Wolf Captured (70 page)

The words rose from the drifts of memory, but Firekeeper could not remember where she had heard them. They were forgotten as soon as formed, yet they chased through her mind, filling all the spaces where she refused to think about the things that hurt. They repeated themselves, carving channels into her mind, and continuing to repeat even as Firekeeper drifted into an uneasy sleep.

She is very small, very sick. The wolves she loves have fought to save her life, but they are losing the struggle. They take her somewhere. Someone she cannot remember helps the wolves to care for her. However, she cannot make herself eat as the wolves do. Inexorably she is melting into death.

Anger shades the voice that urges her to drink hot blood and to gorge on hot flesh as the wolves do. The child chokes at the idea, retching up even the little she has swallowed. At last the voice says in anger,
“
If wolves are to live, then I name you a wolf. Be a wolf. Forget that you ever were human. Your heart is a wolf’s, your appetite a wolf’s, your memory a wolf’s. Strange wolf you may be, but if only a wolf may live, then you must be one.”

Child becomes woman and woman becomes knowledge. Bitter knowledge confronts the unseen speaker.

“But I am not a wolf. I am a human. I have two arms, two legs
.
I have hands, not paws. I have no tail. My nose is dead. My eyes see differently. I hear but poorly. My naked skin breaks and leaks at the least scrape
.
I am not a wolf.”

“Strange wolf you may be
.”

“I am no wolf
.
I am human.”

“Only a wolf may live.”

“I am no wolf
.”

“Then you must be one.”

“How can I be one? Twice I have come close to that which I thought might make me wolf. Twice I have found only hatefulness. I cannot be a wolf
.
I am human.”

“Strange wolf you may be
.”

“I tell you, I am no wolf!
I
am human.”

“
Only a wolf may live
.”

“If only a wolf may live, then I must die
.
”

“You must be one.”

“How?”

“Strange wolf you may be
.
”

It is like shouting at an echo. Firekeeper howls in frustration and hears the frustration turn into a human scream
,
a scream that rips into her ears and forces her …

Awake.

Firekeeper found herself awake, and awake found herself falling. Somehow she had let herself drift deeply enough off to sleep that she had lost her balance. This was a thing that had never happened to her before, not in countless nights spent asleep in the relative safety above the ground.

She grabbed at the branches as she fell, managed to slow her descent, twisting to orient so that she would land as the squirrels do. When she hit, the thick cushion of honeysuckle and rose caught her. Even so, she hit hard enough that the breath was knocked from her, but there was no sharp cracking of bone, no loss of consciousness.

She had stepped clear of the torn vines and was shaking her limbs, making sure that each would obey her, when Blind Seer burst through the underbrush. His breath came hard and ragged. From the sound she knew he had run fast, summoned by her scream. Blind Seer did not stop to catch his breath. Instead, he knocked Firekeeper from her feet and pinned her to the ground.

“Hey! That hurts!”

That was the human sense of the yelp he forced from her. Blind Seer returned neither pity nor amusement.

“I’ve worried about you, bitch. You’re lucky if all I do is knock the breath from you. You’re lucky I don’t break your legs so you can’t run away again.”

Firekeeper lay back, surrendering, mutely begging for mercy she knew she did not deserve. An angry human might have refused that surrender so sincerely offered, but Blind Seer was a wolf and after a long moment he released her from his weight.

“Why did you run?” he asked. “Why didn’t you answer me?”

Firekeeper trembled, a shadow of her earlier despair touching her as she forced her shaken body to sit upright. She leaned back against a tree and looked up from beneath her lashes at the blocky shadow that was the blue-eyed wolf.

“I thought you would do better without me. I’ve seen how you looked at Moon Frost. I’ve heard how the Wise Wolves need new blood. I am no help, only an impediment. As long as you must watch for me …”

“Firekeeper …”

The sound Blind Seer made was a soft moan, a cry from the heart.

“Firekeeper, I never meant to hurt you. It is so hard sometimes being only with the humans. You have not had time to play. I admit, I enjoyed the romps with Moon Frost, but I never meant to make you jealous.”

There was a long pause.

“Well, maybe a little jealous.”

Firekeeper held out her hand. Blind Seer came and lay alongside her. The touch of his fur should have been too hot to bear on this sultry night, but it was not.

“You did?”

“Umm …”

That was all the sound, but it carried within itself a wealth of information. It was a declaration of love and devotion, of desperation, of awareness, of futility.

“Firekeeper, don’t give up.”

“Give up?”

“Give me up. Give up trying to find a way for our worlds to meet. When we left our pack, you were my favorite sister. I don’t know when or how things changed, but they did. You are my partner. Your heart beats with mine. I don’t know why we’re the wrong shapes, but somewhere there must be the means to make a bridge between us.”

“Must there be?” she said.

Her hand rested on Blind Seer’s back, and he bent around to lick it.

“There must be,” he said. “Think, dear heart. We have only been out in the world for a bit more than two years. Twice in that time we have come across what seems to be an answer.”

“If Melina guessed right about that ring,” Firekeeper said, but her mind was struggling to capture a memory. Something about “twice.” “Twice I have come close …” Who had said that?

“I did,” she said aloud, and her belly grew cold.

She had long known that she dreamed at night, dreams that held fragments of her past, but never before had she remembered one of her dreams so clearly.

“Eh?” Blind Seer said. “What is it, Firekeeper? You did what?”

Firekeeper curled her fingers tightly in his fur.

“I dreamed, Blind Seer, about when I was very small, when the wolves first took me in.”

“I thought you remembered nothing of that time,” he said, and she heard something that she realized after a moment was jealousy.

“Blind Seer, I think it was a true dream, not a memory. A voice saying odd things to me, about my being a wolf.”

“Of course you are a wolf!” Blind Seer said emphatically. “A strange wolf, but no less a wolf for the strangeness.”

The dream was fading now, but she heard it again in Blind Seer’s words. “Strange wolf you may be, but if only a wolf may live, then you must be one.” She might forget the rest of the dream, but those words she would remember.

“Firekeeper,” Blind Seer said, “if you can bear it, Integrity told me that there are things she would show us, things rooted in the Old World magic. I begin to think that the Royal Wolves are unwise to court ignorance of such things.”

Firekeeper longed to say, “Why? Such things are gone. They have no place in our world.” But, with the voice of memory still pounding in her head, she could not.

“Even if the Old World sorcerers are gone,” she agreed, “their heritage remains. It shapes the people who are descended from them and has left traces wherever they gathered thickly.”

“There is that,” Blind Seer agreed, “but as I see it, there is another matter to consider.”

“Oh?”

“It seems to me that the Royal Wolves are as puppies regarding this matter. They are torn by thorns and so kick dirt over the bush until it is buried, saying to themselves, ‘There are no more thorns, now. I will never be scratched.’”

Firekeeper nodded, not liking this thinking at all, but seeing the wisdom in it.

“But the bush grows out from beneath the dirt or casts seeds, and soon there are as many thorns as ever,” she said. “And in reality, the thorns were never gone. The pup simply could not see them.”

“Exactly,” Blind Seer said. “We have seen several of these hidden thorns already. Now Integrity offers us a chance to see others, but she can offer us what no one else could—some understanding of how they grow.”

Firekeeper grunted her agreement.

“I will listen and try to learn,” she said. “I think that magic and the avoidance of magic touches us deeply.”

Me more so than you
, she thought,
or so I am beginning to suspect
.
I hardly know what words to use.

“Blind Seer,” she said aloud, “would you believe me if I said I think that my running away was more than bad temper?”

“I would believe it more easily than I believe you are capable of such an extended snit,” he said. “You have your moods, but rarely are you so ungracious.”

His sides huffed in amusement. “And I have never before even heard of you falling from a tree.”

Firekeeper thumped his flank. Slowly and carefully, she related what she recalled of her dream. When she finished, Blind Seer was very still.

“Do you know of any such as I recall? Someone who could give an order to a mind and make it think itself other than it was?” she asked.

“Only Melina,” Blind Seer recalled. “This has something of the same flavor to it. Remember, though, I was hardly a pack leader when we left. There may have been secrets our parents did not confide in me.”

“True. Or maybe they did not know. Rip and Shining Coat were not the One Male and One Female in my youngest days. Do you know what I think happened to me when Integrity told the story of the maimalodalum?”

“I can guess, but tell me and I will listen.”

“I think I was truly in a very bad temper, like a puppy who has for the first time been refused choice meat from the kill. I despaired of ever being a wolf, and somehow touched on this long-ago working in my mind.”

Firekeeper could not go on, so Blind Seer did for her.

“Despair made you consider yourself human, not wolf, and somewhere in your mind was this trap—a wolf could live, but a human could not. You warred with yourself and might have done worse damage than a fall but for that one phrase, ‘Strange wolf you may be.’ It gave you permission to live, though in order to do so you must accept your strangeness—and your wolfishness.”

He rose and licked her face.

“Can you accept that strangeness, dear heart? I am very afraid of your refusing to live.”

Firekeeper hugged his head close.

“I can accept it,” she said. “After all, my own strangeness is the thing I know best. Come. We dwell on such matters too long and too seriously. Perhaps in the end, they are nothing more than phantasms. Let us go to Integrity and see what she has to show us. Things preserved this long are certain to be more solid.”

Blind Seer looked Firekeeper up and down.

“You might want to stop and wash. Falling from a tree has done you no good. We could feed you, too. I heard your stomach rumbling protest while we spoke.”

“I will wash,” Firekeeper said, feeling the tangles and mats in her hair.

“While you do so,” Blind Seer said. “I will hunt for you—and howl to our hosts that you are found and we will be to them by the cool time of evening.”

“Will that be polite?” Firekeeper asked. “I have already been rude enough.”

“Who wants to discuss serious matters in the heat of the day?” Blind Seer replied reasonably. “Whatever they wished to tell us has waited this long. It can wait a bit longer. Besides, not only are you dirty and unfed, you look as if you need sleep.”

Firekeeper shivered. “I’m not sure I want to sleep. I’m afraid of what I might dream.”

RAHNISEETA RECEIVED THE INVITATION to call on Meiyal, iaridisdu of the Horse, without too much surprise. Rumors were already circulating that Derian Carter had returned from wherever the Wise Horse had taken him.

Of course, for most of those relating the story, the return was the first they had heard of the adventure. Rahniseeta and Harjeedian had kept their word to say nothing of the matter. She assumed Harjeedian had made some report to the iaridisdu and ikidisdu of the Temple of the Cold Bloods, but they had been polite enough not to say anything further.

Now
,
I suppose, we are being offered a more complete version of the tale as a reward for our cooperation
,
and I, rather than Harjeedian, am being given the report because no one cares where I go, while Harjeedian is rising in importance.

Despite the sour taint to her thoughts, Rahniseeta felt good about the summons. Varjuna had praised her discretion and she had not been found wanting. Now once again that quality was being rewarded in the only way possible—with further confidences.

Rahniseeta was escorted into Meiyal’s private office immediately upon her arrival. The Horse Temple complex was much smaller than that of the Temple of the Cold Bloods, because so many of the disdum resided in u-Bishinti. Elaborate statuary, paintings, and tile murals representing the patron animals provided ample reminder of to whom the temple was dedicated.

Meiyal did not rise when Rahniseeta entered, but the young man sitting in a chair near her desk did so with alacrity marred only slightly by a certain stiffness.

“Derian!” Rahniseeta said. At the sight of him well and strong, a worry she hadn’t known was with her unclenched itself from around her heart. “You look well.”

“I am,” he said, “and so do you.”

He grinned at her, and Rahniseeta was both pleased and slightly discomfited to hear a compliment in his words. She was more accustomed to tongue-tied silence from the northerner.

Meiyal motioned Rahniseeta to a chair. The clerk who had escorted Rahniseeta in offered refreshments, then stood by the iaridisdu’s side, ready to be of service but offering nothing but a very correct smile by way of greeting. Unlike Rahniseeta, Cishanol was training to become a disdu. Clerking for the iaridisdu meant he was considered promising. In a moment, Rahniseeta would realize that his remaining meant that Cishanol also had Meiyal’s complete trust.