The wolf almost faded back into the brush, but Tehena looked straight into its eyes. There was a shock in her mind of another voice—of a ringing, echoing sound. The snarl that rose in her head made her shudder, and she had to fight to keep from clenching her forearms where old scars from wolf teeth had long since healed. There were suddenly two Gray Ones there.
“I Call you, wolf,” she said hurriedly. “I Call you as the Ancients did.”
The wolves snarled again.
Tehena’s heart began to speed. She felt a chill on her forehead and knew that she was suddenly sweating. Death from a blade was fast and clean; from the wolves …
The yellow eyes glinted; the white teeth gleamed. She could feel their wariness, their instinctive desire to run. She knew that there were others nearby. Human, a lupine voice returned.
“You honor me,” she said automatically.
The wolf did not answer her greeting. Instead, it was suddenly closer. The image-words were thick with emotion that choked Tehena’s breath. By what right do you Call us?
The snarls that struck her from the side were in her ears, not her mind. The Gray Ones seemed to move forward, and Tehena felt her heart clutch her ribs. She stayed her ground, knowing that to move was to become a deer, an eerin, to be run down and slashed to death. “By the … Right of the Wolfwalkers,” she managed. “For Ember Dione.”
For the wolfwalker, he returned.
“I need her. I need her to be alive—to be … To be my …” She couldn’t quite force the words.
She is your packleader, the wolf cut in.
It had been a statement, not a question, but Tehena nodded jerkily. “She is lost, and you have to bring her back. You must Call her and give her purpose. You have to make her want to live.”
The gray voice was hard, and the wolf seemed suddenly closer. Why do you not Call her yourself, human?
“I cannot.”
Cannot or will not? The yellow eyes gleamed, but they were neither friendly nor warm. Instead, that gaze pierced her chest.
Tehena’s voice was ragged. Her words were dragged out by those eyes. “I’ve made too many … mistakes in my life. I can’t… can’t risk making another. You have to do this for me.”
You wish for us to take responsibility for you, as your pack-leader did for you before. You wish for us to help her, so that she can lead you again.
She didn’t answer. She knew they could see into her mind. “You can gather the packs,” she said instead. “There’s time enough. We could be here another ninan.”
You ask this for your sake, not hers?
Tehena felt her heart shrink within her. “I might as well die without her. I’ll die for her, if that’s what you want.”
So you Call us and offer us blood in return. But it is your blood you offer, not hunt blood or kill.
There were suddenly too many wolves, and Tehena felt the sweat drip down her cheeks. Her voice trembled. “By the Right of the Wolfwalkers,” she repeated. “By the … light of the moons and the Laws of… of Landing, I ask you to reach Dione. You have to make her live.”
The yellow eyes seemed to devour her soul. You are no woljwalker to Call to us.
The gray tide swelled; the wolves leaped forward. Tehena threw her arms up, then bit her scream into her own flesh, stifling her terror, as the gleaming teeth slashed down.
XVIII
Who does not know death cannot understand it;
Who does not know grief cannot assuage it—
You cannot live until you die.
—From The End of the Wolves, II
Tehena returned to camp at dusk, while the others were at the river. She burned her clothes and salved and bandaged herself as best she could. She was weak, but the gashes, though ragged and long, were shallow. She eased a long-sleeved tunic on and drew on another pair of leggings. She could handle the bleeding, and the scars wouldn’t matter. The stiffness she could pass off as a fall. But in the distance, a wolf howled, and she shuddered. She moved closer to the fire.
Two days later, the sky was covered with light, high clouds. It rained lighdy at noon—a drizzle that barely touched the summer dust and left the ground stale, not clean. But after the rain, when the sun had crawled barely halfway up the trees, Dion returned to their camp. Exhausted, she dropped to the ground by the fire pit. Tehena rose and left, and Kiyun dug a leaf-wrapped meatroll from the ashes and handed it to the wolfwalker. But Dion stared at the meatroll as if she didn’t know what it was. Silently, Kiyun took the bundle back and unwrapped the food. Dion passed her hand over her eyes, took the roll, and ate.
The wolfwalker chewed slowly, as if the motion of her own jaw was exhausting. And when she was finally done, she said simply, “Pack.”
When Tehena returned, they followed the old road north again, still vaguely trailing the course of the river. The centuries had changed the water’s run, while the stones of the Ancients had merely settled in place. Now, with the road still somewhat straight, the river curved in toward the road and away again in loops. Dion disappeared with the wolves almost as soon as they hit the trail, and Asuli scowled after her. She couldn’t decide if it was her imagination or not that there were more wolf packs here.
When they reached the place where Asuli had watched the wolfwalker before, the intern halted abruptly, and the others stopped with her. As one, they eyed the trampled forest. A massive tree, felled years earlier by lightning, had crushed the undergrowth and laid its length along the ground. But where brush and ferns had once grown up around its length, now there stood only broken, twiggy shrubs, raw pits of soil torn from the ground, and grasses bruised by boots and paws. The shadows didn’t hide the white slashes cut along the length of the tree. The charred lines and symbols patterned in the trunk were raw as a fresh grave; and the stains of sap and dye plants were side-by-side with the marks of blood. Old branches were freshly snapped close to the trunk, as if to punctuate the message ring. The new, wiry growths that cut through the bark were like pointers to the sky. No simple message had been savaged into the log—full forty meters were carved and charred and stained in waves of pattern and poem.
“Moons,” Asuli breathed. She dismounted. The others watched her move forward, as if in a dream, toward the tree. She stepped over the scattered bones of a rabbit without noticing the remains. Heedless of the thorns, she pushed through what was left of the brush to the message ring. Each day and night was carved there, she thought. Every absence of Dion from their camp was represented in the slashings the wolfwalker had left in the trunk of this tree. “What does it mean?” she asked, without looking over her shoulder.
Kiyun’s face looked suddenly tired. “It is Dion’s grief,” he said finally.
“Rain …” Asuli ran her hands over the trunk where Dion’s sword had cut the symbols harshly. “And dirt—no, soil. Dry … ground. And birth?”
Tehena cursed. “You have no eyes,” she snarled.
The intern looked back. “Read it.”
“It’s a story—or, more, a poem. It’s not a simple message, Asuli.”
“Then don’t give me a simple reading.”
The lanky woman eyed her for a moment. Then, surprising both Gamon and Kiyun, Tehena slid from her dnu and moved to the fallen tree. For a moment, she simply let her hands and eyes feel the harsh cuts and slashes of symbols, the mix of colors and stains that drew and connected across the trunk. Some were crude, brutal with emotion; others were tiny, detailed, and precise as a miniature portrait. Tehena walked along the tree, climbing at one point over the massive length to reach the slashes along the other side. Her hard-lined face flickered once, as though she were a shadow of someone else. Then she vaulted to the top of the tree again and squatted upon it, letting her hands feel the message while her flat, hard eyes traced the stains. “It would be easier than grief.” Her voice halted. She closed her eyes for a moment, her hands resting on the tree. Asuli waited. Tehena took a breath and began.
Rain would be easier than g
rief
Because it’s cast away to soils
That want to dry and be reborn.
My tears are so much part of me
That my throat is a white-knuckled fist
Clenched around a marbled breath
That my lungs can no longer grip.
The rock of my heart has no way to beat
So that my temples ache from my chest.
And my eyes burn with the coals of a life
That used to flare like a sun.
Snow would be easier than grief
Because its touch, which chills, then burns the skin,
Is ice on a pond: Superficial.
Cracked by a word, broken by touch.
The cold in my heart extends to my hands So that they are blind on the ground. It freezes my face
So that my parted lips, which try to form words,
Are caught as a gulf on a glacier.
Storms would be easier than grief
Because they rage in exultation.
They draw out the fierceness of the world
And fling it around like laundry.
My grief can’t rage, can’t fight, can’t fierce
Its way out past the bones of my body.
No sound drowns out the ache in my head.
No dreams bring true sleep; no touch, relief.
Only the ache, ache in my throat and eyes,
Like a mountain slowly crushing down
On what’s left of the heart beneath it.
Death would be easier than grief.
They speak of doorways, of hidden gifts,
They speak of lights and gods and heaven.
And in their stupidity, they speak of time
As if it flows like a thickening quilt
To comfort a night of chill.
There is no time in grief.
There’s no gap between then and now.
Only the touch of the wind
On my salt-tightened cheek
Reminding me again and again that
The moisture isn’t rain.
The forest was silent. Tehena didn’t move. A bird flashed between the trees. The blue-speckled creature cried out as it caught sight of the riders. Like a spark of sky, it darted back into the canopy. Asuli stirred.
Something touched her cheek, and she brushed irritably at the bug only to draw her hand away with moisture. She shook herself, swallowed, and pointed over Tehena’s shoulder. “You didn’t read that,” she managed.
Tehena followed her gesture. The other woman had indicated the thin trunk of a dead tree still standing, which was also carved and stained, but only in a single ring, and with sharper, finer marks. Tehena’s face shuttered. “That is not from Dion,” she said flatly. She slid from the fallen tree and walked back to her dnu. She didn’t wait for the others but spurred the riding beast down the road, leaving Asuli to stare after her.
Asuli looked at Kiyun. “What does it say?”
He hesitated. “It is the response to Dion’s grief.”
“Who carved it? You?”
He shook his head.
She jerked her chin at the road. “Her?”
The burly man shrugged.
“Read it—please,” she added belatedly.
But it was Gamon who spoke the message ring carved and stained in the wood:
Let your sorrow be my pain;
Let your cry tear out my throat;
Your tears will choke my breath, and
Your rage burn my eyes—
I will hold your grief for you
Until you heal.
This time, it was Asuli who was silent. She stood for a long time facing the two trees: the one, massive, broken trunk with the growth of new trees pushing out of its length; and the thin, dead, upright tree that stood like a guard beside it. When she mounted again, her face, for once, was thoughtful.
They had been one day out from Changsong when they had turned off for Dion and camped for half the ninan. Once back on the main trail, they reached Changsong by late afternoon. Since the inn was full of climbers, miners, and visitors to the town, they went to the commons house instead. Kiyun gathered their clothes and took them to the cleaning woman’s house, while Asuli volunteered to arrange for their supplies so that she could sell some herbs. Tehena found herself sitting on the steps of the house, splicing two odd lengths of rope left over from the fish traps. Gamon came out and stood for a moment on the porch, then sat down beside her.
Tehena barely glanced at him.
“I was wrong, a few nights ago,” he said finally.
Her voice was flat. “So was I.”
“I mean, I was wrong to say what I did—to reject Kum-jan. To reject you.”
“I don’t need your pity, Gamon.”
“That isn’t what I’m offering.”
“Then what? Your ’friendship’?”
“My apology.”
“When even a man of eighty is horrified at the thought of touching me, that is a lesson, not an insult.”
“Aye,” he agreed. “But it was my lesson, not yours.”
Tehena didn’t answer. Irritably, she scratched at her arms.
He nodded at her forearms. “How is it today?”
“Itches like fireweed,” she said, deliberately truthful. “But what do you expect when you rub up against a sap tree?”
Gamon shrugged with her. “Would have thought you’d know better.”
“So would I,” she said meaningfully.
He gave her a thoughtful look. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet. “I am sorry, Tehena. I said I didn’t judge you on your past, but on what you were today.” His gray gaze was steady. “I was wrong. I did judge you. All I could see was who you told us you were, not who you are.”
“You have that right.”
“I don’t,” he said sharply. “I’ve no right to forgive or judge anyone but myself.”
“Nice statement. Too bad the logic isn’t backed up with truth.”
“Dammit, woman, I’m trying to apologize.”
“Then do so and leave me alone.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Good.”
Gamon pulled his salt-and-pepper mustache to his lips and chewed on it for a moment. “Still angry?”
She tightened the last part of the splice and began to coil the rope. “If you’re worried that I’ll cut your throat some night while you’re sleeping, you can relax. I have better things to do.”
“Like Kum-jan?”
“Go snort a worlag, Gamon.”
The older man grinned slowly. “That’s one I haven’t tried. What about it, Tehena?”
“Personally, I’d rather bed a badgerbear.”
“Good. I know just the man. Come with me.”
She shook him off. “You’re a mutt-faced hypocrite. Leave me alone.”
“I’m serious.”
“So was I.”
“And I was a goddammed fool. Look,” he said heavily. “We’re friends—”
“Were friends,” she corrected.
“Are friends,” he retorted grimly. “Why did you ask me for Kum-jan?”
“Don’t play games, Gamon.”
“Can you, for once, just answer a moonwormed question without barricading yourself in that shell?”
“All right.” She glared at him. “Why did I offer Kum-jan? Maybe it was to prove to myself just how worthless I really am. Maybe I was getting too comfortable in Ariye, and I needed to verify that you all still think of me as spit.”
“Go snort a worlag,” he retorted. “You just can’t say it, can you?”
“I’ve not been humiliated enough? You want to humble me further?” Her voice was low and hard. “You know the mistakes I’ve made in my life. You know what I’ve done. I’d have died in that prison if it wasn�
��t for Dion, and you and I both know I’d have deserved it. Now, I’m so afraid of being responsible for myself that I have to have Dion to be responsible for me. I can plan strategy, but I cannot give orders. I can follow Dion like a dog while she’s hurting, but I don’t dare try to help her myself. I know what she needs to face her future, but I’m so terrified of making a mistake that I can’t even Call her to do that myself. I have to get the w—someone else to provoke her for me. She has to live, Gamon—for me, not for her. I need her.” Her voice, low and hard already, sharpened as if she tried to cut herself. “Without her to be for me what I am not, I’m worse than nothing—I’m a murderer who should have been punished and wasn’t. Prison doesn’t compensate for the life of a child. But Dion gave me a chance to make it up. And I’ve tried. Moons know I’ve tried to make her proud of me.”
“She is proud of you.”
“She’d be proud of a rockworm that got itself to the surface. Maybe, just this once, I was hoping that someone else would see me differently, too. That what Dion believed about me was true—that I’m not just prison-fodder. Maybe I hoped that someone I’ve known for years—trusted, respected … and whom I thought might actually respect me a little by now— would think of me like any other person. Might sleep with me, as a friend.”
He studied her. “Funny thing is, Tehena, it was me who was humbled, not you.”
She stared at him. “You self-centered, egotistical, mud-brained, son of a worlag.” Getting abruptly to her feet, she slapped the rope over her shoulders and started to walk away.
He caught her arm. “Tehena, I’m not mocking you. I’ve something to say—to a friend, as a friend.”
They faced each other almost aggressively on the steps.
“I’m seventy-eight years old,” he said. “I figured I’d seen it all, done it all, felt it all—life, living, dying, death. All I had left was a hundred and fifty years of passing on my wisdom. It hit me, this morning, that I’ve been almost arrogant in my perception of that—of my ‘wisdom.’ I may be nearing eighty, but I’ve still got a lot to learn, and I’m not half as wise as a worlag if I can’t see you for what you’ve become. It … humbles me to apologize to you, a baby-murdering drug addict,” he said deliberately, “for teaching me about learning to accept and forgive. I’ve been so short-sighted that I can’t even recognize the only person—you—who understands Dion enough to keep her sane.”
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