The wolves paused, caught on the edge of the ridge. Their throats loosened, their voices rose, and the wail of their ancient grief was thrown with Dion’s gaze into the sky. Their longing was Dion’s, their grief in her mind. And when she began to run again, to drive that from her mind, the wolves became a wash of gray that raced after her on the sun-dried ridge below the ancient moons.
Run! they howled into her head. Hunt with the pack, Wolfwalker!
The old female sang out, The high trail!
Cross the heights, the others returned. The trail of sky and stone!
Like shadow water, they flowed up the trail toward her, then beside her till they reached the rise of broken stone where the rocks jutted out like knuckles. The Gray Ones had to leap and pace, turn and jump to make their way up again. Beside Dion, the yearling in the lead lost his balance as he tried for a higher rock. Wolfwalker! he cried out.
Dion reached like a flash, snagging her hand in his scruff. She jammed her other fist between two boulders and hauled on the yearling’s fur, straining to hold him until his front paws reached over the edge. Thrusting hard with his hind legs, he kicked off pebbles. One hind leg caught her roughly in the chest. He yelped his apology. She squeezed her eyes shut against the dust he threw back and ducked her face into her elbow, then pushed hard, shoving him up. An instant later, his weight was gone, and he bellied over the edge. Dion and the other seven wolves jumped up after him.
At the top, ahead of Dion, the old gray female hesitated. Yellow eyes bored through Dion’s violet gaze, neither one challenging, but neither giving ground. Then the yellow gleam faded into deep, aged tones. Wolfwalker, the female sent.
Slowly, Dion reached out. This wolf had never run with a human—had never bonded as Hishn had—and although the female accepted Dion into the pack, the wolf was wary as a predator. She barely stood for Dion to touch her shoulder, but her mental voice reveled in the touch.
Wolfwalker, she sang softly again.
Dion’s voice was a whisper. “You honor me.”
You carry the weight of the pack. Your love binds you to Gray Hishn. Your promise binds you to us. Run with the pack, Wolfwalker!
Dion ducked her head, unable to hide her sudden rush of feeling. The old one almost touched Dion’s thigh with her nose, then was gone along the trail.
The wolves had already run around the next set of cliffs by the time Dion reached them. It was a quick climb to the top, and halfway up she grinned at the gray wolf who waited impatiently above her at the rim, where the cliff had eroded into scattered dirt paths.
Hishn eyed the wolfwalker, then turned and snapped at Gray Yoshi when he urged her away. Wait, Hishn told him flatly.
Dion, one hand on the top rock, paused at the sharpness in Hishn’s tones. She could see Gray Yoshi with her own eyes, but that was only visual. The image of the male in Hishn’s mind was harsh and unforgiving, and Dion could not move closer.
If the pack leader picked up Dion’s hesitation, he gave no indication. Instead, he snarled. The human can catch up later, he sent.
Hishn bared a mouthful of teeth. She is my wolfwalker.
Dion’s hands began to ache from their hold. She steadied herself, waited another minute, then determinedly hauled herself up and rolled over the edge of the boulders. For an instant her eyes met Yoshi’s hostile yellow gaze, and she halted on her hands and knees. The gleaming eyes seared her mind with accusation. Then the Gray One turned away. He did not look back as he loped after the rest of the pack. Hishn snarled at his backside, then ducked her head and sniffed at Dion’s cheek.
Dion got to her feet only slowly. She said nothing as she gazed after Yoshi, but Hishn felt the hurt in her mind. The massive female nudged Dion in the thigh, then butted her head under Dion’s hand until the wolfwalker gripped the thick fur. “Hishn,” Dion said softly.
He sings his loneliness.
“I feel it—like a knife in my mind.”
My mate does not speak for the rest of the pack.
But Dion couldn’t hide what crossed her thoughts. Yoshi had not and would never forget what had happened to his wolfwalker. Where Dion had survived, the man had died; and the gray wolf, alone and abandoned, blamed Dion for his grief. It didn’t matter that it had been a raider bolt, not a blade of hers, that had speared the man in the chest. Sobovi had given his life so that Dion could escape from the raiders with others up a cliff. Raiders who had been after Dion and other wolfwalkers like her … Raiders who were after her and Aranur again … Hishn had kept her safe back then, but at what cost? And Gray Yoshi, waiting at the top of the cliff for his own wolfwalker, had found that death climbed with Dion instead.
Hishn gazed at her unblinkingly. Sobovi lives on in the song of the pack.
Dion, looking after Hishn’s mate, tugged at the fur beneath her hand. Memories passed on from wolf to wolf. Hishn’s new pups, if Hishn mated again this summer, would know Dion not only through Hishn, but also through Yoshi’s eyes. She looked down at her hands. The taint of blood—of Sobovi, of the others who had died from raider wounds she could not close, from raider swords they could not dodge … All that clung to her thoughts. Raiders … And her duty forced her to face them. She wanted protection, she realized. She wanted a place that was safe. A goal that was not built on violence, but on the hope of some other future. Her fingers trembled, and she thrust herself away from the wolf and clenched her hands like fists.
“Come,” she said. Her voice was flat and sober. “The pack runs far ahead.”
Hishn eyed her, then turned back toward the path.
When they reached the top of the ridge, Dion halted to catch her breath. Hishn snarled at Yoshi, but the gray male looked once, deliberately, to the west, then turned his shoulder to Hishn’s snapping teeth and loped after the others down the slope.
Dion followed Yoshi’s gaze. There was only one thing to the west: the split, truncated mountain on which his wolfwalker had died. Like a dream, the mountain remained, unnaturally shaped, and forbidden to humans. Sobovi’s death was only one attributed to that mountain; raiders, too, had died there. And Aranur ’s sister, and Aranur’s men, and the hundreds of Ancients who had been struck with plague … Eight hundred years ago, that mountain had been a tall, rounded, lumpy peak. Then the Ancients had landed, cut off the top, hollowed it out, and carved the deep slot through its center. The tethers that had linked this world to the stars had once run through that slotted mountain. Now only wind whistled there.
Dion gazed at the mountain with loathing and longing, unable to separate being drawn to the sky from being linked to the death on the planet. Hishn growled low in her throat, and Dion touched the wolf’s fur. The freedom she felt with the wolves was only a whisper of what the Ancients had had. The symbols left over from the time of the Ancients—their slotted peaks and stone-round domes—represented both death and freedom. It was as if, on this world, the two were inextricably entwined. The gift of one was the other, and the price of the other was the one.
Hishn caught Dion’s hand in her teeth. Blood flows because it feeds us. So the hunt returns, like the moons to night—it is the pattern that must be. Death is life, and life is death. Only the packsong lives on. The gray wolf bit down so hard that Dion jerked her hand free and swatted at Hishn’s ears. The Gray One laughed in her mind. Sing with the pack, Wolfwalker. Our blood is yours. We own each other here.
As if called by Hishn’s images, from below, the wolf pack seemed to coalesce into a single driving need. Hishn’s ears flicked toward them. Dion caught the echo of Gray Yoshi in his mate’s mind: His urgent tones pulled Hishn like a leash.
Dion’s voice was soft. “We are bonded, Hishn, you and I. But we each must have our own goals.” She looked after the male. “Go,” she urged. “Go seek your mate. Your heart belongs to him, not me.”
Hishn hesitated, but Yoshi’s call was strong. Yellow eyes gleamed. Then the massive wolf bared her teeth and raced away on the trail.
Dion cut east over Dry Ridge. She
could already hear her sons on the trail through the ears of other wolves. The voices of those wolves—a small family group—echoed from pack to pack until they reached her mind through Hishn. The other wolves didn’t run right beside her sons, but they could tell, through the noise of the riders, where the boys and their escorts were. It would be an hour before the small group reached the crossroads; they were moving swiftly, but they were late. Dion smiled faintly. Danton had probably run off to play when they were supposed to get started. It would have taken Olarun some time to find and haul his brother back.
Dion climbed Lookout Rock before she passed it—there was a lookout stone on each ridge—to check the skies again, but there was only a single dark shape soaring to the east. Deliberately, she let her gaze roam the ridges on all sides of the message tower before she allowed herself to read the flags. When she did finally read the patterns strung up against the sky, she felt her jawline tense.
“Someday you’ll damn them to the seventh hell,” she said to herself about the elders. Her words held no anger, but her very quietness was a curse. The council… They knew she had left to be with her boys, yet they still called her to work. To the council she was a healer, not a mother. In their minds she had only a wolf family, not a human one. She felt her fingers clench and unclench, then wiped the dirt from her scarred hand onto her leggings. Finally, she turned and made her way down the ridge.
She found the ringrunner on the road near the stone corral. He had been waiting long enough that his dnu and the relay beast he had brought for her were staked out and lazily poking around in the ferns. Vlado himself was relaxing, though his eyes were alert enough to catch her movements the moment she came down the trail. She greeted him reluctantly.
The lean man studied the wolfwalker as she read the message ring—Dion had never been good at hiding her feelings. Right now, she was grim—almost guilty—and her hand, which had strayed to the hilt of her sword, rose unconsciously to tuck a wisp of hair under her silver healer’s circlet. Her eyes were shadowed; there was no mistaking the strain in the lines of her face. “Dion?” he asked quietly.
She looked up.
“Are you all right?”
She shrugged. She’d known him long enough that she could answer truthfully.
The man frowned and touched her arm. “If you need to talk…” His voice trailed off, but the invitation to Kum-jan was clear.
Dion looked back down at the message. She didn’t trust herself to answer. There was an anger growing in her—an anger that the elders would call her even as they promised her a short release. If she opened her mouth, she would lash out at Vlado; and he stood there with his proposition held out like a compliment, well-meant as his friendship, as if sex was the release she needed. Even as she stared at the message ring, she felt that anger harden even toward him. How many such offers would have come her way were she not a wolfwalker? And how many would have been advanced had she not been a master healer, the one who was Aranur’s mate? Scouts had their own etiquette for sleeping on the trail, and some were as open with their bedrolls as they were with their information, but Dion wasn’t one of those. Her Promise with Aranur was like her bond with Hishn—complete, engulfing, exclusive. To dilute either bond would trivialize the strength of her love and leave her unfocused and lost.
A tiny twig snapped behind them in the woods. Dion’s slender body tightened, then relaxed almost as quickly when she recognized the woods’ sounds that followed the twig snap. Vlado found his own body relaxing, as if his senses had taken their reassurance from Dion’s wary acceptance. He eyed her thoughtfully. The wolfwalker was not just strained, he realized, but dangerously so. He almost reached out to touch her again— to massage some of that strain out of her muscles—but her body shifted almost imperceptibly away. He shrugged to himself. It wasn’t a rejection of him, he knew, but a reflection of her bond with the wolves. Where one was wary, the other was remote. But both were instinctively aware of every motion around them. She had told him once it had come from being raised in Ran-donnen, where she had run trail since she was old enough to stand and where the wolfsong was strong as a storm, but Vlado was not so sure. He’d seen her after she’d fought on a venge, and he’d been with her after she’d hunted with the wolf pack. Both times her eyes had been wild and not quite human: hungry, predatory—almost feral. He didn’t care what the others said—it was no set of moons that claimed this woman. The wolves had a hold on Ember Dione, and he didn’t think even Aranur knew how deeply their teeth had sunk in.
Dion stared at the message stick, letting her fingers register the haste in the crudely carved slashes and the tight but uncured knots. When she glanced up at the man, Vlado nodded.
“It came through the watchtower on Restiess Ridge,” he said in answer to her unspoken question. “They need a healer within three hours. They requested that it be you.”
Dion stared down at the message. She was silent for a long time. Then, finally, she said, “Send Khast.”
“Healer?”
She held the message ring out to the runner, but he hesitated for the briefest moment before taking it. Dion looked up. Her face was tight, but her voice was steady. “Send Khast,” she repeated. Then she turned away.
Like a wolf, she faded into the forest. There was a moment when the sunlight shattered the ferns that shifted in Dion’s wake; then the shadows swallowed her as if she was one of their own.
Vlado stared after her. He could swear he had seen a shadow of gray deep in her violet eyes. It had had no gleam, no spark, as when the wolfwalker was angry; instead it had been a guilt, a bitterness—a clouding of her mind. Slowly, he strapped the message ring back on his belt. He looked once more toward the forest. Then he mounted his dnu and, catching up the other creature’s reins, started the beasts up the road.
From the shelter of the forest, Dion watched him go. Her fists were clenched at her sides; her lips tight with the words she wanted to shout. Wait! I’ll go— But her jaw was locked, and her feet didn’t move. She forced herself to breathe, and the sound that sucked between her lips was harsh. I should have gone, the thought pounded in her head. It should be me, not Khast. She had seen the uncertainty in the messenger’s eyes—in all the years he’d run with her, he’d never heard her turn down a call.
The gray fog in her head swamped her suddenly, and she swayed against a tree. Rough bark caught on her fingers; her forehead pressed the cool wood. But it was not guilt that forced her fingers into the bark; it was a growing ice in her gut. She pushed herself away from the tree and stared once more down at the trail below. Then she began to run.
By the time Dion reached the crossroads, the stone in her belly had loosened and her body had tired itself into the trail lope that covered the four kays like the wolves. She paused when she saw the boys below. The chest-high ferns hid her from their eyes, and she took the moment to revel in their youth. They were intent on building a message cairn, and their young voices filled her ears like a packsong as they ordered each other to do this and that, teased each other, then agreed excitedly on the next idea. So straight, so eager they were. So many dreams … Pride and love warred in her so that her eyes blurred, and for a moment their figures wavered. Irritably, she brushed at the tears. If Aranur thought she was overworked now, what would he do if he knew she’d been crying?
She was within meters of the boys before they saw her. Olarun felt her presence first, and he looked up sharply, his young ears already distinguishing sounds. It took him a moment to pick her out from the ferns. Then he poked Danton roughly. “There she is! I saw her first!”
The younger boy scrambled to his feet. “You did not!”
“I did too,” Olarun retorted.
“You always see her first,” Danton muttered sullenly. Dion nodded to the three rider escorts, and they smiled acknowledgment and began to gather their things. They didn’t bother to grasp arms with her before they returned to the village; she was already being pulled away on each side by her boys.
“Momma,” Olarun said eagerly. “Come see what we made. It’s a message cairn. Look!”
Obediently, Dion bent to examine the cairn. “Oh, this is nicely done,” she told them. Their faces flushed with pride, and she looked closer at their work. “I like the way you’ve built the opening,” she said. “A ringrunner will be able to pull a message out without the rain dripping inside while he does it.”
“That was my idea,” Olarun said proudly.
Danton pushed him aside and pulled Dion down to look through the opening. “But I’m the one who made the message platform inside. See?”
“To keep the messages off the dirt? I had no idea you knew how important it was to keep messages from being blurred,” she told him. “You’ve built an excellent structure. Any scout would be proud to use this cairn.”
“Do you want to use it?” Olarun asked eagerly.
“Can you make a message right now?” Danton put in.
Dion looked down into his face. “We’ll leave a message ring for your father,” she agreed. “But you have to help me make it.”
The boys almost fell over themselves to shove into her hands the pile of sticks they had already gathered. By the time they had chosen a single stick to use, then slashed and dyed and knotted their message in the wood, it was late morning, and the sun had risen enough to begin warming the shadows. Dion gathered her sons, checked their small packs, and led them off into the forest.
Danton immediately stirred up a largon nest that Dion pointed out, and they had to run for their skins while the large-jawed crawlers flooded out in search of the intruders. Then the two boys dared each other to taste the yucky leaves Dion found. She laughed at their expressions as they spat and coughed over the flavor. Finally, she led them to a bramble patch growing over a tiny plot of extractor plants. She pulled a new root from the soil, cleaned it off, cut from it two slivers, and wrapped each in a sweet bramble leaf so the boys could get the taste of the other plant out of their mouths. Olarun carefully took the rest of the root and put it in one of his belt pouches.
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