they never once knew he was there.
So he wandered the length and breadth of Sunside's woods; he climbed through the foothills to the tree-line, turned west, and explored the passes and mountain heights. For a year, two, three, he was alone, until the day when he found a great white she-wolf trapped in the scree where the flank of the mountain had slipped a litle. And it was a rare, strange thing ...
Radu had been hungry and could have kiled and eaten the wolf. It would have been easy; he'd stolen a good crossbow in his wanderings and could have put a bolt in her, then dug her out and built a fire to roast her joints. She was a dog, true, but she was meat.
But looking into her great, feral yelow eyes, Radu decided against it. He, too, had been crippled in his time - by apathy and cowardice, and by the shame of the Szgany Zirescu, unable to escape from the shadow of a shameless leader - but he'd freed himself, grown strong in his freedom, and survived. This she-wolfs crippling was a purely physical thing: a forepaw was broken where it stuck up awkwardly from the rubble and debris, and she was unable to drag herself free. But Radu saw paralels, and couldn't bring himself to kill her. It was one of those strange paradoxes; if she'd been Funning with a pack he wouldn't have thought twice about shooting her. But now:
He made his way out onto the dangerous sloping surface of the sliding scree, and patiently dug her free. And with every passing moment the treacherous rocks could have slipped and falen away, grinding both of them into oblivion; or the bitch could have turned on him and grabbed his throat. But the mountain held its breath, and the she-wolf made no such vicious protest; finaly Radu put a rope round her chest and dragged her to one side -
- At which the scree jumble gave a shudder and a mighty groan, and avalanched down onto Sunside!
Wel, maybe she knew Radu had saved her life. But whether or no, she let him splint her paw, and accepted cooked food out of his hand when he shot and roasted a rabbit. And a day later, when Radu thought she could probably make it on her own and set off west again, the she-wolf came hobbling after him. For while her pack had forsaken her, this man had not, and she would not forsake him. After that, going from strength to strength, eventualy she was fuly recovered.
From which time on there were two of them.
In Radu's entire life, this incident was one of the very few good things that had ever happened to him. Who could have guessed that it would result in the very worst thing of al?
CHANGELING!
II
CHANGELING!
In Radu's dreams, his father and sister lived again, and walked and talked with him, reminding him of his past. Waking was invariably a bad time, when suddenly he would know that they were dead, of course, and discover himself a loner. And but for the company of Singer (so named for the fact that when Radu sang to himself of an evening, she would join in to serenade the moon), he suspected he might very easily lose his mind. Nor would he be the first loner to go mad from the solitude of his ways.
But Singer was there, hunting with and for Radu, constantly by his side, more of a friend and companion than any human creature he had ever known, except for the mother he had loved for so short a time, and his family which was no more. But despite the presence of the white she-wolf, ever more frequently he would find himself dwelling upon the fate of his father and sister, and the fact that he'd been thwarted in the hour of his vengeance. At the time, two for two had seemed satisfactory ... now he felt the scales had been weighted again him, and knew how he'd been cheated.
Looking down on western Sunside from the heights where the barrier mountains commenced to crumble to the swamps, he would fancy he saw the fires of Zirescu encampments. And despite his Szgany vow to be gone from the western forests forever, he would feel this oh so strong compulsion to return, for however brief and bloody a time ...
He was a man full-grown now, firm in all his limbs, still lean but springy as