Chapter 8 — Taming the Wolf King

Three weeks after Bach Linh's coup collapsed into a farce over a stolen dinner table, I woke up to find that I had, somehow, become responsible for the plumbing.

Not plumbing in the sense of pipes — the beast world had never heard of pipes, and if I tried to explain the concept to Thuong Diem he would just tilt his head at me like I'd started barking in a foreign dialect. But every tribe needs somewhere for its waste to go that isn't "wherever feels closest," and after I got tired of stepping in things I won't describe on my way to check the smoke racks, I drew a diagram in the dirt with a stick and put two elders in charge of digging a trench system a respectful distance downwind of the cave.

The elders had complained. Loudly. One of them, a heavyset badger-shifter named Trong Cot who'd never once looked me in the eye since the coup, informed me that in forty years of service to the Wolf King's line he had never been asked to dig a ditch.

"Congratulations," I told him. "You're about to set a personal record."

He'd looked to Thuong Diem for support. Thuong Diem, sprawled by the fire with Nhi Bao asleep on his stomach, had simply raised one eyebrow and gone back to picking burrs out of his own tail, which was as clear an answer as any wolf ever gave. Trong Cot dug the ditch. Three days later he grudgingly admitted the flies had gotten better. A week after that, I caught him showing another elder how to angle the trench so it drained properly during rain, with the particular pride of a man who has decided a thing was his idea all along.

This, I had learned, was how you actually ran a tribe of proud, feral, formerly-terrifying beastmen: not through fear, and not really through force, but through never once letting them see you doubt yourself, and always, always giving them a way to save face on the way to doing what you wanted anyway.

It wasn't only sanitation. I'd reorganized the smokehouse so the good cuts didn't sit next to the green wood and pick up bitter smoke. I'd talked three different hunting parties out of a blood feud over a disputed deer trail by the simple expedient of drawing them a map and pointing out there was more than enough trail for everyone if they'd stop being idiots about pride. I'd started keeping a tally, scratched into a flat piece of bark, of which families had thin winters last year, so that when the smoked meat got distributed, nobody's children went without because their father was too proud to ask. None of it was glamorous. All of it, slowly, was working.

"You're getting good at this," Thuong Diem said one evening, watching me settle a dispute between two hunters over whose spear had actually brought down a boar — a dispute I resolved by pointing out that neither spear had killed it, the pit trap had, and both of them owed the pit trap an apology and half the meat each. The hunters had laughed despite themselves and gone off arguing about something else entirely, the boar forgotten.

"Getting good at what?" I settled next to him, and Dai Bao immediately abandoned whatever he'd been gnawing on to climb into my lap instead, because apparently my lap was tribal property now and had been since roughly the second week.

"Ruling." Thuong Diem said it plainly, without the awkwardness he usually had around big words like that. "My father ruled with teeth. I thought that was the only way, until you." He nudged my shoulder with his, which from him was practically a love letter. "You rule with feeding people until they forget to be angry."

"That's called diplomacy, Thuong Diem."

"I call it winning by giving people soup."

I laughed, because it wasn't wrong, and because it was somehow the most romantic thing anyone had said to me in either of the two lives I'd now lived. Dai Bao, sensing an opening, chose that exact moment to steal a piece of bread out of my hand and bolt with it, small legs pumping, tail streaming behind him like a victory banner.

"DAI BAO."

"Ao woo!" Catch me if you can, old woman.

"I am twenty-nine, you disrespectful little demon lord—"

I was up and running before I finished the sentence, which was, I would come to understand, roughly eighty percent of what parenting a reincarnated apocalypse looked like day to day. I caught him by the scruff two turns later, upside down and still triumphantly chewing, and carried him back to the fire like a very smug, very furry sack of grain while the whole camp pretended not to watch and laughed anyway.

---

The elder council met twice a moon-cycle in what passed for a formal chamber: a wide flat stretch of stone near the back of the main cave, ringed with worn seats that had clearly been carved by someone's grandfather's grandfather. I hadn't been invited to my first meeting. I'd simply shown up, sat in the empty seat closest to Thuong Diem, and dared anyone with my eyes to say something about it. Nobody had. That had been six weeks ago. Now there was a seat that everyone quietly understood was mine, worn smooth in a slightly different pattern than the others because I fidgeted less and leaned forward more.

"The southern hunting grounds are thinning," said an elder named Vu Vinh, thin and gray-muzzled, one of the few who'd never joined Bach Linh's coup and had earned my grudging respect for it. "Too many mouths, not enough game this season."

"Rotate the grounds," I said. "Hunt the eastern ridge for a full moon-cycle, let the south rest and regrow. We did something like it back home — you don't take everything from one field every year, you let parts of it lie fallow."

"Fallow," Vu Vinh repeated, testing the human word in his mouth like it was a new kind of meat.

"It means resting on purpose. So it comes back stronger."

Thuong Diem, beside me, made a low sound that might have been amusement. "She did that to me too, you know. Let me rest on purpose. Came back stronger." A few of the elders actually laughed at that, which six weeks ago would have gotten them bitten, and Trong Cot went so far as to bark out a full, undignified guffaw before catching himself and clearing his throat like a man who had just remembered he was supposed to be dignified.

We got through the rest of it steadily. Grain stores were healthy, thanks to a good acorn year. A dispute over den territory near the creek turned out to be two families who'd simply never sat down and drawn a proper line between their claims, which I fixed with three stakes and an afternoon. Someone raised, cautiously, whether we ought to send a formal greeting to the Silver Claw tribe, whose scouts had apparently been sniffing around our northern border more than usual these past weeks — not hostile, exactly, just present, the way a neighbor's dog starts showing up at your fence when it smells something new cooking. Thuong Diem thought it was posturing. Vu Vinh thought it was curiosity. I privately thought it might be both, and made a note on my bark tally to bring it up again before it became a problem instead of after.

We were still turning that over when the watch-wolf posted at the cave mouth let out three short howls. Trouble, but not attack. Everyone's heads turned at once, the easy warmth of the council chamber gone cold in an instant.

It was the priest, moving faster than I'd ever seen him move, his cane barely touching the ground, robes snagging on brush he would normally have picked his way around with careful, unhurried steps.

"Lam Thien." He didn't bother with pleasantries, which from him was its own kind of alarm bell. "The boys. Come now."

My stomach dropped somewhere near my knees. Every terrible possibility ran through my head in the space of a single heartbeat — a beast attack, a fall, a fever, something I hadn't prepared for because nothing ever fully prepares you for raising two apocalypses in wolf-cub bodies. "What's wrong with them?"

"Nothing is wrong," the priest said, which was possibly the least reassuring sentence in the history of language, "and that is precisely the problem. Come and see for yourself before you decide whether to be afraid."

I was already moving, Thuong Diem half a step behind me, both of us abandoning the council mid-sentence over grain stores and border scouts that suddenly didn't seem to matter at all.

We found Dai Bao and Nhi Bao exactly where they were supposed to be, which was somehow more unsettling than if they'd vanished. They were sitting in the little hollow behind the drying racks where they usually napped after stealing food, curled together nose to tail the way wolf pups do. Except that the shadow beneath them wasn't behaving like a shadow. It rippled, slow and thick as spilled ink, spreading a hand's width past their bodies in every direction and then drawing back in, like something breathing.

"They're asleep," the priest said, low, before either of us could panic out loud. "Their bodies are asleep. It's the other thing that's stirring."

Nhi Bao whimpered in his sleep, and a thread of dull red light flickered along his muzzle and died out, like a coal that had almost caught and then thought better of it. Dai Bao's ear twitched, and for just a moment the black around them thickened enough to blot out the grass beneath it entirely.

Thuong Diem's whole body had gone rigid beside me, every instinct in him no doubt screaming that something dangerous was happening within striking distance of his sons, and no idea at all what to strike. I crouched down instead, slow, unhurried, the way you'd approach any frightened animal, and laid my hand flat against Dai Bao's small ribcage. His heartbeat was fast. Too fast for a nap.

"Hey." I kept my voice as ordinary as I could make it, the same voice I used for come inside, dinner's ready. "Hey, you two. Wake up."

The black mist shuddered, then thinned, then vanished entirely, sucked back into two very small, very tired wolf cubs who blinked up at me with eyes that took a second too long to focus. Dai Bao made a small, confused sound and pressed his face into my palm. Nhi Bao just yawned enormously, entirely unbothered, and immediately went looking for something to eat, as if nothing at all unusual had happened.

The priest let out a breath he'd clearly been holding since the watch-wolf howled.

"It has never done that before," he said quietly, to me, not to Thuong Diem — an old habit of his, addressing the person he actually expected to solve the problem. "Not on its own. Not without provocation."

"What does it mean?" I asked, though some cold, practical part of me already suspected I wasn't going to like the answer.

The priest looked at the two cubs, now bickering cheerfully over the last strip of dried meat as though the world hadn't just shown its teeth at us for half a heartbeat.

"It means we should talk," he said, "somewhere the children can't overhear us being afraid on their behalf. Soon. Not tonight — tonight, let them sleep, and let yourselves believe a little longer that everything is fine." He turned his cloudy eyes on me, and for once there was no cleverness in them at all, only a very old man's tiredness. "But soon, Lam Thien. There is a clock running on this, and I no longer know how much of it we have left."