“Dion has been many things to many people—”
“Who cares what she was before? It’s what she is now that’s important. It’s always what you are now—that’s the only thing you have to work with to make things happen in your life.”
“That’s worlag piss. Dion is what her past has made her.”
“Dion is selfish and useless,” she shot back. “Is that what bought your loyalty?”
Gamon’s voice was mild. Kiyun, having heard that tone before, eyed the older man warily. “So you think,” Gamon said, “you should throw a person away if they become useless—or inconvenient.”
“It’s not a matter of inconvenience. Don’t twist my words, old man.”
Gamon’s gray eyes glinted.
Asuli gestured sharply toward the forest. “You let her run around with the wolves like a wilding. You don’t do anything to stop her, to make her face what she’s feeling. This thing with the jellbugs—does she think she’ll avoid death just because she’s a master healer? Or avoid raiders if she stays out of Ariye? She can’t run away from Aranur’s death—or the death of her son or, hell, the death of anyone she’s ever known. Death is her lifestyle. The woman’s not just a wolfwalker—she’s a moon-wormed scout. She’s lifted her sword against raiders as often as she’s used her scalpel—probably caused as much death as she’s prevented.” Asuli jabbed her finger at them. “And you, you’re all as much to blame for the way she’s acting now as she is herself. You’re so caught up in her reputation, you don’t care that you’re simply making it easy for her to run away—to escape herself no matter how much it costs everyone else. You’re like a bunch of disciples trailing some sort of messiah. Anything she needs, you get her; anything she does, you accept. But you’re blind as she is if you follow her. She’s hardly even human.”
Kiyun’s jaw tightened visibly. “What is human?” He threw the question at her. “Words? A speech pattern? Emotions? Thoughts? You think you are more human—somehow better than she? Dion is more human than either of us will ever be. She’s seen eight centuries of birth and death. She’s felt eight hundred years of grief. You have the option of forgetting, of letting memories fade. Dion doesn’t have that luxury. Those wolves, who make her so ‘blind’ to you, accentuate every emotion. They carry every event in their memories and play them back, again and again. When her son was killed, the wolves were there in her mind, locking that memory into their packsong so that it haunts her, day and night. When Aranur died, the wolves were there— she let them into her mind to help her find the strength to hold him as long as she did. And now the image of his death is with her every moment, in the packsong of a dozen wolves. She can never escape it now.” His jaw tightened. “You think we help Dion run away—for a few days or ninans or years if we have to? You’re goddamn right, we do.”
Asuli looked at Tehena. “What about you? You’re going to let her run away too?”
The other woman’s eyes narrowed.
“You think she can be responsible for you when she’s escaping herself? You, who are so desperate for her to give you direction, to give you purpose? Don’t you see? She can’t give you a reason to live—not when she’s lost herself. And if she’s not willing to pull herself out of whatever hole she’s in, what will you do for her? Help her dig it deeper? Or help to get her out?”
Tehena’s light-colored eyes were intent as a wolf on its prey. She opened her mouth, but Gamon put his hand on her arm. The lanky woman stilled with difficulty.
Slowly, Asuli got to her feet. “She can’t save you—not as she is,” she said quietly. “She can’t even save herself.”
Tehena watched Asuli walk away. An odd expression crossed her face, but she said nothing. The long day passed in near silence.
Dion did not return that night, and Asuli was restless. She paced the camp at dawn and fidgeted with the fire until she drove Kiyun to cursing.
“By the moons, woman, can’t you settle down?”
“Where is she?”
“Do you care?”
“Does it matter?” she shot back.
He cursed again. “I’m going to check the snares,” he muttered.
“If you see her, tell her I’m waiting here.”
“I’ve already seen her, and she doesn’t care where you wait as long as it’s away from her.”
Asuli merely nodded. But when Kiyun left camp, she watched with sharp eyes. And later, when Gamon was digging up tubers and Tehena was checking their fish traps, Asuli disappeared.
When Tehena returned from the stream, she had a fat fish in her hands. She prepared it, wrapped it in leaves, and set it in the hot ashes of the fire pit before she realized that the intern’s absence was more than a momentary lapse. Slowly, she stood and glanced around the camp. When she moved east she located Gamon easily. She circled the camp, but although there were two peetrees within forty meters of their site, the intern was not at either one. Tehena chewed her thin Up.
Then she set off in the direction Dion had taken at dawn. There was a wide game trail—used by everything from herds of eerin to worlags and badgerbears—and it was that which Tehena followed.
She had gone only two kays when she heard human sounds: steel on wood, cursing, half sobs. Within twenty meters she spotted Asuli. The intern was crouched near the top of a rocky rise in a stand of koroli bushes, where the fat, waxy, summer leaves hid her shape. When Tehena climbed the rise silently and followed the intern’s gaze, her thin lips tightened grimly.
The lanky woman was within meters before Asuli realized there was someone behind her. Abruptly, the intern turned, her belt knife half drawn before she realized that it was Tehena who stared at her.
The lean-boned woman looked at Asuli, then nodded meaningfully back at the trail. Asuli’s face shuttered. For a moment, the younger woman looked as though she would resist Tehena, but there was a reason the hard-faced woman was rarely challenged. Tehena’s eyes, flat and hard, were empty of empathy, and Asuli had no doubt that Tehena would kill her if she felt she would protect Dion by doing it.
Asuli rose as quietly as she could and followed Tehena back. When they were partway there, she cleared her throat and asked, “What was she doing back there?”
Tehena gave her a cold look. “Carving a message ring.”
“On a fallen tree?”
“You can think of something else big enough to hold her grief?”
Asuli shook her head. “She wasn’t carving—she was attacking that tree. Slashing it and spirting at it. I watched her rip branches apart with her bare hands and reach into the core where part of the trunk was hollow. She tore the sapwood out with her fingernails. She screamed at the wood and cursed it. Cut herself and bled all over the bark.”
Tehena didn’t answer.
“And those wolves … An entire wolf pack was there, digging at the trunk and watching from the bushes.”
Tehena shrugged. “They seek Dion as she seeks them.”
Asuli chewed on that for a moment. “Why?” she finally asked.
“Because she has nothing else, and they give to her instead of take from her. Because they speak to her where we can’t reach her with our words.”
“Any of us could speak to the wolves, couldn’t we?”
It was more of a musing than a question, but Tehena answered sharply. “Not if you want to remain living or sane.”
“What do you mean? They say that all you do is look in then-eyes—”
The other woman cut her off. “You provoke a wolf that way, Asuli. Just like with any dog.” The intern opened her mouth to protest, but Tehena cut her off again. “Just because some wolves do communicate with humans doesn’t mean they all do— they’re still wild animals protecting their packs and dens and food. You stare at one and you’re challenging it. The Ancients engineered the wolves to communicate, but you learn to do that only by looking into a Gray One’s eyes.”
“If it’s just a physical challenge, why doesn’t the Gray One run away?”
“It would—it’s
naturally timid. But when you meet its gaze with your own, you lock it to you through the engineering of the Ancients. The wolf has to stay until you break the contact or it finds a way to break away. You challenge it physically by looking into its eyes, but you challenge it emotionally and psychologically by the human dominance of forcing it to communicate. If the wolf doesn’t like it, if it feels trapped enough, it can attack you—with body or mind.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, a cornered animal will lash out with whatever weapons it has. A wolf trapped in a mental link with a human will lash out against that, too. The human has only one brain to think with; the wolves can pull the weight of the entire pack-song. You challenge a wolf, you could lose your mind.”
“That’s not how the storytellers describe it.”
Tehena snorted. “How many storytellers are wolfwalkers? I’ve been with Dion for thirteen years; I’ve talked to the wolves myself.”
“You looked at a wolf—heard its voice in your head?”
“Once.” Tehena motioned for Asuli to go on to the camp, and the intern passed her warily.
“What happened?” Asuli prodded.
“I tried to do what Dion does—look into one’s eyes and communicate. I provoked it instead.”
“It bit you?”
Tehena looked at her, then slowly rolled up her sleeves. The ragged scars stretched from elbow to wrist. She motioned for Asuli to stay in camp. Then she went back to tend the fish traps.
Thin ice formed overnight in their pans, and the cold dawn brought them from their sleeping bags quickly to build the campfire up. The evening chill sent them back to their bedrolls as soon as the wind cut through camp. Asuli spent the time cutting and gathering herbs while the others took turns hunting and gathering and building up the camp. Tehena spent long hours away; Dion was not often seen. By the end of the first ninan in the camp it had become a full resting place, with a rude corral, two lean-tos, and a firewood rack. Riders stopped by twice to see what they were setting up, and traded salt and sugar and flour for pelts and Asuli’s herbs.
Halfway through the second ninan, they attracted a poolah with the scent of baking tubers. Their first warning was from Dion, who appeared in camp as suddenly as a sharp sound. “Poolah,” she said shortly. Smoothly, the others took up their weapons. Asuli looked from one to the other, uncertain what to do. She had a knife, but nothing else, and she realized abruptly that she lived here at the grace of the others. She made a half sound, and Gamon gestured sharply for her to stand closer to the fire.
The sightless head of the low, slinking beast was visible within minutes. Swinging slowly from side to side, the brown-speckled head followed their scent toward the clearing. It seemed to flow forward over the ground, between trees. Then it went still for a moment as it touched its tongue to the trail to check the strength of the scents. Like a shadow, it flowed forward again. It stopped just outside of the camp. Asuli made another small sound, the fear tightening her throat, and the poolah shifted subtly. There was a moment in which nothing moved; the forest itself seemed to hang in anticipation. Then the beast sprang toward her.
The intern screamed. The arrows from all four archers struck solidly, midair, in the poolah’s body. The beast shrieked with Asuli and fell, twisting and jerking, short by meters of the fire. It died hard, leaving the ground torn and the fire-pit rocks scattered. Asuli almost backed into the flames herself while the poolah before her died.
They had meat that night for dinner.
By late evening, the treespits clouded the chill air like day-bats, drawn to their camp by the scent of the poolah and the radiating warmth of the fire pit. Tehena’s watch was filled with snaps and rustlings.
When Gamon rose to take over the watch, Dion rose with him. She squatted by the fire for a moment, her eyes up, away from the flames. She didn’t speak as she let the heat of the ash pit reach her hands, toasting them with warmth. For an instant, a pair of yellow eyes caught light. The wolf blinked, then disappeared. Dion rubbed her temple, then stood, walked to the edge of the clearing, and melted into the night.
Gamon watched her go with a tightened jaw. “By the seventh moon,” he muttered. “She’s got to stop.”
Tehena shook her head. “Who will make her? You? Me?”
“One of us has got to.”
“If Aranur couldn’t convince her to stay in Ariye for his sake—or for the sake of the sons she has left, what do you think we can do here? Not even Olarun stopped her from running.”
Gamon pulled on his mustache. “Olarun’s part of the problem,” he said. “You saw him before—he wouldn’t speak to her, wouldn’t look at her. Aside from Tomi, who is growing his own home now, Dion doesn’t think she has a son left.”
“Olarun will get over it.”
“Like you did?” The older man nodded at Tehena’s forearm, where the woman unconsciously rubbed at her scarred skin. “That tattoo you wore chased your family away like the plague. Your family rejected you just as Olarun does Dion. You’ve never gone back to show them differently. You’ve never gotten over their blame of you for getting into drugs. With Dion, Olarun blames her for Danton’s death, and he’s chasing her away as surely as if he took a sword and stabbed her.”
“He’s burying his blame.”
“Aye. And burying it so deep it would take the gods themselves to uproot it.”
Tehena laughed without humor. “You want to buck the gods on this? I say, let Dion have her distance, Gamon. She’s strong. She’s a wolfwalker. She’ll survive.” Her voice grew quiet, more for her ears than his. “She has to,” she breathed. “I need for her to live.”
Gamon didn’t answer.
In the faint light of the ash pit, Tehena gave him a sharp look. “What’s the matter?”
His voice was quiet. “Sometimes strength is its own weakness, Tehena. Dion’s problem is not that she’s strong, but that she never learned to be weak.”
“Old man, you talk like a fool. No one needs to learn to be weak.”
“No?” He gave her an amused expression.
“Don’t give me that look,” she retorted.
“Why not? A bit of what you call weakness would do you a world of good. Put some softness in your voice once in a while. Strength shouldn’t be a shield, woman, but a sword.”
“And just what does that mean?”
He shrugged. “Dion may have run from Aranur, but you run from men in general.”
Tehena actually laughed. “You’re worried that I haven’t been with a man?”
“That’s seven,” he returned. “And you’ve had the opportunities.”
She scowled at him. “With drunks, braggarts, and sods.”
“What do you expect? Hang out with the drunks, and they’re the only ones who will proposition you. Get yourself into some decent society, and you’ll meet someone better.”
“Oh, sure, Gamon. I’ll just take my past and tuck it in the closet while I go visiting.”
“We don’t judge you by your past, Tehena.”
“There’s a good one,” she retorted. “Tell me another one, Gampa.”
He ignored it. “We judge you,” he continued, “by what you’ve done since you came to Ariye.”
“And what have I done?”
He looked at her set face. “You’ve ridden on the venges with Aranur and Dion. You’ve helped train the strategists she recommended. You nursed Dion when she was hurt. You’ve been her friend. Moonworms, woman, you’ve helped her through more than her share of grief.”
Tehena’s voice was flat and hard. “It all comes down to Dion, doesn’t it? There are plenty of swords and strategists in Ariye, but only one Ember Dione. As long as she needs me, as long as she protects me from my past, I’m accepted in your county. That stableman—he practically gave us these dnu simply because we ride with the wolfwalker. No one would do something like that for me. Face it, Gamon, I have no value by myself—I’m nothing without Dion.”
Gamon’s voice was h
ard. “No one but you defines your life that way.”
“No?”
“You’re … efficient on your own, woman. You’re straightforward. You’re loyal to Dion. You’re—”
“A drug-addicted, prostituted, baby-murdering, jail rat?”
Gamon closed his mouth.
“Hard to hide the truth when I wore it on my arms.”
“Most men don’t even know where you came from.”
“Enough of them do to see me as less than a raider.”
“A man who wants intimacy won’t see you that way.”
“Right. And I have such a body to attract them, too.”
“Make friends, Tehena. That’s all it takes. You’ve never offered Kum-jan to anyone in Ariye.”
“What about you?”
Gamon turned to look at her, thinking she was joking. But the grin died on his face; her expression was deadly serious.
“What about you,” she repeated.
He stopped. He stared at her hard, lean face. He saw the way she rubbed her forearms, and for a moment his memory flashed back. A lone rider whose flesh was Uttered with the scars of drugs and violence … That bitter voice taunting him as she waited for Aranur’s judgment while her past stared all of them in the face. Gamon shook his head. “No, Tehena,” he said softly. “Not that between us.”
She watched him as his body language visibly withdrew from her. Then she turned and walked to her bedroll, lay down, and closed her eyes.
She rose at dawn and took the water bags to the stream. She cracked the ice that had formed on the tops of the bags, rinsed them out, and filled them. Then she sat back on her heels and stared at the river. She was not surprised to turn her head and see a wolf eyeing her from the forest—the Gray Ones were always thick around Dion.
Tehena watched the wolf from the corner of her eyes. Then slowly, she straightened. The wolf didn’t move. “Well, Gamon,” she muttered under her breath. “Between you and Dion, I’ve nothing left to lose.”
She turned slightly so that she faced the wolf. “Gray One,” she said, her hard voice as soft as she could make it. “Hear me.” The wolf shifted subtly. Deliberately, she turned the rest of the way around.
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