The Blood of Ten Chiefs (23 page)

Tanner smiled with both sides of his mouth, finding his way suddenly made clear. "Is it not plain? I must obtain more human urine," he declared, and he got up and went off to call a council of the Wolfriders to set about it.

"My people," he told them, "I need your help."

It was a request that they could not lightly refuse, and they did not do so. But neither did they agree. And by the end of the night all the tribe was dark with doubt and grumbling about Tanner. No longer one to be pitied and protected, he. A danger, maybe even a madman, Two-Spear's worthy successor. Tanner found himself smiling, the only one smiling. He felt much more happy and comfortable as a danger than as a soft-spoken eccentric, a leader who seldom led, chief in name only and a disappointment to the tribe.

"There," he remarked to Brook after the others had scattered, muttering, to the tree hollows and hidden places where they spent their days. "Finally, I've given you some excitement."

Brook said unhappily, "What did you expect, after letting Fangslayer and Longreach and the other elders run everything for years?"

"You think I'm a fool, Brook? Why do you suppose I only proposed that we watch the human camp until their habits become known to us? I plan to bring Fangslayer and his cronies around by degrees. What we really should do is dig a trap, make a net, and capture a human male to make urine for us."

Brook stared and backed away. "You are crazy," he stammered. Then he bolted toward the safety of his daylight perch.

"And he's the one who always tells the tales of Two-Spear at the howl," Tanner remarked to himself. Shrugging, half smiling in the faint daybreak light, he took to the trees—but not to rest. Silently, by the hidden upper ways, he himself made his way toward the human camp.

Just as he reached the point where he could watch the human hunters setting out to run the deer toward the waiting spearmen at the river, he saw a flash of fair hair some distance below him.

**Stormlight!**

Her easy, swinging gait through the maze of lower branches slowed. Reluctantly she answered the sending. **I am here.**

**I know you are! What are you doing?**

**Watching the human camp for you, my chief, since the others are too stupid to care.**

He felt amused agreement, which he did not dare to share with her. Instead, he tried to sound stern. **Turn around. You know you should not be here. Go back to your family at once.**

**I have none.**

He had forgotten that she was an orphan, raised by the tribe, her parents killed in a hunting mishap years before. Childless and mateless as he was, and preoccupied with his leathermaking, Tanner had taken small part in the rearing of such cubs. He felt a jab of guilt, not only that he had forgotten, but that she could remind him so starkly, as if she should expect nothing more than forgetfulness from him.

**Turn around, then,** he sent more gently yet more firmly, **and go back to the place where you spend your days. I, your chief, command it.**

She went like a flash of birdflight, like a leaf on the wind, like cloud wisp, gone. From his higher, safer, more hidden vantage, Tanner looked on uneasily. For there was a human hunter standing on the ground beneath where she had been, staring upward with a puzzled scowl.

Tanner watched the humans. He did not come so recklessly near to them as Stormlight had done, for it was not in his nature to take unnecessary risks, but nevertheless, he lost rest and watched, and found ways to the nearer trees, day after day. At times the slow-witted human women, grubbing roots, would have needed only to look up from their toil to have seen him. Once a small child did see him leaping from oak to ash, but the women paid no heed to the child's babbling. Tanner spent the rest of that day in hiding and in compunction, for if he had been discovered so also would the tribe have been, and he felt it his duty as chief to protect them. Yet there was that in him which would have died, were it necessary, to fulfill his private quest.

That season there was unwonted silence and lack of merriment at the nightly howls. But one night when both moons were nearly at the full, as he sat alone afterward, Stormlight came to him and seated herself as abruptly as before, and said to him darkly, "I know where you spend your days."

He met her gaze, smiling. "It seems to me that you know everything about me."

She ignored that and went on. "You are watching the human village. I know it because I am watching, too, and watching you."

He was aghast. "Stormlight!"

"And you are going to get yourself caught if you are not more careful," she said to him sternly.

"You have disobeyed me!" Yet for some reason he found that he could not be angry with her or impose a punishment on her, as a chief should do.

"You gave me no order but for the one day," she retorted with a defiant lift of her head.

"You know no cub is ever to venture near the humans!"

"I will not be a cub for much longer! Then I will come and go as I will, and where I will, climb up and touch the lightning if I like. Ride the gale down to the ground, if I can. Do as you do, if it pleases me."

Tanner stared at her. She was as wild as Timmorn had ever been, born to confront the storm, as wild as the wolves. There was that in her which could be as fierce as he was gentle and mild.

Her eyes met his, her eyes of deep indigo, darker than storm clouds, deep as midnight, and he felt the jolt shift his center, his bedrock of self, and felt the tremors run through the rest of him, and he knew her soulname, which she did not yet know herself. And sitting, stunned and quaking, he knew he had to live some small time yet at least, long enough to generate a cub with her.

The cub that always comes of Recognition, combining the best qualities of each parent, her daring, his ... vision... The cub that might someday be his heir.

Stormlight was trembling, edging away from him, her delicate face very frightened; she had felt it too. "What— what was that?" she stammered. "What have you done to me?"

She thought it was something he had imposed on her, a punishment for defying him. Quickly he reached out and laid a hand on her arm to keep her by him. "No!" he exclaimed. "No, it was not me."

"What, then?" she appealed.

"Far larger than either of us. It was Recognition."

"But I—but how can that be?" For all her proud talk, she was still very much the cub. "I—I am not yet—"

"I know, little one." He stroked her hair, shining like pale water in the moonlight. "You are nowhere near ready, neither your body nor your self. Let the high ones give me strength, I will wait for you."

She stared at him. "But it is not fair!" she burst out. "There should be lovemates for me, courtships, choosings!" A wild light was growing in her eyes. A wolf, entrapped by humans, Tanner had heard, would kill itself with fretting against its bonds rather than submit. This daughter of the wolves would take no more readily to the bonds of Recognition. "I have never wanted anything but to be free!"

Her cub, Tanner thought, might have those same wide, midnight-blue, flashing eyes.

"It is horrible!" she cried. "Why should I be—be made a prisoner to—to—"

Be bound to a dried-up old stick of an elf, she was thinking, though she would not say it, not even in her frenzy of shock and anger. But Tanner knew well enough.

**You will be as free as I can make you, Stormlight.** He sent to her, trying to calm her. **The bond need not be for life.**

She glared at him and sprang to her feet. "I'll see to my own freedom, thank you!" she snapped. She strode away from him, legs thin and gawky beneath her leather kirtle, and he watched after her until she went out of sight in the night.

Then he lay back and sighed and dazedly looked up at the stars. He was serene by nature, but Recognition had been at least as much of a shock to him as it was to her.

"Tie me and skin me and cook me in a fire!" he muttered.

By dawn he was still dazed, and went and watched the human village as he did every day, without really seeing anything, and without finding out any more than he already knew, which was that the humans were maddeningly random as to where they put their urine and when they produced it. When the sun was high he slept, right on a thick oak limb as he was, for he felt exhausted. And when a great hubbub from the humans below awakened him, he felt yet so dizzied and weak that he did not at first understand what was happening.

Then he glimpsed a small head of fair hair, so fine it floated like flowerdown above pointed ears, and he knew.

The humans had Stormlight.

One of the tall ones' hunters was carrying her in his coarse hands, carrying her to the center of the camp at arm's length, gingerly, as if even in his triumph he was afraid of her. Other humans, women and striplings mostly, were crowding and swirling around, jostling each other for a chance to see. yet unwilling to come too near; a clear space always showed around the hunter and his captive. Even in his panic Tanner could see that Stormlight had not been hurt, at least not yet. And she might not be if she used her wits. The humans acted more than half frightened of her.

**Stormlight! Be calm, be canny. I will bring help.**

**I—my chief, I am sorry. There is something wrong with me. I was clumsy and slow, he saw me—**

**Never mind that now. Keep your wits about you. Use their fear of you to fend them off. But do not make them so afraid they become enraged.**

**Please—come back quickly...**

At the distance, Tanner could not see the look on her face. Horror held him staring one moment more, and then he tore himself away and sped through the treetops toward the forest.

**Ayooooah! Stagrunner!** With all the sending strength that was in him he summoned his wolf-friend to more quickly carry him the remaining distance back to the camp. Within moments the wolf came leaping to his side, and for the first time in many seasons, and in high daylight, yet, Tanner rode, at speed.

**Ayooah-yoh! Wolfriders, to me! Brook! Brightlance! Joygleam! Oakstrong! Scarp!**

All those who were strong and fit for fighting he summoned by name, sending, and when Stagrunner stopped, panting, at the crest of the hurst, he heard slight, squirrellike rustlings in the beeches as they came to him. Hesitantly they came down to the ground, exposed to view in the blunt daylight, and stood around him with wary eyes-.

They and many whom he had not summoned, Fangslayer among them.

"The humans have captured Stormlight," Tanner told them. "You cubs and nursing mothers, you elders, back to the trees, to hiding." His tone was curt, for only those he had summoned should have come to him; the others should have stayed in safety. "You who will follow me, bring weapons, send for your wolf-friends."

No one moved except to shift from one foot to the other and to shift eyes, glance at neighbors. None of them summoned their mounts.

"How did the cub come to be captured?" Fangslayer asked harshly, his voice sounding oddly loud, like the calling of the crow, in the forest hush. "How do you come to know of it?"

"There is no time now to talk of it!"

Brook said, softly, too softly, "You were spying on the humans, you and she, were you not? And you ventured too near. Is it not so?"

"And now the tribe is to pay the price of your folly," said Fangslayer. "Many lives might be lost, to try to save one."

Tanner felt his hands turn cold where they rested on the thick fur of Stagrunner's neck. He said, "Which of you wishes to challenge me for the chief's lock? Brook? Fangslayer?"

"I am too old," Fangslayer said stiffly.

"By the high ones, I think you have gone as mad as Two-Spear," Brook muttered. His hands balled into fists, and he shouted, "Yes! I will challenge you!"

He strode forward. His fists swung up as if that would help him. But he faltered and slowed to a stop as his leaf-brown eyes locked with the wolf-gray ones of his chief in a battle of wills, a sending that only they two could hear. And while Stormlight in the human village down below wielded the thin blade of human fear and used it to hold her enemies off, Tanner wielded the fragile weapons of mind.

In a few moments Brook's fists fell, his face turned away. Tanner reached out and placed a hand on his sagging shoulder. But his gaze looked fiercely around at the others.

"I am your chief," he told them. "Does anyone dispute it?"

No one answered. The glances of some fell to the ground.

"Then hear me. Some of you have spoken truly. It is my duty as chief to see to the safety of the tribe. I have seen the faces of the humans, and I believe that they will be terrified of us if we strike now, in number, that they will flee, that no lives need be lost. But I have also seen your faces, and I will not require any of you to follow me. For my own part, I must go to the human village. I have no choice. Stormlight and I are Recognized."

A murmur of astonishment ran around the tribe. Even Brook's eyes snapped up. "When?" he demanded.

"Lately." Tanner smiled briefly, crookedly at him, then sobered. "I must go to her at once, alone if need be. I name you chief, Brook. I myself will tie the lock on your head, for I have seen your center, and it is good." He reached up to pull the leather thong from his hair.

"No!" Brook caught hold of his arm to stop his hand. "Keep it! May you keep it for eight hundred turns more. I will come with you to the human camp." .

"And I," said Joygleam.

"And I," said Oakstrong.

And others. And others, and more, and they were all coming close to him, crowding around him with hands outstretched or upraised as if in triumph, and Tanner tilted back

his head and shouted aloud, with no thought for caution any longer, "Ayooooah! Wolfriders!"

Before the sun had dipped low in the sky he had ridden Stagrunner to the laurel thickets at the edge of the forest, where he looked out at the human village, a score of strongly armed Wolfriders at his back.

**Stormlight!**

**Lhu!**

Tanner stiffened and swayed on Stagrunner's back, dizzied. It was his soulname,

**Soulmate,** he asked her, **have they harmed you?**