“This Edlin must have talked a great deal,” Grey Thunder said, seeming impressed, “to teach a reluctant learner.”
“Edlin is, if nothing else,” Firekeeper said with fondness, “enthusiastic. But what does this have to do with these hurt pups and Blind Seer’s eyes?”
“Walk with me through an idea,” Grey Thunder said. “It will be easier. Let us say Blind Seer wished to assure that his pups would have blue eyes. How might he do this?”
Firekeeper didn’t like the trail along which this question led her, but she followed it, thinking of how she had heard Edlin discuss breeding pups or Derian the breeding of horses.
“Might he seek a bitch with blue eyes? That would be a poor way to choose a mate.”
“I agree,” Grey Thunder said, “but we are not saying this would be done. We are walking a trail.”
“Lead then,” Firekeeper said. She found her hand drifting to bury itself in Blind Seer’s fur, as it often did when she was uneasy, but though she knew she gave herself away, she did not move her hand.
“Blue-eyes and blue-eyes would not necessarily have blue-eyed pups,” Grey Thunder went on. “Trust me on this.”
“Easy to do,” Firekeeper said. “Our mother, Shining Coat, rarely has a pup to match her own unblemished silver. More often the pups look like their father. Sometimes they look nothing at all like either parent.”
“This is because all of us carry many forebears in our blood,” Grey Thunder explained, “and when we mingle ourselves in mating, the most common forebears come forth. Now if blue-eyes and blue-eyes mated, there is a greater chance that they would find a common blue-eyed forebear and that forebear would come forth in the color of a puppy’s eyes.”
“So you are saying that though neither Rip nor Shining Coat had blue eyes,” Blind Seer said, “that both must have had a forebear with blue eyes.”
“Yes. However, that forebear probably lived a long time ago.”
Firekeeper leaned forward, thinking of things she had heard humans discuss when they talked of religious matters.
“Are you saying all of us are our forebears reborn?”
“No,” Grey Thunder said. “I am saying that what we were given by our forebears remains within us, even when we do not see it, as the blue eyes were not seen in Rip and Shining Coat. Even unseen, a trait is there, and may come forth.”
And how does this apply to the pups?
Firekeeper wanted to ask, but she could tell that even now Grey Thunder was tense. His hackles had not smoothed all the way, but remained ruffled like the quills of a feeding porcupine.
“Now,” Grey Thunder went on, “I agree with you that it would be foolish to seek a mate merely to attempt to breed pups with blue eyes. However, you did not think it foolish to encourage mating between those who would have strong pups, true?”
“True,” agreed his listeners with thump of tail and nod of head.
“Do you think the only strengths are those of running and biting?”
Looking at Cricket, whose days of being a strong runner and sharp-fanged biter were over, but who still had so much to give, Firekeeper replied:
“No. There are other strengths. Knowledge. Courage. Even humor.”
Grey Thunder thumped his tail in approval, though his hackles did not quite lie smooth.
“Do talents arise in your people? Not the usual ones like sharp sight or a keen sense of smell, but the odd ones?”
“Like never getting lost?” Blind Seer said. “Or being able to hasten healing? Or finding game? Yes. We have these, and others. They are not very common, though. In all our pack, we had none who were talented. A pack we often mingled with during winters had one member who could always find his way home, no matter how far he wandered—or even if things were done to muddle his trail.”
“Blind Seer and I have seen talents among humans, too,” Firekeeper said. “We know one who can enhance healing—a talent I have found useful more than once.”
“Useful, yes,” Grey Thunder said. “Keep that close to you as we walk this trail.”
He licked his foreleg thoughtfully for a moment, his golden-brown eyes focused on the three puppies who were playing below with Rascal. The one with the big head was clumsy, the one with the mutilated leg slow; the one with the missing segment of his tail shouldn’t have been affected at all, but Firekeeper noticed that he often darted in the wrong direction. She wondered if his eyesight had somehow been injured.
Cricket stirred, and her motion prompted Grey Thunder to continue his tale—as doubtless she had intended it to do.
“Now we walk a long road back into the past,” he said. “To the days when a great sickness came among the humans and drove many of them away—you know of this?”
Firekeeper felt as if she were a pup being catechized, but answered politely enough.
“Both our birth pack and the humans had stories of those days. We have even heard a little of how it was here—though only from the human perspective.”
“Forgive me if I repeat a little,” Grey Thunder said. “Perhaps you have heard how in those days the yarimaimalom made a treaty with the humans. We had long noticed their respect for animal-kind, and felt the true heart in their tales of how the deities were formed and how humanity had drawn away from them.”
He must have seen how both Firekeeper and Blind Seer dropped their gazes at these words, for when he continued, a slight growl shaded his speech.
“I shall not trouble you with any long tales, but Blind Seer has bragged to many ears that this journey south is not the first long trip you two have taken. Surely then you have heard about the Old World rulers—about their casual cruelty and disregard for life?”
Firekeeper shifted uneasily, but raised her dark eyes to meet the golden-brown of the wolf.
“Yes. We have heard such tales, both in the former Gildcrest colonies and in New Kelvin. Even allowing for the distortion that comes with years, the Old World rulers were worse than the usual walk of humanity.”
Grey Thunder’s response startled her.
“I think they were not worse than the mass of humanity—not in the bone—but in order to practice the magical arts they relied upon as a wolf relies upon a strong body and quick mind, they needed to dull themselves to what they were doing. Much of their high magic drew power from death—or rather, from the extinguishing of life. Did you know this?”
Much of what Firekeeper had seen, but had not been able to grasp, in the fragmented artwork she and Blind Seer had uncovered in the ruins now came clearer to her. She also recalled the actions of the sorceress Melina and found them of one piece.
“Yes. I think I did, but not clearly.”
Blind Seer tilted his ears back slightly. “I, too, have made myself blinder than I should have been.”
“Now follow that trail,” Grey Thunder said, “and realize that in order to do the things they must to gain the great powers, the Old World sorcerers had to distance themselves from the natural world into which they had been born. They even had to distance themselves from other humans, to view themselves as somehow superior to the mass of humanity, and to the ethical order that governed these people.”
Firekeeper, again thinking of things she had seen, of humans—and wolves—she had known, grunted acknowledgment of the truth in what Grey Thunder said.
“If you learn more of the religion practiced by the Liglimom,” Grey Thunder went on, his ears angling back slightly as if he anticipated physical, not intellectual, protest, “you will hear how after the first birds were created as a gift from Fire to Air, the deities decided they must take responsibility for these little lives. They guided mortals through omens and auguries. However, with the coming of great sorcery, humans grew deaf to divine guidance.”
“We have been told something of this,” Firekeeper said, “and how the humans turned to animals for guidance.”
Grey Thunder’s attitude was now clearly one of defense.
“Would you listen if I told you that we yarimaimalom have experienced the speech of the deities? That we have indeed felt ourselves conduits for communications from beyond ourselves?”
“We listen,” Firekeeper replied, and Blind Seer thumped his tail in concurrence.
Grey Thunder relaxed a trace.
“Not all of us hear as clearly as some. You met the jaguar Truth?”
“We did.”
“She comes from a long line of diviners,” Grey Thunder said. “Her hearing is very sharp. However, such hearing is not restricted to any one type of beast—or even to yarimaimalom. It is found in Wise and lesser, and in all species. The one advantage Wise have over lesser is that we can better interpret the divine will and better communicate it to humankind.”
Cricket interrupted for the first time since she had eased Grey Thunder back into speech.
“I think you walk off the trail, son.”
“Not so far,” Grey Thunder protested. “For these two to understand what we have done, they must understand why.”
Cricket neither agreed nor argued, but Firekeeper noticed that Grey Thunder did return to his original point.
“Now when we made our treaty with humanity, we insisted that these islands be given to us for our land and that no humans be permitted to come here.”
“Except for those who reside at the outpost,” Blind Seer added, his attitude that of a youngling who wishes to prove he has learned to pounce and so now can be taught to bite.
“Except for the outpost,” Grey Thunder repeated. “We chose this place for many reasons. Having been subjected to the cruelty of the Old Country rulers, we did not wish to live among their subjects until we were certain the change of heart was sincere. A more important reason was that from here we could better watch the sea.
“You see, for all their magic, the Old Country rulers have always come from across the ocean. Perhaps large bodies of water interfere with the power they command. Perhaps the sorcerers lacked the ability to use magic to transport themselves over long distances. Whatever the reason, in all our tales the ones from the Old Country have only come from the east, from over the water.”
“So,” Firekeeper said, “it is told in the northern lands as well. I once asked my parents if any tales remained of humans coming from the west, and they replied that there were none such they knew that did not include the sorcerers traveling from east to west first.”
Grey Thunder relaxed even more at this agreement, and continued, “The yarimaimalom took for themselves these lands farthest to the east, where we could keep watch. To this day, the wingéd folk send representatives out a day’s flight to the east each day. The water beasts also keep watch.”
Firekeeper wanted to ask about these water beasts. She knew there were Royal Otters, but she had glimpsed seals during their voyage south and had wondered if there might be Royal ones among these creatures as well. She wondered, too, about the huge sea. creatures she had glimpsed from time to time: whales and dolphins and the cold-eyed sharks. Could these have Royal-kind?
Now was not the time for such questions. At times like this when her curiosity led her off the trail, Firekeeper knew the bittersweet truth that as much as she was wolf, she was human too.
“We watch the omens as well,” Grey Thunder said, and Firekeeper was surprised to see a hint of tension touch him again, and wondered why. Neither she nor Blind Seer had argued against the efficacy of talents. “To this day, no omen has occurred to show that the deities warn us that our enemies are about to return”
Ah
, Firekeeper thought.
I forgot. We think of divination as simply another talent, but to these Wise Wolves it is communication from the deities. I wonder if Derian’s people think that what comes from divination is communication from the ancestors his people revere? I must ask someday.
But Grey Thunder’s tension did not ebb when neither of his listeners questioned whether or not the deities might be responsible for omens. Firekeeper found herself leaning slightly forward, as if to make sure she did not miss some subtle sign on a nearly obliterated game trail.
“Now, remember that you yourselves admitted that talents could be useful,” Grey Thunder said, “and remember that in the days of which I speak the Old Country rulers were not creatures departed and vanished for well more than a hundred winters. In those days, the fear was acute that the Fire Plague would run its course, the sorcerers rebuild their power, and the Old Country rulers return in a few seasons. Even as a bitch digs her den in anticipation of the pups she carries, so the yarimaimalom of those days took actions to prepare themselves against their enemies’ return.”
Cricket added, “The choice we had made to place a good number of ourselves on these islands added to the dread of the sorcerers’ return. For all that the islands gave protection from those who lived on the mainland, should the Old Country magics return, many of us would be trapped and so more easily hunted.”
Firekeeper felt her spine tingle at the image this conjured.
“You did have kin on the mainland, didn’t you?”
“We did and do,” Cricket replied, “but the deaths of those here would have been no less real for that the yarimaimalom would not be destroyed all at once.”
Blind Seer chewed the pad of his paw a bit nervously, as if the entrapment were about to begin at this very instant.
“The choice to isolate yourselves here seems strange,” he said, “but you must have had your reasons.”
“We had them,” Cricket said sharply, “and hold to them still. Remember what Grey Thunder has told you about those days.”
In a sharp instant, like the striking of a bolt of lightning through the blackness of a midnight storm, Firekeeper was sure they were not being told all of the story. She quieted herself, waiting to hear what the rest of Grey Thunder’s account would be. It might be that by the time he wended his way to the end, she would have her answers.
In response to the waiting silence, Grey Thunder glanced at Cricket, saw the senior wolf had nothing more to add, and went on.
“The course of action of which I am about to tell you,” Grey Thunder said, “was further precipitated by omens that indicated that someday the Old World would once again cast a shadow on the New. Our forebears felt that something must be done to prepare against that day.”