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He had the answer ready, his mouth opened.
And stumbled to the ground, grabbing his head. There were men and there was the smell of metal. He saw the hunters. He heard a cry inside, first of anger, then of terror and of pain. He felt the tear of flesh.
"Blackmane!" he shouted aloud, even as his mind sought his friend. He felt a brief flicker reach to him, then gray emptiness. Swift-Spear fell to his knees.
"Ayooooo!" he cried in agony. He knew that Blackmane was dead.
In moments the wolf lay battered and chopped beyond recognition. The men laughed and danced, spotted with the wolf's blood, and Kerthan cut off the still warm ears as a trophy.
"They can be killed!" Kerthan said, his voice loud and strong in victory. "No longer must we fear them." He shook his spear, hot drops of blood from it spattering them all. "Kerthan will protect you with his spear! This is our land and no one will take it from us!"
"Swift-Spear!" Willowgreen cried, and shook him with both her hands as he sat crouched atop the rocks. There was no response. The elf sat with his hands clasped between his knees, his brown eyes wide and shocked. She took his face between her hands and peered into those eyes in search of sense, but there was no reaction at all, not in the eyes, not in the mouth, which remained slack; his skin was chilled and he did not shiver; and there was no contact with his mind, none that she dared seek. Blood, she got. And, metal. And after that she leapt up and went flying down from the rocks, panting as she ran the winding forest trails—
—past the marks the elves knew, past the familiar rocks, and over the fallen log, and through and through the trees with constantly a shriek in her mind: **Help, help—**
Wolves cried out in the forest. None were hers. She was too tall, too fair, too strange for them, and they always distrusted her. **Help,** she called out to them, and did not know whether they heard her or understood. The pain was sharp in her side, and branches raked her hair. She stumbled and caught herself on the old ash, and ran and ran, all but mindless with the pain and the terror as she skidded down a hillside and through the thicket.
And crashed full into the arms of a presence she had not felt, hands that seized her by her arms, and eyes yellow and terrible as any wolf's, a face narrow and hard and familiar to her.
**Willowgreen,** the mindtouch came to her, and the grip held her and shook at her till the thoughts came spilling out, the things she had seen, the fact that Swift-Spear was left helpless because she knew nothing of weapons and nothing of what had brought Swift-Spear down, and only ran, ran, ran, for help.
The elf's hands released her, pushing her away. He was less than her height; he was small and slight and his hair was not elf—it was black-tipped and strange, strange as the mind which could stalk so silently and insinuate itself unfelt. "Fool," Graywolf said. "Helpless fool!"
Which stung worse than the thorns, for he was Swift-Spear's cousin, and had never loved her, never thought her of any worth.
"Go tell the tribe," he said; and said with his mind as he left: **Quickly!** with such force and anger that she stopped in her tracks and did not follow him. **Quickly!**
She fled, in motion before she had decided; she flung up her arms to shield her from the branches, and ran, breathless and aching.
There was still that quiet, that most profound quiet that had held Swift-Spear motionless. No one could hear that silence and move. And yet, he thought in that dim, remote center where he was, yet if he could move, and break that quiet, then none of it would be true, and that silence would not exist, and the world would be whole again.
He tried, desperately. He felt with his mind wider and wider after that essence which eluded him.
He felt a presence finally, and sought after it. It was wolfish and familiar. For a moment he hoped he had found what he sought ... but it grew and grew until he knew it was something else; it filled the space about him, driving other things away. In that presence were yellow eyes, and a voice in his mind that was like a wolf's, which had the essence of a wolf but an elvish mind all the same.
**No,** he said with his thoughts, forcing it away. But it was too late, the presence he had wanted was gone, and this one had made it impossible to recover it. "No!" he howled aloud and struggled in a hard-handed grip that closed upon his arms. He flung himself up and struck at the intruder, knowing as he struck who it was, and seeing with the return of his vision the wolf-mane of hair, the narrow, elvish face, and yellow eyes. He raged and shoved away, but Graywolf was as quick on the rocks, and prevented him with a grip on his arms and a touch at his mind: **Blackmane?**
He had not wanted to think the thought. But the question had its answer. Dead, dead, dead. So it became true. So he knew he could not get back to that place where he had been, deep inside, where a motion might disturb the dead. He had admitted that thought and therefore the other thought was beyond recall.
Therefore he slumped down with Graywolf's small brown hands clenched on his wrists; he sat on the rock and he looked his friend in the eyes... More than Graywolf had come. There was the wolf-friend, prowling below the rocks, hump-shouldered, ears flat to the skull—Moonfinder was his name. Not Blackmane. Moonfinder, second in the pack—till now. Till Blackmane was dead and Graywolf's friend came to sudden primacy.
"Where?" Graywolf asked, jolting him. "Where dead? How?"
"Humans," Swift-Spear muttered, and shoved off the grip that hampered him, thrust himself over the side of the rock on which he sat and landed on the next and the next, so that Moonfinder shied away and flattened his ears.
He paid no heed to this hostility. He cared nothing that Graywolf and his wolf-friend followed him, or that all the woods were roused, the call going through the forest in wolf-howl and the rising of birds. He had his spear in hand. He ran without sight in the present, searching out of his memory all the detail of the place where Blackmane's mind had stopped.
Trees, growing in such a pattern, of such a type, a broken branch, a thicket. It was like all other places. There was only one such specific place. He ran and he racked his memory of the forest on the borders of men. He listened to the sounds of the wolves and the cries of the birds. He heard his own harsh breathing and heard the steps which coursed like a whisper behind him.
He ran, for all that, alone. His friend, a wolf he knew. None of these were help to him. The pack-leader was dead, Blackmane was dead; humans had intruded into the woods, the humans who had encroached closer and closer to the tribe with their strange stone buildings and their diggings and he wings and making of things. They had brought death with them. But when did they not?
It was the forest edge. That much he knew. He knew the way the light had fallen. Knew the size of the clearing. Knew the prey Blackmane had taken. It was all burned into his mind. He gave these things to Graywolf, as he gave them to the forest, to anything which would listen—he knew that Graywolf and Moonfinder searched with their own understanding; and Graywolf was half a wolf himself, not the shapeshifting kind, but wolf by disposition, wolf by senses and by instincts, elf by mind and by a curious blend of elvish and wolfish cu
And it was Moonfinder, or it was Graywolf, who first smelled the blood. He was not sure. It came from both minds at once, and into his own, so that he changed his direction on a pivot of his foot and followed the scent of blood and of men. But both scents were cold.
Memory of trees and reality of the forest began to merge. Birds flew up and screamed warnings; but only selfish ones: the enemy was gone, the chance of revenge was fled, like the warmth in the blood.