by R. Lee Smith
“You came when Chey—”
He interrupted her before the full name could be spoken, making that hooking gesture to catch the sound before it left her mouth. “I came to kill her,” he stated flatly. “Which females are forbidden to do. I shouldn’t be here now.” He turned around.
Olivia caught his arm. “Don’t make me drag you,” she warned. “I can do it, let me assure you,” she added as he glanced back at her cautiously.
Thoughts of Huuk clearly crossed his mind as he considered her. Slowly, unwillingly, he permitted her to turn him and lead him on through the tunnels. He didn’t speak, although she could feel the tension in him growing at each gasp and whisper that came as the females saw him. And then they heard it, bouncing wildly from the misleading curves of the tunnel walls: a blend of gullanese and English in Tina’s high, furious voice.
“—in the bottom of the fucking mountain, and I’ll put you there myself if I ever, if I ever, hear or see or so much as suspect that you’ve done such a goddamn stupid thing again! What do you think went through my mind when I saw them carry you in here? Huh? Answer me!”
“I don’t—”
“Shut up! I have to be den mother to a dozen humans and a hundred gullan and I have three preemies that need round-the-clock care and the last person I should have to baby-sit is you, you insensitive little bitch! Don’t you even care about what I feel? Huh? Is that how much ‘I do’ means to you that you can just go galloping out of the mountain just to throw your spear around? I begged you to stay home, Doru ordered you to stay home, you promised us both you—Are you crying?”
“No!” Tobi’s voice sobbed.
“I’m going to get some aspirin.” Stomping footsteps.
“I don’t need any aspirin.”
“Well you sure as hell aren’t crying because you feel sorry!” Tina roared. “Because if you felt sorry, you’d stop, now wouldn’t you?”
Doru was dragging his feet again, but Olivia kept a firm grip on his hand and pulled him into the brightly lit cave they all called the clinic. Tobi was propped up in a sleeping pit, both arms splinted and wrapped, crying quietly into her chest as Tina messily and noisily threw some of Murgull’s white willow bark and boneset tea into a pot of hot water.
“I’m really sorry and I swear—”
“Save it!” snarled Tina. “Save it until you mean it!”
Tina spun around, sloshing tea over her arm, and saw Doru. Her eyes first widened, then narrowed. “Well, now look who’s here,” she said sourly. “Perhaps, Tobi, you would like to explain to the father of your child why you saw fit to go sneaking off like you did? Go on! Say something!”
“I don’t—”
“Shut up!” Tina roared again, slapping the tea down on the side of the pit. “Perhaps it has escaped your attention, but you are not sixteen and this is not the night of the Junior Prom and I am not your mother, I’m your wife!”
“Tobi,” Doru said quietly.
Tobi had withstood Tina’s final assault very well, but at the low sound of Doru’s calm voice, her burgeoning grip on self-control crumpled and she began to wail.
“I thought I would lose you,” Doru said.
Tobi twisted towards the bedding and sobbed.
“For our child, I still fear I might.”
Tobi shook with tears, hiding from him behind her hands. Tina knelt at her head, her expression in grim harmony with Doru’s low, even words, and brought the tea to Tobi’s lips. Tobi managed a few choking swallows, and then continued to cry, more quietly.
Doru watched her in silence until she had finished her tea and Tina had wiped her face and dried it. He waited until Tobi flinchingly looked up at him. He said, “Will you be tribe?”
She hitched in several breaths, then nodded, unable to meet his eyes.
“Then you will obey your leader. For now, that is me.”
She nodded again.
“Tell me.”
“I’ll obey,” Tobi whispered.
Doru crossed the room and knelt beside his former mate. He brushed her forehead with a kiss and ran his claws through her sweat-spiked hair. “Be healed,” he murmured. “And be easy. You are still tribe and much loved.”
“I’m sorry, Tina,” Tobi said.
The healer snorted, but not as viciously as she might have done a minute earlier.
The sound of it put a quiver back in Tobi’s chin. “I am,” she said.
“Yeah, fine. We’ll talk again. Come here, Doru.” Tina carried the empty cup back to her worktable and Doru followed her. Olivia remained in the doorway, aware only of Tina’s low voice and quiet rumbles of Doru’s agreement. Eventually, Doru returned to her and moved past her to leave the women’s tunnels.
“Well?” She didn’t know if it were rude to ask or not, but she did so on the theory that she was the acting leader’s mate and deserved to know.
Doru grunted, then appeared to come to the same conclusion as she regarding her rights, and reluctantly answered her. “There’s very little risk to the child, Tina says. Tobi dropped only a short distance, went down the mountain to the game trail on her back. She broke her arms by trying to grab an outcrop to stop herself. Clean breaks, both of them. By winter, she won’t even know she’s ever broken them. The scars on her back she’ll carry the rest of her life, but maybe they’ll keep her firmly on the side of sense.”
He stopped walking suddenly and lowered his head, leaning heavily against the tunnel wall.
Olivia came in under his wing and pressed herself against him, willing him comfort as he shuddered once in the grip of some emotion that overwhelmed simple relief.
“I need to sit down,” he said faintly.
Olivia took his arm and led him in blackness away from the women’s tunnels to the closest sub-chamber, little more than a wide place in the corridor with a few candles to expose its emptiness, not even a bench to rest upon. Doru sank down on his haunches and leaned slowly back against the wall, his head bent, motionless.
“Are you going to be okay?” she asked, coming to sit beside him.
“I had to move her,” he said again, his voice muffled by his hands over his face. “I so expected to hear the grind of her bones that for a moment, I actually did.”
They sat in silence for a long time. There was no other sound in the depths of this part of the mountain. They might as well have been the last two people on Earth.
“Thank you,” he said suddenly. “For taking me to see her.” He dropped his hands to dangle between his knees and leaned forward, still staring into space, but definitely more there then he had been.
“Feel better?”
“Yes, oddly.” He permitted himself a thin, almost humorless smile. “In fact, I almost felt sorry for her.”
Without thinking, Olivia laughed and said, “Yeah. Gosh, can you imagine what it would be to have her for—Oh God, I’m sorry!”
He slid a wearily amused glance her way. “To have her for a mate? Is that what you meant to say?”
“I meant,” she hastened to add, “to be mated in the sense that…to have a mate like…oh damn. I’m sorry, Doru.”
“Don’t cut your wings over it.” He reached out and she crawled forward and was drawn up warm against his side. He rubbed his thumb absently over her shoulder and rested his chin on the crown of her hair. “I rather enjoy the mate I have now. I hate to admit it, but I’ve even gotten used to Bodual’s cold feet on my ba—”
It was his turn to break off abruptly. Doru lowered his horns, thinking. “Not…that I am truly mated, I suppose.”
Olivia bit at her lip, watching him stare thoughtfully into space. “Olivia,” he said hesitantly, and then was silent for a long time.
Olivia could feel her eyes wanting to look away, look anywhere but at the naked honesty of his face. She felt his claw trace along the bear-tooth necklace she wore, then rise to the curve of her jaw. She leaned into his touch, unhappily aware of where this conversation had to be heading.
“Do you…like m
e?” he asked.
Olivia sighed, closing her eyes against him. “I like you a lot,” she admitted. “I could probably be in love with you with damned little effort.”
His cautious pleasure at hearing those words died as he heard the bleak reluctance with which she spoke them. “Would you…stay with me? I don’t need to be tovorak,” he rushed to say as she drew a breath for answer. “I would greet Vorgullum in mid-air to make him tall again. But you…”
“Doru, even if I stayed with you, I couldn’t stay.”
His hand on her face tensed minutely. “Could you clarify that?”
She didn’t want to, but she could see that he would not let her go without an answer. “Do you remember what Kodjunn said, after my son was born? I had to swear an oath to the Great Spirit. My time here is almost gone.”
Doru’s head tilted as he searched her face, hunting for some sign that this was not the truth. “He’s taking you away?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why?”
“It’s complicated.”
“When are you coming back?”
“I’m not.”
He drew back sharply, the whites showing in a ring around his dark eyes. “Never?”
“Never.”
His jaw clenched. “Then I’ll go with you.”
She sighed. “You can’t.”
He stood and paced the cramped tunnel for a short time. Finally, despairingly, he came back to grip her shoulders. “You swore an oath?”
“Yes.” She hesitated. “And I can’t come back. I’m going to be… different.”
He stared at her for a long time without moving, without expression. “You have to go?” he said at last, heavily.
“I do.”
“Then I’ll let you go.” He drew her against him and stroked her hair. “What a sickeningly selfish man I am,” he grumbled. “As long as you were there for me, I could share you with any other male. Now that I am faced with your leaving, I feel like hoarding you right here.”
She tried to smile. “It’s a good thing I didn’t tell you sooner. You’d have never let me leave the pit.”
“If I weren’t so miserable and sore, I’d take you there now.” He put her back at arm’s length. “But since I am miserable and I am sore, I’ll just take you back to the commons.”
“Noble Doru,” she said softly.
“At the first opportunity, I’m going to cry like a teething baby.” He stood and raked his claws once over the wall, but not hard enough to leave a mark. “I must be cursed,” he muttered.
Olivia sighed. “What a tempting thought,” she said. “I’ve been rubbing ashes into my hair and yelling ‘Why me?’ for months. It’s kind of comforting to think it might be someone else’s bad luck.”
“All my life,” he mused, “I have believed that the earth will have what it desires. And now, when at last I hold a woman that the earth has no claim on at all, the Great Spirit leaps up and takes her away from me. The Great Spirit. I am feeling, I think, a small fraction of the thing Lorchumn felt, when he bayed out challenge and curses. If I were less religious, or more fool-hardy, I would be tempted to do the same.”
“You’d lose.”
“That,” Doru said heavily, “is not the point. Tell me, Olivia, why are you going?”
“Because the Great Spirit made me promise that I would.” She rubbed at her eyes in the near-total blackness, feeling suddenly very tired and cold. “And he has reasons. Good ones.”
“And you mean to go alone?”
“No, I’m taking Kodjunn.”
He leaned back and actually gaped at her. “What in the world for?”
“He made a promise, too. Oh Doru, I wish I didn’t have to leave,” she said. “I’m afraid to start this journey and I’m terrified of what has to happen at the end. I’m afraid of dying, and I’m afraid most of all of living through it and being changed. But I have to go! Even if it wasn’t for my promise, I have to!”
He was quiet so long she thought he would not answer at all, merely sit and act as a calm sounding-board the way she did so often. But at long last, in a tone of idle contemplation, he said, “If it had to happen, if someone had to go on the Great Spirit’s journey, I’m glad it’s you.”
“What?” She pulled back from him, hurt, and strained her eyes to see him in the darkness. “Doru!”
“Not because you’re leaving. That…that’s too much like a knife in my heart right now. But because of you, of the way you are. If ever there was any one person I trusted to do the work of the spirits and to save our race, it is you. Vorgullum can chant poetry for hours and days and moons about how brave and clever and incredible you are, but I don’t think any of us really understand how right he is. Maybe not even Vorgullum. You’re like the spring that comes from below, showing us only the barest trickle of a great, hidden, rushing river.”
She saw herself again as Bahgree, rising from the water with the light of lunacy in her eyes and shivered.
He felt it, and his arm on her shoulders tightened. “If this has to be, at least it’s you who is going and not…not me, for instance. I, who would have killed a pregnant woman for the sake of two moon’s peace and quiet.”
“Doru…”
“Hush, woman. It’s the truth. But you, you will follow the Great Spirit to whatever fate he has designed for you, and I trust you to meet it with courage and wisdom…and compassion. Of all the people I have known in my life, human and gullan, I think I trust only you to do such a thing.”
“You just don’t know enough people,” she said.
“Ha. You may have a point. And I admit I don’t know what the Great Spirit has in mind for you…but I think I have an idea. And if I am even in the shadows of the truth, I am terrified by it…and more relieved than ever that it is you at his side.”
She turned from that further into his pelt, trying to slow the racing of her heart with the steady beat of his.
“Can you imagine if he’d chosen Tobi?” Doru murmured.
Olivia had a vision of Tobi, pregnant and with both arms in splints, leaping on Bahgree’s back with a knife in her teeth. And on the heels of that, the picture of Tobi putting her knee resoundingly right in the Great Spirit’s groin.
She must have made some sound, because Doru chuckled. “Exactly,” he said. “All the same,” he added, rising and pulling her after, “I wish that I were permitted to join you on this Journey.”
“You can’t,” she said. “You’d be killed.”
“There are things worth dying for,” he replied evenly, as he brought her out of the cavern and back into the tunnel. “I believe that you are one of them.”
They went in silence through the winding halls of the mountain and back into the common cave.
There, rubbing her eyes against the sudden light, Olivia took several steps away from Doru and bumped against a male’s broad chest. “Sorry,” she mumbled, blinking rapidly and backing up.
It was Vorgullum.
They were home.
7
Only then did Olivia hear the excited squeals, laughter, hisses and snarls of contention, and cries of joy as other humans were reunited with their long-lost mates. Beyond Vorgullum’s broad shoulder, Olivia saw Kurlun lift Amy easily into his embrace with one arm while giving Damark a perfunctory and careful shove with his other. Sung and Sutung were locked in blood challenge while Sarah J. watched impassively. Liz had thrown her arms around Gormuck’s neck, squealing with delight, as Hodrub stood off to one side with Levonal in his arms. All around them, gullan met to exchange news, reclaim mates, and welcome their tribesmen, and amid all that commotion, Vorgullum’s silence seemed very loud.
“You’re early!” she gasped, and blushed immediately as she realized how that sounded.
His expression, still and calm as deep water, did not change. “I know.”
“Where are the humans?” she asked, knowing there had ought to be some word of welc
ome, but unable to think what. He was back and that meant she had to go; he was early, and her time here was still done.
Vorgullum began to make some reply, but he broke it off as she burst into tears and threw herself at him.
“I’ve missed your voice,” she sobbed.
“I’ve missed your touch,” he whispered, but he did not move to put his arms around her.
Doru heaved a sigh, nodded once and stepped away.
Vorgullum watched him go, turned his attention back to Olivia, and then caught sight of her necklace. His jaw dropped, and then snapped shut. “He challenged Sudjummar?” he asked, his voice finally coloring with emotion—fear for his brother.
Olivia sighed. “It’s a long story.”
The shape of a mateless gulla came out of the celebratory crowd. Kodjunn caught Olivia’s eye and held it. His gaze was full of welcome and something else—something lost and inexpressibly sad.
“Not yet,” Olivia whispered. “Not yet. We’re supposed to have seven more days!”
Kodjunn said nothing, but looked back once at the dark mouth of the cavern, to the waiting world beyond. When he met her eyes again, it was with a faint gleam of molten gold.
Vorgullum wrapped his arm and one wing around Olivia’s body and turned her away. “Tell me what you can,” he said, walking towards their long-unused lair. “We can light the hearth and lie down together and pretend we have the rest of our lives to tell each other stories.”
He carried her through the chimney passage and into cold rooms made unfamiliar by long months of neglect. She had to feel her way towards the pit room, stumbling as she struck walls that weren’t there in Doru’s chambers, following the dry clack of Vorgullum’s talons on the rock. There was the rasp of a lighter, a faint trickle of flame, and then the coals caught and he was revealed in dark outline before the fire, staring at the stone between his knees.
“Tell me,” he said at last. “My brother…lives?”
“When Wurlgunn returned that first time…when you were shot…”
Vorgullum nodded. “I feared that would bring trouble.”
“Sudjummar had to set me aside. Doru took me in.” She didn’t know what else to say about that, so she said instead, “Sudjummar asked if he could keep Somurg for me and I said yes.”