“Ride west. You should be able to make the Bilocctar border from here before being tracked for that stolen dnu. NeBrenton—arrange to pay the stable master now so we don’t have to haggle at dawn. Cheyko, Slu—check the packs and make sure they’re ready. I don’t want to waste time in the morning. We’ll pick up winter supplies in Nitenton and take the short road toward Ariye. We should make the pass in four days.”
As the other men left, Drovic stared at the map. He didn’t realize that his hands had begun to clench again until the paper crumpled in his fingers. Carefully, he released it. His voice was so quiet in the emptiness of walls and maps that it seemed to be a whisper. “And the wolves of Ramaj Ariye and Randonnen again steal my son away.”
XXXVI
Ember Dione maMarin
“Run,” said the Tiwar. His voice was sly. “Race in fear, in fury, in grief. Sprint for the goal; fly for the end of the world.”
She gripped her thigh where the wound was deep. Her blood was hot on her fingers. “You cannot stop me,” she managed. “I am stronger than you now.”
“You trip over history and do not see it. You plunge into your past like an abyss.” The Tiwar smiled, his teeth a glowing yellow. “I do not have to stop you,” he said. “I merely have to watch.”
—from Wrestling the Moons
The icy dawn was pale blue against the snow-white slopes. The wagon train was a coordinated flurry of motion. A half dozen wagons had already moved into position, stretching out onto the road. Traces were checked, the last dnu harnessed, and the final bundles repacked in the wagons. The last of the unbroken ice crunched underfoot where it had formed during the night. Then the lead riders trotted to the road, and the first wagons pulled out behind them, others sliding into place as the courtyard began to clear. One wagon was awkward with a young driver still learning to turn his team. Dion could see the young man’s father, holding himself back from helping. Then the young man settled himself, and the team moved smoothly forward.
Tehena huddled into her coats and scarves, and Dion’s dnu stamped its feet. Dion did not seem to notice. They should have left before the train, Tehena muttered to herself. Should have ridden out early to stay ahead of the wagons. Instead, they would spend another day trudging as slow as the slowest team before them.
But when the last wagon was rolling, and only the shattered snow was left behind, Dion turned to look north and west. For long, silent moments, she stared at the icy mountains. She could not hear the wolves. Like the day before, at this distance and altitude, with almost no life to resonate with the packsong, her mind was almost clear. Only her own thoughts filled her skull. She did not feel drawn north, or south to Ariye except by her own intentions. She felt no geas here, only the background sea of her own emotions and the hope that had begun to push tiny waves over that infinite surface as she watched the wagons roll. There were other ways to raise a child than by Ariyen methods, ways that would allow her to keep her bond with the wolves and still keep her child safe while she met her promises. They might not be the choices an Ariyen would make, but they would become her ways in time. Face the hunter, then find her life.
Find. Protect. The remembered words seemed to echo in her memory.
Chantz and the other rear riders fell in behind the last wagons, and Chantz gestured for Dion to fall in with him. She shifted as if to urge her dnu forward, then deliberately remained still. She could go with them all the way to Ariye— travel in that safety. But Chantz had his own memories to soothe, and she was done with soothing. She gave herself a twisted smile. The cozar offered her comfort, but the world did not want her safety, only for her to keep her promise. It was done with waiting, but not with taking, and so she was not done giving.
“Dion?” Kiyun asked.
She glanced at him. The very absence of snarls in her head made her promise to the Gray Ones stronger. It was as if, in their near silence, she could identify exactly what she had promised them and herself, and how she thought she could keep all those oaths. She could see the desperation and strength that had given her the arrogance to think she could succeed. She could see what it would cost to achieve those goals. Control, she told herself calmly. Control of the power she held in her hands, in her mind. Control of her fears for her child. Grief, fury, loneliness, and the endless obligations she had accepted in the past—it was control of those things that would grant her freedom. She could have gone on with the cozar to Ariye. But if she did, she would be running right back into chains. Ariye was Aranur’s home, not hers. Hers was with the wolves.
Chantz looked back for a long moment. Slowly, Dion shook her head.
He raised his hand in a silent salute, then turned to folllow the wagons.
For half an hour, Dion simply sat in the cold wind, watching the wagon train wind down around the mountain. Their dnu stamped their feet to keep warm, and Tehena huddled into her coats and scarves. Kiyun tucked his hands in his armpits, and Tehena began to shiver. Dion did not seem to notice.
Finally, Dion nodded—a short motion, more to herself than to the others, then turned and reined her dnu back toward the barn.
Kicking her dnu after the wolfwalker, the lanky woman spoke. “Why?”
The wolfwalker hesitated, then glanced once more at the mountains. “Because he is coming.”
Tehena’s hand went automatically to her scabbard. “The one who hunts you? Dion—”
“No,” she said softly, cutting the woman off. “There are no wolves here to cloud my sight. No Aiueven, no duty. I can feel myself, without any other needs. I can see what I have done and must do, and I can look at him without bias.”
Kiyun stirred uncomfortably. “Rhom is riding to Ariye— to your home. He won’t know you are still in the mountains.”
“He will know.” Kiyun quirked his eyebrow at her confidence, and she smiled faintly. “He comes because I need him. He will always know where I am, just as I know that he is already in Ariye. Whenever I didn’t have the strength to stand up for myself, Rhom stood up for me. Whenever I couldn’t see clearly enough to set my course, Rhom saw clearly for me. My brother will know where to find me. Hishn will show him the way.”
“Your wolf is coming here? Now?”
She nodded. “I could not Call her to me before—she could not cross the mountains on her own, though she would try if I let her. But Rhom can carry enough food on an extra dnu to feed both her and Gray Yoshi.”
“Her mate,” Kiyun said soberly.
Dion raised her eyebrow. “They will not be separated. They are kum-tai.”
“As you will be with this other man when he, too, reaches you?”
Dion gave a bitter laugh. “When he reaches me? Kiyun, the wolves are driving that man to me like raiders to the slaughter. He has as little choice as I. And if he is like Aranur, there will be kum-jan between us even if we do not Promise. Kum-jan, kum-vani . . . Neither of us will be able to help it because of the twice-damned wolves.”
She had not mentioned kum-tai, and Kiyun was silent for a moment. Finally, the burly man nodded. “So we stay.”
She stared out at the snow. “Aye. Without the wolves, there is nothing to smother my mind. If that man and I meet here, we will see each other as we are, and judge our future on that, not on the needs of the wolves.”
“You said he was violent, driven, fierce. Can you love such a man?”
Her voice was soft. “I loved Aranur.”
His voice was troubled. “You will still see Aranur when you look at him.”
“Aye.” Her hand pressed hard on her belly. The scars that ridged her left hand tightened with her fist. The deep ache of remembered burning was like tiny coals in her body. But the grief that had nearly destroyed her center was banked again within walls of control. She had been lazy, careless in her life, had let herself float through years and promises until there was nothing left but duty. She might have the power now to take up those duties again, but that was no longer enough. Control, she told herself. Her voice was still a wh
isper, but that near-silent sound was fierce. “By all the moons that ride the sky, I will have joy again if it kills me.”
Rhom and Gamon arrived at the Lloroi’s house after dark. Tyronnen—the Lloroi—and his wife were waiting for them, along with ten others.
“I apologize for the hurry,” Gamon began.
His brother smiled wryly. “Always you’re either running late or standing still, Gamon. There’s no in-between for you.”
Gamon shrugged, and the Lloroi’s gaze sharpened as his brother did not respond to the old line of banter. Gamon was leaned down like a twig, hard and desiccated, his lined face weathered like bronze. Rhom was not much better, for all that he had more bulk. The blacksmith looked even harder and more dangerous, his muscles gaunt and his face grim, not welcoming.
Gamon began without preamble. “The wolfwalker is coming down out of Kiaskari—we think she’s in the mountains now. But Rhom feels a sense of danger around his twin. It might be raiders, like before, or it might be something else. He says the feeling is constant, and he says its strength is growing.”
The Lloroi did not question Rhom’s intuition. Dione had told him that her twin had never bonded with the wolves, so this must be the link between twins, or the link sometimes between siblings, he reminded himself somewhat grimly. The man nodded at the men and women to the side who listened politely. “You have ten riders here, all of whom are climbers, all familiar with the passes, all good with bows or swords.”
Gamon nodded and glanced over the ten people with sharp gray eyes. Witzen, he knew, and Bray. Ammesdo, Yale, and Bonn had been his own students when he had still been an active weapons master. The others he had not met, but the Lloroi would not have included them had they not been the best. Gamon didn’t have to ask if they were volunteers. The older man knew that there must have been five times this many who were turned away. The Lloroi might have pushed Dion hard as a scout, but just as he demanded the best of her, he would give her only his best in return, and that meant that these eight men and two women were the top fighters who could climb, or the top mountain folk who could fight, who could be gathered at such short notice.
“Pack dnu?” he asked, giving the Lloroi a nod of approval.
“Ready and waiting. Although I have to ask why you’re carrying so much meat.”
Gamon’s voice was dry. “It’s for the wolves, not us.”
The Lloroi looked no less startled than the others. “You’re taking the wolves into the mountains?”
“I’m not. Rhom is.”
Tyronnen regarded Rhom thoughtfully. “To support Dione,” he answered his own question. “Hishn and Yoshi?”
Rhom nodded.
The Lloroi considered for a moment. The meat packed on the dnu should feed two wolves for nine or ten days, if they were frugal. “And if you cannot come back in a ninan?”
Rhom’s voice was flat. “Then we’ll kill the dnu to feed them.”
Tyronnen and Gamon exchanged glances, and some of the others shifted uneasily. They didn’t know Rhom, though stories of the wolfwalker’s twin had certainly reached them. It was one thing to ride into the mountains, something else again to make it out again on foot. If they were delayed, it would be because of a storm, accident, or avalanche, and they would need the dnu for themselves. Killing the dnu to feed the wolves meant they would have to bear their own packs across the snow and ice and still carry weapons against the glacier worms and snowbear that would be hunting with the snow.
Gamon caught some of the doubt in their faces. “He is Randonnen,” he said obliquely.
“And all Randonnens climb,” the Lloroi murmured. Rhom was as good a mountain man as any—and better than most trained Ariyens. He knew the dangers. But his judgment was that of a brother, not that of an objective leader. The Lloroi’s voice was soft. “You risk our men and women, not just yourself.”
Rhom studied the other man. Tyronnen was slightly taller than Gamon, broad-shouldered, with peppered gray hair. There were heavy lines in his face from duty and leadership. He was more classically handsome than his nephew, Aranur; calm, steady. Rhom had never heard of him losing his temper. He wasn’t sure if that was a bad thing or one to admire. But this was the man responsible for the people of Ariye. All the people, Rhom reminded himself coldly, feeling a touch of his own anger.
When Rhom answered, his voice was unforgiving. “When we were five,” he said slowly. “My twin jumped in front of a poolah, armed with only a stick, because it was going to attack me. She was knocked flying, and my father killed the beast. I got off with a scratch on my ribs instead of a torn-out chest. When we were twelve, she dove in a white-water run because I took a cramp and couldn’t make it out before I hit the rapids. She didn’t think about herself—only what she had to do to keep me alive. She broke her arm on Dountuell, and begged me to leave her so that I would survive the downclimb she thought I would attempt alone. And for thirteen years, she has risked herself for your people. She has scouted for you, healed for you at the cost of her own health, fought for you and left her own blood behind, and lost her sons and her mate. Lost them in your service. Lost them because she was told there was a need and she could not decline to meet it.” The rage in his voice began to break through. Driven, he thought—all Ariyens were driven to use any tool in their possession, even a wolfwalker. “But now she is in danger, and you worry about the risk of snow to people who have spent their lives in the mountains?” The violet eyes that flashed so in Dion’s face with her anger were hard in his own face as he glared at the Ariyen Lloroi. “What kind of people are you Ariyens?” The Lloroi tried to cut him off, but he raged. “You talk of using your tools wisely—the forests, the land. Of replenishing what you take. But you don’t do that with your people, do you? Not when you have someone like Dion.”
“Rhom,” Gamon cut in.
He ignored the older man. “There’s no moderation for someone not of Ariye. Use them up before you lose them; use them all at once; use them till they drop. You can always buy another.”
The Lloroi tried to speak again, but Rhom’s fist clenched with his voice. “You feel no guilt at having destroyed a woman, a wolfwalker, a healer whose only fault was to believe enough in your leadership that she willingly gave everything you asked until there was nothing left—”
“Rhom,” Gamon said sharply.
Rhom halted on an angry breath. Gamon stared at him as if he were seeing him for the first time. The older man had forgotten that the passion and strength of will he took for granted in the wolfwalker was mirrored in her twin. Rhom and Dion had been raised in the same county, by the same man, with the same morals and convictions. Like his twin, Rhom had proven his courage, loyalty, intelligence, and skill a dozen times over a decade ago and a dozen times more since then. Worlags, raiders, slavers, plague—Rhom had faced them all without flinching. Like Dion, Rhom was hard, inflexible, and judgmental when he thought his leaders had failed him, and he was not afraid to confront them on those failings or demand that his leaders change.
Rhom took a deep breath. Like that of his twin, his anger matched the reputation of those who had violet eyes. Violent violet, it was called, and with good reason. He forced himself to calm that streak of energy. It wasn’t easy. He had been on edge ever since they reached Ariye, and every delay made it worse.
The Lloroi regarded him soberly. He recognized the same passion in Rhom that he had seen in the Randonnen’s sister. The Lloroi chose his words carefully. A push—that was all it would take to give Rhom a reason to convince the wolfwalker to return to Randonnen. “I do not deny that we used your twin to take as much as she was willing to give. She has skills that we badly needed, that we still need. And I meant no offense to your request for supplies or men. I suppose,” he admitted, “that I was testing you, or testing your conviction that you must go to meet her now when she is already in Ariye—”
Rhom cut him off, his voice still abrupt. “She is not in Ariye. She stopped somewhere in the passes, and she is waiting
there, not riding down.”
The Lloroi cocked his head. “Waiting for what?”
“To face the danger that hunts her.”
“But you don’t know what kind of danger.”
Rhom began to pace. It was difficult to remain still. With so many people, he felt hemmed in already. The dnu were waiting; Hishn was nearby. “She knows that someone is hunting her, and that it is a man of violence.”
Gamon shifted almost imperceptibly, his hands making a subtle gesture. The Lloroi caught the motion and nodded slowly, giving nothing away. “Wait for us outside,” he said to the others. Obediently the climbers filed out. When they were gone, he turned back to Rhom. “Go on,” he said.
Rhom shrugged irritably. “A man driven, a man of . . . anger and action. That’s all I could get through Hishn—or rather, all Hishn could get from my twin. Dion is being hunted, Lloroi, and the man who hunts her has all the feel of a raider, but disciplined; of a killer, but far too determined to meet his goal; of a leader who doesn’t lead.”
“She is not alone.”
“She has only Tehena and Kiyun.”
The Lloroi was silent for a moment, thinking.
“There is something else,” Gamon said quietly. “Someone else. Someone from long ago.”
The Lloroi regarded his brother grimly, and the two men exchanged a look. Then as one, they looked at Rhom. The blacksmith raised his black eyebrows.
“This is not Randonnen business,” the Lloroi said, with a nod toward the door.
Rhom’s voice was mild, but his sharp violet gaze had caught Gamon’s shuttered expression. “I’d say, by the way Gamon looked at you, that this something is part of what hunts my twin, and it damn well is my business.”
Silver Moons, Black Steel Page 38
