Wolf's Blood (33 page)

“I’ve noticed, but I haven’t even tried to bring it up. I’d like to say I don’t know why, but I do, at least a little. I thought if I asked you questions, you might ask me questions. I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear those questions, so I didn’t invite them. Does that make any sense?”

No reply, not even a twitch of a tail or a flicker of an ear, but unless Blind Seer had somehow been rendered deaf, there was no way he didn’t hear her. She kept talking.

“Querinalo was different for me. Different than it was for you, for Derian, for Plik, for anyone I’ve talked to who has been through it. It confirmed that I had some sort of magical talent, but I’ve suspected that for a long time. Hazel Healer suggested some talent might explain why I could speak to Beasts so easily. Remember? Later, when Questioner told me about my human parents, well, that seemed to fit, too.”

She bit her lip, remembering, then forced herself to go on.

“When the fevers hit me, I was focused on you. You’d gone down first, and you’d gone down hard, far harder than anyone else, harder even than Derian. For a while, I don’t think I even knew what I was feeling was in my own body, I’d become so wrapped up in your pain. Later, I realized that I was also sick, but in me there is something that stands like a wall between me and whatever weird magic it is I have. Do you know what that is?”

Blind Seer did not respond.

“It’s the same insane circular thinking that nearly got me killed that time on Center Island in Misheemnekuru. Heart and soul and mind, but not body, never body, I believe myself to be a wolf. Wolf is who I am, what I am, how I think, how I act, how I believe. But if it is the working of some talent that makes me able to talk to my people, makes me able to think like them, then I am not a wolf, I am a human with a talent. I cannot believe this. Therefore, I have no talent. Querinalo feeds on talent, on magical ability, but it cannot find that fuel in me.

“Derian, when given a choice between keeping his talent and letting it be burned away realized that without his talent he would not be who he has always been. He realized that without that extra sense for horses, he would not be himself. He diverted the fires of querinalo, and those fires made him into what he is now: man and horse both. In his soul, though, for all his body looks strange, he is a man still. In my soul, for all I look human, I am more wolf. I denied my talents, and in denying them, I gave them shelter.”

She wanted desperately to ask Blind Seer what had been his experience, what was it he had seen, what was it he had fled from, but thus far he had not yet indicated in the slightest fashion that he was aware of her. If she were to ask him now, he would simply maintain the barrier of silence that separated them, never mind that her hand was on his head, and her skin and clothing were damp with the ocean waters spread by his fur.

She must keep talking, even if in that talking she addressed issues of which they had never spoken, issues of which she did not want to speak, for to speak of them would be to admit something disgusting about herself.

“Did I ever tell you how the Meddler looks to me when he appears?”

This won her an ear-flicker, a victory of sorts, but as the ear had been moving to flatten in anger Firekeeper wasn’t precisely encouraged.

“He looks like a man blended with a wolf. He looks like something from what I once dreamed, long ago, on Misheemnekuru. All but for one thing, in my dream that figure had blue eyes, that figure was you.”

Blind Seer hadn’t moved, but there was something new in his posture, a stiffness that hadn’t been there before. Before he had been somewhere else, hardly hearing her voice. Now he was acutely focused on her, his mood as tense and brittle as glass.

Firekeeper went on. “I don’t know if the Meddler can read our minds, or whether our minds somehow read him and make him into someone attractive, someone we will want to trust.”

She couldn’t say more. She couldn’t admit that she had found the Meddler weirdly attractive. Wolves were faithful in their pairings. She did not want to admit infidelity, even in the most random thought, to this wolf, who, had things been different, would certainly have been her mate as well as her partner.

Nor did she want to speak of that attraction aloud, for she could never be sure when the Meddler might be listening, and she didn’t know to what advantage he might turn such an open confession.

So Firekeeper held her breath, hoping Blind Seer’s now brittle silence would break, and she would not need to confess her own perfidious nature, bringing him back, perhaps only to drive him away.

She sat frozen into motionlessness, no longer even moving the fingers of the hand that had scratched along the edge of Blind Seer’s ear. Thus she felt him shudder and draw breath deeply, and thus she heard the words he spoke, although they came forth faintly.

“Trust? Am I really the image of trust for you, Firekeeper?”

She said nothing, but let her fingers stir against his ear so he would know she listened.

Blind Seer leaned slightly into her, a light, wolfish embrace.

“Trust. How can you trust me when I cannot trust myself? You have let yourself be tempted by one who thrives on temptation. How can you blame yourself for stumbling where so many others have fallen? Me, though, my sins are far more grave.”

“Sins?” Firekeeper said. “Where there is no religion, can there be sin? Have you been among the yarimaimalom so much that you have taken on their religion?”

“Religion?” Blind Seer shivered his skin. “Not their religion, but even where there is not religion there can be belief. You and I were reared to believe certain things were what certain things should be. How could you torment yourself for being drawn to the Meddler’s temptation if you did not believe that somehow the promises you have made to me should make you immune?”

Firekeeper tensed. “Was I then so obvious?”

“Not in how you treated him,” Blind Seer said, a trace of his usual good humor thawing the lines of his body, “but in how you strove not to treat him. He made me so angry, not with anything he ever did—for how could a creature that lacks a body do anything?—but how he made you feel about yourself.”

Firekeeper sighed, let herself relax. Somehow they had come to sit as they had so many times before: she close beside the wolf, her arm around him, he leaning into her. Within this closeness, Firekeeper could feel the knotted muscles that testified that Blind Seer was not relieved of whatever had driven him from the archive room, but at least he was no longer fleeing from her.

“You have something to tell,” she said, hoping she was not overbold. “Tell me what rasps beneath your breath. What sin did querinalo make you think you had committed?”

“You said you trusted me, Firekeeper,” Blind Seer said. “I am terrified you will not trust me if I tell you what sort of abomination I know myself to be.”

She could smell his terror, and the scent raised an answering terror within her own breast, but she forced her breathing to be calm.

“Tell,” she said. “Not telling has driven us apart. Can telling make that worse?”

She knew it might, but she could not believe there was anything about Blind Seer that she might not embrace. She had already been forced to accept that he housed some magical talent within him. Such talents were not unknown among either the Royal Beasts or the Wise. What talent could Blind Seer have discovered that would make her trust him less?

“You tell me that we were walking together when the fever seized me,” Blind Seer began.

Firekeeper recognized the need to slowly stalk up on what was bothering him, and did not remind Blind Seer as she might have one of the talkative humans that since she was the one who had told him of course she knew.

“I remember none of that,” Blind Seer went on. “I remember the end of our battle with the Once Dead. I remember some of the organizational meetings immediately following. I remember talking to the yarimaimalom, enlisting their continued aid. Those memories grow less and less real whenever I examine them, as if I do not really remember, but remember being told, and from that construct some sort of reality.

“What I remember more sharply is being in a deep forest, like but unlike the one in which I was born. I knew this forest intimately, yet some part of me also knew that I had never been in it before. For a time I ran though the forest, chasing the deer, dodging the elk, frolicking with pack mates forgotten until that time—or perhaps never known.

“Then I came upon a hilltop, and there I met three others: the jaguar Truth, the human Derian, and whatever it is the Meddler is. We talked for a time, and the question of how might we preserve our lives arose. Things were said that you have heard already—about the trades one might make, about the choices.

“Despite what seemed like moonspans of running, at this point I was no closer to knowing what it was within me that had attracted querinalo’s fire. All I knew was that where my body lay was pain, while here in these green woods I was without pain, without confusion.

“The Meddler’s words troubled me, especially his simple view that querinalo could only be defeated either by letting it have what it wanted or giving it something in return. It seemed to me those were—forgive me, beloved—very human solutions. A wolf surrenders only to those he trusts. I certainly did not trust this fire that was trying to devour me alive. Nor did the other solution suit my nature. Derian might contemplate trade, but humans have built entire societies around various kinds of trade.

“Wolves share in a strange fashion, but wolves do not trade. Never has one wolf said to another, ‘I will give you this elk’s lung for that bit of kidney.’ We grab. We struggle. We take. Even when we feed our pups there is a bit of the same, for although we give to them, they must learn to take from each other or be ill prepared for the life they will live.

“So I thought these solutions were human solutions, not a wolf’s solutions, and I resolved to fight the pain and hunt what it was that was hunting me. I ran from that hilltop, and forgot everything but my desire and my resolve. I would hunt. I would live. I would win—or! I would die.”

Firekeeper raised a hand and scratched lightly between Blind Seer’s ears, moving herself slightly away from him as she did so. Heat was radiating from him, an indication of the tension he was hiding so well. He panted slightly to cool himself as he continued his account.

“Nose to the ground, I sought the scent of querinalo. At first, I could find no trace, and began to despair. Then I thought to seek my own scent. If I backtracked my trail, which I rationalized was the trail of my own journey through this illness, then I would find the root.

“It is not easy to track oneself, for learning to dismiss one’s own scent is one of the first things a tracker learns, but soon I found it. The trail was a long one, and a weary one, but at last I reached my goal.”

Firekeeper recalled the long hours she had sat sleepless at Blind Seer’s side, watching as his paws grew cut and bloody although they moved against nothing but air, and she thought she had some idea just how arduous that journey must have been.

“I came to a place where a wolf just like me—a wolf who was me—both lay upon the ground and was suspended in the air. This wolf was intact, yet somehow I could see every element within it and knew its workings with an intellectual awareness I had never felt before. Intertwined with the organs and muscle, with the blood and brains and guts, was something I must call a bluish liquid, although it was neither blue, nor liquid, nor in any way like these things. Still, this is as close as I can reach with words.

“This blue liquid was what querinalo fed upon. I leaned closer and sniffed, trying to understand the nature of this thing within me, trying to learn what it might do. I will not pretend that I had not thought what talents might be useful to me. What if I had the ability within me to heal others as Doc does? That would be wonderful. I would not care to divine the future as Truth does, but what if I had a latent ability to find fresh water? That would also be useful. I considered that I might have a special sensitivity for humans, as Derian does for horses, and you do for beasts. This would be useful, and it would also explain why I am so impossibly drawn to you.”

He licked the side of Firekeeper’s face, so the human would not feel insulted. She grasped his scruff and rattled him gently.

“Which did you find?”

“None of these, and yet …” Blind Seer moved restlessly. “Neither did I sense that these were not there. I was trying to reason my way through this when I first heard the sheep laughing from somewhere behind me.”

Firekeeper let her eyes fall shut. Such was the intensity in Blind Seer’s tone that she felt as if she saw what had happened coming to life behind her closed lids.

THE LAUGHTER BLENDED the sound of human derision with a flat, ovine bleat. Blind Seer wheeled lightly, head raised, fangs bared, ears flattened against his skull. He had no expectations as to what he would see, but even without expectations he was astonished.

Safe on the craggy rise of rock behind him was a mountain sheep, but it was no mountain sheep like any of those he had seen before. The disproportionately tiny hooves on which it balanced its shaggy-coated weight shone like polished gold. The heavy, curving horn on its proudly carried head gave back iridescent rainbow sparkles in the clear morning light.

“Why are you laughing?” Blind Seer growled.

“What are you hunting?” the sheep replied.

“I hunt myself and what is in myself, so that I will know whether what is in me is worth preserving.”

The sheep did not seem to need further explanation.

“And?” it said. “What did you find?”

“I found something and nothing,” Blind Seer said. “I see that what I knew was there was there indeed, but I am no closer to knowing whether it is that which I should preserve, or that which I should let be destroyed.”

The mountain sheep gave another mocking, bleating laugh.

“Are you saying that there is anything about you not worth preserving? Are you saying there is that which is you that is not worth fighting to keep?”