"She's accepted me as intern. She must teach me."

He straightened. "Teach you what, woman?"

"Whatever there is to learn."

Gamon looked her up and down. "And that is what you want? To learn?"

"That's what I'm here for," she returned tersely.

"No." He shook his head. "You want to do. You don't really care to 'learn'

at all."

Asuli's voice was strangely low when she answered. "And so what if that's true? If I'm smart-if I can do what others can't, who's to complain?"

Gamon studied her for a long moment "You must hate your patients like the

second hell," he murmured. "You must hate us even more."

Her voice was flat. "Don't you feel the same about me?"

"You've left room for little else."

Abruptly, Asuli turned and stared out at the marshy scrub. "She's out there,

isn't she?"

"No one crosses the marshes," Tehena said shortly, shouldering past the younger woman.

Asuli snorted. "Not even the great Wolfwalker Dione?"

The lean, hard-faced woman bit back her words, but the look in her eyes

was lethal. Asuli stayed her ground only out of a sudden fear to move.

"Get your saddle off your dnu," Gamon told the intern flatly. "You might as well let your mount wait in the shade. We could be here for a few hours."

Already a kay away, Dion jogged steadily across the mossy ground, letting

her leg muscles get the hang of running again after riding for so many hours. The insects were as loud as an orchestra, and they clouded her hearing so that she was startled when the Gray Ones suddenly surrounded her. Abruptly, she halted.

Wolfwalker, they sent.Wild as hawks, they sniffed her warily. The threads of their mental packsong were suddenly loud in her mind. Like a weaver, she pulled those threads around her until they blended into a cloak of gray. Somewhere behind that shroud of gray, a pair of yellow, slitted eyes watched. Dion shivered. There was something in that gaze that did not belong in the packsong, yet the Gray Ones did not seem disturbed. Instead, two of the yearlings mock-growled at her, and the older wolves trotted back to the shade. The gray cloak in her mind seemed to loosen; the image disappeared, but the sense of urgency stayed with her.

It was two hours before she returned to the group, and when she did she was sweating like a rast in an oven. The cool breeze blowing off the coast did nothing to dissipate the humidity that clung to the marsh, and Dion's

clothes were gritty with sweat and salt. She dropped back to a walk as she approached the rise, but Gamon still heard her coming.

He got to his feet. "Ready to ride?"

She wiped her forehead on her shoulder. "I'd rather swim, if I could find

some cold water."

"East or west-it's your choice to the rivers."

"West," she returned.

"The Phye?" Tehena frowned. "You sure you want to go to Sidisport?"

Dion dropped her healer's pack on her saddle. "I want to see the ocean

where it hits the rocks."

"And then?" Gamon said softly.

The wolfwalker stared down at her hands. They were stronger than they had

been a ninan ago-her fingers no longer trembled. She looked up into Gamon's gray eyes. "And then," she said, "we go home."

XII.

There is no difference between need and love when they meet beneath the moons.

-Yegros Chu, Randonnen philosopher Previous Top Next When they started along the marsh road, Asuli trotted her dnu until she

reined in beside Dion. "What were you doing out there?"

Dion glanced at the other woman's face. "I'm a wolfwalker, not just a healer, Asuli."

"And I'm not to be part of that."

"No."

"Wolfwalker or not, I need to know what you did before-in Prandton."

Dion shrugged.

"You know what I mean, Healer Dione. My fa-Wains's nerves were

severed; yet after you were with him, he could feel and move his fingers

again. And Jorg had been bleeding internally-there was nothing I could do to stop it. He would have been dead by nightfall. After you saw him, he stabilized."

Dion didn't answer.

"You aren't one of those faith healers, are you?"

Dion gave her a sharp look. "Of all things that I am, that is the one thing I

am not."

"I found no marks on Jorg's body that the raiders had not made for him or that I had not made in crimping his wounds together. But he stabilized only

after you were with him, doing nothing, according to Cheria, but sitting by his side. Sounds like faith healing to me."

Dion snorted. "Faith healing is nothing more than a stealing of life for

adulation or power or gold."

"And you get none of those things-not even adulation," the intern retorted.

Dion's eyes narrowed. "If you think so little of me, why are you here?"

"You did something to Jorg, to my father. I want to know what that

something was. I pick things up quickly. Show me once, and I'll be able to practice whatever it is on my own. But if the great Healer Dione is nothing more than a faith healer, I'll expose you to the very moons."

Dion stared at her. Suddenly, she laughed. It was a choked sound, but it was a laugh.

Asuli eyed her warily. "Why are you laughing? Why aren't you angry?"

"Why should I be angry?" Dion asked the sky. "Because you have the tongue of a bilgebeast and the temperament of a shrew, and you force both

of them on me? Because you're as arrogant as a raider with twenty men on his side? Because you play with people's lives as if they have no value?

Because you add to the weight on my shoulders as if it is a game to you-to stack the blocks as high as you can to see when they will crush me?" She looked at Asuli, and the intern realized suddenly that the wolfwalker was not at all calm.

"Why," Dion asked softly, "do you think I should be angry with you?"

This time, it was Asuli who was silent.

They reached an inn on the banks of the River Phye by early evening,

before the sixth moon had risen. The sky was still heavy with heat. They didn't ride into the courtyard at the inn; they dragged themselves and their dnu. The heat had sapped both riders and beasts so that the commons, with its cool, green, ground cover, invited them to bed down there rather than in the house. It was with difficulty that Dion turned her dnu loose in the commons and went to the sweltering inn. Inside, the evening was long as a sermon and stifling as anger. By the time they bedded down, even Kiyun was irritable.

Dion came awake suddenly. The moons hung at an angle, shining almost blindingly into the room, and there was nothing moving. She slid out of bed, her hand on her sword. In the upper bunk, Tehena snapped into alertness at the change in Dion's breathing. The lean woman didn't speak, but she shifted to grasp her own sword, which lay beside her. Dion had already moved to her overtunic at the foot of the bed.