Wolf's Blood Read Online Free

can end it.”
    The effort the wolf-woman made to insure that she could not be misunderstood made Derian perfectly certain that she was serious.
    “And how are you going to find where querinalo comes from?” he asked, trying not to sound like he was humoring her. “Does querinalo have a scent by which you can track it?”
    “It has a scent,” Firekeeper said, “if not one I can use to track. I was thinking you could track for me—you and Harjeedian and Ynamynet and all the rest.”
    “What?”
    “Like Lady Melina find the Dragon of Despair,” Firekeeper said. “She find it, so Toriovico tell us later, through old stories. There must be stories from the time before querinalo came. Maybe even there are stories about how it began. The New World does not have them, because we always told that it come from the Old World, but the Old World must have stories.”
    Derian felt some doubt, but Isende was nodding.
    “Firekeeper could be right,” she said. “If not stories, then histories, records that tell where querinalo first appeared and how it spread. Was it like a bout of late-summer spots, spreading from person to person, or did it come in waves, like the sneezing fits that come with the blooming of certain flowers?”
    “Would there be records like that?” Derian asked. “My understanding is that the upheavals and chaos that happened in the New World after querinalo took hold were nothing to what happened in the Old World. In the New World the abandoned colonies had to make do without their rulers and the support of the Old World, but if those tales Urgana likes to tell are representative it seems to me that the Old World fell apart completely.”
    “But not all at once,” Isende insisted. “There was more structure in place in the Old World. As Urgana tells it, the rulers did their best to conceal what was happening. There must be records, archives, something …”
    “But how do we find those?” Derian asked. “If they’re anywhere, they’re in the Old World, and we’re here on the Nexus Islands.”
    “Nexus,” Isende said thoughtfully. “Crossroads. Meeting point. A neutral ground between areas that otherwise were rivals. And after the collapse, the Nexus Islands were abandoned for a long, long while. They’ve only been reinhabited for ten years or so, and many of the old buildings are still untouched.”
    Derian stared at her. “Are you saying the answers might be right here?”
    Isende grinned at him. “We won’t know unless we look, will we?”

II
      A GREAT DEAL had changed in the not quite five moonspans since Firekeeper and her allies had taken control of the Nexus Islands.
    Buildings served different purposes. Almost every resident had been relocated to a different dwelling. The menagerie cages had been torn down. A vegetable garden was planned for that particular location.
    One thing remained the same. Ynamynet the Once Dead remained the preeminent spellcaster on the Nexus Island. She was no longer the only one, as she had been when the agreement between the residents of the Nexus Islands had been made. However, there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Ynamynet was the most important.
    Even so, when Firekeeper knocked on the door of the building that served as both Ynamynet’s home and office, the sorcerer answered the door herself. Of medium height, her thick, light brown hair braided long down her back, one hand still holding a damp cloth, Ynamynet did not at this moment look much like a powerful wielder of magic.
    Firekeeper glimpsed the retreating form of the little girl fleeing down the hallway toward the back of the house, caught the scent of strawberry jam, and guessed that they had interrupted the sorcerer immersed in one of her other identities, that of mother to a lively little girl everyone called Sunshine.
    Ynamynet’s neutral expression changed to one of surprise when she saw who her callers were. She motioned them inside with her damp cloth.
    “Firekeeper, Blind