The man bowed, but he heard the words that Talen murmured under his breath:
"I would that we could have been friends." The old human just nodded his shaggy head once and followed his people into exile.
The night was lit by the burning village. Wavering fires made Swift-Spear's shadow dance at his feet as he stood to face the tribe.
"We have done as we had to do. We fought and won, not for love of fighting, but for justice. No longer will we hide from any threat, but we will face it boldly, and in this world to which we have always been strangers, we shall make a true home, and a new life." He raised his left hand which held his stone-tipped spear. "I shall carry this spear in the hunt, I shall carry it to remember what has been." He held out his right hand, which grasped the metal spear of Kerthan. "And I shall carry this spear, to remind me of what can be, what will be if we have the courage to find it!"
He stood tall and bold, the homes of his enemy burning behind him. He felt the warmth of the flames playing across the muscles of his back. Alive! I am alive!
And he knew his people rejoiced with him.
"No longer shall I be called Swift-Spear." He shook his weapons at the tribe. "But Two-Spear!"
"Two-Spear!" they shouted back, and even the high ones joined that cry.
"Two-Spear." He met their eyes and gloried in what he saw there. "I shall weld the old and the new ways together, and I shall lead you down a path that no elves before us have dared to dream of!"
And with that he cast both spears into the air, one and the other, as if he really believed that they could pierce the stars.
They came as they always did after the howl had filled their memories with Two-Spear. They came like the first stars at dusk; Longreach saw Scouter arrive at his brookside bower and when he looked up again there were eight Wolfriders silently choosing their places on the rocks and grass. They loved the recklessness that characterized Prey-Pacer's son but, like too much honey, they could not always digest what they'd swallowed.
"He was mad, wasn't he," Scouter said, more a statement than a question, "like a sick wolf."
Longreach shook his head. For all their vividness and detail, the memories and stories of Two-Spear were the hardest to hold in the mind. He knew Timmorn better than he'd known the ill-fated chief.
"But Huntress Skyfire had to drive him away. He moved against the Way so he lost his wolf-friend and his place with the Wolfriders." That was Clearbrook, but she was speaking her own hope and imagination, not from the treasure of memory. "He would have destroyed the Wolfriders with his madness."
The storyteller unslung his pouch of dreamberries. "No," he said as he handed the soft leather bag to Scouter. "Two-Spear was the only chief who ever made the five-fingered ones leave once they'd made their stone-piles. And Huntress Skyfire didn't set the Way until after he'd gone. But he was mad, and that made him leave the Wolfriders when they would no longer follow him."
Cutter pushed the wheat-pale hair from his eyes and stared at Longreach. "Not follow their chief?" His interest was clearly personal.
"It has happened at other times. Zarhan Fastfire left before Prey-Pacer tied his hair in the chief's knot, and that was madness, too. Though his was a grief that could not swallow his Iifemate's death. He left alone, but there have been others, by themselves or in small groups, who have gone and never come back."
They vanished from the Wolfrider memory, the treasure of which Longreach was the guardian. There had been a few who had not vanished from his own long memory, and there might be more if the feud between Strongbow and Bearclaw flared instead of smoldered.
"But never a chief, excepting Two-Spear?" Bearclaw's son demanded.
"Only Two-Spear and an eight or so of his followers."
The youth seemed satisfied, but not his slightly older friend. "It always seemed that he'd gone alone," Skywise mused, spitting his second dreamberry pit into the brook. "But now I can feel that some would have gone with him and believed that he, and not Huntress Skyfire, knew the Wolfriders' Way best."
There was no question that the silver-maned Wolfrider ran deeptoo deep to be the guardian of the dreamberry memories, though that truth cut Longreach's heart like one of Bearclaw's cold, metal knives.
"I wonder where they went?" Skywise asked the treetops.
A shiver ran down Longreach's spine. Dreamberries were for remembering and sharing memoriesnot for asking unanswerable questions. He could see that Skywise had caught the others. Their eyes were glazing over and the youth's mouth was open as if he could answer his own question.
"We are the Wolfriders," Longreach intoned, wrenching control of the howl away from the unsuspecting dreamer. "We are Huntress Skyfire's children. She knew the Way, she lived it, and she taught it to us"
Tale of the Snowbeast by Janny Wurts
That year, the season of white cold was worse than any elf in the holt could remember. The storage nooks were empty of the last nuts and dried fruit; and still the wind blew screaming through bare branches while snow winnowed deep into drifts in the brush and the hollows between trees. Huddled beneath the weight of a fur-lined tunic, Huntress Skyfire paused and leaned on her bow.
"Hurry up! It's well after daylight, past time we were back to the holt."
A soft whine answered her.
Chilled, famished, and tired of foraging on game trails that showed no tracks, Skyfire turned and looked back. Her companion wolf, Woodbiter, hunched with his tail to the wind, gnawing at the ice which crusted the fur between his pads.
"Oh, owl pellets, again?" But Skyfire's tone reflected chagrin rather than annoyance. She laid aside her bow, stripped off her gloves, and knelt to help the wolf. "You're an unbelievable nuisance, you know that?"
Woodbiter sneezed, snow flying from his muzzle.
"This is the second night we come back empty-handed." Skyfire blew on reddened hands, then worked her fingers back into chilled gloves. Woodbiter whined again as she rose, but did not bound ahead. Neither did he hunt up a stick to play games; instead he trotted down the trail, his bushy tail hung low behind. Hunger was wearing even his high spirits down. Skyfire retrieved her bow in frustration. The tribe needed game, desperately; the Wolfriders were all too thin, and though the cubs were spared the largest portions, lately the youngest had grown sickly. Tonight, Skyfire decided, she would range farther afield, for plainly the forest surrounding the holt was hunted out.
A gust raked the branches, tossing snow like powder over Skyfire's head. She tugged her leather cap over her ears, then froze, for something had moved in the brush. Woodbiter stopped with his tail lifted and his nose held low to the ground; by his stance Skyfire knew he scented game, probably a predator which had left its warm den to forage for mice in a stand of saplings. Skyfire slipped an arrow by slow inches from her quiver. She nocked it to her bowstring and waited, still as only an elf could be.
The shadow moved, a forest cat half-glimpsed through blown snow. Skyfire released a shot so sure that even another elf might envy her skill; and by Woodbiter's eager whine knew that he scented blood. Her arrow had flown true.
But unlike the usual kill, her companion wolf did not rush joyfully to share the fruits of their hunting. Woodbiter obediently held back, for in times of intense hardship, game must be returned to the holt for all of the tribe to share. Skyfire elbowed her way through the saplings, grumbling a little as snow showered off the branches and spilled down her neck. She picked up the carcass and felt the bones press sharply through the thick fur of its coat. Half-starved itself, the cat was a pathetic bundle of sinew; it would scarcely fill the belly of the youngest of the cubs. Skyfire sighed and worked her arrow free. She permitted Woodbiter to lick the blood from the shaft. Then, as wind chased the snow into patterns under her boots, she pushed her catch into her game bag and resumed her trek to the holt.