The Tiger and the Wolf by [email protected] Read Free Book Online

the Wolf, with the knowledge that she was not good
enough for his god, nor would ever be. Akrit Stone River, her
father, she hated – he had been the tyrant set over her simply by
her birth. He had got her on her unwilling mother, and then he
had her mother disposed of.
But the man she feared was called Broken Axe. He was not
even one of the tribe’s hunters: a wolf who walked alone, save
when Akrit summoned him. Most years, as the nights grew long,
he drifted in to find shelter from the cold with the Winter Runners. But Broken Axe was a lone wolf, a law unto himself.
Somehow, she had convinced herself that she would not see
him this winter, but here he was, trailing into the village unlooked
for, past midnight.
He was a tall, long-limbed man with narrow eyes and a
broken nose, and if he had ever cared to challenge her father,
then he could have been chief of the Winter Runners. Everyone
knew, but nobody said, that he was the one man Akrit Stone
River might fear. Broken Axe gave him no cause, though. He
showed no signs of seeking to lead, and when Akrit had a task
for him, no matter what, he named his price and performed it,
without fail.
Such as killing Maniye’s mother.
This was the same man. When the Tiger had given up a child
into the world for Akrit’s purposes, when the screaming and the
spitting of the birth was done, this was the man who had taken
her into the woods and murdered her. When no other would do
it – Akrit would not invite ill luck by bloodying his own hands
over the mother of his child, and Maniye had heard her mother
was a priestess too, always bad fortune to kill – it fell to Broken
Axe to carry out the sentence. He had done it without qualm or
question, just as always. Everyone said there was something
missing in Broken Axe, who feared no curse nor what any might
think of him. He was hard as stone and iron together.
And here he was, and he would sit by Kalameshli and drink
Akrit’s beer, and his eyes would stray to Maniye, as they always
did, as though comparing her growing face and form to his
memories of the woman he had slain.
Abruptly she was a tiger again, without choosing it, and padding back towards the pit and its lonely occupant.
3
    The history of the Crown of the World was a chronicle of the
harsh land and brittle winters that either hardened the people
there like old leather or drove them out. Winter Runners, Cave
Dwellers, Shadow Eaters, Eyriemen, each had seized its chance
to rule the rest, risen to its prime, then fallen in turn. The Wolf
were strongest now, but the Crown of the World was a mutinous
kingdom. No tribe had ever mastered it for long.
    In the Riverlands of the south they told a different story,
about building and growth. The Sun River Nation, that had
once been just an idea in the heads of a handful of River Lord
chieftains, had pushed its own borders steadily eastwards along
the banks of the Tsotec. All the other tribes had knelt before
them, not destroyed or exiled but consumed with the voracity of
the River Lords’ own gluttonous totem, to be made a part of the
body of the Sun River Nation that stretched out its length along
the river.
    That part of the river that was the Nation’s heartland was
known as the head of the Tsotec, with the fragmented islands of
the estuary forming the teeth in her jaws. Above the falls that
framed the River Lords’ great city of Atahlan, where the river
turned northwards and began gathering in its tributaries, this
was the Tsotec’s back – rough and uneven and cutting into the
side of the Plains before her many tails split into the rivers and
lakes and thousand streams of the Crown of the World.
    On the back of the Tsotec, heading from the endless summer
of the Riverlands north to where winter was already gathering,
moved three boats. Long and narrow, hide stretched around
wooden spars, they were sturdy enough to forge through the
current with the sweat of their oarsmen, light