Free Sun Wolf 2 - The Witches Of Wenshar by Barbara Hambly

though he seemed to have trouble finding which room was his own, he moved with his usual steady grace. He pushed aside the curtain within one dark arch, and Starhawk thought she heard the soft, startled cry of a woman’s voice from within. But no scream followed it; he stepped through into the darkness, and the darkness hid him.

Chapter 4
    Sun Wolf’s term of employment as instructor in manliness to the Heir of Wenshar lasted slightly less than twelve hours—something of a record, even for Sun Wolf.
    He had the weedy, sullen boy slathered with herbed grease to protect his virginal skin from the sun, and protesting all the way, out of the fortress between dawn and sunup, running on the lizard-colored ranges of scrub and camel-bush that spread out below the black granite knoll of Tandieras. The blue dawn periods between the freezing cold of night and the breathless daytime heat were brief; though, as autumn advanced, they would lengthen. As it was, Sun Wolf thought disgustedly when Jeryn stumbled to a gasping halt after a quarter of a mile, they were more than lavish.
    “This isn’t safe, you know,” the boy panted sulkily and jumped aside, lashing his hand at an inquisitive bee. He wiped at the sweat tracking through the grease; stripped to a linen loincloth, with dust plastering his scrawny legs and snarly hair, he was a sorry sight. “If a sandstorm came up now, we couldn’t get back.”
    “True enough,” the Wolf agreed. And indeed, three days ago, on the ride in from the distant coast, he and the Hawk had been trapped in a cave in the black cliffs of the Dragon’s Backbone by a sandstorm. He had felt it coming—the breathless rise in temperature and the throbbing in his head—long before the Hawk had, and that had saved them, allowing them to reach cover in time. From the moment the cloudy line of white had become visible on the desert horizon until all the world had been swallowed by a screaming maelstrom of wind-driven sand had been literally minutes. After the blinding brown darkness had passed, they’d found the desert littered with the ruined corpses of prairie dogs and cactus owls, the flesh literally filed from their bones by the pebbles and sand in the wind. In Tandieras it was said that even wearing the protective white head veils of a desert rider, a man could be smothered and dried to a mummy in a drift of superheated dust within half an hour.
    “But I can read the weather; feel the storms before they hit, before they even come into sight. I know there’s nothing on the way.”
    The boy shot him a look of sullen disbelief from black eyes that looked far too big for his pointy white face and retreated again behind his wall of silence. Sun Wolf had already found that, protest though he might, the boy would never ask for help. Perhaps it was because he had early learned that doing so would only worsen any situation with his father.
    Jeryn tried again. “Nanciormis never made me do this.”
    “And that’s why you got winded after two minutes of exercise.” Sun Wolf pushed back his long hair—he had barely broken sweat. “We’re going to do this every morning at this time, and it’s going to be hateful as hell for about three weeks, and there’s nothing I can do about that. Let’s go.”
    “I’m still tired!” the boy whined.
    “Kid, you’re gonna be tired for months,” the Wolf said. “You’re going to run back to the fortress and lift your weights and work a little with a stick with me, sometime before breakfast this morning. Now you can either do it fast and have time to do other things you’d like, or slow. It’s up to you.”
    The boy’s full, soft mouth pursed up tight to hide the resentful trembling of his lips, and he turned furiously away. He began to race back toward the Citadel at an angry, breakneck pace calculated, Sun Wolf thought, following with a hunting lion’s dogtrot, to exhaust him before he’d gone a third the distance.
    He couldn’t say that he blamed the