"There," he remarked to Brook after the others had scattered, muttering, to the tree hollows and hidden places where they spent their days. "Finally, I've given you some excitement."
Brook said unhappily, "What did you expect, after letting Fangslayer and Longreach and the other elders run everything for years?"
"You think I'm a fool, Brook? Why do you suppose I only proposed that we watch the human camp until their habits become known to us? I plan to bring Fangslayer and his cronies around by degrees. What we really should do is dig a trap, make a net, and capture a human male to make urine for us."
Brook stared and backed away. "You are crazy," he stammered. Then he bolted toward the safety of his daylight perch.
"And he's the one who always tells the tales of Two-Spear at the howl," Tanner remarked to himself. Shrugging, half smiling in the faint daybreak light, he took to the treesbut not to rest. Silently, by the hidden upper ways, he himself made his way toward the human camp.
Just as he reached the point where he could watch the human hunters setting out to run the deer toward the waiting spearmen at the river, he saw a flash of fair hair some distance below him.
**Stormlight!**
Her easy, swinging gait through the maze of lower branches slowed. Reluctantly she answered the sending. **I am here.**
**I know you are! What are you doing?**
**Watching the human camp for you, my chief, since the others are too stupid to care.**
He felt amused agreement, which he did not dare to share with her. Instead, he tried to sound stern. **Turn around. You know you should not be here. Go back to your family at once.**
**I have none.**
He had forgotten that she was an orphan, raised by the tribe, her parents killed in a hunting mishap years before. Childless and mateless as he was, and preoccupied with his leathermaking, Tanner had taken small part in the rearing of such cubs. He felt a jab of guilt, not only that he had forgotten, but that she could remind him so starkly, as if she should expect nothing more than forgetfulness from him.
**Turn around, then,** he sent more gently yet more firmly, **and go back to the place where you spend your days. I, your chief, command it.**
She went like a flash of birdflight, like a leaf on the wind, like cloud wisp, gone. From his higher, safer, more hidden vantage, Tanner looked on uneasily. For there was a human hunter standing on the ground beneath where she had been, staring upward with a puzzled scowl.
Tanner watched the humans. He did not come so recklessly near to them as Stormlight had done, for it was not in his nature to take unnecessary risks, but nevertheless, he lost rest and watched, and found ways to the nearer trees, day after day. At times the slow-witted human women, grubbing roots, would have needed only to look up from their toil to have seen him. Once a small child did see him leaping from oak to ash, but the women paid no heed to the child's babbling. Tanner spent the rest of that day in hiding and in compunction, for if he had been discovered so also would the tribe have been, and he felt it his duty as chief to protect them. Yet there was that in him which would have died, were it necessary, to fulfill his private quest.
That season there was unwonted silence and lack of merriment at the nightly howls. But one night when both moons were nearly at the full, as he sat alone afterward, Stormlight came to him and seated herself as abruptly as before, and said to him darkly, "I know where you spend your days."
He met her gaze, smiling. "It seems to me that you know everything about me."
She ignored that and went on. "You are watching the human village. I know it because I am watching, too, and watching you."
He was aghast. "Stormlight!"
"And you are going to get yourself caught if you are not more careful," she said to him sternly.
"You have disobeyed me!" Yet for some reason he found that he could not be angry with her or impose a punishment on her, as a chief should do.
"You gave me no order but for the one day," she retorted with a defiant lift of her head.
"You know no cub is ever to venture near the humans!"
"I will not be a cub for much longer! Then I will come and go as I will, and where I will, climb up and touch the lightning if I like. Ride the gale down to the ground, if I can. Do as you do, if it pleases me."
Tanner stared at her. She was as wild as Timmorn had ever been, born to confront the storm, as wild as the wolves. There was that in her which could be as fierce as he was gentle and mild.
Her eyes met his, her eyes of deep indigo, darker than storm clouds, deep as midnight, and he felt the jolt shift his center, his bedrock of self, and felt the tremors run through the rest of him, and he knew her soulname, which she did not yet know herself. And sitting, stunned and quaking, he knew he had to live some small time yet at least, long enough to generate a cub with her.
The cub that always comes of Recognition, combining the best qualities of each parent, her daring, his ... vision... The cub that might someday be his heir.
Stormlight was trembling, edging away from him, her delicate face very frightened; she had felt it too. "What what was that?" she stammered. "What have you done to me?"
She thought it was something he had imposed on her, a punishment for defying him. Quickly he reached out and laid a hand on her arm to keep her by him. "No!" he exclaimed. "No, it was not me."
"What, then?" she appealed.
"Far larger than either of us. It was Recognition."
"But Ibut how can that be?" For all her proud talk, she was still very much the cub. "II am not yet"
"I know, little one." He stroked her hair, shining like pale water in the moonlight. "You are nowhere near ready, neither your body nor your self. Let the high ones give me strength, I will wait for you."
She stared at him. "But it is not fair!" she burst out. "There should be lovemates for me, courtships, choosings!" A wild light was growing in her eyes. A wolf, entrapped by humans, Tanner had heard, would kill itself with fretting against its bonds rather than submit. This daughter of the wolves would take no more readily to the bonds of Recognition. "I have never wanted anything but to be free!"
Her cub, Tanner thought, might have those same wide, midnight-blue, flashing eyes.
"It is horrible!" she cried. "Why should I bebe made a prisoner toto"
Be bound to a dried-up old stick of an elf, she was thinking, though she would not say it, not even in her frenzy of shock and anger. But Tanner knew well enough.
**You will be as free as I can make you, Stormlight.** He sent to her, trying to calm her. **The bond need not be for life.**
She glared at him and sprang to her feet. "I'll see to my own freedom, thank you!" she snapped. She strode away from him, legs thin and gawky beneath her leather kirtle, and he watched after her until she went out of sight in the night.
Then he lay back and sighed and dazedly looked up at the stars. He was serene by nature, but Recognition had been at least as much of a shock to him as it was to her.
"Tie me and skin me and cook me in a fire!" he muttered.
By dawn he was still dazed, and went and watched the human village as he did every day, without really seeing anything, and without finding out any more than he already knew, which was that the humans were maddeningly random as to where they put their urine and when they produced it. When the sun was high he slept, right on a thick oak limb as he was, for he felt exhausted. And when a great hubbub from the humans below awakened him, he felt yet so dizzied and weak that he did not at first understand what was happening.