***
For the past few days, Tir’s fighting lessons with Xelind had continued, in spite of Palva’s protests. This time, however, it was not because of Tir’s foolish trusting—Captain Leron, having learned of Xelind’s failure to kill Tir, had taken it upon himself to give Xelind as many opportunities as possible to complete the cruel task. He had issued orders that the lessons must go on, proclaiming to all who would listen of what a good idea it was to teach their weakest member how to defend himself, especially now with the looming danger of the renegade pack, and he had changed the lessons to twice a day rather than once—one lesson at dawn, one at evening. The result was that Tir was almost always bruised and sore—but there were compensations.
No one could deny the fact that Tir was stronger, faster, and tougher; his fighting skills had seen dramatic improvement. Whether it was because of the increase in lessons or the results of the hard months beginning to show, no one knew. But Tir, having realized how dangerous Captain Leron could be, practiced and fought with a new, furious vigor. Xelind was beginning to accompany him down to Palva’s hollow every day, the skinny white Sentinel now bearing wounds of his own.
“Better. Finally better. One could almost say you’ve improved.”
Tir picked himself up from the ground. It was lavish praise, coming from Xelind—the closest thing to a compliment Tir had ever received from him.
“I’m shocked, outsider,” Xelind said. “Shocked. I admit, I never believed you had it in you.”
“Oh, shut up, Xelind,” said Nerasa, who was perched upon a nearby boulder, and seemed to be thoroughly enjoying herself. “You never believe anything good about anybody. He’d have to be an idiot to not have improved by now.”
Ever since Captain Leron had decreed that the lessons must go on, Palva, who still mistrusted Xelind but could do nothing to change his orders, had begun sending Nerasa along with them out into the fields—just in case Tir needed any extra help.
But whether this was a necessary precaution, it was impossible to tell, though Palva refused to take any risk. Whatever he would have done otherwise, Xelind could do nothing with Nerasa present, and he came back into the redoubt every evening with a new excuse for the Captain on why Tir had survived that day’s lessons.
“…you’re a thousand times better, Tir,” Nerasa was saying, swaying from side to side atop her boulder, her black fur buffeted in the wind. “The renegade’d do well to watch her back tomorrow! Oh, I’d even bet you could beat Captain one day if you wanted to. And who wouldn’t want to?”
“What did I do wrong, Xelind?” Tir said, before Xelind could snarl a reply. “I know that my second retaliation was a bit unstable, but other than that—”
“Your eyes gave you away,” Xelind said, bending his head to lick a paw as though he had never been bothered. “Again. And again. You must learn to hide your intentions, otherwise you would never win in a proper fight.”
“So how do I do that?” Tir said. “Look in the opposite direction?”
“That is one method. But a flawed one. The best way—”
“Close your eyes,” whispered Nerasa. “That’s what I do, whenever I look at him.”
Xelind spared her a glance of deepest disgust.
“As I told you in our first lesson, you must try and trick me,” he went on, turning around. “Though, again, as I said then, it will be harder when I am expecting the unexpected.”
“So what do I do now?” Tir said, puzzled. “The expected? Do I do something you’d expect me to do?”
Xelind raised his brow. “That would have been unusually clever, yes,” he said, and then he gave a thin smile. “But it is also clever not to tell your opponent your plans. Try again.”
“Poke him in the eye, Tir,” Nerasa said gleefully. Xelind did not turn to look at her, but his ears flattened and his blue eyes narrowed.
“I understand that your vermin had to come because of the fear I may rip you limb from limb,” he said through gritted teeth. “But can you not do anything to quiet her?”
Tir shifted awkwardly. He knew that Nerasa, like Palva, did not like Xelind and was trying very hard to get under his skin. Xelind deserved it, too; but at the same time, it was disrupting their lesson—which, in the shadow of the upcoming battle, he needed.
“Nerasa?” he muttered, under Xelind’s frosty stare. “Could you please—”
“You!” called a voice from behind them. Tir spun around, startled.
Captain Leron was standing behind him, surveying the three wolves with glittering grey eyes and casting them all in his dark shadow. He did not look pleased. Tir took a step back.
“M—me?” he said, his voice hoarse. Leron turned towards him with a look of disdain.
“Not you, outsider. It’s a Sentinel I’m looking for—in fact, I’ve been looking for her for quite awhile.”
Nerasa flattened her ears.
“And you’ll never believe what Alpha Liyra has just told me,” Leron said, his voice growing tense with restrained anger. “That she has gone fighting with Xelind and the outsider—and has been for the past month, every day, at sunrise and sunset.” He rounded on Nerasa, lips curling in a snarl. “What do you think you’re doing? Are you trying to avoid work?”
“No way, Captain mister,” Nerasa said. “I’ve been busy. Busy helping, and also hunting..”
“Have you?” Leron said, seeming to grow angrier and angrier as he spoke. He did not like the fact that Palva had deceived him. Tir didn’t think he had ever seen him so angry before. “You’re good at hunting, aren’t you, Sentinel? No, I know better. That’s a bold lie, you eavesdropping little—”
“Wait, see here,” said Nerasa, sounding surprised. “There’s no need to be rude…”
Her voice trailed away at Leron’s gruesome, forced smile.
“Insolence,” he stated. “There’s no reason for me to tolerate this any longer. As of late, some wolves have been taking advantage of this situation with the renegade, as if the order of this pack has dissolved. I assure you, I will be telling the Alpha about this.”
“Okay, do that, but I’d like to just stay here for awhile—”
“Oh, no. You’re coming with me. And you will allow the outsider to practice his fighting in peace. Your chatter must be a great disturbance—correct, Xelind?”
“It is, sir,” Xelind said. Nerasa glared at him.
“Good, then,” she muttered. “I must be doing my job right.”
Leron cuffed her around the head, and she yelped.
“Hey!” Tir said angrily, jumping up. Leron’s head swiveled around to stare at him. “Why did you have to hit her? It’s not her fault! She was only—”
“—taking orders from the Gatherer?” Leron said. He was smiling again. It was unconvincing. “Oh, I know what’s going on, outsider. I know all of it.”
“Do you?” Tir said, and Leron’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t know half of it, sir! Palva was the only one who knew about the renegade—”
His words ended in a choked shout as Leron struck him across the face, hard. Tir stumbled backwards, blinded, the impact reverberating in his skull , the lights behind his eyes flashing from one color to the next, the earth rising to meet his face—
The next thing he knew, he was lying on the ground. Nerasa and Leron were gone. Only Xelind remained. The white Sentinel was sitting in the grass in front of him, staring at him. His head felt as though it had been crushed against a stone.
“You shouldn’t have done that, you know,” Xelind said. “He could kill you for it.”
Tir groaned, and tried to stand up. His legs wobbled and then buckled beneath him, sending him sprawling again. “Where’d Leron go?” he croaked, straining to see through the blur that still blocked his eyes. He shook his head to clear it away, but yelped as the motion woke sparks of pain in his head. “What happened?”
“He hit you. Very, very hard.”
“Why?”
“You angered him. He is the Capta
in. You cannot speak to him like that; only the Gatherer can get away with it. But it was an admirable try.”
Tir closed his eyes. A brief image flitted through his mind—Leron, whirling around, his face twisted halfway between a false smile and a snarl. Nerasa, behind him, had been grinning.
“Get up,” Xelind said.
Tir scowled at him from the ground, and struggled to rise. His legs wobbled a bit, but this time they held him. His clouded vision was clearing—Xelind looked less like a smudged, white cloud and more like the gaunt, eerie-eyed creature that he was.
“Where’s Nerasa?” Tir demanded, looking around. She and Leron were gone.
“He took her on a patrol. At least, that’s what he said. It took awhile for you to come around—he must have hit you hard.”
Tir gritted his teeth at the satisfied note in Xelind’s voice. Yew or not, some things would never change. It didn’t matter, though. Tir didn’t care about what Xelind said anymore. He wondered if Nerasa would be okay.
“She went alone with him? He won’t—he won’t hurt her or anything, will he?”
“I wouldn’t know. The Captain doesn’t like disobedience. And she defied his orders.”
“Palva told her to!”
“It isn’t so much her than it is the Gatherer. He knows she was behind it. But he cannot harm her, so he will take it out on Nerasa. I was supposed to kill you a long time ago, you know.”
“Then kill me now,” Tir said, finding himself annoyed by Xelind’s cold indifference. “Go on and do it, make your captain proud.”
“Don’t mock me, outsider.”
“Oh, do I make you angry? Angry enough to kill me, perhaps? You don’t like to be mocked, do you, Xelind? And yet you still call me ‘outsider.’”
“Because that’s what you are. You don’t belong in this pack.”
Tir took a step backwards, taken off-guard. He had been expecting Xelind to deny it, or even ignore it. But not this.
“So where do I belong, then?” he demanded. “As you seem to know so much? If this isn’t my pack, where do I belong?”
“I don’t know. You tell me. Where is your old pack?”
“They’re dead.”
“Where is your old territory?”
“Burned down.”
“Where are—”
“Why are you asking me these stupid questions?”
“You expected me to answer yours.”
There was an angry silence. Tir was burning holes into Xelind with his glare, but Xelind’s dead blue eyes were blank and unaffected. They stared at Tir, unblinking.
“Tell me,” Xelind said after a long time. “Do you hate me now?”
Tir groaned and turned away. “Not this again!” he said. “Why do you keep asking me that? No! I don’t hate you—I don’t hate anyone!”
“Not the renegade?”
“No!”
“Or Captain Leron?”
Tir silenced. Yes, he hated Leron. But he wasn’t about to tell that to Xelind—though he wasn’t sure if it would please or anger him.
“You do hate him,” Xelind said, interpreting his silence correctly. He sounded almost amused. “That’s what drove you to yell at him—and I could hear it in your voice.”
“Then let me guess,” Tir said. “I should go kill him, shouldn’t I? Is that what you’re going to tell me?”
“Would you kill him?”
Tir was startled by the question. It was a dangerous question—but, come to think of it, Leron himself would expect Tir to say yes. After all, he would kill Tir. But did Tir have the nerve to kill anyone—did he have that kind of hatred?
“No.”
Xelind was silent for a long time.
“Then you’re at a disadvantage, outsider,” he said. He sounded almost tired. “Someday, you will fight an enemy that has nothing whatsoever to lose, an enemy that would kill you in an instant and would drain his last breath to do so. What would you do then? Run away? Running can only take you so far.”
“Ha, ha,” Tir said sarcastically.
“It wasn’t a joke. Haven’t you noticed that even the renegade has stopped running? She ran out of space to run. But she will kill if she wins, so therefore she has a chance to win. If you do not kill, then you cannot win. It is a weakness, outsider.”
“Oh, please, do tell me about my weaknesses—I’ve forgotten them since the last lesson. I was just thinking that the best solution would be to kill myself, to save the rest of the pack from my incompetence. Isn’t that clever of me?”
“I’m still waiting to hear something clever from you. I see that I’ve angered you, as is routine, but you’ve yet to make anything of it. You’re taking my criticism poorly.”
“Then stop insulting me,” Tir spat. “I asked you to teach me to fight, not to convert me to your way of thinking. I’m tired of you bringing this up. Palva told me all about you and Leron, and the things he taught you. But you aren’t Leron, and I’m not you.”
“Clearly.”
“I don’t want to talk about killing, or hating. And I want you to stop asking me about it.”
“Do you want to live to see next summer?”
Tir was startled. “What?”
Xelind’s expression had not changed, and he didn’t blink. “I asked you if you want to live,” he said with a sort of sarcastic patience. “Because you seem to have grand, lofty ideas, and there’s a reason why there aren’t many wolves who share them. They don’t survive.”
“I’m not talking about surviving—”
“Then why did you ask to fight? Did you think it was as simple as baring your teeth and not getting bitten? The deer are capable of fighting, but they don’t seek to kill. That is why they are prey, and we hunt them. For one creature to live, another must die—you can be either the prey or the predator, but you can’t pretend to be above the pattern. You asked me to teach you how to not be prey, and that is what I’ve been doing.”
“And I suppose you’ve worked hard to not be the prey,” Tir said quietly. “Leron taught you, and you’ve been perfecting it ever since.”
“I want to live, outsider. It isn’t that strange.”
“So you will do whatever you must to continue living,” Tir said. His voice shook; he was angry, but in his mind’s eye he was watching Arwena standing beneath the yew tree. Tir knew that the death of his sister, long ago, had helped to make life possible for the rest of the pack—but what was that life worth to Arwena? “Nothing else matters, does it? You’ll kill prey; you’ll kill wolves. Whatever is weak, whatever gets in your way. You’ll kill your own sister.”
Seething, Tir fell silent and waited for his reaction, knowing he had gone too far. Xelind’s face flickered, but he did not explode.
“My sister wasn’t weak,” he said, his voice flat. “She was sickly, so she had weakness. But she wasn’t weak. There is a difference.”
“But you killed her anyway,” Tir pressed on, his voice trembling with rage. The blood was pounding in his ears—he met Xelind’s dead, blue gaze levelly, waiting for him to rise to the challenge. “You killed your sister, and now you’re justifying it to me. You’re telling me that I’m stupid, that I’m wrong, if I wouldn’t do the same.”
“You cannot understand,” Xelind said. He had neither flinched nor shown signs of anger; as Tir’s emotions rose, he seemed to sink further into a chilly calm. “You haven’t faced the same things I have; you were never in my situation.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Tir said. His eyes burned. “I did have a sister like yours, and she’s dead, too. And her death destroyed my mother and ruined my life from the start.”
Tir’s words hung in the air like a tangible presence, ringing with Arwena’s old grief and everything Tir had tried to forget. Tir’s legs shook as he waited, in silence, but Xelind did not respond. The white Sentinel’s face had not changed, but his ears flattened, and after a moment he averted his eyes from Tir’s skewering glare. It was then that Tir knew there would be
no more fighting lessons, that fighting wasn’t even what he had wanted at all—he had wanted to learn how to be strong. And Xelind couldn’t teach him that.
Tir turned and stalked back to the redoubt alone.