For isiscolo.
Set in Seige At Blue Mountain and just barely The Cry From Beyond, with references from Fire an Flight and before. Title from Edward Coate Pinkney's "Widow's Song". With thanks to my awesome beta Becca!
~||x||~
Dart remembers the fire.
The feel of his fingers running down the hide his mother had left stretched out between branches. The feel of his father's ever silent presence, heavy like the humming air before sky fire would strike, body taut and still even when the pack was lulled into sound of laughter and whimsy in the return from Redlance's rescue.
It is the freshest sense of The Now he can remember – and being a child.
His fingers in the soft buckskin, how it was pulled tight on the branches outside their den. The way his mother's fingers had just twined into his hair – he always wonders, rewrites, questions, whether this was to laugh at his youthful exuberance or to scold him. He wants to hold out. To savor this moment. The safety under his father's presence and the touch of his mother. To push away what has to come next.
"Dart—"
What never stops coming in dream or memory, no matter how many times he remembers it.
When his mother's fingertips, just barely twirling his short tufted hair, seized like she'd touched ice or been overcome with pain. The whisper-quiet sound of his father's feet as he had leapt up and the air tensed with the heavy weight of a sending he never heard. As his mother's hands found his shoulders and swept him from the ground with no warning, then into his father's arm, tight against a bow thrown over shoulders.
Even surprised, scared by the low whimpers and running footsteps – the only sounds the pack had allowed themselves to have – even when Cutter's voices rang through the forest, dictating what will be taken and where to go. He was a Wolfrider, born of the forest, beloved cub of their tender tanner and fiercest archer. Even in his confusion, even seeing the fear in his mother's eyes when his father swung him down to be caught by his mother on the ground, Dart never cried out.
"Sandstorms, wake up already."
The strong voice, commanded low at his ear when the pillow had connected with his face, brought Dart to awareness with a hard jolt. All scents of the forest faded replaced with blistering arid winds and flakes of sand between his tongue and his roof of his mouth. His heart hammered in his chest, and the hand that had come up to batter away the tree that was a pillow instead fisted into it over his face.
He might not be much older than Cutter was when he led the Wolfrider's across the burning sands to Sorrow's End, but Dart, even now leader of his own ragged pack, can't help the fears that resurface retracing the steps of his childhood.
"The same dream again?" The same voice asked in a whisper meant to evoke confidence in not being overheard. Sushen. Always at his side. The little soul brother he had never known he needed before Sorrow's End.
But even after three years hard training, Sushen is not a Wolfrider. They are not. They will not hear the way he does, the way he'll never stop hearing. How he can tell from the faintest shifting sounds that there are others on the other side of the makeshift tent also quite awake, though whether straining to hear or to avoiding it he cannot tell through the pillow.
Yes, was the single word lock sent as Dart rolled on his side, away from the voice, pulling the pillow down into his arms to clutch tight.
The blankets rustled, ones behind him and then his own, until an arm slithered across his side and wound tight at his stomach. A hand finding his own at the same time as a clothed body was pressed against his back and he was tugged closer. There was the exhale of warmth from the mouth yawning into his upper spine in time to footsteps that stopped by his other side. His fingers laced into Sushen's, Dart looked up as Newstar knelt down by his side.
Even with her glorious corn silk hair piled high and a many colored veil as her sheath for these sleeping hours in the blistering sun and heat, it is the true emotion of her sending and her gaze settled on the hem of his blanket that guides his tongue to stay still. I have them, too.
Dart shifted, ignoring the snort into his shoulder from behind, and lifted open his blanket with the hand of twined fingers. Newstar slipped into his bed as though it were any other bed she might have gone to normally in the Sun Village, the beds that would never have turned down so beautiful a maiden.
But it was in the way her knees drew up slightly, almost like a child. How her head had tucked under his chin and pressed a small shuddering breath into his collar bone, when he wrapped the blanket and their arms around her, which he knew. That their heart beats matched in a rhythm of their thoughts.
They were the only two who had chosen to take up the mission to help the Wolfriders. Her parents were content with the choice they made and Wing had been too young to understand or remember. The cold, the heat, starving for food, never knowing when they would find shelter or whether they would die in the vast stretching sands that were nothing like their forest.
There are no words which can salve the things they've shared, that until now they've been allowed to forget in the balm of The Now in Sorrow's End, that they've given up for this mission.
Still, it's Sushen who murmurs, "Can we all go back to sleep now?" and pulls them both closer together in the circle of his arms.
~||x||~
Dart remembers the fire.
They ride through the dark nights, bundled warmly against bitter cold, following the need the Wolfriders have for them and the directions Savah had given Suntop before them.
Across burning wastelands, where they have to rest during the day lest both jack-wolves and elves both become bested by overwhelming daystar heat and the task deplete their water supplies long before they reach the end of it. The game is sparse and everyone stays quiet and fleet when they are running across the dark night dunes.
The echoes of those who have passed this way before them, and those who have passed on to the realm of the High Ones on this trek as well, tightens both the fear inherent in those who have never left their sanctuary before and the resolve in those who had never known peace until it.
Across the low laying prairies with tufted grass and beside long Winding River, where they rest a day, filling up their water skins and washing for the first time in days, finding leisurely time to remove in-ground sand and losing themselves to each other and to smiling for the first time in many days of hard riding. The game is not plentiful but it's far from the lack they've lived with now, and bellies welcome being filled.
Remains litter the way, hallowed and horrible bench markers as proofs they have gone the right way. Shambled bones of a huge bird half sunk and shining in the ground, where carrion eaters have picked them clean, and memento's of their former pack mates. A knife with little wear, several zwoot packs in various stages of disrepair scattered through the high grasses.
His father's unstrung bow, with one end so gnawed it would never be used again.
Whispered path markers of a true Quest once solved, pointing them ever onward through the endless days and nights.
"Dart, we should rest for the night," Zantee says, edging to the forefront of the group, to pad beside him. Not so shy as he once was, but still more passively than a Wolfrider would broach such a necessary suggestion with their Chief.
"We could still make—" A Chief would have decided for himself, for the pack, for the reason weighed with the risks, but Dart looks back on his people. They droop at the helm of their great mixed wolves, holding on tenaciously with the strength that they've born under three years of training and weeks of journeying.
His words were softer. "They're exhausted, aren't they?"
He does not ask anymore than they can give, and yet the reason to keep going sings in him.
"We've all been going for a while," the once clay shaper says, in a tone that implies he is not talking about simply this day, but all these blurred days, and not them alone – but him whom they follow.
"We keep riding until it's the end," Dodia cuts in from their back right. The wear is in her voice, but the steal of her tone is matched by the growl of shaggy jackal-wolf that she rides. "Skimsand could carry me in my sleep if he needed to."
Those once soft, once makers and dancers, have changed under his tutelage into hunters, protectors, defenders. Denied a healer and with their Mother of Memory stolen, they had changed faster than anyone had given them credit to be able to do when even their protectors, the Wolfrider's, left Sorrow's End to take Cutter the message Suntop carried locked within.
Learning weapons and wounds and making their own wolf-friends from the mixed breeds that seven years in the mountains had given the area. They are now friends and comrades, a pack formed by necessity and choice and willingness to become more than what they were born and raised to be - who came without being asked.
Dart cannot help but see the culmination of all his choices, and their choices, each step of this path they now ride, when he looks back at them. They ride now, not in the dessert which has sheltered them, trained them, been their birth and bread, but in the cover of night, under the twin moons, into dark green forests, where the shadows are as mysterious and frightening to them as the bright intimacy of the great sands under the Day Star were once to the Wolfriders.
He is still a Wolfrider, he will always be a Wolfrider, and the cool shade of these first small trees leading them into the great forest before him calls out to his bones and blood like a missed lover, like water after the parched season – but these people, nervous, yet no longer scared fawns, have become his people, his pack, too. He needs them now as much as they once needed a stripling boy to show them the ways their people had all but erased from the furthest shadows of their being.
"We're almost there. I'm sure of it," Dart finally says to Zantee more than Dodia. "This must be the beginning of the Forbidden Grove."
Yet the hunch to the shoulders to his left, causing his eyes to drag to the boy again, makes him consider the rational need to have it all done tonight. He might want it – want to see pack, mother and father, chief – but his wants were not the only ones at stake.
His jack-wolf still pads forward, uncertainly slowing when focus is changing. His voice rose for those behind him to hear, "We'll break ground for the night up in those—" Dart had raised a hand pointing to the direction of what cover had most called to him—where morning would still hold shade of the trees and sweet water from the river, but the last words were stolen from his mouth.
The distance and the night were broken open with the sounds of wolves howling from the north suddenly, from where Dart had pointed. Long and high, attack and invaders, distrust and warnings about protecting hearth and home and cubs; and then a sudden brightness Dart will never be able to forget flared before their eyes.
He remembers. He remembers what this path has made sure he had never forgotten.
Swinging down from his father's stiff angry hands to land in his mother's arms, catching the look of fear in her eyes only to be distracted from her face, from the fierceness in a mother's usually tender hands by a glow of light like sunrise. In the dead of night. When the stars were still out. Coming too fast. A light which charred the air with smoke, which has sent all the animals running and his pack in panic fleeing from a ten generation home.
Fire.
There is a fire in the trees beyond them.
Sushen called something to him, racing as fast as his wolf could carry him, but Dart had dug his fingers in the pelt of his jackwolf, howling attention to his pack. An order to follow, a proclamation of intention. Driven by the madness of sharp memory, the clear and present danger to this forest. And his Jack-Wolfrider's fly through the dark green, driven onward, faster and harder than they've come on any day thus far.
Fire, fire, fire, it pounds in their leader's heart. Fear for missed family that might be close by and ready for the fight that he plunges his own onward to.
The whole pack howls as one, driven to wakefulness in the first whiff of their own quest's end, as he sends in earnest, in the force of a father never far from heart, over and over again, with all his might,
Wolfriders! We're coming!
~||x||~
Dart remembers the fire.
It is part of the legacy of the Wolfriders.
The Now does not need to look back, but Cutter, The Kinseeker, had taken them to new lands and new people, and the fierce flames had started it. Dreamers had only dreamed impossible dreams of other lands and elves before then. A small, resolute, and often bitter world that denied dissolution by any means – not by hunting, or mad magic, not the humans, nor the trolls, and not the fire that had taken a home older than all could remember.
The fight had all but ended before they burst into the space filled with foe and family. The JackWolfriders and especially their growling jackwolves succeeded in helping to round the band of miscreant humans up into one small space. Kept the angry humans, half covered in preserver webbing, from feeling there was any chance to strike out. But even when their captives stood, awaiting the swift hand of death, fierce in their shame and anger focused on their enemies— the elves did not.
The Now allows the blur of the two-that-are-not-one, a forest far behind, across deserts and mountains and troll caverns, and this one, filled with preservers to merge. Where Wolfrider's call out in howls of celebration seconds after snarls of defense. Their hearts have always been in the green and growing places, and here eyes and hands can touch with joy. If only briefly until the stories can be exchange, until once quest to find leads to revelation of help still needed.
Yet with the persuasion of Redlance, when the humans are rounded up and guarded by suspicious wolves and Wolfriders whose blood calls to wakefulness in this night's passed threat especially, there is time for the Sun Folk to rest before the morning's ride to Blue Mountain.
Dart listened patiently through tales of Winnowill, the Black Snake, and where doubt crests lock-sending is the only proof the JackWolfriders leader, and Wolfrider, needs.
"The Hoan G'Taysho—" The human words fall like rusty, hard tin in their high sweet Elven speech. "—were peaceful." It's a hard, twisted last word for Nightfall, even when she sits in Redlance's lap and his fingers braid and unbraid a long strand of brown hair. "They worshipped the gliders, lived beneath them and with them."
His eyes stray to the rounded humans. She is a hunter, like his father. They see in straight lines. The holt endangered, the forest nearly burned down around them, as in memory it was. Merging the-two-that-are-not-one even more into a singular evocation of fiercely guarded, fiercely needed home. Here, tonight, the past is not forgotten. Wounds inflicted and forgotten in The Now sing in remembered threat.
But it was not only the fire – it was the cause. Humans. Hatred and differences. Revenge and disgust and the need to wipe each other out. They stood there. Those supposedly once peaceful people who echo back to the children of Gotara all too easily. They who had claimed to be peaceful, who had turned their hands to attacking, to burning out. Wolfriders would find it far easier to except and accept that the later was true, that hate always lurking even under the five fingered hand of peace.
Especially when doused flames still lick the trees in the way their treeshaper leaned himself into his love and strain was still seen in even the smallest movements of his hands. It was all too easy to let the pattern lie, to be comforted by The Way, the way it had always been. Short and sharp and violent between Elf and Human.
Even when they have been sent by another elf.
It is almost incomprehensible to image – even when sending shows it to be a truth. Elves have fought elves and challenges have led to splintered packs and breaking ranks, but never have elves willfully causes the death of one another by their own hands, or by any others. To use humans to fuel such an act doubly so.
But Dart sees not only angry, bitter hate around him.
In long missed family and friends he hears the war between what just experienced and the ability to question the motive behind the circumstances. They have changed so greatly, when the hatred in glares cast toward captives is still tempered with words of reluctant belief, with witness to past events which don't hold true to this one.
And even when he looks to them, it is not only hate he saw in the tall human eyes.
He saw a young spindly boy, hands tied before him and a feather dangling in his hair, with small eyes that mix gratitude and fear and relief, who smiles. A smile Dart could not help but return shy and uncertain as it was given to him.
~||x||~
No one could have predicted a smile would change their world
Mountains, like forests, may rise and fall with time, and children and parents may lose and find each other throughout even only near immortal times. Yet one moment of four choices will change the course of history, again.
Kureel's madness, the betrayal of his world, making him scourge upon all the ants which loiter outside his demolished home.
Dart's defense of parents and two packs, well beloved and finally in the reach of fingers; his missed shot; when talons wrap around his lithe body, crushing ribs inward, and he is suddenly weightless. Geoki's hand shooting out to wrap around the spirit bird of the forests hand, and hanging on for dear life when they both are air born.
When they are falling, hurtling through the air toward ruins. Eyes meeting eyes, hands gripping each other in an equalizing terror and understanding – that humans are capable of far more than lighting fires, that elves are capable of more than being worshipped for divinity or feared for difference, when either is more than the taking of lives – before the sudden black ruin of nothingness.
Strongbow, when two shot in defense of cub and The Way, takes the first Elven life taken by Elven hands.
In the mountain elves have allowed humans to rescue humans, while elves have turned to rescuing their own. Yet it is upon the ruins of the once Blue Mountain and near-palace that a human repays the gift of a life for a life, to an elf. Where children of each make the greatest sacrifice of all, with no prize in mind – for each other.
The world is changed. The world will never be same.
~||x||~
They return in late summer, when the leaves have only just edged russet gold and red and orange of fire.
"They won't ever make sense," Sushen kicked a rock with his foot, glancing up at Dart on the low branch he sat on watching the humans that even real seemed to sun villagers as strangers from their legends. "First they want to kill you, then they want to save you, and now they won't stop making that racket because they think –what? Being touched by us made them holy?"
Dart glanced over his shoulder, to where his mother stood in the far top of a tree, touching his father's shoulder. Resolute stillness in one back, the weight of love and consequence wraps into the one which goes back to the humans dancing around the fire.
It is not as simple as a life for a life when even The Now knows change.
"Even you fainted in the presence of the palace, little soul brother," Dart said with an odd smirk, as he leapt down from the tree. Soon they will all be leaving, again. There are still things that need to be handled in realms other than these trees.
"The palace is our very beginnings—" Sushen said, audaciously, smacking Dart's side even as he didn't fight Dart's arm around his shoulder tugging him closer, both to himself and to the raucous display around the fire ring.
-And this is another one, Dart finished for him in an a true, yet affectionate sending, as Geoki looked up tentatively from his place of honor watching the woods spirits two stop a short distance from the offering for all their kind. A long new feather shown in his hair and Nonna's symbol of their act, Human and Elven hands grasped together, stretched around a hoop beside him.
The two regarded each other with that same first silence – and the same, yet not quite so shy, smile.
Their worlds bound each by one choice, each life saved by the other, hands and hearts entwined forever.