The strange female stopped drinking and lifted her head.
Wynn couldn't fathom how this young one, maybe only a yearling, had traveled so far from home. And why had the dog come to her, let alone at the moment the black figure appeared? She crouched to the dog's level and hesitantly stretched out her hand, palm up.
"It's all right," she said again.
The majay-h shrank away with a twitch of jowlbut she cocked her long head as well.
And a moment passed.
The dog stretched her neck just a little, reaching out her nose, though she remained well beyond Wynn's reach. The majay-h sniffed at Wynn, and then shook herself all over, and those pale blue eyes gazed intently into Wynn's.
The same way Chap had sometimes studied her. And the way Lily had looked her over when they first met.
The young female huffed suddenly and took a step.
Wynn remained still, with her hand extended, but the female paused as if waiting for something. The dog finally backed up. That brief instant of near acceptanceand its sudden passingfrustrated Wynn.
The majay-h pack had also had a hard time accepting her. The grizzled black elder had barely tolerated her at all. Lily was the first to allow Wynn close.
The young female's ears pricked up again.
Even Lily wouldn't have let Wynn touch her without Chap present. How was she going to establish trust with this lost sentient beingwithout getting bitten? Wynn leaned forward with her hand still outstretched, until she had to brace her other hand on the floor. She hesitated every inch for fear of startling the anxious female.
The majay-h finally extended her head in like manner, until her cold, wet nose touched the tip of Wynn's middle finger.
A barrage of memories erupted in Wynn's mind. Wobbling under the onslaught, she barely caught a glimpse of one before it washed away under the next.
Chap, his silver-gray fur glinting in shafts of sunlight lancing through the forest canopy...
Lily running somewhere nearby, more brilliant white where the light touched her coat...
Violet-tinged ferns in the underbrush whipping across them within the vast Elven Territories...
Wynn snatched her hand back with a gasp and dropped sharply on her rump.
Hazy and blurry as they were, there was something very wrong about these memories. She'd never run with Chap and Lilynot in such a moment as she'd just remembered.
The young female cocked her head and huffed once.
Even with lingering fever's heat, Wynn sat shivering on the cold stone floor.
Chap could evoke anyone's memories that he'd seen in them once before. He played upon people who were completely unaware of what he did. But he'd left the Elven Territories nearly two years ago.
And those memories had come to Wynn at a touch.
Only the majay-h could do this. They communicated among their own kind through "memory-speak." But this wasn't possible for Wynnor anyone. Resting one night among the pack, she'd tried to listen in among them, but nothing came to her.
Wynn had remembered Chap and Lily in the forest, as if running with them, but that blurred imperfect memory wasn't her own. And it couldn't have been passed to her, a human, from a majay-h. Nor could one so young have known Chap.
What had just happened?
In shallow breaths, Wynn lurched forward onto her knees. The female didn't shy away and stepped two paces closer. Wynn reached out slowly, touching the soft fur between the dog's ears. The female raised her head, forcing Wynn's hand to slip down along her neck.
As Wynn's fingers combed through thick fur, separating the hairs, she saw an almost cream undercoat beneath the outer dark charcoal. She lowered her gaze, meeting the animal's own.
Wynn stared into crystalline blue irises... with the faintest flecks of yellow.
Another image of Lily surfaced in Wynn's thoughts, as if from nowhere.
This time the recollection was clearly Wynn's own. It came from when she'd first been allowed to stroke Lily's head. The sudden unsought flash felt familiar. Like when Chap intentionally called up one of Wynn's own memories. And more images flooded her mind...
Four pups nestled around a creamy white mother with yellow-flecked eyes, each with its own varied shade of coat. Two males of silver-gray, and one more steely in tone, but the last little female was charcoal gray.
Moments and flashes came and went...
Four cubs wrestled and tumbled over a downed tree coated in moss and lichen...
Little furred bodies, grown stronger, ran with their white mother in the forest...
In hunts for wild hares, or strangely colored wrens, or the chocolate-toned squirrels, their legs had grown faster than their bodies. One of them took a horrible spill down a steep incline as it tripped over its own paws...
Each moment that came to Wynn stepped across moons of time. The little ones grew from adolescents into young adults, until finally Wynn saw the charcoal female touch heads with her white mother. The two lay alone beneath a wide fir tree, speaking in memories of their own. In that dim space, hidden from sunlight, the young female's coat appeared inky black, and the white mother was like the shadow of a ghost.
A hazy image of Chap suddenly overlaid that moment, as if the memory of him wasn't quite perfect and didn't belong to the female.
And then Wynn saw an image of herself.
She wore elven clothing, as she had during her time in that landthen suddenly her garb changed to the gray robe of her guild.
Both these last images of Chap and herself were not as clear and crisp as the ones of the pups' lives. Perhaps these were secondhand, passed from mother to child. Wynn ached inside at the memory of Chap, and how much he'd hurt upon leaving Lily behind.
She couldn't help the tears.
Wynn pulled her hand from the charcoal female's neck and looked down in astonishment into those lightly yellow-flecked eyes.
The eyes of Chap and Lily's daughter, sent from half a world away.
Wynn knew Chap feared for her safety since the night his kin, the Fay, had caught her listening in while he communed with them. They'd turned on her, tried to kill her, and might have succeeded if not for him and the pack. And Wynn understood.
Lily had been pregnant when Chap left the Elven Territories. He must've arranged all this through her.
In leaving to guide Magiere and Leesil onward, Chap hadn't wanted Wynn left unattended for so long. But how had his daughter managed to find her?
Wynn wasn't certain she liked the idea. This animal was so young.
The majay-h whined, sounding almost frustrated. Wynn wasn't adept at memory-speak, let alone that it was impossible for a human. Although...
Chap could speak his thoughts directly to heranother aberration of the taint left in her by dabbling with a mantic ritual. Perhaps as his daughter, this young one shared some manifestation of her father's singular qualities. He was Fay, who'd chosen to be born into one of the Fay-descended majay-h.
Too many complications and guesses, yet it was the only explanation Wynn could think of. Chap, and now his daughter, were unique in this world, each in their own way, it seemed. And Wynn recalled the evening when she'd heard something outside the bailey wall, like claws on cobblestone.
A memory of the hunt for the undead sorcerer, Vordana, had suddenly entered her head. She'd run into a crowded street, searching for Chap, and something had brushed her leg. Another memory had come, as if she were looking through his eyes. But the first unsought recollection hadn't come from any contact.
Confused, Wynn backed away. The female huffed, her brief growl turning into a whine, and she took a step to follow. But Wynn held her hand up out of reach.
She had to try something that might gain her more answers. Could Chap's daughter communicate with her from afar, without touch, as her father did?