She stared down the trail. “And yet I feel so empty.”
Gamon rubbed her hand. “I won’t lie to you and say that time will heal your wounds. But I do know it can give you other things to help fill in the void: Family. Your brother. Your father. Your other sons.”
“Tomi nursed me long enough. He needs to go back to his own mate and finish building his own home. And Olarun …” Her voice trailed off.
“Olarun needs his family as much as you do.”
“You are family, too, Gamon.”
“I’m his grandfather,” the older man agreed. “As much as I was a father to Aranur. But I cannot be his mother, Dion. Nor can I be the father he’s just lost. Could you take someone else as your father or your twin?”
“No.”
“And they would have it no other way, too. Come, Dion. Ride this trail with me.”
“I cannot, Gamon.”
“Why?”
“Because …” Her voice trailed off. “Because before I had children,” she said softly, “it was all right to take risks, to explore. I put no one else in danger. I gambled with no other lives. My curiosity balanced the challenges. But then I had Tomi and Olarun and… Danton.” She forced herself to say his name. “And suddenly I became torn between what I was used to doing and what I must not do in order to keep my children safe. I couldn’t raise them the way my father raised me—to run wild in the forest with my twin. Randonnen is safer than Ariye. And as a child, I was drawn to the wilderness by my own curiosity and eagerness. I wasn’t pulled to it or forced into danger with the wolves. But my children are surrounded by Gray Ones. They are affected by the wolves in ways that I never was. And every time I turn around, the Gray Ones pull my boys to the forest. I’m so used to running with the wolves that I did not see the difference between risking the forest for myself, and risking it with my family.”
“Do you really think that a child of yours would have stayed out of the forest just because it was dangerous?” He shook his head. “If you think that, you don’t know yourself very well.”
“I know myself too well, Gamon. And that, I think, is the problem.”
“You’ve done your best, Dion. None of the moons could ask for more.”
“I tried to do my best,” she agreed. “And with Tomi, it wasn’t hard—he was already half grown when we adopted him. But with Olarun and Danton …” She looked up. “They were so little, Gamon—you remember that. One day, I just turned around, and they were old enough to start running trail, big enough to ride dnu. They had little-boy bows and little knives and survival kits. They had trail boots, not just home shoes. Like a night full of shadows, there was suddenly no clear-cut boundary. When were they too young to learn to swim or climb? When were they too small to stay out overnight? The dangers I take for granted— the worlags and poolahs and lepa—those should not have been part of their lives. But I took them into that. I led them into danger like a wolf mother who must teach her children to survive.” This time, her voice shook. “Or to die.”
“Dion…”
She shook her head angrily. “I’m not going to hide from the truth, Gamon. I have lived with the wolves for fifteen years, and I can’t deny that it has changed me. What Aranur saw—what you see—as the ‘Heart of Ariye,’ I see as a heart of gray. I’m too close to the Gray Ones to have perspective. I’m not wolf enough to protect my children, and not human enough to keep them out of danger. My father and brother know that as well as they know me. They’ve told me that often enough.” Her jaw tightened. “I can face my own blame now, Gamon. But I cannot face theirs, too.”
“And going north will help with that?”
“It will give me some kind of purpose.”
“Purpose, Dion? Or escape? Or punishment for the pain you feel you’ve caused? You think to reduce your life to atonement or run from every decision the elders ask you to make? You think you could live with yourself then? Look at Tehena. That’s what she’s become—a shell of a woman, so afraid to make decisions that she would rather be killed by the Gray Ones than decide herself how to force you to live. That’s why she went to the wolves—to get them to make the decision instead, so she didn’t risk hurting you herself. You are the only guide that woman trusts—the only person who gives her the hope that she should not herself be killed. She lives only because you do. She has direction, but it’s your direction that guides her, not decisions of her own. You want to be like that? Running so far, so fast, for so long that you no longer have time to be human? That you’ve forgotten how to live? Dammit, Dion, you could run forever and not escape yourself. You know that.”
Dion’s eyes were shadowed, but her voice was steady. “Maybe I am escaping. And maybe I’m punishing myself. But let me ask you this, Gamon: Could you do any differently?”
He simply looked at her.
Dion made a sound, half snarl, half curse. “I’m empty, Gamon, except for old promises and goals. You want me to find purpose? To continue? To go on? I can do it only this way. I am no longer blind to who and what I am. And if I am too far from my humanity, and too close right now to the wolves, what better time to reach beyond myself, through the Gray Ones, to … to find out what could happen? At least that would have value.”
“So you’ll go where no human has rights to be. Where taking that path will put you in an icy grave that no one will ever find. Has my family not borne enough sorrow? Has there not been enough death?”
Dion didn’t flinch from his gaze. Her own voice was so steady as to be almost hard. “And will there not be more, if no one ever does go north? What will happen when Ariye completes the work they’ve been doing? What will the response from the Aiueven be? The birdmen nearly destroyed the Ancients before. You can’t believe that they will simply let your brother lead Ariye back to the stars without a fight. And as that date gets closer, so does the time of our reckoning. I cannot stay in your county, wandering about, blindly ignoring what will happen, while the lines of my family—our family, Gamon—sit, waiting to be crushed by another alien plague. You talk of the Heart of Ariye, of our hopes and dreams; I speak of our very future.” She closed her eyes for a moment, and when she opened them, they were determined. “I have nothing here, Gamon. And all I will ever have again is what I leave behind for our family. What Ariye and Randonnen work for—it’s a dream that will never be real unless someone goes to the north. Someone who can face the past through the memories of the wolves. Who can face the plague without fear, face Aiueven without forgiveness. I have no fear of death, Gamon. Who better to go than me?”
His voice was harsh. “It will be decades yet before we are ready to try to recover the Ancients’ stars. If you want to die, let it be then, when there is a need for those without fear, for heroes and fantasies. Not now, while you still have a son in Ariye. Not now, Dion.” The older man’s jaw tightened into near-whiteness, and she realized slowly that his hard gray eyes glinted not with anger, but with fear. Fear for her. Fear for the grief she would leave him.
For a moment neither one spoke.
Finally, Gamon squeezed her hand. When he spoke, his voice was rough. “Your home is where your children are, and you belong with your family. Go where you must, do what you must, but remember that, Dion.” He studied her face with his old gray eyes as if memorizing her features. Then he turned away.
“Gamon—” Her voice broke off.
He looked back.
“Tell Olarun and Tomi that I love them.”
He nodded again. This time, when he rode away, no one spoke.
* * *
There were days when they made only a few kays; others when they made close to forty. The mountain route was sometimes smooth and protected, part of the major trade routes, and sometimes little more than deer paths that wound around the hills. And they stayed in inns more than campsites, and Dion didn’t protest.
It took over a ninan to reach the northern border of Randonnen. There, from the pass, they could see to the edge of the mountains. The high desert th
at stretched across toward Ramaj Ariye was dry as Dion’s eyes. At night, the line of tenor trees made a luminescent web, and Dion shivered as she eyed it, as though Aranur and his county spun those ghostly threads to catch her up again.
They had ridden through towns and villages, passed sheer stone walls, crossed lava flows that split the forests with washes of crumbled black rock. They camped in the common circles where the fire pits were well-used from summer and the stacks of cut wood were still full. And finally, they were met at the northeast border with a view of one of the Ancients’ domes. Dion sat for a long time, gazing at it as if searching its broken facade for answers. Then she turned their dnu due north, past the Ancients’ peak, toward Kiren, the abandoned county.
With the rising altitude, the nights were colder, and the air was crisp in the mornings. The wolves that paced the wolfwalker wore thicker pelts of gray. The snow that lay on the tops of the peaks crept down toward the lower forests, and the sky was filled with flocks of daybats migrating to the south.
It took ten days to skirt the edges of Ramaj Kiren. The skinny county would have taken three days to cross except that it was flooded. No one tried to cross that marsh if it was possible to go around it.
On the other side of Kiren, Dion eyed the northern peaks of Ramaj Kiaskari. Against the late-summer pale blue sky, the isolated peaks screamed their white, forbidden brilliance. She drew her cloak closer around her. Already the pull of the northern wolves was seeping into her consciousness. There was independence, not eagerness, in those voices, and something else that was cold and sharp. The gray voices that collected in the back of her skull were shadowed with other colors, and the yellow eyes that gleamed at her were somehow alien.
Something twisted in Dion’s gut. Disturbed, she drew back from the packsong, then focused her mind and sent a shaft of need to the wolf she had left behind. Distantly, faintly, like a spider thread on the wind, the Gray One’s voice came back… Wolfwalker!
And something else. She stared at the peaks and stretched, letting her mind spin out. There was depth there—she was sure of it. And life in those ice-covered mountains.
Then Tehena touched her arm, and she started. It was with difficulty that Dion turned away from that deadly, white-hard promise.
Ramaj Kiaskari was the opposite of Kiren. Where the county of Kiren had been smoothed and softened by mud slides and erosion, Kiaskari was hard and sharp. The settlements in this Ramaj were remote, linked by long, winding roads. The people didn’t grow their houses here, but bermed them deeply into the ground and built their walls from cut woods and stone. The roads were also stone, lined with barrier bushes as thick as houses so that they appeared as rivers of green with a thread of white at their center.
Dion no longer ran with the wolves; crossing the barrier bushes meant running into worlags, and the northern beasts were smaller and faster, more vicious in the hunt. The Gray Ones who sang in Dion’s mind stayed far from the barrier bushes, while the worlags scrabbled and chittered against the outer shrubs.
In the towns, she could see the touch of the Ancients everywhere—on this smooth street, on that pillared porch, within that set of bracings …
“Like a rast den,” Tehena commented.
Dion nodded. After eight hundred years, the clusters of homes had grown into rough patches of color. Up and down the hillside, slab roads followed the contour of the steepening mountain slopes.
Kiyun eyed the quiet, hard-faced people who stopped to watch them ride by. He nodded at them, but none of them gave a greeting. “It’s said that they are guards,” he commented. “That they keep the Aiueven from the throats of the rest of us.”
Tehena snorted. “They maintain the barrier bushes, nothing more. And it’s for the Aiueven, not for us. The Ancients made a deal with those white-feathered aliens. And as the Kiaskari say, To hell with the plague, we’ll keep our end of the bargain even if it kills us.’ ” She looked at Dion. “We’ll stop here?”
“Only for supplies.” Dion stared at the mountains that seemed to hunker over the town. “We’re close,” she said softly.
Tehena and Kiyun exchanged glances. “To the wolves?” the man asked.
She shook her head. “To the Aiueven.”
“Dion …” Kiyun’s voice trailed off.
She glanced at him, but her face was set. He shrugged, and they rode on.
It took two days to reach the northern end of the valley. There were only a few towns and isolated homes farther north, and half of those were vacant except in spring when the barrier bushes were tended.
The streets were stone, but all of these routes had been cut by the Ancients. They were white and smooth as if sanded down, even after eight centuries. The inns were empty, leaving them their pick of places and rooms. Dion chose one that looked toward the mountains.
For a long time, she simply stood at the open window to her room while the wind, like a hungry wolf, bit into her cheeks. The wolfsong, the wolves, and Aranur’s voice rolled over and over through her head. The ledge was like the seawall; the drop like the fall to the rocks … The void hit her suddenly, and she almost cried out Aranur’s name and Danton’s.
Then Kiyun entered the room behind her, and Tehena muttered at the chill. Dion steeled herself, then shut the window, turned, and smiled at them.
They packed their clothes in bundles and stored them at a tanner’s shop. In place of those lighter garments, they bought white fur parkas and fur-lined gloves, winter-weight shirts and socks. The outer layers of their pants and boots were made from the skin of glacier worms. They would keep out snow and ice and the worst of the wind while letting their bodies breathe.
At the foothills of the Blue Mountains, they traded their dnu for dnudu. The smaller beasts were more sure-footed, wiry, and agile, but their shorter gait also made their ride more uncomfortable. Kiyun’s longer legs were so sore from the sharp-jointed jouncing that he cursed when he tried to get out of bed the first morning after they switched riding beasts.
At the last village north, Tehena bought the supplies. They spent the rest of the day packing so that each dnudu carried a combination of food, fuel, and gear. If one beast was lost, the riders could skimp but go on.
The first two days, they camped at the Kiaskari summer sites. A wolf pack Called Dion to run with them. The wolves shared a hunt so that she came back with a chunk of snowdeer, but also a sober expression from catching a glimpse of a pack of worlags that had been thirty strong. She stayed close to the fire that night.
Drawn by Dion’s presence, the wolves crept close to the camp. They touched her thoughts and filled the back of her mind, pushing her gently so that she knew which road to take north or east, knew the places by which she should camp. They had read the Call from the southern wolves, and they came warily to run with her and howl her need to the moons.
The soil was poor, and the plants’ roots thin along the road. Everywhere they could see where raging streams from snowmelt had eaten away at the mountainsides until huge slashes of stone jutted out. Fallen columns of granite lay where they had cracked and rolled. Only some were covered with the tenacious growth of the higher altitudes; others were bare except for the bright violet of summer fungus. At one point, the dnudu picked a path underneath an overhang of shattered columns, and the three riders were silent, listening nervously to the click-click of the riding beasts’ feet echo off the rock overhang.
The third day, they reached the old snow line where leftover patches of last year’s snowpack clung stubbornly to the ground. The fourth day, the wind blew cold, and the clouds that massed on the eastern horizon spoke of a coming storm. They found one of the summer Kiaskari caves, cold and open as a coffin, and holed up for two days while the sleet and the rain came down.
Kiyun eyed the muddy ground the morning after the storm. He slapped his arms to warm them up. “It’s a fool thing we’re doing, Dion. Autumn will settle down hard as a rock, and it’s said in every other county that Kiaskari winters are greedy.”
“Greedy?”
“To add bodies to their soils.”
Dion bundled her bedroll and tied it onto the saddle. Her voice was flat. “Aiueven are more active in winter.”
“Aye. ‘Active’ meaning that they’ll be more aggressive should they find us within their reaches. There’s a reason we maintain the barrier bushes between Kiaskari and these mountains.” He eyed her expression. “By the moons, Dion, you can’t really be thinking of contacting them.”
Her voice was soft. “I need this purpose, Kiyun. I need this goal.”
“Is that true, Dion? Or do you really know what you need?”
“You need art, Kiyun. It speaks to you, even if you cannot describe it. It fills a void in you left by your life. This void in me—a painting might touch it; a sculpture might grasp for an instant what I feel. But no piece of art, no thing, no matter how complex, can fill my needs.”
She gazed at him in silence. Then she turned away to the dnudu.
Kiyun stared after her, then pulled his shirt from the still-warm blankets and put it on.
Tehena watched him for a moment. “Why try to turn her from what she sees as the only path she’s got?”
He shook his head mutely.
“It’s not so bad,” Tehena said. “At least here, she is working toward something.”
“Toward suicide,” he agreed. He stared after her. “I feel as though I should be able to talk to her—to talk sense into her if nothing else. But she looks through me half the time, Tehena. She answers me, but she’s not listening. There’s something else in her head.”
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