Behind him, Dion looked back over their trail once more before joining her brother in the hidden meadow. There was no obvious trace of their passage, but she frowned. That the scouts were concentrating on this area—had there been something left behind, something crucial that told the scouts where to look for them? Not even the youngest, Tyrel, was sloppy on the trail. All of them knew the risks of being so close to the borders of the county of Bilocctar. What with Longear's scouts and Zentsis's soldiers cutting them off from their own county, they had been doubly careful. But, she admitted silently, the scouts were here. The trail of seven people was not an easy thing to hide. And if Dion could follow the trail as easily as she had, then Longear's scouts could see it, as well.

  She glanced around the hidden gully. If they were already within the borders of Bilocctar, they would be considered spies. Longear ... it all came back to Longear. They knew from the letters they had stolen that it was he, the head of the Lloroi Zentsis's secret service, who was directing the raiders against Aranur's county, Ariye. Longear, not Zentsis, was paying slavers to steal women and children like Aranur's sister and cousins. And it was Longear who had forced them to flee when they stole the letters and learned of Zentsis's war plans. But how Longear could have anticipated their trek across the moun­tains Dion could not understand. Yet there were signs of scouts all along the borders—the very borders that Aranur and the others would have to cross if they were ever to get back to Ariye. And if even one of their camps had been located ...

  No. She shook her head. She had chosen most of their camps herself! Picked places in the middle of bramble patches and unexpected clearings in rock piles far from the game trails. She would bet that it was not from campsites that the scouts had found them—if, indeed, they had been found yet. Dion reached in her mind for the Gray One, but found no solace in the distant lupine mind.

  She sighed and dropped to the ground. The throb of her exhausted feet beat at her with every pulse. Rhom glanced across the clearing and grinned. “Footsore?”

  “Stepped on a sharp rock.”

  He motioned at the leather soles that were thin as paper. “You need new boots, Dion.”

  She quirked her eyebrow. “When we get to a shoemaker, I'll have some proper ones made. Until then, it's loose leather and calluses for me.”

  He chuckled.

  Dion glanced around the clearing. Besides her brother, there were two men: Gamon, the eldest; and Aranur, his nephew. Then there were the two girls and the boy. It was strange, the wolf­walker thought, how Tyrel, at fifteen the youngest in the group, seemed so much stronger than his older sister. Sandy hair, clear blue eyes, a smattering of freckles across his nose. He was already taller than Dion, but certainly lanky; his strength lay more in his stubborn will than in his shoulders. He was the son of Aranur's Lloroi, the leader of Ramaj Ariye. And it would be Tyrel who would one day lead Aranur's people. If, Dion reminded herself soberly, the boy stayed alive long enough to earn that post.

  Tyrel's sister, Namina, was barely as tall as Dion, but she was as slender as Tyrel was lanky. She had brown hair as dark as Tyrel's was light. Their blue eyes were the same, but where Tyrel gave off the brash confidence of youth, Namina had an air of depression—the aura of a person who did not care whether she lived or died. She was barely seventeen, the Age of Promising, but she walked like an old woman. Her eyes were deep and withdrawn.

  And then there was Shilia. Aranur's sister was as bright as Namina was dark. Her hair was light brown, and her eyes green. She had the same straight nose as Aranur; her cheeks were high and fine-boned, and there was a lightness and grace to her step when she walked. Dion had noticed long before Rhom that Shilia was interested in him. The blacksmith had finally caught on. Since then, he and Shilia had become close— perhaps closer than Aranur would have wished. But Shilia was also twenty years old—three years past the Age of Promising— and Aranur had no right to judge her friendships.

  Gamon looked to be three times as old as the others. His gray hair, left long and braided in the back and cut short on the sides in the style of old-times weapons masters, bristled out from under his warcap. His nose, once straight like Aranur's, was bent and ridged from both fists and blades. He had gray eyes, too, but where Aranur's seemed young, Gamon's eyes were as old as the moons. He was as tall as Aranur, but his shoulders were less broad, and he tended to favor one knee when he ran. Dion knew that her pack was light, but carrying it along with his own had taken its toll on Gamon. When she looked at him, settling his single pack on his shoulders and urging the two girls to get up again, she could see the dull burn of pain that was written into the fine lines of his face. His knees were no longer as strong as hers, yet he had carried her pack for her without complaint. She owed him a healing.

  And then there was Rhom. Dion smiled slightly as she looked at her brother. He was standing beside Aranur, and watching the two men together, she was struck again by their similarities. It was not their physical looks, though they both had dark hair. Rhom, her twin, was violet-eyed like herself, though his eyes were darker and his face craggy and weathered where hers was smooth. He was burly like an ox; Aranur was tall and lean like a straight line of steel. Dion's smile widened slightly at the comparison. Not even the hands of the two men were the same. Rhom's hands were thickly muscular and scarred by burns and cuts from the smithy, and his shoulders were broad and thick, as well. Aranur's shoulders were broad but not heavy, and his hands, strong and lean like the rest of him, wore only the long straight scars of the blades that had cut through his gauntlets some time in the past.

  No, what made the two men alike was not their coloring or build. It was the aura of power that clung to each man's shoul­ders. Rhom's power: tense and silent, as if it was contained by his strength. And Aranur's: taut and yet relaxed, as if it lay like a pool of light, waiting only to be focused into a lancelike bolt of lightning. Yes, she thought, it was the way they shifted—the way they watched the woods around them, aware of each sound and smell. Their very movements spoke of a quiet danger that could be unleashed before their thoughts called them to action. Dion smiled again to herself. As the others returned to the trail, she followed her brother, silently slipping through the brush like a Gray One herself. She was unaware that she wore that same aura of distilled danger like a cloak, her eyes quick and clear as she catalogued the sounds around her, and her hand resting easily on the hilt of her own sword. The three of them— Aranur, Rhom, and Dion, their leather mail and leggings dark and dirty from the ninans it had taken to cross the mountains from the sea, and their faces lean and worn and wary with the long journey on short rations—moved as one down the path, their steps silent and their passage as faint as the mark of a winter fog on a wet wharf.

  Two kilometers down the trail, Hishn joined them again, first as a shadow that seemed to melt from shrub to shrub, and then, as she loped closer to the small group, as a solid image, still silent, but now in sight. Gamon, who was leading the group, was glad it was not him that the Gray One hunted. He had seen enough of the wolves to realize that the Gray Ones could be a greater threat than most men knew. And they guarded the wolf­walker as if she were one of their own pack—something that Gamon did not completely disbelieve of Dion. He smiled to himself. There was the same wildness in Dion that there was in the wolves, a wildness he glimpsed only as a storm that pulled at the wolf­walker when the Gray Ones ran. And Dion was young. She had not yet learned the depth of that storm.

  Hearing the woman's soft feet pad along the path behind his nephew, Gamon glanced back and saw her eyes unfocused with the sense of the wolves. He wondered if, had he been given the chance, he would have run with the Gray Ones, too.

  It was barely an hour later when he called the group to a halt to make camp for the night. The stunted blaze that Rhom and Aranur built against the exposed rock of a ridge let them cook the game birds Gamon had shot down, but it would still be a slim meal.

  “Try one of these,” Shilia offered, handing Dion a tuber.

  Dion accepted it with rueful thanks. “I think I've eaten my weight in these things in the last ninan.” When Shilia laughed, Dion added, “It's getting so that when I see one of these plants, I run the other way.”

  “No wonder you stay out in the hills so long,” the brown-haired girl teased. “You're trying to avoid the potato plants. And I thought it was because of Aranur's bossy ways.”

  Dion chewed noisily on the root. “He's only bossy with you because you're his sister,” she said sourly. “He's just plain arrogant with me.”

  “At least he notices you.” The girl looked pointedly at Namina.

  The wolf­walker followed her gaze. “Namina will pay more attention to life in time, Shilia,” she said quietly. “She will get better once we get her home to Ariye.”

  Shilia looked unconvinced. She opened her mouth, but her stomach growled just then. She stared at her stomach, looked at the root in her hand, and made a face. “Even my stomach is tired of these things. There's Rhom,” she said suddenly, getting up.

  Dion smiled as Shilia crossed the clearing to join the black­smith. But the thought of food stayed with her. That their bellies growled was nothing new. There was little large game here; hunting had already taken them too far out of their way four times. It was as if something had frightened the bigger animals away. There was not enough masa to account for the lack of deer, she mused. What if Aranur was right? If Zentsis's and Longear's men were already thick in these hills, they would have killed enough game for themselves in a ninan to move the rest of the herds south into the mountains. Dion scowled. The Gray Ones were not thick here either, she realized. Where she now saw one or two at a time, just nine days earlier—one ninan—she had run into packs of eight and ten.

  Her eyes absently followed Namina, who had left to go to the stream with Tyrel, and she blinked as Gamon came up and squatted beside her.

  “It's quiet,” the older man said.

  Dion stirred, and Hishn's head fell off the healer's lap with a thwump. With a soft growl, the wolf shoved her nose back under Dion's hand. Dion, smiling to herself at the Gray One's command, scratched the creature under the chin. “Too quiet,” she said in answer to Gamon' s comment. '' And yet too noisy.''

  “She senses this, too?”

  Dion nodded slowly. “There's not enough big game. And the small creatures are uneasy.”

  “Well, we're close enough to the border that we should expect it.”

  Dion hesitated, and Hishn got up, stretched with a toothy yawn, and trotted down the gully into the night. The wolf­walker stared after the wolf and chewed her lip. “I want to scout back along our trail tomorrow, Gamon.”

  Aranur, standing nearby, looked over at her, gauging the weariness of her eyes against the strength of her voice. He shook his head as he joined Gamon beside her. “After what you ran into today, Dion? No. Look, if the scouts are following us, there's little we can do about it except be more careful on the trail. And waiting for you to return would put us all that much closer to the scouts' blades.”

  “You'd not have to wait for us. Hishn and I can catch up.”

  “And if you run into trouble by yourself? Take Gamon with you. Then you'd be safer and we wouldn't have to wait.”

  She shook her head. “Gamon—no offense—” she said hast­ily to the gray-haired man, “would slow me down.”

  The old weapons master chuckled. “And that gray-eared mutt of yours would chew my butt for falling behind if I did.”

  She grinned.

  But Aranur frowned. “Then stay only a half hour behind us, Dion. That would give you enough distance to know if Longear's men are actually trailing us or just patrolling this side of the border.''

  Dion pictured the trail as they had run it that day. “Staying a half hour behind you won't make the difference, Aranur. If it did, you and I would have picked up whatever it is the scouts are following when we trailed Gamon back earlier.”

  Gamon nodded at his nephew. “You followed us long enough to see what marks we left.''

  “The marks were slight,” Dion stated. “And Hishn helped us find them.”

  The wolf­walker's tact made Gamon smile.

  “It will take much more time than half an hour to find out what the scouts are doing, Aranur,” Dion continued.

  Aranur considered that. “How much time?”

  “Four hours, maybe five. If I don't find traces by then, the scouts must have a way to track us that I won't be able to see. Carrier birds, perhaps.”

  Aranur shook his head. “Not out here. The forest is too dense, and the lepa and other aerial predators too fierce. Carrier birds can get a message through to another post, but would not be able to circle or glide to watch our steps from the air.”

  She shrugged. “Well, I won't be gone more than half a day. And besides, with Hishn's help, I'll be able to see any scouts before they see me.”

  He smiled without humor. “And what if you're seen any­way?”

  “This gully isn't safe either, Aranur. Do you want to wait here until the scouts find us?”

  He chuckled. “Gamon is wrong about you,” he said with a sideways look at his uncle's raised eyebrows. “You couldn't be a moonmaid. You're far too practical.” He ignored Gamon's guffaw. “A moonwarrior, perhaps,” he added, “with those violet eyes and the sword at your belt, but not a moon-maid.” He looked at the sky to judge the time. “You have the last watch,” he pointed out. “If I sit in for you, you can take off early, before the rest of the group is up and before any scout hits the trail. With luck, you should be back by the time we are ready to leave. As long as you don't stop for nonessentials,” he added sharply.

  “I was gone only a few hours today.”

  Gamon gave her a measuring look, cutting off Aranur's acid comment before his nephew could speak. “You were gone six hours before that, Healer,” he said quietly. “And then another two this afternoon before Aranur came after you.”

  Dion sighed.

  Aranur nodded. “I don't need to worry about you day and night, Dion. For this, you can just let the Gray Ones do the tracking. You shouldn't have to go more than a kilometer yourself.”

  The slender woman raised her eyebrows. “The wolves are not the guides you think they are, Aranur. I can see through Hishn, yes. But the others—I can speak with them only. They are not pets, to be ordered around.” She frowned at him. ' “They work with me as a favor to Hishn and as an honor to the ancients who gave them the Voice in the first place.”

  Aranur shrugged. “I've seen you bond with other wolves, Dion. Remember when you called that pack in the mountains? And that time Rhom and I saw you healing the Gray One off-trail? And Rhom says you did that many times in the moun­tains in Randonnen, your own county.”

  “That is not bonding,” she objected. Gamon raised his eyebrows again, and Dion shook her head. “That is merely a merging of thoughts and senses.”

  “It seems to work as well as your bond with Hishn,” Ga­mon said.

  Dion was silent for a moment. “There is no love or loyalty in a merging,” she said finally. “There is respect, but respect is not enough to let them break a merging right away. They have needs that I feel as a wolf­walker. And when there are more than two or three, their needs are ten times as strong because they are combined.” Aranur frowned at her, and she added, “Running with them is like a merging, Aranur. And to track with them, I will have to run with the pack.”

  Gamon gave her a thoughtful look.

  “But you can call them?” Aranur asked.

  She shrugged. “When there are more than four or five, I don't call them so much as they call me.” She looked up at him. “And the call is strong, Aranur. To run with them, that will take some time.”

  He snorted. “If it takes too much time, you could very well run into the scouts that are running after us.”

  Gamon chuckled. “The healer might not be able to call the wolves herself, Aranur, but I'd bet a month's pay that if she ran into Zentsis's scouts, the scouts would turn tail and head the other way. And they'd have a pack of Gray Ones at their backs howling the hunt all the way to Breinigton.”

  “Being a wolf­walker has its advantages,” Dion admitted with a grin.

  Aranur was not smiling. “I realize that, Dion.” He gave her a sharp look. “Sometimes I can hear Hishn as well as you.”

  “Like Rhom,” she admitted, “when you meet Hishn's eyes, and when she opens her mind to you, then yes, you can hear her. But you don't feel as I do. You don't smell from her nose or see through her eyes. If the link between you and me was not so strong—” she blushed at Gamon's sly look “—Hishn would not hear your voice in her mind either.”

  “The question is, Dion,” Gamon returned, sober now, “not whether they can take care of you on the trail, but can they take care of Longear's traps? Zentsis and his man Longear have driven us far from our home to keep us away from Ariye. They want us badly. With the seven of us dead, Zentsis's war plans would remain a secret, and our elders would be ignorant until he marches across our own borders with the raiders leading the way. The closer we get to Bilocctar—if we are not already within its borders—the more traps there will be.” He ran his hand through his silvered hair. “Remember Sidisport? And Red Harbor?”

 

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