winter."

He followed her gaze. For a moment, he chewed on his lip. "Might be a good thing for that storm to break. There's something in her that's losing its hold."

"You mean the wolves?"

"Aye. They're holding her-like they did before. I think without them she would throw herself away."

"She's not that weak."

"Maybe not. Maybe so. But with Aranur... gone-" He forced himself to

say the words. "-the weight of her decisions rests on her shoulders alone. I don't think she can bear it."

"She's always made her own decisions."

"No... " His voice trailed off. "She has an independent mind, but she's never really been on her own. She's always had someone to rely on-her father, her brother, Aranur, Hishn. Now there's no one but herself. Now she is truly alone."

"She has us," Tehena said sharply.

"Aye. Us."

But he said nothing else, and Tehena was left to study him as she studied

Dion: in silence, with a wariness that was growing into fear.

That noon, when Asuli deliberately accosted Dion, Tehena merely watched, the thoughts turning over and over in her hard-faced head. Dion was watering her dnu at the river at which they had stopped, and the intern led

her own dnu up beside Dion's. The bank of the river was soft with silt, and

the current swift but quiet. The sound of their words carried easily.

"Healer Dione," Asuli said. "It's been days since I interned with you. When will you begin to teach me?"

Kiyun looked up as he heard Asuli's voice and started down toward the bank, but Tehena put her hand on his arm. Gamon gave her a sharp look, but held his peace. Kiyun, looking from the one to the other, subsided uneasily.

At the river, Asuli pressed Dion. "You owe me a ninan, Healer Dione.

You've done no work since I joined you, and by the old laws, my ninan starts with your teaching. You'll not get rid of me by ignoring me, no matter how long you do it."

Dion did not look up. Her voice was flat. "There are no patients here, Asuli.

There is no work for me or you."

"You're a master healer. You can teach theory if nothing else."

Dion's voice grew sharp. "I have no skills to give you."

"No skills?" The intern's voice was dry. "All those years of wearing that circlet and there's nothing you can pass on?"

"No. Not now." Not ever, her mental voice snarled.

"So you're giving up."

"I'm giving nothing. Leave me alone, Asuli."

The intern didn't back down. She set her jaw instead. "And what will you

do if you don't work-if you don't teach me? Sit here alone and savor your pain? Chew on the grief each day till you choke?"

Dion raised her head. She said nothing for a moment, but her lips were curled back, her eyes flared and glinting violet and yellow together. Asuli took an involuntary step back. The fury that had filled Dion's chest seemed to burst suddenly out her throat, tightening her muscles so that the sound she made was pure wolf. Asuli began to back away.

Dion wasn't aware of moving, but her legs tensed so that she stalked the intern up the bank. "What do you think to take from me?" she demanded in a low voice. "The 'secret' of healing? My knowledge? My blood?"

"I want to know what you did to my father-how you healed his arm. I deserve that, at least."

"And you offer-what? Anything?"

"It's your duty to teach me."

"So you offer nothing. No thanks. No gratitude. No easing of my workload in exchange for taking you on. You simply want to take what you think the world owes you, draining what is left of me like a mudsucker emptying a corpse." Dion's eyes glinted violently. "You leech of a lepa," she breathed.

She followed Asuli back. "All of you-you're like bloodworms. Haven't you taken enough from me? The endless scoutings. The constant studies in everything a weapons master's mate should know- every history of the Ancients, every text of settlement, every science they think to recover. Even in the clinics you haunt me with every disease and condition and injury and death. 'Healer Dione, we've done all we can. Please, just see one more child.' One more fever-burned woman. One more worlag-scarred man.

Every time I turn around, someone has sucked another ninan away. And now there's you. Teach me this. Give me that. Fourteen interns are not enough duty-you call the old laws to cut out another piece of me and

assign it to yourself. When do you stop?" She grabbed dirt from the ground and shook it at Asuli. "When I'm sucked dry as this dust?" She flung the dirt away.

Asuli opened her mouth, but the wolfwalker snarled inhumanly. The intern gasped. Eyes wide, Asuli stumbled in a swift turn and hurried up the bank, her back twitching as though Dion would spring and tear at her flesh in a rage.

Under the trees in the shade, Kiyun and Tehena stood stiffly, eyeing Dion with wary expressions. Gamon started down the bank toward her, but the wolfwalker didn't look at him. Instead, she stared down at her hands. They were trembling again. She felt the flood of gray sweep her mind, knew her arms were beginning to shake. She turned back to the water. She must have made some sort of sound because the two dnu spooked at her footsteps and bolted back up the slope. Gamon barely caught the reins of one of them as it thundered past through their camp, scattering packs and gear.

On the dusty bank, Dion stared at the river. The water was clear and cold, and the standing waves were touched with both white river froth and sunlight. Heat burned its way into her hair, her shoulders, her face.

Overhead, the sky was almost clear, with only a few streaks of high, gray clouds. The moons hung like eyes in that vastness.

"The moons mock me," she whispered. "And the sun burns away at my

grief."

The water glistened and slicked its waves. The long clouds reflected along its length so that a dozen gray wolf packs streaked through the stream: blue on gray, gray on black. The water seemed to swell against the riverbank.

Suddenly, Dion threw back her head and howled. It was a harsh scream-a sound not meant for human throats. "Damn you," she raged at the moons. "You've taken everything from me: my mother, my son, my mate. Tomi was never mine to begin with, and Olaran-you've turned him so he won't even look at my face. What have you left me? The silver and steel? You think to bind me to this life with that?" She tore the healer's circlet from her forehead and hurled it out into the water. It struck the opposite bank and clattered into the rocks, dropping into water that stole its silver gleam. 'Take it, " she raged. "Take them both. I'll be no slave to either one. " She fumbled with her sword belt, jerking it off almost frantically.'Take them," she screamed. She spun the weight of the blade over her head, then loosed it at the river. It hit with a flat, slapping sound, and sank out of sight in the waves.

Dion sank to her knees. The silt depressed slightly, curving around her knees, and some part of her brain noted that her weight crushed the soil even as the weight of the moons crushed her. The weight of the moons... The weight of her future. Aranur's goal to touch the stars, and hers simply to survive. And it was she again who walked away, while her future died with him. She closed her eyes. Memories raged in her head like the nightmares that clung to her sleeping hours. The howl of her voice crying out for her mate was a sound that didn't stop.

"Dion." It was Gamon's voice, quiet but somehow cutting through the swirling blindness. He didn't touch her, but she knew he squatted beside her in the sun.

Her voice was quiet. "I'm no use to anyone now. I'm not a healer. I'm not a scout. There's nothing left in me to use."

"Don't do this, Dion."

She looked up then, but her eyes were unfocused-not with the sense of the wolves, but with some inner pain so dark that it blinded her to him. "Don't do what, Gamon? Don't scream? Don't cry? I knew you for a year with

Aranur, and you never warned me even once: When I Promised with him, I mated with death. Your county is steeped in blood."

"My blood and yours, Dion. Aranur was a son to me-as you are a

daughter."

"Then the weight of this should be on your back, not mine. I'm breaking now with grief."

"Aye." His voice was quiet.

"How could they do this?" she cried out. "How could they take everyone-

everything-from me? Is there no mercy in the moons?"

"Mercy's a human concept, Dion. It doesn't belong to the moons or skies."

"The Ancients owned the sky, the stars. But what do we own now? Look at

us. We struggle to recover the barest of the old technologies, and what we do recover, we must hide from alien eyes. The Aiueven are legend not just for their plague, but for the death they bring to us each time we advance our sciences. By the moons, Gamon, we live like near-animals. We die in our forties from swords and disease when we should be living three centuries. I can't protect my sons from this world, Gamon. Survival here is a matter of hours, not days or months or years." She thrust out her fists. "Look at my hands. They're not strong enough for what they have to do. I couldn't keep the lepa from my son. I couldn't hold on to Aranur when the raiders decided to kill him. I could watch them die, but I couldn't save them. I can't change

death to life, no more than I can halt the tides or touch an alien star." She clenched her fists. "You fight for a future that won't exist. It's worthless, Gamon-every goal your county has. We'll never recover what the Ancients had. All we'll do is sacrifice our families to the god of the endless future."

Gamon's jaw tightened. "The future is all that holds us together, and deep inside you know that. It's what makes us human-the vision to see what we can become, not simply what we are at this moment. You know what I'm talking about, Dion. It's not just blind hope. If our ancestors hadn't bred and set out the mining worms, we'd have no metals today. If we didn't breed and set out the worms in our own lifetimes, our descendants would be as metal-poor as the first of the Ancients themselves. What we do now depends on what our ancestors did before us; and the things we do now define what our descendants can accomplish. And we're almost there, Dion.

A few more decades, and we can begin the real work in the county. Aranur knew that; that's why he pushed so hard for you to learn everything with him. He wanted you to live the vision with him. To someday touch the stars and watch your children fly like Aiueven in the sailplanes of the Ancients.

The vision is true, Dion. You can't abandon it now."

She didn't move. "I can, Gamon, and I have."