Chapter 10 — Taming the Wolf King

The priest asked us to meet him somewhere the boys couldn't overhear, which turned out to be a shallow cave a half hour's walk from the main den, dry and quiet and smelling of old herbs. He'd clearly used it for private business before. There were dried bundles hanging from the ceiling, a fire pit blackened with generations of use, and a flat stone slab worn smooth by however many worried parents had sat on it before me.

"Sit," he said, and for once didn't soften it with any of his usual cryptic circling. That alone told me how serious this was.

Thuong Diem and I sat. I'd left the boys with Vu Vinh's mate, a patient badger-shifter woman who found their mischief endearing rather than exhausting, on the condition that she was to send someone running the instant anything looked even slightly strange. I did not enjoy being away from them right now. I did it anyway, because some conversations aren't meant for small ears, even — especially — when those small ears belong to the subject of the conversation.

"You already know some of this," the priest began. "The two boys are living vessels for what our oldest stories call the World-Destroying Demon Wolf — Ma Lang, split into two halves at its last defeat, generations ago, so that its full power could never wake in one place at one time. Thuong Diem's bloodline has carried the sealing burden ever since. Every Wolf King born to that line carries the eye of the seal somewhere on his body. His father did. His father's father did. It shows itself differently in each generation — sometimes a mark, sometimes a scar that never heals right. In Thuong Diem, it manifested as the patch on his scalp that never grew hair, until you struck it and knocked the seal half-open without either of us understanding what you'd done."

"So it's not a punishment," I said slowly, working it through. "It's just... where the lock happens to sit."

"Precisely. And a lock is only as strong as what holds it shut." The priest's cloudy eyes moved to Thuong Diem. "For generations, that has been fear. The Wolf King's authority, his dominance, his fitness to rule — as long as he remained unchallenged, unbeaten, the seal held quietly in the background, needing nothing from anyone. It was never meant to be tested. It was meant to simply exist, unnoticed, forever."

"Until I showed up and beat him with a bone club on the first night."

"Until you showed up," the priest agreed, "and demonstrated, in front of the entire tribe, that he could be beaten. Ma Lang's nature responds to strength — it always has, that's woven into the oldest stories too, going back to before the first sealing. It recognized, somewhere in whatever passes for its instincts, that the balance of power in this den had shifted. And so it stirred. Slowly, at first. Then less slowly, as you kept proving night after night that your authority in this tribe was real and growing, not a fluke."

I felt sick, in the specific way that comes from learning you caused a problem by accident while trying to survive your first day in a new world. "So this is my fault."

"It is no one's fault," the priest said, sharper than I'd heard him speak before. "It is a mechanism responding to true conditions in the world, the same way a river responds to rain. You did not choose to be strong enough to unsettle an ancient seal. But since you are, the question in front of us now is not whose fault this is. It is what we do about it."

Thuong Diem, who had been silent through all of this with his jaw set hard, finally spoke. "Tell her about the Convergence."

The priest exhaled slowly, and for a moment looked every one of his considerable years.

"Once in a generation," he said, "the moon runs a particular course — full, blood-red at its rising, the old texts call it the Blood Moon — and on that single night, the seal reaches its most fragile point regardless of anything else happening in the world. It is not a punishment for anything either of you have done. It would come whether you'd ever arrived here or not. But it is also the single night on which the seal could either be strengthened for another generation, or break entirely, and the boys' power would have nowhere left to be contained at all."

"How long do we have?"

"Four months," the priest said. "Perhaps five, if the signs I'm reading are conservative ones. Not less than three, whatever else happens."

Four months. I did the math automatically, the way you do when your brain needs something concrete to hold onto instead of the enormous shapeless dread trying to swallow it. Four months to figure out how to keep two toddlers from accidentally ending the world, on a schedule set by the moon and not negotiable by anyone.

"What happens if it breaks?" I asked, already half-dreading the answer.

"No one alive has seen it happen and lived to describe it clearly," the priest admitted. "The stories from the last true breaking, centuries past, describe devastation on a scale that reshaped mountains. Whether that would happen again, in exactly that form, I cannot promise you. What I can tell you is that the boys themselves would very likely not survive their own power fully unleashed without an anchor. Nor would anyone standing near them."

I looked at Thuong Diem, and saw my own fear mirrored back at me, dressed in wolf stubbornness instead of human panic but no less real for it.

"You said 'anchor,'" I said. "That's not the same as 'kill them before it happens,' which I distinctly remember you suggesting once already."

"I no longer believe killing them is the answer," the priest said, and something in his voice made it clear this cost him something to admit, an old certainty he'd carried for decades finally cracking. "I watched you call them back from the mist behind the drying racks with nothing but your voice and your hand on Dai Bao's chest. I have studied this seal, this bloodline, this prophecy, for sixty years, and I have never once seen Ma Lang answer to anything but fear or force before you arrived. You called it back with neither. That is not nothing, Lam Thien. That may be everything."

"So what do we actually do?"

"We prepare," the priest said. "We strengthen the bond you have with them, rather than fighting it or fearing it. We train, all of us — you especially, because whatever this becomes on the night of the Convergence, you will likely be standing closer to its center than anyone else alive. And we watch, carefully, for anyone in this world who might already know the seal has weakened and might come looking to use that knowledge before the Convergence arrives on its own." His gaze flicked toward Thuong Diem. "The wandering beastmen already tested us twice. I do not believe for a moment they've stopped watching simply because their first two attempts failed."

The words landed in my chest like a stone dropped into still water, ripples spreading out to touch everything. A saber-toothed tiger. A giant one-eyed python leading a whole raiding pack. Both, according to the priest, tests — probes to measure how far the seal had already slipped, sent by someone patient enough to wait and watch rather than commit everything at once.

"Someone's been studying us," I said slowly, "the same way we're now studying the Convergence. And we don't even know who they are yet."

"No," the priest agreed. "We don't. Which is precisely why we cannot afford to spend the next four months only worrying about the moon in the sky. We must also learn to worry, properly and carefully, about whoever is watching it rise alongside us."

Outside the cave, the afternoon had gone gray with the particular flat light that comes before rain. Somewhere back at the den, two small boys who didn't yet understand what they carried inside them were almost certainly stealing food from someone patient enough to let them, laughing the uncomplicated laugh of children who trusted, completely, that the adults around them would keep the world safe.

I intended to make sure that trust was earned, whatever it cost me to earn it.

---

We walked back mostly in silence, the kind that isn't uncomfortable so much as full — too much to say all at once, so neither of us tried. Thuong Diem kept close, his shoulder brushing mine at every uneven patch of ground, an old habit of his I'd noticed months ago and never mentioned, the way he positioned his body slightly between me and whatever direction a threat might come from without ever seeming to think about it.

"Four months," he said finally, when the den was in sight and Vu Vinh's mate's fire was visible through the trees, with two small silhouettes tumbling around it in the last of the daylight. "That's not very long to become whatever we need to become."

"It's not very short either," I said, mostly to convince myself as much as him. "We caught a saber-toothed tiger's attention in about four seconds and survived. We can figure out four months."

"You say that like the two things are the same size."

"They're not. But I've noticed something about big impossible problems, back where I'm from." I stopped walking for a second, turning to look at him properly. "Nobody solves the whole thing at once. You just find the next actual, doable piece of it, and you do that piece, and then you look for the next piece. The priest just handed us the first piece. Strengthen the bond. Train. Watch for whoever's been testing us. That's three things, and all three of them are things we're already halfway good at."

He studied me for a long moment, something in his expression that I was coming to recognize as the particular way he looked at me when I said something that reorganized how he saw a problem entirely.

"You would have made a good alpha," he said, "in whatever world you came from."

"I was a very average administrative assistant, actually. Excellent at spreadsheets. Deeply mediocre at everything else." That surprised a real laugh out of him, low and warm, and some of the tightness in my own chest eased at the sound of it.

By the time we reached the fire, Dai Bao and Nhi Bao had progressed from tumbling to a full wrestling match over what appeared to be the same stick, indistinguishable in every way from any two ordinary wolf pups anywhere in this world. Nhi Bao spotted us first and abandoned the stick entirely to launch himself at my legs, small and warm and utterly unaware of the conversation that had just taken place a half hour's walk away on his behalf.

"Ao woo!" Did you bring food. Also, Dai Bao cheated at the stick game.

"I did not," Dai Bao said, with the particular offended dignity of a much older creature briefly wearing a wolf cub's body, "cheat. I simply won. There is a difference."

I scooped Nhi Bao up despite the dirt he immediately transferred to my clothes, and felt Thuong Diem's hand come to rest, warm and solid, on the back of my neck — his version, I'd learned, of saying we're in this together without needing words for it at all.

Whatever the Blood Moon brought in four months' time, it would have to get through both of us first, and I had every intention of making that as difficult as possible.