“Hush,” I said, my mind still laboring. She had been with me, then, all the time? With me when Kor and I had quarreled, when we had mended the quarrel, when I had quested away from him? With me these past despairing days as I made my slow way back to him? She had guarded my sleep, fought to help me, broken her foreleg—no, arm.… “Talk later, Tass. You’re hurt.”
“I have never been far from you,” she said as if in answer to my thoughts, “since the day I met you, except for the season when you and Kor ventured to the Mountains of Doom. There I could not follow.”
It was the chill mountaintop air on her bare skin, I thought, or hoped, that made her tremble. I ran and brought the deerskin I used for sleeping on and laid it over her. She still shook. She shivered and moaned as I eased her to a less cramped position on the stony ground, and she shivered and bit hard on the pebble I gave her, though she did not cry out, as I pulled her arm straight and splinted it with doubled arrows, bound them tight. All the time I longed to gather her to me and embrace her, stroke her scarred skin, warm and soothe her, and I knew I could not, I would only cause her pain and, maybe, fear … and I had to make my eyes slide over the sight of her small, comely breasts.
“Did Ytan hurt you?” I asked when I was done with her arm. “I mean, that night at your campfire. You looked ready to fall, I was sure you were wounded. But I see no marks on you.”
“No. He did not hurt me in any way you could see.”
She was still trembling, she must yet be cold. Trying to collect my wayward wits, I glanced around me. “Nothing to build a fire with,” I muttered.
“You—you yourself are the fire, Dan.”
This was fair speech indeed, from my Tass. “Will it burn you too badly,” I inquired tenderly, “if I hold you? I want—I hate to see you shaking.”
With a quiet gesture she welcomed me, and very gently I took up her head and shoulders into my arms, sitting by her and beneath her and warming her against my chest. I sat that way, with her lying half in my arms, the wolf pelt and the deerskin wrapped around the rest of her, I sat as if time did not matter, even world’s end did not matter anymore, for I was with Tass. And in time her trembling stopped, her body softened against mine, her breathing grew deep and steady, her head lay at ease in the crook of my elbow.
“Is the pain gone?” I murmured to her.
“Very nearly,” she said. And then, in the silent twilight, her face half turned away from me, half hidden by the dusk, she told me the tale of herself, Tass to the center of her being, as if by making sense of herself she could make sense of the world’s doom. And in so doing she told me why she had been afraid since the day she met me.
Chapter Fifteen
From her very earliest years she had visions.
“I felt that I was very old,” she told me, speaking into the cloth of my shirt. “Even when I was half grown I felt it, that I had lived long, long, that I had seen kingdoms rise and die, men fight their way around the cycles of time, the shapes of the islands and mountains change.”
Being reared by the red wolves on the bleak skirts of the thunder cones, she knew no other humans while she was growing, her thoughts were utterly her own, her visions were all she had of human truth, she had to trust them and remember them. Therefore, even before her wolf parents died and she joined the human tribe, she knew more than most grown warriors of self-will, but little enough of human love.
Her mother wolf had died at hunters’ moon, had raised her muzzle to the swollen orange moon and sung, then laid it down and died. And as if by agreement, her father wolf died in the same way at the next full moon, the witches’ moon. Then the halfgrown wolf girl who had no name was bereft, for she had nothing left. She stayed with her father’s body, and starved—though she did not weep, for she did not yet know of the ways of weeping—and when the body began to bloat and smell, she took the pelt to keep, for she could not let him go. She huddled under the raw skin to sleep, and when she awoke, she was a wolf.
“I was a child, yet I was indeed old. My red pelt went gray with age.”
“You yourself are the seer you have sought,” I said softly.
“Yet there is no wisdom in me at all. I feel as if—as if the older I grow, the less I know. I weep, I stamp my feet in fits of anger, I am no better than a scantling, an idiot, I know nothing.”
“We’re two fools together, then.” And holding her against my chest, I did not feel that I could have asked for anything better except that the world should be well.
“How old were you,” I asked her, “when your—when the wolves died?”
“How should I know? Young enough, in body.”
“Did you starve?” My belly pinched me. Hunger was always much on my mind, those days.
“Not in body. Dan, you know me. I have always fended for myself well enough. But I starved—I felt too much alone. I had never known the touch of humans, of my own kind. I feared them, and yet—there were not even any other wolves to be with me. I wore the skin of the very last.”
So alone did she feel that one day, seeing a few of the Herders searching for a lost ewe among the black rocks of the cinder slopes, she went human and sat, naked as she was, with a wolf pelt scarcely covering her, and let them find her.
“Was it something you decided, the change, or something that just happened?”
“Half of each. If I had willed it, I could have stayed a wolf. But human form calls to human form, it is a struggle to resist it, and sometimes.… I could never let you touch me when I was in wolf form, Dan, because of the love. It would have overpowered me utterly.”
I could not speak. She went on with the tale.
It had not taken her long to learn to love the Herders. They were good to her, perhaps the best tribe she could have gone to, for they were peaceable folk, forbearing with her wolfish ways, gentle in their attempts to tame her, patient as they taught her the human ways and the human speech, so strange to her. But they did not understand her, and even after she had learned the wonder of words, had become a storyteller and an adept with words, even after she had taken to herself human clothing and human customs she felt alone. Lonesome within herself, more so than ever, for was she not among humans like herself, yet not like herself at all?
What was she? Who was her mother? What was her tribe?
Her days, her dreams, were full of visions. In vision she saw the beautiful, many-colored horses of the vast plains years before she saw them in fact. And often she envisioned herself riding such a horse, galloping with the wind, and she took her name from that dream, calling herself Tassida, “horseback rider.” And a wolf’s wanderlust was in her, or the wanderlust of one in search of belonging, so that before she was well grown she went off by herself, alone and on foot, carrying her wolf pelt with her.
“I was young,” she said softly, then paused, thinking of what she wanted to tell me, gathering courage to tell me. And though her arm must have pained her, she shifted her body so that I could see her face, or so that she could look on mine in highmountain moonlight.
“I was young, or my body was young, I had dreams unlike the ones I have told you of,” she said, gazing at me steadily—she was the storyteller, I the fire. “Night dreams that I remembered with shame and unease in the daytime, for I was a scrawny stick of a girl, scarcely grown, and I felt awkward, unworthy of anyone’s passion. But I dreamed them even so, the dreams that made me go warm in my groin. A tall, beautiful man would come to me, and kiss me tenderly, and caress my breasts, and take me, and in the dreams it seemed to me that the whole world was made anew, fresh with birdsong and dew and—and beautiful creatures I had never seen. And the man, Dan—it was you.”
My breath stopped.
“I knew you the first time I saw you,” she said, “even though they had cut off your yellow braids.”
“But why—why—ai, Tass.” I could scarcely speak. “Why did you give no sign? I would have loved you, even then.”
“The devourer had come to me first.”
For some few years she rode the vast plains on him, with her wolf pelt as her riding skin, wandering, in search of her tribe, she told herself. And perhaps in search of something more—for she had people, the Herders, who loved her, and still she felt the stranger among them, so of what use might another tribe be? She came back briefly to the Herders on her shining black-and-white gelding, and found that homecoming was more lonesome than wayfaring, and left again to roam the steppes, the seacoast, the mountains to southward and northward—everywhere but the Red Hart Demesne, where she would have been most likely to find the yellow-braided lover she had envisioned in the night.
She searched, yet was afraid to find.… But a fate that had seemed very harsh at the time had driven me out of the Demesne, across the mountains in the murderous winter, to the sea. And in those snowcovered mountains, that same winter, she had seen a stranger and felt a shock and a strange leap of heart and a feeling without a name, for it was the man from her uneasy dreams.
“Bare-chested even in the icy cold,” she told me softly, “and riding at the hard gallop, confronting the wind like an eagle, the yellow braids flying back over his shoulders and a wild, keen look in his eyes. I was afraid, but I knew I was no longer a stick of a girl. I made Calimir stand in his path, stopping him, and I looked at him. He slid down from his mount, and I knew he sensed something as well, for he seemed to know I was a maiden even though I was dressed as a youth. Or, afterwit tells me, perhaps he did not care.… I left Calimir and walked to meet him, shaking with fright and awe, I felt fated, I looked into his eyes—and he seized me and pushed me down in the snow, bared his member and tried to rape me.”
I turned my face away from her, turned it against the rock, sick at heart—it had been the winter when I had crossed the mountains, fleeing from my treacherous father, maddened and full of rage, the winter of which I could remember nothing. Tass sat up with difficulty to face me, placing her one good hand gently on my shoulder.
“It was Ytan,” she said. “How can you think it of yourself, that you would do such a thing? Ytan must have been pursuing you. It was he.”
I looked at her, wretched still, afraid she said it merely to spare me. But her gaze steadily met mine.
“It was Ytan,” she repeated. “There was no wound on his chest. He carried a bow and baggage. His horse was dark.”
It was true. Relief surged through me, leaving me so weak that I could scarcely hold her when she came back into my arms again.
“But the day I rode into the Seal village and saw you standing there,” Tass explained, “I thought it was you.”
“Blood of Sakeema,” I murmured, “it is a wonder you did not take a knife to me.”
“Why do you think I did not attack Ytan to kill, that day on the mountain, instead of merely slashing at him and fleeing? For all I knew, he was you. Why do you think I did not accuse you, or, failing that, ride away? I felt that same wild leap of the heart, I was as helpless as Birc was in the highmountain meadow when the white hind took him in thrall. I skulked near you like a wolf, but I could not leave you. I loved you, even then.”
“I am honored,” I whispered, my fingers smoothing the dusky tendrils of her hair. “It was hard for you.”
Since she had to believe it of me, that I was a savage, she had believed all men were such savages, even Kor. And she knew Kor, also, on first seeing him, and was half afraid of him—though not as frightened as she was of me—for she had dreamed often of him, also, in her days of wandering the plains, though not in the same way. She would dream first of a darkened, stormy sky over a great expanse like the tallgrass prairie—but no, waves not of deepgreen grass but of greendeep water, the ocean, stretching dusky blue-gray-purple to forever, all the colors of abalone.… Yet when she looked into that stormdark sea there was a great stillness, a wisdom, a love deep and boundless as the sea … it was not sea. It was Kor, his salt-washed sea-colored eye, vast as the eye of sky, and he was as immense as the nameless god. When she could see his face, it looked at her out of the face of the greendeep, the vast face of ocean, and he neither threatened her nor turned away, but gazed at her out of restless water, out of the dark sheen of billow and whitecap, with still eyes that seemed to see her soul. Small wonder she was nearly as wary of him as she was of me.
“Once I have seen him like that,” I told her in a low voice, “in the pool of vision.”
“What else have you seen there?”
“Chal and Vallart.”
She nodded and said quietly, “I saw you and Kor.”
That was much later, the night she pulled her sword from that tarn. But ever since that first day at Seal Hold she had known—something. Something nameless and uncanny, so that in spite of her fear she had followed us, first as a youth, our afterling, later as a maiden, herself, our comrade. And I judged now that I knew why Kor and I had so quickly healed after hotwind wildfire had scorched us. Her touch. Tass, our healer.
But dreamwit though she was, she had not known that truth of herself. An oddling, mettlesome, alone even when she was with friends, and bitter, full of spleen, she could not deem so well of herself as to think she could do good. In no way could she know of the nameless power within her, secret even from self, as fearsome as love. Nor could she feel healing happening. Her hands touched and found hurts less severe than she had expected, that was all she knew. Even after the power of her touch brought Kor back from the dead, we did not know her as the healer. My tears had fallen on his lifeless body cradled in my arms, and Tass had touched once, and seen the healing, and fled in terror.
“And I hated myself,” she said in a low voice.
“But why? No need for shame, Tass. You had good cause for fear.”
“Ytan, you mean? But I had just seen him fleeing, and I saw who he was, and that he was not you. And then I went to find you, and you were holding Kor and weeping as if you would die.… What a coward I was. If I had come to you even a little sooner, I could have saved you both. What am I saying? You should never have been put to torment. Kor had told me what was likely to happen—I should never have left your side.”
“If you had been with us, you would have been bound as helpless as we were. Tass, let it go. What you did for us, even unknowing, was—the greatest gift. Life itself.”
“I still think it was at least in part power of your passion, your tears, that brought him back to us. He dawned back to life like a dayspring. I had never seen such a thing, nor have I since.”
I held her, cradled her as I had once cradled Kor’s hurt body, wishing there were indeed power in me to heal her as she had healed him.
Again and again she had healed Kor or me. In a meadow amid yellow pines, where I lay dying of the wound given to me by a devourer. Lying sleeping like a fool, she had thought, and I smiled to remember how roughly she had awakened me. And on a beach near the Greenstones, when Mahela took Kor and me in her stormy fist and flung us back to land—I might have been a sylkie yet had Tass not given me back to self with her touch. Kor and I had awakened to her scowling, vehement care. Tass, song of our love, name of our love, always leaving us and then returning to our lives like the refrain of a song. She was never enough with us, so we thought, but in fact she followed us as the sun follows the wayfarer, warm, or drew closer to us as the wolf, our shadow—always staying back a little from the fire.
“Your passion,” she said softly, “your force of passion, you never credit yourself enough with tha
t power, Dan. One night you went moon-mad, you howled with lust, and from miles away I came to you against my will.”
“As a wolf.”
“Yes, and called into heat by your howl.… I almost let you touch me that night, but I kept my secret. It was a way for me to be with you without the struggle, the fear.… Once you nearly guessed. I thought surely the devourer had discovered me to you.”
A human in wolf form, I had thought, someone in thrall. I had not thought of Tassida, I had not credited her with such devotion. “Was it you who brought Talu back to me,” I asked her, “at the castle above Sableenaleb?”
“Yes.”
She had caught the runaway mare and brought her to me despite the Cragsmen. She had followed me to the Red Hart encampment and on my journey to the Herders. When I had needed her, she had been nearby, she had come to me at once.
“But—why not stay and give me greeting?”
“The fear,” she explained, or tried to explain, her words halting. “It did not go away. Even though I knew—I understood—you were not Ytan. You were Dan, you would welcome me, I could belong to you, as I had never belonged anywhere. You would—love me with all your great heart. You are my tribe, you and Kor, a tribe of three, But still—I was afraid. Am afraid. There is still in me a nightmare that all that seems fair will turn out to be—otherwise.”
How I knew that fear. My own father had turned to a demon. “I could never betray you,” I whispered. “Nor would Kor.”
“No. I think not even the devourers could make either of you betray anyone you loved. But I—I have let myself love you, Dan, and if I ever lose you … if you are killed … I will have to grieve for you as you grieved for Kor, I will die.”
And utterly I understood her, and clung more closely to her. “Loving is fearsome,” I said huskily.
“Yes. Fearsome as life itself.”
Twilight had long since deepened into night. The waning moon went down, and we could no longer clearly see each other’s faces. Voices dwindled into silence, and in that silence I heard the clink of hooves on stone. A horse shape, dark in the night.… The gelding Calimir stood beside us, with Tassida’s bags and sword and clothing strapped to his back. As Tass had said, he had been trailing us at no great distance all the time. I could have been to Kor within a few days.… The thought wrenched at me, but did not make me angry at Tassida.
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