"Springer, Nancy - Book Of The Isle 05 - Golden Swan v1 0.rtf" - читать интересную книгу автора (Springer Nancy)

"Truly, I don't know," I said. "We shall have to see."
I think I have already seen that flower, Dair said, and I nodded at him.
"I have not yet said that I am coming," Frain put in.
"Ah, but you are," I told him. "What else could be intended for you?" I felt a comforting certainty grow in me. His presence, like Dair's, was a proof, a sign.
"I suppose I am," he admitted. 'That is, if Dair—Dair?" He turned to his companion in sudden anxiety. "Dair, are you coming on this—errand?" -
Of course.
Dair followed the reassurance with a nod, and Frain smiled and relaxed. I felt compunction take hold of me. Such children they were, really, and what was I leading them into?
"It will not be easy," I warned. "None of it will be easy, and the fern flower least of all. It is said to exact a fearsome price."
"Nothing in my life has been easy," Frain said.
Chapter Two
Five days later we set out with as little ado as possible, though there were some tears. I left the house in the care of old Dorcas and Jare, her husband, they who had been my servants for many years. When they died the place would go to ruin, but not before. It gave me some comfort that they would tend it awhile. For their part, they felt comforted that I went with companions at my side.
So off we trudged, toting heavy packs of bread, dried meat and the like. We walked eastward. We walked, for the most part, for the next several months, following nothing more than sunrise and my instinct and the gentle, insistent tug of the unseen Source. We walked out of sycamore forest and into oak and beech and beyond that into ilex and scrub pine. Our packs soon lightened as we ate up our provisions, and Dair took to keeping us supplied with meat, slipping in and out of his wolf form with ever increasing ease and skill. Frain watched him in wonder and in love.
"How do you do it, the shape changing?" he asked Dair as we sat by the fire one night. He had taken to talking to Dair with the aid of a translator—me. The conversations were awkward, especially since Dair was not by nature the talkative sort. But Frain persevered. There was a dogged quality about Frain.
I don't know, said Dair. True enough; he never spoke less than truth. He was an instinctive being, a child of the wilderness.
"You must know something," said Frain. "How did it happen to you the first time?"
— it was you. I wanted to befriend you. I wanted it so badly I howled.
Frain looked both startled and pensive, remembering something. "I believe it was the same the second time, and the third," he mused. "Desire—"
"More is needed than mere desire," I told both of them. I was a shape changer too; just let them wait and see! "It is a matter of being with whatever is. Of being no longer separate. Being at one."
"What?" said Frain, for he was so human, so set apart that he was not even aware of it. And Dair growled in equal puzzlement, for he was so much a part of whatever he sensed… I stared at him.
"There is a risk, too," I said slowly, "of losing self to instinct, the fate of the form. But there can be no changing without risk of loss."
Frain sat folded in upon himself, looking lonesome. I felt sure that Dair had never comprehended that peculiar human quality of being at odds with the world, that cosmic loneliness. But he was soon to learn the meaning of it.
I will never forget the night we first heard the cry of the wild wolves.
There must have been famine in the north that had driven-them to the southern woods. Mournful hunger was in their voices. We heard them at dusk as we ate our cold meat, and I for one felt a sudden urge to make a campfire, though we needed none for cooking. Frain glanced at me askance, his face taut.
"Will they bother us, do you think?" he Basked, keeping his voice low. '
Game was not scarce, so I judged that men—robbers— would be the greater danger. We made no fire. We sat in the gathering darkness, listening to the voices of the wolves, silvery voices that summoned their fellows to the hunt, harmonious and very beautiful.
They ring through me like harp song, said Dair suddenly. I glanced at him sharply. His eyes were glimmering, shining greenly, not with joy but with yearning and a sort of lust.
"What is it?" Frain asked me, alerted by something in the tone of Dair's utterance.
"I think he would like to join the hunt."
Wolf notes were reaching a wild chorus. Like! Dair exclaimed, panting with feeling. It is hardly the word.
could die with longing. The musky creature smells, and that green darkness-—there are no words for what I feel.
It was true, there were none, not even in the Old Language that cannot tell false. But I knew the pang, for I had felt it myself. Wilderness call—one might as well be in thrall. I tried to hide my sympathy, watching him narrowly. He sat trembling, his hands twitching like restless paws, his nostrils pulsating, temples pulsating with the force of the blood that raced through the veins of his bare neck.
Frain watched him as well, his brown eyes troubled. "Did you never run with the wolves in Isle, Dair?" he asked, quite gently.
Dair shook his head violently. No. I heard them, but never so close, so calling, and I was younger—
"He has no business with them," I snapped. "Dair, don't you know you are meant for something more than running with a pack?"
He didn't answer me. Even as I spoke his wolf form came on him all in a rush like loveheat, of its own accord. He stretched his muzzle skyward and howled; the sound shivered through the air. The chorus of the wild wolves abruptly ceased, and Frain's cry of shock sounded painfully loud in the dusky silence.
"Dair! Wait!"
Dair ran to him and laid his long head in his lap with a whine, a wordless appeal. Frain held tightly to the taut, quivering body.
"He has to go," I said, my tone peevish to hide bothersome emotion. "He has to—find out…"
Fate can be a heartless thing.
"He says he will come back to you."
Frain swallowed and loosened his grasp. "Go," he said, and Dair bounded off into the dark forest.
We listened awhile. The wolf song had begun again. It moved farther away.
"No harm is likely to come to him, is it, Maeve?" Frain asked me when he finally spoke. I hastened to reassure him.
"Harm, to Dair? What harm could come to him from wolves? He is a wolf himself."
"He will be back," Frain muttered, to himself rather than to me. "He said he would."
Why, then, if all was well, were we both sitting anxiously in the night?
Neither of us slept, although I sometimes pretended to. At the first light of dawn Frain was up and pacing. From tune to time faint howls sounded far to the east. Dair did not return.
"Something has happened," Frain declared with fanatical certainty a scant hour after sunrise. "I must go find him."
"You cannot find him," I said.
"The pack last howled eastward." He pointed. '