Free Ratha's Courage by Clare Bell Page B

the next event, Ratha touched noses with Thakur, then slid alongside him, both flopping their tails over one another’s backs. She enjoyed a moment of bathing in his scent, and then spoke to him. “Herding teacher, that was amazing! Will you teach it to the cubs?”
    “Yes, but I’ll tell them I don’t like to knock a beast down that way unless other culling methods don’t work. It’s a bit rough on the creatures.” Thakur stuck a rear leg forward and curled down, nibbling clots of mud out from between his spread toes. “And you get very dirty.”
    Ratha licked streaks of mud from his side. Tasting the salt of minerals, she swallowed it. She spit out the coarse grass, and then sat, curling her long tail over her feet. “That’s nothing new for the Named.”
    She saw Thakur grin slightly at the wry tone in her voice. When he lay down next to her, one foot brushing the base of her tail, she felt a wave of warmth surge through her, drawing sweat from her pads and the leather of her nose. It wasn’t the mating season yet. Was her heat coming early?
    She distracted herself by watching the bucking contest. This time it was a tie between Ashon and Mishanti, and the latter did not have to be thrown into a tree.
    “He’s getting better,” Thakur commented, watching Mishanti pick himself up and lope after his mount. “Maybe there are some things he’ll be good at.”
    “Riding bucking dapplebacks and herding rumblers,” Ratha said, her voice slightly sour.
    Thakur excused himself, saying that he should help prepare the next pair of riders. He leaped down from the sunning rock. Ratha felt the surge of warmth fade. No, she wasn’t in heat yet.
    Her gaze strayed back to True-of-voice’s people. One could be replaced by the next, she thought, and it would make no difference.
    Thakur had once told her why he thought the Named varied so much from one another. It was because they had started to farm instead of hunt their prey. Hunters needed to blend into their surroundings. Pelt colors and patterns remained the same from individual to individual and between generations. One whose coat color stood out wouldn’t survive very long.
    The need to match the background was far less for herders. Standing out even helped to fascinate and intimidate herdbeasts, making them easier to manage. Freedom from the constraints of the hunter allowed the Named to choose their mates for beauty as well as ability and temperament. This tendency influenced the colors of eyes as well as pelts. Clan eyes ranged from the agate blue of newborn cubs through all shades of gray, green, yellow, gold amber, honey, hazel, copper, and dark sepia.
    A part of her still couldn’t be convinced that the differences between True-of-voice’s face-tail hunters and the Named were not alien. Perhaps the impulse that made her reach out, to help rather than harm, was, in the end, misguided. A voice in her kept whispering that her choice could still lead to tragedy. It still whispered, making her search among the True-of-voice’s people for any sign of initiative or individuality.
    To her surprise, she did find tiny sparks of it. She saw it among the half-grown ones, the yearlings, and some of the older cubs. In some way, the traits that were so buried in their nature fought their way out. She saw eyes that would widen and brighten with the wish to see more, ears swivel and flick forward with the urge to hear more, tails lash with impatience to know more than just the song. It was then that the young of True-of-voice’s people began to resemble the young of the Named.
    As if the power within the song knew that it was being challenged, it reacted. The sparks in those young eyes flamed only briefly before they were suffocated down to embers and then darkened.
    Witnessing that fading made Ratha heartsick. What right did True-of-voice or that strangeness emanating from him mistakenly called “the song” have to strangle or stifle those tiny flames? It was like