Anger gone as if it had never been, Tanner looked hard at Stormlight. He might as well have been seeing her for the first time. Indeed, she had only been in his long life for a mere eyeblink, fourteen years or so, a tiny span compared to
his seven-hundred-some years. She had been a fair-haired flash darting past him in the night, no more. Now he saw a cub-yet not a cub. All slender quickness and lank lengths of growing bones, but something stirring in the fine, pale face, the huge, night-shadowed eyes faintly sparkling with starlight. She was a cub at the edge, the verge, of passage and adulthood. And she understood.
Tanner found his voice a trifle husky when he spoke. 'I had not thought of the purple,' he admitted.
'But I was right about the rest?' the cub demanded.
'More than right.'
'So what are you going to do?' Her great eyes were intensely on him.
Tanner smiled with both sides of his mouth, finding his way suddenly made clear. 'Is it not plain? I must obtain more human urine,' he declared, and he got up and went off to call a council of the Wolfriders to set about it.
'My people,' he told them, 'I need your help.'
It was a request that they could not lightly refuse, and they did not do so. But neither did they agree. And by the end of the night all the tribe was dark with doubt and grumbling about Tanner. No longer one to be pitied and protected, he. A danger, maybe even a madman, Two-Spear's worthy successor. Tanner found himself smiling, the only one smiling. He felt much more happy and comfortable as a danger than as a soft-spoken eccentric, a leader who seldom led, chief in name only and a disappointment to the tribe.
'There,' he remarked to Brook after the others had scattered, muttering, to the tree hollows and hidden places where they spent their days. 'Finally, I've given you some excitement.'
Brook said unhappily, 'What did you expect, after letting Fangslayer and Longreach and the other elders run everything for years?'
'You think I'm a fool, Brook? Why do you suppose I only
proposed that we watch the human camp until their habits become known to us? I plan to bring Fangslayer and his cronies around by degrees. What we really should do is dig a trap, make a net, and capture a human male to make urine for us.'
Brook stared and backed away. 'You are crazy,' he stammered. Then he bolted toward the safety of his daylight perch.
'And he's the one who always tells the tales of Two-Spear at the howl,' Tanner remarked to himself. Shrugging, half smiling in the faint daybreak light, he took to the trees-but not to rest. Silently, by the hidden upper ways, he himself made his way toward the human camp.
Just as he reached the point where he could watch the human hunters setting out to run the deer toward the waiting spearmen at the river, he saw a flash of fair hair some distance below him.
Her easy, swinging gait through the maze of lower branches slowed. Reluctantly she answered the sending.**I am here.**
**I know you are! What are you doing?**
**Watching the human camp for you, my chief, since the others are too stupid to care.**
He felt amused agreement, which he did not dare to share with her. Instead, he tried to sound stern.**Turn around. You know you should not be here. Go back to your family at once.**
He had forgotten that she was an orphan, raised by the tribe, her parents killed in a hunting mishap years before. Childless and mateless as he was, and preoccupied with his leathermaking, Tanner had taken small part in the rearing of such cubs. He felt a jab of guilt, not only that he had forgotten, but that she could remind him so starkly, as if she should expect nothing more than forgetfulness from him.
**Turn around, then,** he sent more gently yet more firmly,**and go back to the place where you spend your days. I, your chief, command it.**
She went like a flash of birdflight, like a leaf on the wind, like cloud wisp, gone. From his higher, safer, more hidden vantage, Tanner looked on uneasily. For there was a human hunter standing on the ground beneath where she had been, staring upward with a puzzled scowl.
Tanner watched the humans. He did not come so recklessly near to them as Stormlight had done, for it was not in his nature to take unnecessary risks, but nevertheless, he lost rest and watched, and found ways to the nearer trees, day after day. At times the slow-witted human women, grubbing roots, would have needed only to look up from their toil to have seen him. Once a small child did see him leaping from oak to ash, but the women paid no heed to the child's babbling. Tanner spent the rest of that day in hiding and in compunction, for if he had been discovered so also would the tribe have been, and he felt it his duty as chief to protect them. Yet there was that in him which would have died, were it necessary, to fulfill his private quest.
That season there was unwonted silence and lack of merriment at the nightly howls. But one night when both moons were nearly at the full, as he sat alone afterward, Stormlight came to him and seated herself as abruptly as before, and said to him darkly, 'I know where you spend your days.'
He met her gaze, smiling. 'It seems to me that you know everything about me.'
She ignored that and went on. 'You are watching the human village. I know it because I am watching, too, and watching you.'
He was aghast. 'Stormlight!'
'And you are going to get yourself caught if you are not more careful,' she said to him sternly.
'You have disobeyed me!' Yet for some reason he found
that he could not be angry with her or impose a punishment on her, as a chief should do.
'You gave me no order but for the one day,' she retorted with a defiant lift of her head.
'You know no cub is ever to venture near the humans!'
'I will not be a cub for much longer! Then I will come and go as I will, and where I will, climb up and touch the lightning if I like. Ride the gale down to the ground, if I can. Do as you do, if it pleases me.'
Tanner stared at her. She was as wild as Timmorn had ever been, born to confront the storm, as wild as the wolves. There was that in her which could be as fierce as he was gentle and mild.
Her eyes met his, her eyes of deep indigo, darker than storm clouds, deep as midnight, and he felt the jolt shift his center, his bedrock of self, and felt the tremors run through the rest of him, and he knew her soulname, which she did not yet know herself. And sitting, stunned and quaking, he knew he had to live some small time yet at least, long enough to generate a cub with her.
The cub that always comes of Recognition, combining the best qualities of each parent, her daring, his… vision… The cub that might someday be his heir.
Stormlight was trembling, edging away from him, her delicate face very frightened; she had felt it too. 'What- what was that?' she stammered. 'What have you done to me?'
She thought it was something he had imposed on her, a punishment for defying him. Quickly he reached out and laid a hand on her arm to keep her by him. 'No!' he exclaimed. 'No, it was not me.'
'What, then?' she appealed.
'Far larger than either of us. It was Recognition.'
'But I-but how can that be?' For all her proud talk, she was still very much the cub. 'I-I am not yet-'
'I know, little one.' He stroked her hair, shining like pale water in the moonlight. 'You are nowhere near ready, neither your body nor your self. Let the high ones give me strength, I will wait for you.'
She stared at him. 'But it is not fair!' she burst out. 'There should be lovemates for me, courtships, choosings!' A wild light was growing in her eyes. A wolf, entrapped by humans, Tanner had heard, would kill itself with fretting against its bonds rather than submit. This daughter of the wolves would take no more readily to the bonds of Recognition. 'I have never wanted anything but to be free!'
Her cub, Tanner thought, might have those same wide, midnight-blue, flashing eyes.
'It is horrible!' she cried. 'Why should I be-be made a prisoner to-to-'
