Free Mindbond by Nancy Springer Page A

followed we saw it from time to time, often watching us from a rocky vantage, so beautiful that sometimes we stopped to gaze back. We were reaching the region of sea fogs, where the salt smell hung faintly in the air and the gray mists swirled around the dense green of the firs. Moving in the mists, the wolf shone more like a spirit thing than like a creature of flesh.
    The sky had gone mostly gray, sometimes scarrowbright, sometimes dull, sometimes barred with ragged clouds of a yet darker gray drifting slantwise before storm winds. In the far distance, if mists and trees allowed us, we could sometimes see the glint of the ocean.
    â€œLook!” Kor exclaimed. “Seal Hold!”
    Far off at the edge of sight, the rocky headland where he and his people made their home. Lodges looked like no more than jutting edges on it, as weathered as the rock, but we knew the shape of that place well.
    â€œBy Sedna,” he whispered, looking weak with eagerness. “Do you think we will reach it today?”
    Behind us, above us, the wolf lifted its head and suddenly gave forth a piercing howl. The sound shivered through us.
    â€œWhat is it, friend?” I asked, turning to face the wolf.
    It gazed at us across a distance we could scarcely measure, a chasm made of time and failed dreams. We could not see its speaking eyes. Its legs showed thin beneath the dense mass of its fur. In a moment it turned away from us, turned back toward the mountains, and vanished. Old, alone, lonesome, the last of its kind, and we were leaving it there.

Chapter Six
    Kor came home at sundown, through the wind-twisted pines and down to the narrow strand between mountains and vast sea, then along the shoreline toward the headland. Rich, blood-red sunset light touched everything, and I felt for a moment an odd desolation, as if the smell of death lay on that place. As if almost I could see the strewn bodies.…
    I blinked and there was nothing. It must have been the smells—ai, the sea smells. Salt and beached seaweed and fish offal and seal scats. A friendly reek, I knew, but it sent a tremor of memory through me, more feeling than memory, the despair of my first coming to the sea. I, a nameless madman. My beloved father had plotted to kill me, and rage and sorrow had sent me fleeing over the midwinter mountains until I struck like an embodied storm, they later told me, at Korridun and his people. Kor had felt the love and grief behind the attack—his mercy had saved me, and only he had at first befriended me, Dannoc the murderer.
    Time gone by, nearly a year gone, and much had happened since. I shook myself, shaking off the sorrow I smelled in the sea. Fish, dead seaweed, black shells, salt … water salt as tears … Enough. Kor was looking at me, about to say something comforting, and I scowled at him to silence him. Sometimes, even now, his goodness was too much for me to bear. Sometimes I wanted to throttle him.
    He grinned. “Pigheaded,” he stated. Then with a whoop he kicked Sora into a headlong gallop down the strand.
    Startled, delighted, laughing aloud, I sent Talu racing after him. I had never known Kor to ride with such reckless joy. The Seal are not born to be horseback riders—Kor appeared more to fly above Sora than to sit on her. But with her he stayed, and he yelled crazily, keeping her at top speed. Talu’s best run could not catch them. We pounded down hard, wet sand, splashed through inlets and breaking waves, jumped rocks with scarcely a catch in the wild rhythm of the race. Coracles ahead, and the fishermen beaching them, and shouts of fear or welcome—
    So it was that Rad Korridun, the Seal Kindred’s king, came home in a swirl of sand and water and confused noise and sunset glory. Stopping Sora—Talu and I nearly blundered into him—and down in the sand, half-falling, half-jumping, and into the embrace of six or more excited clansmen at once, and the waves washing about