The Reawakened (7 page)

He let his lungs expand, savoring the new Wolverine power. He’d never felt weak or fragile, but compared to now, the man of just ten days ago was little more than a mouse. So what if Raven had passed him by? He wouldn’t trade this feeling for anything.

Especially now. When his legs began to ache from the hours of running, he only had to think of Lania’s face lit with laughter, or her long red curls blazing in the sunset. And then think of how her killers’ necks would feel, shattered between his hands.

They’d called her a Wasp, said she’d turned on them in a fury. But Nilik knew from the beauty she molded out of scraps of cloth and clay that Lania was—would have been—a Spider woman, an artist. She’d felt the unmistakable calling since they were children.

Trees blocked the bright moonlight as he entered a steeply sloped ravine. The tracks of Lycas’s team led down a gentle trail to his left, no doubt because of the pack horses, which meant Nilik could make up ground by climbing straight down and up the other side of the ravine. Maybe he’d even catch them before the end of the night. Then on to Velekos, and vengeance.

He clambered down the steep wall, grasping rocks and shrubs to keep from falling into the streambed. By the time he reached the bottom, his knees ached from the strain, and his strength was beginning to ebb. Wolverines weren’t made for climbing, he reminded himself.

The stream was nearly dry, unusual even for this time of year. Everything seemed to be dying. It was as if the presence of the Ilions had made the land lose its will to live.

A short hop took him over the stream, and after a moment to catch his breath, Nilik climbed, letting the memories stoke his strength.

He’d wrangled every detail of Lania’s death out of his uncle, horrors Lycas hadn’t told the rest of the family. The Descendant monsters had strewn parts of her body all around Velekos, displaying them on street corners. At the entrance to her own neighborhood, the Acrosia, the place where the revolution was coming to a boil, her head had been placed on a pike.

Nilik’s foot slipped. His hands scrabbled for a grip but seized only loose soil. He slid several feet before a jutting stone knocked him off balance, backward into nothing.

He yelped, anticipating the bone-crushing impact on the streambed. But as he fell, his body took over, twisting and bending by instinct, then relaxing just before the ground slammed into him.

Nilik stared at the damp soil beneath his face. Nothing hurt. Last month such a fall would have broken his limbs, maybe even killed him.

Kneeling on all fours, struggling for breath, he thought of Lania. No one knew what they’d meant to each other. No one knew how a year ago, on her family’s last visit, they’d stolen three hours alone in the drafty tent of one of his friends. No one knew how Nilik had begged her to stay in Tiros where it was safe, how he’d sworn to marry her after their Bestowings.

He pressed his forehead into the mud. They hadn’t made love, though they’d come close. Now he regretted stopping, regretted his stupid assumption that someday they’d have another chance, another time when he could make it perfect for her.

He thought of the pale, freckled skin on Lania’s shoulders, the gleam in her green eyes as she’d touched him and held him with the urgency of the besieged. The Descendants had carved that skin and extinguished that gleam forever.

Nilik’s fingers dug deep into the soil, and he swallowed a shriek of anguish. They would pay. If it took his last breath, they would pay.

He got to his feet, stretching cautiously, feeling for sprains or wounds from the fall. Nothing. He checked his dagger belt to make sure his weapons were fastened into their sheaths.

As he passed his hand over the hilt of each blade, a surge of power coursed through him. Wolverine had altered more than Nilik’s body. His mind was now calmed only by thoughts of cutting, twisting, ripping. The bloodlust was like a constant tang on the back of his tongue.

This time instead of climbing the rocks, he loped up the path, following the trail of Lycas’s troupe.

Hundreds of steps later, he reached the top of the ravine, panting. He stumbled as he stepped onto the flat land, and he longed to sink down and rest his screaming legs.

“Halt!”

Nilik froze at the sound of the unfamiliar voice from above.

“Put your hands over your head,” the voice boomed. “Now!”

Nilik hesitated. With his new strength, he could take on several Descendant soldiers, but not without his weapons. He raised one hand over his head, while letting the other drift past his dagger belt. His thumb opened the clasp that held his favorite blade, the one Lycas had given him last year, as if he’d known they would someday be Spirit-brothers.

One thing was for certain: he wouldn’t be taken alive.

Standing in the tree’s shadow, he could hide his movement from weak Descendant eyes. His fingers slipped around the hilt.

“I saw that.” The voice took on a new edge. “Step forward, hands up—both of them—or you’ll be shot.”

Shot?
Descendants didn’t use bows and arrows; they thought the weapons were cowardly, womanly, without honor.

Nilik raised his other palm and walked out from under the trees. A rocky ridge loomed before him, a dark mass against the starry sky.

“Nilik?” came another, older voice. “What are you doing here?”

He let out a breath. Uncle Lycas.

“Hector!” Nilik shouted, hoping Jula had guessed the password correctly.

A short silence followed, then Lycas called, “Stay. I’ll come down.”

While he waited for his uncle to appear, Nilik fought to steady his breath. If his sister had misled him, he’d be in for a long, possibly unconscious ride home to Tiros. At the top of the ridge, two archers stood with their arrows trained upon him, no doubt suspecting him of being a decoy.

Finally Lycas appeared from a hidden trail at the bottom of the ridge. Behind him strode a slightly younger man with a dark, thick beard and the same carved wolverine claw that hung around Lycas’s and Nilik’s necks.

“I thought your mother wouldn’t let you go.” Lycas handed Nilik a water skin.

Nilik took a deep draught and wiped the sweat from his face. “I knew the password, didn’t I?”

Lycas grinned and raised his arms as if to embrace Nilik, then seemed to reconsider. He turned to the other man. “This is Sirin, my executive officer and second-in-command.”

Nilik bowed, feeling his calves and hamstrings quiver at the strain. “It’s an honor.”

Sirin examined him, then nodded and returned the bow. “Welcome to our band of bandits.”

“Bandits?” Nilik furrowed his brow at Lycas. “What’s he mean?”

“It’s what the Ilions call us. They won’t recognize a rebellion, because that would admit weakness, so they treat us like criminals, even though we’ve never attacked a civilian.”

“Thugs, they also call us.” Sirin scratched his chin. “What’s the other one I like?”

“Hooligans,” Lycas added. “Ruffians.”

“Brigands.” Sirin snapped his fingers. “That’s my favorite. I’d never even heard that word before I found out I was one.”

Lycas gestured for them to follow him up the ridge. “It serves us well,” he said to Nilik. “They won’t deploy enough soldiers against us to do the job right, because that would mean we were a threat. They send just enough men to donate arms and horses to our cause.”

“And uniforms,” Sirin added. “Which make good disguises once the blood’s washed out.”

Nilik chuckled, then realized Sirin wasn’t joking. He feigned a cough to cover his embarrassment.

Lycas glanced back at them. “Now it’s to the point where even if they tried a major military operation to stop us, we’d still likely win. We fight on uneven terrain where their horses are useless, we wait in ambush instead of marching in the open like idiots, we fight at night or in bad weather whenever possible. Above all, we’re not afraid to retreat.”

“I don’t understand,” Nilik admitted, his mind as tired as his legs.

Lycas paused on a level part of the trail and waited for them to catch up. “We’re not fighting the same kind of war as the Ilions. They’re still locked into notions of a warrior’s honor and glory. We have no honor except loyalty to the cause, no glory other than survival.”

Nilik made a frustrated noise in his throat. “Then how are we ever going to win?”

“Listen to me.” Lycas put his hands on Nilik’s shoulders. “We don’t need to win. We need to not lose.” He cut off Nilik’s scoff with a light shake. “Let me finish.”

Chastised, Nilik sobered his face. “Sorry. Go on.”

“Imagine a dog. That dog has one flea. Is it in any danger?” Nilik shook his head, and Lycas continued. “Now imagine that same dog with a hundred fleas.” He tightened his grip on Nilik’s shoulders. “A thousand fleas.”

Nilik resisted the urge to scratch his own arms at the thought.

“A dog with a thousand fleas,” Lycas said, “is bleeding to death, little by little. The fleas can’t kill it directly, but they can drive it mad. It thinks about nothing but scratching and biting its own skin. Can a dog kill a flea by scratching?”

Nilik shrugged. “No. The flea just jumps to another part of the dog.”

“Exactly.” Lycas let go of him. “We’re the fleas. Not a glorious image, but it’s the only way we can stand against their superior numbers and arms.”

“So we just annoy them into ending the occupation?” Nilik tried to sound sincere instead of obnoxious.

“Even a thousand fleas can’t kill a dog,” Lycas said patiently. “But one day, when it has a disease, or a wound, it’ll be too weak to survive.” He smiled. “We will have sucked too much blood.”

“So what’s the disease?” Nilik asked. “What’s the wound?”

“The disease is in Asermos, where our people have resisted the occupation since its first days. They’ve turned the Ilions into unwilling tyrants. Martial law is expensive, not to mention a political disaster.” He turned back to the path. “The wound, I hope, will be in Velekos.”

They continued up the ridge in silence. Nilik burned to inflict that wound, and a thousand others, on the Ilion army who had taken his home, enslaved his father and murdered the woman he loved.

He didn’t care so much that Raven hadn’t come for his nephew—Lycas had never put much stock in prophecies, or anything else he couldn’t see and touch. But why not Hawk or Horse or Fox? Lycas would have been happy for any other Guardian Spirit to claim Nilik, as long as it wasn’t one of the warriors, Bear or his own Wolverine. The thought of watching his nephew die in battle made the blood pound behind Lycas’s eyes.

His fingers twitched at the memory of his own twin’s death and the moments afterward. The look of agony on Nilo’s face, fading to blank. Then a skull crumbling in Lycas’s hands like an eggshell, brains oozing between his knuckles onto the blood-slicked battleground. The scream of Nilo’s killer rising to a higher pitch than a man should be capable of, only to be cut short when his throat left his body. Lycas’s sole regret was that he could only kill the Descendant soldier once.

He couldn’t remember the rest of that afternoon, but others said he’d gone mad with grief and fury, savaging the enemy, both the living and the dead. He wished he could remember. It would have been a good memory.

Lycas studied Nilik’s face as the young man focused on the words and plans of his new platoon leader, a first-phase but battle-tested Bear from Velekos. In the old days, Bears tended to be in charge of strategy, while Wolverines made up the masses of troops. But in this sort of warfare, a Wolverine’s wiliness could take a man further in the army than a Bear’s meticulous planning.

Lycas sighed. Though he wished it weren’t so, Nilik had all the attributes of a Wolverine—intelligence, discipline and courage that teetered just on the sane side of recklessness. Spirits knew he had the will to fight—maybe too much.

Sirin approached and sat next to Lycas, balancing two plates of food in one hand while he unscrewed the top of a water flask with the thumb of the other. “I can’t get used to seeing you clean-shaven, my friend. Almost didn’t recognize you when you got here yesterday.” He rubbed his own dark brown beard, which was thick and ragged from months in the wilderness.

Lycas accepted the extra plate and spoke without taking his eyes off Nilik. “Can you use him here?”

“Your nephew? I thought you were bringing him to the camp near Velekos.”

“I’d rather not.” He couldn’t explain why, not even to himself. Nilik knew the password, but Rhia had been so adamant about keeping him in Tiros.

Sirin examined Nilik as he gnawed a strip of dried venison. “What experience has he got?”

“Basic weapons? Some. Mountain warfare? None. But you always say, the greener they come, the easier they are to train.”

Sirin grimaced and scratched the back of his neck. “I’m up to my ears in recruits.”

“Success will do that.”

“Every company in the battalion is full. More recruits means we have to add a fourth company. That would put us at regiment strength, which adds a whole other level of command that we can’t handle.”

Lycas took the water flask. “You can handle it.”

“We’ve got problems with discipline, training. Half the Bears leading these platoons couldn’t persuade a dog to lick its own balls. Then there are the logistical issues.”

“None of which will be made worse by taking Nilik.”

Sirin let out a harsh sigh, then lowered his voice. “I thought the whole point of Nilik being here was to go to Velekos, find the thugs who killed that girl. He’s a motivated fighter.”

“Too motivated. His thirst for vengeance will make him careless.”

“It sure hasn’t hurt
your
judgment.”

Slowly Lycas turned his gaze on his executive officer. Though his eyes were narrowed in contemplation of Sirin’s words, the younger Wolverine took it as a glare of intimidation.

Sirin glanced away, cowed. “As you wish, sir. I’ll reassign him before you leave tomorrow.”

“Thank you, as always, for your candor.” Lycas made himself add, “This time it worked.”

Sirin cocked his head. “So you don’t want me to reassign Nilik?”

“I’ll take him to Velekos and train him myself. You were right.”

“I was?” Sirin blinked rapidly. “Wait. Explain this, so I can remember it for future reference, and so I know I’m not hallucinating.”

“I wanted you to keep Nilik here so I wouldn’t have to watch him die like my brother. That’s a bad way to make a decision.” He took a gulp of water and handed back the flask, already missing the taste of Tiron bitter ale. “Besides, you’re in charge of personnel. I trust your advice.”

Sirin chuckled. “A year ago, you would’ve pounded my face into the dust for questioning you. You’re getting old, Lycas.”

“I think the word is
wise.
”

From behind them came the slap of small boots against stone. Lycas turned to see Sani, the third-phase Eagle woman he’d brought from Tiros as a lookout.

“Sir, Ilion soldiers,” she said. “Twenty men, plus an officer on horseback.”

Lycas hurried to the eastern edge of the ridge, Sirin and Sani on his heels. He squinted at the dusky rolling hills that lay between here and Asermos. Though gifted with excellent night vision, he couldn’t discern details at such a distance.

“Are they headed this way?” Lycas asked Sani.

“No, they’re passing south to north, far enough there’s no way they can see us.” She shoved the strands of gray-brown hair out of her pale face and focused on the passing Ilions. “Looks like they’re on the road to Tiros, probably to the northwest garrison.”

“Twenty-one, you said.”

“Correct, sir.”

He tallied up the number of fighters at his and Sirin’s disposal. They were nearly equally matched with the Ilions, not even counting the Tirons Lycas had brought.

“Release the bait,” he told Sani.

When she was gone, he turned to see Nilik approach.

“Descendants?” his nephew asked him. “Coming here?”

“Maybe. Our archers will drop them, but it’s up to us to finish them off, up close.” He put a hand on Nilik’s shoulder. “If you need to debrief afterward, come to me.”

Nilik swallowed, and Lycas knew immediately that the boy had never killed before. He nodded and choked out a, “Thank you, sir.”

A Cougar hurried to the farthest edge of the ridge to their right, a flaming arrow nocked in his longbow. A sheet of parchment fluttered, attached to the shaft.

The arrow arced across the darkening sky like a meteor, leaving a green afterglow on Lycas’s vision. It would only land halfway to the Ilion soldiers, but they might come to investigate it. When they did, they’d find a note with nothing but Lycas’s initial in bold blue paint next to a Wolverine paw print.

“Few can resist,” Sirin told Nilik. “Junior officers are so ambitious.” He turned to Lycas. “I can only imagine what reward they’d receive for capturing or killing you.”

“Or you.”

“Pah. I’d be a consolation prize.” He shifted his shoulders. “By the way, the bait worked while you were in Tiros, so at least the lower-level Ilion commanders believed you never left the hills.”

“Good.”

Lycas had no desire to be a celebrity. But by fixating on him, the Descendants spent all their energy trying to find and defeat one person. He understood what the Ilions did not: that his death would make no difference.

It wasn’t
his
revolution, after all. It was everyone’s.