gentle as he touched her cheek before he walked away.

Hishn nudged Dion in the thigh. The raider's fang was slow; yours was sharp in his hip. He will nurse his wound for a long time.Dion didn't smile. "He might," she agreed softly. "But I think it will not keep him away from here for long. That look he had... "

His eyes are far away by now. And his blood feeds the largons now. You were fast enough to chase him off. He will not return for you.

But Dion shook her head slowly. "I wasn't fast enough, Gray One." She stared down at her hands. The tremble was no longer visible, but she could feel it in her bones. "I was so distant from everything I saw," she murmured. "I didn't even notice him until he was upon me. If I had been with my children, they would be dead by now."

You need to run more in the forest, away from your towns and cities. You are distracted with your humanness, when you should be like the wolf.

"No." Dion shook her head. She gripped the thick fur in her fingers, letting the greasy feel of it stick on her skin. "I think it's more than that." She rubbed her fingers together as if the touch of the fur would clean the blood from her hands. "Tule is right, Hishn. I'm getting lost in you. And I think I'm getting tired. I don't want to fight anymore. Every day seems filled with violence, and the times between the battles now are just dreams that confuse my life."

There are dreams and there are memories, corrected the gray wolf. Which predator do you flee?Dion stared at the wolf. "Sometimes I think you're too much in my mind."

It is part of the gift of your Ancients. Do you want distance now or more dreams?

"I don't know." Dion looked back down at her hands. "All I know is that I don't want my boys growing up knowing only steel. I want them to understand compassion, not just justice- to hear music, not just sound. I want them to learn the forest as I did. I want to see the joy in their eyes when they play with your pups and hear the packsong in your mind."

They are ours, as you are, Hishn returned. I teach them the packsong with my own cubs. Dion nodded at her image. "They're like when I was younger- when I was first learning your voice. They're like a bridge to me, between the gray and human worlds. Sometimes... " Her voice trailed off. "Sometimes I think they are the only thing that holds me to my humans."

You are wolfwalker. Neither human nor wolf. There is no need to be only one.

There was a faint taint of an alien image to Hishn's thoughts, and Dion gave the wolf a twisted smile. "Like Aiueven-neither familiar nor foreign?" The bright ones who flew in our minds long ago-they are still among us. Your strength makes you close to them.

It wasn't what Dion expected as a response, and she eyed the wolf, suddenly curious. "What do you mean?"

The bright ones. They taught the wolfwalkers to speak, and you are a wolfwalker now. Your voice, their voices can sing together.

She bit her lip. She had heard the alien voices in the echoes of the packsong memories, but she had never thought beyond that. That the alien birdmen had taught the colonists to manipulate energy-that was legend. That wolfwalkers still developed themselves in those alien Ancient patterns, that she had not known. "Do you realize what you're saying?"

The wolf seemed to shrug. You wanted dreams. I sing an old memory. Slowly, she rubbed her temple. Aliens and wolves. Too close, still, after all this time. And Aranur wanting to circumvent the one while she wanted to keep to the other.

You dream of distance, Wolfwalker, yet you cling to the hunt. You long for the pack, yet you hold your own cubs away from us. The image of her two younger sons was clear, and Hishn's mental link to them, a thin gray thread, was twined deeply with the thick bond to Dion. What wolfsong do you teach them, Wolfwalker? What dreams do you want for your cubs?

Dion stared deeply into the yellow eyes. Her answer was simple but full of longing, and the howl in her mind was her own. "I want my sons to dream of the stars, Hishn-as the Ancients did. Not lust after steel as we must."

The wolf didn't blink. The steel of your fang is your heartbeat. Without it, you would be worlag pickings."Only if the raids continue."Hishn whuffed against her thigh. Raiders can be hunted.

"Yes," Dion returned. "But I don't want the blood on my hands anymore." Hishn gripped her hand in white, gleaming teeth, and though the pain of that grip made her shiver, Dion didn't move. Instead, she reveled in the bright pain as if it were the path to her release. No healing, no fighting- nothing but existence in fundamental simplicity. That was what she wanted. Too much weight in the steel she carried, was that what Tule had said? She touched the healer's circlet. He had it only half right: Of steel and silver, silver was the heavier.

Wolfwalker, Hishn growled. The image that Hishn projected was instantaneous. Freedom, bursting green growth, and speed. The feel of wrestling with half-grown cubs. The packsong that swelled deafened Dion so that her fists shot up to cover her ears. And then the packsong faded, and Dion was staring again at the burial pyre. "And now the steel is fed again," she whispered to herself. "But when shall the silver shine?" She began to tremble.

Wolfwalker.

Dion looked down. "Gray One," she whispered. She knelt and buried her face in the wolf's fur as if she could shut out the vision of her own memories. Fear of the raiders, of herself, even of the wolves who seemed more and more in her mind, warred with anger that she should be sent out so often to face herself and that which would destroy her. But what frightened her most was that the anger burned more fiercely than that frigid touch of fear.

IV.

What dreams die that cannot be recovered?

What wolf howls that cannot be heard?

What weight shifts and does not break its bearer?

How long can you live?

-Fourth Riddle of the Ages Previous Top Next It took the rest of the day to reach Dion's home, what with stopping in almost every village between Red Wolf Road and her own hometown to drop off rider after rider. Only Tule and Royce went back south to Kitman; the other riders continued north.

North... Dion scowled as they came in sight of Tetgore. She felt as if she were always riding north. Northeast from the Black Gullies to Ontai, north by northeast to Kitman, north from Kitman to the cliffs, and north again to home.

Hishn didn't wait for Dion along the way. Instead, the Gray One loped on ahead, eager to reach her own wolf pack where her own mate, Gray Yoshi, ran the hills. Dion watched the wolf go with a faint smile.

Aranur caught her expression. "She's escaped again, huh?"

"No meetings for her," Dion agreed. "She's more interested in wrestling with her own kind than in waiting with me while you analyze this venge."

"As are you," Aranur said shrewdly.

She shrugged.

"You no longer want to be here," he stated more than questioned.

She was silent for a moment. Finally, she said, "I need to get back to

Kitman within the next couple of days or that ringrunner will lose the sight of both eyes, not just the sight of one. I need to check in with Jobe at the labs to find out about his new cultures. If they are viable, we'll have enough medicine for all of northern Ariye for three months. And I need to start the nerve repair on little Wentcscho's leg."

"All that piled up during a single scouting mission?"

"All that. There is no break, Aranur. There's just another 'and.' "

"You don't have to be a part of every 'and' there is."

"There are things that need to be done, Aranur. You know that as well as

anyone else. Problems to solve. Damage to fix. It's just that..."

"You're tired of being part of the solution. You want someone to care for you instead of you always caring for others."

"Yes." Her voice was low as she admitted it. Her dnu snorted as they came

abreast of one of the outer hub stables, and it automatically slowed. She

urged it on. They would not dismount till they reached the central hub in this town, where they would have to speak with the Lloroi, who was one of Aranur's uncles. Suddenly depressed, Dion stared at the two- and three- story houses they passed. In their clusters of six and eight, the homes looked comfortable and safe. Aranur had helped build some of those structures last fall, when one of these hubs collapsed. Some of those lintels had been grown by her own son Tomi, who was now one of the top door- men in Ariye. These people were friends with whom she had ridden and fought, lived and killed, sung and worshipped and danced. And she wanted to escape them. To run from them as if they, themselves, were raiders after her soul.

"It sounds terrible, doesn't it?" she said, her voice low. "Selfish and ungrateful."

"Yes," he agreed simply.

"Am I wrong?"

"To feel as you do? Or to act as you want to?"

She didn't answer. Under the rootroad arbor, she could see the Lloroi's home in the distance. Aranur's family crest came from that house; his blood was in that line of leadership. It was one of the oldest, tallest houses in the county. Over centuries, new growth had been grafted onto old so that alcoves and window arches rose up like hope out of history.

Dion raised her eyes toward the peaks she could just glimpse through the trees. Her own family came from another county, across the desert, across the kilometers, in the mountains of Randonnen. The villages there were smaller, the people seemed closer. The goal of recovering the Ancients'

ways was blended into each person's life so that no one family, no single elder or Lloroi, carried the burden of the future. Her people were not her children to be cared for, but friends with whom she simply shared part of herself.

How could he understand that, she thought, when he was raised to lead, not live with, this county? He looked at these people as his children. Like a brood hen, he was responsible for them all, yet the weight of that didn't bother him. And since she had Promised with Aranur, they looked at her the same way. Like a prize they had acquired when Aranur mated. She had never been prepared to carry the weight of so many lives. She had never studied the history they expected her to know; she didn't speak like an elder; she couldn't meet their demands. She didn't have the vision for the future that Aranur did-that everyone in his family did-and that his county expected of him. She looked down at her hands. They were trembling again, and she clenched them tight.

"Dion?" Aranur's voice was soft, almost lost in the rhythm of the hooves.

She looked up. His strong face seemed unwearied, as if the ride had been ten minutes, not ten hours long. She felt like a weed beside him-like

strength without substance. Push too hard and the strength is gone, and all that is left is hollow.

"I... I can't do this anymore," she said to him at last.

"So stop being available," he said abruptly, harshly.

She stared at him. His outburst had been like an attack. But his steely gray

eyes did not look away. "What did you say?" she faltered.

His face didn't change expression. "Stop letting people put their troubles on

your shoulders. If you don't want the burden, don't accept it as readily as you always do." He almost glared at her. "I can't keep you from your job- moons above know that I've tried it. There's only one person who can relieve you from your burdens, who can give you a vision of something other than the weight of the work you do each day. That person is yourself."

Dion's cheeks paled. He was furious-as furious as she had ever seen him.

His voice had bitten out the words as if he were biting at her. "This has been... building up in you for a long time," she said finally.

He nodded curtly as they reined in at the elders' hall. "It has been building up since I met you."

"I'm sorry," she whispered.

"Sorry doesn't change your habits, Dion. You have to do more than apologize if you want anything more out of life."

She stared down at her hands and fingered the leather of the reins.

He dismounted, then looked at her, his voice quiet. "You get so caught up in the here and now-in what you think needs fixing this minute. But the world can't be fixed in a single lifetime. Or by any single person. You have

to look ahead, to choose what you fix today so that you build tomorrow stronger."

"I know that," she said sharply as she slid from her dnu.