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  They always brought more hunters than were needed to take a beast down. The joy of the hunt was in the tracking, the fighting, and the slaying, but many hands were also needed to butcher the animal and prepare it for the trek back to the village. From Garad himself to the youngest member of the party, everyone joined in. At one point Durotan straightened, stretching arms bloody to the elbow from hacking at the carcass. Motion caught his eye, and he frowned, peering into the distance.

  “Father!” he called. “Rider!”

  Everyone stopped what they were doing at the word. Worried glances were exchanged, but all knew better than to speak. Riders never came after a hunting party, which could mean frightening the prey, unless the party had been gone for too long and there was concern for their safety. The only time a single rider would be sent out would be if Garad were suddenly needed back at the village—and that meant bad news.

  Garad looked at Geyah in silence, then stood and waited for the rider to approach. Kurg’nal, an older, grizzled orc whose hair was white as the snow, slipped off his wolf and saluted his chieftain, thumping one huge hand to his broad chest.

  He wasted no words. “Great chieftain—an orc has come to speak to you under the banner of parley.”

  Garad’s brow knitted. “Parley?” The word sounded odd on his tongue, and there was confusion in his voice.

  “What is ‘parley’?” Orgrim was one of the largest orcs in the clan, but he could move with great silence when he so chose. Durotan, intent on the conversation, had never even noticed his friend step beside him.

  “Parley means…” Durotan fumbled for the words. To an orc, they were so strange. “The stranger comes only to speak. He comes in peace.”

  “What?” Orgrim looked almost comical, his tusked jaw hanging open slightly. “This must be some kind of trick. Orcs do not parley.”

  Durotan didn’t reply. He watched as Geyah stepped beside her mate, speaking to him quietly. Like Drek’Thar, Geyah was a shaman, but she had a very specific task. She was the Lorekeeper, one who tended the scrolls that had been passed down for generations and ensured the ancient traditions and rituals of the Frostwolves were not lost. If anyone understood how to properly respond to an orc coming under the banner of parley, it would be her.

  Garad turned to face the silent orcs patiently awaiting his response. “An orc named Gul’dan has come to speak,” he told them. “He invokes the ancient ritual of parley, which means he is our… our guest. We will treat him with respect and honor. If he is hungry, we will feed him the choicest food. If he is cold, he may have our warmest cloak. I will listen to what he has come to say, and behave in all ways in accordance with our traditions.”

  “What if he does not respond in kind?” asked one orc.

  “What if he shows the Frostwolf clan disrespect?” another shouted.

  Garad looked to Geyah, who answered the questions. “Then it is shame upon his head. The Spirits will not favor him for scorning the very tradition he invokes. The dishonor is his, not ours. We are Frostwolves,” she stated, her voice rising with her conviction. Shouts of agreement went up in response.

  Kurg’nal still looked uncomfortable. He tugged at his beard and murmured something to his chieftain. Durotan and Orgrim were close enough to catch the softly spoken words.

  “My chieftain,” Kurg’nal said, “there is more.”

  “Speak,” Garad ordered.

  “This Gul’dan… he comes with a slave.”

  Durotan stiffened with instant dislike. Some of the clans enslaved others, he knew. Orcs fought amongst themselves on occasion. He himself had been part of these battles, when other clans trespassed on Frostfire Ridge and hunted Frostwolf food. The Frostwolves fought well and fully, not hesitating to kill if necessary, but never doing so out of rage or merely because an opportunity presented itself. They did not take prisoners, let alone slaves; the fight was over when one side yielded. Beside him, Orgrim snarled softly at the words as well.

  But Kurg’nal was not done. “And…” he shook his head, as he couldn’t himself believe what he was about to say, then tried again. “My lord chieftain… both the slave and her master… are green!”

  2

  Garad asked Durotan and Orgrim to return to Frostfire Ridge with him and Geyah. He ordered the rest of the party—a male orc in his prime, Nokrar; his fierce-eyed mate, Kagra; and a barrel-chested orc called Grukag—to stay behind, to finish preparing the meat and hides for the trip back to the village.

  Durotan burned with questions he knew better than to ask. Besides, what could Garad even tell him? The idea of “parley” was something the chieftain had doubtless heard about as a youth, but likely had not thought about for years.

  They rode in tense silence toward their village. Once, the lore scrolls said, the Frostwolves had been nomads. They followed the game all over Draenor, wherever the beasts would wander. Their homes could be broken down quickly, tied into bundles, and slung upon the backs of their wolves. But all that, if it was even true, had changed long ago.

  The clan had settled in Frostfire Ridge, with Greatfather Mountain and his protection to the south, the Spirits safely in their Seat in the north, and meadows stretching toward forests to the east and west. As most orcs did, Frostwolves marked the boundaries of their territories with banners—a white wolf’s head against a blue background. They built sturdy huts of stone, mud, and wood. In the past, most family units took care of themselves, calling upon the might of the clan only in rare times of famine or attack.

  But now, many of the outlying huts were empty skeletons and had been for years, cannibalized for their timber as their inhabitants, family by family, moved closer to the center of the settlement. Food, rituals, and work were shared. And now, curiosity was shared as well.

  While smaller cooking fires burned throughout the village as needed, there was a large pit in the center that was always fueled. In the winter, it provided necessary warmth. Even in the summer a smaller fire was kindled for gathering together, for storytelling, and for meals. A place of honor was reserved for Garad—a boulder that, long ago, had been carved into a chair.

  Every Frostwolf knew the story of the Stone Seat. It went back to the time when the clan was supposedly nomadic. One chieftain, though, felt so tied to Frostfire Ridge when he led his clan there that he did not wish to leave it. The clan was anxious. What would happen to them if they did not follow their prey?

  The chieftain did not want to force his people to stay against their will, so he asked the shaman for an audience with the Spirits. He made a pilgrimage as north as north could be, to the Edge of the World. There, in the Seat of the Spirits, a sacred cave deep within the heart of the earth, he sat for three days and three nights, with no food or water, alone in the darkness.

  He was, finally, granted a vision that told him this: if he was so stubborn as not to leave, the Spirits would make of his stubbornness a virtue. “You are as immovable as stone,” they told him. “You have come all this way to find the Seat of the Spirits. Go back to your people, and see what we have given you.”

  Upon his return, the chieftain found that a boulder had rolled to the very center of the Frostwolf encampment. He declared it would forever be the Stone Seat, won for his trial in the Seat of the Spirits—the chair of the Frostwolf chieftain until time crumbled the stone to dust.

  Dusk had fallen when Durotan and the others reached the village. A fire blazed in the communal pit, and its flames were ringed by every member of the Frostwolf tribe. As Garad, Geyah, Durotan, and Orgrim approached, the crowd parted.

  Durotan stared at the Stone Seat.

  It was occupied by the orc who had come under parley.

  And in the flickering orange light, Durotan saw that the stranger, and the female who crouched beside him with a heavy metal circlet about her slender throat, were indeed the color of moss.

  The male was hunched, perhaps because of the age that colored his beard gray. He was bulky in his cloak and clothing. The spikes of some creature
jutted from his cloak. In the dim light, Durotan could not have said how they had been fastened to the fabric. He was staring in horrified fascination at two of the spikes upon which had been impaled tiny skulls. Were they once the heads of draenei babies… or, Spirits save him, those of infant orcs? They seemed wrong, deformed, if so. Perhaps some creature he had never heard tell of.

  He desperately hoped so.

  The newcomer leaned on a staff as adorned with bone and skulls as his cloak. Symbols had been carved upon it, and those same symbols were repeated around the opening of the stranger’s cowl. In the shadow of that cowl, his eyes gleamed—not with reflected firelight, but with a glowing green luminescence of their own.

  Less visually interesting, but perhaps even more puzzling, was the female. She looked like an orc—but it was clear her blood was tainted. How, Durotan could not possibly begin to guess, and the thought repulsed him. She was part orc and part… something else. Something weaker. Whereas Geyah and other females were not as laden with muscle or bulk as orc males, they were obviously strong. This female looked as slender as a twig to him. But then, when he looked into her eyes, she held his gaze steadily. Perhaps her body was frail, but not her spirit.

  “Not a very slave-like slave, is she?” Orgrim said quietly, for Durotan’s ears alone.

  Durotan shook his head. “Not with that fire in her eyes.”

  “Does she even have a name?”

  “Someone said Gul’dan called her…‘Garona.’”

  Orgrim raised his eyebrows at the word. “She is named ‘cursed’? What sort of… thing… is she? And why are she and her master…” Orgrim shook his head, looking almost comically bemused. “What is wrong with their skin?”

  “I do not know, and will not ask,” Durotan said, though he, too, was burning with curiosity. “My mother will think it disrespectful, and I have no wish to rouse her anger.”

  “Nor does anyone in the clan, which is perhaps the sole reason he yet lives, after settling his green rear in the Stone Seat,” said Orgrim. “One does not cross the Lorekeeper, but she does not look happy that this—this mongrel is to be permitted to speak.”

  Durotan glanced at his mother. Geyah was busily braiding some bright beads into her hair. Obviously, they were part of the parley ritual, and she was hastening to finish her preparation. The look she gave the newcomer could have shattered the stone seat he occupied.

  “She doesn’t look happy about any of this. But remember what she told us,” Durotan replied, his gaze traveling back to the fragile but not frail slave, to the arrogant stranger sitting in his father’s chair. “All of this is Gul’dan’s dishonor, not ours.”

  What he did not say to Orgrim was that the female before him reminded him of another, one who had been banished from the safety of the Frostwolf clan. Her name had been Draka, and she had a similar attitude to this slave, even when she faced Exile and almost certain death.

  As his father had drummed into him, the Frostwolves did not indulge in killing or tormenting without purpose, and therefore scorned the practice of taking slaves or prisoners for ransom. But neither did they condone weakness, and those born fragile were believed to undermine the clan as a whole.

  They were permitted to reach young adulthood, as it was known that sometimes what seemed like a frailty was outgrown with the passing of years. But once they entered adolescence, the frail and the fragile were turned out to survive on their own. If they were somehow able to do so, once a year, they were permitted to return and display their prowess: at Midsummer, when food was the most plentiful, and spirits at their highest. Most Exiles never returned to Frostfire Ridge. Fewer still had done so in recent years, as survival became more difficult in the changing land.

  Draka was Durotan’s age, and when she faced her Exile, he had felt a twinge of sorrow. He was not alone. There had been murmurs of admiration from others as the clan gathered to watch her depart. Draka took with her only enough food for a week, and tools with which to hunt and make her own clothing and shelter. Death was almost certain, and she must have known it. Yet her narrow back was straight, though her thin arms quivered with the weight of the clan’s “gifts” that could mean life or death.

  “It is important, to face death well,” one of the adults had said.

  “In this, at least, she is a Frostwolf,” another had replied.

  Draka had not looked back. The last Durotan saw of her, she was striding off on skinny legs, the blue and white Frostwolf banner tied around her waist fluttering in the wind.

  Durotan often found himself thinking about Draka, wondering what had happened to her in the end. He hoped that the other orcs were right, and that she had faced her final moments well.

  But such honor would forever be denied to the slave before them. Durotan turned his gaze from the bold, green-skinned slave named “Cursed” to her master.

  “I mislike this,” said a deep, rumbling voice by Durotan’s ear. The speaker was Drek’Thar, his hair almost completely white now, but his body still muscular, as straight and tall as the newcomer’s was stooped. “Shadows cling to this orc. Death follows him.”

  Durotan took in the skulls dangling from Gul’dan’s staff and impaled on his spiked cloak. An onlooker might have made the same comment, but he or she would have done so while regarding the celebration of bones that adorned the newcomer. The blind shaman saw death, too, but not as others did.

  Durotan tried not to shudder at Drek’Thar’s words. “Shadows lie long on the hills in winter, and I myself brought death today. These things do not bad omens make, Drek’Thar. You might as well say life follows him, since he is green.”

  “Green is the color of spring, yes,” said Drek’Thar. “But I sense nothing of renewal about him.”

  “Let us listen to what he has to say before we decide he has come as a harbinger of death, life, or nothing at all.”

  Drek’Thar chuckled. “Your eyes are too dazzled by the banner of parley to truly see, young one. But you will, in time. Let us hope your father does.”

  As if hearing his name, Garad stepped into the ring of firelight. The murmuring hushed. The stranger, Gul’dan, seemed to be enjoying the stir he was causing. His thick lips curled around his tusks in a smile that was close to a sneer, and he made no move to rise from his place. Another chair had been brought for the clan chieftain; wooden, simple, functional. Garad settled into it and placed his hands on his thighs. Geyah, dressed now in her most formal clothing of tanned talbuk hide painstakingly embroidered with bead- and bone-work, stood behind her mate.

  “The ancient banner of parley has come to the Frostwolves, borne by Gul’dan, son of…” Garad paused. A look of confusion flitted over his strong face, and he turned to Gul’dan in query.

  “The name of my father is unimportant, as is the name of my clan.” Gul’dan’s voice made the hairs along Durotan’s forearms bristle. It was raspy, and unpleasant, and the arrogant tone set his teeth on edge. But worse to any orc’s ears than the voice were the words. The names of one’s parents and clan were vitally important to orcs, and the Frostwolves were shocked to hear the question so quickly and indifferently dismissed. “What is important is what I have to say.”

  “Gul’dan, son of No Orc and of No Clan,” said Geyah in a voice so pleasant only those who knew her well could recognize the barely leashed anger, “you rush the rituals and thus dishonor the very banner under which you have requested parley. This might make my chieftain believe you no longer wish for its protection.”

  Durotan smiled, not bothering to hide it. His mother was as dangerous as his father, as the clan well knew. This green orc only now seemed to be aware that perhaps he might have misstepped.

  Gul’dan inclined his head. “So I have. And no, I have no wish to abandon the benefits of the banner. Continue, Garad.”

  Garad spoke the formal words. They were long and complex, some so archaic Durotan didn’t even recognize them, and he began to grow restless. Orgrim looked even more impatient. The general tone was th
at of safety and a fair hearing for the one who requested parley. Finally, it was over, and Garad turned expectantly to Gul’dan.

  The other orc got to his feet, leaning on his staff. The tiny skulls on his back seemed to protest silently with open mouths. “Custom and the ancient rites that stay your hand compel me to tell you three things: Who I am. What I offer. And what I ask.” He looked at the gathered Frostwolves with his glowing green eyes, almost appraisingly. “I am Gul’dan, and while, as I have said, I claim no clan of origin, I do have a clan… of a sort.” He chuckled slightly, the sound doing nothing to mitigate his unsettling appearance. “But I will speak more on this later.

  “Next… What do I offer? It is simple, but the dearest thing in the world.” He lifted his arms, and the skulls clanked hollowly against one another. “I offer life.”

  Durotan and Orgrim exchanged frowns. Was Gul’dan making a veiled—or perhaps not-so-veiled—threat?

  “This world is in jeopardy. And thus, so are we. I have traveled far to offer you life in the form of a new homeland—one that is verdant, rich in game and fruit and the grain of the fields. And what I ask is that you accept this offer and join me in it, Garad of the Frostwolves.”

  As if he had heaved a mammoth stone into a placid lake, he took his seat and gazed at Garad expectantly. Indeed, all eyes were on Garad. What Gul’dan was proposing was not just offensive and arrogant—it was madness!

  Wasn’t it?

  For a moment, it seemed the Frostwolf leader didn’t know what to say, but finally, he spoke.

  “It is well that you come under the protection of a banner, Gul’dan of No Clan,” Garad rumbled. “Otherwise, I would rip out your lying throat with my own teeth!”

  Gul’dan did not seem either surprised or offended. “So others before you have said,” he replied, “and yet, they are part of my clan now. I am sure your shaman can see things that ordinary orcs cannot, and this world, while troubled, is wide. I ask you to accept the possibility that you may not know all things, and that I may indeed offer something the Frostwolves need. Perhaps tales have reached your ears over the last few seasons of… a warlock?”