Wolves of the Calla Read Online Free Page A

be safe. The others, however, Heddon and Hedda . . . Lyman and Lia . . .
    She suddenly understood what it might mean, him back at the house in the middle of the day like this. She prayed to the gods it wasn’t so, but when she came into the kitchen and saw the way he was looking out at the kiddies, she became almost sure it was.
    “Tell me it isn’t the Wolves,” she said in a dry and frantic voice. “Say it ain’t.”
    “ ’Tis,” Tian replied. “Thirty days, Andy says—moon to moon. And on that Andy’s never—”
    Before he could go on, Zalia Jaffords clapped her hands to her temples and shrieked. In the side yard, Hedda jumped up. In another moment she would have been running for the house, but Heddon held her back.
    “They won’t take any as young as Lyman and Lia, will they?” she asked him. “Hedda or Heddon, maybe, but surely not my little ones? Why, they won’t see their sixth for another half-year!”
    “The Wolves have taken em as young as three, and you know it,” Tian said. His hands opened and closed, opened and closed. That feeling inside him continued to grow—the feeling that was deeper than mere anger.
    She looked at him, tears spilling down her face.
    “Mayhap it’s time to say no.” Tian spoke in a voice he hardly recognized as his own.
    “How can we?” she whispered. “How in the name of the gods can we?”
    “Dunno,” he said. “But come here, woman, I beg ya.”
    She came, throwing one last glance over her shoulder at the five children in the back yard—as if to make sure they were still all there, that no Wolves had taken them yet—and then crossed the living room. Gran-pere sat in his corner chair by the dead fire, head bent over, dozing and drizzling from his folded, toothless mouth.
    From this room the barn was visible. Tian drew his wife to the window and pointed. “There,” he said. “Do you mark em, woman? Do you see em very well?”
    Of course she did. Tian’s sister, six and a half feet tall, now standing with the straps of her overalls lowered and her big breasts sparkling with water as she splashed them from the rain barrel. Standing in the barn doorway was Zalman, Zalia’s very own brother. Almost seven feet tall was he, big as Lord Perth, tall as Andy, and as empty of face as the girl. A strapping young man watching a strapping young woman with her breasts out on show like that might well have been sporting a bulge in his pants, but there was none in Zally’s. Nor ever would be. He was roont.
    She turned back to Tian. They looked at each other, a man and a woman not roont, but only because of dumb luck. So far as either of them knew, it could just as easily have been Zal and Tia standing in here and watching Tian and Zalia out by the barn, grown large of body and empty of head.
    “Of course I see,” she told him. “Does thee think I’m blind?”
    “Don’t it sometimes make you wish you was?” he asked. “To see em so?”
    Zalia made no reply.
    “Not right, woman. Not right. Never has been.”
    “But since time out of mind—”
    “Bugger time out of mind, too!” Tian cried. “They’s children! Our children!”
    “Would you have the Wolves burn the Calla to the ground, then? Leave us all with our throats cut and our eyes fried in our heads? For it’s happened before. You know it has.”
    He knew, all right. But who would put matters right, if not the men of Calla Bryn Sturgis? Certainly there were no authorities, not so much as a sheriff, either high or low, in these parts. They were on their own. Even long ago, when the Inner Baronies had glowed with light and order, they would have seen precious little sign of that bright-life out here. These were the borderlands, and life here had always been strange. Then the Wolves had begun coming and life had grown far stranger. How long ago had it begun? How many generations? Tian didn’t know, but he thought “time out of mind” was too long. The Wolves had been raiding into the borderland