"Our dnu aren't the fastest, Gama. She ought to have the relay dnu."

The elder's voice was suddenly cutting. "We've gone over this twice,

Royce. The healer Dione deserves the best. There's not a man or woman here who argues that our dnu are the finest in the village."

"But not the fastest-"

"You'd rather she rode one of the relay ronyons? Those dnu have more scars and mange than a whole pack of wild cur."

He shrugged eloquently.

The ringing slap of his great-grandmother's hand left his cheek bright red and smarting. For a moment, neither one moved. Then, urgently, "Royce-"

He turned away.

She caught at his arm. "Royce-darling-"

His voice was flat and strangely adult. "Leave it be, Elder Lea."

Had he seen the expression on her face, he might have softened his tone; but as it was, he left her alone, as her sons and their sons had done, and strode coldly out to the road.

Dion thundered toward an Ontai hub that was dark as the ebony grain.

Baton, Menedi, Ontai, Mandalay; then Carston, Allegro, and Kitman... The litany of relay stops was a chant that tickled her brain. Behind it was a constant whisper in the back of her head-the mental voices of the wolves.

Howling, growling, the packsong was a constant drone. It seeped into the back of her skull like water from under a door. Right now Dion held her bond with Hishn tight, ignoring the other wolves, so that the only images that were clear in her head were those she received from Gray Hishn.

Ahead of her, the gray wolf flashed like a thought, nearly unseen in the night. Dion didn't have to use her eyes to know where Gray Hishn was; the invisible link between their minds locked them together like the sea to the sand. Ancient engineering had accentuated the natural lupine bonds so that humans and wolves could be mental, not just physical, partners in exploring new colony worlds. That same engineering had mutated some of the humans, linking them in turn to the Gray Ones. And in the eight hundred years since the Ancients had landed, the wolves had grown and spread across the planet. Now they were a constant noise-a rich packsong in each other's minds, and a pull on the wolfwalkers with whom they bonded. No simple thread of mental gray linked Dion to those wolves. The longer she lived with the bond in her head, the thicker grew the howling.

She wondered whether, if she had not grown up so isolated in that small Randonnen village, she would have bonded to the wolves so strongly. "Closer to Gray Ones than to humans," they said, "was Wolfwalker Ember Dione. And closer to the moons than the world itself, was the moonmaid Ember Dione." She had heard those lines just last month at a puppet show. The puppeteer, when he saw her, coerced her out of the audience to speak the voice of the wolfwalker doll. He had been clever to use her: He had earned more silver that night than in five previous nights of work. And as for what he had said about her: closer to wolves than to humans... At the time, flushing and flustered, she hadn't argued the puppeteer's point. But now, with the world dark and quiet as death, she wondered if it was true. She didn't even have to stretch to feel the wolf like herself. Her bond with the Gray One was close as family, and the constant din of the lupine voices was never absent from the back of her mind. Hishn was friend, packmate, wolf pup... The Gray One had taught Dion more about mothering than any human she had known, since her own mother had died soon after childbirth, and Hishn had had several litters now. To Hishn, Dion was packleader and friend, hunting partner and family. A double bond, between them.

As she rode closer to the town, Dion let her senses flow through the yellow lupine eyes. The mental wolf voice strengthened immediately. Movement became sharper to Dion's eyes, and contrast increased. An instinctual joy spread through her. She felt the fog on her teeth. She threw her head back silently. The howl that tried to burst through her lips made no sound in the night, but it echoed far into the graysong. Instantly, lupine howls returned. Hishn's voice was clearest, but there were others in that mental fog: Gray Rishte, Gray Elshe, Gray Barjan, Gray Koursh... The touch of each wolf in the pack was light, like a feather against her hand.

Sonorously, in her mind, the voices soared. Rising, then falling, falling, falling. From the depths of Dion's mind, the graysong felt her, surrounded her, howled at her presence. Through Hishn's mind, the wolves stretched back. Night flavors touched the tip of Dion's tongue. Night sounds hit her ears. She reached out, as if she could capture the images and save them for her sons. Thirteen years with Aranur... Their sons were now eight and nine; and Tomi, her adopted son, had just Promised himself in mating. Dion let herself read the packsong for the sense of her family. Like Hishn longing for Gray Yoshi, the female wolf's lupine mate, Dion reached for Aranur

and the boys. Soon, she thought, she would see her sons. Soon she would feel Aranur's hands on her skin, his strong touch on her slender shoulders...

Distant light caught Hishn's eyes, and the gray wolf's mental voice

changed. Dion shivered out of the packsong. She focused so that she saw the pinpoints of light from Ontai. "Hishn?" she asked softly, over the hooves of the dnu. She could have spoken mentally, but she needed the sound of her voice to anchor her in her own world and outside of the howling packsong.

Wolfwalker! Hishn returned.The wolf further opened the link between them until Dion was swamped with the Gray One's senses. She peered through Hishn's eyes and her own, but she saw lights on in only five homes up ahead. There was nothing more than a front light at the relay stable itself. She frowned, slowing as the line of rootroad trees hid the village again.Wolfwalker? The wolf's voice rang in her head. It hadn't been a human word that was sent, rather the image Gray Hishn had of her. But fifteen

years with the wolf in her head, and Dion couldn't help but know how to interpret the lupine images. The only thing she wished was that she had the perception of the alien birdmen. Legend told that the Aiueven were able to see into human brains, not just into lupine minds. For Dion, being able to tell the difference between raider and Ariyen would have been a useful trait.

"Stay with me, Hishn." Her voice was soft with unease. "There were two dnu by that second house. Maybe they've moved the relay beasts over for some reason."

There are no hunters here or ahead, the wolf returned. The dens here smell of stale food and sleep sweat. Absently, Dion bit her lip. Hishn's senses were tuned to the wilderness, and her predator sense was strong. If the Gray One said there was no danger here, Dion was inclined to believe it. She shifted to a rolling post as the six-legged dnu slowed itself further and fell into its scuttling gait. This close to the village proper, the clouds of gnats that hovered above the road hit her like tufts of smoke. She blinked and snorted and spit them out as they fluttered into her face. "The ice fevers hit this village hard," she said, covering her mouth with one hand. "Nine died in this village, including three in the council. Perhaps this is part of those changes."

The gray wolf snorted softly. Fevers burn change into all of us. Dion gave the wolf a sharp look. The image sent had not been recent, but old, as though the wolf had tapped into a memory of disease. The gleam of yellow eyes that looked into her mind seemed layered with other, older, foreign eyes. Dion started to follow that thought back into the Gray One's mind, but the shiver she felt at the echo of death made her withdraw. She could not ignore her chill of recognition. The memory of fever the wolf had pushed to her mind was of plague, not winter death. It had been years since Dion had felt that fever herself, but her own images of it were sharp. What had decimated the Ancients eight centuries ago had almost killed her too, and she could still feel the touch of aliens behind the minds of the wolves. Still feel the sense of those foreign minds that had sent the plague to the humans. From their peaks in the north, Aiueven still watched the humans and kept them from the stars. And what had once been a tentative colony world had become an earthbound prison. No human had returned to the stars in over eight hundred years. She bit her lip as that sense of time remained in Hishn's mind. It had been too long-those centuries without the sciences of the Ancients. Aranur's goal, his county's goals to return to the technology of long ago-they were blind hopes. The aliens who had lived here first would not allow any more human progression. So the domes of the Ancients were still ridden with plague, and the wolves, who had helped to colonize this world, still carried their own seeds of disease.

Hishn howled, low in her mind, and the sound was echoed through the packsong. A hundred voices came softly back. None of them pushed, none of them pressed her, but she felt their need like a pressure on her chest. How could she not, when half the cubs birthed were stillborn on the ground? The alien plague had affected the wolves far longer than it had the humans, and Dion had made a promise to the wolves about the Aiueven disease.

It had been thirteen years, and that promise hung unfulfilled in her head, suspended in the work that she did each month and never quite finished.

Each semicure she thought she found went nowhere when tested out. And the other work-the immediate work-of healing, of teaching in Ariyen clinics, of making her scouting runs... That work seemed to press in on her life. What time she had left went to her sons, not to quiet, frustrating labs.

She took a long, slow breath, letting the night air clear her lungs of the stench of ancient plague. The wolves were as patient as winter demons. Their memories would not fade with time- neither those of plague nor of her promise to cure it. And she was only thirty-eight. Raiders and worlags and lepa and work might postpone her duty, but they could not destroy it. She had two hundred years and more to find the cause of the alien death. To heal the wolves... To see them bring forth living litters instead of so many stillborn cubs... Aranur dreamed of the Ancients' stars, but Dion dreamed of thwarting death.

Gray Hishn looked back at her from the road, and Dion felt the impact of those yellow eyes as their minds blended thoughts and words. You think of your promise. Of your bond to us.

Her answer was a projection, her voice a set of ringing images in the gray creature's mind. You saved my brother. Saved Aranur and his family. I want that same salvation for you-freedom from death, from the plague. It is my dream for you as much as Aranur's dream of the future is for his people.

Dreams are like threads, returned the wolf. They weave themselves into the packsong. They will not end till they die with you.

"Aye," Dion said softly, as she turned beneath an arbor. The trees arched overhead into a canopy that splintered the moonlight against the road. "But what dreams die that cannot be recovered?"

Hishn heard her voice, not over the sounds of the dnu's dramming hooves, but as another mental projection. A dream is a howl that lifts to the moons, the massive wolf returned. The silence of the stars is our answer. There is no end to either-the howl or the silence. What you dream and what you promise-they are forever in the packsong.

"They might be forever in your packsong, Hishn, but my memory is short. I have in my head only what I have lived or dreamed of, not all the lives that you remember. And if I fail in my promise to you, I cannot simply pass on my memories as you do."

Then I will pass them on for you to your wolf cubs and your wolf cub's cubs.

The image of her two younger sons was clear-her oldest, Tomi, had never been comfortable with wolves-but Dion didn't answer. The cure she had promised to search for-that was hers to find. And she could not forget it. Each voice of the Gray Ones that touched her mind was tainted with alien plague. The history that was memory to Hishn was killing the wolves off slowly. To find that... To find a cure was a goal that Dion had set. She might be a grandmother ten times over before she found that cure, but she'd be damned to all nine hells of the moons before she would quit that work.

She felt her jaw tense and looked down. Her hands were almost clenched on the reins, as if her determination was set in her fingers as much as in her mind. She laughed wryly, and relaxed back in the saddle. Hishn glanced back, eyes gleaming.

Dion came out from under the arbor barely a kay away from the village, but she did not see the figures of the relay men she expected in front of the relay station. Unconsciously, her hand strayed to the hilt of her sword. She stretched her mind through the senses of the wolf to see the buildings more clearly. Her human sense of shape fed the wolf more specifics than the lupine black-and-white night vision, while the Gray One's sense of movement and contrast merged with hers to create a fuller mental picture.

Now she could see them-the three men at the stable, right there on the edge of town. But they merely stood, watching, and there were no dnu nearby. It wasn't until she rounded the last corner and entered the village proper that she saw again the elder's house where the relay dnu stood instead.

The two people who waited in the light from the elder's house were not mounted; neither made a move to get in the saddle or bring the dnu up to speed for her to switch mounts while riding. If one of them was her escort, he didn't seem inclined to ride. Dion slowed further. Still neither of the two villagers moved, and finally, having no choice, she pulled to a stop.

"Healer Dione." The elder stepped slightly out of the light so that her thin

silhouette grew more reedy. "We are honored by your visit."

Warily, Dion eyed the older woman. "I'm honored by your greeting this night, Elder Lea," she said, not quite so swiftly as to be rude. "However,"

she added, "I'm riding the black road, not visiting. I need a new mount, my escort, and both quickly." She cast a brief, appraising glance at the youth, then looked at the riding beasts. "Are those the relay dnu?"

The elder preened. "These are much better than the normal relay dnu, Healer Dione." She stepped forward and petted the neck of one of the dnu.

The beast skittered nervously. "Their coats shine like oil on water, and their temperaments are gentle yet still spirited. No bulging temple veins in these pretties-their heads are finely shaped." Her voice held obvious pride.

"They're from my own stable."

Dion tried to see beyond the breeding to the meat of the animals. The dnu looked well-fed and glossy, sure enough, but their legs were dainty, not muscle-lanky, and their necks showed the fat, shapely thickness of short

exercise rather than the leanness of long running. "They look like fine dnu,"

she started, "but-"

"They're the very best in the village," the elder assured, missing the glint in

Dion's eyes at the deliberate interruption.

Hishn skirted the dnu and sniffed their haunches so that their eyes rolled

back skittishly. They are like mice in a meadow- easy to frighten, easy to catch. I could run them down before they reached the forest.Dion shot the wolf a mental warning. Don't unsettle them.But Hishn's low growl was already rising. The Gray One's automatic challenge brought a roughness to Dion's own voice, and she struggled to smooth her words before speaking. "Elder," she began again, "I appreciate the offer of dnu from your own stables, but I don't need pretty and gentle in a beast. I need only speed and endurance. I prefer something trail wise.

Where are the relay dnu?"

"Surely you're not suggesting that we allow you to ride out on the mangiest

beasts we have-"

"If they're fast enough, yes," the wolfwalker said, her voice just an edge short of sharp. "I'm not afraid of mange."

The youth at the elder's side made a sound suspiciously like a snort. The elder shot him a look before spreading her hands in a shrug. "But Healer-"

Hishn growled clearly now, and Dion, aching and numb from her ride,

forgot to keep her voice calm. "By the moons, elder, I've told you what I need in a dnu-speed and endurance. Nothing else. I don't care what kind of coats or tails or fat-shaped necks they have. If they don't get me to the venge by dawn, some of our people could die." Unconsciously, she tightened her knees in irritation, and her own mount, tired as it was, chittered and stamped its middle legs.

The three stablemen, emboldened by Dion's words, crossed the street to hear more clearly. Lights went on in another house, and two faces appeared at a window. Gray Hishn's ears flicked, and the faint sound of pounding hooves filtered into Dion's head through the wolf. "Who's coming now?" she demanded.

"Just one of the farmers," the youth said casually. Hishn was already moving away from the dnu to eye the approaching rider and beasts. One man, three dnu, the gray wolf sent. They are fresh from the stable, and he is fresh from his bed. They smell of sleep-sweat and eagerness. Dion, her ears tuned to the nuance of emotion as Hishn's were to the breathing of prey, did not bother to watch the incoming rider. Instead, she let Hishn watch them approach while she turned her attention to the youth.

He was tall and carried a sword that looked too new to have been used. His bow was bright with varnish, rather than oiled and dull as a scout would have left it. He stood confidently, but he made no move to join her. "You are my escort?" she asked sharply.

"If you wish it, Wolfwalker."

Something more in his voice gave her pause. "You're trained?"

"Trained, yes," he returned, with such a slight emphasis on the first word that Dion hesitated again.

"Experienced?"

"No, Wolfwalker."