more than i ever wanted to write for a cariad chapter

too late to say merry christmas?


The red, spraying up and outwards, catches the light before it falls. The falling must take a long time, because before the first drops of Peppermask's blood touch the ready, waiting ground, they are all screaming. A battle-cry, a ululation on all sides that is somehow mechanical, overriding… for as they scream, they are running unconscious, spilling forward like so much blood.

Peppermask slumps and is dead. No one cares now; this is their trigger, no-man's-land safely breached, and city cat and Clanner alike may cross without burning their paws.

Voletooth's caught up in the running, thinking, as his feet pound the ground, Who am I running to? Which fight is his? The Clan bays, keeping pace with him, or perhaps he's merely afraid to drop behind. To be seen to hesitate, and remind each warrior his head was the next on Dawnshadow's list. Dawnstar. Whatever name she has now.

He must be seen to be a warrior.

The two sides clash with a tearing of bones. It's a sound that rises high, deeper than the screams that echo with real, earnest pain now. It has the resonance of thunder; like a storm, all manner of things are breaking.

Voletooth ducks a swinging forepaw, pushes the offender roughly away. His claws are sheathed. He doesn't see their face, just moves on, dodging and dodging further into the melee.

As if in a dream, one of his old ones, up rises a grinning grey face, teeth split and shining. Streamshade. He's never spoken to the warrior, never been given cause, and he certainly does not now. Any conversation between them, now, would contain claws.

Despite himself – the self that, five moons ago, would have delighted, or relieved, in the killing of her – Voletooth puts on another backspin, feinting far out of reach, until another soldier tumbles into his place and begins the hapless fight. Fallen, like a domino, to fall again. Voletooth just pedals further on, legs blurring, feeling stick-thin and lifeless. Out of the corner of his eye (wet, as though with some emotion) something gold and violent tears across the ground. Larger than life now, swollen with blood and death, a hunger barely whetted to match.

It can only be Dawnshadow, who's already foresworn his death.

Feeling shy, stumbling, in her prowess, Cariad ducks behind another figure. He thinks her recognises her, the black cat – Evala – from long-forgotten warehouse days, a soldier never of any note. There, are far as he ever knew, for some free food and a little hope.

Behind her Dawnshadow storms, thunders, throws out flashing claws. General Evori falls where he stands, gently eviscerated.

Voletooth presses to the ground – he's certain he's next.

Evala's shadow is only dark for a moment: only a reprieve for one second longer.

Sunlight is quick to wash across his face again, warm as the weight of a kitten. No, the warm thing is blood; he smells it now on himself, yet not his own. Evala has parted to let the sun shine through, throat torn to the bone, and ceases, quickly, to stand.

Pressed to the ground, Voletooth flounders. The fight he's run from has surely caught up to him now; the same fight he'd thought to escape, once, in a cloudlit clearing with one dead apprentice as his offering. As soon as he sees Nettlecloud standing bloody, he knows it; she has always been perplexed by the concept of a Tainted she can't touch, mustn't kill, and that barrier is freshly fallen for her.

He might say a word. Nothing comes.

Her appraisal of him is measured and slow. He straightens, wanting some dignity for himself, though he's not sure he can wrestle that much away from her estimations before he dies. The look stretches from his toes to the tips of his ears; a savouring, an attempt to make memory. The nod is infinitesimally small, a splinter of movement; thrown at him, almost missed between blinks, he catches it. And she's no longer standing there – she isn't anywhere, and all he has is a reprieve.

Voletooth swears under his breath – what now, what the hell now?

Fight; fight who?

He runs instead, only fighting himself, unsure which side – if either – deserves his life. His scales must be broken. Voletooth runs blindly, swerving by sound. Sonar only works for a moment before he goes crashing into someone. The air shakes from his lungs. The ground bounces, very firmly, beneath him. He meets it again like something discarded and lies heavily, trying to breath.

He sucks it in, trying that; that familiar smell, dearer to him that his own, the scent of a friend.

The old friend is faster, up to his paws again in a flash, pouncing on Voletooth's body with a misplaced, garish laugh. The sound is bone-dry. It loses itself in the melee almost instantly.

"You thought you could run away to join PureClan, and really not hear from me about it?" Thad asks seriously, peering down at him as though the question's genuine.

Voletooth, thinking he's changed, wonders if it is. He just wraps a foreleg over Thad's back, squashes him close, and feels relieved to see a face that doesn't truly hate him, by dint of birth and blood.

"You really didn't get my messenger hawks?" he asks. They must look as though they're tussling, because no one interrupts them. "I sent one every day."

"There's your problem," Thad says, wobbling to a balance on Voletooth's chest, "I don't speak fucking bird, mate."

They giggle on the battlefield, almost hysteric – maybe they are, and hallucinating. This happiness that should feel tarnished doesn't.

Thad gives him a long look, reading his scars, measuring all his Clan-given changes. He must see even what's beyond the surface, and he doesn't rear back. Cariad remembers what it is to have an ally, truly; not some shifty Clan thing, given to murder and deception from moment to moment, master of tricks he doesn't understand 'til they're played.

He must wait for him to beg news of Elettra, but he doesn't. And he doesn't ask questions.

Instead, he gives him the quickest of updates; Miss AWOL; Emory marching; Oakpaw, a vague name he's only heard muttered, in curse, fled and returned; the flood come and gone.

"Your sister," he says; Voletooth sits up and he slides back, back to the ground with a bare thump. Voletooth is glaring; he thinks he won't want to hear this, and, of course, he's right. "Your sister. She came to join the army."

He forces his eyes shut tightly, if only so Thad won't see the deep glittering depths of anger in them, because it's for him just as much as the generals, as Miss and Emory. He let her join too, and she's here? Here to die, break open like a baby bird spilled from its nest?

He throws them open again because he has to look, must find her – sweep her up and take her from here, before she falls.

Thad notices the searching, the scanning of every broken, blank face his eyes can reach. Already, the dead are a multitude, an army of their own. He raps a paw against Cariad's nose, once and sharp.

"She's not here, mate," says Thad. "She left with Oakpaw and didn't come back, before we marched. She must have found something, a group maybe, because we haven't found her yet, and we've scoured every inch from here to the city."

"You lost her?" he growls, trying to redirect his fury to a point over Thad's head, but he must feel it crackle above him anyway.

The anger falls suddenly into a bleakness, and he remembers the rogues dragged into camp, the memory he tries very hard to keep locked up. He had scanned faces, recognised some – but not all of them, before he was ejected from camp. Couldn't save even a single one, and he knows they all died.

Khia was very small; he can't kid himself she ever grew much. In a group she would be too hard to spot, too tiny and too far below the eyeline. In fear, she'd crouch even smaller.

How small, then, would she be in death?

A mouse.

A dot.

A tear.

Easy cleaning.

All feelings crushed, reduced, Voletooth ceases to feel anything at all. Into this thirsty void comes flooding righteousness – not an emotion at all, a duty. His birthright, too long overlooked. The dark flash of a figure reaches his periphery, smelling overmuch of PureClan, a cloying and hated scent, which he too wears.

Regrets.

Voletooth's leg goes out, almost unprompted; the warrior runs dully into it and throws himself back on the ground, mouth a wide and breathless shape, dented by a wheezing rush of air. His lungs do not fill again. Voletooth pins his throat, traps his lungs as one would hobble a bird with broken wings, and goes through it with his claws. It's like hewing through dirt. He saws for a moment, to be thorough.

Voletooth looks down, wondering who he's killed. Scarpelt. The name means little to him, nothing at all now.

It's surprising at all that Thaddeus meets his gaze, gratifying that he does it without flinching. He shrugs as though to say, well, that's what we're here for.

Voletooth had forgotten.

He gives his friend one last, solid look. For the last time: he will be meeting his sister soon.

"Fare well, Thad," he says, his throat choked, like the last breath Scarpelt never took. His own are certainly numbered; shedding down to single digits. He doesn't ask about Elettra. He doesn't forgive Thad the sin of losing his sister. He nods and to the violence he goes, the great big beating heart of it, all chambers pulsing blood. He stands at the centre, centred, and waits.

First to take the bait, shaggy long fur already rimed with blood, is Slatethorn; pedestrian and common to Voletooth, who's never seen him do more than stand guard. Voletooth tosses him aside and waits for something better, something worth the anger in his blood, worth shedding it for. The tabby is next, perhaps the one called Mossfall, who has always stayed far out of his way and given him darkly curious looks – blaming him for Volepaw's death, and not the system that set it up. They all did, and in a way, he knows even Sunfeather does. That she faults him for the death of the Clan's own.

And now she will fault him for more.

The tabby is quick enough, absorbent of the blows he gives her, although the little nicks he scores bleed freely. He feels strange, that they aren't talking or spitting enmity at each other, as the soldiers had always indulged in while training.

They're beyond words; nothing can madden them further, nothing can talk them down.

Mossfall is not enough of a target. He swings against her skull, hears a dull little crack that bodes well for his winning streak, and she folds easily enough away. Dead, maybe. He's without the wherewithal to check. Voletooth just sees the stilling of all motion and moves on. Though not far, never a step to be had without blood and bodies in the way.

He sees a thin grey tom – a weird name, even for PureClan, something about bones and bad weather – standing heaving over a small, slumped form, whom he might know. Britta, he thinks, who took to Miss's orders like a fish to water. She would have followed her anywhere, but the trail ends here, and he sees the venerated leader nowhere.

Sleetclaw runs past, bumps his shoulder to the warrior's, calling out, "Keep it up, Coldbone!"

Voletooth curls his lip. They'd given him an ugly name, but treated their own worse. Coldbone's awful name wouldn't be a problem much longer.

The warrior begins to fight again, some nameless soldier who's unknown to him. A later recruit; somehow there'd still been more to find. Voletooth rips him away from that new opponent, who doesn't even look offended. Coldbone doesn't seem to recognise him, just moves with ease into another fighting stance that is oiled, smooth, and waiting. Voletooth makes a mirror of it; he's practised for this, too.

Voletooth circles for a moment, finding the first opening. Coldbone guards himself, but only with the experience of one, deadly enough, who's never really been tested.

He fakes a move, watching Coldbone fall into it too easily, and shoves his face into the ground. It's a damp red, threatening to go soft and muddy. The grey warrior rises up breathless, dirt on his face; snarl dimmed and ruined by the new stain on his teeth.

Taking the tom apart, Voletooth is wondering why they ever had such fear. The machine may be dismantled, one tiny cog after another. He is ashamed: not for the Clan, but for the city. Their subjugation could've been short. Had they not been gutless, had they prepared well.

Coldbone is left, twitching, on the ground. Voletooth's broken one doll and searches for the next – willing to take down the whole Clan, if no one else will, to beat down each head of the beast. He's waited too long, and his own patience has ceased to impress him. He has to, for Khia. Nevermind the city now.

They always wait too long to strike.

Voletooth turns, almost thinking Coldbone has risen again as a pale face, cold as a good winter's hoarfrost, steps into sight. He snaps his teeth a little at her, determined to put her down again, before he realises it's not Coldbone or another faceless worker bee.

Hers is a face he remembers from his bloody trial, simmering on the edges of memories in camp, from hostile voyeurism in the warriors' den.

Hers is a little too similar to the first Clan cat he killed, to the first dead set of eyes to bore into him, down on him. Volepaw had a sister. And even earlier, before he set foot in the ring with an already-dead tom, he had his sights on her. Thought to take her from the forest, he and Azazel both, that they might make Miss happy. He guesses Miss never got exactly what she wanted; this she-cat, this warrior now, even less so.

Fernstep's cold mask cracks a little, like ice, as she speaks. It's a smile.

"The fluke that saved your life," she drawls, "should be well and truly expired."

She moves to check, a breath of darting grey wind. Voletooth blinks, the moment of fleeting blindness a mistake; she is on his throat before his eyes even open, on his throat and shaking. He chokes, he gasps, makes all the noises Fernstep wants to hear – she's not killing him, not yet, before she wrings out of him all the sounds of vengeance. Her growl is slick and smooth, reverberating through his own throat, until he understands she's purring now.

Voletooth's head goes back, a movement divorced from his own logic. He feels the spray of blood, warm, and thinks he's left his throat in her mouth.

But there's only black scraps in her mouth. Fur, pinned to her teeth, as she puts her ears back and spits.

She wants him dead as he should've been, the death designed for him; finally in the role he was meant to play. The thing marauding in him a moment ago would've laughed at this, snapped her in two like a twig because it could, and indeed, what was there to stop him.

But he doesn't want it.

Not anymore, not a moment longer on this bloody field with shades fleeing every which way. There's only fear and pity for Fernstep, for all those like her, only because he understands what it takes to make them. He was nearly made that way too.

"Stop," he says, a little hoarse for all the bruising on his windpipe. "Your brother was an accident. I wanted him dead no more than I do you."

Fernstep considers this.

He rues that he did not know her, only so he could stop this fight, to the death he imagines, before it earnestly begins.

Much like any Clan cat he's ever met, she doesn't really listen. There's something blocking their ears, always, and it's only the hard and steely words that drive their way through. Fernstep comes forward again, tucked close to the ground to get at his belly. He feels a sharpness blooming before he thinks to fight back, to lay her out as he really meant to a minute ago.

With a heavy paw to her head, he knocks her back. She's stunned, but doesn't care for the sensation, staggering through it anyway with claws grasping for his eyes. He does it again, and once more, until she slumps over.

Not dead, he checks anxiously. Close enough in appearance, with blood dribbling out her mouth and down her throat, and he hopes that suffices. Surely no one is going around feeling for pulses.

He backs away, relief searing through him like something too cold. It seems important now, that her life isn't his to take, and he hasn't damned her like her brother. But the ground beneath him is wet, running with it, and he sinks a little. It's warm, but cooling a little, as the air is cool.

Cariad looks down, just as quickly as the wave of bile rushes up his throat to meet him.

Little Littlefrost. Neck snapped; mouth foamy with blood. And, how much blood.

Again he looks up, the corners of his vision stretched suddenly, impossibly, painfully wide, so he sees it all. He can't not see it all, the awful tableau spread out as though for sampling, for consumption.

Gorsespots, clawing wildly, ripped apart by a she-cat on his back and a tabby at his throat. In the mere moments it takes for him to die they're torn from their triumph, landing bellies upturned, slaughtered in a heartbeat by Meadowmist, the pair he leaves behind. After a space, an afterthought, she leans down and takes the tabby's throat, too.

Nearby Mallowblaze is twitching, a fit of something, with sweat on his flanks and death growing white in his eyes. There are no bodies nearby, no one he might take with him.

And even as he watches, heart sinking, old friend Cort is crushed by Firestorm, pushed into bones and dirt by a too-heavy hand. He goes in absolute silence, but maybe that's Cariad and the ringing in his ears, each heartbeat another shrilling. Firestorm goes, with a foot in Cort's slack dead face.

Cariad looks back to Littlefrost, lying so sweetly in the midst of slaughter. It is chaos and ruin, he should not be here; someone might step on him. He puts gentle teeth in his scruff, remembering what it is to be carried, and takes Littlefrost away. It is none too pleasant; the tabby's bloody head lolling, the broken bones of his neck click-clicking, as though in the effort to be whole again. Cariad stills on the edge of the forest, knowing it would be foolhardy to drag him any further. He thinks about burial. Maybe later there will be time.

But Littlefrost is safe here, as much as he can ever be with bones that won't mend and eyes that don't blink. This diversion was unwise, strange even, but he's glad for the action. It still proves something is right in him; even though, minutes ago, he could've easily murdered this tom without a backwards thought, a backwards anything. Cariad stares pensively into the trees.

Perhaps I should walk back in, he thinks. Let them take me down. What would it cost, really?

His life? Well then, with that gone, he's free to rejoin his sister. What else is there to consider?

His eyes snag on something in the forest. The most alarming colour; deep gold, flashing past leaves, fast enough to stir worry in one's gut. That's a familiar shade, Morningstar's shade, and he hasn't missed her absence. He'd be nothing more than a toothpick to her, a faintly whetting appetizer before she tries the full course. Her daughter's head is on the table.

The colour shutters and reappears, and then he realises they're eyes. Only eyes. They reach the faint light of forest's edge, and Cariad can see it's Sorrelstorm. His stomach tightens into twists again; he left Sunfeather in this tom's care.

The medicine cat flicks an ear. A summons. Cariad creeps into the undergrowth to join him.

"What is it?" he asks, surprised to find he still has a voice. Not gone completely feral, then, despite his best efforts.

Bluntly, the other tom says, "Sunfeather is kitting."

"Early?" he asks, stupidly. Of course it's early.

The ginger tom is hesitating. What's gone so horribly wrong?

"There's something else," he says finally, without the words he struggled to find. "Just come with me."

And he melts back into the forest again, going quickly; without the flashlight of his eyes, Cariad follows clumsily. Too many roots to trip, too many trees to block. He runs best as he can, scent-blind, the smell is blood all within and without.

He thinks he hears someone behind him but it's masked by his crashing, so he only runs faster.

A hard few minutes later he's back in camp, winded. His ribs are aching from a blow he didn't even know he caught. Blood is crusted into a wind-dried shield on his chest. Cariad ducks his head to clean it, vainly; can't see Sunfeather like this (who may, he wonders, be jealous), can't meet his kits like this either, introduce himself as a blight and a murderer.

Sunfeather hisses from the nursery as Sorrelstorm tucks himself inside. A small concession; no one, though, would be expecting hysterics from Sunfeather.

A slip of grey flashes past. He flinches, expecting the blow, but the grey thing – Ashflower – just darts into the nursery after Sorrelstorm. Cariad stares. He didn't know Sunfeather had friends, let alone one she'd want here, in the place of her pair. Sorrelstorm hadn't come for her.

He just lingers outside the nursery. Is he wanted here? Why should Ashflower

A blip crosses his vision. A small dot, moving fast, hitting his nose, spitting… Come from the nursery, small enough to inhabit it, yet nothing of the Clan's. He squints down at the thing batting his chest; reaching for, it looks like, his nose, to shred with tiny thorn-tip claws. He wasn't aware the Clan had any kits, yet, between Puddlepaw and Goosepaw being apprenticed, and Flurrycloud, out on the battlefield in a hormonal homicidal fury, not yet kitted.

Cariad puts a paw on the thing's tail before it accidentally damages something vital. It doesn't stop moving, just turns to gnaw his foot with the self-same fury. Squealing, between nibbles, "Let me go you oaf!"

He does, and it – a she, small, brown and padded all over with cobwebs – sits down with a thump. Hardly large enough to stir up dust: that which does clings to her vaguely sticky, herb-smelling fur.

Bemused, he thinks, Sorrelstorm's taking in rogues now. Morningstar's hardly been gone a minute.

"You're very murderous for a… Khia?"

He thought her dead; she's only halfway dead. Not dead enough to quell that vengeful look in her eyes, which grows tenfold at the realisation he'd not recognised her. Well, how was he to? How should he guess she'd have hardly grown, and would be here of all places?

"I've always been very murderous," she says icily. "I suppose both of us never knew the other as well as we thought we did."

"We thought… what?"

He can't follow, can't keep up, barely processing the bright and pure joy of knowing his sister is alive.

"Me, murdery. You, actual murderer for a cult. We never knew."

"It isn't… I never had a choice in it," he says, aching for her to understand and knowing she won't. The only ones who ever could are long dead, the ones saved too by a strange, unusual law. "When your choices are live a monster, or die a fool, you pick the one that lets you wake up the next morning."

Khia seethes. "You got that right. Monster."

"I may have – I don't think I was ever a…"

Scarpelt, Slatethorn, Mossfall, Coldbone. Volepaw.

Won't tell her the names, let her know she's right; and that he did it all for her.

"I saw you," she spits. His heart goes to a very low place. Nothing will fix what he's done, if she saw him kill.

She goes on. "That day in the forest. Those other warriors. You brought Ru back to them. You gave them his life."

He'd forgotten. Monster he is, Clan-thing he's become, Cariad had forgotten the number of his sins.

"Is he dead yet?" she wails. "Did you kill him for them too?"

"No, Khia, no," he says roughly. "He's fine."

Starving, maybe. Scared, which is only right.

"We brought him back to the cave. We–they keep prisoners there, so that's where he's been… I wanted to let him go, I really was going to… But when I asked him about you, he said he'd let you die. So I thought that was the best place for him, then. The cave."

Khia turns around, smacking the ground with a wince and a scowl. "Damn it! Everybody always thinks I'm dead."

"I didn't," pipes a voice from the nursery entrance; it's a young cream-coloured tom.

"No," she says. "You're about the only optimist I know."

Cariad looks between them; there's a perceptual softening of Khia as she watches the tom, and the small lively bloom of a thing in the tom's eyes. He wonders if he ever looked at Elettra or Sunfeather in quite the same way. No, he knows. He's never had that kind of depth.

"Were you going to let him die?" Khia asks, turning back. "Really?"

Yes, he admits it, he can hardly say he was planning a jailbreak.

"At one point I would've too." She sighs, heavily. "I don't like you, Cariad. Or Volewhatever it is now. I sure as hell don't trust you."

Cariad feels on the verge of a crushing rejection.

"But you are my brother, and I'm not going to forget that," she finishes. Being Khia, she must leave off on a vaguely threatening air. "Don't you forget it either."

"Never," he says hoarsely, a promise, knowing before he came too close.

His sister stares up at him, scrunching her face. "Fine. That's about all the reunion I can stomach, right now. Besides, I think you've done something to that she-cat that warrants your presence in there."

Head bent, feeling chastised, he goes into the nursery. He forgets he was anxious, even afraid, and most of all confused.

He sees Sunfeather first of all, a splash of sunlight in the darkness; Ashflower curled around her like a finger of smoke, murmuring in her ear. And, wiggling there in the nest, three very small shapes. His heart belongs to them immediately.

His pair watches him appraise them. A grey tabby, stripes indistinct and crimped, a little black one, and a large golden tom, black in points: clearly his son, the biggest of the lot. He purrs very loudly, leaning in to stare closer, and Sunfeather has to repeat herself when he doesn't hear.

"That one's not ours," she says. And he frowns.

"Well, why then is it in your nest?"

"Your sister found it. I'm going to raise it. Chillkit," she says, pointing to the golden tom, the cuckoo. "Volekit for the black one, for you, and Strongkit for the grey girl."

"Named already," he says, disappointed but faintly. Names are the last thing his mind has been running through today.

"Yes. I didn't trust you… creatively," says his pair. "Listen. I think it's clear that PureClan, as it was, is over. Without my mother there's nothing else, no other fear strong enough to hold this rabble together. Let alone the war out there, now. I don't expect you to want any responsibility towards these kits, now that you can go anywhere. Sh, don't protest your paternal inclinations. What's more, I don't need you to take responsibility for them. I can do this all on my own, but I don't have to. With Ash here."

Both she-cats are staring at him defiantly. He feels something, a longstanding mental block, fall aside.

"Oh," he mumbles.

"I know you had someone else. I do too. Is that a problem?" Sunfeather asks.

"Err…" Had he loved her? No, not exactly, but she'd been his, everything he had. He feels rather shunted aside, but he had clearly never been to Sunfeather what she was to him, and he can't change that in a jealous pique. Still more, he thinks he wants happiness for her. That maybe she might deserve it. Knowing, as he has for a while, that she was too full of someone else to make room for him (who do you love, unimportant, hundreds or nobody).

Two mothers seem a beautiful thing to Cariad, who barely had one.

He says, "No. I wish you both happiness."

"With PureClan… put aside… I'm going to raise them right."

"With love," he guesses, raising a brow. It will be the blind leading the blind – quite literally, for a few days.

Sunfeather looks uncomfortable with the word, but she nods. Ashflower licks her ear. "I don't have the greatest wealth of knowledge with that," she replies slowly. "If you wanted to stay a while, and lend yours, I don't think the kits would mind. Or us."

Chillkit lets out a tiny growl-wail; the she-cats look at him, suffused with glowing maternal satisfaction, but Cariad is unsettled. Perhaps this tiny thing is already rejecting him… and found? Found? As if finding infants lain on the ground is any basis for parental indictment.

He looks closer.

Touched by gold, a shade not so familiar as it is unsettling… a colour not inherited from Sunfeather, as he thought, but from another source entirely.

Big enough, round tumescence that will turn him tall and imposing, one day soon.

Abandoned, on the eve of a battle that's raging, newborn, the wonder of birth turned aside for the novelty of death.

"Morningstar's," he says. "That's her son."

Sunfeather juts out her chin. "You liked her first one well enough."

"You liked her daughter better still," Ashflower says, her first words, spiked through with sparse enough envy.

"He deserves a chance," Sunfeather says. "Cariad." She says his name like a summons, bringing him back to the thing he was, the new and young thing that would've agreed, before he cracked Volepaw's neck with the antithesis of trying.

Cariad has had chances; more than the usual two, more than most get. This tiny child, unwitting, deserves them all. Live a monster or die a fool, he'd said, but perhaps the line between them can be toed. Just exist.

"I know," he says. "I'll be his father. If you'll have me."

She smiles, and it is suddenly long ago, bright-edged with the touch of memory, Sunfeather saying saying now as she said then: "You are the father of my children."

Outside, the wind changes.

The screaming stops.