Jolie, like Eric, sat alone in a small room with only one door, but she did not see Giles enter. She had glanced at the door and looked away, and when she looked back, he was there, leaning against the closed door, darkly savage eyes looking out from a feverishly pale face.
Their eyes locked and held. Then Jolie said, "What are you going to do with Eric?"
Giles shrugged. "He is no longer your concern." And Jolie looked away.
There was silence for what must have been several minutes, after which Giles said, "You leave me with an interesting conundrum. What shall I do with you, I wonder?"
Without looking up, Jolie said, "What I wonder is why you haven't killed me yet."
"That is an interesting question," Giles replied. "Is there any reason to kill you?" He slid down the door until he was sitting, his eyes never leaving her. "Elsbietka, perhaps. You should not have killed her. She had such colors in her; the moon never entirely bleached them out. That was deserving of death, perhaps."
She turned her head and looked directly at him. "You know as well as I that if I had not killed her, she would have killed me."
"True enough. In a way, it was my fault, for underestimating the animus between you. She always could hold a grudge; I should have taken that more seriously. Still it is not reason enough to kill you, and what other reason could I possibly have?"
Jolie narrowed her eyes. "I tried to undermine you and have you killed."
Giles shrugged. "I began preparing for that the day I met you, as I did with Aveline, and with Seneca, and with every Wolf who is worth my time. Actually, in some ways I admire the approach. Most Wolves who try to take me on make the mistake of going directly for me; this turns it into a direct battle, and I am the Invincible Wolf: the moon guarantees my victory in any direct battle. To work indirectly was exactly the right strategy, and by doing it you managed to drag it out longer than most do. But in the end it is futile either way. Whether the play is three acts or five, I am the deus ex machina, and can still guarantee one ending. Our lives are governed by a nightmare-logic in which nothing matters but what you know. I know more." He reflected a moment, then said, "I would be interested in knowing what the hurry was. You could have given yourself more time to prepare."
It was Jolie's turn to shrug. "The longer the preparation, the greater the likelihood you would have been able to stop me, no? And I was tired. Tired of sitting on a balcony doing nothing, tired of hunting down and slapping a wayward Wolf back in line here and there, just tired. Particularly when we could do so much more; we could break this little world into pieces, and instead we read books over breakfast, muzzled."
"It is the way things must be."
"Why? Because you say so, because it is your will?"
"Yes!" The word came out with a savage snap. "Because I say so, because it is my will! Because I want order, I want civilization, I want reading over breakfast and sitting on a balcony, I want the muzzling of the Wolf. Because even damnation cannot take away reason, I want all the reason I can get...." He checked himself and closed his eyes for a long moment, and when he opened them again his tone was more calm. "You are too young to remember what it was like, in the days of Lykaios and the warlords. Every Wolf against every Wolf and every Pack against every Pack, with no order but what force and violence could make. You have never had the Will of Lykaios pounding in your brain, driving you into ever greater abysses of savagery. Be more Wolf, it said, be more Wolf, kill, maim, destroy. You do not know. All of your life you have known the Will of Aegidius, a whisper in the back of your head so steady you never notice it, telling you to be more human. The day you kill me, it will begin to vanish all away, and you will find that your allies turn treacherous and your enemies savage, and that all the order you have known will drift away like smoke into a civil war of Wolves. I've no doubt you could handle it; but right now you have no idea. Vsesalevitch and I felt the savagery,and fought it, and after the death of Lykaios began to chain it. Elsbietka came on the scene when we were already more than halfway through, and Aveline can just remember the last days of the last Warlords, and helped us finally kill that slippery devil Oleg." He looked at his hands, then with wry smile shrugged. "It does not matter. There is no point in killing you, because I need Primes who can get things done, and you've always been one of the best at that. And with Elsbietka gone, there will be far more work to do. So instead I give you the choice of joining forces with me again."
He rose and Jolie looked up at him. "How do you know that you can trust me?" she said.
"Seneca will no doubt be keeping one eye on you from here on out. Besides, I have never really trusted anyone for as long as I have been a Wolf," he replied, opening the door, and stood beside it expectantly.
"And what if I refused?"
"The only refusals I accept are my own," he said. "Besides, we both know you will take it because it is the only way you will have a chance to kill me and take over in a couple more centuries."
He looked at her; she looked at him. Then suddenly she threw her hands up with something like a surrender and rose from her chair. She walked out the door, not looking back, and he followed behind her.
