Read Sun Wolf 3 - The Dark Hand Of Magic for Free Online Page A

power without discipline can do. But I owe Ari. I owe my men. I’d be dead now if it wasn’t for them. You too, since you couldn’t have saved me alone, and you’d probably have tried.”
    She said nothing. Pillowed against the scarred muscle and golden fur of his chest, her face remained impassive, gray eyes open in the darkness, thinking. In the eight years of brotherhood which had preceded their becoming lovers, he had gotten to know those silences, the thoughts that hid so stubbornly behind the steely armor she wore locked around her heart. In the last year, he’d occasionally wondered that she had ever emerged from behind that armor to tell him that she loved him.
    It was a damn good thing that she had, he reflected. He’d never have had the nerve to say it to her.
    “It sounds bad, Hawk,” he said gently. “Whatever I decide when I get there, I can’t not go.”
    “I’m not saying you shouldn’t.” She didn’t turn her face to him, only considered the darkness before her, impassive, as if Ari, Dogbreath, Firecat and the others were not also her friends and not also in danger of their lives. “But it’s going to come down to a choice for you sooner or later, Chief—him or them.”
    Her hand reached up, long, competent fingers tracing idly the scabbed-over crescents of demon bites on the heavy muscle of his hands. “You always told us in training that the man who knows what he wants in a fight has it all over the man who doesn’t quite; it’s the robber who’s able to kill a man in the five seconds it takes that man to make up his mind whether he’d kill somebody to protect his goods. I just think you’d better figure out what it’s going to be soon, because there’s a good chance that, when the time comes to make that decision, he’s going to be actively trying to kill you.”
    She was right, of course. She generally was, but that didn’t give him any clue as to what he should do, or make his own indecision any easier to deal with.
     
    Starhawk’s breath sank to a nearly soundless whisper of sleep, but Sun Wolf lay awake, his one eye open in the darkness. After a time he heard the brawling laughter of his troopers as they piled up the narrow wooden stair to the gallery—why shut up for the benefit of anyone spoilsport enough to be asleep at this hour? The arrogant clamor dimmed as they settled into the next-door room they shared. Then for a time, he listened to the hushed stirrings downstairs as the innkeeper’s wife and servants, who’d stayed awake to do so, cleaned the empty tankards and the spilled beer, swept the hearth where battles had been fought with the kindling from the wood-boxes and left strewn about the floors, and banked the kitchen fires. By the dim vibration and creak, he tracked them up the stairs, across the gallery, and up still further into the high dark reaches of the upper floors.
    Then he heard only the groan of the wind and the goblin pecking of branches against the shutters, felt the faint sway of the tall wooden building in the heavy gusts; the slow drift of the inn into slumber was like a great, black ship riding at anchor in the windy night. He would go to Vorsal, but what he would do when he got there he did not know.
    Lying in the darkness, he remembered Ari as he’d first seen him, a puppy-fat child with rainwater streaming down his long, dark hair, standing on the edge of the training floor of the winter camp in Wrynde, with his father’s pike and arrows balanced on his shoulder; Sun Wolf remembered a thousand winter afternoons and evenings on that floor, with the rain pounding the high roof above the vaulted lattice of the rafters while he put his men through their paces or ducked and dodged the Big Thurg or Starhawk in a practice bout. He’d yelled at them, ragged them, cursed them, and, when necessary, beaten them black and blue, conditioning them to the instant obedience of absolute trust—Dogbreath, Penpusher, the Hawk, the Big and Little Thurgs,