Lord Eoin McCrae awoke with a splitting headache. He stumbled out of bed, face in his hand groaning in agony. As the pain cleared memories gathered from the last few weeks. A sellsword had showed up with a little boy. He had a message from the Raven. It was simple enough, a move to shift the uprising sooner, to capitalize on existing unrest, but there was something else, a piece trying to force its way through his mind, or was he forcing his way to try to remember? In the last few weeks the sellsword, Berach, had helped train the boys. He'd been skilled, Eoin had to admit, if a bit undisciplined, even downright insubordinate. I wouldn't brook insubordination from anyone, especially not some sellsword. Whatever the recollection was it lay just beyond his comprehension. It felt important, not in the most profound sense, but like a splinter in his pride, an itch that he couldn't quite reach, a sliver in his brain. The harder he tried to remember the more it hurt.

  Berach and his son had been here for how long now, weeks, months. Must have been weeks. The time was close for uprising. The thousand-year festival fast approached. It was hard to say what might happen with Lord Gawn in the Capitol. He may well gain them a little more time, a more peaceful path to revolution. The sellsword didn't understand any of that. He wasn't a believer, just a merc who needed the coin. At least he was useful, and that boy. His son was strong for his age. He had throttled every boy he'd faced in the anvil with ease. None were hurt, most surrendered or fled. There was something eerie about that child.

  Another surge of pain crashed against the levee of his mind, and he felt something cracking, the agony forcing bright spears of light through his vision. Berach was leaving today, with his son. Some business elsewhere. But there was something else. Lord McCrae stumbled onto the balcony and looked out over the anvil, and finally, like a hammerstroke to a weakened dam, everything cracked, and memories burst through.

  The boy, that damned boy with the silvery eyes. He'd pacified Lord McCrae, not once or twice but a dozen times over the weeks, forcing his anger and pride into its place. Creating dams in his mind. He'd controlled him, and Berach had encouraged it. What other seeds had been sown by those two since coming here? He knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt that the boy was dangerous, and Berach had to be stopped. I've been a puppet, strung by a small boy and his lowlife lowborn father. Cold rage iced away his pain. "It started with the duel... but a simple duel isn't enough punishment for this." He walked back into his chambers, threw on his clothes and exited to the ground floor. A small group of his finest young warriors were racked out on cots, and he woke them quietly. "I've a mission for you boys. We have traitors among us."

  #

  Berach awoke with a hand on his mouth and a knife to his throat. His legs and arms were each held by another member of Lord McCrae's private guardsmen. Only teenagers, they still had plenty of strength combined to bind the man. They didn't say a word to him. Before they departed his simple hut they put a burlap sack over his head and led him away in the darkness. Berach’s thoughts went to the boy, the young wolf who he'd been dragging around for weeks. I hope you got out kid.

  Wolf watched from the ceiling. He had heard the coming storm, and had moved into hiding, pressing his body out between rafters to hold fast and wait. When they had all left, he dropped down and began to stalk them. This was a different kind of hunt. Over the weeks in this camp, the boy had grown fond of Berach, rough as he was. What he'd been doing to the Lord on a regular basis he didn't fully understand either, but it seemed useful. Like the animals of the forest, he was becoming able to enforce his will upon men now as well. It was a strange feeling.

  Berach had encouraged it to continue, so he had pacified the Lord dozens of times, forcing eruptions of his anger back inside so as to keep things steady. Meanwhile, Berach helped train the young men in the camp. They had significant discipline, though they lacked some grace. The boys were brutish and competitive.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Wolf had been thrown into their games and training as well, though he never said the words or worried much about the oaths. Wolf had beaten them all. He had no interest in leading them though, he merely wanted to be left alone, for them to be quiet. The only time he enjoyed was learning the sword with Berach. When he was forced to fight the other boys he would either play with them, forcing them out of the ring, or use his compulsion to make them surrender. He didn't want to fight the weak. He wanted to fight for the weak, but he was too young to know how. He was too young to know that people never suffer a hero for long.

  Wolf followed the abductors as they wound through the maze of tents and barricades back to the central building. When they arrived, they entered through a cellar door in the back, to a place known only as the hole. It was used as a punishment for exceptional cases, theft, murder, desertion attempts. Rarely was it used since his arrival, but Wolf knew it. The young men threw Berach inside and locked it with a thick padlock and then they made it look like they left, but Wolf knew better. His eyes were sharper than theirs by far, and his other senses just as keen. In truth, even with his eyes closed he could feel their hearts beating in the surrounding tents, could almost see through their eyes as they peeked around corners and between flaps. They waited for him to come. Wolf excelled at waiting.

  He would wait them out.

  Just shy of four hours passed before the last of the watchers succumbed to exhaustion and closed his eyes. During that time the young Lord arrived, entered the hole for maybe half an hour and then left. Wolf moved swiftly from his hiding place to the hole and swiftly broke the wooden rung that the metal lock was attached to. Aiming for weakness was something he learned from Berach. Wolf slipped in triumphant and then stopped, gaping at Berach. The man had been brutally beaten. He was unconscious. His left eye was swollen shut, his lips could barely open enough to let air pass through. His body was covered in deep purple bruising. Shallow cuts covered him in between the bruises, not deep enough to kill him, but deep enough to hurt, to wound. Some of his tendons were severed, and his arms and legs were bent at impossible angles.

  Wolf had never seen the effects of torture, but he was appalled at it. Something deep in his gut churned and he wanted to wretch, and scream, and wail, and crush the world all at the same time.

  All his soul wished to cry out, every ounce of strength in his body to force its way into the world and destroy the people who had done this. But more presently he wished to see Berach healed, wished that he could save him, that somehow he could transfer his own life for the sake of this broken man. He curled into himself and clenched his fists, gritting his teeth to agony, and though he made now sound himself a great humming cacophony arose around him.

  The devastating blast of power which emanated from Wolf vaporized the room they were standing in and the full two-story building above was shattered to pieces and sent flying. A crater roughly one hundred paces across was all that remained, and in the center the air warped and bent, dust swarmed and swam like a thing alive. The moonlight played off the shifting site, and, in the epicenter, stood Wolf and lay the broken body of Berach. The image of a fully healed Berach, of the man as he was when Wolf had first met him was held firmly in his mind. Berach’s body was lifted from the ground and the dust began to shift and wrap Berach in a tight embrace. The dust transformed into mud, into something else and finally into raw flesh and began knitting Berach back together. Cuts healed before the boy's eyes, the tedons re-attached of their own volition, bones re-set, and bruising faded. It was as though Berach was held in stasis and his body sent backward to a time when it was unharmed.

  Some hundred paces away, the blast had thrown Lord McCrae from the balcony. He landed with a crash in the sand of the Anvil, breaking his sword arm with a sickening crunch and shattering a series of facial bones on the same side. The whole camp was awake now, the watchers from before dreadfully alert, but not one dared move. Those farther out thought they were under attack and began to gather weapons and move towards the commotion. The watchers were stunned, where once there was the Lord's house now there was nothing. When reinforcements arrived, all were struck mute in terrified confusion. The whole encampment gawked at the scene. A broken body made whole, rage and love comingled, and a boy they knew as Wolf stood in the center of a massive crater, his eyes toward the moon, streaming with tears. The torrents of wind and whipping dust and debris seemed to howl mournfully around up raising up in a great cyclone to the night sky.