Free The Reawakened by Jeri Smith-Ready

flea. Is it in any danger?” Nilik shook his head, and Lycas continued. “Now imagine that same dog with a hundred fleas.” He tightened his grip on Nilik’s shoulders. “A thousand fleas.”
    Nilik resisted the urge to scratch his own arms at the thought.
    “A dog with a thousand fleas,” Lycas said, “is bleeding to death, little by little. The fleas can’t kill it directly, but they can drive it mad. It thinks about nothing but scratching and biting its own skin. Can a dog kill a flea by scratching?”
    Nilik shrugged. “No. The flea just jumps to another part of the dog.”
    “Exactly.” Lycas let go of him. “We’re the fleas. Not a glorious image, but it’s the only way we can stand against their superior numbers and arms.”
    “So we just annoy them into ending the occupation?” Nilik tried to sound sincere instead of obnoxious.
    “Even a thousand fleas can’t kill a dog,” Lycas said patiently. “But one day, when it has a disease, or a wound, it’ll be too weak to survive.” He smiled. “We will have sucked too much blood.”
    “So what’s the disease?” Nilik asked. “What’s the wound?”
    “The disease is in Asermos, where our people have resisted the occupation since its first days. They’ve turned the Ilions into unwilling tyrants. Martial law is expensive, not to mention a political disaster.” He turned back to the path. “The wound, I hope, will be in Velekos.”
    They continued up the ridge in silence. Nilik burned to inflict that wound, and a thousand others, on the Ilion army who had taken his home, enslaved his father and murdered the woman he loved.

    Lycas watched Nilik across the campfire and wished the boy were anywhere else. Any thing else.
    He didn’t care so much that Raven hadn’t come for his nephew—Lycas had never put much stock in prophecies, or anything else he couldn’t see and touch. But why not Hawk or Horse or Fox? Lycas would have been happy for any other Guardian Spirit to claim Nilik, as long as it wasn’t one of the warriors, Bear or his own Wolverine. The thought of watching his nephew die in battle made the blood pound behind Lycas’s eyes.
    His fingers twitched at the memory of his own twin’s death and the moments afterward. The look of agony on Nilo’s face, fading to blank. Then a skull crumbling in Lycas’s hands like an eggshell, brains oozing between his knuckles onto the blood-slicked battleground. The scream of Nilo’s killer rising to a higher pitch than a man should be capable of, only to be cut short when his throat left his body. Lycas’s sole regret was that he could only kill the Descendant soldier once.
    He couldn’t remember the rest of that afternoon, but others said he’d gone mad with grief and fury, savaging the enemy, both the living and the dead. He wished he could remember. It would have been a good memory.
    Lycas studied Nilik’s face as the young man focused on the words and plans of his new platoon leader, a first-phase but battle-tested Bear from Velekos. In the old days, Bears tended to be in charge of strategy, while Wolverines made up the masses of troops. But in this sort of warfare, a Wolverine’s wiliness could take a man further in the army than a Bear’s meticulous planning.
    Lycas sighed. Though he wished it weren’t so, Nilik had all the attributes of a Wolverine—intelligence, discipline and courage that teetered just on the sane side of recklessness. Spirits knew he had the will to fight—maybe too much.
    Sirin approached and sat next to Lycas, balancing two plates of food in one hand while he unscrewed the top of a water flask with the thumb of the other. “I can’t get used to seeing you clean-shaven, my friend. Almost didn’t recognize you when you got here yesterday.” He rubbed his own dark brown beard, which was thick and ragged from months in the wilderness.
    Lycas accepted the extra plate and spoke without taking his eyes off Nilik. “Can you use him here?”
    “Your nephew? I