Whispers on the Wind (27 page)

“What is this place we have come to?” he asked, rising lithely to his feet as if he had never had to deplete himself to “mend” her.

Tugging her afghan closer around her, Lenore stood, too. “This is the cabin,” she said. “Don’t you remember it?” She gestured to the door on the left. “Through there is the room where you slept.” She waved a hand toward the archway. “The kitchen where we ate.”

Jon smiled. “Ah, yes. Of course I remember now. My mind is not all...collected.”

“After such a swift mending of one unconscious woman and one dead woman, followed by an unplanned translation like that, and scooping me up on the way by,” Minton said, making Jon swing around to face him, “it is no wonder you were depleted.”

“I did not guide that translation,” Jon said as he wrapped an arm around Lenore’s shoulder. “Lenore grows more powerful each day.” He smiled into her yes. “You knew we needed safety,
letise
, and you brought us here.”

She stared at him. “I did no such thing! According to Fricka, I was dead. She had killed me. She thinks you are angry.”

“Fricka did not kill you!” he said, his demeanor expressing shock at the notion. “It was Rankin who did that. But,” he added, “it appears even Rankin’s malice was not as strong as I’d thought. Enough of your spirit remained intact to bring you to your place of safety.”

He turned to the other woman. “Fricka, I was angry, it is true, but not with you. If your unexpected arrival had done damage to Lenore, I would have been. Since it did not, I am not.”

“Nevertheless, I should have approached with more caution and less enthusiasm. I am Aazoni, not a child or a foolish
patán
,” Fricka said.

A
patán
, Lenore remembered from one of her excursions with Jon, was a long-haired, red-brown creature similar to a tailless monkey. They were cute to look at and mildly telepathic, but made poor companions as they were completely untrainable.
Patán
could be used as a mild reproof for an impish child—or as a deadly insult to an enemy.

“Will you forgive me for that error?” Fricka continued, folding her long, slender hands in a prayer-like gesture under her chin.

Jon bowed. “Fricka, I forgive you.”

Fricka stood and let her serape drop to the floor. She bowed deeply. “Jonallo, I thank you for your forgiveness.”

Despite the Aazoni formality and ritual, Lenore’s prosaic, human stomach growled loudly. “I think we should all have something to eat.” Not to mention getting dressed!

Jon, she knew, was always as hungry as she was following translation—and not just for food. Unfortunately, with two other people in the cabin, she knew that there was only one appetite of his—and of hers—she would feel at ease in satisfying.

Jon turned and gazed again directly into her eyes. “Sharing?” he asked, then laughed softly as Lenore felt heat rise up in her face. Their sharing of food always led them directly into a far more intimate kind of sharing.
Baloka
...The word seemed to hover, unspoken, almost unthought, between them, but the emotions, even unexpressed, were as intense as ever, the yearning as great.

When we are more than two, we still share, though the sharing is...different.
The words, Jon’s words, occurred in her mind, privately, she hoped. She also hoped she wasn’t unconsciously projecting for the other two to see exactly what she was feeling, thinking, wanting.

You are not
, he assured her.
I have given us a cloak of privacy.

More relaxed, knowing that, she returned his smile, wondering if he could keep all their communications private from others if he so desired.

Of course. And that is something I will teach you to do also
, he told her, then spoiled her state of composure by adding,
tonight. When we are alone
.

“Jon...” A note of warning. She would not spend a night in bed with him while others were in the house. Especially not telepathic others!

He laughed softly.
Fear not
, letise.
The others wouldn’t want to be privy to our personal discussions or activities. It is not the Aazoni way
.

For which she would be eternally grateful!

But...It is not the polite human way to exclude others in the room from a discussion,” she said aloud. “That would be as rude as whispering behind someone’s back. Fricka, Minton, are you hungry? May I offer you something to eat?”

“I am very hungry,” Minton said, “since I have not eaten in four days and have been traveling hard in search of either Zenna or Jon. After Rankin found me during my last translation, I preferred to remain on foot, with my mind shielded. But I have not yet mastered the art of making these...skis?”—he said, looking at Lenore as if she had the answer—“move gracefully except on snow and they are very difficult to walk in. I found them especially so in the forests I felt compelled to remain in so as to travel undetected as I traversed this land in the direction my
Kahinya
told me I would find Jon. Can you assist me, Lenore? I’m certain you know more of such conveyances as these than do I. I will need to make them fly again if I am to move around with any speed on Earth, or even inside this dwelling. Speed does not appear to be one of the talents that traveled with me.”

Lenore gaped. “You can’t ‘fly’ with them indoors! You’d break your neck! In fact, you’re not supposed to use them except on snow. Take them off, for goodness sake, then you’ll be able to walk.” The notion of him traipsing through unknown distances of forest preserve not only locked into ski boots, but with skis attached as well—and no snow under them—was stunning. “And you’ll be more comfortable if you shuck the boots, too.”

Minton sighed and looked disconcerted. “I cannot remove them. I have been trying to do so since I left the place where snow was. These extremely hard shoes seem to be permanently fastened to my feet, as well as to the skis, which do not move well without snow.”

Lenore had to laugh. “I just told you, they aren’t supposed to.”

So, maybe these Aazoni supermen weren’t as invincible as she’d thought. Marching over to him, still clutching her afghan to her breasts, she pressed the concealed button to release the electromagnet that held the boots to his feet, and the lower one that kept the boots in their bindings.

Gratefully, he slid his feet out of them, wiggling his toes inside the socks that went halfway up his lower legs. He tugged them off and she realized then that the pant legs, like the sleeves of the jacket, were much too short for him. In fact, the entire outfit was too tight, which explained why he hadn’t zipped it fully, thereby leaving his
Kahinya
exposed, something Jon had made sure neither he nor she did in their various translations.

For heaven’s sake! If the guy was going to create the illusion of clothing, why didn’t he do it with garments that fit?

Lenore shook her head. “Why didn’t you simply make them disappear?” she asked.

Minton blinked at her as if she were speaking a foreign language, which, she supposed, she was. He unzipped the jacket, tugging it off. She saw he wore no kind of undergarment beneath it and...Wait one, here! How did you manage to translate alone, clothed?”

“I was not translating. I was...shuffling and sliding until Fricka swooped me into her surround.”

“I see...then, once you were off the ski slope, why didn’t you simply make all that”–she waved at the boots and skis, the long orange socks and the jacket dumped messily on the floor—“disappear?”

“I cannot make things disappear,” he said. “That is Zareth’s task.”

“I see.” She tried not to see that he was also unzipping the high-waisted pants of the ski suit. “And what is yours?” Better, Lenore thought, to be forewarned.

Mercifully still wearing the pants, though they gaped open as far as his navel, their shoulder-straps dangling down toward his knees, he slumped to the chair where she had been sitting. “I have none,” he said, and buried his face in his hands. “I am here only to recover my bond-mate, my Zenna. I am poorly equipped, mostly untrained in the ways of an Octad. This was my first off-world translation.”

He looked up, his face tortured. “It was not you, Fricka, who broke the translation. It was I. I sensed Zenna’s presence and lost my concentration.” Standing, he stood before Fricka and bowed. “Fricka, I beg your forgiveness.”

He turned and did the same to Jon. “Jonallo, I beg your forgiveness.”

Jon and Fricka both bowed in return, and oddly enough, it didn’t seem totally bizarre to Lenore that two naked people and a barefoot man in bottom half of a too-small ski-suit were completing such a formal ritual in the living room of her and Caroline’s mountain retreat. “You are forgiven,” Jon and Fricka said in unison.

Then Jon added, “Though forgiveness is unnecessary, as is shame, among any of us. It was the storm that interfered with our translation, not the failure of any one person.”

Minton looked hopeful. “But now we are three, the task of locating the others will become that much easier.” It was almost posed as a question—a plea for reassurance.

Jon treated it so. “It will, my brother. Though we must take great care, as Rankin is aware of my presence.”

Minton shuddered as he projected a brief image of the ugly, angry entity that had plunged him deep into the snow, creating an avalanche. “And of mine.”

“I do not think he has yet sensed me,” Fricka said. “So if you two search from within my surround, once my
willayin
is stronger, we have a greater chance of doing so undetected. Now we are three, we will surely succeed in collecting the others.”

“One moment,” Jon said. He dropped his arm from Lenore’s shoulder, stepped in front of her and bowed formally. “Lenore, will you join us in our search?”

Lenore suppressed the impulse to bow in return, and an even stronger impulse to giggle like an idiot. A
patán
?

“I thought I already had.”

Jon smiled slowly. “Why yes. That is correct.”

He turned to Fricka and Minton. Minton stood again and completely stripped out of the pants. Lenore held her breath and forced her gaze to fix itself on Jon’s familiar face.

“Lenore and I have been searching together for some time now,” he continued, as if there were nothing at all odd in another man stripping naked in front of her—which she supposed, to him, there was. “We have followed many different leads, but to no avail. With we two, and now you two, we have become four and our task will be less onerous.”

“Wrong,” Lenore said, this time unable to hold back a splutter of laughter that had its roots deep in hysteria, “this time, for the first time ever, I have to believe that two plus two makes only three and a half. I...I can’t wait to tell my f-father.” Her splutter became a giggle, which ended in an uncontrollable series of choking sobs.

Jon cradled her close. “Toor-a-loor-a-loor-a...”

“Wait a minute!” she blurted, recovering swiftly and swiping the backs of her hands over her eyes. She glared at Jon accusingly as if it were all his fault.

“Can you explain exactly why my supposedly Aazoni mother would have known an Earthly lullaby?”

Her question was met with such a barrage of surprised mentation, questions bombarding Jon from both Minton and Fricka, she cringed under it until she felt, with gratitude, Jon provide a shield to protect her. Their surprise, their...joy in this knowledge still came through to her, but with less daunting intensity. It was not that they were intruding, merely that they were curious. It reminded her, oddly, of the way the child’s mind had felt when it accessed hers in the recurring dreams.

Clutching her hands together, holding the afghan close to her suddenly chill-prickled skin, she realized the child was probably real—and very likely Aazoni. Also, probably, as Jon had originally thought, it was his sister, peeking cautiously out from a childhood safe-place.

Before she could question him about this, he spoke aloud.

“Lenore had—maybe still has—an Aazoni mother. That much we know,” he said, gently touching the central bead on her
Kahinya
. She felt a tingling in her chest. It seemed to be reaching tendrils right into her heart. She recoiled from the sensation, pulling back from Jon.

He dropped his hand away and the tingling, along with some apprehension she didn’t recognize until it was gone, faded. She was not ready to further explore her relationship with her mother—or that of her parents from her mother’s point of view. She doubted she ever would be.

“More,” Jon added, stroking her arm soothingly, “we do not know. Lenore and her mother were separated when she was only a few weeks past birth. Though her father is fully human, Lenore is a singleton, hence she has stronger powers than she would have had as half a birth-mate duo—even with only one Aazoni parent. Still, these powers are very new to her, very strange, and must be treated with delicacy, as if she were a fragile new-born.”

Lenore closed her eyes as she rejected that, too. Suddenly, she didn’t know what she wanted—to be treated as a human with extraordinary powers, or as an Aazoni, willing to take her place, to whatever extent she could, among these strange new cousins of hers. But whatever she ultimately decided, she would not choose to be less than she knew she could be. If she had a greater potential than she had ever anticipated, she would reach out and try to achieve it.

No. I am not fragile. I am not newly born. And I want to learn.

Yet even as she deliberately, fiercely projected the thought, unsure if she was doing it correctly, if it was reaching the others, she felt a quiver of trepidation pass through her at her personal defiance of accepted Earthly wisdom. Only Jon’s steadying presence gave her the courage to continue to reach out, to hold open a portion of herself to the other three Aazoni.

W
HY, ZENNA BERATED HERSELF
, had she not taken the time to glove her hand, to mask her face and snatch up the amplifier when she had the chance? Sick with the knowledge that in her own impulsive flight, with her panic-driven lack of forethought, she had missed a chance, she briefly considered leaving Glesta and returning the Pacific Coast camp, hoping the two men would still be incapacitated by the blow from Jon’s mind.