**Will guard... Come soon...**
Three days later, Acorn and Lionleaper stood where Goodtree had stood, and looked down into the valley where she had gone. The sun still shone brightly, but far to the west cumulus clouds were capping the peaks with white towers. Leafchaser sat beside the pitiful pile of possessions that had been too much weight for Goodtree's spirit, but when the two elves began to seek a way down the slope after her, the wolf rose, snarling, to block their way.
Lionleaper looked at his companion helplessly. "She told Leafchaser to stop us!" He supposed they could ask their own wolf-friends to get the she-wolf out of the way, but he was not sure they would obey.
"Goodtree doesn't want us to follow her!" exclaimed Acorn in sudden anger. "We've hounded her for almost an eight-of-days, but we have to stop now—"
"Why?" Lionleaper began. "We don't even know if she's still living!"
"Even if she were dying, we wouldn't have the right. This was her choice. And there's magic in that place. We can't go down there. Don't you yet understand?"
"No..." Lionleaper hunkered down beside the pile of abandoned clothing with a sigh. "All I understand is that I had to follow her."
Acorn's sudden smile transformed his angular face. "So did I. ..." He lowered himself to the stone.
"The others are safe enough in the little vale at the top of the pass. I'll send Fang with a message for them," said the warrior. "Do you know enough stories to fill the time until she returns?"
Acorn laughed. "Long ago, in the time of legends, the high ones came to the world of two moons ..."he began.
By the end of the first day, Goodtree's belly was cramping with hunger until she wanted to scream. It had been that way when she tried this before, she remembered, and tried to distract herself by focusing on her surroundings.
For her vigil she had chosen a grove of what she called sun trees, for they were new to her, rising like columns covered with smooth bark that had a golden sheen. Their leaves were a translucent pale green edged with sunlight, and the radiance that shone through them filled the grove with a gold-green glow. If she concentrated on it, perhaps she could feel the luminous warmth penetrating her body. Her heart shook with longing to understand the secrets of those trees.
Fill me! Transform me! she prayed, opening her awareness to the sensation as if she were trying to contact a cub who was just learning to send. And for a moment she did feel it. Then the demands of her belly distracted her. She swore, and settled herself to try again.
Sometime during the third day the hunger pangs left her. Goodtree looked down at her naked body with a curious detachment. Her breasts were still pointed and firm, but her hipbones jutted painfully and she could count her ribs. It occurred to her that several days of hard travel after a lean winter had not been the best preparation for fasting, but the thought had no power to disturb her now.
What was disturbing her was memory.
Living with the wolves made it too easy to see life as they did—a succession of events whose connections were rarely remembered or recognized. The moons and the seasons flowed by; cubs were born and the old were killed or died. But one cycle of the seasons was much like another, and those who died nourished the unborn so that nothing was really lost, only transformed.
It was a good way to live, a way that had enabled the Wolfriders to deepen their bonds to the beasts with whom they shared their lives so that both survived. But there were times when understanding cause and effect required a linear view of reality. Perhaps, once she had done this, Goodtree would never have to think this way again. But to understand who she was now, it was essential for her to remember who she had been.
With the same discipline with which she would have back-tracked an animal to its den, Goodtree began to move backward along the paths of memory. The death of her father was a recent sorrow; the death of her mother more distant but in its way more painful, for Stormlight had died as violently as she had lived.
But how Goodtree's parents had ended did not matter. What was important was that with each death she had felt as if she had failed them, and there was too much that she could never say to them now. And yet somehow it still needed to be said.
They were so different! she thought in wonder. How could they have Recognized, and produced me? In theory, the offspring of such a union should have the best characteristics of both parents, or at best, something new. But I can't do anything unusual, thought Goodtree, the easy tears spilling from beneath her eyelids. Until I find my soulname, I don't even understand what every other grown Wolfrider knows! She shifted position on the grass beneath the sun tree as if she were in physical agony.
Mother! Why couldn't I have your courage?
The image of Stormlight came vividly to mind: midnight eyes bright and pale hair sparking wildly, preparing for the hunt as if she was going to war. Goodtree remembered sitting behind her mother on the wolf's back, clinging for dear life as they charged into a herd of branch-horns. She heard once more her mother's yell of triumph as the sharp spear bit, and relived her own terror when the murderous horns grazed her as the beast fell. She had sobbed hysterically all the way back to the hurst, and her parents had argued over it for hours— that was a painful memory too.
O my father, why couldn't I have inherited your calm patience?
She remembered the gentle abstraction in Tanner's face, already weathered by the years when she had been born. A lock of brown hair would fall over his eyes when he was working—and he usually was working, always trying to refine the process he had invented to tan the leather the Wolfriders wore. She had wanted to help him, she remembered, so that he would be pleased with her, but the acrid preparations he used had blistered her hands, and the fumes had stung her eyes until she ran away, weeping. He and Stormlight had argued about that, too.
I cried a lot in my cub days, Goodtree thought distastefully, but maybe I had reason. When did I stop being so sensitive, and why?
A chieftain's cub was adopted by everyone in the tribe, and she had certainly never lacked for food or care. But apparently it had not been enough to make up for the sense of separation she felt from the two beings she loved most in the world. She did not know what would have become of her if she had not had Leafchaser.
When Goodtree was small she had been sure that her father was the wisest elf in the tribe, just as her mother was the bravest and the most beautiful. But as she grew older, she had fought with her mother, refusing to hunt with her or learn the craft of the warrior and Stormlight's skills with the stabbing spear. Instead, she had spent long hours alone, practicing with the bow. Her father had tried to talk to her about the craft of the chieftain. Tanner had been old when Goodtree was born, and she understood now that he had suspected how young she would still be when she succeeded him. But she had refused to hear.
But they are both gone now, and I cannot turn back the seasons to seek them! Once more she wept as if her parents lay newly dead before her, but it was the loss of all they should have shared that she was weeping for. They had tried their best to help her, just as she had tried to please them. There was no blame for either them or Goodtree—all they had needed for understanding was time.
But they had not been given it. Where had those bright spirits gone when the flesh failed them? Was the soul extinguished, or did it dissipate like mist before the sun? Or did Tanner and Stormlight live still in some realm where even wolf-senses could not discover them?