Surely Recognition might cause such madness. Partially reassured, the chieftess caught the stranger beneath the shoulders. The gray wolf whined, but did not interfere as she half lifted, half dragged him over the heavy drifts. The Dreamsinger was slight, perhaps the same build as Sapling. Yet the Huntress was tired, and the snow hampered her steps. Leaving her arrows and broken bow, she labored over the ice with her burden until her feet stumbled beneath her. Her strength was long-since s
pent. Somehow she continued. In
time the magic of despair fell behind. The stars overhead lay pale in the glow of dawn, and green ferns and moss cushioned her steps.
Skyfire lowered the Dreamsinger in a clearing and flung herself down by his side. Whether or not there were humans, she could go no farther. She curled on the ground beside the strange elf and slept. After pacing with uneasiness the gray wolf curled on the opposite side of elf-friend and buried its muzzle beneath its brush.
* * *
Huntress Skyfire awakened to song. Sunlight dappled her shoulders and eased the ache of her cut wrist; yet even summer's warmth seemed thin beside the joy in Dreamsinger's melody. The chieftess stirred, and found eyes of unearthly silver intently watching her. The black
-
haired elf seemed poised, as if for flight; only the ties of Recognition prevented.
Speech itself seemed an intrusion, a sour note against a magnificence of song that no living being might dare to spoil. **Come,** Skyfire sent. She raised her arms toward him.
The outsider elf hesitated. Outcast, the song defined him, and a thread of sadness slowed the cadence.
'No.' Skyfire smiled, for the moment as sure as bedrock. 'Dreamsinger.' Though the ways of the pack and the vision of dream might war inside her, the call of Recognition obscured them.
For a moment the fey elf did not move. All his years of wandering cast a current of doubt between them. Skyfire smiled, uncaring; and the pull of longing overwhelmed. The Dreamsinger answered the name he had been given and gathered Skyfire into his embrace. His song swelled around her. For an instant she knew the wild joy of Timmain running with her wolf-mate; then the pound of blood in her veins overturned the dream. The notes of the spell shifted afresh, transformed the clearing to a place of new spring grass that was softly perfect for mating. Skyfire had known the exertion and thrill of the hunt. She had killed for food and for survival, and lived the fierce way of the wolf-pack. She had howled in moonlight, and chipped winter ice for drinking, and gnawed upon bones when her stomach was hollow with hunger. The life of the pack contained all there was to know of death and survival. But in Dreamsinger's arms the Wolfrider chieftess learned gentleness, and that one thing overturned all else.
Dreamsinger traced her many scars with light fingers. His song spoke now of healing, and places where elves need not kill. Skyfire heard, and ached with the terror of the unknown. This dream which lacked the howl and the hunt tore away the familiar, left her adrift without bearings. The Dreamsinger sang of the past, lost forever, or of a life impossibly far into the future. Skyfire caught her fey mate close, for his body was warm and listening caused pain. Yet little comfort came to her. He was the song, and his strangeness brought conflict beyond bearing. The pull of Recognition would not let her leave, not let her run and join Woodbiter, and find refuge in the pack. She could not go; in time she no longer wanted to. The Dreamsinger's strange magic touched her spirit and wove irrevocable change.
After the mating he caught up her fiery hair and gloried in the colour, which promised both sunset and dawn. As he braided the shining length of it, Skyfire looked up past his head and watched a tree burst spontaneously into blossom. The scent made her languid and content, until the Dreamsinger's spell changed key, as, inevitably, it must. He belonged to no pack. As Outcast, he must leave her, or risk the leadership she had won from Two-Spear at such cost. Dreamsinger's music encompassed the brightness and sorrow of that. Released from the drive of Recognition, and caught in contention between ways, Skyfire pulled free of his arms, unable to speak.
The aftermath of their joining was bittersweet. The Dreamsinger pulled on his ragged clothing with his back turned. Before the afternoon was spent, his grey wolf arose and slipped away with him into the forest.
* * *
Evening fell, and the moon rose. Skyfire sat amid drifts of falling petals. Woodbiter crouched at her feet, insistently proud of finding her; she had strayed very far from known territory. The old wolfs sides heaved as he panted, yet occasionally, in concern, he would turn his muzzle and lick at the cut on his chieftess's arm.
Skyfire scratched absently at his ears. She was hungry but had no inclination to hunt. The woodland silence oppressed her, filled her with a strange, numb emptiness that the way of the wolf could never fulfill. She would bear a cub to the Dreamsinger; such was the fruit of Recognition. But his song and his dream might leave her with more than offspring, if she was bold enough to risk leading the tribe into change.
For by the way of the wolf, Dreamsinger was Outcast. The magic of the high ones ran to madness within him. Rightly the earlier generations had driven him out, for compassion and dreams of peace had no place in pack life. Yet Skyfire had shared his visions. She had experienced the hopes of Timmain, and through them she understood that her ancestress had mated for more than the toughness and savagery of the wolf. The ancestress had wished to pass on hardiness and forest cunning, yet retain the bright dreams of the first ones. All of this had been lost over time. Skyfire's tribe lived only the way of the pack, and not an elf among them questioned why.
The chieftess rose restlessly to her feet. She drew on her boots, and blossoms fell like snow from her shoulders. She considered the cub she would bear from this mating. It might inherit its father's fey madness. By pack law, it also might suffer and be driven away into solitude. Skyfire flicked her braid back in frustration. By then she herself might not remember the song and the dream, for the wolfsong eroded the memory. This minute she perceived very clearly. If the tribe continued as it had, they would have nothing to offer their cubs but hardship and hunger and the changeable luck of the hunt. Something precious stood to be lost, perhaps without chance of recovery.
Dreamsinger himself held the answer. He wandered the forest in exile, hunting what he could forage, and driven relentlessly by gifts that had potential to kill him. Yet he had not died. His madness had harmed no others. Skyfire might bring him into the holt, and ensure the continuance of the dreams his songs inspired. But to do so defied pack law. For that the Wolfriders would challenge her, force her to fight and fight again until all had submitted to her will. Her chieftainship might be lost. She might be defeated by another, and earn death or even exile without hope of reprieve. The thought of sharing Two-Spear's cruel fate filled her with distress. Woodbiter sensed, and whined softly by her knee.
Skyfire stroked the wolfs head, but not to offer reassurance. **Find Dreamsinger,
**
she sent.
The wolf hesitated. Sharply impatient, the chieftess drove him forward. She had learned a thing worth fighting for, worth even the risk of total loss. Elves might hunt with wolves, and share the hardships of survival. But Dreamsinger had showed her another way, neither elf nor wolf, but a glimpse of Timmain's wise vision. Skyfire chose change. She slipped through the thickets like the wild creature she was, her ears listening keenly for distant strains of a song she still could not distinguish between the sending of an elf, or true sound.
Triple-Cross
Lieutenant Jensen paced, spun in a tight circle, then hammered an angry fist on the chart table. Loose marker pins scattered from the blow, falling like micro-shot through furniture tight-knit as a battle formation. 'Damn the man, what godforsaken plot could send him back to Guildstar?'
i
nformation, maybe,' suggested Harris, who lounged with closed eyes on the wall bunk, his pilot's coverall in its usual neglected state of crumple. Quarters on
Sail
were far too cramped for displays of violent frustration; by now resigned to having sleep disrupted by his senior's obsession with the obscure motivations of a criminal, Harris chose not to fight the inevitable. 'You can bet Mac James isn't making the run for any merchant's sake.'
The model of a Fleet officer in a faultlessly fitted duty coverall, Jensen swore. Black-haired and classically handsome, he leaned on his knuckles and glared at his holo map of Alliance space, which hogged whatever paltry space their quarters had to offer. The display was crisscrossed with threads and speared with markers in three colors: blue for those sites the skip-runner MacKenzie James was rumored to have visited; yellow for a confirmed sighting, and red for any station or planet or interstellar vessel that had fallen prey to his penchant for piracy. Mac James being the most wanted criminal on Fleet record, the map was peppered red from end to end.
'Or else the source you bribed is selling you a line of crap,' Harris added.
Jensen swore again. He smoothed back bangs razor
-
trimmed in the latest military fashion. 'My informant isn't wrong. I pay another rebel to cross-check her.'
Harris knuckled the orange stubble that roughened his jaw. He failed to open his eyes, or speak; but his silence on the subject spoke volumes.
'The two are
not
in cahoots,' Jensen defended, hotly enough to send another pair of markers bouncing across the narrow aisle of decking. They fetched against the corrugated plastic of the shower stall, where the lieutenant irritably retrieved them. 'My people don't even know each other, and since when does a Freer do business with a Caldlander without one sticking a knife in the other?'
Now Harris did sit up, incredulity etched across lines left by laughter and self-indulgence. 'Damn, boy. You've been had. I know you're rich, and that you've dumped all of Daddy's allowance into tracking skip-runners, but didn't anyone tell you? Freerlanders never sell out on a comrade. Mac James has teen named in their honor song since the day he jammed that surveillance station over Freermoon and knocked it out of orbit.'
Jensen returned an arch look. 'This Freerlander is the one whose ancestral burial grounds got slagged under nine tons of radioactive junk, direct result of that foray.'
Harris flopped backward. 'OK,' he agreed in defeat. Jensen's back-up informant wouldn't be lying for gain, but hell-bent on bloody revenge. Harris wasted no energy wondering who else besides rebels his aristocratic senior had courted for access to Mac James's secrets. He shrugged one shoulder and said, 'So your damnable pirate has business on Guildstar? So what?'
Jensen's brown eyes narrowed. Because it made no sense, he thought, slipping into one of those sudden, uncommunicative silences that claimed him when he contemplated the skip-runner captain whose activities preoccupied him wholly since the Khalian wars wound down. Combat action was reduced to a minor few far-flung outposts, and the present best chance for glory and promotion remained the capture of MacKenzie James. And James, who was never careless, never forthright, and never in his life involved in honest trade, should have been anathema in a system as straitlaced as Guildstar. Half the merchants on the council there had suffered losses due to Mac's operations; his ship, the
Marity,
should in theory have been blown to bits the instant she applied for a docking bay.
Webbing creaked as Harris shoved to his feet. His pilot's reflexes spared him from stepping unshod on spilled tacks, but the near miss sent him muttering toward the galley cubicle for coffee, or beer, or the chocolate bars he ate after difficult flights that unjustly never fleshed out his middle; even his tailored dress uniform hung on him like a mechanic's coverall.
Jensen's lips thinned in distaste. Harris's sloppiness was tolerable only because he could fly the shorts off just about all of his peers. And if Harris resented his assignment on
Sail,
a three-man scoutship commanded by a lieutenant whose father had stonewalled all reasonable opportunity for advancement, the pilot was too lackadaisical to care. Jensen despised such lack of ambition, but kept his contempt to himself. Without Harris,
Sail
had no prayer of intercepting the
Marity.
Longingly, Jensen reached out and fingered the single green pin in the display. How would his pilot respond, he wondered, if he knew that Daddy's allowance had gone toward the spreading of false information? Would Harris file for transfer if he understood that the green pin marked a trap most painstakingly laid to entice the
Marity's
master, precisely so that
Sail
could effect a capture?
But the
Marity,
damn her wayward, disingenuous traitor of a captain, appeared not to be buying; instead she was making a third run to Guildstar, decorously scheduled as the merchanter she assuredly wasn't.
Jensen loosened a clenched fist and retrieved a marker, a blue one; with determined steadiness he imbedded the pin by the existing pair over Guildstar, then muttered, 'It makes no sense.'
Though Harris could overhear from the galley, Jensen felt no embarrassment. While other officers jockeyed for leave to visit wives and families, the lieutenant curried favor with Intelligence. He was first among the lower ranks to hear that the Khalia had been armed and financed by the Syndicate; the shock just beginning to filter down from above was that war was far from over. The heated issue now was location of the Syndicate's worlds. Weasel sources held no clue, spies in the most sensitive positions drew blanks, and the brass was reduced to screening hearsay in a vain search for coordinates. Jensen viewed the dilemma with an eye for opportunity. His passion to trap MacKenzie James took on increased importance: a skip-runner who trafficked in state secrets and whose record held multiple charges of treason would be acquainted with the Alliance's enemies. The Syndicate should be numbered among his customers. If James did not know their home system, he would have a contact, or a base of operations that would open a direct lead. To capture him, to claim the hero's honor for uncovering the turf of the enemy, Jensen was prepared to stake his name and career.
Lieutenant Michael Christopher Jensen, Jr, tapped the blue pin into the holo map, then considered another red one with a speculative frown. Mac James had pilfered plans for prototype weapons the Fleet had in classified research; the designs had not turned up in Indy hands, as everyone first supposed; where had James sold his booty that time?
Where?
The blue pin mocked, by Guildstar.
'None of this makes sense, damn you to Weasel castration!' Jensen exploded, as though the arch criminal he hunted could hear his curse across space.
In the galley cubicle, surrounded by crumpled cups and a fashion magazine left by the ensign, Harris lifted doubtful eyebrows under a crown of red-gold hair. 'Obsessed,' he muttered to himself, and the coffee just ordered from the dispenser sat cooling while he rummaged under the mission's accumulation of debris after his illicit cache of beer.