Night of the Wolf Read Online Free PDF

storm.
     
    She is young, Blaze thought disapprovingly as she rode up to Mir’s hut.
Too young to be what she purports to be.
“You are?” he asked.
    “Dryas,” she answered. She was mounted on a beautiful blood bay mare. She wore a leather overblouse and a dark, divided skirt that hung almost to her ankles. It was thickly embroidered with gold at the hem. The long brown mantle that covered her shoulders was clasped at her breast by a broach formed of poppy flowers and leaves.
    “Did you come through the Roman lines?” Blaze asked. “They patrol the countryside of Gaul everywhere.”
    “I wasn’t far away,” she answered. “Most of the ruling men seem to be gone, but a few of their women remain. Some retain power. They wanted my advice on how to survive now that the Roman conquest is complete.” She dismounted, keeping the reins in her hands.
    “The answer is, we can’t,” Blaze snapped. “Our only hope is to continue—”
    “Oh my, yes,” she said irritably, “and tempt these demons to slaughter and mutilate the remainder of our menfolk and sell more of our women into slavery, a slavery that is only a slower kind of death. Don’t be fools, I told them. Preserve what you can, make any accommodation you must, but live. Teach our traditions to your sons and daughters. The old world is finished. A new has begun, and who knows where it will lead?”
    Blaze fixed her with an icy stare. “That is what I would expect of a woman’s counsel. No more. No less. But I didn’t invite you here for a lesson in politics.”
    She pulled off her leather cap. A coil of long black hair fell from under it and spread fan-wise down her back, crackling a little with electricity. “I wouldn’t expect you to ask. You
men
have done so wonderfully well up to now. At least half the people in this wretched realm are dead or carried away as slaves. The rest, their lives shattered, scramble for survival among the ruins of all they once held dear. And you, Arch Druid of Gaul, send letters to me asking that I dispatch one of my women—and you dare to specify an attractive one—to play the whore with a . . . a . . . wolf What nonsense have you connived at?”
    Blaze’s face went scarlet with fury. He stepped toward her. To do what he had no idea; he’d never struck a woman in his life. But her words scalded the deepest part of his being, the place in his soul where his people’s agony was his own.
    She dropped the cap and the horse’s reins and shrugged the mantle aside. She wore a sword. In less than a second, it flashed in the sun. “Back off,” she whispered between bared teeth. “One more step, I take your hand. Another and it will be your head.”
    Mir, who had been standing by quietly, just as quietly stepped between them. “For shame,” he said. “For shame,” he repeated, looking at Dryas. “He is unarmed, and I so old a child could overpower me. And it is cruel to berate a brave man over things perhaps no one could change. My girl, outstanding member of your order that you may be, there is a truth that age teaches. We do all we can, but sometimes fate takes us by the throat and we are helpless.”
    Dryas stepped back and sheathed her sword. “Forgive me, my father,” she said respectfully to Mir. “I have been long in the saddle. What I have seen here sickens me.”
    At this moment, the girl Mir called his wife stepped through the door and looked at Dryas.
    “Oh,” Dryas whispered, taking in the vacant stare and the hideously scarred face. “In the name of all good spirits, you didn’t tell me you had this kind of problem.”
    Mir stepped aside. “Do what you can,” he said. “I know that those of your order can often ease the despair of those driven beyond reason by private grief, and sometimes even reclaim the lost. Help her if you can.”
    The girl drifted toward Dryas, who took her by the hand and led her into the forest.
     
    Blaze was sitting at the table, having some wine, when Mir