hand signals. Aidan wondered

if these servants were chosen to attend the King so they could tell no tales. But really no one could be

that monstrous.

Could he?

47


Aidan ate little. He had intended to eat nothing, but the food smelled very good and he was

hungry.

Over wine, Gyrreg got down to the reason for this invitation.

“You imagine that I gave an order to have Sara Chandler killed,” King Gyrreg said, sounding

more smug than conciliatory. “You must know that I gave no such order.”

“I know no such thing! You did so order!” Aidan cried.

“Ah? You claim to have heard me utter such a command? What precisely did I say? When? And

where were we when I said it?”

“You know damn well I didn’t hear the exact words you spoke to Lord Osso. But you gave Sara’s

land—my land—to your Lord Osso. You left it up to Osso how he would take possession of her land.

And you knew Osso would need to kill me and Sara if he was to take possession of Chandler’s Valley.

You counted on Osso winning that duel. But woe is you. I won. You witnessed it yourself! Chandler’s

Valley is mine.”

“Goodness. So many things I know that I didn’t know I even knew!” King Gyrreg said,

condescending and serene, as if no blade could pierce him.

“This is all very confusing,” Gyrreg went on, dripping false innocence. “Where is Chandler’s

Valley anyway?” And he smiled—smiled at Aidan.

Aidan was too angry to talk.

“Your mother was a cunning duplicitous woman,” King Gyrreg said. “She was renowned for

running a clean discreet brothel. Nobles all throughout my Northern Province trusted her to use

protection when they enlisted her services. They trusted her not to tell tales. They trusted her not to get

bastards.

48


“Just how exactly do you think she could afford to send you to the Citadel, the finest school in the

Northern Province?

“Your mother was reliable whore and well-compensated for her service which included her

silence.

“I took every precaution to insure that my firstborn male issue would be my legitimate heir, not a

whorespawn bastard like you.”

“Your mother tried to trick me into planting my royal seed in her! Tried, mind you—only tried. I

gave her no chance to have a little accident with me,” Gyrreg said. Then his face assumed a look of

mocking surprise. “ Or did she dare try to tell you that you were mine? Oh dear. She did, didn’t she?

How sad.”

“No!” Aidan snarled, revolted. “She never did! Because I’m not yours! You are ugly, and we are

not!”

“But you know I had to purge her of any wild spawn who might be alleged to be mine,” Gyrreg

said. “And the rumors. I couldn’t let the rumors live either. You see why she had to die?”

“Not really. No!” Aidan said, gazing at the King in horrorstruck fascination. Gyrreg was actually

confessing to Sara’s murder.

Aidan shouted at him. “Even if you believed my mother might be carrying some spawn of yours,

you could have just denied it! You could have abandoned the child on some good person’s doorstep!

Sara was never a threat to you! You killed my mother for no reason! So now I’m thinking about

cooking your feet and eating them in front of you for as long as you survive the ordeal,” Aidan said.

His hand found its way to his dagger’s hilt.

“Enough with your crude sadistic fantasies,” Gyrreg said. “What will it cost me to make you go

away? What is your fondest wish Aidan Whoreson? Name it.”

49


“Let’s see, uh, die?” Aidan suggested. “Yeah. I want you to die, Gyrreg. Die scared like Sara

died.”

“Ah.” The Falconwolf King smiled coldly. “I have much the same wish regarding you. But unlike

you, I had the foresight to act on my own desire before you did. Goodbye, Aidan Whoreson.”

King Gyrreg rose from the table.

Only then did Aidan become aware how cold he was, and he knew that he had been poisoned.

50


Chapter Three

Aidan flailed out of his chair and staggered to his feet. He blundered out to the courtyard where

his trusty falconwolf, Fala waited, untended.

King Gyrreg knew that Aidan wasn’t going to be riding anywhere. Already Aidan was losing

control of his limbs. He couldn’t mount his falconwolf. He could not stand up.

Fala lifted Aidan up by the scruff of his tunic and, with a few cantering steps and three broad wing

strokes, took flight.

Fala carried Aidan swiftly to the coast, and then out over the open sea.

The world was upside down and blurry. Aidan retched.

At the place where the water underneath Fala and Aidan turned from ocean blue to deepest indigo,

Fala carefully closed his talons around Aidan’s body and bunted over in mid-air to plunge straight

down.

And down.

Into the sea.

Aidan held his breath as Fala labored, crawling through the seawater, down and down, with great

strokes of his wings, until they were too buoyant for Fala to drag himself and Aidan any deeper.

Aidan still held his breath. He clung to Fala’s fur while he hummed a single musical note over and

over.

And then he was out of air.

51


He needed to inhale. His head felt hot. His eardrums hurt. His lungs burned.

And then there was nothing for it.

He inhaled.

Water filled his lungs.

In blind panic, he convulsed once. Twice.

Then all strength left his limbs.

His hands let go of Fala’s fur. His mind went numb and soggy, as if he had of become part of the

water.

This was the end.

At the edge of consciousness, he felt something—a tentacle—reaching up from below. It wrapped

around him and dragged him down and down, farther into the blackness. His mind shut down.

This had to be death.

Aidan came to consciousness, coughing and rasping.

Breathing.

Above him and all around him was dark and starless. The air inside this vast space was damp. It

took Aidan a while to figure out where he was.

He was inside an undersea dome.

A vast transparent membrane held in the air that Aidan was breathing. On the other side of the

clear dome, fantastical sea creatures were visible, moving in schools through the deep water.

Aidan was in a city under the sea.

52


Vibrantly colored sponges and glowing sea creatures shed strange light on the enormous space

inside the dome. The air inside wasn’t quite dry, but it wasn’t altogether wet either. After a long fit of

coughing, Aidan was able to breathe the humid air.

All around him vegetation dripped. The rock that Aidan sat on was damp.

And he became aware of the octopus sitting on the wet mossy rock at his side.

“Are you well, Aidan Chandlerson?”

“Middle C!” Aidan joyfully sang the musical note that was this octopus’s name. “I thought I was

dead!”

“You were, a little bit,” said the octopus.

“You! You saved me, didn’t you!” Aidan cried.

“I believe that we did so,” Middle C said, changing color and sounding very pleased with himself.

“My colleagues sought to distill a wrong substance from your bodily system.”

Wrong substance? Aidan puzzled. Then translated aloud, “Poison! You mean poison!”

“Poison, yes, that is the word I was looking for, ” Middle C said. “My colleagues’ endeavors to rid

your system of the poison appear to have been successful. I am thrilled beyond words. Ah, but you, my

friend! You are not where you intended to be now. No? You were going to a certain place when we

first met. This is not that place.”

Aidan coughed. Cleared his throat. “Actually, I did make it to my intended destination. I made it

to the Court of the Two Kings. I was able to plead my case. And I won!

“It was only after I returned home that everything went truly wrong again. How did you ever find

me, Middle C?”

“A she-being of your kind sought me out,” the octopus said.

53


Aidan puzzled for some moments. What woman might have tried to contact Middle C on his

behalf? Could it be the Swamp Witch? Not likely.

Then it came to him.

“Bess!” Aidan cried.

“Yes, the she-being calls herself Bess,” Middle C said brightly. “She is devoted to you. You

should procreate with her.” And Middle C touched the tip of one tentacle to Aidan’s cheek. “What

does it indicate when your kind’s skin turns this color?”

Aidan felt his face burning red. “It means mind your own business.”

“Ah. This is what is called embarrassment. I don’t know what that feels like,” Middle C said. “We

don’t do it. Though I think it would be fun to turn color. Requires warm blood, does it not?”

“Yeah,” Aidan said sourly.

“Tell me how you happened to get poison inside you,” Middle C said. “I asked your falconwolf

but he doesn’t seem to understand the concept of language.”

“Fala can understand some parts of spoken speech but he can’t compose sentences,” Aidan told

Middle C. “Though he can sure communicate the concept of ‘We gotta get out of here right now now

now now yesterday! He can get that message across as clear as anyone.”

“And so he did!” Middle C said. “And why did you need to get out of that place so urgently? Did

that have to do with the poison?”

“Yeah,” Aidan said, sour. “My King poisoned me.”

“I must be misunderstanding your words. The words you just spoke don’t sound reasonable. Why

would your King poison you?” Middle C asked.

“Because he’s an evil, conniving, murderous, false monster who deserves to die!” Aidan said.

54


Two of Middle C’s tentacles waved a figure eight in the air. His color changed hue. Then he said,

“Aidan, you have a caller.”

“A caller?” Aidan prompted when the silence dragged on too long.

“A visitor,” Middle C said. “A being like yourself. Like you but colored a much darker shade.

Perhaps his is a color phase? He—the dark being—is male. He wishes to speak with you. I can arrange

for him to come down here with his falconwolf unless you do not wish to receive them. We can screen

him for —how do you say?—poison? That test might be worth doing.”

“Did this being give his name?” Aidan asked cautiously.

“The being calls himself Hector,” Middle C said. “Hector Xanderson. His falconwolf is called

Zephyr. He travels with the adolescent she-being called Bess.”

* * *

Hector’s smile shone very white in his dark face under the chemical lights of the transparent

undersea dome. Bess held tight onto Hector’s cloak with both fists as they entered the undersea rock

chamber.

“By all the gods, Aidan, how do you get yourself into these places?” Hector marveled, laughing as

he was given entry to the octopuses’ vast city beneath the sea. “This is amazing!”

“I know!” Aidan laughed with him. “You gotta visit their Academy before you go back to the

surface. The octopuses are all philosophers. Their library is fantastic.”

“In what language are the books written?” Hector asked.

“All of ‘em!” Aidan laughed. “All languages! You really gotta see this library!”

“I do. But first I’d like to know how you eat down here,” Hector said. “What’s edible? I didn’t

pack much food. I’m getting concerned going this far from shore without knowing where my next

meal is coming from. I hate going hungry, and you know I don’t eat raw fish.”

55


“Food is not a problem!” Aidan said brightly. “The octopuses bake their fish! Can you believe it?

They barbeque shrimp! They boil clams. They have some interesting spices down here.”

“Are you not afraid of toxins, Aidan?” Hector picked up a colorful sponge. “We’ve never seen

these things to know what effects they could have on us.” He turned round and round to see the many

colorful bioluminescent creatures floating in the water on the other side of the transparent dome.

“The octopuses have distilled a whole bunch of anti-toxins that work on people,” Aidan assured

Hector.

“Aidan?” Hector began suddenly guarded. “Just how did the octopuses come by the anti-toxins? I

mean, doesn’t that suggest to you that they’ve done ‘a whole bunch of tests of toxins on people?”

“Of course they have done so!” Aidan said. “When they come upon a deathly ill person, they try

to save him—like me! They saved me!”

“Why did you need saving in the first place?” Hector demanded.

Aidan stopped short. “Really? You really don’t know what happened, Hector?”

“No, I don’t know! And I don’t like guessing games,” Hector said. “Just tell me how you got

here!”

“King Gyrreg poisoned me!” Aidan cried.

“What?” Hector cried. “What did you do?”

Aidan gave a blink that jerked his whole body. “Really? That’s all you’ve got for me? ‘What did I

do? What did I do? You mean you’re asking what did I do to deserve poisoning?’

“No. I am not saying that at all!” Hector cried. “I—Allow me time to be utterly stunned, Aidan!”

Aidan pressed on, furious, “Your King didn’t just poison me. He poisoned me at his table! Under

his own roof! At his hearth! At his hearth! And I didn’t even consent to go there! I got snatched and

delivered to his hearth by a harpy. The harpy will back me up on that.”

56


Hector’s mouth opened and stayed open. The crimes against hospitality were unspeakable. The

magnitude of the King’s crimes was appalling.

When Hector found his voice, he asked Aidan, “How did you escape? How did you get here?”

“Fala brought me here,” Aidan said, gesturing around him at the undersea city on the other side of

the transparent dome. “The octopuses saved my life.”

“They saved you from drowning?” Hector filled in.

“No, they saved me from Gyrreg’s poison!” Aidan said hotly. “Inhaling the water saved my life!”

When Hector recovered his voice he cried, “Why, by all the gods, would our King commit such

an atrocity? It’s obscene!”

“You are surprised that the man who had an assassin shoot my mother in the back with an arrow

and gave away her holdings to his minion Osso would poison me?” Aidan said.

“No. You’re right, Aidan,” Hector said. The violations against hospitality and the attempted

murder are criminal enough by themselves,” Hector said. “Now he’s burying his evil. This is

unbelievable! Unbelievable!”

Aidan leaned forward earnestly. “Do you believe me?”

“I have to believe you, Aidan,” Hector said, his brow pinched, his eyes intent. “You have never

been false. Not ever.”

Hector wiped sweat from his upper lip. He glanced around. “Aidan, do the octopi have any liquor

down here? The stronger the better?”

“Sure do!” Aidan said brightly and he requested a bottle of something stout for Hector and

himself.

“Oh, and don’t play poker drunk with an octopus,” Aidan advised Hector as the whiskey bottles

arrived in two of Middle C’s tentacles. “You don’t stand a chance.”

57


“We are very good players,” the octopus Middle C confessed.

Aidan poured a muscular round of drinks for himself and for Hector, a very short one for Bess,

and another tall one for the octopus Middle C, who joined them in a toast. “To us!”

It was a warm and cheery moment. And then Aidan dropped back into despair.

“When Gyrreg finds out I’m alive, he’s gonna know that I told you all this. He’ll send an assassin

for you and your father. I’m so sorry I ever got you snarled up in this.”

“Don’t be daft!” Hector cried. “My Lord Xander will want to know the truth of it. My family are

not weak and we are not cowards. We know our duty, and we do know how to defend ourselves. My

father needs to know what kind of faithless monster our house has sworn fealty to.”

“What can your lord father do?” Aidan moaned. “My plea needs to go to the Court of the Two

Kings—and one of those two Kings is my attempted assassin! Your lord father is one of King Gyrreg’s

nobles!”

“My lord Xander will not abide this atrocity,” Hector said. “And you need someone to serve your

complaint. I shall effect service myself. Where is King Gyrreg now?”

“I couldn’t know,” Aidan said, shaking his head. “He left me dying outside his hunting lodge. Fala

might be able to tell Zephyr where the lodge is—north of here, I think— but there’s no use going back

there. Gyrreg will surly have destroyed it and moved on. King Gyrreg thinks I’m dead. I’m guessing

his smug, evil self can be found seated on his damned throne holding court in the Dual Capital as

usual.”

* * *

After three turns of the Moon, Aidan Chandlerson marched up all the steps to the Court of the

Two Kings.

No one tried to stop him.

58


Hector accompanied him, carrying a summons to serve on Gyrreg, the Falconwolf King.

The towering Court House doors parted to reveal Gyrreg enthroned next to Carn in the Dual

Ravenwolf/Falconwolf Throne. Aidan was too angry to see straight. He gripped and re-gripped his

sword hilt, his strides lengthening as he drew closer. He was well ahead of Hector.

The Falconwolf King’s guards were strangely unresponsive at Aidan’s approach, but Carn was on

his feet in an instant, charging down the steps of the dais, placing himself bodily in between Aidan and

Gyrreg, where Gyrreg’s own guards ought to be.

Carn spoke softly to Aidan, with his dagger drawn. “Son? You don’t want to do this.”

“Oh yes I do!” Aidan declared, his gaze fixed past Carn and firmly on his target, Gyrreg, the

Falconwolf King, seated on the Falconwolf side of the Dual Throne.

“Aidan. You don’t,” Carn said, quietly urgent. “You really don’t. Take a step back.”

Aidan was shaking in rage. “Carn, you of all people know I need to do this!”

“I, more than anyone, know that you desperately need to not do this,” Carn said, emphatic. “Trust

me here.”

“Trust him,” King Gyrreg called to Aidan from his side of the Dual Throne, with a sickly smug

and smarmy smile.

“You shut up, Gyrreg!” Carn rasped, as he moved to keep himself in between Aidan’s blade and

the Falconwolf King. But Aidan got past him.

As Carn was glancing backward, Aidan dashed wide and up the last few steps to the royal dais, his

sword drawn, even as King Gyrreg spoke withering condescension. “Oh really—”

“This is for Sara!” Aidan shouted, and he thrust his sword with all his strength and all his hate and

all his sorrow into the smug Falconwolf King’s midriff and up under Gyrreg’s ribcage, through to his

evil heart.

59


“Die!” Aidan cried. “Die, you self stuffed pig!”

Hot blood soaked Aidan’s tunic, his hand, his sword. He staggered back away from the dying

King.

Aidan gulped great breaths. His entire being quivered, nauseated.

Gyrreg tottered down from the dais, his mouth opening and shutting, his pale eyes gone blank. He

lurched woodenly toward Aidan, until he twisted round and fell on his back. His head cracked against

the floor.

Carn ran to the fallen Falconwolf King Gyrreg and dropped into a squat at his side.

Balanced on the balls of his feet, Carn dropped his knife and hung his head between his knees. He

breathed into his hands. Then he let himself drop back on his ass to sit on the courtroom floor. He

covered his mouth as if he would be sick.

Aidan could hear the Ravenwolf King’s muffled words, “Skak skak skak skak.”

Aidan paced with long quick strides, back and forth, his blood running fast and hot in his veins.

His nerves felt to be sparking with vicious elation. “There! Done!” Aidan cried, his voice gone

strident. “Done!”

He moved in again to give the carcass of his mother’s murderer a kick, and then he spat on it.

“DONE!”

Aidan had, at long last, avenged Sara.

All the folk who had been in the chamber before were now gone—the courtiers, the guards,

everyone.

Carn was still seated on the floor, breathing into his hands as if something was desperately wrong.

“Carn!” Aidan cried down at Ravenwolf King, pleadingly. He dropped onto one knee to speak to

his face. “Gyrreg deserved to die! He was a rotten man and a despicable King! What is so wrong?”

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Carn lowered his hands away from his face. His eyes were wide and glassy, his voice rasping and

stunned. “You don’t know what you have done!”

“I killed the flocker!” Aidan cried. Gyrreg was a tyrant! He was a criminal! He ordered the murder

of my mother! He had no right to do that! I am allowed to avenge my mother! He shouldn’t get away

with murdering people just because he was a King!”

Carn stared up from the dust at Aidan in something like horror. “This is not about the death of a

King, you idiot! The crime you have committed is far worse. It’s a crime against Nature. You just

murdered your own father!”

After a blank moment, a cold gauze of dread spread inside Aidan’s head, leaving him stunned,

bewildered. He turned round and round, looking for help in the hollow chamber. His mouth opened

and shut. There had to be a mistake.

Slow clarity penetrated his thoughts, and he retched. He ran behind a pillar, fell down on hands

and knees, and he vomited until he had nothing else to bring up.

When he looked up again, the Court chamber was vacated. The body of the Falconwolf King had

been spirited away. All the people were gone. Only Carn remained.

“Can I stay in your fortress tonight?” Aidan croaked, trembling.

“You had better,” Carn said, eyes wide and directed at the floor.

In the next moment Carn was in motion again. He got swiftly up and strode across the chamber.

Aidan followed Carn like a lost dog.

“I didn’t know he was my fornicating father!” Aidan cried at Carn’s back. “I would not have

knowingly killed my own father!”

“Ignorance means nothing,” Carn said, not turning to look at him. “The sacrilege is in the deed.”

61


“You might have told me!” Aidan cried. “I asked if you knew who my father was. You didn’t tell

me.”

He was thinking through the sequence of events that brought him here, to this.

Aidan’s mother, Sara, had allowed King Gyrreg impregnate her. Aidan had always guessed that

Sara wanted her son to be royal born, the firstborn child of a King. She might even have imagined her

child would be heir to the Falconwolf throne. It explained why the Falconwolf King had sent an

assassin to hunt down Sara and kill her, and then to kill Aidan.

“My King tried to have me killed,” Aidan said dully. “I would not have killed him if you had told

me he was my father.”

“Yeah, you would,” Carn said.

Aidan blinked. “How can you say that!”

“Because he killed your mother. Gyrreg would be dead no matter what I did to stop you.”

After a long silence, Aidan said, “Are you sorry you ever helped me?”

“Don’t you dare ask me that question right now,” Carn said. “You are, without a doubt, your

father’s son.”

That hurt.

“No. I am Sara’s son,” Aidan cried.

“You are that, also,” Carn said.

And a sudden thought struck Aidan. “No! Wait! Wait! Wait! I can’t be Gyrreg’s son! He’s ugly,

and I’m not. I look nothing like him! There!” Aidan spread his hands as if the case were closed.

“You look nothing like him because you favor your mother,” Carn said. “That much is obvious.”

Aidan grasped for any shred of hope. “There must be a way for me to make up for what I did. I

cannot be the only man in history ever to kill his father by accident.”

62


“Accident! The killing was no accident,” Carn said. “You were very deliberate in killing Gyrreg.”

“But I didn’t know he was my father!”

“Gyrreg is still dead at your hand. And there are two crimes here. The patricide and the regicide.”

It hadn’t occurred to Aidan until that moment that regicide could carry the most dreadful

consequences imaginable. And here was Aidan, talking to the survivor of the Two Kings.

“Am I going to die horribly?” Aidan asked Carn.

“It’s possible,” Carn said. “In fact it’s likely the way you live. But do you really mean to ask if I

intend to sentence you to something grisly? No. Not I. Not by myself. Judgment in this highest of

crimes requires two Judges. Normally one of those would be the Falconwolf King, but you killed him.

And then here am I, who witnessed you assassinating the Falconwolf King.”

“You’re talking as if you’ve decided I’m guilty,” Aidan said.

“You are guilty, you ass!” Carn said. “There is no slight of law to get you out of that. There are,

however, requirements for working off such a stain. It is always the Two Kings who assign such

labors. Two Kings. I need to enlist another sovereign for a decision on suitable labors to be done.”

“Another sovereign?” Aidan’s voice came out a squawk. “How can there be another sovereign?

There are only two Kingdoms, Ravenwolf and Falconwolf!”

“There is another Kingdom,” Carn said. “Getting there is not a problem. Getting out is seldom

done, but you have already done it once, and the daughter of its sovereign likes you.”

“What?” Aidan cried, utterly mystified.

“The Third Realm is the Kingdom of the Dead,” Carn said. “The Swamp Witch is its sovereign.

“Now, I have affairs to get into order in my Kingdom in the event that I am unable to return home

from this mess you got me into,” Carn said. “If the fates allow, I will meet you at the border to the

underworld on the eve of the next full moon.”

63


“Then what?” Aidan demanded.

“Then you and I are going to Hell,” Carn said.

* * *

When Aidan arrived at the border of the Third Realm on the eve of the full moon, he was relieved

to see that Carn had arrived ahead of him, and was now seated at a very low camp table across from a

bone-thin bone-pale young woman dressed all in black. The two didn’t seem to be talking about

Aidan’s crime. They were playing chess.

And someone else was here in this gloomy netherworld—a vivid, warm and stately figure,

standing with his arms crossed, watching the chess match, with little Bess holding tight onto his

sleeve.

Hector!

Hector Xanderson gave a mute nod of hello to Aidan then returned his attention to the chessboard.

Aidan waited for one of the players to look up and notice him.

They didn’t.

After a very long time, Aidan blurted, impatient, “Uh hello? I’m dying here. Carn, can you

possibly give me labors to work off my stain?”

Eyes still on the game board, Carn said, “Two crowned Judges are required to assign labors in a

capital case. And you killed one of those two crowned Judges.”

“Well, how long does it take to crown a new Falconwolf King?” Aidan pressed.

“I don’t know,” Carn said. “This is not my Kingdom. I suppose it’s possible that a successor might

be crowned in your lifetime.”

“What! Wait! No!” Aidan cried. “I need to work off my debt now. Right now!”

64


Carn surveyed the chessboard and muttered, “There is another realm with its own crowned Judge.

Not a place one willingly goes.”

“Where is that?” Aidan demanded, incredulous. He had no idea that a third Kingdom might exist.

Hector gave Aidan an elbow in the back and muttered, “Aw, c’mon, Aidan! You know! You’ve

even been there!”

“What?” Aidan coughed, shaking his head. He looked to Hector then to Carn, then back to Hector.

“I’ve been where?”

“The Kingdom of the Dead,” Carn said. “The border is here at the Dismal Swamp. And you have

already met the Kingdom’s sovereign.”

The very white, very thin, young woman seated across the chessboard from Carn spoke without

looking up from the chessboard. “She’s my mother.”

Aidan gasped. “The Swamp Witch!”

“Yes,” Carn said. “You know Persei’s mother as the Swamp Witch, though she is also known as

the Queen of the Dead.

“Most of us just call her Death,” Death’s daughter, Persei, said.

Persei took one of Carn’s pawns.

Aidan flinched.

“Death may serve as the second crowned Judge along with me in your trial,” Carn told Aidan.

Then his brow knit, perplexed, and he spoke. “For some reason, she likes you. Gyrreg is already in

realm of the dead.”

“You can’t mean that Gyrreg rules the dead!” Aidan cried in alarm. “He can’t pass judgment in

his own criminal case!”

65


“No, you idiot,” Carn said. “Gyrreg doesn’t even rule his own toes now. Death herself reigns in

the Kingdom of the Dead as she has always done. Her daughter can ferry you to the border.”

Eyes still on the chessboard, Death’s daughter nodded and lifted a bone-white finger to say this

was so.

“Ho! Wait! Carn!” Aidan balked. “Death’s daughter can ferry me to the border of the Kingdom of

the Dead, and, um—this is important—back again?” Aidan asked, anxious.

“Possibly back again,” Carn said, with a quick glance to Death’s daughter across the game board.

“I can’t speak for her. I don’t know if she will keep you. You got past her once before.”

Persei did not speak. She was studying Carn’s last move.

“What do I do at the borderlands?” Aidan demanded.

“You wait,” Carn said.

“Please, Carn,” Aidan said, trying hard to sound humble and patient. “How long is the wait?”

“As long as it takes,” Carn said, and he and Death’s daughter faded away into the cold fog.

Night fell. There had not been a day.

Aidan waited at the fringes of the Dismal Swamp with Fala amidst things that muttered, shifted,

and growled. He wondered where Hector and Bess were. He hoped they’d got out of this hellish

netherworld.

At last a shape materialized from the hazy gloom.

Before Aidan could make out the woman’s features, she faded away from him into the swirling

darkness and then to spongy stillness.

66


Alone again with only Fala for company in the Dismal Swamp, Aidan turned around to go back

the way they had come, but he wasn’t sure which way was back anymore. Fala wasn’t sure either.

They might circle in this featureless dark forever.

And maybe this was his judgment.

The not knowing was terrible torment in itself. He wondered if this was it, his final destination.

“Fala? Are we in hell?” Aidan murmured.

Fala just looked lost.

At very long last, motion roiled again within the dark fog. Aidan heard the quiet draw of oars, and

he made out the shape of the Swamp Witch’s rotting rowboat as it approached stroke by slow stroke.

Here was Death herself.

Aidan’s heart drummed in his chest. If Death told him to get into that boat, he resolved to jump

overboard and make a swim for it.

The boat stopped. It stayed motionless on the still black water for a time, then it quietly withdrew

into darkness once again with a slow draw of oars.

For a panicked moment Aidan thought he’d been abandoned in hell. But through the swirling mist

Aidan saw a pallid, bone-slender young white girl standing on a rotten raft. He hadn’t seen her before

while he was staring at Death in the darkness.

The girl was dressed in black rags. With her long pole, she dragged her raft across the shallows of

the motionless swamp. There were no ripples in her wake.

“Ave,” Aidan greeted the hooded figure diffidently.

“You are Aidan,” the cadaverous girl said. “I am Persei.”

Aidan bowed. He knew who she was. He had seen her playing chess with Carn.

67


Persei was Death’s daughter.

“Aidan son of Sara!” Persei called to him. “My mother bids you come with me.”

Aidan inhaled. He felt as if his heart were standing still.

“To where, Your Highness?” Aidan whispered.

“Get on the raft,” Persei said.

Aidan stepped carefully from his own boat onto Persei’s tenuous collection of logs. Persei’s raft

felt like it might disintegrate at a harsh thought.

Once Aidan was aboard, Persei poled the raft deeper into the murk. The air was damp, cold, and

rank. Impenetrable. Aidan’s heart hammered in his chest. He knew he must be alive, because he was

mortally terrified.

In woeful panic, Fala watched Aidan and Persei pull away. When the fog became impenetrable

and they could no longer see each other, Aidan heard the splash.

Fala had jumped into the swamp.

Aidan heard Fala’s panicked dog paddling following after him through the murk.

“You have worked evil,” Persei said without looking at Aidan. She pulled the raft slowly with her

long pole. Aidan wondered if he should offer to help, but then decided that might be like volunteering

to dig his own grave.

“Yes. I killed a King,” Aidan said softly. He hoped he might earn some good will for not trying to

deny the crime.

“The regicide?” Persei said, dismissively. “The regicide is a small thing. Worldly Kings always

imagine they are special. They are not. And you are not here for the regicide. Your King was a noxious

creature while he lived, and the land of the living is better now that Gyrreg is here among the dead. But

68


Gyrreg’s life was not yours to end, Aidan Chandlerson. You are here for the unforgivable. You are

here for the patricide. Patricide is a violation of a law of Nature. You are an abomination. You had no

natural right to kill the man who gave you life.”

“He tried to kill me!” Aidan cried.

“That is his right as your father,” Persei said coldly. “You didn’t cause him to come to life, now

did you?”

“But I didn’t know Gyrreg was my father!” Aidan cried. “I didn’t know!”

“So Gyrreg tried to kill you,” Persei said. “Running away was an option for you, was it not? No

one needed to die that day, and ignorance does not raise the dead,” Persei said. “Your father is still

dead at your hand, and even I can’t bring him back to life.”

When the full import sank in, Aidan started to shake. The bottomless depth of his father’s malice

struck him hard.

Aidan clenched his fists and murmured. His thoughts blazed white hot. Bastard! That rat bastard!

Gyrreg’s last treacherous act on the living earth had been to provoke Aidan to patricide—when

Gyrreg was already near to the grave and had less than nothing to lose, while Aidan had the whole rest

of his life before him.

He knew! He knew!

If Aidan had waited just a little longer, Gyrreg’s life would have ended very soon in its own

natural course.

But Gyrreg wanted Aidan to murder him and so make Aidan an abomination. Forever.

Aidan felt dizzy at the depth of his father’s hatred for him.

Persei’s raft sludged to a stop somewhere in this abysmal underworld.

69


Fala caught up with him. A coating of weeds and algae made Fala look like a swamp monster. His

slimy nose kept up with the passage of Aidan’s raft.

Squinting ahead into the gloom where Persei ferried them, Aidan made out the loathesome figure

of Gyrreg, seated on a mossy rock in a cramped, dripping cave, grandly posed as if seated upon a

throne.

On sighting Aidan, the spirit of Gyrreg gave a slow, snide smile through crocodilian teeth. He was

white as a shroud. “Ah! You need a second royal judgment, don’t you, boy?” Gyrreg sneered. “Alas,

you shan’t have it from me! Not a favorable one anyway!” And he cackled.

Persei beckoned the deceased shade of the Falconwolf King, Gyrreg. “Come.”

Gyrreg’s eyes rounded. “Come? You dare beckon me, girl? Ha! I choose not to come!” Gyrreg

crossed his arms and smiled still more broadly.

“Gyrreg, once a mortal King, you have no power here, no rights, no jurisdiction. Her Majesty bids

me produce you in her Court as a defendant, not as a royal Judge. And I am here to give safe passage

to this man, Aidan son of Sara, to that same Court, where We shall pass judgment.”

Just as Gyrreg opened his mouth to speak again, Persei snapped her fingers, ending in a point

toward a crevice in the rocks off to her side. Immediately a great blackness emerged out from a narrow

fissure in the stone. The blackness expanded as it spilled out of the rock and then coalesced into the

shape of a monstrous black spider, growing larger and larger, its mandibles clacking, its many eyes

shining.

It advanced on the sharp points of its shiny black claws.

—And, of a sudden, the spider pounced upon Gyrreg. It swiftly cocooned him as it spun loop after

loop of sticky white gauze. Gyrreg lurched and wrenched inside his thickening shroud, his mouth wide

in horror. He tried to scream but his throat was glued shut with spider silk.

70


Gyrreg’s every exhalation tightened the shroud around his chest until he couldn’t inhale at all. The

loops pulled across Gyrreg’s mouth, across his nostrils, then around his torso. Gyrreg could not lift his

arms to tear the white strands away from his face. Hideous noises got stuck in his lungs—noises of

wanting to breathe, to scream. There was no space for air. Not that he needed air to breathe—he was

already dead. But the sensation of not having air was identical to mortal suffocation—as was the

sensation of perfect mortal terror.

Gyrreg thrashed now. Tortured sounds clogged his throat. His eyelids were open wide and stuck

that way.

“You mistake the summons,” Persei said coldly to the deceased Falconwolf King. “We do not

require you to appear as a Judge, Gyrreg. You have no authority here. Or anywhere, now that you have

left the mortal realm.”

Aidan fought to contain a smile of his own. At last. Fair judgment at last!

But he didn’t want to be caught gloating, so he clapped his hands over his mouth and assumed a

face of wide-eyed horror. It was easy enough to show fear. He was quivering. His heart was racing.

Persei was speaking to Gyrreg. “We summoned you as a defendant, Gyrreg,” Persei said, using a

royal plural for herself. She clawed out a narrow slit of a mouth to allow Gyrreg to answer.

Gyrreg demanded in a whisper, because he couldn’t expand his chest to roar. “You summoned me

for what? What crime?”

“For the murder of Sara Chandler.”

Aidan gasped in shocked wonder.

“That!” Gyrreg hissed, astonished. “That! That is what this is about? All this bother for the killing

of a whore? Is that even a crime? Little girl, you are insane!”

Persei turned to Aidan. “And, you, Aidan son of Sara Chandler, We find you guilty of patricide.”

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Gyrreg’s empty eyes lit up within his cocoon. He snorted a cruel, self-satisfied snigger at Aidan

just before the spider’s silk muffled him again.

Persei addressed Aidan. “Before we proceed, Aidan son of Sara, do you wish clemency in the

afterlife for your mother’s murderer?”

Aidan was shocked to even be asked that question. He shook his head. His voice came out

tremulous. “No! If I am given that choice, I want that man to suffer horribly as my mother suffered.”

Persei warned, “Before I affirm your judgment, you must know that whatever you ask for could

come right back at you.”

Aidan shuddered. He drew a tremulous breath, and then nodded. “I understand.”

“Now, I ask you again, Aidan Chandlerson,” Persei said, “What would you have me do with your

mother’s assassin?”

Gyrreg’s pale blue eyes shone through his shroud as slivered crescents of expectant evil glee on

seeing Aidan having no choice but to ask Death’s daughter to release Gyrreg unharmed.

Aidan swallowed down sickness. He bowed his head to Persei. “I want justice for my mother, no

matter what horror comes back to me, Your Highness. My mother was used cruelly. I request that you

do to this awful creature as you would do if your own mother were so violated.”

“I approve your sentence,” Death’s daughter said. “Your will shall be done.”

Gyrreg’s pale blue eyes flew wide in his stark white face and he tried to cry out even as a

chattering mass of black, winged creatures rose up with a terrible stench from a deep well in the earth

that seemed to have no bottom.

The flapping, chittering cloud swarmed around Gyrreg and lifted him up, then dragged him down

and down. Choked screams sounded from Gyrreg’s closed throat until his nose and mouth were

72


shrouded shut. Gyrreg plunged down and down into the bottomless darkness to join the wails of all the

damned.

Death was not the end of suffering.

Aidan shuddered. He turned to face Persei. The blood left his head, and he felt suddenly faint. He

lowered his eyes and bowed his chin to his chest. He had no words. He was terrified.

“You are not evil,” Death’s daughter told Aidan. “You are angry and grieving. Which does not

mean you get out from your bloodguilt unscathed. You killed your father. Evil as he was, you must

pay dearly for that patricide.”

Aidan did not look up. “I know that I don’t have the right to ask for anything, Highness, and I’m

not asking this for myself. For my mother’s sake, wherever her spirit is, please don’t let her see what

I’m going through.”

Persei’s black gaze looked oddly mild. “I can grant that,” she said gently.

Aidan felt weak with relief. He bowed again, resigned to his fate. “Thy will be done.”

“Go now, Aidan Chandlerson, back to the world, to the Court of the Two Kings,” Persei said.

“There you will be given six labors. They are things that need doing. Dangerous things. Things with

purpose. You shall perform these labors or die trying.”

* * *

Death’s daughter, Persei, ferried Aidan back across the dismal swamp. Her rotting raft held

together just long enough to get him to something like ground to stand on.

He heard Persei’s voice sound from the gloom behind him.

It sounded as if Death’s daughter wished him luck.

* * *

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Aidan climbed up from the Underworld where the Royal Road turned inland. He and Fala had

been this way before. It was a poor path that had been paved once, but now the deep forest crowded

the way on both sides. Aidan rode point on Fala’s back. Hector, riding Zephyr, took the rear guard.

Bess and her hulking Talionis walked behind Fala. Bess’s raven had not turned around to go home. It

still ghosted Bess like a dark guardian spirit.

All along the way through the swamp, they had to duck to avoid the grasping tree branches. Aidan

and Hector kept their swords out all the time now.

Came the voice crying somewhere off the path in the forest depths: “Ai . . . dan!

Aidan’s mind went blank in shocked recognition. “Mama!” he breathed.

“Keep moving, Aidan,” Hector said, stern. “That’s a trap and you know it.”

“Sara!” Aidan cried into the darkness.

“Don’t listen to that, Aidan!” Hector barked.

“No! No! You don’t understand! That’s Sara! For real. I know my own mother’s voice! SARA!”

he roared, then held his breath to listen for his mother’s reply.

The damp silence was thick and spongy. Then came the moan, his mother’s moan.

Aidan took a few gasping breaths and cried out, “Mama!” He looked urgently to Hector and Bess

and Fala. “It’s Sara! Sara is in there!”

“No, she is not,” Hector said. “That is not she.”

“I know my mother’s voice!” Aidan cried.

“So does that thing in the mud pit, Aidan!” Hector shouted.

“I gotta go back for her.”

“Aidan, don’t,” Bess pleaded. “That’s a trap! You know it’s a trap. That is not your mother! What

would she be doing in there!”

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Aidan looked frantically to Bess’s hulking falconwolf Talionis. “Tal! You know Sara’s voice!

She’s in there! I’m telling you, Tal! That’s Sara in there! Your Sara is in there! You hear her! You

know her voice! Help me save her!”

Tal fretted. He pulled tufts of fur from his forepaws in agitation. He turned a circle in place. He

whined.

Astonished and outraged at his companions doing absolutely nothing to help Sara, Aidan charged

back toward the mud pit. He sprang into a flying dive.

Instantly, tendrils broke the thick surface of the mud pit. Aidan saw them as they darted up at him

and laced around his neck, his legs, and his flailing arms, and they pulled him down. His palms

slapped the mud surface as he went under.

A yank on the back of his tunic reversed Aidan’s plunge and rapped Aidan’s teeth together.

Something was hauling him up away from the pit and into the air. He was aware of Hector, standing

on the brink of the pit, his sword slashing wide strokes, shearing off anything that reached up from the

mud surface.

After an eternity, a set of jaws—maybe the jaws of Bess’s hulking Talionis—got hold of Aidan’s

tunic between his teeth and hauled Aidan free from the mud and the grasping tendrils.

With a muffled roar, Talionis threw Aidan well away from the pit and its reaching vines.

Aidan rolled, coughing amid the ferns, crying to clear his eyes.

Hector stomped through the ferns and gripped the front of Aidan’s slimy tunic. Hector snarled into

Aidan’s face in blind fury, his eyes wide and wild. Hector roared. “I’m throwing you back in! I’m

throwing you back in! By all the gods, you are going back in!” Hector rasped, and he and set himself to

dragging Aidan back toward the pit. Aidan could feel Hector’s furious heat, his whole body vibrating

rage. “You wanna go in? You’re going in and you’re staying there! GO!”

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Hector’s falconwolf Zephyr wedged his great head between Aidan and Hector. Zephyr softly

nuzzled Hector and whuffled gently into his hair to back him down from his insane rage.

Hector heaved great angry breaths that moved his whole body. By slow degrees, Hector released

his grip on Aidan’s tunic.

Aidan scrambled away from the pit and away from mad Hector.

Hector’s breaths slowed. He sat on his heels amid the ferns and stared at his own hands.

When he looked up again, the expression on his face was regretfully sane. Shaking his head,

Hector croaked at Aidan, “I don’t know where that came from.” Hector’s voice was tremulous. His

face looked astonished. “I have never been so angry in all my life.”

“I have that effect on people,” Aidan said, apologetic.

“No. It’s more than that. It’s these woods,” Hector said. “We need to get out of here before

something can confound us again. We’re almost clear. Move it, now! Right now!”

Aidan on Fala, and Hector on Zephyr, and Bess on Talionis cleared the woods. It was their second

journey to the Court of the Two Kings so they knew what to expect. The brilliantly paved royal road

still impressed, but it no long awed them. Hector and Bess with their falconwolves, Zephyr and

Talionis stopped in the fountain house to be cleaned and dressed for Court.

Aidan was too angry to allow himself to be made presentable in the Royal Court. So Aidan arrived

disheveled and foul smelling at the foot of the grand stairway to the Court of the Two Kings.

There, Aidan stood for several moments, just breathing. He put his arms around Fala’s neck and

buried his face in Fala’s thick slimy mane. He leaned into his falconwolf for balance.

Fala spread one sheltering black wing across him.

Fala snuffled Aidan’s matted hair, then gave him a nudge in the back with his soft muzzle.

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It was time for Aidan to face his fate.

At last, Aidan straightened his tunic and combed his fingers back through his mud slimed hair,

then tied it back into a tail with a leather shoelace. It was too late for him to try to make himself look

presentable.

He marched up the grand marble staircase to the vast doors of the Court of the Two Kings.

Fala followed immediately behind him.

Men arrayed in royal livery parted the mammoth doors for Aidan and his falconwolf to enter.

As Aidan and Fala passed from brilliant sunlight into the relative darkness of the candlelit

courtroom, Aidan blinked away the floating blotches of colored clouds that swam before his eyes.

Aidan could just make out the figure of Carn dressed in black riding leathers and seated on the

black-and-silver side of the Dual Throne as sovereign of the Ravenwolf realm.

Carn was slouching.

On the gold-and-white side of the Dual Throne—from where the Falconwolf King Gyrreg had

ruled during his life—Death herself was now seated in the Falconwolf King’s stead for the

interregnum.

Death’s face was bone pale and eerie, hooded within the blackness of her long coarse hair and her

shapeless shroud.

Aidan knelt before Death at the foot of the raised dais and he bowed his head all the way down to

Death’s feet. “Your Royal Majesty.”

He waited.

“Aidan Chandlerson,” Death’s voice was reedy. “Rise.”

Aidan got up unsteadily, keeping his eyes respectfully downcast.

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A skeletal hand extended from one black sleeve of the figure enthroned on the crowned head and

beckoned, impatient.

“Come, come,” Death said. “If I meant you to be dead, you would be dead. Get up here. Let me

see you.”

Death’s hood turned aside, Carn’s way, beside her on the Dual Throne. “Is the young man always

this slow?”

“In the face of you, Death, yes,” Carn said. “Most men are.”

Without delay, Death handed down Aidan’s first labor to begin to atone for his crime of patricide.

“We bid you, Aidan Chandlerson, to deliver the nine heads of the hydra here to the Court of the Two

Kings.

Aidan knew about the hydra from books, so he was familiar with the particular difficulty of

removing of a hydra from its nine heads.

Cutting off a head of the hydra caused two heads to sprout from the severed head’s neck.

The trick to preventing the heads from doubling with each beheading was to cauterize each of the

monster’s neck stumps as soon as they were severed. It would appear that the hydra’s heads could not

grow back through scar tissue.

It all sounded rather magical, and Aidan had not known that the hydra was an actual real living

monster before now, and he still didn’t really believe it.

With his sword well honed, Aidan flew out boldly on Fala’s back toward the lair of the legendary

beast. When he was near the monster’s cave, he veered out to sea to approach the hydra’s roost from

the open water.

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He found the monster there all right, on a high ledge overlooking the sea, exactly where legend

said it would be. This labor was going to be a glide on the air.

But, as Fala carried Aidan closer to the monster’s ledge, the cave blossomed with hydra heads—

so many more than nine of them. There were lots and lots and lots of vicious snapping heads.

Lots.

Apparently there had been other heroes who had come here before Aidan—heroes who had

slashed off some number of hydra heads and failed to finish the job of cauterizing the stumps, because

the damned hydra now had vastly more heads than any of the earlier heroes ever dreamed of in their

worst nightmares.

There weren’t nine heads.

There were hundreds.

* * *

The moon waxed and waned before Aidan returned to the Court of the Two Kings with his trusty

falconwolf, Fala, hauling a weighty, voluminous bag up the courthouse steps.

At Aidan and Fala’s approach, guards, courtiers, lords and suppliants scurried out of Aidan’s path.

“Open the doors!” Aidan demanded.

The grand doors of the Court of the Two Kings parted, and the doormen immediately vanished

into shadows like frightened rats.

Everyone other than Carn and Death, seated upon their Dual Throne, pointed in alarm at the

thrashing movement within the giant bag that Fala dragged behind Aidan into the presence of the Two

Kings.

Folks in the high galleries scrambled for the exits.

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The Court secretary moved around behind the Throne of the Two Kings and cringed there. The

secretary’s voice wavered as he demanded, “What is in that bag?”

In answer, Aidan finished untying the bag’s knot.

Before anyone else could object, Aidan had the bag unfastened. He bounded out of the way as

hydra heads spilled out onto the courtroom floor—many, many severed, snapping, hydra heads.

Aidan scampered up the steps to the royal dais, and he bowed low at the feet of Death, seated on

her side of the Dual Throne.

“I didn’t know which nine heads you wanted, Your Royal Majesties,” Aidan said. “So I just

bagged all that would fit,” Aidan said. And he looked to his other judge, Carn, the Ravenwolf King,

and asked, “Where do you want ‘em?”

Carn started to speak, but even as he began to form the words his voice wobbled into a snigger,

and he sputtered into laughter instead. Soon tears sprung to his eyes and he fell into laughter every

time he tried to speak.

One of the few remaining lords in the room cowering in the rear of the Court’s high gallery

objected, appalled. “This is contempt!”

“Could be!” Carn said merrily. Carn’s eyelashes were wet. He struggled not to laugh any more.

He turned to Death. “What say ye, Your Royal Majesty?”

Death shrugged. “Possibly contempt. But the defendant has in fact over-fulfilled the task as given.

I don’t think I should consider that a fault. I see why you like this young man, Carn.”

Death then nodded at all the decapitated hydra heads, most of them still snapping at one another,

and she turned again to Carn. “Are you going to eat those?”

“Too lively for my taste,” Carn said. “They’re all yours, Your Royal Majesty.”

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Death nodded down and announced, “This labor is fulfilled! Court is in recess. Clear the Court.”

And she pointed at the hydra heads. “Those go into the kitchen!”

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Chapter FourAidan’s third labor was of Carn’s devising.

Carn charged Aidan with presenting the Stag of the Huntress, alive and unharmed, before the

Court of the Two Kings.

Aidan had heard of the Huntress and her Stag. Who hadn’t? The Huntress was a local divinity

who fiercely guarded her wild domain and all the creatures in it.

The Stag of the Huntress was a dangerous beast that had a formidable rack of antlers with which

to attack its enemies, and powerful legs with which to outrun any danger. The beast dwelled in the

dense woods that ringed the Twin Capital of the Falconwolf and Ravenwolf domains.

The forest was not a large territory, but it was nearly impenetrable here. And when Aidan looked

up, the forest’s high canopy of leafy branches was dark as a shroud.

Aidan had expected to receive some task less dark and deadly from Carn. Now he felt betrayed.

He decided to carry no weapons into the woods of the Huntress. He had been advised that the

Huntress would use his weapons against him. Better that he go in helpless. He carried only his knife in

a sheath strapped to his thigh. The knife was the kind of blade that men customarily carried as a tool,

not as a weapon.

Aidan didn’t know how he was going to find the Stag, much less bring it before the Kings without

hurting it. He should not have worried.

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The Stag found him.

Fala caught its scent first, and gave a warning yelp.

The Stag’s head was already lowered, presenting its terrifying rack of tines at Aidan and Fala in

pure menace.

Aidan froze.

A deep feminine voice demanded from somewhere in the dense forest, “What are you doing

here?”

Aidan turned round and round. “I— I’m caught between damnations, milady,” Aidan said to the

unseen speaker.

The voice sounded again. This time it seemed . . . milder, perhaps?

“Explain,” the voice bade him.

“I require an audience with the Huntress, milady.”

“Do you now?” the voice said. And a being dropped down from the tree behind Aidan.

Aidan flinched and turned full round.

The Huntress was a large, mightily-thewed woman, clad entirely in animal skins that were

expertly tanned. She carried her stout bow across her back along with a quiver filled with long,

perfectly straight arrows. She wore a large hunting knife in a sheath strapped to her muscular thigh.

She turned her back on Aidan. “Follow me. Those, too.” She jerked her head toward Hector, Bess,

and their falconwolves.

Fur-clad servants appeared from the forest to open the gates to a rough fortress built of moss-

covered stones. The building blended in so perfectly with the trees and rocks that Aidan would not

ever have seen it if the Huntress had not led them to it.

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The Huntress’s attendants offered Aidan and Hector and Bess water and food in the manner of

civilized folk. The woman was not a savage.

Only after hospitality was satisfied did the servants lead Aidan and Hector and their falconwolves

to a massive set of wooden doors within the brooding citadel walls.

These doors creaked open to an immense throne room. Its columns were wild grown trees whose

branches held up a high, high timber roof. The Huntress strode into the chamber and mounted the steps

to the dais. She turned to look down from her vast throne that was fashioned from many many racks of

antlers.

“Why are you here?” the Huntress demanded.

“Milady, I need to beg a favor that only you can grant, and which you have no reason whatsoever

to give me.”

A faint smile ghosted across her lips. Apparently she liked blunt honesty. “I will hear more,” she

said, and she sat on her throne and motioned for him to go on.

Aidan spilled his whole story.

In the end he made his plea. “I need to borrow your Stag. He will come to no harm in my care.

I’ve been charged with producing your Stag, unharmed, in the Court of the Two Kings.”

The Huntress sat straight upright in her throne, her face tight, her knuckles white from gripping

the throne’s arms. All sense of friendship between them was gone.

“Those beings who sent you here do not mean you or my Stag well,” the Huntress said. “There is

a difference between a falsehood and a lie. You speak falsehoods that you honestly believe. Those

beings who sent you are liars. You, on the other hand, are a dangerous fool.”

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Aidan felt his face burn as she glared at him. “I apologize, Huntress. I would not have knowingly

pledged false to you. Apparently I have done so. We’ll go now. I am heartily sorry for having offended

you.” He turned around to go.

Swiftly, the Huntress was on her feet, vibrating. “I have not given you leave to go!”

Aidan lurched to a halt and turned around again. He nodded down, confused, his eyes fixed at the

feet of the Huntress.

“I obey, Huntress,” Aidan said, and he waited for the Huntress’s next command.

The Huntress gazed hard at Bess for a long time. At last she said, “Girl. Are you with these men

of your own will?”

Bess’s eyes went full round. She heard the question behind the question. “Yes! Milady!” she cried.

“What are they to you?” the Huntress demanded.

Bess stammered. She didn’t know what to say. “These are my brothers by choice.”

“Ah. Very well.” The Huntress’s posture relaxed. She considered all of them, then came to her

verdict. “Eat something from my kitchen. Feed your beasts in my stables.” The Huntress nodded

toward the falconwolves, Fala, Zephyr, and Talionis. “You may kill one animal of suitable size for

each of you to eat.

“You!” she barked at Aidan. “Feed this girl well. She is too small.”

This girl—little Bess—was trying to vanish behind Hector.

Then Huntress went on. “In the morning I shall accompany you to your Court to present my Stag

to your so-called Kings. Those men have no right to summon any creature of mine from my domain!”

Aidan hadn’t realized quite how near they were to the Twin Capital. He wilted, crushed with

gratitude. “I would be ever so honored and grateful if you would accompany us with your Stag to the

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Court of the Two Kings, Huntress. I will remain in your debt until you charge me with suitable tasks

by which I might repay you.”

“I accept your debt,” said the Huntress.

The Huntress’s protection extended to Hector and Zephyr and Aidan and Fala, Bess and Talionis

through the dark woods to the place where the Royal Road opened into bright sunlight before the gates

of the Twin Capital.

Aidan and his companions were almost at their destination.

The towering gates of the walled Capital City parted for Aidan and his companions without

challenge. It appeared that someone knew to expect them.

Officials from the Falconwolf and Ravenwolf consulates didn’t even try to question the travellers.

The Huntress swept through the towering gates like royalty. Aidan’s small entourage followed in her

wake.

The Huntress with her formidable Stag presented herself before the Throne of the Two Kings.

Behind her, the Stag’s many-pointed crown glinted, breathtaking and deadly.

The Huntress took in her surroundings, her eyes squinting critically. She glanced over Death

without fear, then set her sights on Carn, seated on his side of the Twin Throne.

Straightaway, the Huntress called Carn a jerk.

Aidan’s startled blink moved his whole head. He almost laughed out loud.

“You did this,” the Huntress said to Carn. “You had me dragged here with my Stag.”

Carn hid a smile behind one black-gloved fist. His eyes were merry crescents. Then he confessed

to the Huntress, “Guilty. I am guilty, Your Royal Highness.”

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“What is your game, Carn?” Death murmured aside to Carn from her side of the Throne of the

Two Kings.

“I wanted an audience with the Huntress,” Carn blithely told Death. “I needed a pretext to get her

here.”

And, at that, Carn, the Ravenwolf King, stood up from his side of the Twin Throne and descended

from the royal dais. He bowed over bended knee before the Huntress and said, “Marry me.”

Aidan’s jaw dropped open, and stayed that way.

“Not ever,” the Huntress said, and she swiftly turned her back on the Ravenwolf King.

Aidan dived out of the way as the Huntress strode out of the Court of the Two Kings with her

deadly Stag.

The tips of its vast rack of antlers scraped the marble walls and columns as it passed.

Court was quickly adjourned.

Aidan didn’t stand up until the Court was all but empty. Then he hauled himself to his feet. His

face felt burning hot.

Aidan snarled up at Carn, who was again slouched on his side of the Dual Throne.

“You used one of my labors to make a proposal of marriage?” Aidan heaved, aghast.

“Of course I did,” Carn said. “In my position it’s damnably difficult to meet the right sort of

woman.”

“You are a King!” Aidan shouted at Carn.

“And I meet battalions of women,”Carn said. “The right sort is more elusive. This wasn’t a total

loss. I think she likes me.”

Aidan swallowed wrong. Coughed.

When he could speak again he cried, “You think that? From that?”

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Liking was so not the impression Aidan took away from Carn’s interchange with the Huntress in

the courtroom.

“Yeah. She likes me,” Carn said. “I need to send her a gift. What would be a good gift for a

woman like that?”

“There are no women like that!” Aidan shouted at him.

“Exactly,” Carn said.

Aidan coughed. He wanted to tell Carn to go fornicate himself. Instead, he suggested with a wry

snarl, “Why not give her arrows! Yeah. You know. Fletched with your Midnight’s feathers. To make it

personal, right?” Aidan thought he was being sarcastic.

“That is an excellent idea,” Carn said.

“It is? Does this count as one of my labors?” Aidan demanded, impatient.

“Yes. Of course it does,” Carn said. It was painless for you, was it not? I was the one who got shot

down. You should thank me for giving you such an easy labor.”

“I might,” Aidan muttered. “If I live through the rest of my sentence.”

* * *

Too soon, Aidan was summoned once again to the Court of the Two Kings.

He felt ill facing Death again.

“Do you hunt?” Death asked Aidan from her side of the Twin Throne.

As before, Death was shrouded entirely in black. Aidan could not see the face of Death at all.

Aidan caught only glimpses of her skeletal hand.

Aidan bowed. “I only hunt for food, Your Royal Majesty. In hunting parties at the Citadel I was in

charge of the supply wagon.”

Aidan had never enjoyed hunts. He didn’t like killing. Even butterfly collections made him ill.

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“Then learn everything there is to know about wild boars and how to kill them swiftly,” Death

commanded. “And learn how to fix a tourniquet. It is highly likely that someone in your hunt will need

one.”

“Yes, Your Royal Majesty,” Aidan said, confused.

“Surround yourself only with able hunters. This expedition is not for sport. This is one of your

labors. You are going on a boar hunt in Calydon.”

“Ah.” Aidan knew where this was going now.

“This particular boar is a monster,” Death said. “A killer of men and livestock, a destroyer of

crops. The land needs defending. The boar must die. You must know that you are useless as any kind

of master if you cannot defend your land or give aid to your neighbors to defend their land.” She thrust

a rolled parchment map at Aidan.

Aidan nodded, accepting the map with both hands, and he started away. In a few strides he

stopped and looked back. “Majesty?”

Death waited for his question.

“Why are you aiding the living?” Aidan asked.

“Why would I not?” Death said.

The woods around Calydon were famously dense and dark. This was no right place for a wide-

winged falconwolf flying among other riders armed with bolt-firing crossbows.

Huntsmen from all the surrounding provinces and from many lands beyond were gathering to

stalk the infamous marauding boar of Calydon. There were even Pegasus riders gathering here for the

hunt.

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Pegasus riders never leant their strength to champion the helpless. And, true to form, these

Pegasus riders were here for the money and the fame, every woman for herself. The bounty on the

marauding boar of Calydon had grown extraordinarily high, and the promise of glory was irresistible.

Arriving high over the forest of Calydon for the hunt, Aidan spotted an unexpected opening in the

dense foliage of the forest’s tangled canopy.

Branches bowed as his falconwolf tried to perch in the treetops. Fala teetered and flapped for

balance.

Down on the deep-shadowed ground below there were too many men and dogs milling for Aidan

to possibly line up a clean shot at any creature down there.

Even as he thought it, his break appeared. Aidan had the boar sighted just below him in the

shadow-hollowed woods. The beast had snagged one tusk on a stout vine. The boar was stuck.

Instantly Aidan drew back his bow, took in a breath, held it—

A hoof stamping on his back sent Aidan sprawling over Fala’s neck. Aidan’s shot flew wild. His

bow fell from his hands and jounced on its tether even as he grabbed fistfuls of Fala’s mane to hang on

for his life.

Distantly he heard a woman’s voice crowing. “Got it! Got it! Got it! Got it!”

Snarling, Aidan clawed himself upright onto Fala’s back, and he settled his shins into his saddle’s

sheathes, his heart thrumming in his chest, his whole being buzzing.

He brought Fala down to the soft bed of pine needles that carpeted the forest floor.

As he dismounted, he heard the voices of many men arguing. One of them was bellowing, “You

ass! You bastard! You shot my dog! You bastard! You cur! You! What are you going to do about it!”

Aidan ignored that voice until he realized that the angry man was shouting at him.

Men clustered around Aidan, making sure that Aidan the dog killer could not flee the scene.

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Aidan knew very well that he had missed the boar, but he was just as certain that he had not killed

anyone’s dog.

He asked Fala, just to be certain. Fala snorted no. Aidan had killed nothing.

Swiftly the master of the hunt stormed in between Aidan and his irate accuser. Before anyone

could tamper with the scene, the master of the hunt quickly wrenched the lethal arrow from the slain

dog.

Aidan already knew that arrow wouldn’t be his. All of Aidan’s arrows were fletched with Fala’s

feathers. Yet the master of the hunt was frowning directly at Aidan.

“You!”

Aidan blinked in disbelief. His entire being felt as if it were blossoming into pin pricks from the

inside out. He wanted to run. Tried to. But the master of the hunt was already pointing at Aidan, and

many sets of eyes followed the master’s damning gaze to Aidan.

“You! Yeah, you! Stay right there, you dog killer!” The master of the hunt bellowed as he stalked

toward Aidan and Fala with hunch-shouldered menace.

A gaze that could ignite fires raked Aidan up and down. The master bellowed. “Do not move!”

Aidan froze, nauseous.

Aidan had long experience with being set up during his stay in the Citadel, and he knew it was

happening again now.

“This!” the master of the hunt stalked toward Fala and snarled, brandishing a black feather in his

fist. He plucked a black feather from Fala’s wing in his other fist. “This!”

Red-faced in anger, the master of the hunt shook the feather at Aidan. “This!”

Aidan died a bit. He felt the heat of anger rolling off the master’s body. Aidan closed his eyes and

felt the angry spittle spray his face.

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There was an eternal pause.

Then the master of the hunt coughed. Aidan opened his eyes. The master of the hunt shook his fist

as he was forced to declare loud and furious—not to Aidan but to Aidan’s accuser—“This is not the

feather of the falconwolf whose rider killed your dog, sir!”

Aidan’s eyes flew wide, astonished to hear the truth for once.

“Look elsewhere!” The master of the hunt bellowed to all the other hunters and stalked away in

fury.

Aidan wilted in relief. No one met his eyes. There were many mutterings, but no one apologized

to Aidan.

Aidan’s whole body tingled. He swallowed down sourness.

He wanted to demand an apology, but knew that would win him nothing good.

As Aidan walked unsteadily out of the dark woods of Calydon with Fala, a young page of a

Pegasus rider approached him and said, “Give me your tunic.”

“What?” Aidan snarled at her. “Why?”

The Pegasus page opened both her palms in silent demand, waiting for Aidan’s tunic.

Mystified, Aidan mumbled, “Fine. Here.” Aidan dragged his dirty tunic up and off over his head

and he threw the tunic at the page. “Have that cleaned!” Aidan sneered at the Pegasus page.

The page caught Aidan’s thrown tunic. “No,” the page said, and she carefully turned Aidan’s tunic

right-side out, then placed the folded garment back to into Aidan’s hands.

“You want to keep this,” the Pegasus page said solemnly. “Just as it is.”

This was Aidan’s tunic.

The page was waiting for Aidan to look at it.

Aidan rolled his eyes and looked.

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There, on the back of Aidan’s tunic, was the clear imprint of a muddy hoof with the distinct mark

of its horseshoe’s maker on it.

A winged horsewoman had clearly fouled Aidan. With this hoof print, if anyone accused him,

Aidan could not be held responsible for the fouled shot.

“I owe you,” Aidan told the young Pegasus page softly, hand over his tremulous heart.

The Pegasus page nodded. “Yeah, you do owe me,” she said. “Don’t forget it!”

“Your lot have an undeserved reputation,” Aidan said.

“Pfff!” The Pegasus page made a noise of disgust. “No we don’t! We’re weasels. We earned that

reputation! Don’t trust us!”

“OK. I won’t,” Aidan said. “As soon as I know your name.”

“Dani,” said Dani. “Take me with you.”

Aidan shook his head. “Dani, You need to know what you’re asking. I’m working under judgment

of the two crowned heads.”

“Yeah. The Falconwolf King and the Ravenwolf King,” Dani said for him.

“No. It’s actually the Ravenwolf King and the Queen of— Okay, trust me you don’t want to meet

that Queen.”

“Don’t make my decisions for me,” Dani said. She jumped up to a stout tree branch and hoist

herself up to sit. “What Queen of what Realm are you talking about? I’m not stupid. You see I know

there are only two Kingdoms, Falconwolf and Ravenwolf. My herd of Pegasus riders is not a

Principality. We’re more of gang.”

“Yeah,” Aidan said. “I’ve met your gang, Dani. I mean there is another Kingdom.”

“Horse skak. What other Kingdom?” Dani demanded. “There is no third Realm. Who does Her

Royal Majesty imagine she rules?”

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“All of us,” Aidan said. “She rules all of us. She is Death.”

There was a very long silence.

Aidan broke the silence first. “Dani, why are you not running away screaming at this moment?

Are you mad?”

“I’m brave,” Dani said.

“Oh. Worse,” Aidan said.

“I can face Death,” Dani said.

Aidan’s falconwolf, Fala, snorted.

“I would invite you to join us, Dani, but you need to know that I’m a criminal. I’m working off

some labors,” Aidan told Dani. “It involves doing very dangerous things.”

“Like hunting the Calydonian boar?” Dani supplied.

“Yeah. Just like that,” Aidan said.

“Exactly the kind of challenge I want,” Dani said. “But you didn’t kill the boar of Calydon. Do

you get any credit just for going on the hunt?”

“Oh, I doubt that very much,” Aidan said, sour. “I’ll find out for certain when I return to the

Court of the Two Kings.”

“Well then, let’s go there,” Dani said.

“I am not going back to Court empty handed,” Aidan said.

A crackling of boots on underbrush sounded from behind Dani—sounds of someone approaching

through the woods.

Dani drew her knife.

Fala’s ears turned, but he didn’t snort in alarm. Aidan’s falconwolf gave a woof that sounded

completely friendly. Joyous even.

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Aidan squinted into the forest trying to make out the approaching figure. He hesitated in disbelief.

“Hector?” Aidan cried. “Is that you, Hector Xanderson!”

“Aye!” Hector said with a broad white smile.

Aidan dropped his blade and ran to Hector and jumped into his arms.

The taller man, Hector swung Aidan around, then dropped him onto his feet so he could thump

him on the back.

Their falconwolves, Fala and Zephyr, tussled with friendly growls.

“You two know each other?” Dani said dryly, not a question.

Hector and Aidan exchanged glances.

“Nah.” Hector said.

“Nope,” Aidan said.

And they pulled each other into another back-pounding bear hug.

Hector cried, astounded, “What in blazes were you doing on a boar hunt, Aidan? I have never

known you to kill anything that’s not trying to kill you!”

“It’s um, I um,” Aidan stalled. “It’s kind of a labor. The Kings are assigning me dangerous labors

to work off my crime.”

“The Kings!” Dani cried. “You are really actually serious! You are working for Kings!”

“Yes,” Aidan muttered.

Dani gaped. She quickly recovered enough to put on a brave front. Apparently this was exactly the

kind of dangerous company the Pegasus rider wanted to travel with. “That’s a hell of a trump card you

just played!” Dani cried. “I can’t believe it! By all the gods, what awful thing did you do?”

“I—uh.” Aidan couldn’t say it.

“I—”

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Aidan’s eyes turned up beseechingly to Hector.

Hector shook his head. “Don’t look at me. This is all yours Aidan. It won’t get any easier. Just tell

her.”

“I killed Gyrreg, King of the Falconwolves,” Aidan blurted.

“Bull skak,” Dani said, flat.

“Fine. I don’t give a rat’s ass what you or any horse rider believes,” Aidan said and turned his

back.

“That wasn’t the worst of it,” Hector said, wryly. “Give her the rest of it, Aidan.”

“Why?” Aidan cried.

“Because it’s just gonna come oozing out later anyway, and at the worst possible moment.”

Neither Hector nor Aidan had ever liked their lawful sovereign.

Gyrreg King of the Falconwolves had been a self-serving corrupt coward and opportunist. But

nothing on earth gave Aidan the right to kill Gyrreg. In fact everything in the universe required him

not to kill Gyrreg.

Aidan’s face burned. His throat thickened. “I—uh He—uh—”

Hector gave Aidan a slap upside the head. “Get it out!”

Aidan coughed. “He’s my father—Gyrreg is. Was. He’s dead now. I killed my own father. My

own King. I am completely and absolutely damned. You gotta stay away from me, Dani. I’ve got

nothing good for you. You don’t want any of my guilt wearing off on you.”

Dani looked to Hector and demanded, “So why are you here, Hector son of Xander? And why are

you still keeping company with Aidan the Damned?”

96


“This is what noblemen do,” Hector said to Dani. Then to Aidan, Hector said, “I know your heart,

Aidan. It is not evil. You are reckless and unfortunate. Carn knows that. You cannot possibly have a

more powerful ally than Carn.”

“Carn!” Dani cried, astounded, her eyes perfectly round. “THE Carn?” Dani bent over double and

reared back laughing. “The Ravenwolf King Carn! That Carn?”

“The only Carn,” Hector said.

“But I don’t understand,” Dani said waving her hands as if erasing the words from the air. “If the

Falconwolf King is dead, then who can possibly sit as the other sovereign judge on the Twin Throne?

Ha! You see, I know that Carn cannot sit for the Ravenwolf and Falconwolf throne both!”

“You're right, Dani. Carn can’t sit for the Falconwolf King,” Hector told her. “Death can sit for

the Falconwolf King.”

“And she’s waiting for me,” Aidan said.

* * *

When Aidan and Hector were at last alone in the day’s failing light, Hector murmured with a head

tilt in the direction of the young Pegasus rider, Dani. “Can’t we lose the horse?”

“Why?” Aidan asked.

“I don’t trust Pegasus riders,” Hector said. “At all.”

“Dani helped me in the boar hunt.”

“Yes! Dani helped you against her fellow Pegasus riders,” Hector said. “Makes her a turncoat to

her own kind, does it not?”

97


“I won’t take Dani’s side against you, Hector,” Aidan said, hand over heart. “You gotta know that.

And if you tell me to lose her, then she’s gone, right now,” Aidan said. “But I would consider it a

personal favor if you let Dani travel with us—at least for a short time longer.

There was a very long silence.

Hector growled, conceding, “A very short time.” Hector’s expression was all doubt, and he

quickly stalked away to where Dani was brushing her winged white horse and demanded, “Dani? Why

do you want to travel with Aidan?”

“Ah. I hear you,” Dani said, smiling. “I hear that tone of distrust. And yeah. It’s true about us. We

Pegasus riders have a reputation for back-stabbing. It’s kind of an art among us.”

“So why would you ever want to fly with us?”

“I don’t like the art,” Dani said. “I read some stories about falconwolves and their riders. All those

stories have this romantic nobility to them. A trust. My kind call your kind suckers. But I like your

chivalry. Is there any truth to any of that? The chivalry? The trust? The sense of duty? The bond? The

honor, the pride?” Dani’s eyes were bright, expectant.

“Okay,” Aidan started. “That is the ideal. But you need to know there are some real skaks among

the falconwolf riders.”

“I’m sure there must be. But in my herd, we’re all skaks,” Dani told Aidan.

“There are a bunch of those in our Kingdom,” Aidan said. “But yeah, noble duty is a falconwolf

rider’s reason for being.”

“That seals it. I’m travelling with you,” Dani declared.

“You can’t,” Hector told Dani. “You’re not one of us. You haven’t sworn the oath.”

“I have so sworn on my honor,” Dani said.

“You’re a Pegasus rider. You don’t have honor to swear on.”

98


“I have pledged the Falconwolf oath,” Dani said to Hector and Aidan. Does that mean anything to

you?”

Hector was without words.

Aidan coughed. “It should mean everything.”

“Then let’s hear it. Right now.” Hector challenged. He took one step back, and crossed his arms in

a pose of waiting. He looked perfectly regal.

Instantly, Dani put a hand over her heart and recited the entire oath flawlessly.

“I swear on my life and on my sacred honor to do my duty to the gods and to my King

To provide for folk under my protection

To help other fair neighbors;

To keep myself strong that I may maintain the safety of the Realm.

Little Bess applauded. Her hulking falconwolf Talionis bowed to Dani with a welcoming growl.

Hector was left open-mouthed. Finally he coughed. “I apparently owe you an apology, milady

Dani.”

“Just don’t expect everyone who speaks that oath to really mean what he pledges,” Aidan warned

Dani. “Especially that lot in the Northern Province. There are some real skaks in our realm.”

“Why doesn’t the Falconwolf King do something about them?” Dani demanded.

“Because the Falconwolf King himself was the worst of the worst!” Hector said.

“Was?” Dani echoed. “Was?”

“He’s dead,” Aidan said. “I killed him.” Aidan got his secret out there before it could fester any

longer.

Dani gaped at Aidan in a mixture of horror and intrigue. “You killed your King! You killed your

father! Skak!”

99


Hector told Dani, “King Gyrreg was an evil man and a corrupt King. He is well gone from this

life.”

“Gyrreg murdered my mother,” Aidan told Dani. “And I killed Gyrreg—My father. My King.

Now I’m on a quest of atonement for that crime.”

Dani looked dazzled. “And how exactly does that get done?”

“The Two Kings assign Aidan labors to work off his crime,” Hector told Dani.

“Wait!” Dani cried. “Kings? How can there be Kings if there were two and Aidan killed one? Is

the Ravenwolf King ruling everything now?”

“No. The Ravenwolf King enlisted another sovereign judge from another realm to act as regent

during the absence of a lawfully crowned Falconwolf King of the Falconwolves.”

“What other crowned head?” Dani demanded in disbelief. “You can’t mean one of us Pegasus

riders.”

“No. Of course not,” Hector told Dani. “Your lot are not a Kingdom. You’re a gang.”

Dani blithely nodded that this was indeed so.

“There is a third Kingdom,” Aidan told Dani.

“Is not,” Dani said. “Never heard of it. “Where is this so-called third Kingdom?”

“Where everyone goes in the end,” Hector said.

Dani’s eyes went round. She shuddered, smiling in terror. “The Dead! You mean the Dead, don’t

you!”

Even as Dani said it, a scroll arrived, dropped from the sky by a raven.

Dani tried to snag the parchment scroll first, but Aidan caught it falling.

As Aidan feared, he got no credit toward his labor for flailing around uselessly in the boar hunt.

Someone else had killed the dreaded boar of Calydon.

100


Aidan had accomplished precisely nothing toward his labors since producing the Hydra heads in

the Court of the Two Kings. He still had all but one of his labors remaining to perform.

He read the message on this new scroll down to its bitter end.

“Oh no. Oh skak. Oh fornication,” Aidan moaned. He let the parchment roll itself back up and

looked hopelessly to Hector.

“Well, let’s hear it,” Hector said. “What is your labor?”

“Calm the wrath of the whirlpool,” Aidan said.

Hector blinked, scowling at Aidan. “What whirlpool?”

“Uh, yeah,” Aidan hedged. “About that.”

How to tell that tale?

A year ago Aidan had got it into his head that he wanted to sail across the Sea that Never Ends and

discover what lay on the other side. He had already picked out a name for the country he would

discover on the far shore. He assumed there was one out there—a far shore—and he would call it

Chandlerland, for himself and his mother.

But instead of discovering a far land, he had blundered into a vast whirlpool way out somewhere

in the Sea that Never Ends. His boat had capsized into the maelstrom, and he had nearly drowned,

taking Fala down with him.

A vast, hulking harpy had rescued all three of them from the vortex and set them back down on

the shore from where they had started.

Ever since then, Aidan harbored a great affection for the mammoth, fearsome, ugly, winged

harpies, and he had developed a powerful aversion to the Sea.

Now Aidan led Fala, Hector, Zephyr, and little Bess with her giant falconwolf, Talionis to the

coast off which he had first encountered the whirlpool.

101


Fala carried Aidan out over the sea to lead the others to where Aidan had first sighted the

whirlpool. Fala flew way up high to see beyond the horizon. But for leagues and leagues there was

nothing out there but placid blue water.

A current that vast just could not be difficult to spot.

It just wasn’t down there.

The sea was calm and blue, without any obvious current.

The next morning, Hector sent a raven out to summon a harpy.

When the harpy answered the summons, Hector bade the vast creature to carry him and Aidan out

to sea where it had first rescued Aidan from the whirlpool on his first foolish attempt to cross the Sea

that Never Ends.

The harpy carried them where he was told to go, but the whirlpool was gone. At any rate, it was

not where it used to be. There was nothing out here but leagues and leagues of brilliant blue water with

no whirlpool to be calmed.

Returning to shore, Aidan stomped onto firm high ground and wailed, “Oh for cryin’ tears, did the

whirlpool move?”

He thought he was being sarcastic, but the hulking Harpy indicated yes with a squawk and a nod

of its monstrous head.

“Yes?” Aidan cried at the harpy.

Yes. The harpy nodded yes.

The whirlpool had moved.

“Show me where whirlpool went!” Aidan bade the monstrous Harpy, and he climbed onto its

broad back.

102


“Us!” Hector told the Harpy. He climbed aboard the harpy’s back with Aidan. “Show us where

the whirlpool went.”

A cry of “Us! Us! Us!” sounded, flailing up the shoreline.

The Harpy crouched low and waited for the bunch of tumbling boneless legs that was the octopus

Middle C, who would not be left behind. “Us! I’m part of Us going to the whirlpool!”

Left behind on the shore was Bess, because her own hulking falconwolf, Talionis refused to carry

her into danger.

Dani’s Pegasus steed had no such care for her rider. Her Pegasus would take her rider into any

peril she wanted to dare.

High, high the Harpy carried Aidan, Hector and Middle C, up, where clouds were icy wisps and

the sun was harsh and bright.

Dani’s Pegasus kept pace with the vast harpy.

The octopus Middle C laced all of his long legs in the harpy’s thick mane for warmth. And from

this lofty vantage Aidan sighted the thing he searched for. He glimpsed it through the shredded clouds

—A vast churning wheel of water, sinking ever downward into its central vortex. The whirlpool was

leagues away from where Aidan had first blundered into it a year before.

“It moved!” Aidan cried to his companions after the Harpy had restored Aidan, Hector, and

Middle C to the beach again. And to Bess he cried, “It’s not there! It’s just not there!”

“Can the whirlpool possibly be alive?” Hector demanded.

“Of course it’s alive,” the octopus Middle C said, as if it were something everybody knew. “Why

else would the Kings give you a labor to calm the whirlpool?”

“How can a water current be alive?” Hector said. He thought he was being sarcastic.

103


“I don’t know how anything becomes alive,” Middle C said. “But the whirlpool is as alive as you

are Hector Xanderson, and it is every bit as vengeful as you are Aidan Chandlerson.”

Aidan was some time processing what he was hearing. At last he asked, “Who does the whirlpool

feel driven to take vengeance on?”

“On Gyrreg, King of the Falconwolves,” the octopus Middle C said.

There was a strangled noise. Bess had been taking a drink of water from her waterskin. She

swallowed wrong and fell to coughing.

Hector gazed open-mouthed and vacant-eyed in shock at the octopus Middle C—at what Middle

C had just said.

“But that can’t happen!” Aidan told Middle C, horrorstruck. “The whirlpool can’t take vengeance

on Gyrreg.

“The whirlpool is quite determined,” Middle C assured Aidan.

“No! I mean it physically can not happen! The whirlpool is too late!” Aidan cried. “I have already

killed Gyrreg, King of the Falconwolves!”

After a startled pause, the horsewoman Dani burst into cruel laughter as if she’d been set up in a

practical joke. “You? You? Not ever!” Dani looked laughingly to Hector to join in the joke. “Nu uh!

He couldn’t!”

“He did,” Hector said, solemn. “And we don’t give a skak what any winged horse rider believes.

Aidan, forgive me, I cannot listen to this gal’s horse skak any longer. I need to put some space between

us. You coming?”

Aidan nodded wryly. “Yeah.”

Aidan didn’t like Dani’s company either. He set himself to gathering up his things to move on.

Hector mounted his falconwolf Zephyr.

104


“Wow! No! Wait! Wait! Wait!” Dani flapped her arms, laughing at the enormity of Aidan’s crime.

“I mean wow! What made you kill the King?”

“King Gyrreg murdered my mother,” Aidan said as he mounted his falconwolf, Fala.

Some of Dani’s bad bitch callousness slipped. “I remember you!” Dani pointed at Aidan. And

you! And I really remember you, handsome!” She pointed at Hector. “You trespassed over our

Pegasus lands last year!”

Immediately, Aidan jumped down from Fala’s back. He stalked to where Dani was seated on her

winged horse. Aidan hauled Dani out of her saddle, and he punched Dani across the face, hard.

Dani crumpled to the dirt. “What was that for?” Dani squawked up at Aidan.

“I remember you too!” Aidan snarled. “We were bound for the Court of the Two Kings. We were

on a mission. Your lot made us stop and play a fruking game of flying polo!”

Aidan hauled back a fist and hit Dani again.

Dani blinked the stars from her eyes.

“And what was that for?” Dani squawked. She daubed her nose on her kerchief. “Of course we

made you play! We are Pegasus riders! If you fly over our ground, you’re gonna play. That’s the way

it is! The sky above our heads is ours!”

“Well this is not your ground here, and I am not playing a game!” Aidan said. “You play me

again, Dani, I will end you!”

Rubbing her jaw, Dani looked across at Hector. “He talks big, doesn’t he?”

“If he doesn’t end you, I will,” Hector said, without the rage. Hector was simply stating a deadly

cold fact.

Aidan wished he had even half the commanding presence that Hector possessed. Dani said

nothing for while.

105


A shadow passed over all of them, then passed again. Aidan squinted up to see a raven circling.

He groaned.

“What is it?” Bess asked, following Aidan’s gaze to the sky.

“My next labor,” Aidan said.

“Gotta be,” Hector agreed. “No use trying to dodge it, Aidan. Just take it.”

Aidan lifted his hands, his palms open upward.

A parchment scroll fell from the sky neatly into Aidan’s hands.

Dani jerked her chin inward. “Nice drop, bird!” she said up toward the raven, impressed with its

accuracy. The raven did not stay to hear compliments.

Aidan broke the black wax seal and quickly unrolled the scroll. He scanned the message swiftly

with Dani reading over his shoulder.

Dani stepped back.

“Ah. Well. Oooh yeah. Good luck with that!” Dani said, moving away. “Been fun riding with you

all.”

Dani whistled to summon her Pegasus.

While Dani saddled her winged mount, Hector quietly murmured to Aidan. “Which King is giving

you this labor?”

The seal was black, but both of the Kings, Ravenwolf and Death, used black wax, so it wasn’t

immediately obvious whose seal was on this message. Aidan showed the seal to Hector.

“This one’s from Carn,” Hector told Aidan. “This imprint is a raven. Death uses a skull.

106


That evening, Dani still wasn’t gone yet. She ate well. Dani always ate well. Dani never hunted.

Dani never cooked. She never volunteered to take a turn on the night watch. But neither Aidan nor

Hector wanted to close their eyes while Dani was around anyway.

Dani and her Pegasus were gone before dawn.

“Good riddance,” Aidan muttered as he collected his things. “I was afraid we would never get rid

of her! Did she take anything?”

“My iron blade,” Hector said.

“Oh no!” Aidan cried.

“It’s all right, Aidan, I wanted her to have it,” Hector said. “The blade is old and rusted and it

won’t hold an edge worth a skak. It belongs where it can do the worst damage. May it give Dani joy.”

Aidan blinked. “I didn’t know you could be devious, Hector! Not that I mind that here.”

“I should be ashamed of myself,” Hector said. “But I’m not.”

Aidan and Hector walked together out to the seashore.

A shadow passed over them. Aidan shuddered without looking up. “Raven?” he guessed.

Hector looked up. “Not sure,” he said. “It’s big enough, but—”

The ragged bird let go of the scroll that it was carrying.

Aidan dodged out from under the falling parchment. He wasn’t ready to face his next labor.

Hector caught the falling scroll and immediately passed it into Aidan’s hands. “Gotta be yours.”

The scroll bore the seal of a skull. Aidan looked up at the circling bird who had dropped it.

The bird was a black vulture.

“Oh skak,” Aidan moaned. “This one’s from Death.”

Hector kept himself from shuddering. Aidan’s hands trembled a bit.

107


Aidan broke the royal black wax seal on Death’s parchment, and quickly read the message. At the

end, he dropped it and moaned.

“What is it?”

Hector had tried to read over Aidan’s shoulder, but Aidan was already crushing the parchment and

he and threw it aside in disgust.

“‘Calm the maelstrom,’” Aidan recited sourly. “Death wants me to calm the maelstrom! Does she

mean that fornicating son of whirlpool?”

Hector retrieved the crushed scroll to see for himself. He read out loud to Aidan, “‘You have a

kinship with the maelstrom. These days, the maelstrom moves about the ocean, hunting ships and

killing them.’”

“I know that,” Aidan said, sour. “Why is Death telling me this?”

Aidan had blundered into the whirlpool by accident a year ago on his first journey to the Court of

the Two Kings. It had taken a mammoth harpy to get Aidan and Fala out of the whirlpool alive.

Here, now, Aidan crushed Death’s parchment and threw it away from himself.

“Kinship with the whirlpool, my ass!” Aidan cried, almighty pissed off. “How am I supposed to

calm the maelstrom! How? This is ridiculous!”

A bubbling voice at his back sounded cheerfully. “I’ll go for you.”

Aidan and Hector spun about to find an octopus draped over a large wet rock where the sand met

the sea.

“Despair not,” the creature bubbled. “You just need an octopus!”

“Middle C!” Aidan sang.

All Aidan’s anger fell away on seeing his friend again. “You wonderful, wonderful being! Do you

really think you could help me, Middle C?”

108


“I may have already done so,” Middle C said, then asked, “Is this the Lord Hector?”

Hector bowed courteously to the octopus. “Honored and delighted to make your acquaintance,”

Hector said and hummed a perfect middle C.

“I did not know you were traveling with us, Hector Lord Xanderson,” Middle C said.

Hector flinched. His dark face darkened.

“Because he’s not traveling with us!” Aidan said fiercely, and he turned on Hector. “We don’t

need you, you deserter! Me and Bess and Fala and Talionis are doing very well on our own. Go

abandon someone else who was relying on you!”

Hector bowed his head penitently. “I cannot obey. I am honor bound to see this quest through to

the end. I confess it was faithless of me to leave you before our quest was done, Aidan. I swear it

won’t happen again. I won’t leave your side until we complete your labors and you have absolution

from the Kings.”

“Well, you can turn yourself around and leave right now,” Aidan said. “We don’t need you.”

“Um. We might have need of him,” Bess suggested.

“And I need to confess that I don’t know how we’re going to find the whirlpool much less calm

it.” Hector said. “It’s not there anymore.”

“What is not where?” Aidan demanded.

“The whirlpool. The maelstrom,” Hector said. “It’s gone.”

“Where did it go?”

“I don’t know,” Hector said.

Aidan was about to tell Hector that he was useless, when a bubbling voice sounded from a wet

rock on the shore, growing wetter with the advancing tide. “I know where the whirlpool is now.”

Aidan spun about face to find the octopus draped over a wet boulder on the tideline.

109


“Middle C!” Aidan cried. “That’s fantastic! Can you pilot me to the whirlpool?”

“Not precisely,” Middle C said. The whirlpool moves. The current quite angry these days. You

need to approach it gently.”

“I don’t want to approach it at all!” Aidan cried.

“There lies the trick. I’m afraid it is you who must do the approaching,” Middle C said

apologetically. “You have something in common with the maelstrom, you know, Aidan Chandlerson.”

“No! I don’t know!” Aidan cried.

“It’s an angry current,” Middle C said.

Hector spoke to the octopus in a disbelieving voice, “You’re talking as if the whirlpool was

alive!”

“Yes, of course it is alive!” the octopus said. “And you, Aidan Chandlerson, you have a common

bond with the whirlpool. The Falconwolf King Gyrreg killed the whirlpool’s mother.”

“The whirlpool has a mother?” Hector and Aidan said as one, astonished.

“Had one,” Middle C said. “Of course it had a mother. Where did you imagine the whirlpool came

from?”

“I never thought about it,” Hector confessed.

“Well, it had a mother,” Middle C said.

“And did she call it little Eddy?” Dani sniggered.

Middle C went on without paying notice to anything that Dani said

“The whirlpool’s mother was murdered by the same faithless fiend that killed your mother, Aidan

Chandlerson,” Middle C said.

Startled, Aidan cried out, “But King Gyrreg murdered my mother!”

“Yes, exactly,” Middle C said. You and the whirlpool have that sorrow in common.”

110


“King Gyrreg murdered the whirlpool’s mother?” Aidan cried in disbelief. “I mean—The

whirlpool has a mother? I mean I don’t know what I mean!”

Aidan’s thoughts crowded into an incoherent mass. At last he blurted, “Middle C! Can you

introduce me to the whirlpool?”

“I can and I shall,” the octopus said. “I will see if the whirlpool is amenable.”

Aidan’s thoughts raced. “Wait!” he cried.

He wondered if the whirlpool would resent him for stealing his vengeance against his mother’s

killer. “Offer him this.” He rummaged through his backpack and produced the blade that had ended

King Gyrreg’s life.

Aidan returned to their camp on the beach under a mass of dark roiling clouds. The unhappy

octopus Middle C reported to Aidan and Hector that the offering of the blade caused the reverse of the

expected reaction. And now storm clouds gathered on the horizon. Lightning flashed over the

tumultuous sea.

“Alas, you were right, Aidan,” Middle C confessed. “The whirlpool was not at all pleased to learn

that Gyrreg is already dead without the whirlpool’s exacting any vengeance of his own.”

“That’s all I have for him,” Aidan said. “Honestly, that’s everything. Let me talk to him. Can you

translate?” Aidan asked Middle C.

“You should be able to talk to the whirlpool for yourself. The whirlpool is fairly fluent in your

language, Aidan. The whirlpool has, after all, sucked down quite a number of ships of the Falconwolf

Kingdom. If I tried to translate, I would just be in the way.”

“Well then!” Aidan cried.

Quite a number of ships!

111


“You’re telling me that the whirlpool sucked down quite a number of ships?” Aidan cried, shrill.

“Then the whirlpool has no cause to have grievance with me! Damn him anyway! The whirlpool is a

mass murderer! I’m glad I killed his mother!”

“Don’t tell him that,” Hector said.

“No, don’t tell him that,” Middle C echoed. “Doing so runs counter to your completing your labor,

Aidan. You are meant to calm the whirlpool, not provoke it to violence.”

Aidan marched down to the seashore. There he used a stout cable to anchor himself to a massive

outcropping of bedrock that jutted up well above the water line.

As soon as he arrived at the water’s edge, a great wave swelled over Aidan and pulled the sand out

from under his feet. The receding current dragged Aidan down toward the vast Sea that Never Ends.

Aidan’s anchor in the rocky higher ground held fast, as did the cable.

“You stole my vengeance!” the whirlpool bellowed at Aidan. “Now, because of you, I can never

never avenge my creator!”

“And was I ever allowed to take vengeance for the murder of my creator!” Aidan shouted back at

the whirlpool.

“As I understand it YES! You killed King Gyrreg! Now, go kill yourself!”

“Why?” Aidan demanded. “Why do you need me dead?”

“I will have my vengeance!”

“Can’t happen. I can’t un-kill Gyrreg for you,” Aidan said.

“Then you can die for him!” the whirlpool roared.

The sky turned black as midnight under the whirlpool’s fury. Lightning trees snaked jagged paths

in the sky horizon to horizon. Thunder hissed and crackled. The whirlpool blew in toward land. Its

waves lashed the shore. Aidan suspected that the whirlpool was trying to get at his companions.

112


But Hector, Bess, Tal, Fala and Zephyr had moved farther inland to firm, higher ground. Under

the dense canopy of the forest they were able to put up a tent and even build a campfire.

In the darkest hour before dawn, Aidan walked out from the forest and hiked down to the beach

Winds and waves roared. Aidan spoke in a normal voice. It hardly mattered what he said. Aidan was

counting on the whirlpool’s curiosity to quiet itself down enough to hear what Aidan was saying.

And at last, the whirlpool did grow quiet.

“How did Gyrreg kill your mother?” Aidan asked the whirlpool.

“I don’t quite know,” the whirlpool said. “I cannot imagine how Gyrreg could possibly have done

it! My mother was a vast whirlpool. Vast! Your puny Gyrreg was an insect next to her. He mocked my

mother terribly.

“Sometimes the worm Gyrreg would slow down to taunt my mother, daring her to catch up with

him. Last I saw of my mother she was sweeping along the coast, chasing Gyrreg. The chase went on

and on. I fell behind. My mother has not returned yet.”

Aidan’s throat felt tight. He asked in mortal dread, “Did Gyrreg—” Aidan started. His throat

thickened. He could not continue.

Aidan shut his eyes in horror.

“Did Gyrreg what?” the whirlpool prompted.

Aidan started over. “You said Gyrreg led your mother southward?”

“Yes,” the whirlpool said.

“No!” Aidan moaned, closing his eyes, horrified.

“Yes, he did!” the whirlpool insisted. You weren’t there.”

“No, I mean—” Aidan wasn’t getting the proper words out.

“Did she….” Aidan foundered. And he heard himself asking the fatal question.

113


“Did your mother cross the equator?”

“Last I saw her she was moving that way,” the whirlpool said. “She hasn’t come back yet.”

“I am so very sorry to tell you this, your mother is dead,” Aidan said.

Instantly, the winds above the whirlpool rose up in fury, becoming a water-laden funnel cloud.

“LIAR! You cannot know that!” the whirlpool bellowed. “You can’t possibly know that, you land

bound worm! You weren’t there!”

Thunder roared. Hard drops of chill rain pelted down.

Then it was hail.

“I didn’t need to be there to know what happened! It’s the laws of physics!” Aidan shouted at the

whirlpool. “Tell me: Can you move yourself this way?” Aidan said, circling his arm clockwise. “Can

you circle with the ocean currents of the south?”

“No. Of course not!” the whirlpool shouted. “It’s unnatural. Impossible. You are stupid. No one

can defy the current.”

“I believe Gyrreg tricked your mother into crossing the equator. And that’s the last you ever saw

of her,” Aidan said. “Isn’t it?”

“How can you even pretend to know that! You weren’t travelling with her!” the whirlpool

bellowed, astonished. “You can’t have seen that! You did not see that!”

The sky overhead was roiling black.

“I did not see that,” Aidan admitted. “I did not need to see it to know what happened. The laws of

physics don’t bend. All the winds and all the sea currents on the far side of the equator turn the

opposite direction from what is natural here. Listen to me. You must not ever try to cross the equator.

Ever! Your mother is gone. Please don’t search for her. She would not wish you to follow her. The

current at the equator will kill you.”

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The sky rapidly darkened. Clouds rolled and mumbled in menace. They bellowed like bulls over

the sea, gathering with horrific speed. Tall trees along the shore bowed. Their branches nodded and

thrashed with the mounting winds. The sky turned black and furious. The day became dark as night.

Lightning flashed from horizon to horizon.

Waves surged in from the sea and hurled themselves at the shore as if to drag all the land back

into itself.

“What did you do to piss off the whirlpool?” Hector yelled at Aidan in front of the rising storm.

“How do you know it was something I did?” Aidan shouted back over the angry winds.

“Because only you could have made any living thing this angry! What did you do?”

“The whirlpool doesn’t deal with hard truths well,” Aidan said.

“Why in the world did you have to go and give it hard truths?” Hector cried.

“It deserves to know,” Aidan said.

“And I don’t deserve to drown!” Hector shouted at him. He hiked back up into the woods, to make

camp on bedrock among the sheltering trees well above the tide line.

The whirlpool stormed the seashore all through the night. Furious waves battered the beach.

Heavy drops of angry rain spattered down hard.

The whirlpool bellowed.

“Liar! Liar! Liar!” the whirlpool roared up at the shoreline. A giant wave rose and advanced with

a wall of angry sound.

Aidan fled up the high embankment into the woods where Hector, Bess, and the falconwolves

were camped. The rains pelted down. The high tree branches thrashed. Waves crashed against the

shore. Red and blue bolts of lightning snaked across the sky. Smell of ozone burned the air.

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“What kind of beast are you to say such evil things to me!” the whirlpool bellowed in Aidan’s

direction. “Go away! Go away!”

Aidan ducked into the tent with the others under the trees.

“Aidan! What did you do?” Hector demanded as lightning bolts snaked across the angry sky.

“The whirlpool didn’t like what I was saying,” Aidan said.

“Your labor from the Kings was to calm the whirlpool not piss the holy skak out of it!” Hector

cried.

“I know. I know. I know,” Aidan said, frantic. “I screwed up.”

“Yeah, you did!” Hector agreed.

“What ever did you say to it?” Bess demanded.

“No, no. I’m not saying it twice. I am so —oh skak!”

Aidan was instantly on his feet and dashing out of the tent, running down to the storming

seashore.

Gigantic waves loomed. One wave rose up and engulfed him, sweeping him up off his feet—and

then it pulled him out to sea. Aidan was able to take in a last deep breath before a great wave hauled

him out to deep water.

He tumbled end over end, rolling in the waves. Sand stung his face. He dared not open his eyes.

He lost the meaning of up.

He needed to breathe. He was going to die.

Suddenly frigid air slapped Aidan’s face and stung his ears. Something had wrapped around him

and immediately unwrapped. Aidan was airborne, flying up the embankment.

He touched down on hands and knees on wet sandy ground and rolled. He scrambled up and away

from the shore just as another towering wave advanced on him.

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A human hand closed hard on his upper arm and hauled him quickly uphill, high above the

tideline.

And now Aidan was inside a tent.

A hot mug of brew found its way into Aidan’s quivering hands.

He heard Fala outside the tent, shaking out his thick furry coat before he would squeeze himself

into the dry tent.

When Fala came inside, he surrounded Aidan with his soft furry warmth.

Aidan mumbled miserably into his mug of hot brew. “Go home, Hector. Leave me. Save yourself.

You do not deserve the skak I’m dragging you through. Take Bess with you. Find a good position for

her.”

“Bess—” Aidan started, but she cut him off.

“Don’t you dare tell me what to do, Aidan Chandlerson!” Bess shouted at him. “I am a free

woman! Sara would skin me if I left you alone in this mess!”

The sound of his mother’s name jolted Aidan out of his self-pity.

“You’re too good for me, Bess,” Aidan said. “All of you are too good for me!” He looked to each

of his travelling companions and their falconwolves.

“Yeah?” Hector said. “You’re right about that, Aidan. You don’t deserve any of us! You are also

an amazing idiot. We will all get through this, together.”

Immediately Hector looked around for who was not here.

“Where’s Dani?” he said.

The young Pegasus rider, Dani, was gone.

“Dani? She’s not one of us,” Aidan snarled. “She was never one of us. So who cares?”

“I do!” Hector cried. “She took my compass!”

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“No. I did that,” Bess said. She dug into her pack and handed Hector’s compass back to him.

“Sorry, I was using it.”

A raven swept into the tent. This one carried with it yet another parchment scroll with yet another

royal black seal.

This could only be a new labor from either the Ravenwolf King or from Death.

Bess and Hector each reached for the parchment, but the raven wanted nothing to do with either of

them. The raven croaked and flapped. It would only release the scroll to Aidan Chandlerson.

Aidan reluctantly put out his open palm. The scroll fell into it.

Aidan held the message against his chest, and he waited for his heart to step down from its mad

hammering. He really didn’t want to see what this scroll said.

At last he took a deep breath and forced himself to break the black wax seal and unroll the

parchment.

“Another labor?” Hector asked.

Aidan nodded. He had scarcely begun reading when he yelled out loud, “Yeah. Oh for cryin’

tears!”

“What is it?” Hector said. “What do you need to do?”

Aidan heard himself asking, “Is there consciousness after death? Do you really think so?”

“That is the damning question now isn’t it?” Hector answered. “Is death the end of sorrow, or is it

the beginning of sorrow without end?”

“Or the beginning of joy without end,” Bess suggested.

“I’m asking what do you think happens?” Aidan demanded of Hector.

Hector thought for several long moments, then said, “I cannot imagine for a moment that the vast

powers who created sunlight and seas, and skies of breathtaking beauty, and all living things in their

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astonishing variety—things that need one another—like falconwolves and their riders—I cannot

believe that those powers would end life with sad bitter punishments doled out to somehow atone for

petty human transgressions committed in ignorance. It defies what I have come to understand as

logical. I can only hope that I don’t do something deeply evil and bitter enough for me to end up in the

same place where Gyrreg exists now.”

Aidan would not have thought himself capable of such evil, and yet here he was—his father’s

murderer.

Truth was, Aidan could very well end up exactly like Gyrreg.

Aidan shuddered to recall the nightmare image of Gyrreg in the underworld, shrouded in the

spider’s cocoon, eyes bulging, mouth gaping, suffocating for eternity.

Aidan offered the scroll for Hector to read the next labor. Aidan couldn’t face it.

“Bring the hide of the Lion of Nemea before the Court of the Two Kings,” Hector recited dully.

He let the hand holding the scroll drop to his side. “Oh this is bad.”

“I thought the lion of Nemea was a myth,” Aidan said.

“Alas, it is not,” Hector said. “The Hunt of the Damned is a true story.”

“You know that for a fact?” Aidan asked.

Hector nodded down. “My uncle was one of the Damned.”

The past tense of Hector’s uncle didn’t escape Aidan.

Aidan struggled for words. “I’ve been through Nemea many times. Nothing ever threatened me

there.”

Hector’s breaths were deep and audible now. “You are saying that my uncle asked to be killed,”

Hector said tightly.

“No! I’m real sure I didn’t say that, Hector!”

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“What are you saying then?” Hector demanded, sounding perfectly hostile.

“Honestly, Hector, I don’t know what I’m supposed to think.” Aidan coughed. He found his voice.

“I’m saying there’s a whole lot things here that I don’t know. I’d take it as a personal kindness if you

enlightened me before I say something else disrespectful.”

“You say you have passed many times through Nemea where many noblemen—lords and

seasoned hunters—died,” Hector said tightly. “You think you’re special, do you?”

“Hector, I don’t know what to say about that! I’m real sorry that I’m still breathing air and your

uncle is not. I can see that it’s a piss poor trade-off from where you’re looking. Well, you might not

have much longer to put up with me. I have a royal mandate to produce the Lion of Nemea in the

Court of the Two Kings or die trying. I am already way way way deep in your debt. And as you’ve

said, men far better than I have fallen victim to the lion.”

“Yes, they have,” Hector murmured, and he moved out to set up his own tent well apart from

Aidan.

When Aidan and Fala Hector and Zephyr, Bess and Talionis arrived in Nemea, Aidan moved

farther down the path, away from all the hunters who had gathered in the woods of Nemea, preparing

to take on its infamous Lion.

Aidan unrolled his sleeping bag.

As he was dozing off, the thought struck Aidan, blinding and obvious, that Hector was not coming

with Aidan to help him perform this labor to kill the Nemean lion. Hector was obviously here on his

own quest to kill the Nemean lion to avenge his uncle’s death. If Hector killed the Nemean lion, then

Aidan would be short another labor.

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He listened to his own heart pounding. Then he stalked to Hector’s tent and cried at him out loud,

“You were there!”

Hector didn’t pretend not to understand what Aidan was saying.

“Yes.” Hector’s voice was distant and cold. “If you mean was I in the Hunt of the Damned. Yes.

I was my uncle’s spear carrier.”

Bess was awake now. She drew closer to hear the story.

“Was—” Aidan started. Stopped. “Was King Gyrreg in the Hunt?”

“Gyrreg was in our company,” Hector said, scowling deeply. “He wasn’t King at the time. He

killed a dog.”

Hector scowled. At last he spoke the rest of it. “It was my Lord Xander’s dog that Gyrreg killed.

The dog’s name was Fidelius. That dog watched over me in my cradle.”

“I’m sorry,” Aidan said. “I mean it.” Aidan nodded down as the campfire died.

In the darkness, Aidan said, “The lion needs to die. Let’s end this thing, you and me.”

“Yeah,” Hector said.

Bess was no hunter. She spoke in the dark. “I’ll be right here with a medic kit. Don’t make me use

it.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Aidan and Hector said together as the falconwolves muttered.

The lion of Nemea was vast. Aidan had not imagined a creature anywhere near as, well,

monstrous as this lion was. Aidan couldn’t even see all of it for its great enormity. The lion was a wall

of tawny fur moving within the shadowy forest, pure menace in its walk. Aidan scarcely dared breathe.

He was trying to gauge which weapons to use against the monster.

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Aidan had got separated from Hector and all the rest of the hunt. There were many other hunters

out here, lusting for glory. There were probably several survivors of the Hunt of the Damned out here.

Aidan tried to identify those and stay well clear of them. They needed this kill as badly as Aidan did.

And the surviving members of the Damned felt entitled to it. Aidan guessed that the men he saw

wearing the scarlet armbands had to be members of the Damned.

“What are you doing here?”

Aidan looked around for who had spoken. It was a man Aidan didn’t know. The man wasn’t

wearing a scarlet armband. The man was talking to Aidan, demanding, “What are you doing here?”

“I’m trying to kill the lion just like everyone else,” Aidan said.

“This is no place to cut your milk teeth on, boy. You’re fouling the field. Stay out of the way!”

“I can’t stay out of the way,” Aidan said, weary. “I’m under royal order to kill this thing.”

A lot of angry scoffs broke out around him.

“What a faker,” someone growled.

“Not even a good faker!” another said. “Don’t you know that the King is dead you stupid ass!”

“The Falconwolf King is dead,” Aidan confirmed. “No one knows that better than I. I killed him.”

The hunters stirred, shocked, confused, then unwilling to believe. “You killed who?”

“I killed Gyrreg the Falconwolf King!” Aidan snarled at them. “Now you stay out of my way! All

of you! I’m under orders from Death and the Ravenwolf King to bring back the hide of the Nemean

lion.”

Many of the hunters muttered among themselves, disbelieving. But all of the falconwolves of the

huntsmen conferred with Aidan’s Fala.

Falconwolves were never known for spinning yarns. The falconwolves confirmed for their riders

that Aidan’s labor had truly been sent down from Death and the Ravenwolf King.

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But that didn’t clear the way for Aidan to kill the lion.

“You can try to kill the Nemean lion,” the largest of the men told Aidan. “But if I see a shot, I am

not standing aside for you, your royal mandate be hanged!”

“Of course not,” Aidan said haughtily, as if he expected no less.

Another huntsman nodded to Aidan. “Welcome to the Damned.”

Hector and Bess made camp with their falconwolves off the beaten path. The members of the

Hunt were already two days into their quest for the glory. Aidan had passed this way many times

before, so he already had a feel for the place, its rhythms, its varied denizens.

Aidan’s falconwolf whuffled Aidan’s hair from behind. Aidan froze and immediately glanced in

every direction that he could without moving his head. His skin roughened.

He was quick to pick out from the dense woodland the thing that Fala intended for him to see.

The Lion. It was here.

Right here.

The lion was vast, colored like wheat and sand and underbrush, close enough to smell. It smelled

warm. Aidan’s heart galloped. Aidan was sure the lion must be able to hear his terrified heartbeat

within Aidan’s chest.

Fala folded in his wings, dropped to the earth, and hugged the ground, trying to make himself

invisible amid heaps of last year’s fallen leaves.

Aidan also dropped flat to the ground.

The lion dropped flat to the ground.

The lion was quivering. Aidan could feel its tremors through the ground.

Skak!

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Aidan lifted himself up on hands and knees. He gathered up armfuls of dirt and leaves and heaped

them on the Lion and motioned for Fala to do the same. Now. Now. Now.

When no part of the lion could be seen, Aidan sat on the lion’s leaf-covered shoulder, took out his

harmonica and started to play a tune.

Immediately, many furious voices from all directions rasped for him to be quiet. Aidan was sure

they would have beaten him to death if Fala had not been there, baring his teeth at anyone who came

near with harmful intent.

The irate huntsmen backed away, grumbling, searching elsewhere for their game.

On returning to their base camp in the evening, the huntsmen roared at Aidan. “What were you

thinking back there?”

Aidan turned his harmonica over and over. “I heard a story about a lion that was calmed by music.

I thought the lion might like a song.”

Mouths dropped open.

Immediately Aidan feared he’d overplayed his idiocy.

To his great relief, the members of the hunt exploded, calling him epithets Aidan had never heard

before. Not a one of the hunters stopped to question whether Aidan could really be that thick.

The hunters sent him out to gather mushrooms. Not that they really wanted mushrooms. They

were more likely hoping that Aidan would make a terrible mistake with a death angel.

Aidan foraged deep into the forest with Fala.

He sensed the lion before he or Fala saw, smelled or heard the giant beast.

Fala stood still except for his quivering.

Aidan turned slowly around.

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The lion was enormous, with a sand-colored hide and a full, autumn-colored mane. Its jaws were

bigger than a falconwolf’s head.

The Lion was afraid.

Aidan offered the lion a piece of beef jerky.

The lion sniffed it. The lion’s warm breath whuffled. The giant beast quivered, and refused the

offer of food.

“Can I touch you?” Aidan asked softly, putting out a hand.

Aidan’s falconwolf and the lion exchanged guarded looks.

Not getting snarl or a warning, Aidan slowly lifted his hand to the lion’s vast face. Its fur was

coarse, its face warm to the touch. Its amber eyes were wary.

“Fala, can you make this guy understand that he needs to follow in your footsteps? Tell him there

are men who want to harm him. We need to get them off of his trail, now. Right now.”

Fala grunted out some kind of message. The Lion reared, angry, frightened.

Aidan opened his arms wide, his face downcast, leaving himself open to harm.

The Lion dropped down on its forepaws. Its breaths came deep and shuddering.

Aidan turned around slowly to lead the way to safety. At least he hoped he was leading the lion to

safety.

When he glanced back farther down the path, he saw Fala behind him. Of course Fala would be

behind him. Following also was Hector, Zephyr, Bess, and Talionis. And farther behind all of them

was—thank all the gods—the Lion of Nemea.

The lion moved softly for such a vast beast. Arriving at the Twin Capital at last, Aidan and his

small party emerged from the forest in twilight and climbed the grand steps to the Court of the Two

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Kings. All the would-be spectators were baling off the steps and running away. Most of the people

inside the courtroom charged out through side doors in panic at the Lion’s approach until the only

people left inside the Court room other than Aidan’s companions were Carn and Death seated side by

side on their Dual Throne.

Aidan and the Lion approached the high dais, until Aidan couldn’t make himself move anymore.

He dropped onto one knee before the Kings. He felt faint.

“You were commanded to produce the hide of the lion of Nemea in Court,” Death told Aidan, her

voice stern.

“And I have just now produced the required hide here in Court, Your Royal Majesty,” Aidan said.

“The lion is still alive inside it. No one told me to take the lion out of its hide.”

Death turned to Carn on the other side of their conjoined throne. “He’s very cheeky, your young

man.”

“He’s also right,” Carn said from his habitual slouch.

“We shall need to be more specific with our labors,” Death murmured.

“Why?” Carn said. “I’m finding this all very entertaining. And merciful.”

“From where does such mercy come?” Death asked Carn. “I understand the young man has not

been treated well in this life. So from where does such kindness spring?”

“His mother loved him fiercely,” Carn said. “And he knows how to make friends. There is

powerful magic in both those traits. I want Aidan to live.”

“I cannot argue,” Death said, and then, “I want the Lion of Nemea to live. Tell the Lion to be not

afraid. I accept this labor as fulfilled.”

Perfectly astonished, Aidan’s legs gave way, and he crumpled into an unconscious heap in front of

the Dual Throne.

126

FALCONWOLF BOOK TWO R. M. Meluch127


Chapter FiveAidan came to consciousness on a vast, comfortable, hay-stuffed mattress. Along with him were two

of the falconwolves—Fala and Talionis—who snored around him.

Tal was the really loud one.

The space was fragrant of wood and hay and grain. Well-groomed horses nickered in their stalls.

Aidan pulled stalks of hay out of his hair and out of his plain-spun clothes.

He found Hector already sharing breakfast with Bess outside the stables.

A parchment scroll waited for Aidan on the small rough-hewn table, along with some bread and

cheese and a pitcher of cold spring water.

Aidan sat down with his companions and immediately tore into the bread and cheese. He had

learned on this journey to never ever pass up an offer of food, and to always keep his water container

filled.

When he could eat no more, he stuffed all the leftovers into his pack, and then it was time to face

whatever words were on this parchment scroll a raven had left behind.

This would be—as Aidan well knew—his next labor.

He unrolled the parchment and stared at it for a very long time.

“Today, please, Bess said.

“Out with it, Chandlerson,” Hector said.

Aidan read aloud. “Tame the Stallion of the Middleweald,” he read, then lowered the parchment

to the tabletop. “Doesn’t sound too hideous. No?”

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“The Stallion of the Middleweald is a notorious man killer,” Bess said.

“Since when have you been to the Middleweald?” Aidan demanded.

“Never,” Bess said simply. “I’ve heard all the stories of The Stallion of the Middleweald. Haven’t

you?”

“Uh. No.” Aidan said.

“I have,” Hector said. “The Stallion is famously vicious.”

Aidan dragged back his chair and stood up. “Let’s have a look.”

Aidan was a falconwolf rider. How difficult could a natural horse be? He paid the innkeeper and

set out, against all the warnings from the innkeeper and his help staff to please not go.

“I don’t like burying folk,” innkeeper told Aidan.

As Aidan and Hector and Bess walked out to the stables, they heard what must be the demon

Stallion itself.

Aidan stopped. “Bess, go back. Get away from here. We’ll meet you back at the inn.”

“I’d like to see the Stallion,” Bess said.

“No,” Aidan said, a flat command. “Don’t imagine it will spare you just because you’re a girl.

Lots of women have been maimed by the beast.

The innkeeper overheard them and clucked. “Listen to your man, girl. It’s a dreadful beast.

Beautiful? Can’t say it isn’t. But it’s a monster. And you lot! Don’t be thinking of letting the girl

within twelve leagues of the stables of Middleweald. That demon gets loose?” The innkeeper stopped

talking and shook her head. “It’s a monster.”

“I see wheels turning in your head, Bess,” Aidan said and warned. “Don’t you dare!”

“What?” Bess said. “Why should I not take a look at the monster?”

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“Because I know you. You’re not gonna just look at the monster. You’re gonna talk to it. You’re

gonna get on its back and you’re gonna get launched into the Sea that Never Ends.”

“It’s my life,” Bess said.

“No. No! It is not just your life, Bess!” Aidan cried. “There are people on this side of the River

Styx who love you and value you. You don’t get to piss away your life for no weighty reason. And if

you don’t think the rest of us have a say in this, you are selfish, mean spirited and wrong."

Bess gaped. “Oh gods. You’ve turned into your mother!”

“Yeah?” Aidan said. “You’re right. Sara is here!” Aidan tapped his chest over his quick-beating

heart, not arguing that fact. “Sara is right here! And we are not gonna let you die under my care!”

Bess turned wearily to Hector for help. “I am not a child!”

“Sound like one to me,” Hector said.

Bess made a noise between a screech and growl, clenched her fists and stalked off to pout with her

falconwolf, Talionis.

Aidan woke at the cockcrow. He looked around the warm dark stable. Bess was not on her straw

bed. Her falconwolf, Tal was not in the stable.

A goat bleated from somewhere.

Aidan groaned. He thrashed out from under his saddle blankets, pulled his boots on, and ran

outside.

“What do you think you’re doing!” Aidan cried in a muted shout.

“I’m doing your labor,” Bess said. She had a saddle blanket folded over her skinny arms along

with a halter and a tether.

Aidan tried to put words together but he was too scared, too shocked and too angry with her.

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“That thing is a monster!” Aidan whispered a cry.

“He’s not happy,” Bess said.

“Everyone knows that!”

“I think I know why,” Bess said.

“You think? You had better know!”

“Aidan?” Hector said softly. “Who tamed Talionis?”

Aidan coughed. He couldn’t string any words together.

And Hector was right. This was Bess, the girl who tamed the mad giant falconwolf Talionis. Little

Bess had a gift for calming angry beasts.

Hector nudged Aidan with his elbow. “Let the woman work.”

“Is this gonna be like Alexander’s Boukephalos?” Aidan asked. “The horse is afraid of his

shadow?”

Bess rolled her eyes. “I wonder how many men tried that with the Stallion of the Middleweald

before now, and got themselves trampled for it,” Bess said. “No, the Stallion does not have a problem

with his blessed shadow. Just stay out of my way.”

Bess shooed Aidan, Hector, and their falconwolves out of the yard.

Aidan gave way without protest. Bess was mistress of the monster falconwolf Talionis. She

obviously knew how to handle deadly creatures.

At the opening of the stable doors, the infamous Stallion reared and bugled in its stall and pawed

the air.

“There! You see—” Aidan started.

But before Aidan could even curse, the Stallion had already bolted out of the stable and ran into

the sunlight.

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Aidan and Hector dashed outside in time to see the notorious Stallion racing down the approach

path. The Stallion reared and knocked the fence’s crossbars off their posts.

Then it ran—

—to where a gangly, knock-kneed little goat grazed in a wide green pasture.

The Stallion charged at the little beast, made a skidding turn, then reared and came to a halt.

The Stallion shook out his mane, whickered, and walked back toward the goat.

Then the infamous wild Stallion of the Middleweald snuffled the goat’s head and licked its ears.

Aidan and Hector stared at the docile Stallion as it nuzzled the gangly, knock-kneed goat.

Bess looked to Aidan and Hector, her fists planted on her hips. “Did you really think that people

were the only living, feeling beings who keep pets?”

Aidan shook his head, his mouth dropped open in perfect astonishment.

The infamous vicious Stallion of the Middleweald nuzzled his pet goat, and the two beasts

placidly chewed their grain together.

After breakfast, Hector murmured to Aidan, “Have you noticed anything about your labors? The

three so far?

“Besides that they could get me killed?”

“Quite so,” Hector said. “The labors could easily get you killed if you weren’t you. These labors

that the Kings gave you play right to your strengths.”

“I have strengths?” Aidan said. “What are those?”

“Courage. Empathy. Kindness. Cunning. Loyalty.”

“Courage? Courage?” Aidan cried. “I’m a coward!”

“You went into single combat against an opponent you could not possibly best.”

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“Uh, yeah, I think we’re both pretty sure that I had help in that match. A lot of help.”

“Exactly! You did!” Hector said as if the point were obvious. “You had help. And how exactly did

you come by that help? You didn’t force anyone to help you. No. You made friends and earned our

loyalty. We—your friends—We prefer to live in a world with you in it.”

Aidan blinked, amazed. He placed his hand over his heart. “I value your friendship, more than I

can say.”

“There you go!” Hector said. “Now, let’s get this done. I want to go home.”

“You and me,” Aidan said.

133


Chapter FiveAidan woke in the hayloft to the sound of Fala noisily lapping up water from a trough outside the

stables. The infamous Stallion of the Middleweald and its pet goat were also out there at the trough,

drinking companionably side by side.

From dawn’s earliest glimmer, folks from the Middleweald came bearing gifts—mostly of food

and wine and fresh garden produce—to the hero Aidan Chandlerson.

Young Bess had been awake for some time. Now she was picking burrs from the Stallion’s glossy

coat.

Hector was brushing out their falconwolves’ thick fur when a moving shadow passed over them.

It was a raven.

“Heads!” Bess shouted. And everyone within earshot looked up.

Aidan knew what this was. This raven was bringing him notice of his next labor. And even though

Aidan knew there was no escaping a royal summons, he still vaulted over the fence and launched

himself into an all-out run, pelting across the waving grasses, gripped by the notion that if he could just

make it over the fence at the far end of the pasture he could escape this summons.

His breaths came harsh and urgent in his lungs as he ran, his heart hammering faster the nearer he

came to the far boundary and his imagined salvation.

And then, all at once, darkness rose up from the sweet pasture ahead of him.

Black wings blossomed wide and high out of the gentle field.

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Aidan stumbled, and he mushed to a halt in the soft earth at the paws of the giant ravenwolf.

Aidan lifted himself up to hands and knees. He let his head drop forward, his chin on his

breastbone. He swayed a bit, catching his breath.

Black boots tipped with silver stepped into his view.

“This is an interesting move,” Carn spoke down at Aidan’s bowed head. “It makes absolutely no

sense. What did you hope to achieve?”

“I don’t know,” Aidan said. “Nothing. I was just running.”

Aidan stood up and brushed the grass off his tunic and his trousers, then he put out an upturned

palm in defeat. Carn slapped the parchment scroll into Aidan’s hand.

“What is this one?” Aidan grumbled as he broke the black seal.

“You can read,” Carn said as he mounted his vast ravenwolf Midnight and took to the sky.

Aidan unrolled a few inches parchment, then he let the scroll curl back in on itself.

“No,” Aidan said. “I’m not doing it. No.”

He tried to spot Carn in the air but Midnight was already over the horizon.

Aidan let the parchment drop to the ground and he backed away from it.

And he tripped over Hector’s foot.

Aidan lay on his back, startled, winded, and betrayed.

Hector retrieved the parchment from the ground and physically closed Aidan’s hands around it.

“You have been served,” Hector said. “You know you can’t get out of this. You’re wasting time.

Face it and get it done, Aidan. I want to go home!”

Aidan muttered breathless obscenities as he read the summons.

"Man-eating horses!” I’m supposed to tame—! How am I supposed to tame man-eating horses?”

135


“We won’t know how to deal with them until we get a look at them,” Hector suggested. “So let’s

get that look. The sooner the better.”

They advanced slowly, softly. Sounds of enraged horses sounded within the woods, became

louder with their approach.

Aidan murmured, “I don’t think we’re going to tame these horses with goats.”

They decided not to announce themselves to the local lord if there was one.

One of the horses must have caught their scent because it reared and bucked and bugled. Its eyes

flared in their direction, absolutely mad.

Hector murmured, “Bess. You’re the expert here. What do you see?”

“Atrocity,” Bess said. These horses aren’t mad. They’re starving! I can see their ribs. They’re in

pain and they’re fighting back with the weapons they have—their hooves and their teeth. You can see

they’ve bitten each other!” He voice came out a sob.

Aidan cautiously put his hands on Bess’s shoulders. He felt her vibrating. “Bess? We’re

outnumbered here. Real bad.”

“You’re going to leave the horses like this!” Bess hissed, outraged.

“That’s not what I was gonna say,” Aidan whispered. “I’m saying that me and Hector are gonna

need help. Do you think you could kill a man?” Aidan asked softly in her ear. “It’s not an easy thing.”

“These men?” Bess said, a tremor in her whisper. “Those aren’t men! They’re monsters! Get me

within bowshot! I might even leave a couple for you!”

“Have your knife ready as a backup,” Aidan said.

“No!” Bess cried. “If they get that close, they’ll turn my blade on me.” And she gave her knife

over to Hector. “Make it count.”

“I will,” Hector vowed, hand over heart.

136


Aidan wished he could be as sure of himself as Hector was. Hector didn’t promise to try. Hector

promised to defend.

137

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