“I’ll get it,” Dair offered, and he ambled out. Old Dorcas hid her face in modesty at the sight of him and fled to a secluded portion of the house.
We ate lunch when he returned. It was mostly green beans from the garden; Dair chewed them with much sour grimacing. Already I knew that he would be out on the hunt for meat after dark. I smiled and turned my attention to Frain.
“Tell me why you are here.”
We talked through the afternoon. It took that long to get much sense out of him. I think that he himself did not really know what he wanted of me, so he had to tell me his whole story before I could understand the joke fate or his own foolhardiness had played on him. He had thought Isle to be Ogygia—well, he might have been not too far wrong. Isle was a magical place. He had spoken with Alys there. He had to find Shamarra, he told me, and the goddess had sent him to me for help.
I knew nothing of Shamarra, night birds or Vale either. “What exactly did she say?” I asked. I knew the riddling ways of the goddess.
“To go east.”
“Did she say you would find Shamarra in the east?”
“No,” he admitted. “She did not say where Shamarra was at all. She said you would help me.”
“But did she say what I was to help you to do?”
He sighed. “Some nonsense about fern flower,” he said, “and fire meeting flood.”
I sat thinking of my own quest. The Source lay east, if I could judge by the remembered lore of the elves and the yearning that sang to me from the rising sun. I tried not to let my judgment be skewed by the tug that was on me. No—the truth was plain, tug or no tug.
“Shamarra is not your true quest,” I said.
I saw his eyebrows leap up. He did not feel well enough acquainted with me to argue, but I knew he did not agree. And I knew just as surely that I would be taking him with me to the Source.
Dair meandered in. He had been out foraging, and he looked pleased with himself and with the world at large. He carried a basket full of mushrooms and blackberries, and he wore a sort of breechclout in deference to Dorcas’s squeamishness. I remembered the days when Trevyn used to go about like that, and my heart swelled.
“Come here,” I said to him. “I was just about to tell Frain that I am to go on a journey.”
I noticed your bags. He came over and sat at the table with us. When will you leave?
“Not for several days. Not until you two have had a chance to rest. Frain does not look well.”
He has been very ill.
“I wish I could understand you two,” Frain sighed.
I switched to Traderstongue. It would be difficult to explain myself to him in such a clumsy tongue. It would have been difficult to explain my reasons in any language of man. I knew what I was doing or to do in one sense, a nighttime sense, a dream sense, but in the daytime sense I did not know in the least what I was about. I had a vague notion what Dair was for, and that was all.
“I have been seeing flowers made of red flame in the sunrise,” I said tentatively, “and in the hearth, and I have been hearing voices in the night when I am half asleep, voices telling me it is time the old woman came out of her wood. I have sometimes thought that the One has been talking to me. I wish I were foolish enough to feel sure. At any rate, I have made up my mind. I must leave this place and set out to find the Source.”
Frain merely nodded. It was nothing to him what I did. He was not seeing the safe haven of thirty years left behind.
“And I feel quite certain, Frain, that you are to come with me.”
He sat up at attention then. “Only if Shamarra might be there,” he said.
Little did I know of Shamarra and her vengeful ways. “She might be there or anywhere,” I declared, resorting to sophistry, certain that he would not respond to better truth. This birdwoman was the least pressing of his needs, I knew that by then, but she gave the only hold I had on him. I would bribe him into obedience by means of Shamarra.
“And if she is there how are you to recognize her?” I demanded. “And even if she were to sit on your hand in bird form, how would you speak to her? If you cannot understand Dair, you will not be able to understand a night bird.”
His shoulders sagged. “The goddess said I would not be able to—well, help her,” he mumbled. “But I have to keep on trying, don’t you see? Because of—the way I am.”
I stifled a sigh of exasperation.
“There is a song the elves used to sing—” I began.
“Elves?” he interrupted.
“The old folk, a fair, tall race. Those who went before.” Did he know nothing? “They sailed to Elwestrand. None have set foot on the mainland for tens of thousands of years, but some of us still remember them and the Source whence they came, they and their bright stones.” I stared down his doubt. “There is a song they used to sing, and it is in Dol Solden, too, I believe, the mystic Book of Suns. A song about the Source and the magical fern that grows there.
Fern flower, fire flower,
Burn, burn when the great tide turns.
Fern flower, show your power.
The Swan Lord will be there to see,
To grasp the stem that burns
And speak with thee,
learn melody,
and sing with wind and tree.”
Dair sat looking at me in suppressed excitement, and Frain quite blankly.
“But it is nonsense,” he protested. “Ferns don’t have flowers.”
“That is why this one is so singular,” I said. “The legend is that the flower of this fern, if plucked at the proper time, will give the bearer power to understand almost anything—the speech of water and trees and wind and even stars.” I took significant pause. “And, of course, birds.”
“You mean Shamarra?” Frain jumped as if he had been jabbed. “But when is the proper time?”
“Midnight on Midsummer’s Eve.”
“But—is it far?” Midsummer was nearly upon us.
“Very far, I imagine. We might get there by this time next year.”
“Another year!” he groaned.
“You have nearly infinite years before you,” I reminded him gently. “And so has Shamarra.”
That settled him. “What is this Source?” he inquired, with the first real, sensible interest he had shown. “The Source of what?”
“Of everything! All that is.” I looked at him in surprise. “Does no one tell tales of the Source in your land, of the Beginning?”
“Of Adalis, of how she lay upon the flood and mothered forth all that is in Vale—”
“Well,” I said rather too sharply, “you have seen that there is more to the world than Vale.”
“Adalis is true goddess,” he returned just as sharply. “I have seen that as well.”
“She is in Aene.” I smoothed the edge off my voice. Ignorant he might be, but he was courageous, and he was there, in my house, in the flesh—an exceptional event. There had to be some reason for it. And he was arching his brows again.
“The nameless One,” I explained. I had used the elfin word; my mistake. “Aene is sun, moon, empty sky and all that is on earth. Aene is dawn and dusk. Aene sang the world into being. The Source is the place of that singing. Strong magic is there.”
What else is there? Dair asked.
There was a quality about Dair that was too goodnatured to be called irreverence or flippancy; it was only that he was so very blunt. Frain sensed the tone of the question even though he could not apprehend the content, and he laughed out loud. I had to smile.
“Truly, I don’t know,” I said. “We shall have to see.”
I think I have already seen that flower, Dair said, and I nodded at him.
“I have not yet said that I am coming,” Frain put in.
“Ah, but you are,” I told him. “What else could be intended for you?” I felt a comforting certainty grow in me. His presence, like Dair’s, was a proof, a sign.
“I suppose I am,” he admitted. “That is, if Dai
r—Dair?” He turned to his companion in sudden anxiety. “Dair, are you coming on this—errand?”
Of course.
Dair followed the reassurance with a nod, and Frain smiled and relaxed. I felt compunction take hold of me. Such children they were, really, and what was I leading them into?
“It will not be easy,” I warned. “None of it will be easy, and the fern flower least of all. It is said to exact a fearsome price.”
“Nothing in my life has been easy,” Frain said.
Chapter Two
Five days later we set out with as little ado as possible, though there were some tears. I left the house in the care of old Dorcas and Jare, her husband, they who had been my servants for many years. When they died the place would go to ruin, but not before. It gave me some comfort that they would tend it awhile. For their part, they felt comforted that I went with companions at my side.
So off we trudged, toting heavy packs of bread, dried meat and the like. We walked eastward. We walked, for the most part, for the next several months, following nothing more than sunrise and my instinct and the gentle, insistent tug of the unseen Source. We walked out of sycamore forest and into oak and beech and beyond that into ilex and scrub pine. Our packs soon lightened as we ate up our provisions, and Dair took to keeping us supplied with meat, slipping in and out of his wolf form with ever increasing ease and skill. Frain watched him in wonder and in love.
“How do you do it, the shape changing?” he asked Dair as we sat by the fire one night. He had taken to talking to Dair with the aid of a translator—me. The conversations were awkward, especially since Dair was not by nature the talkative sort. But Frain persevered. There was a dogged quality about Frain.
I don’t know, said Dair. True enough; he never spoke less than truth. He was an instinctive being, a child of the wilderness.
“You must know something,” said Frain. “How did it happen to you the first time?”
I—it was you. I wanted to befriend you. I wanted it so badly I howled.
Frain looked both startled and pensive, remembering something. “I believe it was the same the second time, and the third,” he mused. “Desire—”
“More is needed than mere desire,” I told both of them. I was a shape changer too; just let them wait and see! “It is a matter of being with whatever is. Of being no longer separate. Being at one.”
“What?” said Frain, for he was so human, so set apart that he was not even aware of it. And Dair growled in equal puzzlement, for he was so much a part of whatever he sensed.… I stared at him.
“There is a risk, too,” I said slowly, “of losing self to instinct, the fate of the form. But there can be no changing without risk of loss.”
Frain sat folded in upon himself, looking lonesome. I felt sure that Dair had never comprehended that peculiar human quality of being at odds with the world, that cosmic loneliness. But he was soon to learn the meaning of it.
I will never forget the night we first heard the cry of the wild wolves.
There must have been famine in the north that had driven them to the southern woods. Mournful hunger was in their voices. We heard them at dusk as we ate our cold meat, and I for one felt a sudden urge to make a campfire, though we needed none for cooking. Frain glanced at me askance, his face taut.
“Will they bother us, do you think?” he asked, keeping his voice low.
Game was not scarce, so I judged that men—robbers—would be the greater danger. We made no fire. We sat in the gathering darkness, listening to the voices of the wolves, silvery voices that summoned their fellows to the hunt, harmonious and very beautiful.
They ring through me like harp song, said Dair suddenly. I glanced at him sharply. His eyes were glimmering, shining greenly, not with joy but with yearning and a sort of lust.
“What is it?” Frain asked me, alerted by something in the tone of Dair’s utterance.
“I think he would like to join the hunt.”
Wolf notes were reaching a wild chorus. Like! Dair exclaimed, panting with feeling. It is hardly the word. I could die with longing. The musky creature smells, and that green darkness—there are no words for what I feel.
It was true, there were none, not even in the Old Language that cannot tell false. But I knew the pang, for I had felt it myself. Wilderness call—one might as well be in thrall. I tried to hide my sympathy, watching him narrowly. He sat trembling, his hands twitching like restless paws, his nostrils pulsating, temples pulsating with the force of the blood that raced through the veins of his bare neck.
Frain watched him as well, his brown eyes troubled. “Did you never run with the wolves in Isle, Dair?” he asked, quite gently.
Dair shook his head violently. No. I heard them, but never so close, so calling, and I was younger—
“He has no business with them,” I snapped. “Dair, don’t you know you are meant for something more than running with a pack?”
He didn’t answer me. Even as I spoke his wolf form came on him all in a rush like loveheat, of its own accord. He stretched his muzzle skyward and howled; the sound shivered through the air. The chorus of the wild wolves abruptly ceased, and Frain’s cry of shock sounded painfully loud in the dusky silence.
“Dair! Wait!”
Dair ran to him and laid his long head in his lap with a whine, a wordless appeal. Frain held tightly to the taut, quivering body.
“He has to go,” I said, my tone peevish to hide bothersome emotion. “He has to—find out.…”
Fate can be a heartless thing.
“He says he will come back to you.”
Frain swallowed and loosened his grasp. “Go,” he said, and Dair bounded off into the dark forest.
We listened awhile. The wolfsong had begun again. It moved farther away.
“No harm is likely to come to him, is it, Maeve?” Frain asked me when he finally spoke. I hastened to reassure him.
“Harm, to Dair? What harm could come to him from wolves? He is a wolf himself.”
“He will be back,” Frain muttered, to himself rather than to me. “He said he would.”
Why, then, if all was well, were we both sitting anxiously in the night?
Neither of us slept, although I sometimes pretended to. At the first light of dawn Frain was up and pacing. From time to time faint howls sounded far to the east. Dair did not return.
“Something has happened,” Frain declared with fanatical certainty a scant hour after sunrise. “I must go find him.”
“You cannot find him,” I said.
“The pack last howled eastward.” He pointed.
“He will not be with the pack. Stay here. You will lose your way in the forest if you go off, and then he will have to find you.”
Frain glared at me, insulted, but worry won out over injured pride. “Dair needs my help. I am sure of it,” he said, and started away. I caught hold of him.
“Stay,” I said angrily. “It is bad enough that one of you two infants is out on his own.”
He shook off my hand.
“Stay and give Dair a chance to keep his word,” I said in a different tone, reaching through anger to truth. Frain stared at me, then nodded.
He kept to camp, but restively. Neither of us ate. We stood erect and alert all that long morning, as if any moment something might pounce on us with teeth and claws and send us reeling into disaster.
Dair told us later what had happened.
The wolves, the wild pack, his brothers. They had struck a fine stag that led them a long, swift chase. Dair followed the sound and scent through the night, feeling the surge of his own power and grace. He heard the brief triumph howl at the kill, but it was daybreak before he found them where they lay feasting.
Seven of them in the sunlight—
He spoke in wonder of the colors of their pelages. Two were tawny fawn, one cinnamon, one nearly red, one brown, one gray and one, the largest and the leader, pure black. That one was as large as he. But he did not get to look at them for long;
they scented him almost as soon as he sighted them. Man! they barked, and with that warning they streaked away, leaving their kill.
I must have lost my mind, Dair said wryly. I ran after them.
And he caught up with them in a few moments, for he was swift and long of limb. He sped into their midst, and of course they were terrified by his strangeness, appearance and essence that did not match. Their terror made them savage. They attacked him fiercely.
His thick fur gave him some protection. But he could not stand against them all, and within the minute he was forced to flee, limping and bleeding from a dozen slashes. They pursued him. He could no longer outrun them, wounded as he was, and they harried him. He ran at first back toward our camp, but as they continued to follow, biting and snarling and worrying at him, he thought hazily that he might be bringing danger down upon us and he changed direction, setting a twisting course through the ilex trees. After a while, sluggish from full bellies, the pack circled away and left him. Dair struggled on, no longer sure of his bearings, feeling lost and desperate to find us. He would not stop to rest or lick his wounds until he had rejoined us.
Maybe the wolf god knows the effort it cost him—he endured. He came back to us. About noon of the next day he staggered back to the campsite where Frain and I stood frantically disputing. One of his eyes was swollen shut from a cut just above it, and the ear on that side was torn, and his gray fur was all dappled and clotted with brownish red—he had one glimpse of Frain’s shocked and anguished face and he was himself again in human form. His injuries looked even worse on his furless human skin.
“Oh, no!” Frain cried out, choking. “Dair—”
He stood swaying a moment, and then he fell against Frain, who caught him with his one good arm and laid him down. But Dair came to himself again in a moment. He had needed that human embrace, I think.
I am sorry, he muttered thickly.
“Hush,” said Frain fiercely, almost as if he could understand him. “Maeve, water. Eala, if only I could help him—”
We used all our water on him. There was not enough to properly cleanse the wounds. We concentrated on the ones around his face and head, binding them as neatly as we were able, hoping they would not scar too badly.
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