“She’ll heal herself. She always does, when she’s with the wolves.” Behind them Asuli made an odd sound, and Gamon glanced over his shoulder. “You might as well go home now, woman. By the time Dion works again, your ninan will be over. She’s no use to you right now.”
“Perhaps then, I can be of use to her.”
The older man just eyed her. His voice was cold. “You’ll do what you want anyway, I imagine, and to hell with everyone else.”
Asuli said nothing, but stayed with them like a leech.
They bought dnu at one of the city markets and began to ride to the inn, but Dion turned her dnu back to the seawall instead.
“Dion,” Gamon said sharply.
She looked at him. Her violet eyes seemed drowned in darkness. The yellow glint was dull.
“North and east, Dion. Not south.”
“Gamon,” she whispered. “Is he really dead?”
Something blurred the older man’s vision. Slowly, he rubbed his forehead. His lips moved, but no sound came out, and he realized that he hadn’t spoken. He cleared his throat. “Aye,” he said finally.
She didn’t nod. Her eyes, unfocused, seemed to see through him. In his head there was an echo of something dark. The echo swelled, rose and fell, and he knew it for the howl of the wolves. With the sun striking his shoulders, a chill hit his blood. He didn’t speak, but he took Dion’s reins and forced her dnu with his, east, back to the inn.
She rode with them, but there was an emptiness in her that blinded her to what the others did. She had thought she was already empty—naught but a void when Danton died. But there must have been some corner of her self that still held emotion because now that too had drained away. The void within her cried out for sound, for something to fill it. And there was no answer at all.
She barely noticed that Tehena packed her things on her dnu, or that Aranur’s things were packed with them. But when Gamon gestured for them to ride out again, north, back to Ariye, she turned her dnu south and west instead.
With a glance at her face, Kiyun shrugged at the others and let his dnu fall in with hers. Gamon hesitated, then did the same. A few minutes later, with the wolves filling her head, Dion rode back toward the sea.
She rode without stopping, and the others followed. Back through the markets, the stone streets, the sun-filtered shadows. Unerringly, she headed for the seawall. The city bustled as if it had not noticed the bodies in its streets, the wagons that had blocked the waterfront. The bloodstains had already been sanded on the stones, and the raider bodies were gone. The noon markets were busy, the sidewalks full. The city turned blind eyes to death.
Dion saw the seawall. Her eyes, she knew, saw the fitted stones, but her mind saw the raiders upon them. Her ears heard the clatter of dnu hooves on rock, but her mind heard the clang of metal. She didn’t remember dismounting or climbing over the seawall. She didn’t remember the cold steel of the access ladders in her grip. But she felt the rocks when she stumbled across them. She felt her knees press into their rough texture, her hands rub across their edges. With her eyes unfocused, she simply knelt at the water’s edge, ignoring the rough touch of the waves as they sucked at the rocks before her.
The sun burned at her from both sky and water, and brine spray showered her lightly. Her mind relived the fight. She could have seen it from her own eyes, but she had the memories of the wolves to double her vision. As she had let them into her mind in the fight, the violence was now in the packsong. She stretched, and the wild wolves howled with her. Their drive to hunt Aranur… Their urgency … The bloodlust they thrust into her mind. Over and over, the scene replayed. Aranur hanging on to her arm. His eyes, his voice. Her arm—jostled. Her hand— slipping. And his body, falling away.
She started when Kiyun touched her arm.
“Dion,” he said softly. “It’s time to go.”
She shook her head. The sun was still low.
“We can’t stay here at night,” he said.
She frowned and looked vaguely at the sky. The sun was low, but it struck her eyes from the right, not the left. It had crossed both water and sky and was sinking back to the hills that ringed the bay. She shivered as if the brine spray had stripped away the sun’s heat. Slowly, Kiyun helped her stand. She swayed, then stumbled to the access ladders. She didn’t remember how she got up, but somehow she was astride her dnu again, staring out at the bay. Her skin burned from the sun, but she felt cold as ice, and she shivered as though it were winter.
Kiyun leaned back to her saddlebags. He pulled her cloak from the bundle and started to put it around her shoulders, but she choked out a sound and spurred her dnu forward. Startled and chittering like a stickbeast, it bolted down the road.
Blindly, Dion let the dnu have its head as she fled from the Sidisport sun. The others simply followed. She didn’t know how long she rode or where the dnu took her. But it was dark when it stopped, and the eastern road was empty of city buildings and homes. The dark pressed in with mugginess, and it seemed to resist her as she slid from the saddle. The night was thick with wolves.
Unconsciously, lupine memories filled her skull so that she knew the land over which they rode. She didn’t glance at the others as she dismounted and unerringly led her dnu from the road toward a short-grass clearing. When she reached the meadow, she unsaddled the beast, placed the gear by a log, and led the dnu to the stream that wound through the trees nearby. When it had drunk its fill, she lay down and let the cold water shock her face. Then she tethered the dnu to the log, walked into the grass, and lay down. She didn’t speak as the others followed suit. Asuli said something to Tehena, but no one answered the intern. Within minutes, the clearing was quiet as a grave, the night as thick as a shroud.
Dion lay with her eyes open. The grass was half stiff with the dryness of summer, and the ground was warm and humid at her back. Four of the moons hung heavily in the sky, and they looked like pairs of eyes. Eyes that searched for her. Eyes that stared … Yellow eyes, gray eyes … A fist caught suddenly in her throat, and it choked her breath so that for a moment she thought she would suffocate. Then a body rustled in the grass. Another slunk by a moment later.
The wolves found her beneath the moons and curled up beside her. Their hot breaths whuffed the summer pollens, and their musk scent filled her nose. The packsong swelled in her head. Overhead, the stars shifted, the moons swam in the blue-black sea. Dion, surrounded by the wolf pack, slept.
* * *
They camped without fire. They rode with mindless urgency. They sped through villages and didn’t stop, and camped only when Dion dropped from the saddle in exhaustion. For four days, they didn’t even speak.
There was something wild yet fragile about the wolfwalker, as if she would somehow break were she disturbed by human speech. And there were wolves around her like clouds of gnats. They weren’t seen so much as felt, so that a solid screen of predators surrounded the wolfwalker’s group.
By the end of the fourth day, they had crossed into the eastern hills and out of Wyrenia Valley. They bought supplies at two of the villages through which they rode, but Dion barely waited for them to complete their purchases before spurring her dnu farther east. By the sixth evening they were deep in the forest, where roads as ancient as the wolves appeared, ran for kays, and sank again beneath the soil.
Asuli tried twice to get Dion to talk with her, but the wolfwalker said little, and Tehena watched her carefully. “There’s a storm there,” the lanky woman muttered to Gamon one dawn. “It’s brewing as surely as if it were winter.”
He followed her gaze. For a moment, he chewed on his lip. “Might be a good thing for that storm to break. There’s something in her that’s losing its hold.”
“You mean the wolves?”
“Aye. They’re holding her—like they did before. I think without them she would throw herself away.”
“She’s not that weak.”
“Maybe not. Maybe so. But with Aranur … gone—” He forced himself to
say the words. “—the weight of her decisions rests on her shoulders alone. I don’t think she can bear it.”
“She’s always made her own decisions.”
“No…” His voice trailed off. “She has an independent mind, but she’s never really been on her own. She’s always had someone to rely on—her father, her brother, Aranur, Hishn. Now there’s no one but herself. Now she is truly alone.”
“She has us,” Tehena said sharply.
“Aye. Us.”
But he said nothing else, and Tehena was left to study him as she studied Dion: in silence, with a wariness that was growing into fear.
That noon, when Asuli deliberately accosted Dion, Tehena merely watched, the thoughts turning over and over in her hard-faced head. Dion was watering her dnu at the river at which they had stopped, and the intern led her own dnu up beside Dion’s. The bank of the river was soft with silt, and the current swift but quiet. The sound of their words carried easily.
“Healer Dione,” Asuli said. “It’s been days since I interned with you. When will you begin to teach me?”
Kiyun looked up as he heard Asuli’s voice and started down toward the bank, but Tehena put her hand on his arm. Gamon gave her a sharp look, but held his peace. Kiyun, looking from the one to the other, subsided uneasily.
At the river, Asuli pressed Dion. “You owe me a ninan, Healer Dione. You’ve done no work since I joined you, and by the old laws, my ninan starts with your teaching. You’ll not get rid of me by ignoring me, no matter how long you do it.”
Dion did not look up. Her voice was flat. “There are no patients here, Asuli. There is no work for me or you.”
“You’re a master healer. You can teach theory if nothing else.”
Dion’s voice grew sharp. “I have no skills to give you.”
“No skills?” The intern’s voice was dry. “All those years of wearing that circlet and there’s nothing you can pass on?”
“No. Not now.” Not ever, her mental voice snarled.
“So you’re giving up.”
“I’m giving nothing. Leave me alone, Asuli.”
The intern didn’t back down. She set her jaw instead. “And what will you do if you don’t work—if you don’t teach me? Sit here alone and savor your pain? Chew on the grief each day till you choke?”
Dion raised her head. She said nothing for a moment, but her lips were curled back, her eyes flared and glinting violet and yellow together. Asuli took an involuntary step back. The fury that had filled Dion’s chest seemed to burst suddenly out her throat, tightening her muscles so that the sound she made was pure wolf. Asuli began to back away.
Dion wasn’t aware of moving, but her legs tensed so that she stalked the intern up the bank. “What do you think to take from me?” she demanded in a low voice. “The ‘secret’ of healing? My knowledge? My blood?”
“I want to know what you did to my father—how you healed his arm. I deserve that, at least.”
“And you offer—what? Anything?”
“It’s your duty to teach me.”
“So you offer nothing. No thanks. No gratitude. No easing of my workload in exchange for taking you on. You simply want to take what you think the world owes you, draining what is left of me like a mudsucker emptying a corpse.” Dion’s eyes glinted violently. “You leech of a lepa,” she breathed. She followed Asuli back. “All of you—you’re like bloodworms. Haven’t you taken enough from me? The endless scoutings. The constant studies in everything a weapons master’s mate should know— every history of the Ancients, every text of settlement, every science they think to recover. Even in the clinics you haunt me with every disease and condition and injury and death. ‘Healer Dione, we’ve done all we can. Please, just see one more child.’ One more fever-burned woman. One more worlag-scarred man. Every time I turn around, someone has sucked another ninan away. And now there’s you. Teach me this. Give me that. Fourteen interns are not enough duty—you call the old laws to cut out another piece of me and assign it to yourself. When do you stop?” She grabbed dirt from the ground and shook it at Asuli. “When I’m sucked dry as this dust?” She flung the dirt away.
Asuli opened her mouth, but the wolfwalker snarled inhumanly. The intern gasped. Eyes wide, Asuli stumbled in a swift turn and hurried up the bank, her back twitching as though Dion would spring and tear at her flesh in a rage.
Under the trees in the shade, Kiyun and Tehena stood stiffly, eyeing Dion with wary expressions. Gamon started down the bank toward her, but the wolfwalker didn’t look at him. Instead, she stared down at her hands. They were trembling again. She felt the flood of gray sweep her mind, knew her arms were beginning to shake. She turned back to the water. She must have made some sort of sound because the two dnu spooked at her footsteps and bolted back up the slope. Gamon barely caught the reins of one of them as it thundered past through their camp, scattering packs and gear.
On the dusty bank, Dion stared at the river. The water was clear and cold, and the standing waves were touched with both white river froth and sunlight. Heat burned its way into her hair, her shoulders, her face. Overhead, the sky was almost clear, with only a few streaks of high, gray clouds. The moons hung like eyes in that vastness.
“The moons mock me,” she whispered. “And the sun burns away at my grief.”
The water glistened and slicked its waves. The long clouds reflected along its length so that a dozen gray wolf packs streaked through the stream: blue on gray, gray on black. The water seemed to swell against the riverbank. Suddenly, Dion threw back her head and howled. It was a harsh scream—a sound not meant for human throats.
“Damn you,” she raged at the moons. “You’ve taken everything from me: my mother, my son, my mate. Tomi was never mine to begin with, and Olarun—you’ve turned him so he won’t even look at my face. What have you left me? The silver and steel? You think to bind me to this life with that?” She tore the healer’s circlet from her forehead and hurled it out into the water. It struck the opposite bank and clattered into the rocks, dropping into water that stole its silver gleam. “Take it,” she raged. “Take them both. I’ll be no slave to either one.” She rumbled with her sword belt, jerking it off almost frantically. “Take them,” she screamed. She spun the weight of the blade over her head, then loosed it at the river. It hit with a flat, slapping sound, and sank out of sight in the waves.
Dion sank to her knees. The silt depressed slightly, curving around her knees, and some part of her brain noted that her weight crushed the soil even as the weight of the moons crushed her. The weight of the moons … The weight of her future. Aranur’s goal to touch the stars, and hers simply to survive. And it was she again who walked away, while her future died with him. She closed her eyes. Memories raged in her head like the nightmares that clung to her sleeping hours. The howl of her voice crying out for her mate was a sound that didn’t stop.
“Dion.” It was Gamon’s voice, quiet but somehow cutting through the swirling blindness. He didn’t touch her, but she knew he squatted beside her in the sun.
Her voice was quiet. “I’m no use to anyone now. I’m not a healer. I’m not a scout. There’s nothing left in me to use.”
“Don’t do this, Dion.”
She looked up then, but her eyes were unfocused—not with the sense of the wolves, but with some inner pain so dark that it blinded her to him. “Don’t do what, Gamon? Don’t scream? Don’t cry? I knew you for a year with Aranur, and you never warned me even once: When I Promised with him, I mated with death. Your county is steeped in blood.”
“My blood and yours, Dion. Aranur was a son to me—as you are a daughter.”
“Then the weight of this should be on your back, not mine. I’m breaking now with grief.”
“Aye.” His voice was quiet.
“How could they do this?” she cried out. “How could they take everyone—everything—from me? Is there no mercy in the moons?”
“Mercy’s a human concept, Dion. It doesn’t belong to the moo
ns or skies.”
“The Ancients owned the sky, the stars. But what do we own now? Look at us. We struggle to recover the barest of the old technologies, and what we do recover, we must hide from alien eyes. The Aiueven are legend not just for their plague, but for the death they bring to us each time we advance our sciences. By the moons, Gamon, we live like near-animals. We die in our forties from swords and disease when we should be living three centuries. I can’t protect my sons from this world, Gamon. Survival here is a matter of hours, not days or months or years.” She thrust out her fists. “Look at my hands. They’re not strong enough for what they have to do. I couldn’t keep the lepa from my son. I couldn’t hold on to Aranur when the raiders decided to kill him. I could watch them die, but I couldn’t save them. I can’t change death to life, no more than I can halt the tides or touch an alien star.” She clenched her fists. “You fight for a future that won’t exist. It’s worthless, Gamon—every goal your county has. We’ll never recover what the Ancients had. All we’ll do is sacrifice our families to the god of the endless future.”
Gamon’s jaw tightened. “The future is all that holds us together, and deep inside you know that. It’s what makes us human—the vision to see what we can become, not simply what we are at this moment. You know what I’m talking about, Dion. It’s not just blind hope. If our ancestors hadn’t bred and set out the mining worms, we’d have no metals today. If we didn’t breed and set out the worms in our own lifetimes, our descendants would be as metal-poor as the first of the Ancients themselves. What we do now depends on what our ancestors did before us; and the things we do now define what our descendants can accomplish. And we’re almost there, Dion. A few more decades, and we can begin the real work in the county. Aranur knew that; that’s why he pushed so hard for you to learn everything with him. He wanted you to live the vision with him. To someday touch the stars and watch your children fly like Aiueven in the sailplanes of the Ancients. The vision is true, Dion. You can’t abandon it now.”
She didn’t move. “I can, Gamon, and I have.”
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