C. Cherryh - Swift-Spear

But this, Graywolf thought, frightened, halted for a heart- beat where the gardens began, before the tall wooden walls, over which the tops of stone huts showed; and human stink wafted on the wind, mingled with the smell of grease and smoke and water. They cannot carry away the stone, can they? Or their food-gardens. They expect to win all their fights. They do not think of moving.

Dim light and the whisper of trees. Swift-Spear blinked, unable to reconcile this with the dirt and the flash of weapons and the ring of human faces where he had, he thought, died.**Blackmane,** he sent hopefully, in the thought that if that were not true, then perhaps the other were not-it was that hard to give up his friend.

But when he moved in the next moment and felt the twinge of healing wounds, and when he turned his head and saw Willowgreen bending down to kneel with a cup in her hand, when he saw how wan and worn she was and felt the pain everywhere, then he knew that the time was after and not before the fight at the wooden wall; and that somehow he had lived Graywolf, he thought. He had not come alone to the human camp. He had only gone alone to the challenge.

"Graywolf is alive," Willowgreen said, having caught that fear spilling from his mind; and lifting his head into her lap she gave him the cup to drink and showed him in that quick way of a weary and powerful mind how Graywolf had come riding in with him, how she had healed him.

There were other impressions, quickly snatched away, but not quickly enough: the memory of Skyfire with her spear. The two high ones, Rellah and Talen, his own face through Willowgreen's eyes, bloody and pale and senseless as he lay in her lap, her hands pouring strength into him, the great fear- And anger then, indignation, as the high ones dealt with Graywolf, as Graywolf walked away, head bowed, shoulders tense with anger**I tried to tell them-** she began. **Tried. Tried.** His heart ached. There was pain behind his eyes and in his throat.**Tell him I want to see him.**

But the figure in Willowgreen's eyes only walked away into the woods, began to run, and he knew that direction, he knew the dread in Willowgreen's heart, though no one else would have seen and no one had noticed or turned his head: it was Graywolf's talent, such a silence-only he could not trick the eyes.

"He has gone back," Swift-Spear murmured, and sought to get his arm under him. He thrust himself up to sit, and flung off Willowgreen's protesting hand. "Ah!" The pain surprised him.

"Lie down, be still!"**Do not think of going after him; he is no fool, he will not-**

Unfortunate word. I ache; could she do no more? Do not think of going after him? Fool. Maybe she is right and I am that; but better a fool in courage than wise in cowardice. But she had tried to hide her fear for him: that and her fierce protectiveness warmed his heart-nor could he forget the power in her healing. In her own way, he realized, she had strength like his; and she would never betray him.

He gained his feet. She stared at him in shock, thinking first that he was her chief and then that he was her lover and that she never mattered to him half what he mattered to her.

That she separated herself from the high ones and their tutelage, that she tried to be Wolfrider and was not-did he never understand, had he nothing better than resentments, was there for her nowhere to call hers? And because he was who and what he was, he did not see her turmoil-and even if he had seen, being who he was, he would not say the things she needed most to hear.

But Swift-Spear went on his two feet, grabbed up his spear where it leaned against the woven wood of the bower, and used it as he went, to keep his steps straight. The pain he smothered. She felt it keenly, and knew if she followed her heart and followed him he would rail on her and tell her she was no help at all.

The only service she could do him was silence, and she clenched her hands in her lap and kept that silence; she wove it all about him, with an effort that beaded her brow with sweat and left her trembling and unable to rise from where she sat.

By then he had vanished into the woods, no elf having seen him pass, and there was no more that she could do. She did not see the gentle smile he gave in answer to her gift.

The stench of smoke and human was very strong now on the wind, and Graywolf moved carefully, keeping his hand on Moonfinder's shoulders, his own black-tipped hair bristled up like a crest and his elvish ears atwitch. He wanted to sneeze. Surely so small a sound would not be heard in the evening noises of the camp. He smothered it, and Moonfinder jumped and ducked his head. **Faugh, yes, Here.** There was the blood-smell, wolf- blood and corruption amid the filth, there was death and a human smell thick as wolf-smell in a den, and every instinct warned Gray wolf that it was foolhardy as venturing a cave, out of which such smells came. The sky overhead was a lie; this open place was not safety but a trap; and the cruelty that made humans mutilate as well as kill, that made them fight in packs and respect a leader they had to defend from challenge- all these things advised Graywolf what he could look for if he made the least error.

But he wrapped his thoughts about himself very tightly, went into that silence in which he could move unfelt, and laid hands on the dead trees that made up the wall, that part of the wall that had moved and shut him out. He pushed at it and it did not move; he was wary, for it might be human magic which had made it stay, and he worked delicately, not to disturb anything which might alarm the magic-worker, if there were such.

He peered through the cracks, seeing stone tents and one fat human waddling along with a gourd in hand. He heard voices; he saw the stain of fire on walls; and of a sudden a drum began a slow pulse, a drum of a strange, high tenor. Even their music was strange; and alien voices rose in weird, harsh laughter that sent shivers down his back.

No, the wall would not give to any effort. But he was elf, and the dead trees, their branches roughly lopped, their trunks bound together with twists of fiber, left irregular crevices between, which were no difficult matter for elvish hands and feet. He laid a cautioning hand on Moonfinder, who sniffed at the binding ropes and insinuated his nose between the cracks.

Then he set his knife between his teeth and stepped up onto those ropes, his small, four-fingered hands finding a grip here, a crevice in which a clenched fist became an anchor while he pressed himself close to the wall and one foot sought through empty air-up, and up, and up, till he had an arm over the gate.

Over the sharpened logs, then, carefully, silently, arms taking the strain as he let the other leg over, his ribs between the two sharp points while he hung there and glanced down past his arm and the inside of his knee to see the place where the human monsters had fastened Blackmane's ears. Death stink was thick here. He sweated and drew air carefully past teeth clenched on the blade as he spidered his way over the wall one log at a time. His limbs were trembling now. Sweat was stinging his eyes.

Now, now, he had reached the place. He held with one hand and seized the blood-stiffened, stinking remnant of a friend, and pulled with all his strength. It came free; he stuffed it in his belt while his clenched fist, wedged tight in a crevice between logs, grew numb and his legs shook with the unnatural angle.

Then he swung his body flat against the wall and began to climb again.

"Hey!" a shout rang out, shocking him to greater effort. Tumult broke behind him, below him. He sought handhold after handhold, and a weapon hit the logs beside his face, another on the other side below his waist. He flung an arm over the top of the wall, between the sharpened logs, as a third and a fourth weapon hit about him and a fifth scored his side. That last was goad enough to launch him over, reckless of the scoring the points of the logs gave his leg and his ribs, or the height of the drop below him.**Moonfinder!** he cried out with his mind, and hung and dropped and hit the ground with a force greater than he had planned, which buckled his legs and sprawled him flat and stunned as his head hit the earth.