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.Dark? Darkening.Foggingmore: Dion s voice, so deeply woven into the song of the wolves,weakened, faded.Went still.Aranur felt it and screamed, a hoarse, strange cry.Half-human,half-wolf, his voice shocked through the forest.Hishn howled.Thewolves surged.Like a single wave, the packsong crushed throughthe stillness to the last whisper of Dion s mind.They found her lungs and forced them to move.They found her heart and bit at itwith their minds, driving it to beat.Seventy wolves sank theirmental teeth into her soul and yanked it back from the path to themoons.A heartbeat pinched through Aranur s mind.Then a second tinypound.Dion s chest didn t rise, but a shadow of breath seemed towhisper.Gray wolves, close and raging, refused to let her go.Andfinally her heart beat again and pushed what was left of her bloodthrough her veins.Aranur screamed again a desperate sound, and again the wolfpack surged.This time it was physical.And, as if his own need hadadded to Hishn s, the wolf pack picked up their pace.Urgency bit athis thoughts, as though it were he, not Dion, caught up in thatbond.His eyes, which once had been a solid gray, seemed tingedwith a glint of yellow.One woman s dnu began to falter, and the wolves bit at its heels.The riding beast, exhausted from the sprint to the meadow and therace that it could not now escape, squealed and jerked ahead.Olarun, clutching the saddle horn, felt his own blood chill.He hadseen the eyes of the wolves who snapped at that dnu, and there wassomething there that he had not seen before.It had none of thegleam of the eager hunt or the steady gaze of the pack mother.Those eyes were not as he had ever seen them, and it terrified himlike the eyes of the lepa.He tried to stretch as his mother had described, letting himselfhear the packsong.But what he realized was a roaring din, like afire in the tops of the trees.Hishn was no longer a creeping fog alight touch in the back of his mind.He had found the wolf s voice,and it was not gentle or firm, but vicious and driving and wild.Theboy tried to call out to his father, but he couldn t seem to speak.Hecould only sit, with the burn of the gashes in his shoulder, while thewolves forced them toward home.An hour passed, and the wolves refused to slacken their pace.Two more towns flashed by.The message relays had caught upwith them, and the villagers emptied the streets, standing onporches and peering from behind their windows at the flood oflupine gray.A group of relay riders tried to join up from one town,but the wolves repulsed them viciously.Aranur shouted to theriders to get a relay of dnu waiting ahead in the villages, and theriders fell back while the wolves raced on. They didn t ride the main roads home the wolves chose theshortest routes, the routes that Hishn knew.There were placeswhere the dnu were forced at a ran up steep, slick hills or throughthe rocky streams.Aranur could feel the trembling in the musclesof his own beast the dnu ran more from terror than strength, butthe wolves would not let it slow.They came to another village, and there was a set of relay dnuwaiting.The relay men, unmounted, started the dnu running freeby whipping them with rope until the beasts scuttled ahead of thewolves.When the pack swallowed up the riderless beasts, some ofAranur s men and women were able to transfer over.Olarun washalf lifted, half thrown from one onto another saddle, but the manwith whom the boy had ridden was not able to switch with him.The boy found himself, his mind dull with pain and exhaustion,clinging one-handed to the saddle horn.The stirrups, set for anadult, were too long for his skinny legs.He couldn t hold his seat.Ashaft of fear hit him as he felt his body slip.Hishn, he cried out unconsciously.The wolf howled back in his mind.The gray sea seemed to shift.A dnu was forced close, its eyes wild and rolling.Then someone shand crushed his on the horn.The boy jerked, but the weight wasgone as quickly as it had appeared, and Tehena slid into placebehind him.Her hard, lean arm caught him around the waistbefore he could slide off beneath the trampling hooves.Hishn, he cried out again, unconsciously trying to reach hismother.Only a snarling returned.They rode.Three villages and another hour passed, and the pack still swelledas if the night called them like darkness.The wolves now numberedeighty.The villages through which they flashed were blurs in theirexhausted sight.The moons fled overhead, leaving a patch of skydark as death in which the eyes of the stars stared down.AndAranur clung to his mate as though she could feel his strengtharound her.Only the sense he had of the gray wolves within hergave him hope that she still lived.When they reached the outskirts of the Lloroi s town, the wolvesdid not run around it.They drove straight through as though they could see the house that overlooked the town.Gray Hishn didn tlead, but she snarled into the packsong, and Yoshi pushed his wayforward.As though the other males had given way to Yoshi, theyfollowed the gray male s direction.Through empty streets, pastknots of people standing in the dark.Through the outer hubs, thenthe center one, while the dnu hooves clattered on.Onto old stoneroads from the Ancient times.And out again to darkness.Twentyminutes, Aranur told himself.Twenty minutes to their home.When the riders fell in behind the pack, Aranur didn t look back.He knew who they were: the healers, summoned by message ringsthat had been run through the darkness.They rode well back fromthe tide of gray, and the wolves, linked to Dion, ignored them.Andthen they were into the rising hills that led to Dion s home.The dnu, pushed to shreds of endurance, gasped as they leaped upthe roads.Aranur held his knees firm, guiding his dnu over roughspots as it began to stumble.He could see the lights from theirhouse, and he felt a wash of relief weaken his grip.Gamon, hethought, and Tomi both were there.He didn t even notice, as theyswept toward the lights, that the sea of gray had lessened.Grayshadows, filtered out by the trees, disappeared into the rocks nearhis home.When he reached the yard and swept past the gate, therewere only eight still with them.Hishn growled in his mind, and his dnu, as if suddenly released,collapsed.He barely kicked free, leaping away from the saddle andthe weight of the dying beast.As his boots struck earth, hestumbled with Dion s weight but somehow kept his feet
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