Chapter 7 — Taming the Wolf King

Bach Linh had never walked this far into the wild forest without an escort in her life.

Three days ago she had been a fox-shifter beauty with a bone necklace and a following of admirers. Now she was a woman with torn animal-skin sleeves, bramble scratches down both forearms, and nothing to eat since yesterday but a fistful of sour berries that had left her tongue numb. Behind her, somewhere past the ridge, the wolf tribe's fires still burned. Ahead of her was nothing but black trees and the particular silence of a forest that knew something was hunting in it.

She kept walking anyway. Walking was better than sitting still and thinking about the look on Thuong Diem's face when he'd told the whole tribe to cast her out. Not even angry. Just — finished. As if she'd been a stone in his shoe he'd only now noticed he could remove.

"Get out. You're not worthy of being Vuong's mate." She could still hear her own voice saying it to Lam Thien, weeks ago, so sure of the answer. She had never once considered that the tribe might ask the same question of her and get a different result.

A twig snapped behind her. Bach Linh spun, baring teeth that were sharper than a human's but nowhere near sharp enough to matter out here alone. A shape uncoiled itself from the shadow of a fallen log — not a shape she recognized as any beast she'd hunted or been hunted by. Long, sinuous, the color of wet slate, with eyes set close together and a tongue that flicked out to taste the air before the rest of him had even finished forming into something with a face.

"You've been crying," the shape said, in a voice as smooth and unhurried as oil poured over stone. "Interesting. Foxes don't usually cry over wolves. We eat you, generally."

"Who are you?" Bach Linh backed against a tree, wishing for claws she didn't have and a den she couldn't reach.

"Doc Nha." He inclined his narrow head, almost courteous. "And you, I think, are the girl the wolf tribe threw away like a fish bone. Word travels fast when it travels on a river. Or a swamp." His smile showed a second, smaller set of teeth folded behind the first. "My queen collects fish bones. She finds uses for them."

Bach Linh's pride told her to run. Her stomach, empty for a day and a half, told her pride to sit down and shut up. Three days ago she would have laughed in the face of anyone who suggested she'd one day take counsel from her own hunger over her own dignity. Three days ago felt like a different life belonging to a different woman, one who had still believed that being clever and pretty and patient would eventually be enough to win a Wolf King's heart out from under a human stranger's bone club. That woman had been wrong about almost everything. Bach Linh was not in a hurry to make the same mistake twice.

"Your queen," she repeated carefully. "Who is she to me?"

"Someone who has been waiting a very long time to hear news from inside that particular wolf tribe," Doc Nha said. "And you, little fox, are about to become the most valuable guest she's had in a decade."

---

The Wandering Beastmen did not live in caves. Bach Linh discovered this with something close to awe as Doc Nha led her three more days east, into swampland that smelled of standing water and old blood, until the trees gave way to a black rock hollow sunk into the earth like a wound that had scarred over crooked. Torches burned green along its walls — some trick of the moss that grew near them, Bach Linh guessed, though she didn't ask. She had learned, in three days of walking beside Doc Nha, that questions here were currency, and she hadn't yet earned the right to spend any.

At the hollow's center, coiled on a dais of sun-bleached bone, was the largest snake Bach Linh had ever seen outside of a nightmare. Not a giant python like the one she'd heard had attacked the wolf tribe — bigger. Older. Its scales were a black so deep it looked wet even in torchlight, and down one side of its face ran a long, pale scar that had never quite healed straight.

"Hac Xa," Doc Nha said, and even his oil-smooth voice went quieter. "I bring you the fox from the wolf tribe. She has been cast out. She hates them. She knows things."

The great serpent's head lifted, slow, deliberate, and two black eyes fixed on Bach Linh with an attention so total it felt like being weighed on a scale she couldn't see.

"Does she." Hac Xa's voice was low and rasping, like stone dragged over stone. "Come closer, little fox. Tell me about the bald spot on the Wolf King's head."

Bach Linh's mouth went dry. "How do you—"

"I have been watching that tribe since before you were born into it," Hac Xa said. "I sent a saber-toothed tiger to test how deep the seal had cracked. I sent my own son, my beautiful boy, to finish what the tiger started." Something moved behind those black eyes, something that might, on any other creature, have been grief. "He did not come back. Instead I hear that two wolf pups burned him to nothing in the space between one breath and the next. Burned him like tinder. My son, who could crush a bear's skull between his coils."

The hollow had gone very quiet. Even the green torches seemed to hold still.

"So." Hac Xa's tongue flicked out, tasting something in the air that Bach Linh couldn't name. "You will sit, fox, and you will eat, because a hungry tongue lies to save time and I want the truth slowly. And you will tell me everything about the woman who tamed a Wolf King with a bone club. Everything about the two boys who are not boys at all. And when you are done, I am going to make you a queen of something far larger than one wolf tribe's leftover scraps — and you are going to help me finish what my son started."

Bach Linh should have been afraid. Some small, sane corner of her was afraid, screaming that this creature had just admitted to sending monsters to kill children, that whatever came next would not be clean or kind. But louder than the fear was something uglier and more familiar: the memory of Lam Thien standing at the mouth of the cave with a bone stick and every eye in the tribe on her, none of them on Bach Linh at all.

"Everything," Bach Linh said, and sat.

---

She told Hac Xa about the seal first, because that was the biggest secret and she wanted to see what it bought her. She told her about the bald patch, about how the priest had gone gray-faced explaining it to Lam Thien, about the words "eye of the seal" and "vessel." She told her about the cubs — Dai Bao's black mist, Nhi Bao's red fire, the way they'd turned into shadows taller than the trees to burn a giant python to ash without so much as raising their voices. Doc Nha listened with his head tilted, cataloguing. Hac Xa listened without moving at all, which was somehow worse.

"And the woman," Hac Xa said, when Bach Linh finally ran out of tribe secrets and had to fall back on the ones that actually mattered to her. "Tell me about the woman."

"She's nothing," Bach Linh said, too fast, too bitter. "A human. She fell into our world with a stick and dumb luck, and somehow the whole tribe decided that made her—" She stopped. Made herself slow down, the way Doc Nha had told her to on the walk here. Hungry tongues lie. Slow tongues get believed.

"She's not nothing," Bach Linh said instead, quieter. "She beat the Wolf King the first night she arrived and never once let him forget it. She feeds his sons before she feeds him. She stood in front of the whole tribe and made them ashamed for doubting her. I hate her," she added, and was almost surprised by how true it came out, "because everything she did without trying, I tried to do for years and never managed."

Hac Xa's black eyes gleamed with something that might have been satisfaction.

"That," the serpent queen said, "is the most useful thing you've told me all night. A rival who understands her enemy's strength instead of dismissing it. Doc Nha." She turned her great head. "Bring the fox water and dry meat. And bring me the map of the northern territories. If the seal is truly this fragile, we no longer need to wait for the Convergence to come to us."

"My queen," Doc Nha said, already moving, "the Convergence is still months away. To move before the Blood Moon—"

"Would be reckless, yes." Hac Xa's tail uncoiled, slow, in a gesture that in a smaller creature might have been a shrug. "So we will not attack. Not yet. We will watch. We will test them again, smaller this time, and quieter — enough to learn their weaknesses without waking them to how close we already are. And when the Blood Moon finally rises over that valley, little fox, you and I are going to be standing very close to the wolf tribe's door, wearing smiles they never see coming."

Bach Linh looked at the great black serpent, at the pale unhealed scar running down one side of her face, and felt something settle into place inside her chest that she didn't have a kind word for. It wasn't hope, exactly. It was closer to the feeling of finally, finally being asked to sit at the table instead of clearing it.

"What do you want me to do first?" she asked.

Hac Xa smiled — an unsettling thing, a snake's mouth was not built for it — and for the first time since Bach Linh had stumbled into this hollow half-starved and friendless, she felt like she had found somewhere she might actually belong.

"First," Hac Xa said, "you're going to teach me everything you know about how a proud man wears a hat to hide his shame. Because before the Blood Moon rises, little fox, I intend to know that wolf tribe better than they know themselves — and you are going to help me build the lever that finally cracks it open."

Far to the west, in a cave that smelled of woodsmoke and roasting meat, Lam Thien had no idea that her name was already being spoken in a black hollow full of green torches. She was, at that exact moment, losing an argument with a wolf cub over the last piece of dried venison, and winning, as she always did, by sheer force of stubbornness. It would be some time yet before she learned that stubbornness alone was not going to be enough.