She stared back at him. “And what have I survived?” she repeated harshly, finally. “My son—your son—is dead because I took him to Still Meadow when the lepa were flocking. My other son won’t speak to me because I killed his brother and left him to face the lepa alone. Even the wolves reject me because of Sobovi’s death on my hands.”
“Everyone goes to Still Meadow this time of year. And the lepa were late in migration. You had no way to know they would flock. The spring diggers had gone there at dawn that day, and they saw no sign of flocking.” His grip was hard enough to bruise her, but neither one of them noticed. “And Gray Yoshi may resent you, Dion, but he doesn’t reject you, and you know it. It was he, not Hishn, who led the pack to bring you home. Even I felt it. He is as much a part of you through Gray Hishn as you are part of the pack.”
“You speak of meadows and lepa and diggers and wolves, but do not speak of our sons.”
His expression grew bleak. “Damn you,” he whispered. He dropped his grip, and she closed her eyes. Finally, she turned away.
“Damn you,” he snarled louder. He grabbed her arm, forcing her to face him again. “Don’t you dare run away from me now. You’ve survived worlags and plague and raiders and wolves. You’ve survived me, for moons’ sake. Even if you can’t look at me now, I’m still here. You still have me. You have Tomi. You have Gamon and Rhom and the rest of your family. You have friends, Dion, who care about you—”
“Words. Words.” She shook him off.
“What you need is here, Dion, not out in the wilderness.”
“What I need is here? By the light of the moons, have you no sense? All that I have here are ghosts, Aranur. Every time I turn around, I see my son.” She grabbed the fence post beside her. “This is the post he used to climb. That is the tree he fell out of last fall. Over there is the hole he buried his boots in to keep me from seeing the way he’d cut them up—”
“Don’t you think it’s the same for me?” Aranur’s voice was quiet as stone.
Her tone matched his. “Yes, I believe it is the same for you. And I wish I could ache for the way you feel, for your grief, for the emptiness in your eyes when you look for him in the morning. But I can’t. I can’t feel anything but that which now consumes me.”
“We feel the same thing, Dion—”
“No,” she cut in sharply. “We don’t. It is not you who carries the blame for Danton’s death. It is I.”
Aranur didn’t answer.
“My love,” she said, “I can’t see myself anymore.”
“I can see you. Why isn’t that enough?”
She shook her head. “You—your choices are so simple, Aranur. Raiders ride, and you draw your sword and cut them down if you can. I must choose to lift my hands to the blade, or lift my hands to heal. I hold the decision of life and death, not in clear defense as you do, but in cold rationality. I cut off one side of myself in order to loose the other. So I am a healer, but I killed my own son. I am a swordswoman, but I heal my victims. Look at me, Aranur. Tomi isn’t mine—he still dreams of his real mother. And Olarun rejects me for Danton’s death. I am a mother without children—and a child without a mother. My world is life and death without balance, and it’s tearing me apart.”
“And if you ride away, what do you think to find? Danton’s soul? A mother for yourself? A sword that magically doesn’t kill, or a healing technique that does? Why not just ask the Aiueven for a stepping stone to the stars? Even that’s more likely than balancing the things you’ve lost.”
“It’s not just that.” She clenched her fists. “Don’t you see? I’ve lost more than my sons and myself. I’m too close to the wolves and too far from all of you. I’ve lost my own humanity. Staying here won’t give me back that.”
“Balance, wisdom, humanity …” He gestured sharply, angrily. “They’re not out there, Dion. If you find them at all, they’ll come out of yourself.”
“And in my heart, I know that’s true,” she agreed.
“But you’re still going to go.”
Dion’s voice trembled. “Dammit, Aranur, I don’t want to breathe here. I don’t want to see or hear the ghosts. I don’t want to eat. I don’t want to live.”
“And out there, you will.”
“I don’t know,” she almost cried out. “But I do know that here, I cannot survive Olarun’s blame, nor yours, nor my own.”
“Then take someone with you.”
She almost laughed, but the sound was harsh and without humor. “A bodyguard? A nanny?”
“Me.”
“It’s your blame I’m trying to escape.”
“I don’t blame you—”
“Don’t you? Isn’t there some tiny, hidden part of you that says, ’If Dion hadn’t taken them out in the meadow, Danton wouldn’t have died’? We don’t touch anymore—our hugs are perfunctory, not desired. We barely speak or eat together. By the moons, we don’t even sleep together anymore. I’m like an alien in my own home. And why is that? Can you honestly say that there is not some part of you hating and blaming me even now?”
His voice was harsh. “You confuse what I feel with what you think you deserve.”
“But you don’t really deny it, do you?”
Aranur couldn’t answer.
“I’ll ride with the wolves,” she told him quietly. “They’ve always been company enough.”
“They’re the past and the present, Dion, not the future. You need something more than that to become yourself again.” He paused. “Your future is here, with me, with your family. You’ll not find it by running away.”
But from the forest Hishn’s ears flicked as the wolf read Dion’s resolve. The Gray One howled deep into Dion’s mind, and the sound echoed into the void of her emotions. For a moment Dion almost believed that the packsong could fill that void. Then the mental howl faded, and what it left was emptiness.
Aranur watched her eyes unfocus and focus, and he knew that Hishn was with her. His voice was almost desperate when he spoke. “Have you forgotten the raiders? They’re active as worlags in fall right now, and even the wolves can’t protect you from them. You can’t expect to outrun them—you still limp like a lame worlag. You’ve got a sword, a bow, that blade hidden in your healer’s circlet, the knives in your boots … But none of that can stand against a single surprise attack.”
She couldn’t meet his gray gaze.
“Don’t even think it, Dion,” he snarled. “Letting yourself be taken or killed will not absolve you of the guilt you think you deserve, nor will it bring Danton back. It would merely strip Olarun’s mother from him more permanently than your running away does now.”
“That isn’t fair,” she whispered.
“But it’s what you were thinking, wasn’t it?”
She looked down.
“Take someone with you. Take Gamon or maJenia or ma-Trawek.”
She shook her head.
“Take Ruttern, then. He’s good. Or neBraye.”
“No.”
“At least take Tehena. The way she’s been hovering over you the last three months, I can’t believe she would let you ride out alone anyway.”
“I sent her to get some things from town.”
His face hardened. “So she doesn’t even know that you’re going.”
Dion shrugged.
This time when Aranur grabbed her, she didn’t flinch. He dug his fingers into her arms as if to force her to feel him. “You’ll take someone with you. Promise me, Dion. If you love yourself at all—if you love me even a fraction anymore—take at least one rider with you.”
She stared at him for a long time. His face was gaunt like hers, she realized. There was no shadow of stubble along his chin, and she found herself wishing he had one to soften the hard line of his jaw. Without it, he looked bleak. Lost. She reached up and touched his cheek, then dropped her hand to his arm. His lean muscles bunched beneath her touch.
“Take Kiyun,” he said desperately.
When she finally spoke,
her voice was soft. “I will wait while you get him.”
Something in Aranur’s eyes seemed to die, but he nodded, a short, sharp movement. Then he took the reins from the post and mounted her dnu. He wheeled and gave the dnu its head, letting it thunder out of the courtyard.
Dion looked across to the forest that hid Gray Hishn. “Kiyun, Tehena …” she said softly. “It doesn’t matter who it is, or how many there are. It will not make a difference.”
* * *
Aranur rode hard, by instinct more than by sight. His urgency drove him to drive the dnu, as much to tire it so that Dion could not ride far on its back as to dull his own thoughts. He didn’t wave at those he saw on the road. He didn’t pause at his uncle’s house even though his aunt was on the porch, looking up as he rode by. Instead, he pushed the dnu’s pace through the first city hub, then the next, until he reached a long, vaulted structure.
When he dismounted, he stood for a long moment before entering the building. The wide, arched porch was more like what one would see on a library than on a house, and the doorway, arched and pillared with intricate growths of aircoral, belonged at a museum, not a home. He couldn’t help noticing, as he paused in the entryway, the two sculptures that decorated the entrance.
“Kiyun,” he called out. His voice was harsh, and he felt his lips tighten automatically.
“Back here,” a voice echoed distantly from within.
Aranur stepped through into the main hall of the home. It was a vaulted room lined with paintings. They were not of recognizable shapes and figures, but were rather splotches of color, shades that shifted from one monochromatic palette to another. Dion had bought them one by one but had never brought even one of them home. Instead, she had asked this man here to hold them for her, building this collection. Did she think this swordsman’s hands could appreciate the delicate touch of the brushes that had applied the colors here? Did she think this man’s blood-weary eyes could find philosophy in the aggressive bursts of paint? The sculptures that stood between the paintings or in clusters of two and three were twisted figures, human and otherwise. Kneeling together, clinging or struggling, the figures echoed pure emotion. And Dion had asked Kiyun to hold them.
Aranur stared at the man who was sitting, sipping a mug of steaming rou, but as he entered, Kiyun got swiftly to his feet, setting down the mug. The two men eyed each other for a long moment.
Kiyun was as tall as Aranur, but his hair was brown where Aranur’s was black, and his shoulders heavier with muscle. His hands were thick where Aranur’s were lean; but his face, though strong, appeared almost soft compared to Aranur’s hard expression.
“How is Dion?” Kiyun asked finally.
Aranur’s voice was flat. “She’s running away.”
“You want me to …” Kiyun’s voice trailed off. Want me to talk to her, he wanted to say, but the look on Aranur’s face killed the thought.
Aranur made a show of looking around the hall. “You keep, what, twelve of her sculptures now?” he asked instead.
Kiyun did not nod. “Twenty-two paintings, twelve sculptures, three art-message rings.”
“She’s never brought any art home.”
The other man shifted uncomfortably.
“You are special to her,” Aranur said.
The man shrugged.
“She has always cared for you.”
“She doesn’t love me like that,” Kiyun returned.
Aranur gave the other man a hard look.
Deliberately, Kiyun took up his mug of rou.
Aranur’s voice was cold, unforgiving. “You offered her Kum-jan.”
“She asked me to,” the other man said calmly. He nodded at the cold fury that glinted in Aranur’s gray eyes. “She asked me to do so as a friend, so that her rejection was public. Only a woman who wants an exclusive bond with her mate will publicly reject Kum-jan from an intimate friend.”
“She didn’t tell me that.”
“No.” Kiyun paused. “I’ve never hidden what I feel, Aranur.”
“I know it too well.” Aranur bit the words out.
“And you think someday I’ll try to take her from you,” the other man returned, his voice hard. “You’re dead wrong, Aranur. Of all the things I feel for Dion, one of them is respect. Even if she were to offer Kum-jan now, I would refuse her that. She will never want me except as a way to reach toward what she thinks she has lost with you. It is you she chose as her mate, not me. I would never be enough.”
And I am not enough now: She seeks what she has never had, and I cannot give that to her. Aranur’s thought was written on his face. Kiyun said nothing. Aranur stared around the hall, one part of his brain automatically cataloguing the number of paintings against the years he had been with Dion. “She is riding out tonight,” he said finally. “I can’t stop her.”
The other man put down his mug and waited.
Aranur had to force the words out. “She said she would ride with you.”
“All right.”
Aranur glared at the other man.
“Say it,” Kiyun said. “You might as well.”
“You … She …”
“She is yours, Aranur. I’ll not touch her.”
Aranur didn’t trust himself to speak, but his eyes were cold and icy.
“I’ll swear it, if you need the words,” offered the other man.
Aranur turned abruptly away. “Don’t let her get too close to the wolves. She’s lost right now. She could … She …”
“She will be all right,” Kiyun returned. “Whatever else she is, she is still Dion. She’s strong, and she knows, deep down, that you love her. She won’t abandon you and Olarun, even for the wolves.”
It wasn’t the wolves that scared him. Aranur didn’t know why he thought that, but he knew suddenly that it was true. He stared down at his hands. Long-fingered, lean, strong hands they were, skilled at pulling and holding together men and women in a common cause. But strong as they were, desperate as they were, they could not hold on to Dion. “Those who have strong passions, create strong self-destructions,” he said finally, flatly. He looked up. “Make sure that she seeks healing, not death.”
The other man nodded.
Brown eyes bored into gray. Neither man moved. Finally, Kiyun held out his arm. Aranur stared at him. He turned on his heel and strode from the room. Kiyun was left standing, arm out, as if the emptiness of the room would shake Aranur’s words from the air.
“He doesn’t know,” he told the paintings finally. “He’ll never understand her. The world is black and white to him, but she lives in shades of gray.”
* * *
It was dusk when Dion rode out, and there were three riders with her, not one. Gamon, Tehena, Kiyun—when they showed up together, Dion merely looked at them, then turned her dnu toward the darkening forest cliffs.
Aranur, alone in the courtyard, watched her go in silence. Olarun refused to see his mother off; he had disappeared instead. And the others had sensed the chill of Aranur’s fury. They left quickly, so that only the twilight, which gathered around Aranur as the wolves gathered to Dion, stayed to keep him company.
Aranur’s voice was cold and hard as he watched the riders reach the upper ridge trail. “Damn you, Dion,” he breathed. “But you’ve made me love you more than life. You’ve made yourself a part of me until I can’t turn around without looking for your touch, listening for your voice. Now you think you have to leave me to become whole again by yourself.” He stretched his own mind to hear the faint echo of wolves, but all he found was a wisp of fog that shredded beneath the moons. A lone wolf howled up on a ridge, and the sound hung over his ears. His jaw muscles jumped, his gray eyes narrowed. “You are torn, Dion, and so you tear me. You need balance, but you won’t find it without me.” His fist pressed against his sternum. The two gems of their mating, which studded his bone, were hard nodules under his fingers.
His voice grew intent, and only the night saw the steel that glinted in his eyes. “I am y
ours, Dion, and you are mine. You can’t lose me by leaving me, no matter what you think you deserve.” He watched a shadow flit across the ridge, and he knew that it was she. “You’ll face yourself—and me—again, or you’ll find no future you can live with. You can’t hide in the packsong forever, Dion. You can’t hide in whatever you seek. If you don’t come back to me on your own, I’ll track you down like a wolf does a deer, to the ends of this world and beyond. Through the mountains, through the wolves, through alien peaks or the depths of the sea—on the very path to the moons, if I must.” The gemstones ground into his bones. He didn’t notice. “By the Gray Ones,” he breathed. “By Ovousibas, by all nine moons, by all the Ancient curses, I swear this, Ember Dione maMarin: By all the gods of past and present, I’ll find for us a future. I’ll bring you back to me.”
IX
Time turns the planet round in place;
Tune moves the days from dawn to dusk;
Tune dulls the grief until it fades;
Time turns one’s heart into a husk.
South and down along river mountains. South, where trails were hard and dry above brutal, white-watered rocks. South, away from the mountains, away from Ariye, Dion kept their dnu turned. Two days on the trail turned into three, then five, then eight. And all the while, the ground lowered itself from the mountains to the border hills that ringed the coastal valleys. The trails, which had been half rock, became softer soil and dirt. The summer air, which had been clear and cold at night, grew humid and warm with moisture. And the sea began to flavor the wind.
From the hilltops, the summer fields stretched out like swatches of rolling green caught between taller, darker forests. Thick lines of barrier bushes gave way to stone or wood-weathered fences. It was easy to tell where the plants of the Ancients were grown. Within the fields of indigenous vegetables and grains, as if guarded by their contoured rows, the irregular patches of darker and lighter shades made a poxlike pattern of color. Seeds of the Ancients, Dion thought, carried across the stars. Like the seeds of then-past, carefully guarded and protected by legend and books. Or the germs of new science, grown up behind walls and sheltered from alien eyes… She couldn’t help the look she gave the moons. If the moons could give the Ancients a world, why couldn’t they give her peace? But the white orbs floated silently in their distant, blue-humid sky.
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