“She’s in rebellion, Wolfwalker. She’s just stubborn enough to refuse to back down when told she should go home. It’s not an eagerness to learn that drives her to follow you. It’s willfulness and selfishness and ignorance of the road.”
“That too,” Dion agreed.
Kiyun grinned without humor.
Dion let herself sink into the packsong that surrounded this part of the scrub. Even without Hishn strongly in her mind, she could hear the wolves clearly. It was a large wolf pack—their voices were thick in the meadows that hid between the low hills—and the sense of them was like a dull roar, where Hishn’s voice was now dim. There was no sense of fever within them as there had been with the wolves near her home. Whatever disease had struck in Ariye, it was contained in those mountain peaks. She knew she had healed the sickness from the Gray Ones that ran with Hishn, but she still tested each new lupine bond with which she came in contact.
Hishn … The ache in her chest cramped down, and Dion caught her breath. Death, longing, loss … There were old tones, not just her own grief, in that mental song. Stretching, deliberately torturing herself with longing for her own gray bond, Dion felt Gray Yoshi’s tones mix with those of Hishn’s. They had met then, up the valley. They were running the distance home. And with summer’s heat filling their urges, they would mate soon in the woods while Dion kept running, even though she was now alone…
“Tell me I did the right thing,” she whispered.
Wolfwalker! Hishn cried out faintly. Even at that distance, the fierce joy in the gray wolf’s tones answered more clearly than any image could.
Gray One, Dion returned. Then she shut her mind to the wolf. But as the sound of Hishn’s voice faded, Aranur’s eyes hung before her. “You can’t hide in the packsong forever…”
She shuddered. “One day,” she whispered. “One day to the coast. Then I’ll return to you.”
But she felt him behind her, hunting, like a wolf on her trail. When Kiyun murmured her name, asking if she felt all right, she could only shake her head and spur her dnu to move faster.
Dion’s first glimpse of the sea was from the top of a low hill. She thought at first that the sky had changed back to a cloudy color, but as she paused on the rise, she realized that she was seeing the waves. She caught her breath. So many years since she had seen the ocean …
Low dunes, half forested and half grass, stretched south shortly to the sea. A herd of coastal eerin, small and sandy-colored, moved into the shelter of a stand of trees as the riders appeared on the open stretch. Several flocks of seadarts combined, their shapes at first a gnats’ nest, then a conceited flow of purple-white movement in the sky. Dion saw them and breathed deeply the salt tang. The white that frosted the tops of the waves shifted and rolled as the waters washed in, and she could taste the ocean now, not just see it.
“ To wash myself in your waters,’ ” she quoted softly. “‘To cleanse my soul in the sea.’”
“Dion?” It was Gamon.
She kept her eyes on the ocean. “I need to run for a while, Gamon.”
“Here?”
“I’ll be all right. There are wolves nearby; no worlags.” She glanced behind her at the other three riders who straggled up the low hill, then she dismounted smoothly.
The older man took her reins. “We’ll wait here, then.”
She nodded, but her eyes were still on the sea. She took only one small pack from the saddle, then jogged off into the brush.
When Asuli and the others arrived, the intern’s sharp gaze caught the missing pack almost immediately. It was a healer’s pack, not a running pack, and Asuli looked around. “Where is she?” she asked.
Tehena glanced at Kiyun, who was already unsaddling his dnu. “Where she needs to be,” the lanky woman answered shortly.
Asuli’s brown eyes narrowed. “If she’s working, I have a right to be with her.”
Gamon looked up slowly. “All this talk of your rights, Asuli, and none of the rights of Dion?”
“She’s accepted me as intern. She must teach me.”
He straightened. “Teach you what, woman?”
“Whatever there is to learn.”
Gamon looked her up and down. “And that is what you want? To learn?”
“That’s what I’m here for,” she returned tersely.
“No.” He shook his head. “You want to do. You don’t really care to ‘learn’ at all.”
Asuli’s voice was strangely low when she answered. “And so what if that’s true? If I’m smart—if I can do what others can’t, who’s to complain?”
Gamon studied her for a long moment. “You must hate your patients like the second hell,” he murmured. “You must hate us even more.”
Her voice was flat. “Don’t you feel the same about me?”
“You’ve left room for little else.”
Abruptly, Asuli turned and stared out at the marshy scrub. “She’s out there, isn’t she?”
“No one crosses the marshes,” Tehena said shortly, shouldering past the younger woman.
Asuli snorted. “Not even the great Wolfwalker Dione?”
The lean, hard-faced woman bit back her words, but the look in her eyes was lethal. Asuli stayed her ground only out of a sudden fear to move.
“Get your saddle off your dnu,” Gamon told the intern flatly. “You might as well let your mount wait in the shade. We could be here for a few hours.”
Already a kay away, Dion jogged steadily across the mossy ground, letting her leg muscles get the hang of running again after riding for so many hours. The insects were as loud as an orchestra, and they clouded her hearing so that she was startled when the Gray Ones suddenly surrounded her. Abruptly, she halted.
Wolfwalker, they sent.
Wild as hawks, they sniffed her warily. The threads of their mental packsong were suddenly loud in her mind. Like a weaver, she pulled those threads around her until they blended into a cloak of gray. Somewhere behind that shroud of gray, a pair of yellow, slitted eyes watched. Dion shivered. There was something in that gaze that did not belong in the packsong, yet the Gray Ones did not seem disturbed. Instead, two of the yearlings mock-growled at her, and the older wolves trotted back to the shade. The gray cloak in her mind seemed to loosen; the image disappeared, but the sense of urgency stayed with her.
It was two hours before she returned to the group, and when she did she was sweating like a rast in an oven. The cool breeze blowing off the coast did nothing to dissipate the humidity that clung to the marsh, and Dion’s clothes were gritty with sweat and salt. She dropped back to a walk as she approached the rise, but Gamon still heard her coming.
He got to his feet. “Ready to ride?”
She wiped her forehead on her shoulder. “I’d rather swim, if I could find some cold water.”
“East or west—it’s your choice to the rivers.”
“West,” she returned.
“The Phye?” Tehena frowned. “You sure you want to go to Sidisport?”
Dion dropped her healer’s pack on her saddle. “I want to see the ocean where it hits the rocks.”
“And then?” Gamon said softly.
The wolfwalker stared down at her hands. They were stronger than they had been a ninan ago—her fingers no longer trembled. She looked up into Gamon’s gray eyes. “And then,” she said, “we go home.”
XII
There is no difference between need and love
when they meet beneath the moons.
—Yegros Chu, Randonnen philosopher
When they started along the marsh road, Asuli trotted her dnu until she reined in beside Dion. “What were you doing out there?”
Dion glanced at the other woman’s face. “I’m a wolfwalker, not just a healer, Asuli.”
“And I’m not to be part of that.”
“No.”
“Wolfwalker or not, I need to know what you did before—in Prandton.”
Dion shrugged.
“You know what I mean, Healer
Dione. My fa—Wains’s nerves were severed; yet after you were with him, he could feel and move his fingers again. And Jorg had been bleeding internally—there was nothing I could do to stop it. He would have been dead by nightfall. After you saw him, he stabilized.”
Dion didn’t answer.
“You aren’t one of those faith healers, are you?”
Dion gave her a sharp look. “Of all things that I am, that is the one thing I am not.”
“I found no marks on Jorg’s body that the raiders had not made for him or that I had not made in crimping his wounds together. But he stabilized only after you were with him, doing nothing, according to Cheria, but sitting by his side. Sounds like faith healing to me.”
Dion snorted. “Faith healing is nothing more than a stealing of life for adulation or power or gold.”
“And you get none of those things—not even adulation,” the intern retorted.
Dion’s eyes narrowed. “If you think so little of me, why are you here?”
“You did something to Jorg, to my father. I want to know what that something was. I pick things up quickly. Show me once, and I’ll be able to practice whatever it is on my own. But if the great Healer Dione is nothing more than a faith healer, I’ll expose you to the very moons.”
Dion stared at her. Suddenly, she laughed. It was a choked sound, but it was a laugh.
Asuli eyed her warily. “Why are you laughing? Why aren’t you angry?”
“Why should I be angry?” Dion asked the sky. “Because you have the tongue of a bilgebeast and the temperament of a shrew, and you force both of them on me? Because you’re as arrogant as a raider with twenty men on his side? Because you play with people’s lives as if they have no value? Because you add to the weight on my shoulders as if it is a game to you—to stack the blocks as high as you can to see when they will crush me?” She looked at Asuli, and the intern realized suddenly that the wolfwalker was not at all calm.
“Why,” Dion asked softly, “do you think I should be angry with you?”
This time, it was Asuli who was silent.
They reached an inn on the banks of the River Phye by early evening, before the sixth moon had risen. The sky was still heavy with heat. They didn’t ride into the courtyard at the inn; they dragged themselves and their dnu. The heat had sapped both riders and beasts so that the commons, with its cool, green, ground cover, invited them to bed down there rather than in the house. It was with difficulty that Dion turned her dnu loose in the commons and went to the sweltering inn. Inside, the evening was long as a sermon and stifling as anger. By the time they bedded down, even Kiyun was irritable.
Dion came awake suddenly. The moons hung at an angle, shining almost blindingly into the room, and there was nothing moving. She slid out of bed, her hand on her sword. In the upper bunk, Tehena snapped into alertness at the change in Dion’s breathing. The lean woman didn’t speak, but she shifted to grasp her own sword, which lay beside her. Dion had already moved to her overtunic at the foot of the bed.
“Dion?” Tehena breathed.
“It is nothing,” the wolfwalker returned.
Dion threw on her clothes, shifting her sword from one hand to the other. Then she glided across the floor and was out the door. Tehena was left to stare at the moonlight and listen in the silence.
The hallway was dark; the only light was that cast by the three moons that rode low in the sky. Dion could hear the man now—outside the inn. His breath was controlled, but loud to her sensitive ears, and the dnu from which he slid panted heavily. She waited till his sounds faded, as though he walked the beast toward the stable, then she slipped outside. Her bare feet were silent on the porch.
Like a wolf, she followed the man toward the stable. The stones, set into hard-packed dirt, were cool beneath her feet. She hesitated at the door to the barn, her sword held tightly— ready—but down at her side. She found him waiting for her like a raider.
He eyed her for a long moment. Then quietly, he said, “Dion.”
“You could have waited for me.”
“I never had much patience.”
She studied him. He was leaner, she thought, than when she had left him—his face was harder somehow. There were shadows under his eyes that even the dim stable light couldn’t hide. But she couldn’t move toward him, and he didn’t shift to touch her.
“Will you come back to me?” His voice was hard.
She couldn’t answer.
“I need you.”
“I love you,” she whispered.
“Then come home.”
She didn’t remember either one moving, but suddenly, she was in his arms. His strength engulfed her; his arms crushed her to him. She pounded on his chest, hitting him over and over, crying out, “Damn you, damn you.”
Finally, she collapsed against him, half sobbing against his chest. She looked up finally, and their lips met with bruising force.
“Damn you,” she whispered.
“I know.”
She kissed him urgently, deeply. He lifted her from the floor so that she was pulled completely against him. Their urgency grew into a violence. She snarled low in her throat, and he answered the sound. His gray eyes glinted; her violet eyes flashed with an almost yellow light. He started to lift her into his arms, but she wrenched free.
“No,” she half snarled. “Not here.”
She backed from the stable, then turned and half ran toward the road—toward the forest. Halfway there, she stopped and looked back.
He didn’t hesitate. He reached her in a second. This time when he touched her, she didn’t fight him. Instead, she drew him with her.
In the inn, in the darkness, Tehena watched them meet. Then she turned and gathered her things. When she moved quietly to the floor in Gamon and Kiyun’s room, it was Kiyun who asked softly, “Dion?”
“Aranur,” she returned. She rolled to her side and stared at the wall. Sleep was a long time coming.
XIII
She swa flowed pride,
Held out her hands and begged:
“I cannot be what you want me to be;
I cannot do what you want.”
“I biow,” said the Tiwar.
“That’s what makes this so delightful.”
—From Wrestling the Moons
Dion rose at dawn. She dressed in silence while the gray voices called in the back of her head and the moonlight gave way to the sun. The warmth of the summer was still caught in the soil, which steamed lightly at the edges of the courtyard. Dion felt as if she saw the wolves in that fog.
Behind her, Aranur murmured, and she turned to watch him sprawled on the bed, one sheet tangled around his leg, his face gaunt in the early light. He looked frighteningly worn. He murmured again, restlessly, and softly, Dion answered. Her voice, woven into the packsong that touched the back of his mind, calmed him in sleep so that he breathed more easily. Absently, she rubbed her forehead where the circlet pressed on her bones. Then her gaze sharpened.
Below, on the road, two riders raced into the courtyard. Their dnu, sweating, drummed to a halt, and one of the riders leaped down. “I’ll see if she’s here,” the youth called over his shoulder, already sprinting to the inn door. “You ride to the next inn. NeHaber’s fever’s too high to waste time. He’ll die if we can’t find the healer.”
Dion cast a glance at Aranur, then took up her pack, slid her sword belt over her shoulder, and quietly slipped out the door. She met the innkeeper on the stairs.
“Healer Dione,” the man said in relief as she handed him her healer’s pack while she jammed her warcap on her head. “There’s been an accident,” he continued. “Two days ago, a worker was burned when one of the glass furnaces blew. Last night his fever shot up. They can’t bring it down.”
Dion nodded, buckling on her sword belt. She was already moving with him to the door. “Is my dnu ready to ride?”
“I took the liberty of ordering it to be saddled,” he said hurriedly, handing her pa
ck back. “The messenger is outside. He’ll take you there. It’s the west side of town, on the waterfront. The Raven district.”
She nodded again. “Tell Ar— Tell my friends, when they wake, where I’ve gone. I’ll send a ringrunner back telling them how long I’ll be, or if I want them to join me.”
The messenger, a well-built youth, was waiting impatiently on his dnu. Dion barely had time to toss her healer’s pack on the back of the saddle before the young man spurred his riding beast out of the courtyard. She mounted as her own dnu began to run. She cast a single glance back at the inn, but there were no faces in the window. Then she looked ahead to the road.
The morning air was warm. In her head, Dion could hear the wolves nearby. They had been drawn by her presence last night. She let their senses fill her nose as she urged her dnu up even with the youth’s.
“How far?” she called across.
“Thirty minutes. Over the River Phye.”
“In Sidisport?”
He nodded.
“What happened?”
“They were working with a steel alloy when one of the glass furnaces blew. NeHaber was right in front of it.”
She studied the rider surreptitiously. He was older than she had at first thought in the shadows of the inn, slender and cleanshaven, brown-haired, brown-eyed—almost boyish. But he rode as if he was born to the dnu. “How did you know where I was?” she called.
He gave her a wry look from across the saddle. “You really want to know? As I heard it, a cousin of the man who is courting the mother of the healer’s intern was at your inn—he thought— last night. He’d had a bit too much grog to remember exactly which inns he’d been visiting. But he told his cousin, who told the intern’s mother. The intern told his healer. It’s the healer who is tending neHaber who requested that you help.”
Dion grinned. “I’m sorry I asked. Which healer?”
“Urth neVonner. He’s new here, out of Ramaj Eilif.”
“I don’t know him.”
The other rider shrugged. “He knows of you—but then, who doesn’t?”
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