The Rise of the Fire Moon

  25.

  Balance Upset

  “So did you manage to catch the renegade?”

  Tir’s ears rose at the Gatherer’s whispered question. Someone had limped down into her hollow, and she was moving amongst her herb-boulders now, collecting the plants she would need. Her visitor had taken a seat not far away from where Tir was lying down, but Tir did not look up. He was pretending to be asleep. His pelt still burned with shame at Liyra’s ruling; he had tried to be brave, to make a stand, but in the pack’s eyes he had only been sent away like a misbehaving pup…or the dangerous outsider he had once been. Whichever was worse, he was in no mood to explain himself to another wolf.

  “Oh, yes,” came the very sarcastic reply. “Yes, Kesol is telling her a story at this very moment.”

  “No need to be rude,” Palva hissed. “How did she escape this time?”

  “I’m not certain; it was all a mass of confusion, but I think that—”

  Crash! Something came storming down Palva’s tunnel and skidding to a halt in her hollow. There was an indignant growl from the wolf Palva was speaking with, and Palva groaned.

  “What do you want, Nerasa? Did you get flung into a tree as well?”

  “No! I—oh, of course, sorry, Xelind. Does it hurt much?”

  “Close your mouth,” growled Xelind. “I notice you did not bother to fight at all.”

  Tir could almost hear Nerasa smirking.

  “Wouldn’t make any difference,” she said. “Everyone knows that Captain’s already got your name down for chief Sentinel. Excited?”

  Xelind did not answer, and Nerasa gave an exaggerated sigh.

  “Yes, well, I gotta tell Tir something,” she said to Palva. “D’you mind?”

  “Can it wait?”

  “It’s urgent!”

  “What about?” Palva asked suspiciously.

  “You know! Everyone knows! It’s awful—”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Everything’s wrong! It’s all upside down—I’ll bet she’s gonna come hunting us now.”

  “She tried to kill Alpha Liyra,” Xelind said. “She was too bold.”

  “Yeah, but we got her in time. Losai bit her hard; it slowed her down a lot.”

  “She almost killed Liyra?” Palva said, sounding alarmed.

  Tir’s eyes flew open. Xelind was staring at him from atop a boulder, his blue eyes narrowed and unyielding. An ugly purple bruise was seeping a splotch of blood into his fur.

  “I see you’ve decided to come around,” he said. “The Captain told me about your mad spell. I’m afraid you’ve missed a—”

  Nerasa whipped around, her fur bristling and yellow eyes wide.

  “It’s the renegade!” she said in her loud voice, cutting him off. “She—she’s…”

  “She’s not a renegade,” Xelind said, licking one of his cuts.

  Tir struggled to rise. He swayed, and Palva gave him a sharp look.

  “What?” he said, feeling dazed. “She’s not a—”

  “She’s not, she’s not!” Nerasa yelped, leaping up as well. “I can’t understand how she did it.”

  “But—”

  “She’s not!” Nerasa rushed on. “We were chasing her, and we almost had her—she was cornered! Then, there was a bit of fighting and that’s when Xelind got thrown into a tree—”

  “This is serious, Nerasa,” Palva said sharply.

  “I am serious!”

  “What happened?” Tir demanded.

  “She was cornered,” Nerasa continued, turning back to face Tir, yellow eyes wide. “And then, just as we were about to close in—”

  Tir shuddered. They really were going to kill her.

  “…we caught a weird scent. I mean, a really weird scent—we hadn’t noticed it before, I mean, the air was all full of the scent of fear and blood and things of that sort. But it was the scent of a whole pack of wolves!”

  Tir fell down with a thump.

  “A—a whole pack of wolves?” His voice was shaking.

  Nerasa nodded, yellow eyes wide. “Yes! Can you believe it? This whole time, we thought she was the only one in on this. Moon in a hole, is Alpha in trouble now.”

  “But what can we do?”

  Xelind looked up. “Well,” he said serenely. “obviously, this pack is going to attack us. I don’t know when they came to the forest; maybe they had been hiding this whole time—Rya knows we’d never have known, being that there are so many shadows in that cursed wood. But why did they suddenly decide to reveal themselves? We don’t know. We’ve all thought the renegade to be a half-mad loner, haven’t we? To go throwing about outrageous threats the way she did.” He sounded almost amused. “One wolf can’t possibly be capable of doing such things. But now she isn’t one wolf. Just the thought of a whole pack of wolves like her, wolves who hold the same convictions as she…” He nodded with grave significance and went back to licking his cuts.

  Palva shot him a look of disgust. “You don’t sound very unsettled by it all,” she said. “I suppose our good Captain has filled you in on the grand plan? What are the fine points? Disembowelment? It’s what we’d do to survive, isn’t it?”

  Tir averted his eyes. Up until this point, Palva had been behaving with something near civility for the white Sentinel. But the hatred ringing in her voice now showed that she hadn’t forgotten anything.

  “How very eloquent of you,” Xelind said without looking up. “But no, I haven’t any idea what Captain Leron is planning. I would think that you, Gatherer, would know more of the plans than I—”

  “I won’t have anything to do with that bloodthirsty tyrant and his plans! Nor will I put up with anyone who associates with him!”

  “And where does that take us, Gatherer?” Xelind asked, his voice deadly soft. “Have you stored away any plants that aren’t poisonous?”

  “Errrm,” Nerasa said, her yellow eyes darting between Palva and Xelind. “I don’t know what we’re talking about, but we’ve gotten a bit off-subject.”

  “Yes, we have, thank you,” Xelind said tonelessly. He looked up at Tir. “I have heard that you had something of great importance to tell Alpha Liyra before the hunt? What—”

  “Nothing you need to know!” Palva said. “Go back to licking your cuts!”

  Tir turned away, their angry voices fading in his mind. His head was spinning with a million different thoughts. A whole pack of wolves. Where had they come from? Why were they here now? Had the renegade summoned them? She’s not a renegade, he thought with a prickling chill. She has a pack of her own.

  “How do we know that this pack really is the pack of the renegade?” Palva asked, after there had been a long, terse silence. “They could be anything.”

  “The howl,” said Nerasa. Her ears flattened. “When we ran, she howled. Mocking us, you know.” she scuffed at the ground. “And the other pack answered her. We could scent them; she had led us to them.”

  “They’re coming for us,” Xelind said with eerie calmness, not looking up. “They’re going to come and kill us all. And we thought we could end everything tonight.”

  Palva was shaking her head and Nerasa was walking in stiff circles at the entrance to the grass tunnel. The air in the hollow, always fresh and spicy with the sharp scent of Palva’s herbs, was buzzing as though it were filled with tiny, apprehensive insects.

  Tir looked away, curling up in a knot on the grass in a sudden, dizzying wave of tiredness. He was no longer worried about the renegade—shocked, yes. But the renegade had a pack of her own and, that being true, now there were other wolves in greater danger. Tir did not have much sympathy for Alpha Liyra—she was set in her ways; she wasn’t heeding any of the warnings—but others, such as Nerasa, Kesol, and Palva were innocent of the alpha’s foolish decisions. Tir was worried for his new pack, his friends. For once, he did not feel the usual prick of guilt at this thought—his old pack was dead, and he mourned for them, but their troubles were ended. He must defend what he still had.

/>   “Oh!” Nerasa said from the corner, in a tone of sudden revelation. “Oh, yes, Palva—Alpha wants you to come to a Council meeting when you’re done. I was supposed to tell you sooner, sorry.”

  Palva groaned.

  “No doubt, they will be wanting my opinion on this renegade pack, won’t they?” she said. Tir wondered if he had imagined the line of bitter sarcasm in her voice.

  “I suppose they’re gonna talk about all that important exciting stuff, you know. How we’re gonna deal with this pack. I suppose Alpha’s gonna want some of your plans.”

  Palva groaned again, and there was a muffled thump that sounded as though she had pounded her head against a boulder.

  “You okay?” Nerasa asked, sounding alarmed.

  “Fine,” Palva growled through gritted teeth. “We’re all fine.”

  “Alpha’s not. She’s in big trouble, and she knows it. But you can’t really blame her, I mean, who would have guessed?”

  Palva said nothing.

  Tir did not look up. He did not want to see the dark, stormy anger that was no doubt flitting across Palva’s face. He could feel it in the air already—bitter and sharp as blood. Who would have guessed? Who would have guessed that the tides would turn and the hunters become the hunted? Who would have guessed?

  “Oh, and by the way—Tir, Captain said for all wolves to report back to their dens immediately. That’s why I was supposed to come down here in the first place—sorry, I got a bit sidetracked.”

  “Why?” Palva asked.

  “I dunno,” Nerasa said. “I guess he wants ‘em all in one place. Maybe he’s afraid the renegade pack will attack tonight. Or tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow? Could this be the last night Alpha Liyra’s pack had to live? Tir shuddered, and a paw jabbed in his ribs. Palva was standing over him, her face haggard and worried.

  “Get up,” she said quietly, then her voice regained its usual briskness. “Go on, then, get out of here.” She padded over to her herb boulder, limping on her three legs.

  Tir shook the fragments of dead grass that had collected in his thick pelt. He did not want to return to the redoubt main, where the other wolves would no doubt be angry and itching for the renegade’s blood. He did not want to face any more fury and fear at the moment—he didn’t think he could take this any longer.

  “Can’t I stay here?” he pleaded, realizing how childish he sounded.

  Palva looked at him sharply, as though she knew what he was thinking.

  “No. Do as your good Captain tells you.”

  Reluctantly, Tir turned and padded up the grass tunnel, his tail whispering over the grass behind him.

  The redoubt main was empty, of course. A few wispy strands of dead grass fluttered on the hard dirt ground, making little sighing noises as the cold night breeze swept through. Tir looked up. Sure enough, the orange fire-moon was there, glowering down at him. He shuddered, wishing it wasn’t there. Even Blacksky was preferable compared to the eerie, unnatural shade of Rya’s eye. He jumped as a sudden explosion of growling erupted from a cluster of dens nearby—it sounded as though the Sentinels were scuffling amongst themselves again. Were the Hunters doing the same?

  Tir sighed and padded over to the familiar ledges and dens on the Hunters’ end of the cliff face. He could see them gathered in a dark clump at the base of the stony wall, a few voices floating in and out of his hearing as he approached.

  To Tir’s surprise, the Hunters were behaving as though nothing awful had happened. Kesol was leaning against a nearby boulder, telling a story in an unnecessarily loud voice. Mluma was lying on the ground, listening to him with rapt attention. By her lingering scent, Simetra had just left. And Raatri…Tir squinted at the dark levels and pits in the stone above him, but could not see the timid little wolf.

  “And so then,” Kesol was saying; he was shouting, for some reason. “At that moment, the beetles began to dance and the pebbles began to sing, the way bears do when it rains. Ha! They thought they could fool me, but all the while—”

  “Kesol,” Tir interrupted, walking around Mluma. “Where is Raatri? Is he here?”

  “Why, the last time I saw him he was busy gathering bullfrogs near the—”

  Tir twitched an ear irritably. “Where’s Raatri?” he asked again, this time to Mluma.

  “He’s here,” she said in her soft, wispy voice. “He didn’t like the renegade hunt.”

  Tir looked up. For the first time, he noticed a tiny knot of quivering black fur on one of the lower shelves, crying softly.

  “Go on then, Kesol,” Mluma urged. “What did you do after that?”

  Tir padded away to his own den, too weary to want to listen to one of Kesol’s nonsense tales. His paws were heavy weights that dragged him down as he clambered up over the low lip of boulders. The earthy den floor felt soft and familiar, and Tir curled up with a sigh.

  Poor Raatri. Ever since the white renegade had come and threatened Alpha Liyra that one terrible night, he had been deathly terrified of her. Tir knew that Raatri was convinced that the renegade was no normal wolf—he had caught him telling a hushed story to a sympathetic Salka about how the renegade was a demon or a ghost in disguise, therefore explaining how she had managed to vanish and reappear out of thin air in her forest. Tir did not believe that the renegade was what Raatri said she was, but she was still a strange creature. A whole pack of wolves like her was a terrible thought indeed—but it was true.

  Who were these strange wolves? Were they the renegade’s pack? Were they all renegades, from different places, summoned by the white renegade’s call? Her friends, perhaps? After all, Alpha Liyra had never explored the land that was beyond the forest. For all they knew, there could be an entire army of wolves living out there, waiting, preparing.

  His mind went back to his shocked, half-frozen thoughts the night the renegade had first come to their redoubt with her threats. He remembered thinking then, how a cornered animal is more dangerous than anything else. A creature fighting with nothing to lose can tear down beasts three times its size; the will to survive is the most powerful driving force in nature. Liyra’s pack had learned that in the marsh, and they were learning it again, from the renegade.

  And now they were outnumbered.