Now she brought him porridge and blood sausage from the fire. She stood watching him, holding the food in the wooden bowl. Long before, she had learned not to question his choices, because it was common for the men in the village to abandon their old mothers and fathers to the wolves, the totem of their clan, when there were too many mouths to feed. But her son was a powerful hunter. Others claimed to see the deer and elk search for him in the meadows and the woods, and lay their horned heads in his lap.
“Haggar,” she said.
He looked up, smiling into her coarse and wrinkled face, until he noticed that her eyes were bright with tears. “Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried. But you are going far away.”
He expected some sort of complaining then, and when it didn’t come he started to say all the things that he’d rehearsed in order to forestall her: “I won’t be long. I’ve left seven necklaces of iron cash. In the digging pit there’s a wooden box with agates and opals you can sell in town. Humans love them for their games. The smokehouse is full of meat and fish.”
But when she said nothing about any of that, he stood up to comfort her. “I won’t go far,” he said, which was a lie, the first he’d ever told her.
“There’s my cousin,” she said, referring to a girl in the village. “She waits for you.”
When he put his arms around her, she relaxed into his chest. “Me, too,” she said, fingering the bone buttons of his father’s shirt.
Later, as it got dark, he left the encampment. Barefoot, he ran uphill through the woods. When the trees gave way among the rock piles, he clambered onto the ridge, then stood looking back for a moment at the firelight among the trees. It was the first night of the summer festival, and the men were lighting the bonfire in the charmed circle. They were already drinking their honey beer, and soon the women would dance to the rhythm of the drums, while the old shaman marked their foreheads from a bowl of blood-he’d never seen this ceremony. He missed it every year.
He stood on the ridge as the darkness gathered. “I know you’re here,” he said without turning round. The she-wolves picked their way over the stones, their heads low. He ran among them up the slope into the high meadow, among the red-star columbines. The wolves coursed after him but could not reach him, because as he ran he gripped his totem stick and muttered his evocations, until he could feel the coarse hair on his back and down his arms, and he dropped down to all fours.
Everything she’d asked he had accomplished, no matter what the sacrifice. Tonight she would understand that there was no remaining trace of the boy whose shape had so disgusted her. She would recognize how love had changed him.
Before moonrise he paused at the stone gatepost on the mountainside, whose runes, he now saw, spelled out a name, or else part of a name: CENDR. The remaining letters on the other side had crumbled away, and the post itself had broken into pieces in the coarse grass. The wind had died. Black clouds hung above him, obscuring chunks of stars.
And when he saw the sky glow silver behind the eastern peaks, he picked his way down the avenue of statues, his feet delicate on the uneven stones. At the limit of his senses he could hear the noise of rats or rabbits in the empty houses; they would not show themselves. They would crawl into their crevices and holes, not knowing they were safe from him; he wasn’t hungry. All day he had fasted, in preparation. Now finally he reached the rim of the stone basin and lowered his head to drink. But at the last moment he did not break the surface with his long tongue, and as the moon rose he saw his countenance reflected as in a mirror, his yellow eyes and cruel teeth. Baring them, pulling away his dark lips, he allowed his breath to trouble the water, while at the same time a small wind came out of nothing, following his secret command. It stirred the surface, sparing him the sight of his ugliness as he regained his mortal shape.
When the circle of the moon was bright in the water, he heard her laughter from the other side of the pool. She sat on the far lip of the basin, weeds in her yellow hair, which gleamed with phosphorescence. She was examining the bottom of one foot when she raised her head.
“Haggar,” she said, her voice soft and musical, and he wondered if he’d ever told her his true name, and if not, how she came to know it. “So many years you’ve disappointed me. When I tell my friends, they laugh at me. But it’s time to prove them wrong. I need your help. I have an urgent need. I hope things are different now.”
So many years-nine years. During that time he had changed utterly in body and mind, but she had not changed. He stood in his leather breeches and his father’s wedding shirt, his totem stick slung in his belt. Now she stood and beckoned, and as he stumbled forward, it occurred to him that he was older than she, or at least he looked older, a full-grown man. And at the same time he thought about what she’d said: she needed him. What for? Need, he knew, was different from love, however similar they felt. And friends-what friends? He’d always thought she was alone in the world, last of her race, of the people who had lived here in this city, perhaps.
He paused, the water around his shins. She stood within a stone’s cast away, one hand on her slim hip. She smiled at him, a mocking smile, he understood, and for the first time he listened to his doubts-he had learned much in the solitary study of his craft. He knew the evocations that summoned clouds and rain, and those that summoned lightning from the sky. He had his hand on the druidic chain of being that linked all beasts with the primal spirit, and he knew the evocations that would pull him closer to that spirit up the evolutionary links, so that he could find the dividing lines, and sink back down again into another body, bird, or fish, or reptile, or warm-blooded beast. And though he had the practical mind of his mother’s people, he could not have learned these things without some knowledge of the rest, of other worlds or planes that joined to this one in small places, of the Feywild and the crystal towers of Cendriane, where the eladrin had once lived, tall and proud and slender, but blind in their suspicion that all other races were animals to be used. Worse than humans in that way.
“When I tell my friends…” Now suddenly he imagined her not as a solitary gift to him, but as an emissary from that world. He took a step backward, and at the same time watched the smile fade from her lips. How had she known his name, and not even his clan name but the secret name his mother called him? For an instant he imagined his mother’s cottage in the woods, and heard in his mind’s ear the drums of the summer festival, and saw the bonfire and the women dancing among the trees, among them Uruth, his mother’s cousin, but younger than him, a sweet girl with big eyes, but not beautiful, not like this.
Her smile dwindled as she saw his doubts. She stood with her hand on her hip, while the moonlight spread across the surface of the water. “Catch me,” she said, and she dived into the depths-the pool was deeper than it looked, he knew. With a cry, he dived in after her, struggling to follow, to seize her as she swam down. For an instant he thought he’d clasped her in his arms, but then she’d slipped down deep, her wet silk slippery as eel skin. The water was murky, suffused with light, and he saw nothing.
His lungs were bursting, but he held his shape. He knew this was a test, a last test, and if he failed it she would not come again. Last year he’d tried to follow her down, and in the hole at the bottom of the pool where the current changed and the water turned cold, he’d lost his nerve. Defeated, desperate, he had clawed his way up to the surface again.