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Chapter Text

Six Weeks After The Palace Moves...

Moonwake Island

Shen Shen had never been a magic user. She had used to think of herself as a dull spot of ordinary in an extraordinary family. Even her small talent with midwifery was just another aspect of her commonplace self.

Now, everywhere she went, except her home and Naksima's, she was stared at and whispered over. The Go Backs were less fraught over her than the Gliders, but they kept their distance as well.

“I didn't do anything,” she protested to Orolin one day, while he taught her to turn the Scroll of Colours. Images, mist and fire, were passing. There was Savah, tiny, save for her huge belly, watching Yurek shape the well. There was father, as a child, stubbornly feeling his way away from his mother with a stick. There was a flood, rain that washed away the soil. Ahlekah, in triumph, creating the Bridge of Destiny. That bridge had fallen in on the village during the quake, and that appeared suddenly, so Shen Shen allowed the Scrolls to still, and left them.

The spirits were both there, and not there. They were a presence, as though someone were in the next room, not interested in one at all, or what one was doing, but simply performing their own chores. You could speak to them, if you drew their attention, but that took patience and care.

Orolin had little interest in her troubles.

Their opinion is based on ignorance, he told her. Once you have taught them the means of piloting the Palace and moving the Scroll, they will understand.

**That's not what they want,** Shen Shen informed him, walking out of the Scroll room into a small sitting area. Osek had shaped small benches, with backrests, and placed some fresh water into a pool at the centre, with a fountain that he claimed cleaned the water as it spun it into the air.

The preservers had joined them, brought by Yeyeen days ago, all but a few who had chosen to join Kahvi's wandering troupe. Already, Gliders and Go Backs were weaving and sewing the silk together. The northern elves claimed the air was too warm for them, and the Gliders shivered in the stormy winds.

Ahralree had left food on one bench, but it had long since gone cold and, at any rate, Shen Shen had no appetite. She had very little patience for Ahralree, she found, who had used to follow her around, from the morning, trying to help her dress, to the afternoon, when she would wait with food, until one evening, when Shen Shen had lost patience and shouted, telling her to leave, and let her do things for herself. Since then, Ahralree had left her alone, but stayed a silent presence, like the spirits of the Palace.

It was autumn, Shen Shen thought, running a hand through the water. Last spring she had been with Ahleki.

Orolin had fallen silent, his soft, detached puzzlement clear through the bond. To him, the answer was simple. Make the Palace fly. Turn the Scrolls. Anything outside that was simply as alien as eating or drinking.

Voll was lingering at the edge of the Palace as she left. She ignored him, and went down to her new house.

“You've missed two meals this day,” Naksima observed, over fish and sliced burdock roots.

“I'm making up for it now,” Shen Shen said, breaking her roots in half.

“If you want to have this baby, you need to eat more,” Naksima said, tightly. “And more often.”

The baby. Shen Shen stopped pretending to eat, feeling her stomach twist.

“When is the baby going to be born, anyhow?” Ahleki asked. “Next summer? Next spring?”

“The winter?”

“Excuse me,” Shen Shen stood up, and went out to the privy to vomit.

...

Fog was staring into the Father Tree branches when Scouter arrived.

“What are you doing?”

There was nothing on that branch. There had been a nest, once, but during a hard year, their mother had climbed out onto the branch and wrung both bird's necks and emptied the eggs down his and Dewshine's throats.

“I was remembering,” Fog said, still looking at the tree.

“What were you remembering?” Scouter laid his head next to hers on Steady's belly, while Bristlebrush nibbled at the huge wolf's nose.

“I was remembering when I was a bird,” Fog said.

“When you were a bird?” Scouter tried to remember when they had played at being birds. Maybe she had played it with Ember and the other cubs? But Fog didn't play well with other children. She was always slower, behind them, too prickly.

“A long time ago,” Fog murmured, leaning her head against his. “When you were little.”

“It was cold,” she continued. “Mother came up into my nest, and she ate me. Then I went inside her to be her baby.”

Scouter rolled his eyes. An imagining. Mother must have told her the story.

...

Instead of going back inside, Shen Shen took her mantle and went walking along the shore. The beaches were made up of small pebbles, rather than sand, and the grey sky was reflected in the grey waters.

It was cold and wet and dark. The trees were thrown by the wind, which tugged at her mantle, and the darting, distant lights of the houses scattered on the hills were nearly invisible.

She felt stupid and sad. Her crutch and her leg skittered on the rocks, and she nearly fell more than once.

Naksima was waiting for her when she got home. She didn't say anything, but she took off Shen Shen's mantle, then her dress, and helped her dry off and dress again, settling her at the fireplace, with a bowlful of broth, smelling of fish and seaweed. A fortifying meal. Shen Shen drank, sniffled, and drank some more. Naksima waited for her to finish.

“Ahleki misses you,” the human woman began to comb through Shen Shen's curls. “She thinks you're angry with her.”

Shen Shen sighed, but it came out more like a sob.

“I'm so tired,” she said. “I don't feel alive anywhere.”

Naksima nodded, and hummed in agreement.

“Pregnancy is like that, sometimes,” she said.

“I know it is,” Shen Shen laid down, putting her head in Naksima's lap. “I just wish... I don't know.”

Naksima sighed.

“Do you miss the man?”

She used the Red Mountain word, and for a moment Shen Shen misunderstood, then she shook her head.

“I don't miss him,” she shook her head. “He's there.”

Naksima understood her, and her combing fingers stopped, then started again.

“I don't know if it's good for the dead to be so close to the living,” she said. “It seems too confusing.”

“I don't talk to him,” Shen Shen said, feeling a bit guilty. “He wants to see me, but I don't want to see him.”

Wake up, make breakfast, speak to the Gliders, ask Urda what the Go Backs needed, see to both, go to the Palace, turn the Scrolls, fill the day. Fill the day so full that it overflowed, and collapse into a sleep deep enough that dreams don't touch you. It was an unsustainable pace, she knew, but she couldn't stop herself.

“I wish I'd never gone,” she admitted. “I wish I'd stayed with Ahleki, and you, and Osek. I wish I'd turned back when I saw the birds. I wish I'd never seen him. I wish I'd stayed home.”

“But you left,” Naksima was gentle, but firm. “And you dared to leave, and you dared to ride down the waterfall on the back of the Mountain-tall, and you dared to climb into the nests of the great birds, and when all seemed lost, you led your new people to a new home, people you didn't even know, but that needed your help.”

Shen She shrugged.

“I was stubborn,” she whispered, wondering when she had begun to cry.

“You were brave,” Naksima corrected her. “You had to be brave.”

“Now,” Naksima drew Shen Shen up and looked her in the eyes. “You've been brave long enough. Take a rest.”

Shen Shen laughed.

“I don't know how,” she admitted.

“Stay with us tomorrow,” Naksima told her. “Let's take some of that “see-ilka” and make a new clothes for the children.”

Shen Shen nodded.

“Good,” Naksima lifted her as if she were a child. “I'll stay with you tonight. We'll talk and giggle until near dawn, just like children.”

Shen Shen laughed. In the end she fell fast asleep in moments, clinging to Naksima like a child.

The morning dawned crisp and bright, the sun flooding in through a rock shaped window of clearstone. Hot, stewed berries and slightly bitter morning-bright tea made a quick breakfast, and Naksima went out and got some silk from the weavers, coming back with a bright blue and a green. Shen Shen began to measure the children and cut, while Shenkir and Ahleki held the fabric against each other and each assured the other that they would be the best dressed on the island.

“Go and see if you can find some shiny shells,” Shen Shen suggested, when all the pieces were cut. “Something that Amrok can carve into beads.”

They went out into the sunlight, copper needles flashing in the sun, while they chatted. Shen Shen began to wonder, while they worked, about the child. For once, there wasn't the nausea inducing panic. Boy, or girl? Would they be as oddly pale as a Glider, or a healthy brown? What colour hair? What colour eyes?

“Lady Shen Shen!”

It was Ahralree, her skirts fluttering like a butterfly.

“I had not seen you this morning,” she landed gracefully, and bowed. “You were not meditating with the Scrolls?”

“Um,” Shen Shen shrugged. “I wanted to sew some new clothes for Ahleki.”

“Oh, did she need some?” Ahralree looked nonplussed. “I could have told the weavers, if you had come for me.”

Shen Shen chanced a look at the other maiden's face. It was smooth and serene as a flower petal.

Yet, she stayed every day in the Palace, with a plate of food that was inevitably uneaten. Patient and silent.

“Oh, you know how mothers are,” Naksima laughed. “We like to do these little things ourselves.”

“I see,” Ahralree wilted a little. “I'll take my leave, then, My Lady, Naksima Maker's Mate.”

“Will you stay?” Shen Shen held out Ahleki's skirt. “I have to do more sewing than Naksima. Ahleki is so vain.”

“I am not!” Ahleki shouted from down the beach. Then, “That one, Shenkir, the shiny blue one, to match my skirt. I want to be the most sparkly one.”

Shenkir was already good naturedly stooping to add it to their collection when the adults burst into giggles, Ahralree decorously hiding her smile, while Naksima and Shen Shen bent double with their laughter.

The sun's warmth felt light, and slightly scolding, as if she were annoyed that they were daring her brightness. All around the island, small dwellings were flooding out of the earth, shaped by the Gliders under Osek's supervision, while Go Backs hunted the many small, red deer that populated the island, who were very unused to predators other than the rare, silent cats of the hilltops. After a while, a young maiden with roughly tied hair brought several stretched hides and three children down to the shore and joined them with a rough friendliness, introducing herself as Kima, and admiring the silk thread.

“Do you think it could be used to sew leather?” She asked, clearly trying to be careful and not get the detritus from her hides on the sewing.

“It can,” Ahralree was carefully hemming Ahleki's skirt with small, nearly invisible stitches. It left Shen Shen free to embroider the old sun symbol she had first learned so well she could almost do it in her sleep, along the neck of the dress, and to admire Naksima's careful work on Shenkir's clothes, which would be the centre of attention at the next potlatch.

Soon a Glider weaver came down, his hands full of silk. He eyed Kima with some amusement when she asked for some thread, but when he gave it to her, she pulled her belt off and began a delicate, intricate pattern of birds in flight, and his face lit up with admiration.

“I'm hungry,” Ahleki flew back over the beach, skirt filled with shells. “We're all hungry, Mama, can we have something to eat?”

“I think we-” Shen Shen was about to get up, when Ahralree flew to her feet, skirt flying out around her like a flower.

“I'll fetch food, my lady,” she flew up the mountain with ease, leaving Shen Shen with a still open mouth, and her crutch in her hand.

She came back with two other Gliders, all three bearing food, and several Go Backs, including Urda.

“You shouldn't bother Shen Shen and Naksima,” Urda scolded the children, putting fish and salted fruits in their hands, while Ahlralree laid out glasses of water. “Especially you, Kima, you're old enough to know better.”

“No bother, no bother!” Naksima laughed, putting down Shenkir's festival clothes. “It fun to have company. Ahleki and Shenkir need play friends.”

Playing. How long had it been since they'd sat together, with their children in sight, waiting out the end of the day, talking about nothing in particular.

Not since before she'd left.

And now.

“Everything is changed,” she said to Naksima, in the Red Mountain language.

“It changed, but it's still good,” Naksima said, with a shrug. “Life is all change, even if it's not usually as big a change as this.”

“You and I haven't changed,” she added, looking Shen Shen straight in the eyes.

“Yes,” Shen Shen nodded. “We haven't. But the baby. That will change everything.”

“You've become a chief's wife, and become mother of a new chief who isn't even born,” Naksima agreed. “That would make even the strongest want to rethink their life.”

All around them, Go Backs and Gliders had settled into happy quarrels and discussions. The children were all playing further down the beach, and Shenkir was surrounded by a happy crowd of admirers, who were still entranced by the newness of his size.

“I never wanted to be special,” Shen Shen knew she was being bitter, and furthermore that she was lying, but couldn't help it. “I never wanted to be a leader, or a mystic, or anything like that. I was happy in my old home, happy in my old life. If the earthquake had never happened, I would have been happy there forever. Nothing needed to change. I wouldn't have left my parents and my sister, I wouldn't have to be there for Ahleki and Osek all the time. I would have had a man from my home, not a strange, crazy elder who risked his life and lost it for something that makes no sense.”

“Hmm...” Naksima sighed.

“If the earthquake had never happened,” Shen Shen sighed. “I would never have had Ahleki. I wouldn't have known I could be a mother. I would never have known I could cross a desert on a zwoot with two jars of water, and almost no food. I would never have known I could make friends with humans, or that I could climb a mountain with one leg, and make a thing of stone fly.

“It's not that I want to take it all back. I just wish it were easier. Sometimes I get up, and I don't want to get up. If I could stay in bed forever, I would.”

“Well, you're not.” Naksima said. “Staying in bed, that is. Not that I would blame you.”

“No,” Shen Shen smiled and bent over her sewing again. “You never blame me for anything.”

“Just the things that are your fault, like when the roof falls down.”

“How was I to know the rain would do that?”

“We only told you a half a dozen times.”

...

They sewed all day, and Ahleki's new clothes were half finished by the time Amrok came down to the beach and exclaimed over the shells, pulling a bag from his belt to fill. Not long after that, the sun went down, and everyone returned home. Ahlralree accompanied them most of the way, face pensive and downcast again.

Shen Shen remembered Ahdri. Savah couldn't even send her handmaiden away for a rest, the maiden's only purpose in life had been to awaken before her, fetch water and food, prepare her clothes, and wait on every move. Ahdri had loved to do the little things, as much as Ahnshen loved to make clothes, to adorn every maid and lad in the village, and Minyah loved growing things.

She wondered if Ahlralree was the same.

“ Ahlralree?”

Shen Shen stopped outside her house, waving at Naksima and Shenkir as they went on, and faced Ahlralree.

“Will you bring me a fish tomorrow?” she asked, thinking as fast as she could. “For my meal. And make sure Ahleki has something to eat.”

“Yes, my lady!” Ahlralree sprang to life, face brightening with a wide smile. “Yes, my lady Shen Shen.”

Shen Shen watched the Glider flutter away with a sigh. Hopefully that would handle one problem.

Of course, she later thought, of course it made another.

...

Shen Shen wondered if there was any point in what she did in the Palace, and began to take Ahleki. It also made the time shorter, as Ahleki had no patience or interest in viewing the home of her ancestors that had come so close to killing her. Her concerns were more immediate, looking at B'Rak, seeing, at last, the huge human that had carried her mother down the waterfall. Shen Shen had wondered if it was possible, then discovered Olbar in the midst of crowing over his pregnant daughter to the assembled mass of humans in his village.

Ahleki liked to fly and run from one end of the Palace to the other. She led Shen Shen all over asking what one thing or another was for, asking why Osek had made the fountain, what the High Ones had eaten or drunk during their long voyage.

The spirits were intrigued by her. Not just her own parents, who followed her dotingly, sending their answers to her and to Shen Shen, but all the spirits. The old were entranced by her youth, the young by her energy and playfulness.

“I should have brought you here sooner,” Shen Shen admitted. “To see your mother and father, if nothing else.”

“You should have,” Ahleki was admiring herself in a reflective wall. “But it's alright, Mama, I forgive you.”
It was not, Shen Shen thought, the sort of response a proper Sun Village maiden would have made to her elder.

Ahleki is not a Sun Villager, Shen Shen thought. That place is no more. The Sun Folk are scattered to the winds, or here, as the Gliders are here. As Mekda is here. As countless elves who lived and died are here.”

Am I dead, too?

Shenkir ran in, followed by a smattering of Go Back children.

“They'll run about until they get bored,” Shen Shen spoke, for the first time in many eights of days, to the unseen presence at her side. “They have nothing to do here.”

We will give them toys, beloved, Voll answered. The spirits here know how to shape the star-stone. It's a skill you will learn one day.

“Will I?”

She looked down at her dress. She hadn't washed it in too long. She hadn't bathed in days, she realized, not since her last swim. Her stomach was still flat, but she could feel something, something in her belly, low and hungry, the first hunger she'd felt since she'd come here.

No wonder Naksima worried so much.

“I want those berries,” she realized, out loud. “The sweet ones with fuzzy skin. And fish, smoked the way Rolf makes it. I want my- my mother's bread.”

“I want a bath,” she said to Ahralree, as the maiden entered, food in hand. “Can you help me, Ahralree?”

“Of course, my lady,” Ahralree set a plate of food down, in easy reach of the children. “It would be my honour.”

Behind her, Ahleki, Shenkir, and their playmates cheered as the stone reformed itself around them

...

It was still hard, but she found herself letting Ahralree take on more chores. Her leg began to pain her as her belly began to swell, and Ahralree helped her dress with careful impersonality. She could teach the Glider maiden some of her healing potions and tricks, mindful of the days ahead when she would be less mobile.

“That's it,” She told Naksima, one morning. “I know the trick.”

“What's the trick?” Naksima asked, carefully painting in some carvings on one of Amrok's new legs.

“To keep going,” Shen Shen said, firmly.

...

Leetah went to Moonshade, since Moonshade wouldn't come to her. She'd been diligent for moons, and now she stopped. Leetah had allowed her her space, but she had the feeling that continued avoidance would be negligence, rather than tact.

Strongbow was awake, sitting beside Rayek, who was staring coolly at nothing, muttering a bit to himself. He shook his head when Leetah went to use her powers.

**She can still feel it.**

There was rage, hatred, and terrible pain simmering under Rayek's skin. Some his, the rest... not.

She shuddered, and withdrew, then tried to smile at Rayek.

He looked as if he didn't recognize her.

**Moonshade's by the lake,** Strongbow told her, before he draped a comforting arm over Rayek, and held some broth up to the other elf's mouth.

Moonshade was sitting on a ledge over the water, lit from below by the moons' reflection. At her side was a lantern, illuminating a jacket on her lap that she was embroidering with a delicate pattern of flowers. She herself was wearing a hooded gown that wrapped around her, guarding her from the early autumn chill. Leetah approached with her acquired silent footsteps, which were still loud enough that Wolfriders could easily pick them out.

“Moonshade?”

Moonshade gasped, jumped, and would have fallen, lamp and all, into the lake, if Leetah hadn't caught her around the waist.

“You startled me,” the tanner rebuked Leetah, irritably.

“I'm sorry, I-” Leetah cut herself off. “I'm sorry, Moonshade.”

“No,” Moonshade's face fell, and she shook her head and gathered her embroidery. “No, I- I would have heard you. Before.”

Leetah remembered all the times Wolfriders, just by walking up out of sight and calling her name, had driven her nearly out of her skin, and was ashamed.

“I wasn't thinking,” she admitted, helping Moonshade settle the lamp down again, and smooth out her embroidery. “How are you today?”

“Tired,” Moonshade sighed. “Deaf. And... How do you not go mad?”

Leetah hesitated, and touched Moonshade's head. Nothing there, except the normal workings of an elfin mind, thoughts sparking off one another in perfect harmony, the humming in the background of the little workings that kept heart and lungs in harmony, the memory storing itself away piece by piece.

It was the memory, Leetah realized. Unlike Wolfrider minds, which stored memories away quickly, save for the most important, calling them up at will, or under the influence of dreamberries, a purely elfin mind held the memories at a flow, recalling them with near perfect clarity at the merest hint of a reminder.

“I see Crescent's skull,” Moonshade whispered. “Covered in flowers, where I put it, and I want to cry out all over again. It's as if the pain is only just now reaching me. Yet I felt it before. I lived it before. I hear Dart play, and suddenly, I am looking at him again, newly born, at my breast. I see my brother, for the last time, leaving for the hunt with his lifemate and son, and I think I can tell him to stop. But it isn't real!”

“For us,” Leetah settled down beside Moonshade and began to untangle some threads. “It is as natural as breathing. We recall and release with the same breath. I cannot even say how.”

“I hate it,” Moonshade double-sewed a stitch, then snapped it off. “I hate it. I feel deaf, I feel sick, I feel tired all the time. Holtfinder cries when she smells me, like I'm sick. I can only walk half as far, and I can't climb anything.”

She kept sewing for a moment, flowers and leaves flowing into life under her fingers.

“I can never go home.”

The holt was only a short ride away, but not that. Moonshade could go to the holt anytime she chose, but she couldn't go home. She could never go back, not the way she had come.

“You understand,” Moonshade sighed. “No one else could.”

Leetah sighed, and rewound some green thread.

“I think everyone would understand,” she said. “In their own way. Not in others. Not perfectly.”

“No, I know.” Moonshade turned the corner of her work. “But I can't face them now. I don't want to.”

She fell silent, and Leetah looked out over the lake. The water was so still it reflected the moons in perfect white, the sky in pure blackness. She'd seen more water in the last eight years than in her entire life before this.

“I'm tired of the healing,” Moonshade said, softly. “Let's not. Another time, maybe.”

“Alright,” Leetah replied, settling back against the grass, watching the moons in the lake.

...

Scouter jumped out of the tree, like a squirrel fleeing a cat's jaws, and pulled Fog behind him out of the holt, following the path the stream cut through the woods, Steady and Bristlebrush behind them.

“What is wrong with you?” Fog asked, when they finally stopped, hair full of leaves and twigs, face red with the rush.

“Nothing,” Scouter told her. “Don't you want to swim, or catch a fish?”

“No,” Fog pouted. “I wanted to do that yesterday.”

“I was busy yesterday,” Scouter told her. “We can do it today.”

“You never want to do anything with me,” Fog whined, eyes filling with tears. “You only took me because you don't want to talk to Mama and Papa about lovemates.”

“Oh, High Ones,” Scouter groaned, and put his head in his hands. “I am not.”

“You are!”

Fog's voice rose, to the pitch that wore on everyone's nerves, and prompted cries of “stop whining” from Ember and Wing, and she stomped her foot, looking much younger than her eight years.

“Stop lying!” She wailed. “Stop lying to me!”

She was in tears, nearly doubled over, and Steady whined, pulling her down against himself. She stayed stiff and angry, then she sat up, and threw a clump of mud at Scouter, throwing herself back down to sob into her wolf friend's fur.

Scouter sat down on the moss, and leaned back against Bristlebrush, who was chewing on her own toes in distress.

Fog kept crying for a little while.

“I don't like it when you're lying to me,” she sniffled. “Just stop it.”

“Scouter?” Mother came through the brush, Whitebrow at her elbow. “I can't find Fog, is she- Fog!”

Fog climbed into Mother's arms. “Scouter made me go with him!”

“Oh, Cubling.” Mother rocked Fog back and forth. “Scouter, you can't just run off with her. You know that.”

Scouter looked at his hands.

“Fog, you're alright,” Mother said, firmly. “Now, enough crying. You'll ruin your eyelashes and give yourself a headache.”

“Scouter's a horrible Scouter,” Fog declared. “I want a new Scouter.”

“Maybe I want a new Fog,” Scouter snapped back, then immediately felt ashamed of himself when Fog began crying again.

“Honestly, both of you,” Mother scolded them. “Scouter, you're old enough to know better.”

“Sorry,” he muttered.

“Father needs someone to help smoke the fish,” Mother told him. He made a face at his hands, and knew better than to object.

“I like fish,” Fog said, voice still thick with snot and tears. “I want to help.”

“Why don't you help me catch some fish?” Mother said. “I have a fishing spear in just your size, Fog.”

“Oooh! Thank you, Mama!”

Mother had clearly told Father, judging by his pointed silence and set lips. Scouter resigned himself to smoke and fish and the smells thereof for possibly the rest of eternity, even though he wasn't a cub anymore and his parents couldn't tell him what to do.

“If it were someone else,” Father said, laying down coals under the sliced, white flesh. “If it had been Newstar, or Skywise, I don't suppose I could expect them to understand.”

As if Skywise, or anyone else, would take Fog anywhere, Scouter thought. The stargazer in particular was shy of Fog's piercing, grey looks, and her strange, secret truths.

“But you know Fog,” One Eye said. “You know her better than anyone except for me and your mother. You know what taking off into the woods would do on a day like this.”

“I just wanted to take her swimming.”

“You went off with her because you knew we wouldn't follow you if you were together.”

Scouter gutted a fish and tried to pretend he wasn't there.

“We don't know if Fog will grow up like everyone else,” Father's voice softened, growing blue and far away. “We don't know if she will grow up.”
“She's been growing since she was born,” Scouter protested, stung by the implications.

“Not that much,” Father slit a fish with more force than necessary. “Leetah checks Fog every so often. Fog is small for her age, and her mind, well, she's as young as she looks.”

Father tended to be blunt, and this near round about way of putting things shook Scouter.

“Fog's just short,” he protested. “She's just little.”

Shorter than Ember and Suntop, closer to Tyleet in size. Short tempered, too, apt to fly into a fury if things weren't done perfectly, to certain specifications. Late to walk, late to talk. Scouter had heard all these things, but Fog was Fog, happy to ride around in his arms, happy to curl up with him to watch birds fly home for the night, happy to ride with him on his wolf-friend. She was his sister, the brightest spot in his life during that terrible first year after losing Dewshine. She'd finally taken her first steps from his parents' hands to his, and spoken her first words into his ears.

“She's smart, too,” Scouter pointed out. “She knows all the birds from just their wings, and she can tell when it's going to rain days before it happens.”

“No one is saying Fog doesn't have gifts,” Father told him. “But we don't know if she'll be- We don't know what will happen.”

Scouter dropped his knife.

“Fog is smart,” he repeated. “She's smart.”

“Scouter, she's smarter than most of the elves in this holt!” Father strapped a rack of fish into the smokehouse with more force than necessary. “But she's small, she's behind, in her feelings and actions, and she has weak lungs, and Mother and I won't always be here.”

Mother was the second oldest of all the elves in the tribe. They'd never been sure, until Leetah came, but she'd settled the quiet competition with a touch. Much older than than Father, more than twice his age, actually.

Mother would go and then Father, and then what?

“Fog needs to be able to trust you,” Father told him, voice becoming gentler. “She needs to be able to look to you for help when we're gone, and even when we're here. You're all we have, and we need to know you'll be okay.”

Scouter picked up his knife, and cleaned it off, walking out with his father and sealing the smokehouse shut.

“There you are!” Skywise rode up happily, hands deep in his elderly wolf's fur. “Come up to the Tallest Tree with me, I think there's more shooting stars tonight than ever before!”

Scouter glanced at his father, who held up his hands with a dry laugh.

“He's certainly not looking for my eye, cub.”

There were more shooting stars than usual. They darted through the sky, brief, bright flashes that came and went without disturbing the night at all.

...

Leaf Change came. It came quietly this year, but quickly, and with a great chill that made the leaves burst into colour and froze tender plants that the Sun Folk depended on, and Redlance went into the village, carefully coaxing them back.

“There!” He left off the squash and turned to smile at Minyah.

The older elf smiled, but it was brief and soon faded. Redlance glanced over his shoulder, where Nightfall was taking Tyleet to go and visit with Moonshade and Strongbow. The light was still strong, and Tyleet was still yawning.

“Is everything alright, Minyah?”

The elder shook herself, and shrugged.

“This frost,” she sighed. “I love our home, but the weather sometimes.”

“It's hard,” Redlance agreed, standing up, and stretching out his arms. “When the cold comes, and the flowers sleep and die, it always feels a bit like I'm sleeping and dying, too.”

“Oh, don't say things like that!” Minyah exclaimed, shuddering. “I can't bear it!”

Redlance stared at her, then realized people were very studiously ignoring their conversation.

“Why don't you show me how the south fields are doing?” He asked, taking her by the arm. “Let me just check on them.”

The seeds slept beneath the ground, tiny and expectant, hardy against the chilling frost, waiting for the reprieve of spring. Minyah watched him with slumped shoulders and a morose expression.

“What's wrong, Minyah?”

He pretended to continue to seek out the seeds and check their health, while he secretly watched his friend.

She sighed, and shrugged.

“You won't always be around to do this,” she commented.

“I wasn't planning on leaving anytime soon,” Redlance laughed.

“No, you aren't planning on leaving,” She sat down on one of the stones that lined the fields. “But you will.”

Redlance hesitated, then began to have an inkling of what the problem was.

“You know, Minyah,” He sat up, abandoning his pretense of tending to the seeds. “Every seed that blooms and grows dies, but it leaves seeds behind and life, as well.”

“Seeds and life,” Minyah laughed, bitterly. “I don't want seeds and life. I want the plant.”

Redlance hesitated.

“It's not the fate of the plant to live forever,” he said. “I can bring a spark of life back to frostbitten leaves, but the plant wilts in the frost again.”

“The plant has no choice!” Minyah wailed, tears beginning to trace her cheeks. “Elves do! If the wolf blood can be removed, why let yourselves wilt? Why let it nip at you until the last spark of life is dead?”

“The frost comes to eat the flowers,” Redlance thought about it. “And the flowers fade to feed their children. It is as it is.”

“But it needn't be,” Minyah caught his hands up, pleading. “Redlance, if you needn't wilt, why do it?”

Redlance tried to decide how to answer.

“He's going to leave me,” Minyah whispered, eyes deep and haunted. “He's going to leave me and...”

She put her hands on her belly, already beginning to swell.

“Leetah says the baby is like... you.”

Redlance thought about it.

“Minyah, have you spoken to Moonshade?”

Minyah shook her head.

“She seems fine,” she murmured. “She's adjusting.”

“I'm going there now,” Redlance stood up and brushed the dirt off his breeches. “Why don't you come with me.”

They made their way down to the shores of the lake, along the ridge closer to the woods, where he had helped Ahdri shape a cave and an elderly willow into a home. Rainsong and Strongbow were sitting together, weaving door and windowcovers, stuffing them with leaves and moss, to prepare for the quickly coming snow.

“Father!” Tyleet ran out the door, waving a small scrap of leather. Upon closer inspection, it was a bag, with stitches in varying size and a crude wolf's head embroidery.

“It's wonderful!”

It really was, considering Tyleet's age and lack of experience. Clearly it had been made with pieces of left over from something else, probably as an opportunity to keep the child out of trouble while Moonshade and Nightfall visited, but it was pretty, in its own way.

Minyah went inside, and he heard Moonshade greet her. Nightfall left, as Minyah came in, and her face made Redlance think of her name, the soft fire in the sky that heralded the coming of darkness.

“You're beautiful,” he told her, as they left.

“Thank you,” she glanced back, to where Strongbow was walking with Rayek, down to the lake. “Why did you bring Minyah?”

He winced, and told her about Minyah's concerns.

“That may not have been well done,” she commented. “Moonshade hasn't been well, lately.”

“I didn't know what else to do,” he sighed. “She's so afraid of it.”

“I know.”

“What is Minyah afraid of?” Tyleet asked.

Nightfall stopped, and looked at Redlance. Redlance winced.

“Tyleet,” He hesitated. “Wolfriders are different from other elves.”

“I know, we have wolves and live in the holt.”

“We do,” Nightfall said, slowly. “But we also are all children of Timmorn. Timmorn was half wolf, and we all bear his wolf blood in our veins.”

“Is that why I can smell more things than Rayah?” Tyleet asked, eyes wide, but with a slightly gleeful smile beginning to show. “And why Fog can hear better than everyone?”

“Fog is different,” Redlance said quickly. “But there's another thing that the wolf blood does.”

Tyleet listened as they explained, eyes growing wider and wider, until they nearly took up her entire face. Redlance watched her, wondering what was happening, what Tyleet would choose.

“Will I die?” Tyleet asked.

“Not for a long time,” Nightfall assured her.

“Not for a long time for everyone,” Redlance added, firmly.

“But, can Leetah change it?” Tyleet asked.

“Yes,” Redlance said. “Maybe. Either way, it's not a choice you should make until you're a grown up.”

“Alright,” Tyleet thankfully went back to examining her bag and talking about all the things they should put in it.

“Moonshade says she has talent,” Nightfall mused. “I'm going to take her back in a day or two and see what happens.”

Redlance nodded, and by then they were back at the holt, with Ember calling out for Tyleet, and Scouter needed help fixing the branch to his parent's den.

“I don't know why he doesn't move into his own den,” Redlance mused later, in their den, while dawn made its way over the forest. Tyleet was asleep and they were on their way.

“Maybe he's just lonely,” Nightfall murmured, then, “Do you think Minyah and Treestump are alright?”

Redlance sighed.

“I don't know,” he admitted. “Minyah's already lost so much, I'm not surprised she wants him to give up his wolf-blood.”

“I suppose,” Nightfall sighed, then shuddered. “Ugh.”

“What?”

“I don't want that,” She hissed. “I want my body and bones to run with the wolves, and I want my spirit to rest with the Father Tree.”

“Hmmm...” He sighed, and curled back up around her. “Both of us together, in the Father Tree. That's something to look forward to.”

...

They harvested that day and the next. Ruffel worked harder than she had since they'd left Sorrow's End. Squash, beans, red fruit, fire fruits, and all, they went to storing and jarring and drying, smoking meat and fish.

Moonshade and Ahnshen worked together to patch winter clothes and make new ones, but Ruffel was spared that because she and Rainsong were weaving doors and windows.

“I hope it's not an early winter,” she complained. “Maybe it's just a cold snap, or something. Surely it can't come this fast.”

Rainsong shook her head.

“I've seen more than one winter like this,” she said, calmly. “It's been a good summer, but you can feel the winter coming on.”

“Besides,” Maleen came in with a burst of chilly air and pressed her cheek to Ruffel's, just to hear her squeak. “I like the cold.

“Get off,” Ruffel threw her hands back, and Maleen fell, laughing, into the stuffing.

“Oof,” Rainsong left off giggles and put her hands behind her back, groaning. “That's terrible, you two.”

“Are you alright, Rainsong?” Maleen sat up.

“I'm fine,” Rainsong shook her head. “It's just so close to my time.”

“Maybe you should be resting,” Maleen suggested. “Ruffel and I could finish without you.”

“I'd trust you and Ruffel to work without supervision as much as I'd trust my youngest,” Rainsong said, dryly, then glanced over her shoulder to where Wing and little Behtia were carefully spreading child's teeth to dry near the fire. “Actually, slightly less.”

“Unfair,” Ruffel protested. “I was working, it was Maleen that was playing around.”

“Don't put all the blame on me,” Maleen said, bending her head to help finish the weaving.

They all laughed, then fell into silence, weaving and stuffing and finishing, with the winter nipping around the hanging grasses in the windows. Maleen drew Ruffel down to lean on her, not losing a single moment of work as she did.

“Rainsong?”

“Hmm?” Rainsong hummed softly in response.

“What's it like to have a child?”

Rainsong's head flew up, eyes growing wide and rounder.

“What?”

“And Recognition?” Maleen put the finished door aside and took out more reeds and started another door. “What is that like?”

“Did you know Woodlock before you Recognized?” Ruffel asked.

“What is it like to nurse?”

“Oh, High Ones,” Rainsong shook her head. “I- It's like nothing I can explain. Like being dipped in water at the height of the white cold, then thrown into a fire

“The whole world goes away,” she sighed. “It's just you and him, and the need. You long for each other, in a way no other heat can fill you. You can't think or do anything else, you have to be together.”

“Then it's over,” Rainsong laughed. “And you're sore and tired and it's two years of misery ahead. If they ever find a way to get the cub without the Recognition and the bearing, I'll jump for it.”

Vurdah came in, followed by her lifemate. Ruffel looked down at her weaving, and finished the edge of the window-covering.

“I wonder if we could make windows out of clearstone,” Halek mused, as he brought a basketful of stuffing for them. “We've made lanterns out of them, haven't we?”

“Yes, but the lanterns burn to the touch,” Ruffel pointed out, having had the multiple stinging fingertips to know, and the certainty that she would have more. “Wouldn't all the heat just go through the window-covers?”

“What about double panes?” Vurdah suggested, smiling, setting her burden of leaves down. “If we put in two pieces of clearstone, instead of one?”

“We'll have to wait until spring to see if it might work,” Rainsong said, with an unusual-+ firmness. “Truly, this is the coldest fall that I can remember in many turns of the seasons, and we'd best be ready for it.”

“Summer breaks with a storm,” Vurdah sighed, and stretched, going back out to fetch more leaves.

“She always was a poet,” Maleen chuckled, and helped put the new door in a pile with the others.

“I never had a lovemate before Woodlock,” Rainsong gave them an odd, knowing look. “He and I are agemates, so it seemed we fit.”

“For wolfriders, Recognition usually means lifemating. It's rare a pair doesn't find some kind of middle ground.”

“It's the same for us,” Maleen commented, beginning a new frame.

“I suppose it's alright,” Ruffel said. “It's better for the child.”

Rainsong shrugged, and they worked in silence for a time.

“Hard for anyone left behind,” she commented, finally.

...

The winter came with thick snow, wet and soft, and that was accompanied by rain and mist, and everyone gathered in the Palace, more and more, where it was warm and dry.

“It's so wet that my bones are soaked,” Urda groaned, stretching out on one of the fur blankets that the Go Backs left strewn all over the Palace. “I can handle snow, it's the rain that's driving me mad.”

“Eh, they say it never snows on the coast,” Naksima pouted. “Only about every seven years. I can't take walking through piles of white shit everyday.”

Ahleki and Shenkir led a group of giggling children past, to play on the slides and the climbing apparatuses that had shaped themselves from the star-stone. Shen Shen watched them enviously, then laboriously drew her crutches up underneath herself, and left the group, pausing only to touch Naksima's shoulder reassuringly when the woman tilted an inquiring eyebrow at her.

Ahralree followed her, a silent, reassuring shadow, somehow grown unobtrusive.

Where the Scroll of Colours had been a curiosity and distraction, a true interest was beginning to grow. Shen Shen, never magical, never clever, never wise, found herself drawn to it, to the star-stone.

I wonder if this was how Savah felt once.

Orolen was a better tutor than Voll, although how much of that was due to Shen Shen's residual anger she couldn't say. His unelfin, inhuman looks were reassuring, in a strange way. One couldn't despise an enigma.

He guided her through the Scroll.

This was my task. To record all we had done, all we would do.

She understood, through him, that she could, if she chose, look to the many shades of the future, or to the present, perhaps even to her own family.

She never did. Frightened, perhaps, of what she might see.

The past was different. It had happened, was immutable. She saw Savah, a child, but so pregnant that she seemed ready to burst. An unknown ancestress of hers, hiding in the rocks with a spear, ready to pounce on a boar. Ahlekah, hair wild in the wind, shaping the Bridge Of Destiny while a young lad with flowing black locks wailed for her to come down.

Strangers. Elves that rode the Vastdeep the way the Gliders danced in the air, some on strange contraptions that caught the wind and rode it, some by shaping themselves to match the beasts that dwelt under the waves.

An elf who was confronted by a great hawk, and responded by spreading his arms so wide that they became wings and taking to the air beside her. Shen Shen watched, first in fascination, then disgust, skipping over for a matter of moons, when the eggs hatched, and strange, half-elfin, half bird creatures came out, screaming and small.

You needn't concern yourselves over my children, a spirit murmured in her ear, amused. They have done well for themselves.

The bird elves found other elves and other birds, and formed a new kind of elf, a new kind of hawk. The two, elf and bird, twined themselves together, generation after generation, until five had passed.

Shen Shen looked away then, gagging internally.

A small group of elves encountered a similar sized tribe of humans in a distant forest. The two remained shy of each other, but they began to trade and to talk. They made homes together by shaping trees into a dwelling place as big as Blue Mountain, humans by coaxing vines and branches with gentleness, water, and fertilizer, the elves doing the same and adding magic. Shen Shen lingered for a moment on images of those long dead, or perhaps old enough that they had forgotten the festival and the feasts that Shen Shen was watching.

A girl with long, flowing braids rode a humpless zwoot across the plains, trying to escape Recognition and her Recognized(not far behind, he called her back). She was young, less than two eights, and Shen Shen's heart ached.

Then it ached for another reason. The maiden's parents were behind the lad, and her mother raised her bow.

Shen Shen watched, almost horrified and not quite. It was clear there was no other choice. The girl was too young to bear a child safely, too young even for lovemating. The arrow flew true, and the boy never even knew he had died until he arrived at the Palace.

Amazing that we managed to survive, Orolen observed all events with an equal dispassion. Much less thrive to the extent that we have.

Now, he stilled the Scrolls. You can turn. How is your control?

It was very different, Shen Shen had found, simply watching and slipping through the events of the Scroll, and consciously finding a specific location and time.

She answered by looking at Ahleki, but found herself watching a very different Ahleki. Tall and lovely, with a prominent nose and long, waving hair, held back by a familiar head-band. And Ahleki, with short hair, a ring through her nose, and a scar on her cheek. And Ahleki, and Ahleki, so many that she became dizzy, and had to force herself to withdraw from the Scroll.

“-She is your own Lord's Recognized!”

“She's a jumped up degenerate who was lucky enough to lock eyes with Lord Voll at the right moment.”

The voice was cold and barely familiar. Lysanara, usually seen in the company of Hoykar and Eresir, and a few others who tended to look slightly ill in the presence of anyone but each other.

“She carries our future Lord in her belly,” Ahralree's voice was soft and tight. Clearly trying not to disturb Shen Shen, clearly trying not lose her temper, and clearly very upset.

Shen Shen kept her eyes on the Scroll, as if lost in contemplation.

“She carries an infant who may or may not become our future Lord,” Lysanara's voice was quietly contemptuous. “Provided it shows the promise of its father.”

Shen Shen rolled her eyes. The promise of what? Voll had barely been awake the last few years of his life, and he'd gone mad for the last few days. Hopefully the baby would take after Leetah. Or Father. Mother. Even Ruffel would be better.

“She led us over the mountains, she made the Palace fly, she-”

“She has been extraordinarily lucky, hasn't she?” Lysanara was patronizing, amused. As if Shen Shen had stumbled into the Palace, tripped, and fallen into the chair, which, Shen Shen thought, wasn't too far off from the truth.

“All that,” Lysanara sneered. “And saddling us with a gaggle of barbarians and humans.”

“Not even proper humans that know how to serve,” that was Eresir. “Humans that set themselves above us, that deigned to offer us charity.”

“Us, the children of the High Ones,” Lysanara again. “The rightful rulers of this world, and all others!”

Of course, that was what they had been doing in Blue Mountain, Shen Shen thought. Ruling.

“And you,” Lysanara went from hostile to conciliatory. “You've gone from hand-maiden to the First Born himself to servant to a silly goose who chases humans and dreams alike.”

A silence spread itself across the room.

“I am the hand-maid to the Lady Shen Shen,” Ahralree said, coldly. “Who led us over the mountains, who made the Palace fly, who brought us to the Greenwake, who bears the child of the First Born in her belly.”

“You're a fool-”

“Good day, Lysanara,” Ahralree said, then quickly, as if someone had made to speak. “Good day, all of you.”

They left in a whisper of silk and soft furs. Shen Shen counted to eight twice, then turned around.

Ahralree stilled had her back turned to her, but for the first time in all the moons since Shen Shen had met her, her shoulders were slumped, and she was shaking.

Shen Shen went to her hand-maiden, and wrapped an arm around the taller elf's waist.

“Thank you.”

“My Lady!” Ahralree whirled out of her grasp, like the leaf Shen Shen had once unkindly compared her to. “My Lady, you should not have-Did you hear?”

“I did,” Shen Shen looked out the door that she assumed Lysanara and her flocked had exited through, and her luck still held as Ahralree followed her gaze and blanched.

“I thought things were going too well,” Shen Shen sighed, almost relieved rather than irritated. “You know, she isn't wrong. Half of what I've done has been luck.”

“My mother said luck is what happens, wisdom and cleverness is how you use your luck,” Ahralree said, firmly. “You use your luck well, My Lady. Lysanara is jealous, that's all. Jealous and hateful. She loved Winnowill, and wished for a child of Voll's to grow within her body.”

“Oh, well,” Shen Shen sighed. “At least I know, now.”

They stood in silence for a moment, then Ahralree spoke.

“I cannot be the only one Lysanara has approached, My Lady.”

Shen Shen nodded, considering it. “I would say not. She's the type that likes to spread poison.”

There was nothing she could do about it now. Perhaps Urda and Naksima would have some insight. Meanwhile, Ahralree was wilting like a frostbitten flower.

“Ahralree, do you know how to turn the Scroll?” Shen Shen asked the older she elf.

“No,” Ahralree shook her head, blushing. “I have no gifts whatsoever, My Lady. Not to shape, or light fires, or anything at all.”

“Then let's see if we can learn together,” Shen Shen suggested.

Ahralree stared at her in astonishment, then, smiling, joined her.

...

“She's an idiot,” Shen Shen rolled her eyes, pulling at the end of her curls, and trying to remember if she had combed her hair recently, then realizing she needed to comb Ahleki's, anyhow. “I don't know what she was trying to do, talking to Ahralree like that. If she wanted to get her on her side, well, it didn't work.”

“It's not how I'd try to get anyone on my side,” Naksima agreed, carefully tying her braids off. “It was more like she was trying to frighten her than get her help.”

“What I don't understand is why,” Shen Shen ran the wide toothed cedar comb through Ahleki's hair, admiring the soft waves. “Ahleki, let's pin your hair up for the night.”

Ahleki groaned, but allowed Shen Shen to pin her hair in twists for the evening.

“I don't know,” after Ahleki went to bed, Shen Shen and Naksima were still up speaking, while Shen Shen tried to comb out at least two days worth of tangles. “If she hates it so much she might as well leave.”

“Why should she leave?” Amrok asked, carving another hand. “All her people are here, everything that she has left is here.”

Shen Shen, who had been about to say something rather cruel, shut her mouth.

“I never thought of that,” she admitted.

“It's hard to think kindly about someone who does things that infuriate you,” Amrok laughed. “I have trouble with it myself, even though I'm mostly perfect.”

“Perfect, of course,” Shen Shen rolled her eyes. “But even knowing why she must do it doesn't change the fact that she does it, and I need her to stop.”

“B'Rak would put someone like her on a council of elders to stop her complaining,” Amrok put the hand down and began to work on the little pegs that would be fingers.

“We don't have anything like that,” Shen Shen finally got the last tangles out of her hair and began to twist it into a coronet. “But it wouldn't be a bad idea to have one. I mean, everyone feeling like they had a say, then no one could complain.”

“If only the Gliders weren't so-so flimsy!”

She stretched out her arms, shaking feeling back into her fingers.

“Even if we had a council, they'd just float around, and wait for someone to tell them what to do, how to think. And Go Backs! Half the time they quarrel over where to set stitches, how to tie bootlaces, or anything that crosses their paths, all to hear their own voices!”

“How much better if you remain the only voice anyone hears,” Naksima agreed, facetiously, voice dryly amused. “Surely the Gliders will all learn to think for themselves that way. And the Go Backs will never quarrel, knowing that they have so little to offer. It will be as if Winnowill and Voll never died.”

Shen Shen blushed, pulling her mantle close around her shoulders and pouting at the fire.

“I'm not like that.”

“If you're not like that, then don't act like it,” Naksima said, sitting down and carving nails into the fingers Amrok was making. “And don't come looking for pity from us.”

...

“Leetah!” Pike almost jumped into the treehole, tumbling from the branches with glee. “What are you doing? Rainsong's cub could be here any breath now!”

“I'm sure it's not coming that fast, Pike,” Leetah laughed, and finished packing her bag.

“That sounds like Rainsong,” Pike muttered, then said nothing, as Leetah had shot him the kind of look anyone who'd given birth to cubs could give in their sleep.

The Village had begun to grow used to children being born at this point, and while there was a general feeling of excitement, they mostly just went about their daily business, clearing snow from between the houses and off the roofs, gathering and chopping firewood, and all the general chores associated with winter.

“Leetah!” Newstar, mittened hands clasped together, wrapped in several layers of fur and wool, jumped up and down outside her family's house. “Leetah, it's time!”

“I swear, I am going to tear out my womb after this is done!”

Newstar giggled.

“She said that last time, too,” she commented, opening the door.

“Close that poking door!”

Rainsong was twisted up, courching in Woodlock's arms, panting and gasping for breath. A hooded figure knelt before her, trying to help her stay seated.

“I hate you,” she snarled, glaring at Woodlock. “Go poke a bear, you horrible creature.”

“M-hm,” Woodlock hummed, and grinned at Leetah. “How are you?”

Leetah was about to answer, then the hood on Rainsong's helper fell back, revealing Toorah, and Leetah couldn't speak for a moment.

“I'm not as good as Shen Shen,” her mother smiled nervously at her. “But there seems to be a lot of pain here.”

“Let me see,” Leetah hurried over, and took off her mittens, carefully warming her hands before touching Rainsong.

“Dung!” Rainsong hit the arm of her chair. “Dung, dung, dung!”

Silvergrace whined, licking her elf-friend's face gently.

Rainsong wasn't in more pain than she ought to have been, Leetah realized at a touch. She was just a bit less interested in bearing the pain than some mothers were. Which was just as well, as far as Leetah was concerned, for she'd never seen the point in excess pain during birth. With a whisper of thought, Rainsong sighed, easing.

“Bless you, Leetah.”

“Bless you,” Woodlock echoed, eyes still warm and humourous, despite Rainsong's fingermarks on his arm.

“Much better,” Toorah laughed. “Well done, Leetah.”

The birthing went smoothly after that. Rainsong pushed when she needed to push, breathed when she needed to breathe, and the baby came with the mid-morning sun, burning bright across the snow.

Silvergrace cleaned the baby, then knelt to do her work on the afterbirth, a tradition that still made Leetah squeamish and even the newly serene Toorah had to look away. Woodlock wrapped the newly clean baby in a blanket of rabbit skins and woven zwoot-hair, and carried him outside, to the jubilation of the Sun Folk. Rainsong nursed the baby and fell into a deep sleep.

“What will you name him?” Toorah asked, dangling a little toy in front of the baby's face. He had golden curls, and it was too early to see what his eyes looked like, so he might have been Suntop, Leetah thought bitterly, remembering how Toorah had stared through her children, as if they were so much mist.

“Mender,” Woodlock said, proudly. “For his gifts.”

They left the little family alone, with Newstar running back and forth in the village, sending out word of everything that had transpired, and little Wing curling up next to his mother, a little sad in the way all older siblings were, even when the newborn was much awaited and desired.

“A pretty baby,” Toorah sighed. “Not as pretty as yours.”

“You didn't see my babies when they were that small,” Leetah said, sharply, although she didn't mean to be sharp. She was angry, and trying not be angry made her more angry. “They were equally as red and wrinkled.”

“Yes,” Toorah nodded. “You were in the woods. I was...”

“In the village,” Leetah remembered. “Skywise offered to bring you.”

“I was sick.”

Sick was a word for it.

“I know.”

“Do you?” Toorah stopped, and looked at her straight on. “You have children of your own, now. Do you truly understand? Could you possibly imagine?”

Imagine. Leetah didn't want to imagine. It was in her mind everyday, what it would be like, when Ember was gone. When she died. When Cutter died.

“I have another child,” she said, instead. “You have another child.”

“My child was grown. She had a lifemate of her own, a life of her own. I had nothing.”

Leetah turned them into her parents' house and shut the door, barely giving Trollhammer enough time to tuck himself in and climb into a pile of cushions at the side of the stove.

“I carried my babies alone,” she hissed, not wanting to wake her father up. “I gave birth with my lifemate, but I wanted you, and when I brought the twins to you, you didn't even look at them!”

“I was sick!” Toorah was equally angry and low voiced. “I was sick, and then when I was better, you were angry. You never even left the twins alone in my sight, and you almost never bring them here.”

“Why should I bring them here?” Leetah felt as if she were spewing poison, but she couldn't help it. It was as if an infection had been lanced, and pus and blood were pouring out. “What for? So you can stare straight through them, too?”

Toorah's face was marred by a frown, one of a very few that Leetah remembered in all her years.

“You're spoiled,” she declared, all care for noise gone.”You've always been spoiled. Not just by me, or your father, but all the Sun Folk. Even the Wolfriders, a little. You've always been sweet, so we never knew, but you are spoilt.

“You're one star among many, Leetah. You aren't the sun.”

Leetah felt rage actually close her throat.

“I lost the sun the day that Shen Shen died. The dust from the earth shake blotted it out. I hope you will never know that.”

Ember rose in Leetah's eyes.

“I couldn't heal you,” she said, finally. “I couldn't heal you, and I couldn't leave my family, and you wanted Shen Shen, not me, and I couldn't find her. Cutter could tell you, days when I woke up, wanting to go and find her, go and be with her. It was all pointless, anyways.”

“And you blamed me,” Toorah laughed, but it was bitter and dry as a winter wind. “For what? Being sad?”

“You never tried to be anything else,” Leetah insisted. “Yes, grief is grief, but we all have to get up. We all have to cook and to clean, and to walk forward, even through a swamp, even through the storm.”

“There was nothing to get up for! You were grown, you were happy, Anatim was, your father was alright, there was nothing for me to do!”

“You could have loved me!”

Toorah flinched.

“I'm not Shen Shen,” Leetah thought of her sweet, sharp, slightly silly sister, of her top-knots, bouncing as she bustled from one task to another to another to a gossip session to a feast to another, but always there. Before Shen Shen was almost half of her lifespan, yet it seemed to belong to someone else. It had happened, but in the way that things had happened before one was born, only half-real.

“I'm sorry I'm not Shen Shen,” and she really was. “But I needed you. I needed to know when to nurse, when to wean, what to put in their hair when they began to lose it. I needed to know that you were thinking of me, too, that you wanted me to come by, that you looked forward to me. I needed you.”

“Leetah,” Toorah shook her head. “I am sorry. I should have woken up. I should have been there.”

“But you are a maiden grown,” she said, firmly, as if she were telling Leetah she could tie her own sandals, wash her own clothes, and comb her own hair. “You have no idea what I was going through, and you didn't care. It's not the nature, after all, for children to care about what their parents go through, and you, more than most, never had to care about anyone's inner thoughts. Just their bodies.”

“Well, tell me how you feel, then,” Leetah snapped, stung by her mother's assessment of her, not wanting to admit to how much of it was true. **Tell me what you feel that's so much more important than any of us!**

Toorah cried out, and nearly fell, grabbing a table to keep herself upright, and Leetah, who had falled subconsciously into sending, ran to her.

“Mother, I'm sorry, I-”

But Toorah had lived with magic users her entire life, and recovered quickly, turning her eyes and her mind to Leetah, both burning bright with indignation, and she learned quickly.

Leetah was overwhelmed. Her mother's eyes looked into her skull, and filled her mind with a great, grey fog, an overwhelming despair. She wandered, desperate, trying to feel, trying to see. Her own face, going from despairing, to perplexed, to joyful, then, strangely, to impassive, then sharp and angry. She tried to reach out, but her hands felt as if they were encased in thick clay. Her father was there, and she tried to turn to him, to smile, and speak, but she couldn't find him.

And through it all, Shen Shen. She dreamed of her, thought of her, reached for her. At night, she woke up to the sound of Shen Shen coming in, tinkling glass beads that were silenced by a hand that thought it was subtle. In the day she turned to her, and she was gone.

And the want. Recognition was nothing to this, hunger and thirst paled in comparison. She needed Shen Shen, like air, and she couldn't move or speak without her.

She was overwhelmed by memories, by regrets, by misery. She was paralyzed and angry, and she hated the house and the village and the weather.

“Leetah!”

Her mother was clutching her shoulders, fingers digging in so hard it hurt, and Leetah felt the fog burn away, as if the sun had come out.

“You've-you've never sent before,” she said, when she had breath again. “Have you?”

“Leetah!”

Her mother embraced her, tightly.

“I'm sorry.”

“I'm sorry, too,” Leetah murmured. “You were right, I didn't know.”

They sat for a long time, after that, and talked. The sun was falling into a fire by the time Leetah left, and the muted celebration that accompanied births was in full swing. There were a few Wolfriders, including her own lifemate and cubs. Toorah let her go, promising to catch up with sweets.

She looked for Cutter, and found him with her father and the cubs, near little Wing.

“You're much better than a baby,” Ember was saying scornfully to Wing. “Why, he can't even talk. You already have your wolf-friend, and you can even shoot a bird out of the sky with your sling!”

“That's not really the point of babies,” Wing said, amused. “He does other things.”

“Oh, yes, magic,” Ember rolled her eyes.

“He's a really nice baby,” Suntop offered, when Wing began to look irritable.

“I thought you might be here,” Toorah came up behind them, with soaked balls of maisa soaked in honey, that Leetah remembered from her own childhood, shaped like bees, with delicate wings of candied flower petals.

“Grandmother!”

The twins were as excited as any child upon meeting their grandmother. They took the honey-treats, and ate far more than their fair allotment, to Leetah's shame and her parents' delight.

Mender was welcomed by two tribes, and he and his mother slept through most of it, under a pile of furs and next to a bonfire so tall that it took two elves to see over it.

“Do you think I'm selfish?” Leetah asked Nightfall a few days later, having mulled over the conversation she'd had with her mother for days.

“Honestly?” Nightfall asked, then laughed as Leetah groaned. “Don't ask that if you don't want an answer!”

“It's not a bad selfishness,” she pointed out. “You just- You have a lot of regard for yourself. It's not bad. You can sometimes be a brat over it. You always give your opinion, even when people don't ask for it, but that's alright. Why do you ask?”

Leetah shrugged.

“My mother said- We were arguing.”

“Ah,” Nightfall shrugged. “That.”

“You agree with her?” Leetah asked, slightly hurt.

“It's not the nature of cubs to think of their mother's needs,” Nightfall said. “And it's not my business, but yes, sometimes I think you could be kinder to her.”

Leetah thought about it, and Nightfall took the opportunity to press on.

“Your people treat, or used to, treat magic users a little too high. I think it makes you think yourselves a little high, whether you mean to or not.”

“That's not-” Leetah snapped her mouth shut, thinking about it.

The Sun Folk had always adored her. Even in jealousy, they looked to her like the flowers of flood time, like the sun. She had always thought she escaped Rayek's arrogance, that she was nothing like his coldness.

And yet.

“It is true,” she said, softly. “And when mother...”

“Don't think about it,” Nightfall sighed. “If you think about it, you'll be unkind to yourself. Just try to be kinder going forward.”

...

Shen Shen thought they might have starved, but for the Forbidden Grove. Petalwing had insisted they go fetch the animals cocooned there, much to Lysanara's displeasure.

“Preservers are always shrieking about some nonsense or other,” she had commented at Council. “Generally it's all silliness, like a bird in their hive.”

“I've been to the Forbidden Grove,” Shen Shen retorted. “It's full of more meat than we could eat in the year, and we'll have enough to share with B'Rak's people, and the Deathwater Clan.”

“Why should we share with them?” Eresir objected, but since his voice was at least civil, Shen Shen didn't let her temper override her.

“Because they've helped us. We sent all the Hoan G'Tay Sho refugees to Deathwater, and B'Rak's people, well,” she nodded to Naksima, whose eyes glimmered in amusedment back at her. “They've given us more than enough.”

“Who knows how long this weather might last,” Lysanara objected. “We may not have enough to feed ourselves, let alone the humans.”

“”The humans” who fed you and gave you land when you were homeless,” Naksima said, with a dry, irritable note in her voice. “I see the honour that the “bird spirits” possess.”

“We remember the aid the humans gave us,” Urda said, giving Lysanara and Eresir looks as sharp as the ice shards that coated the beaches this winter. “Go Backs will do their duty.”

Duty, honour, Shen Shen rubbed her temples to avoid rolling her eyes. Her hair was pulled up into a coronet, had been for days. Combing it was exhausting, so she left it until she had to tearfully pull apart tangles and knots. It was starting to look awful. She tugged at her loose curls, little tendrils that had been coming out since she'd put it up.

“They gave us a home,” Reevol agreed, looking much better than he had when Shen Shen had met him, his hair loosely braided over one shoulder. “The least we can do is share our food.”

“How long will the winter last?” Shen Shen asked Shuka, a delicate Glider with an odd gift for shaping water, as opposed to stone, or trees, who had been brought to Council by Lysanara, and who startled when Shen Shen spoke to her.

“The water sings of darkness, My Lady,” Shuka answered, after glancing timidly at Lysanara for permission, which the elder gave with a bored shrug.

She doesn't even pretend to think I am a leader, Shen Shen thought, amused. She thinks of this place as hers.

“The clouds whisper of dust and rain,” she continued, only just above a whisper. “And of cold, deep, but with an end. By this time, next year.”

She trailed off, awkwardly, blue eyes distant and empty.

“If it's one year, we'll have plenty of food,” Urda said, calmly. “We still have fish, roots, berries, seaweed, enough of everything, and the Forbidden Grove will just fatten our stores, possibly to bursting.”

“So, not only will this gain us allies,” Shen Shen pointed out. “It will also relieve us of a burden, storing all that meat.”

Naksima nodded.

“If the worst should happen, you may well need allies,” she explained. “And a gift of food when it's needed most should soften even the hardest hearts.”

There was a general murmur of agreement, and Shen Shen saw Lysanara's thin lips plump into a pout. It looked juvenile, but Shen Shen ignored it.

They took the Palace one morning when the sun was weakly shimmering across the waters, and a bitter wind was pushing white capped waves to the island. In a moment, the sun was gone, and they were under high, grey clouds, in the haunting stillness of the Grove.

“By the rainbow lights,” Urda murmured. “It's as still as death.”

Aroree, silent and wide eyed, nodded.

“These, high things!” Petalwing alighted on a branch over a cluster of little coccoons. “Here, all still-quiet furbabies! Still-still, you come, come see!”

Shen Shen walked through the woods, remembering how it had felt, just her and Olbar in the silent green.

“I don't know how far the cocoons extend,” she admitted, wincing as her crutch slipped in some mud. “Maybe a full day's walk, or more.”

“Well, it's not for you to come and find out,” a sturdy Go Back said, coolly pointing to a low branch on an ancient tree. “Sit down, Curly-top, let hunters do our work.”

“I'm the Lady of-” Shen Shen realized she wasn't actually sure what she was Lady of. The Gliders? Only those that didn't want to follow Lysanara. The Go Backs? They had a chief in Urda. The strange mix that might grow of them, living so entwined.

“I brought us here,” she tried.

The Go Back, whose name she couldn't recall, even though he sat on the council and up until now had been sensible and polite, laughed.

“You're about to fall in the mud,” he said, roughly and condescendingly, but not cruelly. “Sit down, wait for us, then take us back. Relax.”

He was right, so she sat, pouting. Her hair felt greasy, and her scalp itched.

They took almost every cocoon out, cutting a few to make sure they contained the animals they sought. Most did, and a few had fruit and vegetables.

Olbar and Ulma were pleased to see Shen Shen, and quietly mistrusting of the Palace. The Hoan G'Tay Sho remnants were conspicuous in their absence.

“Never got here,” Ulma said. “We would have welcomed them, but they went another way, I suppose.”

The food was welcome and the Gliders were politely ignored, while the Go Backs were immediately adored.

“We have cold summers every so often,” Olbar told her. “Not usually frost this late in the year.”

“Meat will mean more hands can turn to gathering,” Ulma said, ignoring the immediate groans and complaints from the young people behind her. “I doubt we'll have much food to speak of from the gardens.”

“If any at all,” Olbar sighed. “Thank you, little Shen Shen.”

B'Rak was also pleased and, unlike Olbar, he was fascinated by the Palace, in his own quiet way, accepting a ride back with them, to see his brother and their little family.

Shen Shen, sitting beside him, saw his small smile of delight, and grinned at her own hands.

“How are Nilma and Luko?”

“They're well,” he said, running a hand over the statues in the palace, admiring the smooth lines. “Nilma is worried about the cold weather.”

“It won't last more than a year,” Shen Shen assured him. “The watershaper is very reliable.”

“Even a year is a long time,” he shook his head. “The People Who Fight Us All The Time might grow restless, and some of our allies might be hungry, too.”

“Will the sea be affected?” The annoying Go Back asked.

“I don't know,” B'Rak shook his head. “No one in living memory has seen a year without summer.”

“I can't understand why it's happening,” a Go Back girl, Myrna, sighed. “It's as if the sun was dimmed.”

“It's the dust from the fall of Blue Mountain,” Reevol explained. “When the mountain fell, the rocks that were ground to dust were enough to cover the entire world. It will be much reduced within a year, and gone within ten.”

“Cooee,” she whistled. “Imagine that!”

“We didn't have to,” Hoykar said, dryly.

Shen Shen remembered the mountain, first suspended in the air, then flying upward, then burning, bright as a second sun in the sky.

The Gliders told the story to the Go Backs when they returned. The children hung on every word, and Ahleki had to cover her ears at times. Shen Shen was surprised to listen, not really recognizing the story. It was as if it had happened to someone else, some other Shen Shen.

This other Shen Shen was heroic, admirable, angry. She faced her foes with confidence and bravery that held everyone spellbound, and she was eloquent, unselfish and lovely in every way.

Everyone looked at her when it was done, and she shrugged, holding out her arms expansively. “I don't remember any of it that well!”

They all laughed.

“Where do you think the Hoan G'Tay Sho went?” Osek asked, later, while their little hearthfire began to die down, and Shen Shen banked the embers.

“I don't know,” she sighed. “And with Lysanara, this coming year, and the baby, I'm not in a mood to worry about them. Hopefully they went off to make a good life for themselves.”

“Ah,” Osek nodded. “There's nothing more we can do at this time.”

A silence fell, and Shen Shen fell asleep in her chair.

...

B'Rak sat at their council once, and when it was over, and he and Shen Shen were alone, he cast a glance at her that was all glimmering smiles, as close as he ever came to laughter.

“What is it?”

He shook his head.

“Your enemy is a fool,” he told her, as they walked back to her house.

“Why do you say that?” Shen Shen didn't think Lysanara was a fool. She had followers, she had a presence, albeit a cold one, she was pretty, even if that mattered less than Shen Shen had thought it did.

“She thinks she has great power,” he told her. “But everything has changed, and she doesn't know it. You have two people coming together, making a life together. They look more to you, and that little grey-haired chieftess, because you have already remade your life. She doesn't know that. She's used to moving through the world like a feather on the breeze. You fall like a pile of stones, and make your mark without apology.”

He motioned around them. The houses that had sprung up over the course of the last few moons, the little fences and sitting areas. Treeshapers had dug out the rough sides of canoes, and a strange contraption to get in and out of the water that the Gliders called a “pier”. There was meat, fish, a smokehouse awaiting more fillets. Gliders and Go Backs engaged in conversation, argument, debate, and more than a few lovemated pairs clinging to one another. There were Go Back and Glider maidens who were as heavy now as Shen Shen.

“I didn't make this,” she told him. “I just made a life.”

“Well, you didn't make it alone,” he said, calmly. “So you might as well take responsibility for it.”

Naksima and Amrok had them over for dinner, while Ahleki and Shenkir went out to eat with their friends, of which they had many. Ahralree and Urda were there, the latter slightly uncomfortable at first, but thawing as the meal went on.

In the morning, while Amrok watched anxiously, B'Rak eagerly climbed aboard a great hawk, while Aroree soothed her bird to make her fly low.

“He'll be fine,” Shen Shen held Amrok's hand. He was shaking his head.

“It's not natural,” he insisted. “If we had a bridge, or something, maybe he'd walk like a normal man.”

Shen Shen doubted that anything would keep B'Rak from the back of the birds. His face was like a man in love.

But a bridge wasn't a bad idea.

...

Naksima was pregnant halfway to Shen Shen's baby being born.

They were quiet about it at first. There had been several almost babies over the past nine years, and all had ended badly, so both she and Shen Shen were watchful and wary. In addition to that, the promised year without summer was in full swing, and winter was coming on with fierce winds and snow, such that the bay was full of chunks of floating ice.

But it passed the mark that none of the others had, and celebrated quietly, just them, the children, and Ahralree and Urda. Food stores were running low by now, and even the preserver wrapped meats were running short.

“This is only your second?” Urda had children all over the island, who all had children, and she had more that were dead or gone and dead and gone. She had been both shocked and appalled by the low birth rate among Gliders.

“Well, no,” Naksima's glow faded a bit, halfway through a bite of carefully rationed deep-root. “There were others, and, well. They were never born late enough.”

“Really?” Urda had more sensitivity than most of her people, and she patted Naksima roughly. “Well, that never happens to Go Backs, so clearly we've rubbed off on you.”

“Really?” Ahralree's eyes widened with shock. “Never?”

“We seem to have luck in birthing,” Urda shrugged. “Not to say that there isn't a bad birth, or a weak fawn, but we bring them to term well enough.”

“Oh,” Ahralree stared into her water, then drank to avoid questions.

“Our two new babies will be age mates, too,” Shen Shen crowed, then winced as her own little passenger shoved a hand or foot into her bladder.

“But our baby will be older than yours,” Ahleki informed Shenkir.

“It's not when the baby is gotten,” he retorted. “It's when it's born, and your baby is slow.”

“She is not!”

“Enough bickering, you'll give the babies a bad temper,” Amrok said, mildly.

...

Shen Shen and Naksima, and several other maidens, Go Back and Glider(although both terms had ceased to have much meaning anymore) were fully swollen. If the baby hadn't inherited Voll's gift for floating, she wouldn't have been able to walk. As it was, she was exhausted, and had given up and chopped her hair short, little curls that Naksima said framed her face charmingly, and that Ahleki said made her look like a raspberry.

They were nearly out of food. Spring had begun to tap at the edges of the world, held back by frost and sullenly melting snow, but the deer were reduced in population, as well as the small game, and no plant had even the suspicion of a green leaf.

“We'll have to ration even more,” Shen Shen said, trying to sound decided, when in reality she just wanted to go back to bed and sleep through the winter, an ambition that Ahleki had declared she would attempt that day, curling up with Shenkir at their house.

“Elders eat first,” Naksima said. “Then the children. You'd be surprised at how little you eat when your baby is staring at you.”

“Wouldn't stop Rolf,” the annoying Go Back said, rudely.

Rolf made an obscene gesture, but said nothing.

“We should raid that human settlement,” Lysanara said, gesturing to the east, and the People Who Fight Us All The Time. “That one that raids your humans' from time to time.”

“Don't be an idiot,” Shen Shen began, but Urda interrupted her.

“They've been as quiet as newborn mice all year,” she pointed out. “No point in making trouble for ourselves and B'Rak.”

“They have an odd sort of honour,” Naksima explained. “They won't try anything until the weather improves.”

“We still have a few cocoons,” Reevol said, easily. “No need to panic yet, and-”

“Urda!”

“Urda!”

“My Lady!”

A glider, two children hanging from her hands, flew in in a swirl of skirts and dangling limbs.

“It's huge!” The smaller of the two children climbed into Urda's lap, clutching her jacket with tight fingers.

“The biggest thing you've ever seen!” The other child took the annoying Go Back by the hand and tried to get him up.

“A huge creature!” The glider, Nirani, was too excited to stop fully, and held out her hands entreatingly to Shen Shen. “Bigger than anything I've ever seen, bigger than the hawks, as long as three together!”

Shen Shen hesitantly took those hands, and whooped as Nirani flew once more into the chilly air.

They flew over the island, to a small peak on the far side from the Palace, to a small cliff over the sea.

And it was huge, too big to be believed, long and grey and smooth. Furthermore, it appeared to breathe, huge puffs of air that rose in clouds from holes on its back.

Shen Shen gasped. “What is that?”

“A whale,” Naksima gave the name in her tongue, then explained. “A great animal, fish and not fish, it's two things at once.”

“To Guttlekraw's beard with that, can we eat it?” The annoying Go Back asked. “Is it food?”

“It's a blessing,” Naksima said. “The Eagle Woman and the Sea Lion Man made a bargain and sent it to us.”

“That was kind of them,” Urda said. “But if we can't catch it, it's no use.”

“We can catch it,” the annoying Go Back said, face set and grim.

“We will catch it,” Reevol said, then paused and turned to Shen Shen.

After a moment of silence, Shen Shen realized they were all looking at her. The annoying Go Back whose name she couldn't recall chuffed impatiently, and she realized they were waiting on her word.

It was so big. What if it had teeth and claws to match? High Ones, if it rolled over, it could crush a canoe.

There were a few small cocoons left in the storage rooms, strangely shaped, and none larger than a Go Back. Shen Shen thought about that, and about Ahleki and Shenkir's thin faces and how they had both attempted to claim a lack of hunger, that Naksima and Shen Shen could eat more for their unborn babies.

“I assume you have a plan,” she said, raising an eyebrow at Reevol, who grinned.

“Giant hawks, in the air,” he sketched their flight with his hands. “We'll throw spears with ropes attached-”
“And we'll pull it in,” the annoying Go Back interrupted, tossing his head defiantly at Reevol's skeptical look. “What, birdie, did you think we'd let you have all the fun?”

It stayed in the bay while the canoes and the hawks were readied, mostly swimming along the surface, occasionally leaping out of the water, fishlike. A strange, sinuous noise emerged from the animal, bone deep and thrilling, that Naksima and Amrok couldn't hear. It was as if it didn't even see them.

The spear-bearers were steady, with hastily prepared lines, ready to drop once the animal had died, while the canoes paddled into place.

Amrok and Naksima sang a song, one of great joy and gratitude, that the Go Backs hesitantly echoed, more as if it were the thing to do rather than out of piety. Shen Shen felt herself gripping her hands together, surprised by her anxiety.

“There they go!” One of the children climbed a tree to get a higher vantage point, clinging to the dead branches fiercely, even as the winds drove the gliders up into the air as leaves, and the hawks fought with wingbeats that thrummed in the air like thunder.

Hoykar threw the first spear, but it was Aroree's that found its way home, burying itself deep in the creature's side.

It screamed and thrashed, and more spears followed the first, none missing this time, and it gradually weakened.

Go Backs were stronger than Gliders, and the canoes moved into place, one elf after another stowing paddles to grab the lines, beginning to pull them in.

“Not yet,” Urda began to fret, surprising Shen Shen. “Not yet, you young fools, it still has some fight, not yet.”

“Urda,” Shen Shen was about to ask what the matter was, but an outcry loud enough to drown out the wind and the waves flew over to their little crowd, and a Glider screamed.

The annoying Go Back had been pulled by one of the lines , over the edge of the canoe, into the wild grey water. He went below for a long time, but eventually surfaced, evidently still breathing and conscious.

The water was warm enough that it wouldn't kill anyone, especially not a hardy Go Back. It was still cold enough that he could get chill fever, or water sickness, the slowing of the body in the cold. They'd lost three to it in the past winter, two of them Gliders, one Go Back. Shen Shen thought she would watch him die, if not from that, then from the thrashing of the whale, as he drifted towards it.

He was conscious, Shen Shen realized, watching as if she were far away. He was trying to get away, swimming towards the canoe, being pushed back by the waves. The Gliders tried to dive and catch him, but were thrown back, just like the canoes.

“High Ones help him,” Urda breathed. “One of you flyers catch him!”

**We're trying to,** Reevol answered. There was a brief flash of driving winds, strong enough to strip the breath from a body, and sharply cold water.

The Go Back's movement began to weaken. Shen Shen watched him, saw how the water was soaking his clothes, and thought about the way they clung to him and how heavy wet furs were.

He was going to die, she realized, while they watched. He was going to sink down into the grey waves and become a part of the Vastdeep waters.

Naksima and Amrok continued to pray and sing, and the Go Backs accompanying them faltered, then continued. Line and line of prayer, and softer, stumbling broken human tongue.

The water was turning pink from blood. The whale was still struggled, and one of the lines broke.

Nothing wants to die.

They came from under the water, with sharp fins that pierced the water like knives, with round, dangerous heads full of teeth, and white spots that almost looked like eyes. They slipped in and out the water, and made it red with blood and white with foam.

One of them circled the annoying Go Back, who was nearly unconscious, or looked it. It was huge, with a fin on its' back as tall as a Glider. It jumped, once, as if to draw attention to itself and the drowning elf, then began pushing him up with its nose.

Aroree dived down, straight as an arrow, and caught up the Go Back, laying him across her bird's back. They fought the winds and came back, depositing the Go Back into Urda's waiting arms.

“Cool water,” Urda ordered, stripping off the lad's clothes. They came off as heavily and sodden as Shen Shen had expected, and rockshapers quickly pulled up a shelter and the requested water.

The newcomers kept biting, and the whale died. The new animals were whales, too, Shen Shen realized. They puffed the same puffs of breath, moved the same, but more quickly. Even their axe-like tails were the same, flat and slapping at the waves.

They were a family, she thought, as a baby surfaced, and dove, and as they brushed against each other with clear affection. They seemed cheerful, and pushed against the canoes with the same rough affection they used on each other, even bobbing up to allow the hunters to pet them.

They tugged playfully at the lines, and at the dead whale, as if the winds and the chilling water didn't bother them at all.

It was so anti-climactic that Shen Shen had to look over shoulder at the crowded little shelter behind her, where Urda was barking orders and rubbing down the near frozen hunter, who was looking around with half closed eyes, to remember that tragedy had nearly taken the day.

He saw her watching him and gave her a cocky, infuriating grin. She turned her back, and went back to watching the hunters try to get the whale in while their new companions tried to pull it back.

...

In the end, they compromised, and the new whales, “whale killers”, as the Go Backs dubbed them, ate the tongue and the heart and liver of the whale, the former after it was lain up on the beach and cut out by a hunter, which they seemed satisfied with. They lingered in the bay while everyone swarmed down to butcher, playing as if it had been a hard winter for them, too.

It took all day, and well into the night, and they feasted for all of it, cooking chunks of meats over huge open fires. Gliders took subtle spices out of storage, and Go Backs found hidden caches of roots and berries. Shen Shen and Naksima were seated with children and other expectant mothers, while warriors and workers ate first.

Shen Shen was insulted at first, then realized that not only was this a way to ensure that hunters and workers ate well, they also ate sensibly, saving the best bits for everyone else and serving them with a flourish.

The meat was good, tasting something like deer, not fishy, as she had expected. The spices and savouries were subtle and delicate, but not faint, and she was ready to gorge herself for the first time in moons.

The ribs were as tall as two or three elves, and the spine bones were as high as ShenShen's waist. By the time the butchering had finished, the sun was coming up, and everyone was tired and aching. They went to bed, but no one could sleep, and they woke up at noon, laughing.

Not just that the sun was up, grey light had floated over the back and the forward of the long winter, but it was out, out and full in its joy, as if the bounty of meat brought the bounty of spring.

The whale killers were still in the bay, still playing and splashing, and seemed to notice when the elves came out, as their bouncing became more ecstatic. Shen Shen joined Naksima on the shore, with Ahleki and Shenkir, as Amrok helped cut more meat up to smoke, or to cover in wrapstuff, or to roast and stew right there in huge pots over open fires.

The baby whale killer was lifted in the air, over and over again, and the smaller whales seemed to think this was great fun.

“They're called “blackfish” by the shore people,” Naksima sat on a log with a grunt. “But I've never seen one before.”

“I suppose they live here now,” Shenkir said. “Do you think they eat people?”

“I've never heard any stories of them eating people. One bumped a boat when I was a child, but he disappeared right afterwards.” Naksima smiled. “Some people say they're the canoes of the underwater people. Some people say they're the underwater people in their true forms.”

Shen Shen imagined people, living deep under the waves. Maybe humans, maybe elves.

Actually, elves would make sense, considering their gifts. Winnowill had shaped Tyldak to fly like a bat, why couldn't a healer shape fins and gills? For Yurek's sake, perhaps the whale killers were elves, shaped to resemble whales.

Naksima laughed.

“It's not that I don't think your people couldn't do it, but they're so big,” she sketched the shape of the whales. “Even that bat elf, Tyldak, was made from his own form.”

Shen Shen agreed that it wasn't very likely.

They wrapstuffed any meat that couldn't be eaten immediately, or smoked, or dried, or, as Go Backs sometimes preferred, fermented. The children played as they hadn't played for months, wildly and foolishly. More than once Shen Shen looked up and felt her heart pause, as Ahleki ignored multiple warnings not to float over the whale killers and tap them with her feet.

“But they're nice, Mama,” Ahleki protested. “They like us.”

“They might be and they might do, but it's too cold to be in the water now,” and Shen Shen wasn't sure she liked the look of those huge heads, tapping at Ahleki's little feet. Even if they didn't intend to eat her, they could surely do some damage without meaning to. “Come in now, and do some work.”

“That's right!” One of the Go Back children shouted. “Don't be lazy, Ahleki!”

Given that he was swinging from the top of one of the whale's massive rib bones as he said that, it didn't, perhaps, have the impact he intended it to have. Ahleki still came in, though, pouting slightly, and began to help scraping at the massive hide. It was mostly to get the last few bits of meat off, though, as the skin was too thick and huge to be used for any hide, according to the tanners.

“If we bury it, it might make the soil more rich,” a treeshaper named Alindel said, shaking out her brown locks as she spoke. “The plants that grow back will be stronger.”

“That's for shapers and growers to worry about,” the annoying Go Back walked up, as jauntily, it seemed, as if he'd never taken his dip.

But his fingers shook as he filched some meat from Shen Shen's bowl, and when he winked at her withering glare, his gaze slipped past her, to the glittering sea, and he paled, slightly.

“Lose any toes, Cheidar?” Aroree floated over, bearing two bowls of roasted meat and vegetables and a mischievous expression.

“No,” He laughed, and Shen Shen felt a pang, for some unknown reason, watching him smile at Aroree. “Thanks to you and that whale killer.”

“That is most fortunate,” Aroree floated away again, leaving a parting shot. “If you become any uglier, a toad might mistake you for her mate.”

Cheider laughed, tossing his head back carelessly and Shen Shen remembered that he was very irritating. His laughter was just as irritating as the rest of him, raucous and loud, and he showed too many of his teeth, which were white and pointed.

“What kind of name is Cheidar, anyhow?” She asked, around a mouthful of fat. It sounded similar to “hawk”, and, indeed, in the Go Back accent, the words were the same.

He shrugged.

“First thing my mother saw when she felt me kick. Could have been worse,” He leaned back on his arms, and looked out at the water. “My sister was named “Berry”.”

“Vah-ya”, as Sun Folk would say, but he lengthened it, stretching out first syllable, and the second. Shen Shen thought about it. Pretty, but it would be embarrassing when one grew up.

“Yeah, she doesn't like it,” he chuckled, and it was nice. Shen Shen realized this was the longest conversation she'd ever had with him.

“Where does your name come from, curly-tops?” He sat up and looked at her, and for the first time, she saw that his eyes were very brown.

“My father loved the sun so much, he named me for it twice,” she said. It wasn't strictly true. There had been a double sun in the sky when she had been born, an illusion born of rain and fire.

He laughed.

“Your people are truly from a place with no snow?”

She nodded, and looked over to where Ahleki was as entranced as every other child by a story Urda was telling, with wild gestures and fierce expressions.

“Would you like to see my home?”

“What?” He sat up further, staring at her. “In a sending?”

“Not,” she glanced over her shoulder, at the Palace. Everyone was down on the beach, it should be empty. “Not exactly.”

He helped her up and then helped her with her crutches. Shen Shen expected her pride to sting, but it didn't.

It was quiet in the Palace. Everyone was outside, Shen Shen supposed. No one had been watching them leave, so perhaps no one knew they were gone.

Shen Shen called up the Scroll. She didn't show the Sun Village as it was, half rubble, half empty, abandoned houses, but as it had been. It was Flood and Flower. The lanterns, garlanded with flowers, danced gaily on ribbons, and drumbeats moved distantly with them.

Leetah, as ever, danced as if she stood in her own light, as if the moons and the lanterns shone for her alone, the pipes and tambours, the drums and harps, sang for her alone. Shen Shen stared at her, and wished, wished with all her might, that she might go back. She remembered, as if it were someone else, being jealous of the light, the songs, jealous and spiteful.

“There you are!” Cheider pointed to the image, to a small, pouting figure that Shen Shen barely remembered being, after eight and more years. “What a sour face, curly-tops!”

He reached out and took hold of one of the curls that had escaped from her hair pins, tugging it straight and letting it go. Shen Shen remembered how irritating he was, and wondered if Vaya had hated his teasing.

No sooner thought, than an image flashed across the Scroll.

The maiden was small, no taller than Shen Shen. She held a child, no older than a toddler, a tiny girl, who wore a heavily embroidered dress, and was in the process of climbing over her mother's shoulder to a tall lad behind them. Clearly, from the embroidery on the dress, and the small bits of jewelry the child wore, she was well loved. She even had small round cheeks, where the maiden's face was over-thin, just as her frame was, save where her belly was swollen with child. The lad was thin, too, and they walked together, down a worn path, between grey, whithered plants. They looked tired, eyes shadowed and distant, then she reached out and took his hand.

When their eyes met, they smiled. The promise of spring was in those smiles, Shen Shen thought, for there was also love.

“She's very lovely,” she told Cheider.

He shrugged.

“She's strong,” he said.

The image faded. Shen Shen allowed the Scroll to return to its holders.

“I thought I would die,” Cheider said, after they had sat in silence for some time. “I thought the water would pull me down, and I would fade away. Then the whale was there, and Aroree.”

“Aroree is very pretty,” Shen Shen murmured, remembering her pale face as she'd handed Cheider over.

“She is,” Cheider laughed. “Not as pretty as you.”

Shen Shen stared at him for that, and he laughed at her again, showing his sharp teeth, which, she thought, were not so sharp as she had thought.

There was some noise, and Shen Shen slid down, pulling Cheider with her. Perhaps they'd just pass by and not notice her trying to... to do what?

They did not pass by, but they paused outside the doorway, and spoke.

“You should have come down. Or at least sent Shuka.”

Eresir, who had thrown one of the spears that had hit the whale, perhaps even the one that Cheider had grabbed like an idiot, was speaking.

“I'm not sure what you're suggesting. That Shuka turn her hands to the work of slaughter? She's a watershaper, Eresir, not a butcher.”

That was Lysanara, Shen Shen thought, and rolled her eyes. Eresir wouldn't like to hear his work called “butchery”, and Lysanara was too arrogant to know it.

“I am suggesting that a life was nearly lost, Lysanara,” Eresir said, coldly.

“One of the degenerates is hardly a great loss,” Lysanara returned, equally cold, and Shen Shen took Cheider's hand, holding it tightly.

It was hardly necessary. The irritating smile dropped from his face, but it was replaced by a cold, blank expression, as if Cheider was disappearing to somewhere else.

“You think to take the leadership of the council,” Eresir said, sounding as angry as Shen Shen had every heard, an icy fury. “You cannot do so without the support of hunters.”

“If the Eight have any honour, they won't follow a green girl, no matter whose baby she's carrying,” Lysanara said, carelessly. Shen Shen could picture her tossing her long yellow hair, the pale yellow of wildflowers, over her shoulders, as if she were dismissing a fly. “And the loss of one of those barbarians means very little to me, Eresir.”

There was a long silence.

“The loss of a single one elf is the loss of all elves, Lysanara. After the mountain, after everything, you should know that.”

“Eresir...”

He'd left, Shen Shen realized. He'd flown away silently, and Lysanara followed, calling his name.

“She's an idiot,” Shen Shen told Cheider, after they were sure everyone had gone, and had slid back up onto the bench. “Don't mind her. Everyone's heart stopped when you fell in the water, and they didn't start again until Aroree brought you up.”

Cheider shrugged.

“It's not the first time one of the floaters has said that, curly-tops. It won't be the last,” he looked at the Scrolls, and stretched. “They hate us, some of them, and they hate us more because they need us. It kills them that some “barbarians” can do all the things they want. Hunt, dance, bear children.”

“That last one,” he chuckled. “They really hate us for that one. As if we're to blame for their seed being sour.”

“Oh, midday fumes!” Shen Shen rolled her eyes. “It's not like your folk are much better.”

“Oh, we aren't,” Cheider shrugged. “We're jealous and sad. It's hard to be rough and ready-hewn, when you're around ice flowers all day long. But we're not like them.”

...

Spring came, as had been promised by Shuka. The berries were richer and seemed to ripen faster, as did the small, starchy roots, and the fish seemed heartier, and the deer bounded through the woods as swiftly as ever, as if that cold, terrifying year had never happened.

But the whale killers stayed in and about the island, played with the fishing boats, and with fearless Ahleki and Shenkir and the other children, Lysanara stayed as cold and sharp as stone, and Shen Shen's birthing day was coming, faster and faster.

...

No one had truly believed Fog when she told them that there wouldn't be a summer that year, and famine came with lack of preparation. That the winter would be colder had resulted in the hunting of more game, and the storing of more food, but if it hadn't been for the Sun Folk, the Wolfriders, down to even One Eye, would have lost more than a few pounds. Fog's reputation was made by that winter(perhaps bitterly so), and no one doubted her strange, terse little predictions again.

The Sun Folk, having got into the habit hoarding food, made it out a little better than the Wolfriders. They tried to share their bounty, but, as Leetah could have told them, the beans and grains fought the Wolfrider bellies hard, wolf's bellies that hungered for red meat, and they were left slightly withered by the time the sun began to weakly push through the clouds of that long winter.

But when she was asked, Fog told them summer was coming that year, and she was proven right again, as the snow melted, and the creeks rose, and a soft green crept over the forest.

“Ah, warm again!” Nightfall sighed, and raised her hands to the air, sighing. The air was slightly brighter, and the chill was somewhat abated, even in the cool evening.

Redlance was shaping a berry bush under the branch that Leetah and Nightfall were perched on, and Ember led Suntop and the others in and out of the new-green, with laughter and songs.

“A squirrel!”

There was a momentary squeak before Tyleet snapped the little creature's neck, and Ember sliced it open, sharing out the meager meat cheerfully.

Leetah remembered her first kill, the little animal whose name she did not know, and how she had not been able to eat the rich meat. Fortunately, Tyleet wasn't as squeamish, nor Ember, and they both fell on their little snacks gleefully.

“I'm so happy for spring,” Leetah sighed. “I've missed the sun, the blue sky.”

“We haven't even had stars for moons,” Nightfall turned her eyes up to the darkening skies, where a single twitching light had appeared.

“Well, the sun is warm again, and the streams have overflowed their banks. It's always flood, then flower, even here,” Leetah leaned back against the tree trunk and thought about tart-sweet berries, savoury roots, fresh venison.

“Flood, then flower,” Nightfall laughed. “Are you Sun Folk all word-shapers?”

Leetah laughed.

“It was what we called Festival of Flowers, back in the desert,” she explained.

Nightfall and the children peppered her with thousands of questions about the desert, and the festival, and how it all worked, what it was like to live in a place where it rained so seldom, and especially how warm it was.

She was finishing telling a story of her youth, with Rayek, and the first zwoots, when Cutter came back.

The hunting parties had gone out before dusk, but all they'd brought back was small game, and one skinny deer.

“There's not much now,” Cutter admitted later, over his meal of raw deer, which Ember shared, and Leetah and Suntop's cooked rabbit. “Give it a few eight of days and the deer will fatten and the fish will jump.”

Ember and Suntop sighed happily, bellies full for once, and lay back on the fur covered ground.

“Father?”

“Hmm?” Cutter barely responded to his daughter, trying to break open a bone to get at the marrow inside.

“Will you take me hunting next time?” Ember sat up. “You said I could come when Choplicker and I were older. We're older now.”

Leetah's first instinct was to say no, to tell them to wait a while longer, to wait for Ember's arms and legs to grow.

But Ember was a Wolfrider, through and through, and Leetah was not. Cutter was, though, and he would know.

So she looked at him.

He smiled at her, gentleness and softness, then he looked at Ember.

Ember sat up, trying to look taller, and opened her eyes, so she might seem alert and ready.

Cutter then leaned out the door, and looked down at the pack, still chewing on their own bones.

“Choplicker's limbs are still too thin after the winter,” he said, sitting back up. “Ember, you can come with the next hunt, but you'll ride with me. By the end of the summer, Choplicker'll be strong, and you can ride him to hunt.”

That satisfied Ember, and Leetah found it satisfied her, too, her image of Ember being thrown or gored replaced with her sitting on her father's wolf,. Laughing and running behind a great stag.

Ember did ride with Cutter in the next hunt, and came back laughing, with stories of her own heroics. Leetah laughed with everyone else at her childish exaggerations, thinking that it wouldn't be long until they were truths. Ember was that eager to grow and learn.

At least Suntop was staying small, she thought, cuddling her youngest child to her. Small enough to tuck under her wings while they watched Ember fly.

...

Shen Shen regretted nothing more than every time she had scolded mothers for turning to Leetah to relieve the pains of childbirth. Even with Nilma's special teas, the willow bark and the mother weed, it felt as if she were going to die.

She didn't say as much, however. Ahleki was flitting around the windows, having been forbidden to enter, but Shen Shen knew she was thinking of her birth mother. Shen Shen put all thoughts of Marek from her mind. She was much better off than her dead friend. She was in her own home, she was well fed, relaxed, with family and friends.

It still hurt like... actually, she had no comparison. It felt like she was being split in two. Or like the remains of her lost leg were trying to tear off the rest of her.

She wanted her mother.

But wanting wouldn't bring her here, so she breathed, screamed, and pushed when Nilma told her to push.

The baby came out floating and screaming, and Naksima cleaned her off, while Shen Shen pushed out the afterbirth, which actually took longer than the birth, but was easily swept away under the floor with a little rock shaping magic.

“A daughter! A new lord!”

Outside, everyone was shouting, but Shen Shen was alone, just her, her family, and her new daughter.

The baby had brown eyes. Toorah's eyes. There was a tuft of silver hair, and even though she was red with exhaustion and rage, she looked a healthy brown under it. She was big for her age, but her father's gliding kept her light. Shen Shen had trouble getting her to latch on, but once she did, she ate fiercely.

**Hello, Ahnoor,** she sent.

The baby glanced up at her for a moment, then went back to eating.

Ahleki thought Ahnoor was cute, but boring. Shenkir was inured to floating magic and thought she was just boring. Naksima and Amrok told Shen Shen Ahnoor was beautiful, which, since Ahnoor was small and wrinkled and had thick, glaring eyebrows, Shen Shen knew to be a lie.

Everyone was interested in her. Even though she wasn't the first born on the island, an honour that had gone to Erna of the Go Backs, she held a certain cachet among both Go Backs and Gliders as Shen Shen's child. Cheider in particular liked to steal her from time to time, to show her off to his folk, then bring her back, weeping, hungry, and with filthy moss in her swaddling clothes.

“You horrid creature,” Shen Shen would scold him.

“Have off with the fussing, curly-tops,” he would laugh. “She likes adventure, your chick.”

“Likes adventure, indeed,” Shen Shen sighed, finished cleaning Ahnoor, and settled her down to nurse.

“It'll take forever to get her to settle down, now,” Ahleki inserted, looking as exasperated as Shen Shen.

“And she'll keep Orami awake all night,” Naksima added, although she couldn't quite keep a laugh back.

Naksima's baby was big, too, like Ahnoor, who had split Shen Shen nearly down the middle when she was born, scars and a pain in her back that she suspected would never go away. Naksima hadn't suffered anywhere near as much, though. She was tall and broad enough herself that Orami could have come foot first and it wouldn't have torn her as much as Ahnoor had torn Shen Shen.

Shen Shen was a bit bitter about the latter.

“Ma.”

And now she was old enough to bob around on her own and to be left alone with Ahleki(who was old enough to be left alone with Ahnoor, and almost as tall as Shen Shen, and far too thin), and to make her little wants and needs known in screams and little rage storms, one of which was brewing now.

“Ma will be right back, dearest,” Shen Shen shouldered her little bag of herbs and potions and bandages. “Listen to Ahleki. Ahleki, listen to Naksima.”

“But who will Naksima listen to?” Ahleki teased, darting out of Shen Shen's playful poke.

“Naksima will listen to Shen Shen,” the human woman came in, Orami on one hip and trying to get down and play with his agemate. “And Shen Shen will listen to Naksima and let Amrok take her down the hill on his contraption.”

“She will not,” Shen Shen nearly muttered, but there was a slightly hard gleam in Naksima's eyes she disliked, so she nodded reluctantly and limped away.

One good leg left, and a ruined hip and side,she thought. Cheider had been eyeing her since Ahnoor was born, but Nilma had advised her never to have another baby, for fear it would finish the job Voll had unwittingly started. Going places had been an ordeal since she had birthed her second daughter.

Amrok had solved this problem with a system of pulleys and ropes and a wooden bench that raised and lowered under the power of elfin muscle, ingenious really.

Shen Shen hated it. It was completely senseless, but she despised it. Everytime she sat in the bench, she felt alone, and broken, and far to dependent on the nice elves at either end who operated it.

It wasn't like she was the only one who used it. Osek took advantage of it, as did several other veterans of trollish brutality.

Not much in the world made sense, though, she thought, and let the bench carry her down. At the other end a young elf nodded to her, and helped her get her leg and her crutches back under her.

Her patient was under a roof of whale bones and deer skin, painted with symbols that Go Backs had used for time immemorial. She was small and young, and bleeding something out between her legs.

Shen Shen had seen a miscarriage before, and there wasn't much difference between this and any human woman losing a child. It was almost over, she just needed more moss and some willow tea.

“I'm sorry, Larig,” she patted the girl's shoulder.

“I'm not,” Larig said, not defiantly, just honestly. “I didn't want a fawn, and I told everyone that.”

She looked down at the moss her mother was carrying out, and her lip trembled for a moment, then stilled.

“I took a tea the human healer made,” she admitted, in a whisper so soft that Shen Shen almost missed it. “I told her I didn't want a baby, and she gave me a tea.”

Nilma, Shen Shen realized. Larig had gone with a trading company over a bridge that the rockshapers had pulled from ocean floor, and she must have complained where Nilma could hear. And Nilma, a healer, had given her the remedy. The only remedy she knew.

“I'm glad you took it,” she told Larig. “I'm sorry it hurt you, though.”

“It doesn't hurt that much,” Larig shrugged. “I've had worse from falling off a deer.”

Shen Shen thought about it on the way home. A baby was considered the height of achievement in the Sun Village. Among the Go Backs, they were taken as charming incidentals. Among Gliders they were adored talismans of joy and magic.

Even Lysanara loved babies, especially Glider babes. She could be found caring for her own people's young often, cooing and singing to them. She would even have taken Ahnoor under her wing, but Shen Shen, remembering that difficult first year, had refused.

“How's Larig?” Urda asked, as Shen Shen made her way back to her little house.

Shen Shen shrugged.

“Miscarriage,” she said, not wanting to go further.

“She was young to bear,” Urda shrugged. “Took a couple of falls after she figured it out.”

The easiest way to lose a child, Shen Shen realized, or at least a fairly reliable one.

In the cottage, Naksima was sitting with Amrok, painting his carvings. His client, a woman with a missing leg, right below the knee, was telling a story about shape changing wolf demons, who prowled the night with glowing eyes and companion animals who could run though fire.

The woman finished the story, about a crazed demon that ate children, by miming his actions, causing Ahleki and Shenkir to squeak and jump, and making the babies cry.

“I'm sorry!” The woman was dismayed by the reaction, and Shen Shen noticed that she was young, too young to have her own children. She wouldn't have known how easy it was to frighten babies.

“I'm so sorry,” she put both the little ones on her lap. “I'll tell a better story, dears. I know one about a bear who married a young chief. Their children still reign some miles south of here.”

Naksima wrapped her arm over Shen Shen's shoulder as she sat down.

The story was lovely. The bear became a beautiful maiden, and she and the chief had three children, a girl and two boys.

“Ma!”

“Mama!”

“Aunt Shen Shen, when did you get here?”

“Sen!”

“I got here while you were all forgetting that wolf-demons aren't real,” Shen Shen teased them. “What's for dinner?”

“We thought you were getting dinner,” Naksima said, a bit surprised. “Cheider said he would bring a fish by from the smokehouse, and-”

“Here we are!”

Cheider came in with fish, vegetables preserved in salty liquid, and roasted tubors from the far south, which gliders claimed they could make grow on the fertile, but rocky ground here on the island. Shen Shen disliked him intensely, and almost refused the food.

“I went to meet you on the way up,” he told her, and she forgave him and hated him and herself for it. “You were already gone, though.”

“There's nothing you can do about a baby loss,” Shen Shen said. “She wasn't bleeding much and she was clean.”

Cheider nodded, and changed the subject. A great whale had been spotted entering the bay, and the chief of the whale killers, a huge female named Spot, had started dancing around the piers, tugging playfully on spears and paddles, sneaking up under swimmers and tugging them gently under, or throwing them lightly up with a nudge of her nose.

“She wants us to go kill the whale,” he said, sounding eager. “Reevol and I had a talk about it this morning.”

“Do we need to kill the whale?” Shen Shen asked, shuddering at the memory of the bloodstained, chilling water, and the way Cheider had had to be packed in with furs and hot stones.

“We don't,” he conceded. “But Spot wants us to go so badly.”

He sounded amused and indulgent, as if Spot were a child.

“If the whale comes close, it's a gift,” Naksima said, cheerfully. “Then we can get B'Rak and all go out together.”

It was decided so easily.

Summer had come, and it looked like a long one.

...

The bridge was more of a chain of islands, leading to the mainland in a looping pattern, although one road ran straight down the centre of the chain, which looked as if it pained all the rockshapers, for they'd left it plain and rocky.

There were other paths. They led to little bowls of land, with water fountains and streams that disappeared on one island and reappeared on another, but always fresh and sweet. Trees had been coaxed into young growth and berry bushes of varying types, in varying stages of bloom and fruit. It made for idyllic places for rest and relaxation. Some had made their homes here, human and elf and bird alike, both human and elf drifting closer and closer to each other.

It had done nothing to stem B'Rak's love of flying, nor his son's love of flying, and Aroree's Littletrill had laid her eggs on a rocky craig near the mainland, so B'Rak was slowly taming a young female who cooed whenever she saw him.

Amrok had given up trying to talk sense to his brother, and instead turned his attentions making a harness that would hold a passenger on a bird, through storm winds and looping swoops. Cheider had taken an interest in it, and so had Reevol, whose daughter, thus far, hadn't shown any signs of floating magic.

Shen Shen had tried to comfort him by telling him the story of Ahleki's fall awakening her gift, but he had just smiled.

“You don't ask a star why it shines,” he said, cradling his baby with awed hands. “It's enough that it shines, after all.”

And Shen Shen had left it.

Lysanara had only a few die hard followers left. Everyone else, Shen Shen mused, was probably too busy.

“We all work too hard to make plots and have intrigues,” she told Naksima.

Ahnoor was taking her first few steps, speaking little nonsense words, and Orami was already running and climbing everywhere, as soft and silent as mist. The sun set and rose in fire, no one had heard a peep from the People Who Fight Us All The Time, and Kahvi had brought Olbar for a visit that past spring.

Summer, after all, had come.

...

Chapter Text

They rarely worked at cross-purposes in the Palace. If one person wanted to turn the scrolls, then another could work on flying, and rockshapers were always around to help anyone who wanted to learn to shape the star stone.

The interest had sparked during the year without summer, and continued to the present, with Go Backs learning the secrets they’d always been too busy fighting to care about, and Gliders sharing their knowledge with their little cousins from the “outside” they were fast learning to love.

Shen Shen, for her part, was learning to relax.

“You’re not going Erinissar’s birthing?” Naksima asked, combing out her hair.

“If she’d asked me to, but,” Shen Shen shrugged. “She said she’d rather just have her friends with her.”

“You know, it’s funny,” Shen Shen rolled over in the hot spring, sighing at the heat. “If you’d told me ten years ago that I would have missed a birth, I would have said you were crazy. Now, there’s so much else to do that I sometimes don’t know until after it’s done.”

“You’re changing,” Naksima grinned at her. “You had to grow up sometime.”

“Never!” Shen Shen pretended shock and outrage, and flung some water at her. The afternoon descended from there.

...

Scouter astonished everyone that summer by moving out of his parents’ den.

“It’s not as though it was totally unexpected,” Nightfall said, while Leetah stood still for Moonshade’s laces. “I just thought if he’d do it, he would have done it years ago, while Dewshine was alive.”

“In the Sun Village, people usually stay with their parents until they Recognize,” Leetah commented, raising her arms so Moonshade could pull on the bodice ribbons a bit more. “It’s lovely, Moonshade, but how will I get it off?”

“That’s what lifemates are for,” the older elf winked, and Strongbow, dozing at Rayek’s side, sent a glimmer of amusement at them. 

“Cutter likes undressing you, but he won’t want to run for you everytime you need to piss,” Nightfall laughed, then ran a hand over her own offering, which had been painstakingly sewn by her own little girl, from patterns that Moonshade had cut. “I’m not used to having this many clothes. One for every day out of eight, it feels like riches.”

“It’s not for every day,” Ahnshen stepped up to defend his fellow tailor. “Just for festivals and the like.”

“You look pretty, Leetah,” Tyleet added, although her face was a bit dubious.

Moonshade and Ahnshen mutually despaired over Tyleet’s practical nature, her near total lack interest in silks and bright colours was a loss to them, but almost the entirety of the local elfin population breathed a sigh of relief at her soft, plain shifts and shirts, her loose skirts and trousers that breathed and allowed the wearer the same. Ahnshen complained that the fields looked as if they were tended by identical mirages, and Moonshade cast silent, sorrowful looks on hunters that wore the browns and greys of the woods, but Tyleet was well on her way to being almost as high in demand as they were. Leetah thought privately it was well enough that they be quietly undersold by her namesake, as even her beloved pink lounging dress was slightly too long and too flowing by halves for being roused in a hurry, unlike a cotton tunic that Tyleet had made her, clumsy stitches, but easily thrown on during an emergency.

On the other hand, without Moonshade and Ahnshen’s embellishments, Tyleet’s offerings were drab and dull, without even an embroidered flower or a beaded collar to offset the plain tones and cuts.

“But those would catch the light and be heavy during working times,” Nightfall protested on the way home. “Besides, Tyleet is still a child, she’ll probably change her tastes as she gets older.”

Leetah agreed, and watched as Ember crawled over the holt, moving easily in the little leather shirt and trousers Tyleet had made. Ember and Fog probably were the happiest of all the children with Tyleet’s offerings. Suntop preferred bright colours and ornaments, as did Newstar and Mender. At three, Rainsong’s youngest was slightly spoilt and and a bit of a pheasant, strutting about, showing off his powers and his golden hair and bright blue eyes to anyone who cared to give him the time of day, and this pride extended to his clothes, bright blues and aquatic greens being his favoured colours.

It was hard to say what Wing thought of the situation. Rainsong’s middle child was as quiet and soft as a cloud, with hair that was beginning to brush as his brown shoulders, and downcast eyes as bright as his sibling’s. He was in the holt more and more often, at his uncle’s side, and Rainsong seemed relieved to have someone giving him the time that her other two children demanded of her.

“Stop it, Ember!” Suntop ran past them, away from a giggling, mud-covered Ember. Leetah caught her up, happy for the plain coat she’d thrown over the lovely dress Moonshade and Ahnshen. had laced her into.

“Where are you going, my little frog?” She tossed Ember into the air, grunting as she came back down. “Oof, you’ve grown since I left this evening!”

“I’m going to cover Suntop with mud,” Ember nuzzled her cheek, leaving smears of river clay on her. 

Suntop was, by now, very much escaped, and so Leetah put her down and watched as she ran back into the wet soil by the creekside, where Fog was quietly occupied making small birds of mud and Wing was waiting for his playmate’s return, stripped down to his breeches. He welcomed Ember back with a gentle grin and they returned to hollowing out the creek where it made its way from the holt to the lake.

The stars and the moons were soft and yellow, yet bright, and the berries were full and nearly ripe. 

It was summer. 

...

Shen Shen tried to ignore the grey hairs that were beginning to thread their way through Naksima’s hair, and the lines at the corners of her eyes. Naksima in turn ignored her lack thereof, and they kept laughing and joking together, shared meals and kept each other’s children. 

Shenkir was taller than she was by now, with broad shoulders and a deep belly laugh to match his father’s, his voice now squeaking, now rumbling. He was more at his father’s side now, to Ahleki’s slight dismay, although she herself was now more with Shen Shen and Naksima, her stitches becoming more even, her powers more refined, her limbs long and skinny, her face gaunt and ugly with new maidenhood. 

And where she was growing far too thin, Ahnoor was getting bigger and fatter. Glider children were often of a height with her, but their weight was much reduced in comparison. To Naksima and Nilma, Ahnoor was a healthy size, and to Shen Shen, she was the same as most Sun Folk babies, sized up to match her height. But Lysanara and her followers made much of a fat, brown baby, making noises of her resemblance to humans, of her brown eyes, of how the shock of her white-silver hair was bright and artificial. 

Ahnoor had Voll’s eyes, and his hair, in curls, and she had his height. If she was brown and if she was fat and if she looked a bit like Naksima and Amrok, Shen Shen thought they were both beautiful, and that Ahnoor was the loveliest of all the babies she had ever seen.

Besides which, it was summer, and a bright one, with a huge, white sun, which was probably where the lines around Naksima’s eyes and the grey in her hair came from, bleached by the light. Or possibly it was the stress of that hard winter.

The mountainsides blossomed with life, berries and fruits bursting forth under the sun and over the rich soil, at the hands of the treeshapers and the gardeners. Deer bounced forth as if leaping from the dirt itself, and fish seemed to appear in the rivers and streams as if by magic. Seals and sea lions climbed up on the rocks to pup, followed by leaping blackfish, Spot and her kin, who had apparently perfected the art leaping out of the water and wriggling back in, mouth full of screaming flesh. 

Shen Shen supposed she ought to have been more appalled by the last, but there was so much life, as if lashing back at that terrible winter, and Spot and her children seemed so joyous that it was more like watching birds catch fish, or cats go after mice.

The councils went more smoothly. Lysanara’s words after the hunt had severed most the Chosen Eight from her side, leaving only Eresir and some former hunters. The rest of her followers were an assortment of sad and sickly Gliders, magic users and barren lifemates that had, thus far, not been touched by the blessing of children that had followed the mountain’s destruction.

Shen Shen was only sorry for them now. Lysanara was looking more like a bitter child, a spurned lovemate, than a leader. It was sad, rather than maddening. Shen Shen saw her walking with her small group from time to time, hands in her sleeves, usually in the Palace, playing with the Scrolls and the star stuff.

“Maybe she’s found some peace.”

“I doubt it,” Ahralree ran her hands through Ahleki’s hair, carefully parting it before raising the scissors to trim away some split tips. “That is to say, I’ve never known Lysanara to be content with anything in her life.

“She’d be happier if she found a way to be content,” Naksima was painting a new leg for Shen Shen, flowers and tiny  suns. “But some people can’t do anything except think about what they haven’t got.”

...

Fog insisted she should have her own den not long after Scouter moved into his, and her parents at first protested, then grudgingly allowed a small hollow just off theirs, with much grumbling over how cubs were spoilt these days.

Leetah suspected that it had less to do with Fog being spoilt, and more to do with her being small and frail, and Clearbrook’s very last child. Fog herself was beginning to grow up, although she was still smaller than Acorn and Tyleet, and Clearbrook and One Eye were warier now than they had been when she was younger and content to stay close to home. 

Not without cause. Parts of Fog’s mind continued to lag behind her peers, and even behind Tyleet thus far.

“You mustn’t expect more of her than that of a very small cub,” Leetah suggested, quietly running a hand over Fog’s dozing head. The cub reached up and pushed her away, grumbling.

“That’s tickling.”

“I apologize, Fog,” Leetah smiled. “You’re growing very well, kitling.”

“Liar,” Fog pouted, her lack of growth having recently become a sore point, as Tyleet outstripped her. 

“Everything grows at its own rate,” Leetah smiled at the tiny cub. “You’re like a flower before it blooms, small one day, a lovely blossom the next.”

Fog rolled over, turning her back to them, sighing.

“Tired now, go away.”

It would rain soon, according to Fog, and she had decided to sleep until it did, thus prompting Clearbrook to run for Leetah. 

“There’s nothing wrong with her,” Leetah explained. “It might be an aspect of her-her weather knowing.”

Fog was nothing if not unique, but in the worst ways at times. Her weather foresight was unknown in the entire memory of both tribes. Savah had meditated for days on it, and even her great storehouse of knowledge had nothing like it.

The early summer had brought Treestump and Minyah’s newest babe, a small, plump little thing they called Blackbird. His wolf blood brought Minyah to tears, but his face had brought Dewshine to Cutter and Treestump’s mind and he was much adored by his older sister, Acorn, who, without even a suspicion of wolf’s blood, was becoming her mother’s comfort.

“Mother!” Ember climbed up her shoulders, thankfully clean, and hung from her shoulders, giggling. 

Soon, Leetah thought, Ember would be like Newstar, a tall, blooming maiden, disdainful of motherly touches and fatherly affection. With this in mind, she swung her eldest around to carry her on her hip, where she still fit as if she’d been made to it.

She had to put her down at their destination, the little cave house that Dart had dubbed “Willow Hollow”, but Ember simply made a beeline for the water, leaping in and swimming for Dart and Shushen’s latest craft. There were several earlier models out on the lake as well, Leetah noted, these ones being used by Sun Folk who fancied themselves fishers, with spear or net. 

Everything was idyllic, the early evening air was sweet, the last golden rays of sun met the horizon with gentle nudges, and a few early stars were peeping out. Therefore, Leetah felt she might have been excused for not immediately noticing the tension inside.

Once within, however, it was impossible to miss. Strongbow, eyes still slightly blurry with sleep, Rayek maintaining a very firmly neutral expression, and Moonshade stubbornly looking over a piece of embroidery, avoiding both of them and Leith.

“Is everything alright?” She hesitated to ask, given that Moonshade and Strongbow’s quarrels were like a rockslide, rare and apt to alter significantly any portion of landscape they happened to touch. But it was that, or back out slowly, as if she had stumbled upon a bear.

Rayek ran a hand through his hair, and released a puff of irritated breath, shrugging. Strongbow pressed his lips together and glared at nothing. 

It was Moonshade that finally broke the silence.

“I don’t want to do this anymore.”

Something broke in that moment, like the sky opening up, and Strongbow ran for the door, leaving it swinging in his wake. Rayek stood for a moment, looking between him and Moonshade, whose eyes were glistening faint, until she nodded after Strongbow and he left.

“He’s like a child,” Moonshade whispered, turning back to her work. 

Strongbow wasn’t important to Leetah. He could rage himself out on the plains with Rayek for all she cared, but Moonshade was right there, in pain and alone.

“Are you alright?”

Moonshade wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and shook her head. 

“I’m tired of being prodded and poked,” she sighed. “It’s been three years, Leetah, and nothing’s changed. We’re no further along than we were when we started, and I’m tired.”

“I’m making some progress with Trollhammer,” Leetah started, and Moonshade cut her off.

“And it’s not fair to him, either,” she shook her head. “I’m weary with it all, Leetah. I’d rather turn myself to finding peace in the change.”

Leetah hesitated.

“I’m not telling you to give up,” Moonshade said. “Play with Trollhammer’s blood all you like. Just leave me out of it, unless you manage something real.”

Leetah stayed just long enough to be sure that Moonshade was alright then left. Outside, Shushen was picking Ember up and tossing her in the water, while Dart watched from the shore.   Leetah joined him, waiting for her daughter to tire of the game.

“Father thought you’d refuse,” Dart said, after a moment of silence. 

“Your father isn’t in charge of your mother, or me,” Leetah said, dryly.

Dart smiled, a smile that he’d carried about since Leetah had met him, already patient with the inconveniences of the world.

“I know,”” he leaned back on the sand, looking out into the lake at Shushen and Ember. “He thinks he can be the boss of everything.”

“Well, not of this,” Leetah lay back on the sand,  looking at the sky. “This is your mother’s choice.”

“I know,” Dart smiled saucily at her. “That’s why I’m staying with Shushen for now.”

Leetah grinned back, and the talk turned to other things, until Ember finally decided she was hungry and that they should go and see Toorah and Suntoucher.

...

Lysanara was growing more and more petulant, although from the way she spoke and moved it was clear that she thought she was dignified in her martyrdom. Shen Shen thought she could have told Lysanara the difference, but she didn't think of Lysanara very often, and saw her even less. She blamed herself for that later.

She was walking over the bridge from a smaller island, having left a small settlement behind, the little crop of houses, above a small bay, the elves and humans that were quietly filling in the space behind her. 

The rockshapers had been very proud of it from the start, from the very first suggestion of small walk ways between the small islands that dotted the bay, close to Greenwake, gently drawing the stone overhead as they sat in small, skin boats. Before the spring after that long winter, they had decided to expand the project out until the bridge reached the mainland. Little by little, treeshapers had followed and the watershaper Shuka had been taken by their entreaties, so that small hamlets were springing up on the little islands, and also along the broad bridges. Even the hawks had made their nests in hollows on the supporting pillars.

“Lady Shen Shen!” 

It was Kureel, long blonde hair plaited loosely against his scalp, mounted on his great bird, grinning broadly. Shen Shen had never known any Glider to smile as much as Kureel did, his sunny temperament even rivalling Aroree’s starlike giggles and glittering eyes. Joy was his natural state, even during the dark winter months. 

“Kureel,” she laughed as he whirled in place. “Are you looking for Nireen? She’s with her lovemate, back by the Whirling Well.”

“Shuka, actually,” he told her. “Star was going after a seal pup and underestimated her own weight. She’s stranded on the north end of Freewind, and poor Spot’s going wild with fear.”

And Shuka would be able to gently swirl water under the young whale killer until she was back in her element. It happened once a year, so far, when an over confident hunter would go too far and find themselves trapped on the shore. It had been a panic the first time it happened, now it was only an inconvenience. 

“Shuka is at her mother’s house today,” Shen Shen told him, leaning against the rail. “I saw her go in this morning. You know those two, they’ll be chattering like ravens all day.”

Kureel shook his head ruefully. 

“You know, I’m not even sure who my mother is, these days,” he commented, bringing his bondbird down to her level, holding out his hand to her. “Shuka was always a strange one. Want a ride back to Moonwake? We can let you off at Ayeen’s house.”

She wasn’t as eager as B’rak had been before he bonded to his young hawk, but neither was she Amrok to pass up a chance to make a sunmark’s walk as short as a breeze, and accepted. It was a lovely day, and, for once, Kureel resisted the urge to show off his bird’s acrobatic skill. The sun glittered off the green sea, and they passed overhead of Spot and Star, the latter surrounded by elves, splashing her with water, or holding up sunshades, and trying to soothe her cries. 

“I’d feel sorry for her,” she shook her head. “But I’m pretty sure she did this last year, too.”

“It was definitely her,” Churl shook with laughter. “I’d know those spots anywhere. She’s getting too big for this, but she’s not getting too smart for it.”

“I can think of some others like that,” Shen Shen commented wryly, thinking of some of Kureel’s scrapes. Kureel responded by sending his bird into a dive, laughing when she shrieked.

The earth was wet and spongy with the near daily spring rain, smelling strongly of life, both in potential and realized. They landed near a small cluster of homes, the kind that seemed to embrace each other, just as a scream rose from Ayeen’s neatly kept, large, airy house.

They ran together, or, Kureel flew and Shen Shen ran as well as she could on the wet dirt and her wooden leg. Ayeen’s door was open, and her multiple foster children were gathered close to their mother, who was crouching over Shuka, hands outstretched helplessly. The reason for that was Shuka’s pale, still face, and a puddle of blood around her head.

“Don’t touch her,” Shen Shen ordered, and gently moved a child aside. “Let me through, little one.”

Shuka was unconscious, but the wound wasn’t serious. Shen Shen made a poultice and tied it on with a bandage. Ayeen didn’t cry, though her eyes were wet, and one of the children used her powers to lift the watershaper to a nearby couch. 

“Lysa came by,” Ayeen said, her voice hoarse with fear, as she served Shen Shen hot spiced berry juice and smoked fish with pickled vegetables. “She told me she’d make dinner with Shuka. We were both so happy, it’s been so long. The children don’t even know her, and we went for berries.” 

Then they came back, and Shuka was lying there, so still. 

“Lysa?” Shen Shen asked. “I don’t know-“

“Lysanara.”

Shuka appeared in the doorway, her little round face bitter. She swayed as she moved, floating as if she was unsure which way was up. 

“She’s my sister,” she said, collapsing into a chair. “She loves me. She hates me.”

“Shuka, you need to rest,” Ayeen stood up and tried to chivvy her daughter back to bed. “You’re badly-“ 

“She’s planning something,” Shuka reached out with a blindly seeking hand, gripping Shen Shen’s shoulder with painfully tight fingers. “She hates you, she’s so jealous-“

A shower of cries came from outside, as if this day, which had been so soft and sweet, would end in only hard terror. 

“Mama!” A tiny girl ran in, face pale with terror. “Mama, the Palace is flying!”

Shen Shen stood and ran for the door. 

It was in the air, shimmering brightly with all its power, floating higher and higher, but in a trembling uncertain manner. For a moment, she thought it might land. Then she feared it might fall. It did neither, but steadied, then disappeared in a bright point of light. 

She ran for her house, but a Glider, Arayan, kindly lifted her into the air, making a long walk a short flight.

Everyone in that little hamlet was standing about, frozen, in shock, and Shen Shen remembered the Mountain, remembered the earth shake, remembered that something was missing, someone was gone.

“Amrok!”

Amrok stood, staring at the sky, at the place where the Palace had become a point of light and vanished. 

“Amrok, where’s Naksima?” Shen Shen felt off balance, as if some other piece of her were missing.

“Mama!”

It was Ahleki, tall and pretty, but with tear tracks on her cheeks. She’d ruin her eyelashes, and Shen Shen sighed, using her skirt to wipe the tears away. They kept coming, though, and Shen Shen hugged her, hoping that she could squeeze the crying away. 

“Shen Shen.”

Amrok was staring at her, eyes empty and dark, Orami on his hip, frightened and sobbing.

“We thought,” Amrok gestured vaguely. “We thought that you were at the Palace.”

She’d originally planned for that, before someone, she could no longer remember who, had called her down to help negotiate a boundary line in a garden. 

“I was on the Bridge,” she said, and began to feel a sick, detached wave flow over her body.

“Naksima went,” Amrok shook his head, denying his own words. “Ahnoor wanted you, and Naksima took her to the Palace.”

Shen Shen shook her head.

“No,” she said, firmly. “No, Amrok, no.”

“Mama!” 

Ahleki was young, Shen Shen remembered, with a suddenness. She was too young for any of this.

She drew her shoulders back, and reached, as she had seldom reached before, as, in fact, she never had.

**Ahnoor.**

She reached, and reached, and then, suddenly, she was there, in the glowing brightness of the first home. She was there, and Ahnoor was there, where Naksima had curled up around her little body, both of them with eyes squeezed tight, and she was powerful. She could feel the Palace as if it were her own body, she could see that whoever was piloting it had no idea what they were doing, and she reached once more. She reached with an angry hand, and turned it off, pushing the Palace down, down, gently but terribly in her rage.

Then she was waking up, eyes on her own ceiling. She knew, with a commonsensical certainty, that it had been no dream. 

She had landed the Palace, but it was far away, and, she realized, she didn’t know where it was. 

She could find it, she thought. Surely she could. She had found Blue Mountain, she had walked across the world. 

(She had lost her entire family. The Mountain had fallen.)

“Lady Shen Shen!” Ahralree was so tall. She was really beautiful. One day, Ahnoor would be that tall, but more beautiful. And Shen Shen likely wouldn’t see it, without some miracle.

“I’m alright,” she swung herself out of bed. “I put the Palace down, but I don’t know where.”

She left her home. The council was standing in a circle, faces worried and voices soft. B’rak was there, with his gentle frown, his knowing look, and he anchored her. Osek was there, his gentle face fierce for once.

“Who have we lost?” Shen Shen asked. “Lysanara had followers, but everyone is welcome in the Palace.”

“Cheidar,” Urda said, voice tight and cold. “Nik, Thora, about ten others. All of Lysanara’s. Naksima. Ahnoor.”

Shen Shen swallowed some tears and nodded. 

“I think,” she said, hesitantly. “I think I made the Palace land. But I have no idea where it is.”

“I know,” a cold voice said.

Everyone turned their heads downhill, towards the small clusters of houses the dotted the mountains. Shuka stood there, leaning on Kureel, clearly exhausted and still heavily bandaged, in the clumsy way of mothers unused to injured children. 

“I know where Lysanara is,” she continued. “I always know.”

“I’ll take you there,” she continued, her eyes turning to the north and the east. “To her.”

...

Chapter Text

“I hate dreamberries.”

Maleen chuckled, and burrowed more deeply into their blankets. Ruffel sat up and pouted down at her. 

“I hate you, too,” she added, petulantly getting up to respond to her demanding bladder. 

It was late, past noon. They had slept as only lovemates who have no children and no demands on their time can do. She drank from the water pitcher, and flicked at the cloud flower curtains on their window. It was a strange day, bright and shimmering. Some odd noise had awakened her, an outcry, a song. No doubt some child playing outside their window.

“Ugh.”

She collected some fruit and bread and some smoked shagback, crawling back into bed with her plate, which Maleen stole and ate from and fed to her. If she hadn’t felt so dreadful, it would have been sweet. 

“Are you two still sleeping?” It was Rainsong, coming in without knocking, her voice conveying a certain level of disbelief that levelled judgement at them. Mender was clinging to her skirt, and he stared at them with a similar disdain. 

“We had a late night,” Maleen said, shamelessly, breath still sour with wine. “We have to recover.”

Rainsong became more contemptuous of them, impossibly and unexpectedly. 

“A house fell into the meadow.” Mender announced. 

Ruffel stared at him. It was the kind of thing children said. She’d cared for enough of them to know it. It couldn’t possibly be true. 

Rainsong threw some clothes at her and Maleen. 

“Come on, you two.”

...

“You run,” Cheidar was pushing a knife into her hand. It was long in his hands, and he called it a sword, but it was a knife to her. “You can’t fight as well as us, but you have longer legs and you know how to live anywhere. So run, and get Ahnoor away from her.”

Lysanara wouldn’t have even left Ahnoor with them if Naksima wasn’t nursing still. The elf woman had sneered at them, rude and disdainful, even as her grasping, sharp fingers had reached for Ahnoor. 

Naksima nodded, and waited. The Gliders acted as if she and the little elves were beneath their notice, like animals that could be dismissed and dealt with later. 

They were, as Shen Shen had grumbled more than once, very stupid.

Orami was with Amrok. Shen Shen would nurse him. Orami was alright. 

“‘Rami,” Ahnoor wept for her playmate, suddenly, and Naksima soothed her. 

The Go Backs went to the door and flung it open, nearly pushing her through, before the sleepy-eyed “guard” could do more than raise his head, into a summer meadow, filled with flowers. Naksima had time to note that the flowers and the grasses were the same as the flowers and the grasses on the near endless plains where she and Shen Shen had met, that wondrous night so many years ago.

And there were people there, she saw, a large village, with stone houses, and small figures gathering only the length of a small whale away. She turned to them, and nearly halted in shock, seeing the familiar pointed ears and large, bright eyes. 

It couldn’t be Shen Shen’s people, she thought. They couldn’t be that lucky. 

And they weren’t.

“Stop her!” Some enemy Glider had got past the Go Backs and the good, for lack of better phrasing, Gliders. It was Lysanara, hand outstretched, with a carefully molded, falsely wounded look on her face. “She attacked us, stole our child!”

“What?” Naksima shook her head, clutching Ahnoor more closely. “No, this is my friend’s baby. She stole us, we need your help...”

But she could see that these elves, like Olbar’s people on meeting Shen Shen, were suspicious already of her and some of them had weapons.

Idiots, because Ahnoor was was plastered against her side, and clinging to her so tightly that it pained her. Naksima turned, not back to the Palace, but there was an arm of forest, reaching into the plains, not her own soft, green woods, but sharp, grey and brown and green, the kind of forest that welcomed winter with the fire of autumn leaves. She could run, and maybe hide, and maybe leave Ahnoor safely in some hidden hollow, to retrieve later.

Behind her was the sounds of pursuit, and battle, but hopefully Cheidar would make it out and reason with the strangers. Then they could go home. 

...

Fog was drifting in the creek, with Steady on the edge of the stream, watchful and gentle. Dart had managed to persuade Shushen into paddling up the river, into the forest and one of the many rivulets that fed into the greater. Wing had come, too, with a net for fish, and Ember and Suntop had tagged along. Fog had apparently planned on a day in the water separately, but did not object to their presence.

This summer was soft, Dart decided. It was nearing his last summer as a child, and he planned to enjoy it and stretch it out as long as possible. His family was changing, but he was still the youngest, and he needn’t think of all the things he’d have to do one day, in his own home, with his own mate.

“Look!” Wing held up a wriggling fish, huge and sparkling. “This one would make a great lunch!”

“No, not that one,” Fog murmured. “She’s busy. She can’t be food today.”

Wing objected, irritated by the whimsy, and Ember argued in favour of their empty stomachs, but Suntop sided with Fog, and the fish went back down into the stream. Wing spread his net again, face smoothing out. That was what Wing was best at, putting his own feelings aside and working. Ember began sulking, however, and Dart made a mental note to keep her away from Fog.

Eventually an even bigger fish tangled itself in the net and Fog agreed that this one had time to be food, so they all went back to the woods and argued over what could be eaten raw and what needed cooking, eventually wrapping the fish in leaves and laying it in their small fire, and Wing and Fog setting out to fill leaf packets with berries and roots. 

Dart wondered if anyone in the past had ever had such long, golden days, that headed into soft, tender evenings, like this. It felt as if he were the only one in the world who had ever been young. It felt as if there had never been summer before.

“We should all paddle back to the Sun Village,” Shushen said, after they finished eating. “See how fast we can go. I bet we can jump the rocks at the final bend and make the biggest wave the lake’s ever seen.”

“I don’t like the lake,” Fog objected, clambering over Steady’s back. “There’s monsters there.”

“No there isn’t!” Ember snapped at her, while Choplicker took her berries, staining his muzzle purple. “There’s no monsters in the lake!”

“Yes there are,” Fog told them, seriously. “They’re all scary, they look like their skin is cracking off, and they grab you if you go in the water.”

“There’s nothing in the lake!” Ember snapped, clearly still sore from the argument over the fish. “It’s just fish and reeds and frogs!”

“There’s monsters in the lake!” Fog slammed her hands down in some mud, much to Suntop’s irritation, as it splashed across his new boots. “They’re huge, and they have too many fingers!”

“There’s no monsters in the lake!” Ember yelled at Fog, just as Suntop and Wing put their hands.

“Ssssh!”

It broke the quarrel apart long for the sounds of the woods to come through. Screeching birds, chattering squirrels. A deer crashing in the woods, surprised by their wolves, running…

Running towards them?

“”There’s monsters in the lake,”” Ember sneered mockingly at Fog, who was turning bright red. “”I used to be a bird, that fish can’t be food, the lake is full of monsters.””

“Shut up!”

Steady woke up long enough to grab the back of Fog’s tunic, aborting her attack, while Ember made faces at her, ignoring Suntop and Dart’s abortive gestures.

Then the deer crashed into their clearing, and Dart saw that it was his childhood nightmare. 

…

Naksima did what she thought Shen Shen would do, and ran. She didn’t look back, she minded where she put her feet in the dense undergrowth, and made for the trees. She’d seen woods like this before, and if she made her way in far enough, she could lose anyone. 

She found herself in a dry creek bed, lined with small stones and sand, under the cover of willows and other bushes. Ahnoor wept against her neck, and she tried to soothe her, but it was proving fruitless.

She didn’t see the fire, or the wolves. Her eyes had been caught by  the glitter of water and she was thirsty. Perhaps she could run along the stream bed, disguising her trail from any pursuers, on the off chance that Cheidar wasn’t able to get ahold of the situation. At any rate, she knew how to hook a fish by the gills, and what plants grew along the water’s edge, so she and Ahnoor could eat when the time came.

But the fact remained, focused on the water, she hadn’t smelled the faint smoke of a hot summer flame, and she nearly put her feet in it. Then, sidestepping that, she’d trod on the foot of a wolf, and they both screamed, her in terror, and he in pain. Then. Then.

It was chaos. There were two youths, one with a spear, one with a bow. There were wolves, one the largest she’d ever seen, who shoved a baby-sized girl behind itself, hauling it’s bulk up with unthinkable speed. There were three other children, two as bright as the sun and dark as the night, one with a fishing net in his grip as if even he were uncertain of what to do next, and they were all terrified.

Everyone froze. The fire crackled.

Then a petulant voice, in ShenShen’s language, from behind the monstrous wolf.

“I told you there were monsters!”

…

“Stay there,” the tallest boy ordered her, his companion levelling his spear in her direction. Naksima did as she was bid, sitting on the soft earth, clutching Ahnoor tightly, listening to the stream as it gurgled and whispered.

The children stared at her. The littlest one wasn’t a baby. She was just incredibly short, half the size of the rest, smaller than Ahnoor, but old enough to run and jump and speak. The others were a few years around Shenkir and Ahleki’s age, older and younger. Naksima thought the boy with the net might be of an age with her friend’s daughter, but he was a hand or so smaller than she was.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Naksima tried to smile, wincing as Ahnoor pulled her hair in her anxiety. “I’m sorry I scared you.”

They all stared at her, shocked. 

“You speak our language?” Their leader asked. Naksima nearly asked him how he had expected her to understand his earlier command, but he was still a child. He’d probably just hoped she would understand the gist of it.

The wolves circled them now, uncertain and growling softly.

“My friend taught it to me,” she tried smiling again, and the children all softened, except for the smallest one, who stepped over part of the fire to get to her. 

“See!” The tiny girl moved too quickly for her friends to stop her, and made the huge wolf bark roughly in concern, grabbing Naksima’s hand and holding it up. “Too many fingers! Just like the lake monsters!”

“Don’t be rude, Fog,” the leader grabbed the little one, pulling her onto his lap, at the same time as he nodded to his friend to put the spear down. The other boy frowned, and there was a moment of that wordless speech that ShenShen called “Sending”, before he reluctantly obeyed. “You can’t just grab people.”

“Why not?”

“She’s not a monster!” This, as Naksima’s ear was roughly grasped by the other little girl, was clearly part of an earlier argument. “She’s just a human.” 

“The baby isn’t a human, though.”

That was a little boy, with golden curls and a strong family resemblance to the one who’d yanked on Naksima’s ear. 

“Is that your baby?” His… sister? asked tactlessly.

“Ah, no,” Naksima wondered how to explain. “She’s my friend’s child. We were separated and…how do your people say it? We were taken against our will, to this place.”

“That’s terrible!” The young leader turned huge, sad eyes on her. “Where did that happen?”

Naksima looked around. It was a green, bright woods, with leafy trees that could never have attained the greatness of her own home’s huge cedars, and with squat, hardy plants that spoke of winters whose harshness would kill those same great trees. 

“I’m not-“ she hesitated. “I’m not really sure. They brought us here in a strange… flying thing. I wasn’t able to tell the direction.”

“A flying thing?” 

That was one of the elder boys, looking skeptical and just this side of suspicious. 

Ahnoor chose that moment to release her grip on Naksima, as if persuaded by the conversation that the danger was over, and floated just a few inches away. The lead that Shen Shen had fashioned for her, with much embroidery and of the finest silk, as if to disguise its intended purpose, held her close, and Naksima was so used to floating babies at this point that she barely noticed the child escape her grasp, but the children all gasped in happy astonishment.

“The baby flies!”

That was that, and all the smaller children descended into a game of bobbing Ahnoor along, with barely enough foresight to douse the fire before they began. It was familiar enough, a game that everyone, human and elf alike, on Greenwake played with the floater children. Gliders claimed it helped the children learn to control their powers, Go Backs and humans simply found it funny. Naksima kept her grip on the lead tight, but other wise let them play, and introduced herself and Ahnoor to the older boys.

“I’m Dart,” the leader told her. “This is Shushen, that’s Wing, and Ember and Suntop. The littlest one is Fog, but she’s not the youngest. The twins are. Oh! Twins are babies born at the same time. They’re very special.”

“I should ask them to give me a blessing,” Naksima then had to explain what twins meant to the Red Mountain People, and it astonished him into asking more questions, and allowed her to ask questions, too.

It turned out that they weren’t from the same place. Dart, Shushen and Wing had come from the same village that Naksima had just fled(when she told them that they frowned and another moment of wordless communication passed, this one with a slightly stronger sense of urgency, then Dart assured her all would be well), and Ember, Suntop, and Fog had come from a smaller settlement further in the woods.

“The baby smells strange,” Ember interrupted, right before Naksima was about to ask Dart if he could speak as far as his village, and see what was happening. 

“She probably needs new moss,” Naksima tugged Ahnoor closer, to the infant’s delight. “I didn’t bring any with me, but do you know-“

“She doesn’t smell like poop,” Ember interrupted, ignoring her brother’s hissed admonishment over her manners. “She kind of smells like our treeden.”

“Sort of like your mama,” Fog interjected. 

Then there was the noise of branches breaking, and a red and green blur, long, graceful fingers, and hair held back by a twist of flowers.

“Ember! Suntop!”

…

Cheidar hadn’t had any real thoughts about the new elves, other than hoping that they weren’t idiots. Luckily, some were practiced in sending, so it took less than a breath for Lysanara’s deception to collapse, helped along by the fact that her little band barely knew how to run through the ancient rituals of war they held. His, born and bred to it, had them outside the Palace in a circle of spears.The new elves didn’t help, but they didn’t hurt, either.

“What is wrong with you?” He glared down his blade at Lysanara. “What by the rainbow fires is your problem?”

She didn’t answer, just glared at him. 

ShenShen would be waiting for him, he thought, aimlessly. They were going to meet for dinner, and he was going to bring her some new berries that Ishuree had bred, sweet and piercing sour. The berries were scattered across the Palace, and even if it would be hours until dinner, he was definitely going to miss it. 

“We’ll go and find your friend,” a youth with gentle eyes was comforting Thora. “The woods are thick, but she can’t have gone far, and our friends will help. There’s no one better than a Wolfrider for the woods!”

“Wolfrider?” Thora’s voice faded as she and the boy wandered off.

Aiyi, what to do, what to do. Cheidar rubbed his eye as he glared down at an offensive flower. It was blue and small and hardy, and it looked nothing like the delicate, huge, orange blossoms that were covering Greenwake right now.

He had picked some only days ago and showered Ahnoor with them, to the chorus of much scolding from Shen Shen and Ahleki.

These ones didn’t suit this village, he thought. Not with their airy stone houses, nor with the bright, saturated colours of their clothes, nor the sun symbol, eerily familiar, stamped on the sides of houses and embroidered on clothes, and… 

“Savah!” 

“Savah!”

The cheerful calls from the Sun Folk filled the air like birdsong, as the crowd parted, revealing a tall, gorgeous figure. She was robed in green, and crowned in gold, but it was somehow lush rather than lavish. She bore her rainments and regalia as if they had grown on her somehow, and her face, gentle and serene, was a familiar one.

“Shen Shen’s people!” He was too excited to remember he was supposed to be on his guard. “You’re Shen Shen’s people!”

The elder stopped, serene face drooping in undignified astonishment.

“You-They- Shen Shen?”

Cheidar turned his nastiest smile onto Lysanara.

…

When word came that a human was in the woods, all Leetah could think of was the twins, and she hopped onto Trollhammer before anyone else came close. Unlike Nightfall, she didn’t have to fetch her weapons(she only carried a small dagger that Cutter had given her), and unlike Redlance, she was coming from the Holt itself.

Trollhammer could smell out the cubs better than Leetah could send for them, even though they’d been in the water all day, up and down the streams that made their silvery veins all over the woods.

“Suntop! Ember!”

She called for them as she rode, scattering birds and leaves and little animals. Sending would have been smarter, but the news from the village seemed to have scattered her wits and all she could think of was the layer of ash just under her feet and the blackened markings where the trees had nearly burned. All she could think of was Redlance’s nightmares and the little skull covered in flowers that lay on Moonshade’s window frame.

“Ember!” There was a little turn in the creek here, where Dart sometimes paddled his little waterleaf with Shushen, and Ember led the younger cubs in ambushing them. “Suntop!”

Trollhammer turned, yipping happily as he found his packmates, and Leetah shivered in relief.

There was a strange voice, somewhat deep, like Savah’s and Oddbit’s, and as Leetah turned her head, all she could see was the thing that sometimes haunted Cutter’s nightmares, a giant with five fingers and almost no ears to speak of, skull-like head only enhanced by the tiny, near pinpoint eyes.

“Ma!”

It was a baby. Huge, bigger than little Trinket had been when she was first born, with a shock of silvery-white hair, and huge brown eyes. Yet, for all her size, she was nearly weightless, as if she were made from cloudflower wool.

“Ma?” 

The baby’s face crinkled in misery, and she slipped away from Leetah’s grasp, wriggling like a new caught fish. Leetah cried out, and tried to catch her, but her aim was all wrong, as the child didn’t fall, but instead zipped like a little hummingbird, straight to the human.

Leetah’s pulse raced in her throat as she stared at the human woman, but the woman just looked miserable and a little lost. She tried to smile at the baby, but it was forced and timid. 

“I’m sorry,” the human shocked her by speaking their language. “You look so much like my friend. We’re far from home, and-“

“This is Naksima, mama!” Ember climbed up her leg, shouting thoughtlessly. She was far too old to be as spoilt as she was, Leetah thought absently, but didn’t know how to change it. “She’s a human, and she’s friends with an elf! That’s not her baby, it’s her friend’s baby, and she can fly!”

“Not Naksima,” Suntop, the little pedant that he was, corrected her rudely. “The baby can fly.”

“Yes,” the human laughed. “Ahnoor can fly, I find it somewhat difficult.”

Ahnoor, huge and and somehow featherlight, like a little storm cloud, stared at them all disapprovingly. Leetah hesitated, then smiled, holding out her arms to the baby.

“Hmm!” Ahnoor stuck her face against the human’s neck and wrapped her arms around the woman’s neck. Naksima turned towards the child and held her, whispering soft things that sounded like words, but only almost. 

Of course, Leetah realized. Humans have their own language.

“We left our friends in the village,” Naksima told her. “They’ll be worried about us, but I can’t send. Would you take us back with you?”

“Mother and father will be worrying,” Dart said, standing up. “Actually, Naksima, you could come in our waterleaf?”

Naksima looked bemused for a moment, then, following his gaze, saw the craft, pulled up on the banks of the stream. 

“Oh, a canoe*,” she smiled, then looked worried. “But will it be big enough for me?”

“It can take all of us,” Dart assured her. “So some of us can run or ride, and you and Ahnoor can ride.”

“That would be lovely!” The human woman clasped Ahnoor close to her breast, and Leetah wondered if she’d gone mildly insane, because it didn’t frighten her at all. 

…

The mild feeling of vertigo continued in the village, where a huge, shimmering structure had sprouted in one of the meadows north of the little hamlet. It was huge, alien, and it was singing to her, a song as sweet as flowers, as sweet as fresh cool water.

Shushen and Suntop began laughing together, Shushen throwing up his hands and cartwheeling as they approached, and Suntop holding his hands out to the grasses Leetah was riding through, letting them flow over his hands. Ember glanced between him and Leetah, looking bemused, and Fog, clinging to Steady’s fur, shook her head and frowned one of her fierce frowns. Leetah wondered if she should be concerned, but she suddenly had no concerns at all, bouyed up as if she was floating through stars.

It vanished in an instant as a scream, a cry of loss and rage, echoed off the sky. It went on and on, while a murmur of concern flowed from the village. Leetah knew the voice and choked. 

“Grandmother!”

Ember slipped out of her hands, and ran to Toorah, who was curled up in a ball in front of Savah and a strange elf with shaggy brown hair and a crooked nose that had been broken once, while Suntoucher knelt at her side, speaking in a voice too low for Leetah to hear.

Trollhammer made his way through the crowd, parting it with a friendly grumble that made Vurdah’s brother frown and snatch up his tiny nephew. Leetah scarcely noticed, slipping from her wolf-friend’s back to kneel in front of her mother.

“I’m sorry,” the strange elf looked between them and Savah. “I thought she’d be happy. I didn’t know…”

Leetah lost track of his words, reaching for her mother, who met her hand with a grasping, trembling touch. She was in a state of shock, her heart racing, her breath short. Leetah couldn’t heal this, the body’s natural reaction to something, something that shook her mother apart. 

“Mother?”

“Leetah,”Toorah grasped her, bruisingly hard, staring with tear-filled eyes. “Leetah, Shen Shen is alive!”

It was impossible, it was madness, and yet, glancing between Sarah’s tearstained face and her mother’s, she knew it was impossibly true. And something else…

Naksima arrived at the docks almost unnoticed, despite her height and her exotic looks, disembarking Dart’s waterleaf with a tall, earthly grace, clinging to Ahnoor, and looking around nervously until she saw the newcomers and smiled.

She had Ahnoor with her. She had Shen Shen’s baby with her, and Leetah knew this as she knew her own hands, knew Ahnoor’s curls hadn’t come from the unknown father, that her round cheeks, her smile, her small, chubby hands, and her graceful step, even mid air. This was Shen Shen’s baby.

…