“But you don’t really stay back, do you, Dione? If you were truly only a scout, you would mark the position then fall back to the road. But you stay to make sure Aranur—or someone else— doesn’t need you. You carry steel to kill, not just heal. And each time you do kill, even if it is in defense or protection, it’s still a piece of your soul. You only have so much in you, Dione. Don’t throw away what’s left.”
She had listened to him, her face still. When she spoke, her voice was low. “Saying no to the elders when there is a need for my skills, when people could die without them … Could you live with yourself if you did that?”
He met her question frankly, and she was surprised to see the depth of pain that writhed within his gaze. His voice was equally soft. “What good are your skills if you kill yourself carrying such burdens? No one can ride forever, Dione. Not even the Gray Wolf of Randonnen. Step aside, Wolfwalker. Let someone else bear the weight. There has always been and will always be a need for people like you. Your turn will come again.”
She looked at Hishn and let the gray voice wash over her mind. “You think it’s the elders, the burdens, the fighting? It is and it isn’t, Tule. The wolves pull me and make me as much as I make myself.” Yellow eyes gleamed, and Dion felt Hishn’s pro-tectiveness surround and engulf her. “I don’t know if they would let me go. Or if I can let go of them.” She looked up at him then, and the shadows in their eyes seemed to meet and merge. “What do I do then, Tule—if neither Hishn nor I can let go?”
He touched her scarred hand with his single one. “Find something beyond yourself, something stronger than the wolves to pull you. And leave this if you can. You weren’t made for this— weren’t raised for this the way your mate was raised to lead and protect his people. There is joy in you, not just duty. But you’ll kill that joy if you stay in the violence for the sake of duty alone.” She began to shake her head, but Tule cut her off. “Spend time with your mate and your sons, Dione. Stay away from the venges and swords. I know what I’m saying, Wolfwalker. I’ve lost an arm, but you—you’ve lost a part of your heart. Yours is the harder loss.”
Aranur returned then, to wrap a heavy cloak around her shoulders and help her to her feet. His gray eyes looked deeply into hers. Then, unobtrusively, he pressed a packet of food into her hand. He was away again in a moment, striding toward a small knot of men and women, pausing only briefly to drop his hand reassuringly on Royce’s shoulder where the young man knelt vomiting in the dirt.
Dion followed him with her eyes as she slowly unwrapped the meatroll. Her ears, still sensitive through the wolf, heard his quiet words clearly.
“Some people say you shouldn’t look,” Aranur murmured to the young man in the dirt. “I say look, and look well. Know what you’ve done to that man, and why. He attacked, he robbed, and he killed for greed. Now he won’t do it again. Stay sick, stay angry if you must, but keep your guilt at bay.”
Weakly, Royce nodded.
“And get yourself a different bow,” he added. “Details like that stand out and catch the eye. They’ll make you more of a target.”
Aranur motioned sharply to another man, who was wiping his hands continually on his leggings as if to scrape off blood he could no longer see. “Ibriam.” Aranur broke the man’s abstraction. “Gather the loose weapons, then go with Tehena to get the dnu.”
In the morning chill, Aranur’s gray eyes were shadowed, and his dark hair lifted slightly with the wind as he gave his orders. The bodies of the raiders were carried to one side and thrown into a shallow depression. Branches and debris were tossed on top. The boughs gave a rude protection to the dead, but no words were spoken over that scant grave before it was lit on fire. Within the hour, the mountain men and women had cleaned the trail and packed their gear to move to a temporary camp. They spoke little as they lashed the body of their own dead man onto a funeral pyre. They built it hot so that the flames forced them back, away from the smell of flesh. It was Aranur who finally spoke the Words of the Dead, and his voice seemed to blend into the raging fire so that the words rose with the smoke to guide neHendar ’s soul.
Half of them rode carefully to the campsite with Mjau and the other wounded. Dion, Aranur, and five others stayed at the cliff to scout for the raiders’ trail. But with the pass blocked up to the ridgetop, there was little else to see. By the time Dion confirmed that, the insect scavengers were already at work near the burial pyres, and clouds of daybats, attracted by the smoke, had gathered overhead.
Aranur joined Dion at her dnu. He gave her a hand checking the cinch while she packed the healing kits back into her saddlebags. She caught his glance at her bandaged arm. “It’s just a scratch,” she said.
“Dacarr said you were limping.”
“Scraped my ankle again. It’s just bruised.”
“I didn’t see you until after we had taken most of them down.”
“I know.” She paused in what she was doing. “I was cut off.”
His gaze sharpened. “Cut off—deliberately?”
She nodded.
“To keep you out of the action?”
“At first, that’s what I thought.”
“But then?”
She shook her head, more to herself than to him. “There was only one raider,” she said. “But he was highly skilled—as good as you and Gamon. He had to be a master in Abis, if not in other arts also. Knives, swords, hand-to-hand… For a while, I thought I could hold my own until I got help, but it was he, not I, who controlled the fight.”
“What do you mean?”
“He cut me off, Aranur. He pushed me back, chased me down into the draws so that you couldn’t see me. Every time I tried to move, he was there before me. Every strike—he could see it coming. He was fast. Deceptive. Intent…”
“Intent?”
She nodded. “There was a moment when we simply faced each other. He looked at me as if I were a goal. As though he would go through whatever defense I had to get me.”
“Dion…”
“He didn’t want to kill me, Aranur. He wanted to capture me— take me alive. He wanted me, not just any Ariyen.”
Aranur’s voice, when he spoke, was low, so that only she could hear. “Are you sure?”
She glanced over her shoulder and kept her own voice quiet. “His blows were flat, not lunging.”
“He knew who you were?”
“He spoke my name.”
Aranur was silent for a moment. Then he nodded curtly. But his hand was gentle as he touched her cheek before he walked away.
Hishn nudged Dion in the thigh. The raiders fang was slow; yours was sharp in his hip. He will nurse his wound for a long time.
Dion didn’t smile. “He might,” she agreed softly. “But I think it will not keep him away from here for long. That look he had …”
His eyes are far away by now. And his blood feeds the largons now. You were fast enough to chase him off. He will not return for you.
But Dion shook her head slowly. “I wasn’t fast enough, Gray One.” She stared down at her hands. The tremble was no longer visible, but she could feel it in her bones. “I was so distant from everything I saw,” she murmured. “I didn’t even notice him until he was upon me. If I had been with my children, they would be dead by now.”
You need to run more in the forest, away from your towns and cities. You are distracted with your humanness, when you should be like the wolf
“No.” Dion shook her head. She gripped the thick fur in her fingers, letting the greasy feel of it stick on her skin. “I think it’s more than that.” She rubbed her fingers together as if the touch of the fur would clean the blood from her hands. “Tule is right, Hishn. I’m getting lost in you. And I think I’m getting tired. I don’t want to fight anymore. Every day seems filled with violence, and the times between the battles now are just dreams that confuse my life.”
There are dreams and there are memories, corrected the gray wolf. Which predator do you flee?
Dion stared at t
he wolf. “Sometimes I think you’re too much in my mind.”
It is part of the gift of your Ancients. Do you want distance now or more dreams?
“I don’t know.” Dion looked back down at her hands. “All I know is that I don’t want my boys growing up knowing only steel. I want them to understand compassion, not just justice— to hear music, not just sound. I want them to learn the forest as I did. I want to see the joy in their eyes when they play with your pups and hear the packsong in your mind.”
They are ours, as you are, Hishn returned. I teach them the packsong with my own cubs.
Dion nodded at her image. “They’re like when I was younger— when I was first learning your voice. They’re like a bridge to me, between the gray and human worlds. Sometimes …” Her voice trailed off. “Sometimes I think they are the only thing that holds me to my humans.”
You are wolfwalker. Neither human nor wolf. There is no need to he only one.
There was a faint taint of an alien image to Hishn’s thoughts, and Dion gave the wolf a twisted smile. “Like Aiueven—neither familiar nor foreign?”
The bright ones who flew in our minds long ago—they are still among us. Your strength makes you close to them.
It wasn’t what Dion expected as a response, and she eyed the wolf, suddenly curious. “What do you mean?”
The bright ones. They taught the wolfwalkers to speak, and you are a wolfwalker now. Your voice, their voices can sing together.
She bit her lip. She had heard the alien voices in the echoes of the packsong memories, but she had never thought beyond that. That the alien birdmen had taught the colonists to manipulate energy—that was legend. That wolfwalkers still developed themselves in those alien Ancient patterns, that she had not known. “Do you realize what you’re saying?”
The wolf seemed to shrug. You wanted dreams. I sing an old memory.
Slowly, she rubbed her temple. Aliens and wolves. Too close, still, after all this time. And Aranur wanting to circumvent the one while she wanted to keep to the other.
You dream of distance, Wolfwalker, yet you cling to the hunt. You long for the pack, yet you hold your own cubs away from us. The image of her two younger sons was clear, and Hishn’s mental link to them, a thin gray thread, was twined deeply with the thick bond to Dion. What wolfsong do you teach them, Wolfwalker? What dreams do you want for your cubs?
Dion stared deeply into the yellow eyes. Her answer was simple but full of longing, and the howl in her mind was her own. “I want my sons to dream of the stars, Hishn—as the Ancients did. Not lust after steel as we must.”
The wolf didn’t blink. The steel of your fang is your heartbeat. Without it, you would be worlag pickings.
“Only if the raids continue.”
Hishn whuffed against her thigh. Raiders can be hunted.
“Yes,” Dion returned. “But I don’t want the blood on my hands anymore.”
Hishn gripped her hand in white, gleaming teeth, and though the pain of that grip made her shiver, Dion didn’t move. Instead, she reveled in the bright pain as if it were the path to her release. No healing, no fighting—nothing but existence in fundamental simplicity. That was what she wanted. Too much weight in the steel she carried, was that what Tule had said? She touched the healer’s circlet. He had it only half right: Of steel and silver, silver was the heavier.
Wolfwalker, Hishn growled. The image that Hishn projected was instantaneous. Freedom, bursting green growth, and speed. The feel of wrestling with half-grown cubs. The packsong that swelled deafened Dion so that her fists shot up to cover her ears. And then the packsong faded, and Dion was staring again at the burial pyre. “And now the steel is fed again,” she whispered to herself. “But when shall the silver shine?” She began to tremble.
Wolfwalker.
Dion looked down. “Gray One,” she whispered. She knelt and buried her face in the wolf’s fur as if she could shut out the vision of her own memories. Fear of the raiders, of herself, even of the wolves who seemed more and more in her mind, warred with anger that she should be sent out so often to face herself and that which would destroy her. But what frightened her most was that the anger burned more fiercely than that frigid touch of fear.
IV
What dreams die that cannot be recovered?
What wolf howls that cannot be heard?
What weight shifts and does not break its bearer?
How long can you live?
—Fourth Riddle of the Ages
It took the rest of the day to reach Dion’s home, what with stopping in almost every village between Red Wolf Road and her own hometown to drop off rider after rider. Only Tule and Royce went back south to Kitman; the other riders continued north.
North … Dion scowled as they came in sight of Tetgore. She felt as if she were always riding north. Northeast from the Black Gullies to Ontai, north by northeast to Kitman, north from Kitman to the cliffs, and north again to home.
Hishn didn’t wait for Dion along the way. Instead, the Gray One loped on ahead, eager to reach her own wolf pack where her own mate, Gray Yoshi, ran the hills. Dion watched the wolf go with a faint smile.
Aranur caught her expression. “She’s escaped again, huh?”
“No meetings for her,” Dion agreed. “She’s more interested in wrestling with her own kind than in waiting with me while you analyze this venge.”
“As are you,” Aranur said shrewdly.
She shrugged.
“You no longer want to be here,” he stated more than questioned.
She was silent for a moment. Finally, she said, “I need to get back to Kitman within the next couple of days or that ringrunner will lose the sight of both eyes, not just the sight of one. I need to check in with Jobe at the labs to find out about his new cultures. If they are viable, we’ll have enough medicine for all of northern Ariye for three months. And I need to start the nerve repair on little Wentcscho’s leg.”
“All that piled up during a single scouting mission?”
“All that. There is no break, Aranur. There’s just another ’and.’”
“You don’t have to be a part of every ‘and’ there is.”
“There are things that need to be done, Aranur. You know that as well as anyone else. Problems to solve. Damage to fix. It’s just that…”
“You’re tired of being part of the solution. You want someone to care for you instead of you always caring for others.”
“Yes.” Her voice was low as she admitted it. Her dnu snorted as they came abreast of one of the outer hub stables, and it automatically slowed. She urged it on. They would not dismount till they reached the central hub in this town, where they would have to speak with the Lloroi, who was one of Aranur’s uncles. Suddenly depressed, Dion stared at the two- and three-story houses they passed. In their clusters of six and eight, the homes looked comfortable and safe. Aranur had helped build some of those structures last fall, when one of these hubs collapsed. Some of those lintels had been grown by her own son Tomi, who was now one of the top door-men in Ariye. These people were friends with whom she had ridden and fought, lived and killed, sung and worshipped and danced. And she wanted to escape them. To run from them as if they, themselves, were raiders after her soul.
“It sounds terrible, doesn’t it?” she said, her voice low. “Selfish and ungrateful.”
“Yes,” he agreed simply.
“Am I wrong?”
“To feel as you do? Or to act as you want to?”
She didn’t answer. Under the rootroad arbor, she could see the Lloroi’s home in the distance. Aranur’s family crest came from that house; his blood was in that line of leadership. It was one of the oldest, tallest houses in the county. Over centuries, new growth had been grafted onto old so mat alcoves and window arches rose up like hope out of history.
Dion raised her eyes toward the peaks she could just glimpse through the trees. Her own family came from another county, across the desert, across the kilometers, in the mountains of
Randonnen. The villages there were smaller, the people seemed closer. The goal of recovering the Ancients’ ways was blended into each person’s life so that no one family, no single elder or Lloroi, carried the burden of the future. Her people were not her children to be cared for, but friends with whom she simply shared part of herself.
How could he understand that, she thought, when he was raised to lead, not live with, this county? He looked at these people as his children. Like a brood hen, he was responsible for them all, yet the weight of that didn’t bother him. And since she had Promised with Aranur, they looked at her the same way. Like a prize they had acquired when Aranu mated. She had never been prepared to carry the weight of so many lives. She had never studied the history they expected her to know; she didn’t speak like an elder; she couldn’t meet their demands. She didn’t have the vision for the future that Aranur did—that everyone in his family did—and that his county expected of him. She looked down at her hands. They were trembling again, and she clenched them tight.
“Dion?” Aranur’s voice was soft, almost lost in the rhythm of the hooves.
She looked up. His strong face seemed unwearied, as if the ride had been ten minutes, not ten hours long. She felt like a weed beside him—like strength without substance. Push too hard and the strength is gone, and all that is left is hollow.
“I… I can’t do this anymore,” she said to him at last.
“So stop being available,” he said abruptly, harshly.
She stared at him. His outburst had been like an attack. But his steely gray eyes did not look away. “What did you say?” she faltered.
His face didn’t change expression. “Stop letting people put their troubles on your shoulders. If you don’t want the burden, don’t accept it as readily as you always do.” He almost glared at her. “I can’t keep you from your job—moons above know that I’ve tried it. There’s only one person who can relieve you from your burdens, who can give you a vision of something other than the weight of the work you do each day. That person is yourself.”
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