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An audible gasp went through the crowd, and their leader stepped closer to me. He watched the stone intently, but he didn’t touch it.
“So, it is true. The old blood is back.”
“Yes,” I told him. Luke stepped closer until he was standing side by side with me. “The old blood is back. And we are calling them together. It is time to take back what was stolen from us. It is time we are restored to our prestige.”
The man smiled and turned around, looking at the men who had surrounded the three of us, so we were now in the center. He walked away from us and towards the men.
“Do you want to fight, people?” he asked them, and for a moment, there was no reply. The air was fraught with anticipation, and I held my breath. I knew whatever way they replied would determine what their answer would be.
“Yes,” one of them answered, and soon enough, the answer spread, and it became a chorus.
“Yes! Yes!” they yelled.
“Do you want to take back what has been stolen from you?” Penit asked.
“Yes!” his men yelled. Their voices were louder now, and they made the air vibrate with such violence I could taste it. If these men, as hyped up as they were set on a town, they would bring it down in mere hours.
“Do you want to go with the bearer of stone and die in their war? Do you want the pain of war to roar through you and set you on fire?”
“Yes!” the reply came, and this time, it was more a roar than it was a word. Penit turned to me and smiled.
“There is only one thing more important than pain to a Gork. Prestige. We shall fight with you, and if need be, we shall die for you, bearer of the stone.”
***
With two in the bag, the last would be the hardest. Bonne had given us a brief history about the family we were going to meet, but most importantly, he’d told us to think on our feet with them. They were skeptical and had been since before the Tarloux uprising against the royal families. He called them the waterside werewolves because they’ve always chosen to settle in places with large bodies of water and give great reverence to family itself. Even greater than other werewolves. To others, it was more about the name and the power that comes with the family, but with them, it was about the unit itself and its composition.
When we arrived, we were made to wait in the living room of their big cabin house by the river until dinner, all by ourselves. No one entered the room where we were, and no one talked to us, but we could hear them whispering about us. They knew we’d gone to the first two families, and they were the last. They would have no choice but to join us, but it seemed like they would make it hard first.
Later in the night, one of the kids came to get us, and he led us out of the cabin and to the waterside, where a large table had been set, and the table gathered a crowd. There were two seats set apart for us, so we sat down.
“We’ll eat before we talk,” their family head said. A man called Patel with a stern look, lean body, and skinhead. He had the calmness of a leopard and the alertness of a cheetah. He was one of those werewolves that looked lean but had extreme strength within them. Thinking of him made me remember Ilad. I would have to talk to Ilad and see if any of the werewolves with Viper would like to come to us. I would convince Ilad particularly to join us. We could use him. We could talk to all the people.
Dinner was huge, and it took over an hour to eat. When we were done, the table got cleared, and bottles of wine were brought out. Then, the kids left, and it was just the elders left at the table, but I could still sense the kids listening through the windows. I could tell Patel sensed them too, but he said nothing to the effect and watched Luke and me instead.
“You met the Gork before us. Why?” he asked, jumping right into it, and it sounded like he took offense to that fact. I remember Bonne’s advice. Think on your feet, and with the look Patel was giving me, I could tell he wasn’t very interested in the words of my answer but in how I phrased the response.
“We were following a route,” I said. “The Kael was the closest to us, followed by the Gork.”
That wasn’t entirely true, but it was suitable for this moment. Patel smiled a bit and nodded his head.
“When this is over,” he said, taking a sip of his wine. “We would need diplomats and not fighters anymore. I just wanted to know if you two can be that. In ruling, fighting and wars only take a small percentage of the time. The rest, you listen to people and try not to make them angry. You’ve answered well. Now, can we see it?”
Luke looked at me, and I nodded at him. He reached into his pocket and retrieved the stone before passing it to Patel, who looked at it disinterestedly and passed it to the next person in line. He said nothing as the others checked it out, and they were all impressed by what they saw.
I watched Patel. There was a certainty about him. He looked like a man that would make a meal before going to war, assured that he would return to consume that meal. He was talking aboutgovernance already, and when this was all over when the war hadn’t even started. The stone found its way back to him, and he didn’t pass it back to Luke. He examined it again.
“It looks rather ordinary; wouldn’t you say?”
“I don’t think the look of it matters.”
He scoffed, but it wasn’t derisive. It was hard to pinpoint this man’s emotions.
“Of course, the look of it matters. The look of everything matters. Why do you think the royals lasted as long as they did? Do you think they weren’t just like the Tarloux? They wreaked tyranny too and were terrible people. But the people on their own would never have rebelled against them. It took a man close to royalty himself to spur them on. A man that witnessed their rotten ways and decided enough is enough.”
I frowned at him. He was saying the polar opposite of what I expected from him. People have never talked about the royals in that manner before. Rotten wasn’t a word I would have imagined getting associated with them.
He smiled at me.
