Extraits

The sound of the chase confirmed he’d been right: they were heading his way. No doubt the quarry was flagging by now, but still keeping ahead of the pack. Akrit was not as young or swift as he once had been, but strength came in many forms, and raw speed did not decide success in a hunt like this.

A big, broad-shouldered man was Akrit Stone River: weather-beaten skin like old tanned leather and his hair starting to grey. He had led the Winter Runner tribe of the Wolf for twenty years, and each one of those years had made his people stronger, extended their reach, brought more hearths into the Wolf’s Shadow. If he showed weakness though, some challenger would step from the pack to face him. On days like this, he knew they were all waiting for it.

“I am the Wolf. I am the voice that calls in the night. I am that which hunts in a pack.”

“You say you have tried to make me strong? Old man, you have tried to break me all my life.”

“You have ever sought to be a taller man than you are, and to do so you have piled up the bodies of others.”

“She speaks of a great war and a time of broken laws. She says it will be soon now.”

“When deer and boar stayed close to their homes, when horses would founder and get lost, the wolves ran free and taught all others exactly why the winter was to be feared.”

“And I thought about it all too long, what we were doing. And I knew that if I just did what I was told, and it was wrong, then being told to do it would not save me.”

“For all a man wanders, having a home is still a good thing.”

"... “That sound spoke of ages, great stone volumes of history that had come and gone, filled with the lives of men who thought that their 'now' was the only now that mattered. -pg 329”

― Adrian Tchaikovsky, The Tiger and the Wolf..."

“That is how people are. Once they have food and drink and shelter, the next thing they must find is a quarrel.”