Ice Wolves Read online

  “I . . . I didn’t get anything. I was too busy trying to figure out how to hide, once the window closed,” he admitted.

  Rayna was quiet for a moment, but then, as she always did when he messed up, she grinned and slung an arm around his shoulders. “Doesn’t matter,” she said cheerfully. “We saw a puppet show today, that was pretty good.”

  Dusk was falling, and they both knew it was time to hole up for the night. It wasn’t a good idea for twelve-year-olds to be out after nightfall. So they made their way over the rooftops of Holbard until they reached a tavern near the center of town.

  The Wily Wolf, the sign outside said. They had to move all over the city to scrounge up enough to stay fed, so they couldn’t always make it back to the Wolf at night. But whenever they could, they did. The Wily Wolf was special.

  On the ground floor it was bustling with business, golden lights coming on one by one, noise spilling out into the street. But it had two more stories above that, fairly tall for a building in Holbard, and it was on a small hill as well.

  Together they climbed up to the roof and lifted a hatch they’d found years ago, all overgrown with grass. Inside was a tiny attic, really just a space between the grassy rooftop above and the flat ceiling beneath. There was no way to get to it from below, and it wasn’t large enough for an adult to even sit up inside. But it was just big enough for the twins to curl up and stay warm.

  Anders always thought that curling up inside the roof of the Wily Wolf was as close as he could get to coming home. It was their special place—their secret.

  Rayna wriggled down first, and Anders paused halfway in to look around and take in the view, which was quickly vanishing in the dusk. Thick city walls circled Holbard, the plains and mountains beyond lost in the dark. The rooftop meadows stretched away in every direction, and to the east of him was the glint of the sea, the masts of the ships in the harbor.

  Just as he was about to pull the hatch down, he heard a soft mew from nearby. He waited another few moments, and a small black shadow with bright yellow eyes slipped out of nowhere, darting down to join Rayna. It was Kess, a cat that sometimes slept with them at night to keep warm.

  Anders pulled down the hatch on top of the three of them, and Rayna spread the blanket over the two humans, Kess curling up by their feet. Anders’s stomach was growling with hunger, and he was sure his sister’s was too, but neither of them mentioned the lost sausage. Or the fact that even surrounded by food, he hadn’t thought to shove any in his pockets. Safe together in their secret spot, the evening didn’t seem so bad.

  Still, he had to say something. “Thanks for coming to get me,” he whispered.

  “Don’t be silly,” Rayna whispered back. “What else was I going to do? We’re a team.” She wriggled one arm out from under the blanket to wrap it around him. “We’ll always be together, Anders. We’ll always take care of each other, I promise. Right?”

  “I promise too,” he said, because of course it was true.

  But as they settled down to sleep, and he lay there in the dark, waiting to drift away, he knew the truth. Rayna would never need him like he needed her.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE NEXT MORNING, ANDERS AND RAYNA were on their way to the docks early. The monthly Ulfar testing—the Trial of the Staff—was one of their best pickpocketing days, so neither of them wanted to miss a moment of it. And it turned out to be a good thing they’d started out early—the Wolf Guard were still on street corners, far more of them than usual. The twins were forced up onto the rooftop meadows again, which was safer but took longer. Finding ways to cross the streets often meant going out of their way by several blocks.

  Their goal, the dockside square, was bordered by tall, thin, colorful houses on three sides—yellow, green, and blue, with square white window frames and polished wooden doors. The houses were squeezed together, two and three stories tall, often with more than one family living in them.

  On the fourth side of the square was the harbor. From far away the docks looked like a forest, masts sticking up from a flotilla of ships from all over the world. Vallen wasn’t a big island, but everyone always said that you didn’t need to leave the capital city of Holbard to see the world—the world would come right to you instead. And that was because of the wind guards.

  High above the entrance to the port were the huge, metal arches of the wind guards, the biggest artifacts in all of Vallen. They had protected the harbor for generations.

  The arches were marked with runes forged all along their length—the runes were the sign of an artifact—and were big enough for even the largest ship to pass under. But though Anders could see straight through them to the ocean on the other side, the guards magically kept out the wind. Even when a storm raged beyond them, the harbor was always peaceful.

  The docks were where newcomers arrived in the city of Holbard from all over the world. The safety of the harbor meant that people from every place Anders could imagine—and some he couldn’t—came not only to trade, but to live as well. From what Anders knew, most cities were a mix of people from all over, but perhaps none were quite as varied as Holbard.

  The dock was where traders waited for news of their goods, where merchers and fishers plied their wares, and where Anders and Rayna picked pockets once a month, during the trial—and occasionally on other days too.

  The Trial of the Staff was a spectacle, and it meant a square full of visiting merchers who were usually so busy gawking at the twelve-year-olds on the dais that they never noticed the twelve-year-olds right beside them, slipping a hand into their pocket or basket. The visitors all knew of the elementals found in their homelands, but ice wolves—and scorch dragons—were unique to Vallen, and nobody wanted to miss seeing a child transform into an ice wolf before their very eyes.

  Anders was never entirely easy at the docks. He and Rayna had no idea where they’d been during the last great battle, ten years ago. But Anders thought perhaps they’d been here—there was always something about the place that made him nervous. He would look at the scorch marks on the wooden doors, and for an instant he’d think he could smell smoke. The crowd would jostle him—which never bothered him anywhere else—and it was as if he heard a scream, quickly snatched away. Sometimes he had nightmares about it.

  Today the twins climbed down from the rooftops a couple of streets away and made their way on foot to the square. As they reached the edge of the crowd, a warm, salty smell came wafting in their direction, and Anders knew it immediately. Somewhere, a mercher was selling roasted veter nuts, their favorite. They’d only managed to pickpocket two coppers on the way down to the docks, but . . .

  He and Rayna whispered the same words at exactly the same time: “What about—” They both paused to snicker, then finished together: “Breakfast?”

  “We’ll have more money before the morning’s out,” Rayna said. “Let’s have a treat.”

  They squeezed their way through the tight press of bodies, following their noses. And sure enough, there was a woman in a bright green coat roasting glossy brown veter nuts in a large cast-iron pan. There was no fire underneath to warm it, but there were runes carved all around the outside of the pan, marching along its edge in a neat procession, and it was heating itself without any fire needed.

  “A copper a bag,” the mercher said, noticing them looking.

  “Usually it’s a copper for two,” Rayna protested. “Are they some kind of special nuts?”

  “They’re artifact-cooked,” the woman replied. “The heat’s more even than you’ll get over any fire, and you’ll taste the difference. No burned bits.”

  Rayna grumbled, but Anders knew her mouth had to be watering as much as his, and in the end she handed over their two coppers. The woman handed them each a fat paper bag the size of their fist, stuffed full of roasted nuts, and they drifted into the crowd, munching through them as fast as they could. It was nearly time to start.

  They dodged a pack of four Ulfar Academy students—teenagers who had
passed the monthly trials already, and would one day be Wolf Guards—who wandered by in their gray uniforms, trimmed with white to show they were students. They were often in fours, Anders noticed.

  Suddenly everyone’s attention turned to the dais on one side of the square, and though Anders couldn’t see over the heads of the crowd, he knew the trial must be beginning. He licked his fingers clean and stuffed the last of his veter nuts into his pocket.

  It was the start of spring, and the only remaining traces of the snow were the gray lumps around the edges of the square, but he was still wearing his winter coat. It was lined with pockets where he could stash his takings, and the cold wind that still blew meant it wasn’t out of place.

  He and Rayna drifted along the edges of the crowd, where the people were less tightly packed, looking for their first target and pretending not to know each other. The siblings might have the same curly black hair and the same medium brown skin, but somewhere like Holbard, where people came from every place there was, that was no reason to think they were related. And everything else was so different about them that they looked nothing like twins.

  Anders spotted a woman with her head craned back, staring up at the sky nervously. The rumors about dragons were everywhere. Her expression was distracted, and her clothes looked expensive, which might mean good pickings. He bumped his shoulder against Rayna’s, nodding in the woman’s direction.

  Rayna stopped to fiddle with the buttons on her coat, looking over his target from beneath her lashes. Then she shook her head, just a fraction. “Zips,” she murmured.

  Anders shuffled a step to his left, taking a surreptitious look at the woman’s pockets. He sucked in a quick breath. No wonder she was so absentminded; she had no need to worry about her pockets at all. They were lined with chunky metal zips, and hanging from each zipper was a small metal charm, engraved with a pair of runes.

  He’d nearly reached for a thiefcatcher. If he’d laid his hands on the zips to open her pockets, the charms would have started blaring a quick, high alarm, turning every face in the square toward him. It would have been a disaster. Trust him to get it wrong.

  He bit his lip, and Rayna gave his hand a quick squeeze—never mind, the squeeze said—and led him onward. He let her pick the next target. He wasn’t as good as she was at pickpocketing anyway—or at lock picking, or at anything, really—but he was always worst of all in the square, where he was nervous.

  Rayna chose a mercher just as the leader of the wolves—the Fyrstulf, Dama Sigrid Turnsen—took to the dais. The mayor of Holbard and two members of Vallen’s parliament already stood waiting for her in their finest coats and gold-linked chains of office, but everybody in the square—everybody from Vallen, at least—knew where the real power was on the wooden stage. Sigrid Turnsen was a pale woman with short, white-blond hair, lean in her gray uniform, the opposite of the man Rayna had picked for their target.

  Their mark was a broad-shouldered man with a bright red-and-blue jacket of thin, silky material that fluttered in the breeze. The red on his coat was their first clue that he would be an easy target—it was the color of a dragon, so locals rarely wore it.

  The flimsy materials and the long, sweeping sleeves of the mercher’s coat suggested he came from the Dewdrops Archipelago, and that he’d most likely arrived recently, since he clearly hadn’t planned for Vallen’s cold winds. As a newcomer, all his attention was probably on Sigrid Turnsen right now. And possibly on how much he wished he had a more practical coat.

  “Now, more than ever, we must remain vigilant,” the Fyrstulf was saying, her voice ringing out across the square as Anders took up position. He’d heard this speech every month since he was six, but it never sounded boring. The power in the Fyrstulf’s voice always kept a part of his attention on her. Rayna did a pretty good impression of the speech, but Anders could never find it in himself to laugh at Sigrid Turnsen.

  “After ten years of peace,” she continued, “the dragons wish to turn toward war once again.” Well, that part of the speech was new. Things really must be serious if the Fyrstulf was acknowledging them out loud.

  “Ten years ago the Wolf Guard drove them back from Holbard to their refuges in the mountains, and now we stand ready to do so again. We know that anyone here could be of scorch dragon blood. Could be a spy, willing to risk the safety and stability we have worked so hard to build in the last decade across all of Vallen.”

  Anders stared at her as she spoke, a shiver running through him that had nothing to do with the nerves the docks usually awoke in him. Even though she spoke about the battle each month, reminded the Vallenites of the danger and the sacrifices the wolves had made, this month she was more intense than usual, an edge to her voice.

  Casually, Rayna slipped into place just in front of the mercher, apparently choosing that moment to retie the tattered ribbon at the end of her braid. She adjusted her copper hairpins and fiddled with her bow a little, tucking in a stray black curl, and then flung the braid back over her shoulder. In the same movement, she released a pinch of finely ground pepper from between her thumb and forefinger. It wafted straight up to the mercher, who was already drawing breath in indignation at having Rayna’s hair shaken in his face.

  Anders’s job was to slip two fingers into the man’s pocket—a thumb was too bulky—and let them graze along the silk of the lining until he found his coin purse. Quickly he eased it free, then dipped inside his own coat, dropping the purse into one of the waiting pockets. It felt light, though—probably just a couple of coppers.

  He left the man in the middle of a sneezing fit and slid sideways, past a pair of local merchers in brown coats. Rayna would meet him away to the man’s right, as always. Together, they set off in search of their next mark.

  Anders extracted a small purse from a woman in a yellow dress busy gossiping with her neighbor, while Rayna politely asked them the time, keeping away from the front of the crowd.

  The Wolf Guard lined the edge of the dais as the Fyrstulf spoke, all alike in their gray uniforms, hair cut short, eyes narrowed as they swept across the crowd. It was like they were beaten into the same shape when they walked through the doors of Ulfar Academy, each one turned out from the same mold.

  Sigrid was speaking again. “Who now claims ice wolf blood and, having reached their twelfth birthday, steps forward to be tested? Many Vallenites proudly claim at least one wolf in their ancestry, but few have the gift that will allow them to transform.” The words gave Anders a shiver. The gift she was talking about could change someone’s life forever in an instant. “With this rare gift,” the Fyrstulf said grandly, “comes great responsibility: an obligation to enter Ulfar Academy. To train to join the Wolf Guard, and devote one’s life to protecting Vallen. It means life as a soldier. It means—”

  A brutal gust of wind tore through the square, ripping away her words. The crowd staggered and some fell, screams rising all around Anders.

  In an instant he was in the middle of the memory this place always tried to bring back. The screaming was terror, the wind was carrying smoke, and as Rayna grabbed for him, he saw movement out of the corner of his eye.

  He whirled around to see something huge moving amidst the sea of ships’ masts, and his brain conjured up the rumors from the night before—conjured up the memory of the dragon he’d seen with his own eyes just half a year before.

  His mind made the billowing ship’s sail into a dragon, swooping in toward the port—and then the wind was gone, and he saw the dragon was no more than cloth, and realized the screams were dying away. His heart slammed in his chest as the people around him picked themselves up.

  “The artifacts are failing,” a woman wailed nearby.

  “The dragons are doing it,” another hissed.

  Up on the dais, the Fyrstulf was looking as calm as ever, as if nothing had happened. “The wind arches sometimes require venting,” she said, raising her voice over the hubbub of the crowd. “That should have been arranged for the nighttime, when nobody
would have been disturbed. My apologies. Now, let us continue with the Trial of the Staff. Who seeks to join the Wolf Guard and play their part in protecting our people?”

  The crowd was still murmuring as five children his own age walked up the steps to the dais, three girls and two boys. They were each dressed in their best, and the last girl in line was shaking so hard Anders was pretty sure she was going to fall off the stage before she made it up to the Staff of Hadda and the Trial itself. Anders was still trembling pretty hard himself after the fright the surge of wind had given him.

  There were at least two dozen more children queuing for their chance to make it up onto the dais. Most of them wouldn’t succeed. In a good month, two or three candidates would successfully transform. Anders always felt sorry for the ones who failed.

  The first boy stepped up to stand front and center as a member of the guard handed Sigrid the staff. Sigrid nodded, and the boy’s face drained of what little color it had, until it almost matched his fine white coat. When he spoke, he was so nervous his voice shook as he lifted it to be heard over the noise the crowd was still making.

  “My name is Natan Haugen. My grandfather is Bergur Haugen, who was a member of the Wolf Guard. My great-grandmother was Serena Andersen, who was a member of the Wolf Guard. My brother Nicolas Haugen transformed three years ago and is a student at Ulfar Academy. I claim ice wolf blood and stand for the Trial.”

  Sigrid and many of the crowd nodded as Natan looked sidelong at the Fyrstulf. Even from his place in the crowd, Anders could tell that Natan was gazing at the amulet hanging at the woman’s throat.

  The amulet was a small ring of gray polished metal suspended on a leather band, engraved with a complex design in runes. There were stories about what the amulets did—that they allowed a wolf to tell when you were lying, that they gave a wolf the strength of ten people, or perhaps just that they were the only way of knowing a true member of the guard. Whatever they were for, Natan was staring at Sigrid’s like it was his ticket to a new life, and in a way, he was right.