She took a water-worn pebble from the pouch at her bell, stood holding it a moment. She wondered what she should say, then shrugged and tossed the pebble onto the cairn and went on loping through the fog.

  Grey’s ghost ran beside her through the long gray days. Neither spoke, but settled into the busy silences of snow and mist, hearing and not hearing the rhythmic body sounds, the grunts and hoarse breathing, the shish-shish of ghostly snow-shoes on snow that wasn’t there.

  At least the snow is gone today, she thought. Grey’s baby from his frozen sperm. Something to keep him alive, a part of him. No. Not now. If he was alive, if he’d be there to share the joys and irritations of raising a child, yes, oh yes, oh a hundred times yes. Without him—she’d had enough of fatherless children. No and no and no, the harsh explosive denials came with the thudding of her bootsoles. If Grey lived, if he lived, if Shadith brought him out of the trap, if he came out of Kell’s torment not hating her, oh yes. Having Grey’s baby now not knowing if he was alive or dead, that would be a sickly smarmy necrophilia. As she ran, she wept, slow tears that were as much grief for the child who might never be as for the man who was most likely dead.

  Remembering that other run. The silence was deep between them. A shared silence. In the night camps that other time, they were sometimes lovers, sometimes just held each other. A good rich time.

  Her mind was too busy. Her body had adjusted easily enough, but she was thinking and suffering, grieving and filled with anger. The second cairn.

  She stood a long time by the pile before she tossed the stone onto the sloping side, remembering all too vividly the bitter quarrel with Grey before she left for Ibex. She’d come back expecting to retrieve the relationship, to patch up once again the wounds they tore into each other. But there was no time, no chance to repair the damage. That sat like fire in her belly. No chance. Or if there was a chance, it depended on Kell’s madness and his need to torment. She looked at the stone in the hollow of her gloved palm and wondered. Should she hope he was alive if it meant torment of a kind she couldn’t begin to imagine? Was any life at all better than being dead? Shadith had deliberately opted for a finite life with death at the end of it, though she was guaranteed immortality. What did that say? She tossed the stone and started on.

  Remembering the bad time after the second cairn, running with Grey … they moved in separate solitudes, turned in on themselves in the grim struggle to maintain sanity as they moved over endless white snow through endless white fog. An ice storm came suddenly on them and they were forced into shelter. The days passed dark and dreary. They grated on each other until both were at the point of screaming. They began treating each other with an exaggerated courtesy that was bitter as the worst insult. When the storm passed over and they emerged into the eternal mist, it was with such a feeling of relief that the mere freedom of movement and the explosion of space sparked a surge of joy in both.

  Rain began falling, a steady sluggish rain, not icy but cold enough to soak in to the bone and steady enough to turn the hard earth to a treacherous slop. Clay soil, fine-grained and a good approximation of a frictionless material when saturated, slowed her to a lurching walk. Strangely enough, though the world wept drearily around her, though she was cold and soaked, inhaling air thick with water, though her muscles strained because walking in these conditions was a series of controlled falls, in spite of all these things, the pain and rage inside her grew paler and began to flow away.

  The pack of silvercoats was bigger now, and bolder. She could smell the rank odor streaming off them. She could hear them clearly, that coughing, yipping call of theirs. Late that afternoon she had to shoot two of them to back them off her. Leaving the pack tearing hungrily at the bodies of their mates, she ran on into the gray misery of the day.

  The third cairn.

  Gaunt and haggard, splattered with mud, she took out the pebble, tossed it onto the smaller heap, then went wearily on. Too much still needed working out. It wasn’t time to turn back yet.

  Her long struggle was over; she was drifting, rudderless. From the time she’d left her first home, she’d had the quest for her mother to give a meaning to her life, something to work toward even when she had to divert from the direct road because something demanded immediate attention. But the goal was always there in the back of her mind, not urgent, not smothering anything else, her own pale pole star. The quest was over. No more need to search. Over. First deal with my mother, then settle down with Grey, keep on Hunting, maybe raise a child or two, work my way into the ordinary life of Wolff. For a while, at least, for as long as I can manage.

  That’s what I planned. Madar knows what’ll happen now. Though she couldn’t extinguish a faint spark of hope, Grey was most likely dead. And if he is, what keeps me here? She brooded over the question as she ran, half her attention on the silvercoats slinking after her. She enjoyed being a Hunter. She even enjoyed having a name that meant something, though she found it irritating at times. Canyli Heldeen was a good friend. The best. Sybille was abrasive and a vicious infighter when her defenses were triggered, but after their bad beginning, she’d turned into a cranky and half-unwilling friend, defending Aleytys as much because she despised those who attacked her as from respect and liking. Most of that fractious collection of individualists assembled under the aegis of Hunters Inc. had grown into friends she valued. And there was Tamris. She had a tendency to stand in awe now; later she’d make a friend, much like her mother. Her life was what Aleytys had wanted for Sharl, cherished, with a warm haven to return to from her forays into life. Canyli had even managed to extend that carefully unsmothering care to her daughter’s first Hunt, sending her with Aleytys, knowing Aleytys would let nothing harm her. Tamris was so unscarred by life, so … Aleytys shook her head, then regretted her absence of mind as she lost balance and slid into the muck, crashing onto hands and knees, bruising herself and bringing the silvercoats at her, feral snarling shapes flashing from the rain, their pads better adapted than her booted feet to the treacherous ground. No time for the darter, no time to get to her feet. She crouched in the mud and burned. She threw flame from her hands; her clothing ashed around her glowing body.

  Silvercoats howled and died as the rain sizzled about them, leaving them soggy black corpses with chalk-white bones showing through brittle skin and burned flesh. Silvercoats fled howling into the rain, rushing in blind panic from the fire horror.

  As the howling diminished, Aleytys scowled down at herself. Her clothing, her boots, her gear were smears of ash on her body, streaks of ash running out from her feet; the darter was a blob of plastic and ashy metal warped out of shape, half buried in the mud by her knee. She spat a few curses into the drearily falling rain, but broke off. All that did was take the edge off the fury that still churned in her. It did nothing at all for her embarrassment at her stupidity.

  She got to her feet and stood letting the rain chill the heat out of her. Naked and shivering, she began to wonder if she would get out of the Wildlands or leave her bones and flesh to mingle with the bones of the ancient dead.

  And discovered she had no intention of going back yet and even less intention of dying. She tapped her symbolic power river and brought her body heat to normal, healing her scrapes and bruises with an absent ease that startled her later when she thought of it. She lifted her arms as high as they would go, stretched her spine, rising onto her toes, letting her heels slam back into the mud, realizing suddenly that she felt very good indeed. Energized, vital, looking forward to the next day, looking forward to taking up Kell’s challenge.

  After a moment’s thought she kicked about in the mud until she found the last pebble. She stood holding it a moment staring into the rain. It seemed to her Grey stood out there seen and unseen, hidden then revealed by the swaying curtains of rain. He lifted a hand in that way he had, amused and affectionate, the way he was in the best of times, then the ghost image faded into the rain.

  Pebble in her mouth, she loped easily through the rain, her bare feet finding an easier purchase on the slick clay soil than her boots ever had. Why didn’t I think of this before? Hunh, tunnel vision, conditioned by other folks’ expectations. Better watch that. Kell won’t honor my blind spots.

  As the days passed she settled into the run, growing gaunter since she had to stop and hunt her food, but she didn’t bother gathering rocks for shelters now, simply set out intangible alarms to wake her if danger came too near. Twice she woke to slice warning fire before the muzzles of hungry silvercoats. She killed no more of them; it seemed both unnecessary and somehow stupid, a distraction from the truth she was trying to find.

  The fourth cairn.

  Grey’s cairn, a small heap of stones three spans high.

  Remembering what he told her. At the foot of a thirty-meter cliff swept clean by icy winds, he built his cairn and carved his name into the cliff side. He stepped back, examined the crude letters and thought he should add something to tell the next one here what he’d learned in the silence of the shelter, then he shook his head. Grey. It was enough. Whoever came here would have found his own peace. Anyway, there were no words for what he wanted to say.

  Aleytys flipped the pebble on the cairn and traced the letters still visible in the stone of the cliff after more than a dozen years of weathering. The rain had stopped and the mists were temporarily burned away. The day was clear and bright, deceptively warm where a bulge in the cliff shunted the wind aside. She sat in the quiet warmth, her back close to the hard gray granite but not touching it. She sat letting whatever would bubble through her mind, holding on to nothing, letting all go, the hardest of all disciplines, letting everything come and go as it would until the turmoil in her stilled, until the grief and rage and self-dislike flowed out of her, until even her joys stilled into quiet acceptance, until she was sitting in sunshine, then starshine, then rain, then eddying fog, emptied of all things, emptied of wanting and fear, until she was stone and wind and mist herself, her pulse slowed until her body beat with the great slow beat of Wolff.

  She blinked. Moved a hand. Spat hair from her mouth. Rocked on her buttocks in a slow sway to break free of the trance she’d been caught in for … how long? She didn’t know; her body clock said it was more than a day, and she accepted that. She was hungry. The problem of her future could wait. There was time for that, time for all the momentous decisions she had to make. Besides, experience had taught her long ago that most of those decisions would make themselves when the time was right.

  She got stiffly to her feet, looked down at her gaunt naked body and chuckled at the thought of strolling into her house like that. Shake them up a bit. Then she sighed and shook her head. In the vadi Raqsidan, where she had been born and had lived for longer than the years she’d spent wandering, nakedness was reserved for sexual intimacies. Wolff was like that too. I’ll have to wander a lot longer before I shake that feeling.

  Certain and uncertain, centered yet drifting, she moved along the cliff and touched the letters of Grey’s name. If you live, my love, if you live, Shadith will find you. If you’re dead … so stupidly dead, snuffed by a madman’s whim … but what do you care if your dying had significance or not? Dead is dead. If you are dead, my love, nothing matters to you now. If I could be sure you lived, if I could be sure my presence wouldn’t precipitate your death, if I could be sure, I would come for you forgetting everything else, my mother, Vrithian, everything, nothing Kell could do would keep me from you. I can’t be sure of anything. Ay-Madar, for a clear-cut choice, something comfortably black and white. Doesn’t work that way, does it, my love …. I want it to be me, but oh no it can’t be me, she’ll come for you, child out of my head born into a new body. Like Swardheld. I didn’t tell you who and what Swardheld was, I was too angry at you, I never let you know that much of me, and oh my dear, oh my love, I’m sorry for that. Can’t change it now, can’t change any of it ….

  “Ahhh …” She brushed her fingers over the chill stone, then turned to begin the run back to the flitter.

  Wolff

  getting set

  Aleytys walked into the sitting room and found Shadith stretched out on her stomach on the rug in front of the fire, absorbed in the slide of her stylo across a sheet of paper laid on a book, the flying angular lines of her native script like bird tracks on the creamy white. Warmed by a surge of affection for that ancient child, she leaned against the door-jamb watching as Shadith stopped writing and began reading what she’d set on paper. With an exclamation of disgust she wadded it up and flipped it away to join similar wads scattered near the hearth.

  Aleytys chuckled. Chuckled again as Shadith leaped up, twisting to face the sound as she moved, wary and lethal as one of the silvercoats. “Which is it? You bankrupt me paying for paper or you burn my house down?”

  Shadith straightened, relaxed, ran inky fingers through her tangled thornbush of brown-gold curls. “You look better. When did you get in? I didn’t hear anything.”

  “I wasn’t noisy about it.” She crossed the room, lowered herself into a chair, propped her feet on a hassock and sighed with the pleasure of being home again. “Anything interesting turn up?”

  “Don’t know how interesting.” Shadith dropped into the other chair near the fire and brought her legs up. “I went through the stuff Head sent over, made some notes. Like to know what you think about them.” She laced her fingers behind her head, gazed drowsily at Aleytys. “Unless you’ve changed your mind about sending me.”

  “No.” Aleytys frowned at the fire. “If I want to draw Kell off Grey, I go to Vrithian and stake myself out as bait. I hate that, Shadow, you don’t know-how much.” A half-smile, a glance at Shadith. “Well, maybe you do.”

  “Mmm. What’s Harskari doing?”

  “Brooding, I suppose. I haven’t heard from her since Ibex.”

  “She’ll come out of that when she’s ready.”

  “You said that before.”

  “Yeah, and got my head chewed off. By proxy. At least she can’t do it in person anymore.”

  “More than time I found her a body. Maybe on Vrithian.” She slid farther down in the chair, watched her bare toes wriggle. “Damn all screw-ups,” she said. “I was settling in here.”

  “You can hang on.”

  “Think so?”

  Silence stretched out, filled with small noises. The fire snapped, popped and hissed, threw out a fan of warmth invaded by wandering drafts. Wolfflan houses were built to minimize drafts, but during the in-between times, the short autumns and shorter springs when the houses were adjusting to rapidly changing temperatures, the chill crept about everywhere, touched everything. A whisper of air curled around Aleytys’s legs, slid along her body and tickled at the short hairs at her forehead, passed on to rustle through the wadded papers on the hearth.

  Aleytys stirred. “Kell! May his teeth fall out and his gut have holes like a colander and may all he have to eat be bone and gristle and hot pepper sauce. May everything he touches rot under his fingers. May he be a hissing and a bad smell to everyone who knows him.” She sighed. “For all that’s worth.”

  “Yeah. There are worse places than this to come home to. I always enjoyed getting back.” Shadith slanted a glance at Aleytys, chocolate eyes curious and searching. “Don’t scorch the earth behind you.”

  “I’m all right,” Aleytys said, answering the look rather man the words. “I don’t know. I’m still not used to having him gone. I don’t know how I’ll feel later. When I was flying back from the trek, I found myself thinking when Grey gets back, then pulling myself up reminding myself that it’s too damn likely he won’t be coming back ever. I’ve a feeling I’m going to keep doing that, and it’s like getting kicked in the belly. But I’ve got good friends here.” She closed her eyes. “Would you like living here, Shadow?”

  “Never in winter. Nice to come and visit for a week or so—it’s a cushy little world, this.”

  “Wolff?” Aleytys opened her eyes wide, stared at Shadith.

  “Uh-huh. Everyone the same, lots of space, good living thanks to the home shares in Hunters. Tell you what I think, I like my worlds gaudier. Rougher. Full of life and anger and energy. Always something happening, a soup of species and races and cultures, boiling over. Wolff is too bland, people look alike, think alike. Live here all the time? No way.”

  Aleytys closed her eyes. “Still …”

  “AH right, all right, you need this. That’s what I’m saying. Leave yourself a way back. You want a resting place.” She pulled her hands down, let them lie limp on the chair’s arms, grinned briefly at Aleytys. “Wolff’s a great place for hibernating.” She wriggled in the chair. “Your mum’s running late.”

  “Said she’d be here.” Aleytys brooded at the fire. “She will.”

  “Aleytys.” The face in the comscreen was solemn and strained.

  “Shareem.” Aleytys felt a little strained herself.

  “I’m stationary over the field. Come up for a while. I’ll send a shuttle for you.”

  “Right. Will you be down?”

  “We’ll leave that for later if you don’t mind.”

  “I hear you. Take about twenty minutes to get there.” She hesitated, but there didn’t seem to be anything else to say and she didn’t know how to break off. She and Shareem stared at each other for a long moment, then each started to speak. Shareem grimaced, lifted a hand, let it fall; the screen went blank.

  The doll-like android bowed with liquid grace and left. Aleytys stood in the middle of the oval room and looked around. Grass and growing things, an impossible little waterfall making impossible music in the heart of a starship. Light coming from nowhere with the pearly tinge of a cloudy spring morning. Smell of damp earth and green growing things, elusive flower scents. Muted by distance, a bird singing intermittently. Not quite familiar but haunting, suggesting a dozen birds on a dozen worlds she’d visited. A room in her mother’s ship, thick with her mother’s presence, though Shareem was not there yet. Aleytys marveled at the quiet charm of the place and felt exceedingly uncomfortable, as if somehow, at this late date, she’d returned to her mother’s womb. Little prickles like the brush of electric hairs ran over her body. Come on, she thought, enough’s enough. I’m as unarmed as I’ll ever be.