For a long moment, the three held their breath. Then Dion raised one foot and stepped carefully away from the hunting hole. Tehena’s pale eyes were hard and dangerous, but her skinny body shook with adrenaline and fear. Kiyun’s pulse beat in his neck like a sledge. Dion took another step, saw no movement, and motioned with her knife hand. She cleared the way for Tehena, who forced her way through the slightly packed tracks. Carefully, they eased back. Kiyun brought up the rear.
When they reached the road, they stood for a long moment to catch their breath. Dion bent to release her snowshoes, and Kiyun broke the silence. “Moons. That was . . .” He shook his head.
“Enlivening,” Dion said wryly.
They stared at her.
She grinned ferally. The Gray Ones still vibrated in her mind, and she knew they were still running toward her. The sense of a man behind them, of his need to protect her, was strong, and she realized that the wolves’ desire to keep her alive was tainting other links. Deliberately, she projected the kill. The satisfaction in the wolves was clear.
Tehena cleared her throat. “I thought you always knew where the danger was.” She wiped the half-freezing sweat from her hands on her trousers.
Dion fitted and lashed the shoes together, then slung them over her shoulder. “The worm wouldn’t have been a danger if I hadn’t moved, and I don’t know what the wolves don’t send, unless my own eyes see it first.”
Tehena and Kiyun exchanged a glance. They were one day out of the last town, and two days from the next. It was discomfiting to remember that, heightened as the wolfwalker’s senses had become, Dion had no better way to see the unseen dangers near the road than their own ears and eyes. “Would have been nice to know that before you wandered off in the hunting ground of the worms,” Tehena muttered.
Dion’s voice was quiet. “Vellace only grows at this altitude, only in the snow, and can only be harvested this time of year. A couple grams of this will pay for our next night’s lodging.”
“We have a tent,” Tehena retorted as they reached their gear.
Dion shrugged. “Even I like a few nights in a real bed.”
The skinny woman snorted.
“We’ll have to move now to cook.” Kiyun picked up the small packstove to stow it. “There’s rockier ground down the road.”
Dion tossed her snowshoes beside her pack and worked quickly to resaddle the dnu. She was as uneasy as the others, but it was not the thought of other glacier worms that made her pause and glance often at the jagged horizon. It was the echo that had wracked her concentration, the voice of the dead in her mind. The Gray Ones had passed memories to her before, but usually only when a wolfwalker asked. For them to push other voices . . .
The wolves continued to prowl at the edges of her mind as they closed the distance more slowly. They loped now, instead of sprinting, but their need for reassurance was clear. Their awareness of her was a separate harmony beneath the mental chorus. In the packsong, the sense of herself was a doubled image: hers and theirs. As they came close, they echoed her scent, the sound of her breathing, the timbre of her voice, the cloud of her steaming breath, her lean strength, her will, her hopes and fears . . . Their sense of the wolfwalker was a picture of their perceptions, not simply an image of her physical body. It was a sense that sometimes caused confusion among the wolfwalkers who read those images. The image of a small man with great inner strength could be clear and bright, larger in the wolves’ packsong than in their vision. At the same time, the image of a muscular man could be weak and withered as the will that had died within him. Dion cocked her head with a sudden thought. With all the hunters who were using the wolves as one more way to find her, it would be a useful skill to learn to project a false self-image. Something to think about in the coming winter, when almost everyone was home-bound. She had been hunted too long, had seen the determination in too many raider faces to toss off the thought once it occurred. She pictured the face of the man who had killed her mate—heavy brows, squared jaw, peppered hair. His will to capture and mold her to his use had been as inexorable as the tide, and just as deadly. And the tone of the hunter she had just heard in the packsong was as fierce as any raider. She shook her head as she hooked the last pannier on the dnu. Whoever that hunter had been, he’d had no true bond with the wolves. The contact between them had been made by the Gray Ones, not by him, and what she’d heard had been barely human-colored by her memories.
She set her gloves beside the short stone wall that lined the road and let herself gaze south with the wolves. The walls had been shaped by stoneworms or hand-hewn and fitted into a mosaic of glittering beauty. It was an icy painting that pulled as much as the wolves, and she judged the curves she saw against her mental map of the county. She smiled grimly. The Ariyens would have a difficult time getting her to stand still after so much time on the road.
Tehena, about to mount her dnu, caught Dion’s slightly unfocused gaze. The lanky woman said nothing, allowing Dion to listen. Tehena’s own mind became blank, simply waiting. For years, she had followed Dion like a shadow, snarling at those who would threaten the wolfwalker, stepping between Dion and those who might attack. She owed Dion her life a dozen times over, though Dion would never admit it. At this point, Tehena’s life had wrapped so far around the wolfwalker that she didn’t know where she herself began. It was not disconcerting. It gave the woman comfort to know that her purpose was clear, and that Dion was that purpose. So Dion waited, and Tehena waited with her. Dion was silent, so Tehena also listened.
Dion looked south again, toward Ariye and Eilif, but aside from the wind, the cliff was still as a headstone. She could see nothing, hear nothing out of place, but the sense of that hunter was clear. Finally, she shrugged, tightened her dnu’s cinch, put on her gloves again, and mounted her dnu.
Tehena and Kiyun followed suit. As usual, Tehena muttered so that Kiyun would think she was irritated by the wait. “Another five minutes, and you’d have had to chip me free from the ice.” She kicked her dnu into a trot.
Kiyun grunted and urged his own riding beast after Tehena. The thin woman didn’t fool him. He had followed the wolfwalker as long as Tehena had. The skinny woman might nag up one side and down the other, but she would never leave Dion’s side.
As they rode, Kiyun watched Dion protectively. She had moved well when the worm attacked, faster than he had hoped. He should have expected it; after all, wolfwalkers healed quickly, but he could swear that the old scars had softened more than they should. By the time they reached Ariye, the marks would look more like decade-old scratches, not six-month lepa-clawed gouges. He wondered how much energy she was using to heal herself, and how much she kept back for the babe. It had to be substantial, for her recent history was now written less in the lepa claw marks, than in the old, ridged flesh on her left hand—a hand that Dion flexed and stretched too often, as if it hurt worse now than when it had first been injured years ago. He had wondered if that motion was more reminder than actual pain, as though the discomfort kept her from thinking of what else that hand had lost.
He nodded to Tehena. “She’s riding better now.”
Tehena adjusted her thick scarf to cover her chin from the cold. Her reply was noncommittal. “She should; she was born in the saddle.”
“Born to the wolves, you mean.” He guided his dnu around a slick spot where shadow preserved the ice, and back into the faint rut that paid tribute to countless wagons.
The woman’s voice was bitter as they kicked their dnu into a slow trot to follow the healer. “Born to the mountains into which we ride,” she corrected. “The wolves are just shadows of Randonnen peaks.”
“You blame her for them?” Kiyun asked mildly. “They are her strength, not her curse.”
“Like a pack of moonworms,” Tehena retorted. “They hound her like a nightmare. Her mate was her strength; Gray Hishn was her focus. With the first one dead, and the wolf long distant in Ariye, she wanders like a ghost in the howling.”
“It
is a woman’s way,” he said slowly, “to explore the hurt, to find its boundaries, to see if she can live beyond it.”
“And you would let her do that alone.”
“She was kum-tai with her mate, Tehena. They had the forever bond. With him dead, she will always be alone, regardless of what we do.” He shrugged. “Besides, the wolves gather around her like thieves. They’re company enough.”
“Like ghouls,” she muttered.
“I don’t think they’re the real problem.” Kiyun pulled briefly ahead between ice patches and matched paces again with Tehena. He had never been good with animals, and his dnu was more calm when he rode beside another. “The Ariyens don’t have to be here with us to be the greater threat,” he reminded her. “They’ve been sending out message rings like fleas. And Dion may be avoiding the message walls, but she can’t have missed the talk, not with half the elders and healers wanting her for this meeting and that favor and this healing and that advice.”
“Well, she’s running right toward them, now.”
“But she has something to fight for: her child, the wolves. Even pushing as hard as the Ariyens are, I don’t think they will keep her this time.”
“Unless they find something else to bind her to them.”
“Something that can get through both you and me?” He snorted. “Hells, but half of Randonnen would go to war to keep her out of Ariye if that was what she wanted. She may go back to face the Ariyen elders, but they won’t be able to hold her. It’s the wolves driving her now.”
Tehena said nothing.
He knew she agreed, and he shot her a slanted look. “Well?” he prompted.
She scowled at him. “Perhaps.”
He merely waited.
“You may be right,” she said finally.
“In a pig’s eye,” he returned mildly, not hiding the touch of smugness that he had made her say the actual words.
She shot him a fulminating look. “I’m not going to say it again.”
“I wouldn’t want you to strain yourself,” he added dryly. “The day you admit I’m right and mean it is the day I give up art.”
She cast a disparaging look toward one of his saddlebags where there was a conspicuous bulge. The twisted carving wasn’t even clearly human or alien, just a jumble of shapes and colors. “Considering your taste in art, that might be a favor for the whole county.” She chewed her thin, chapped lip, glanced ahead toward the wolfwalker, and didn’t bother to hide her shiver.
Kiyun followed her glance. “I think I froze my eyebrows this morning.”
“Get used to it,” Tehena returned without sympathy. “It’s a long road to reach the main heights, and we’re on our way up, not down. Besides, there are advantages here.” The lanky woman gestured at the lupine prints in the snow. “If we take the pass routes instead of the valleys, we’ll eventually be high enough that the Gray Ones won’t be able to follow, and that will give Dion some peace.”
“For a few days, maybe.” The man glanced toward the white line of mountains that still rose ahead like a wall. “You know as well as I that some other wolf pack will pick her up on the other side of the mountains.”
The lanky woman’s voice was sour. “You could leave me my fantasy for at least a few minutes.”
“That the wolves will leave Dion alone?” Kiyun snorted. “That’s not much of a fantasy.”
Tehena shrugged. “It’s as much as I can manage. You know what they say: the greater the dream, the greater the risk to make it come true.”
“And you don’t take those kinds of risks.”
“Not me,” the woman agreed.
“You long-faced liar.”
“Wart-nosed bollusk,” she retorted.
His eyes narrowed. “You’re a worm-tempered stickbeast, if ever I saw one.”
“And you’re a clod-brain, if ever one was born,” she snapped back.
“Puce-veined cave-bleeder,” he threw back at her.
“Piss-patter,” she snapped.
He sucked in a breath. “You fat-hipped, lepa-lipped, puff-haired piece of refuse from the worlag-bit end of a poolah.”
For a moment, Tehena glared at him. Then a strange, almost haunted look crossed her face. She started to choke. Obediently, her dnu stopped in the middle of the road as she lost control of the reins.
“Moonworms!” Kiyun halted abruptly and reached across to steady her. “Are you all right?”
But the woman continued to choke. She gargled something and hit his thick arm with her fist.
He opened his mouth to call out for the wolfwalker, then stopped. He frowned. Tehena’s skinny fist still beat helplessly against his rock-hard arm, but now she was doubled over her saddle horns. She gasped, gargled her words, and choked again, and he simply stared.
She was laughing.
“Damn all nine moons to all nine hells,” he murmured to himself. “Thirteen years I’ve known you, and I’ve never heard you laugh. Gamon said he figured it would happen someday, but I didn’t believe him. Guess it’s fitting that you choke to death on a sound you don’t know how to make.”
“Fa-fat-hipped,” she choked.
He raised his eyebrows. She was so lean as to be almost bony.
She pounded his arm. “Pu-puff-ha-ha-haired—”
What hair of hers that could be seen was—as usual—thin, grayed, and stringy. He shrugged.
She gave up beating on his arm, straightened up only to double over again, and finally regained control of her reins. She rode off after Dion, still gasp-laughing as the humor forced its way up and out of her throat.
Kiyun gazed after her, then spurred his dnu to follow. He could not help taking stock: a ghost of a healer who heard the dead like demons tearing at her mind; a scrawny woman who would rather choke on dung than laugh out loud; and a man who rode blindly after both because, long ago, he had left his home to follow the gray of a legend. He wondered if he had misjudged the two women, and it was he who was not sane.
VI
Talon Drovic neVolen
Who is the hunter?
You, who seek your destiny,
Or those who drive you to it?
—Question of the elders at the Test of Abis
Clouds of gnats hovered over Talon’s face in the dull gray of dawn. His skin was slick with sweat. The eyes of the wolves pulled him abruptly from the nightmare, but the images left fingers on his skin. It had been Jervid’s body sprawled at his feet, but it was Talon’s knife, not Drovic’s, that had sunk into the other man’s gut. Talons hands had grown warm, as if he clenched them too tight. But when he had looked down, the knife was in his own gut, and it was his blood that burned his left hand and gushed out from his fingers like night. Drovic had smiled and withdrawn the blade, patted his arm as if to comfort, and said, “This, too, was your decision . . .”
Talon rose with a mutter to do his morning duty. He should be grateful, he thought as he rubbed his aching, half-crippled left hand and then his aching right wrist. At least it was a variation on the dreams of the dark-eyed woman. If he could just touch her, feel her skin under his hands, scrape his teeth over her throat—get her out of his system along with the wolves—then other bedmates would look better.
He roll-stuffed his sleeping bag almost brutally. In spite of the weighted bag, he had not been warm, and as he mixed the hot morning rou with his bitter tincture, the shivers wracked him again. “Cold,” he muttered as he downed the drink. “Cold as a grave’s ambition.” Moons, but how long would Drovic hunt the underground labs? They’d already dropped off three packs’ worth of bioforms in the town of Verge for transport to Bilocctar. What they carried now was for Drovic’s contact in the north, and after that, they’d begin again: hunting, finding, stealing. Killing. He rubbed his temple without relief. He wished he remembered as little of that as he did the rest of his life. Instead, the images of fights and battles seemed engraved on his mind. Raiders, worlags, slavers, venges—the dead were everywhere.
Behind him, a ridin
g beast snorted, and he made his way to the crest of the ridge so that he could study the roads down below. There was still a faint glow to the root planks, and they made a web in the dark, a web that caught the world. It occurred to him that it was not time—the centuries since the Ancients—that held the world in place without progress. No, it was the heavy slabs of this nine-mooned world. The roads that men themselves had set down now locked progress in place like a leech-chain on a wolf.
Dust, trails, freedom . . . The gray impression broke in as he stalked down toward the stream, and he knew that at least one wolf was close. The pressure from the Gray Ones was as much a vise as the pounding ache in his head. He waded shin-deep into the cold and splashed it on his face as the sun lightened the tiny ravine. When he looked up, his gaze met that of the old male.
Leader.
The shock of that intimate contact made Talon’s jaw tighten. The word-image was confused with lupine patterns he could not quite interpret in his human mind, but the message was clear enough. “I hear you,” he muttered. “But I am no leader here.”
You let a lesser wolf command you.
Talon thought of the way Drovic had laid him in the dust two ninans back. The unconscious skill of the older man. The power in those arms, and the rage. Lesser?
Gray Ursh seemed to nod, and the sense of splitting from Drovic was clear. Hunt with us, he urged. The trails are close. We know where you must go. We know what you need.
The image of bonding, of the closeness of the pack family, was unmistakable, and Talon’s own rage erupted. His mate, his children, his family—gone. His strength, his sense of self—destroyed. He remembered the village woman cringing in her cloak, crawling at his feet. Knew that the cloak should have been different, that the woman was wrong. And realized that killing Biekin to save that woman had crystallized something inside him. Even without the wolves, he could not go back now to following his father like a bollusk in the herd. They had brought him to this, had hounded him until he could not even stay with his father. “Do you realize what you’ve done?” he demanded.
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