his crimes, your father requires your respect and you will show it.”
Artis glared back, Vaelin finding the boy’s face a disconcerting mirror of Nortah’s at the same age. He also possessed much the same capacity for acting without due thought.
“That man is no longer my father!” Artis shouted, getting to his feet, defiance overcoming his fear. His spoon skittered away as he flung it down on the table. “And you’re not even my real uncle.”
“Artis!” Kerran said, a rare scowl of anger on her brow as she rose from her seat, casting a pointed glance at Alum. “We have a guest!”
“And you’re not my mother!” Artis yelled, whirling away and rushing to the door. “My mother died, remember?”
The door slammed as Artis fled the room, leaving a thick silence in his wake.
“You should send him to a hut in the hills,” Alum told Kerran. He seemed unruffled by the disturbance and continued to partake of his soup, lips smacking in appreciation. “Once I was disrespectful to my grandmother so my father sent me to the hut for a whole summer, with only a knife and no food or water. I ate snakes and scorpions.” He gave a nostalgic chuckle and took another mouthful of soup. “Or you could just beat him.”
“That’s a thought,” Vaelin muttered, drawing a hard glance from Kerran.
What had passed between them had been a brief thing, born of mutual loneliness in the months after the war’s end when the absence of those they had lost felt like a raw, bleeding wound. They had both known it would never last. Close as they became, their shared affection was not the kind that blossoms into something that could endure. It had ended amicably, at her insistence. She blamed it on the minor scandal and burgeoning gossip their less-than-discreet nightly liaisons had engendered, though he had known that to be an excuse; throughout it all the mourning ribbons never went away. Even so, these five years later, Kerran continued to enjoy a certain leeway with the Tower Lord not afforded to others.
“Perhaps,” she said, “he would be better behaved if his uncle spent more time attending to family instead of endlessly scouring the countryside for more outlaws to hang.”
“He misses home,” Lohren said, voice soft and eyes distant as she stirred her mostly uneaten soup. “Our friends are all at the Point. Cara teaches school there now Father’s gone. She is firm but kind and they love her, which makes her heart hurt less. She misses Lorkan but won’t say so, even to herself.”
Kerran stared at her niece, face suddenly pale. “You’re doing it again,” she said in a thin whisper. “You said it didn’t happen anymore.”
“It doesn’t, mostly. But sometimes it comes back. I don’t tell you when it does, but Uncle Vaelin needs to know something.”
Lohren gave a wan smile and raised her face to Vaelin, eyes wide and unblinking. He knew she wasn’t seeing him, or anything else in this room. “Last night I dreamt of a wolf. He was very big and very beautiful. Also, old. So old. He’s showed me many things. One was a man, also old but not nearly as old as the wolf. He’s worn many faces, lived many lives. Done so many things. He’s come such a long way, Uncle. He has something to tell you.” A line appeared in Lohren’s smooth brow as she frowned, a shadow passing over her small face. She blinked and he saw a tear trace down her cheek. “But he has people to kill first.”
The wolf. It had been so long since he last saw it, but the memory was as sharp and real as if it had been moments before, in the Great Northern Forest when its mighty howl summoned the Seordah Sil to war against the Volarians. All the other encounters tumbled through his mind in a rush. That first glimpse in the Urlish Forest before it had intervened to save him from the assassins, a vision of silver-grey predatory beauty licking blood from its jaws. Its snarl in the Martishe that had made him step back from the brink of outright murder. Outside the walls of Linesh during the Alpiran war before it summoned the sandstorm that saved him, but failed to save Dentos. Said we should listen for the wolf’s call, Nortah had said, words spoken to him by a dead man in a dream. Vaelin well knew the wolf’s call often brought salvation, but it also brought death.