"It feels like magic" said Acorn, leaning nervously over the edge. "Timmorn's blood! What a song this is going to make one day!"
"Let's not start talking about stories until we know the ending" Lionleaper answered grimly. "We still don't know what happened to Goodtree!"
"There will be a song, perhaps my greatest, whatever the outcome. I know the power that drives me..." Acorn straightened with a sigh. "But there will be no joy for me in the making of it if the ending is tragedy." He met Lionleaper's eyes soberly. His face was smudged, and damp brown hair clung close to his skull; scarcely a sight to charm a maiden. But Lionleaper supposed he looked no better. He could scarcely bear to wonder what condition Goodtree was in now.
"Have you felt" The warrior could not finish his question, but Acorn understood him.
"Nothingnot death, not life. I get no sense of Goodtree at all..."
"Well let's go find her then!" said Lionleaper explosively. "And if that cursed she-wolf of hers tries to stop us I'll strangle her!"
Goodtree swam up out of endless depths of darkness to awareness of pain that almost sent her back again. But someone was calling her, not by her soulname, but with a depth of anguish that compelled her attention. She took a deep, aching breath, letting awareness extend to limbs that felt as if they had been beaten with sticks. Exhalation became a moan, and abruptly she was shivering.
**High ones! Her skin is like ice! We've got to get her warm somehow!**
The sending had a familiar flavor, but she was too tired to identify it. She felt motion; her body was turned, and another naked body pressed against her back. She tried to curl up to protect her belly, but someone else was there, holding her close, and her feet touched the familiar rough warmth of wolf-fur.
**Leafchaser?** After an unmeasurable time Goodtree summoned her wits sufficiently to grope for the touch of her old friend's mind. She felt a kind of anxious amusement in return.
**Silly cub! Don't leave me behind again!**
Well perhaps she was a cub at that. Certainly she was curled up like a cub with its litter-mates, all tangled together. Returning circulation was gradually ceasing to be painful; she sighed and pressed closer to whoever was holding her, wondering where she was.
"Goodtree?" came a whisper in her ear. "Are you awake?''
Scent identified Lionleaper, but then who was behind her? Goodtree forced open her eyes and met his anxious smile. She blinked in confusion, shifted in his arms to look around and met Acorn's brown gaze, deep as a forest pool. It was their body heat that was warming her, and a warmth of the spirit came to her from them as well that welcomed her back to consciousness. She gazed from one to the other in wonder. Back at the hurst they had been unacknowledged rivals, but now she sensed only harmony.
The faces of the two elves had a radiance that came only partly from joy. The light was golden; Goodtree looked beyond them and saw sunlight filtered through fluttering green-gold leaves.
The Golden Grove! Abruptly she remembered her journey, and the storm, and her name. She stiffened in their arms.
"The tribe" Talking was painful, and she switched to the speech of the mind. **Are the Wolfriders safe? Did the dam stop the flood in time?**
**That was your work then! Yes, they're all safe, and thanking the high ones for a miracle!** sent Lionleaper, but from Acorn came another question, **Goodtree, why did you come here? What have you become?**
She closed her eyes in relief, wondering how to answer them. She seemed to be a treeshaper, she thought, remembering how the vines and pine trees had obeyed her, and perhaps in time she would discover other masteries. But that was not what she needed to say.
Goodtree turned over so that she could slip an arm about the songshaper and the warrior as well and hold them as they had held her. She swallowed, meeting their eyes, and made her voice obey her will.
"I'm the chieftain of the Wolfriders now. ..."
"Must we always fight with the humans?" Woodlock asked as he braided flower stems together for Rainsong's hair.
"It's fight or run, isn't it? And we've done enough of both since the high ones came here," Rainsong replied sadly.
They were the quietest and gentlest of the Wolfriders. It was fortunate they'd been born near the same time and found each other. It would have been more fortunate, Longreach considered, if they'd been born when Prey-Pacer was chief or Freefoot or one of the other rare times when Wolfriders and humans did not intrude on each other's hunting grounds.
"I wish they'd just tie their bundles on their backs and go someplace else. We were here first." Her voice held both the hopes and the angers of the innocent. "The Father Tree is the Wolfriders' homewhy can't they understand that?"
And wasn't that the problem? Never before had the Wolfriders stayed in one place so long, but since Goodtree had worked her magics on this grove it had been home to the tribe and none of them could imagine leaving it. The humans had changed too, put down their own sort of roots and made their own Father Tree, not with living magic but with piles of stone and little bowers where everything grew in straight, unnatural lines.
"Wouldn't they ask the same of us?" Longreach asked softly. "They have been by the caves a long time themselves."
Woodlock shook his head, his eyes growing uncommonly fierce. "It's ourseverything we can see from the highest branches of the Father Tree. It belongs to our wolves and it belongs to us."
Longreach shook his head. Such belligerence, such a sense of possessingwas this truly Goodtree's legacy through the Father Tree?
Rainsong took the finished flower-wreath and placed in on her hair, but the hard look did not fade from her eyes. "Someday," she whispered, forcing the thought deep into her mind where she'd find it no matter how wildly the wolf-song sang. "Someday we'll frighten them away."
The storyteller gathered his legs under him and pushed himself to his feet. There were storiessad storiesthat had an answer for her bitterness. But Bearclaw's Wolfriders could no longer hear them or learn from them. Strangebecause they were almost all about Bearclaw's father
Lessons in Passing by Robert Lynn Asprin
The child was not far from the village center, playing in the sun as his mother worked in front of their hut. Suddenly, a movement as small as a butterfly's wing turning on a flower caught his eye. One of the forest demons was standing at the edge of the woods watching him with a half-bemused smile.
He had heard of them, of course, and even glimpsed one once when the tribe had surprised a few of them at the river. His parents warned him of them when they said they loved him, and threatened him with them when he was bad. Once, when he was still a baby, he had dared to tell his mother he thought they were beautiful and had been thrashed for his honesty: once by his mother, and again by his father after his mother told him of the indiscretion. Now he knew better and kept his thoughts to himself.
Child and forest demon examined each other with open curiosity.
The demon didn't look dangerous. If anything, being closer to the child's size, he seemed less threatening than the adults who ruled his existence. True, his hair was wild and unkempt, but that made him seem even less like an adult and added to his mysterious allure.
The forest demon smiled fully now and beckoned to the child before disappearing into the brush.
The child started to follow reflexively, then hesitated. If he was caught playing with a forest demon ...
He shot a guilty glance at his mother, but she was engrossed in her work, oblivious to her son's temptation.
Maybe just for a little while. She would never know...
The forest demon appeared again; this time his summoning gesture was a bit more impatient. His grin expanded to show mischievous eyes and teeth before he vanished.