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  He lowered himself to the stone floor. Already the blue light was dimming, pulling itself into his skin. He seemed to see blood vessels, ligaments, bones outlined in the unearthly glow.

  Then more words bubbled from the hidden source, pouring through his lips as his hands moved gently along the ragged wound in his thigh. Again the words were indistinct, unfamiliar, yet eminently appropriate. He was not surprised to see the raw edges of the five furrowed wounds close as his fingers passed over them, nor to see the flesh cleave once again, unharmed, complete.

  Totally exhausted, he dropped both hands to his sides and, unmindful of the sodden cold drifting through the cleft from the Veil of Heaven, unmindful of the chill settling in his naked limbs, Kynne returned to the sleep he thought never to have left.

  Once, just as sleep had nearly overcome the boy, he stirred. With an instantaneous flash of blue, the…light, the…thought hidden deeply in the back of his mind winked off. Immediately, he was restive, throwing his head back and forth, shoulder to shoulder, rolling it along the uncomfortable stone behind him. Fever crept down from his forehead, stiffening arms, seeking the wounds along his leg. His eyes flew open momentarily onto a darkness at once unbroken and comforting. The dream had passed. He slept.

  * * * *

  Morning was late in waking the boy. Outside, the Veil had remained low until hours after it usually dissipated and withdrew to its permanent line along the highest ridges. The diffused light entered the cleft early but did not touch the boy crouching deep in the shadows. A slight breeze dared the entrance, whispered warmth along arms and legs clammily cold from a night exposed and unprotected. But the boy did not awaken. His chest rose and fell with healthy regulating, an appearance at least partially contradicted by the rusty crust of dried blood spread along the stones beneath him, and by the equally rust-red stains splotching the narrow length of rhiam cloth that had once been wrapped about the boy’s loins, but that now had been pulled loose to provide a bandage of sorts.

  And the beast crouching before the entrance waited, patient and motionless.

  Finally the boy stirred. One hand rose as if of its own volition and rubbed lightly along one temple, where a fly had momentarily paused before spiraling downward toward the pools of drying and dried blood. The hand rubbed, began descending, wavered, then rose again to push its way through thick, disheveled hair.

  The other hand stiffened, flexed, turned palm up on a sharp fragment of rock. The rock pricked at the tender skin along the back of the boy’s hand, and the boy opened his eyes, tentatively, warily.

  At first he remained still, unaware of where he was. Certainly he was not in his own cot in the village, nor was he surrounded, as he usually was, by the bustle of late morning busyness. Even newly awakened, he retained the infallible sense of time common to most Omnans. He had slept late; it was nearing mid-day.

  He shifted, and a flood of memories burst upon him. Standing upon the ledge overlooking the sea; the wulf, and a frantic flight toward the stone chimney; claws raking the flesh of his leg; darkness. He seemed to remember vaguely a dream—a light, some words—but that memory was too dim for him to hold. It dissipated in the light and heat of day.

  Kynne pulled his good leg up, preparing to brace himself against the wall. From where he sat, he could see his blood…on the ground, clotted on the rhiam clout he had been wearing, and which he had sometime during the night twined around his injured thigh, and crusting the uninjured inner skin of his sound leg. He prepared to clench his teeth against the pain as he flexed his muscles—then did indeed clench them, not in pain but in surprise. There was no pain.

  He reached down and pulled the cloth to one side, exposing what the night before had been vicious claw marks. Nothing. Just dried blood, already flaking away as he touched it…and five thin white lines stretching from hip to knee. There were no wounds. There was no stiffness. And bit by bit vague memories of the dream returned.

  He turned to face the light filtering through the cleft. The beast was still there, waiting, poised to spring. But Kynne could now see that the eyes, though open, were unseeing. The claws, semi-retracted into the mat of dense gray fur along the forepaws, rested limply on the rock, their glistening points arching up toward the light.

  The boy stepped cautiously toward the beast, then over it and out into the morning light. The animal did not move. It was dead. Kynne remembered more of the dream.

  He had done this, had destroyed this beast of the high ranges. He had, Kynne of Myvern, orphan and outcast, weaponless…he had killed. His heart throbbed in exultation.

  At the moment, he could not clearly remember the circumstances of the beast’s death, nor did he think again about the wounds in his leg. He shouldered the great beast, almost slipping as he did so. As he straightened his right leg to support himself and the wulf, his left struck a sharp edge of rock. Blood oozed through the abraded skin and down his shin.

  Kynne barely noticed it, other than as a brief moment of pain. His thoughts were elsewhere as he began his careful way through the detritus toward the path leading to Myvern. The bloody clout flapped irritatingly along his thigh as he walked.

  * * * *

  The villagers saw Kynne approaching while he was still on the slopes of the Pillars. There had been some who had asked after him—he had not returned as usual the night before, nor had he slept in the cot provided for him in a room off the village storehouse. One or two had glanced toward the heights as evening had approached, half hoping to spot the boy before night fell, but no one had urged that others risk the dangers of night by going out to search for him. They had more pressing concerns: families to care for, dinners to prepare and eat, nets to mend before the morrow, farming implements to repair. The rhiam would be ripening soon, and the harvest tools must be ready on time. So the villagers had slept, unaware that one of their own was lying in a chimney of cold stone, trapped by a beast of the high ranges.

  In the morning, none had noted that Kynne was not present. Well, perhaps Alinor had, the daughter of the village elder, who pitied the poor, parentless Kynne and who remained unaware of his feelings toward her. Perhaps she questioned briefly as she left the village along the seaside path toward a small field of rhiam pocketed in the lowest terraces of the Pillars.

  But certainly she noticed as she glanced up a few hours later to see a figure poised on the rocks, nearly naked save for a dark brown loincloth, with a great beast heaped in a shaggy lump across his shoulders.

  Alinor screamed, once, long and piercingly. Then the apparition resolved itself into Kynne, familiar yet somehow altered. The figure moved down the rocks and approached her.

  Then she screamed again, this time not in fear of the unknown but because she recognized the brown stains discoloring his clothing and legs.

  “What happened?” she called across the diminishing distance, beginning to run toward him. “Are you hurt?”

  “I’m fine,” Kynne said, stooping to remove the weight of the wulf from his shoulders. “I spent the night in the ranges and have brought this back with me.”

  He indicated the body, touching it lightly with one toe.

  “It is your kill?” she asked in a voice tinged with incredulity. Kynne was, after all, only a boy, and the beast at his feet was legendary in its ferocity. Few men of the village had ever seen a live wulf, let alone claimed to have slain one.

  He nodded.

  “And your bounty?”

  “Yes,” he answered slowly, then more vigorously. “Yes, it is. I hadn’t thought of that until now. The credits are mine. With my own hand, I killed this beast.”

  Alinor started to question further but her words were cut off by the arrival of a vanguard of Myvern men, armed with wooden weapons and streaming along the narrow path in answer to her duet of screams. Her father, Maak, was among the first.

  “Alinor, are you hurt?”

  “No, Father, but Kynne has returned. And he has killed a beast.”

  Maak moved closer, prodding the w
ulf with the wooden shaft of his harvesting scythe, a wickedly curved length of stone-hard ranya wood polished and fire-tempered to cutting sharpness. For a second, Kynne saw in it the curving talons of the wulf as they had gleamed in the strange blue light of his dream.

  Then the vision passed. Maak was speaking quickly to the others. Three came forward and lifted the carcass, bearing it down the path toward the village. To Kynne, Maak gestured absently. The boy was to follow. There would be a moot at the village center. Something was not right.

  * * * *

  Kynne had great difficulty telling his tale. From the beginning, he felt the antagonism of the men gathered outside the small storehouse, pulled away from their daily tasks by the strange tale told by the orphan boy. He could sense muted anger that he should be wasting his time climbing the mountains all day, particularly now, when the rhiam—that staple of life throughout Omne—was ripening and required increasing care. He could sense their incredulity as he told of seeing the great beast flickering like a shadow among the pillars of the high ranges; then their incredulity hardening into active murmuring as he spoke of the night in the chimney…and of the strange blue light.

  He sensed all of this, but only on a lower level of consciousness. For the most part, he was too taken up in the emotions and experiences he was reliving to assess the sharp glances, then the flushes of anger rising from necks to faces, the pointed muttering.

  Until Maak spoke.

  “You claim to have slain this beast with your own hand,” he intoned, semi-ritualistically, with clean emphasis on the word claim. It was almost, Kynne thought, as if the elder sought to discredit him, to accuse him of the unheard-of crime of speaking words that went against reality.

  “I did kill it. I stretched forth my hand, touched it, and it died. It died.” Suddenly his exhilaration and pride evaporated, as suddenly as the blue light had snapped into darkness the night before. He stared at the beast stretched out in death before the storehouse door, seeing it with a combination of regret and sorrow.

  “Yet, there is no mark,” Maak said. “No mark of stone nor wooden blade, no mark of club. How did you kill it?”

  “I told you. I touched it. And it died. That is all.”

  Maak sighed.

  “How close were you to the beast?”

  “As close as I am to you…no, closer. I took only a step or two, then laid my hand on its head. And it died.”

  “You were that close to the beast, within inches almost, and it sat quiescently waiting for you. It did not attack?”

  “Not then. It did earlier, though. Along my leg….” Kynne bent slightly to trace one finger along the central of the five thin white lines barely visible on the outside of his leg. “The blood…it was painful. I think I nearly died, or would have, for loss of blood.”

  “But there is no wound,” Maak said, not ungently. The boy’s fabrications were becoming more and more difficult to hold together. Maak did not remember precisely when and how the boy had received those scars, but they were obviously Cycles old. Anyone could see that.

  “There was, before the blue light came. Then I touched the flesh and it closed. Look,” Kynne hurried on, his voice strained and insistent, “look, the blood on my clothing….”

  “From your knee,” Maak said quickly, pointing to the fresh abrasion, crusted with rusty blood.

  Kynne sank back into himself. He had nothing, no proof, beyond his own memories.

  He blushed—then embarrassment kindled into anger as the first muted laughter rose from the assembly. They did not believe him, he realized, appalled at the thought. They thought him a liar. A liar. Such wickedness was rare, for the Makers always taught the sanctity of the word, as if truth and reality were inextricably conjoined. Kynne had never spoken an untruth. He was not speaking one now. Yet everyone else laughed at him and believed that he was lying.

  He spun in anger, away from faces he had known his entire life, now twisted in laughter at his expense, to confront Maak.

  “I killed the beast, as I have said. And I claim the bounty as my right.”

  Maak remained silent. The bounty would be substantial. Even though wulfs were increasingly rare, they could on occasion invade the herdlands of the Myvern ranges (although usually farther to the north and west), destroying wantonly, apparently more for pleasure than for food. According to law and custom too old to alter, the slayer of such a beast was rewarded generously by the village. But to reward a boy, one without any of the training necessary to kill a predator, one whose tale was replete with impossibilities…. And perhaps most tellingly, one who presented an unmarked carcass as his evidence. There could be only one judgment.

  It was perhaps to Maak’s credit that he did not meet Kynne’s eyes as he spoke.

  “This beast is the bounty-right of Myvern. It is unmarked, uninjured, unharmed. It must have died naturally, and was found. The boy may keep the pelt to use as a covering. The bounty, however, will remain in the village coffers, to be apportioned out to those in need during the coming Cycle.”

  Kynne started to retort, but Maak raised one hand in an authoritative sign for silence.

  “I have spoken and thus it shall be.

  “And Kynne, I would urge you to spend the next few days in isolation, thinking on the untruths you would have us accept. We are not children. We cannot be gulled by wild tales.” Maak’s voice hardened. “Perhaps if there were a Maker among us, the beast might have died as you said. But none of the Makersraad have been seen here in the Lesser Pillars for a handful of Cycles, not since Honna of Los’ang slept one night among the cottages of Myvern.”

  For a moment Kynne heard no more. Honna of Los’ang. That was the name. Kynne vaguely remembered her, although he had been a mere child then, before his parents were lost. She had looked at him once, long and hard, and then turned away. And he had forgotten her from that instant on, until…until the night before, when the patterns had reminded him of a tall, gaunt woman draped in living blue. Honna of Los’ang. But….

  Maak continued, cutting into Kynne’s reverie.

  “That is all. The body will be taken away and prepared. And Kynne,” here he lowered his voice, “I would advise you to be more careful with your words.”

  Kynne burned even more furiously. And he couldn’t even bring his distant memories of that single glance from the Master Maker of Los’ang to his defense. No one believed him. Even worse, no one would ever believe him again. What little comfort he had felt in Myvern was lost forever. He would be totally outcast, ignored.

  He ran northward along the broad gravel spit leading out toward the sea, little caring that he seemed by his actions to be admitting guilt, his inability to fit into a society of honest, word-honoring people.

  Instead, he ran, leaving behind the beast and the crowd of villagers, darkly shaking their heads and clucking moral tongues. He ran, to be alone.

  * * * *

  At the farthest point on the spit, a handful of boulders rose as if from the womb of the sea itself, forming a tight cluster. Sometimes, during the highest tides of Seed Time, the boulders were isolated by heaving waters. Usually, however, a narrow ridge of gravel threaded out toward them. Today, Kynne did not even try to follow the ridge. He splashed noisily in the salty waves, not noticing as the water washed dried blood from his leg and seeped stingingly into the abrasion on his knee.

  He clambered onto one of the boulders, the northernmost one, and sat, knees hunched up to his chin, brooding. His mind spun, still trying to reconcile his dreams of honor and fame with the reality of his public humiliation. His mind was so caught up in the seething patterns of irreconcilable alternatives that he failed to hear the other person arriving and taking a seat on the rock just behind him.

  “I’m sorry,” a soft voice said, breaking the silence.

  He turned toward the sound. It was Alinor.

  He swung his head back to face away from her. He could not look into her eyes, not as long as she thought him a liar and a cheat, not as long a
s her own father could publicly censure him for speaking what Kynne knew to be the truth.

  “Go away,” Kynne muttered, hoping to injure her for his own sake and ashamed of himself for hoping so.

  “Kynne,” she began, then broke off long enough to slip lightly onto the northernmost boulder and seat herself next to him. She did not touch him, but he could feel her, could smell the freshness of her hair, could react to the faint warmth of her body through her pale yellow dress. He could even smell—faintly and surprisingly—the rhiam fibers in the cloth itself.

  Rhiam. Always and forever. It was Omne. Yet he had never noticed it so strongly as he did today.

  Suddenly aware, he realized that he could smell the fibers in his own garments…and the spots of blood…his blood…from wounds that never existed, that were dreams, hallucinations, lies. He repeated bitterly, “Go away.”

  She laid one hand on his arm, as if to allay his anger.

  “I really am sorry. I think you deserve the bounty….”

  His heart skipped a beat. She believed him, she among all the villagers, the only one whose feelings and opinions were truly important. And if she believed him, then perhaps….

  Then the anger returned, coupled with despair and frustration as she paused, continued: “I think you deserve it. It was brave to stay alone in the ranges at night. And even to come near such a terrible creature, even if it was dead….”

  “I killed it,” he said. “I killed it.”

  She swallowed tightly and looked away, toward the northern horizon where the Veil of Heaven merged with the blue-gray of the sea. A thin line of darkness marked a storm front bearing down on the Myvern shore. The afternoon might remain pleasant—or it might erupt with only a moment’s notice into a raging storm. Alinor looked northward and did not speak.