The blizzard ended so abruptly that it took her unawares. Shia had no idea how long she had been ploughing grimly on, her eyes fixed blindly on her trudging feet, urging her weary, frozen body through breast-deep drifts. Suddenly she looked up, blinking rime-encrusted eyes, to discover that the snow had gone, and she could see at last. What’s more, she had reached the higher end of the pass! The truncated, shattered face of the Steelclaw peak and the lands of her people lay before her! When she saw the familiar shape of Steelclaw, Ship’s heart turned over in her breast. There were SO many memories here . . . She was home at last, but she was still as much of an exile as ever,
“Hold, Stranger!”
Shia froze, one paw uplifted in mid-stride. The sentinels came bounding out, one from a ledge high on the cliff above the defile, the other from behind a broken, boulder-strewn ridge. She dropped the Staff and sniffed the air, her whiskers angling forward to pick up messages of temperature and the movement of the wind. It would help to know the identity of her opponents.
The two black females, sleek and well muscled, stalked her, bristling, the fur on their backs hackled up to a threatening ridge. One was a stranger to Shia, a youngster, lithe, delicate, and wiry, who moved with the light-footed grace of a dancer. The other, much older, was of stockier build, with powerful shoulders and a thick ruff of hair around her neck, almost like a male. Shia, hiding the surge of joyful recognition that flooded through her, looked the older cat in the eye—a deliberately challenging move.
“Do you not know me, Hreeza? You, my mother’s den mate?”
The powerful old cat wrinkled her gray-flecked muzzle and bared her fangs in a snarl. “My den mate bred well and often. Do you expect me to remember every last stray kit? You could be anyone, Stranger.”
“What, you? Forget a kit that you helped to raise?” Shia’s ears flattened. “Don’t lie to me, Hreeza—not even to save your own face!”
“Will you let her talk to you like that?” The youngster’s eyes were blazing as she addressed Hreeza. “And what manner of evil thing is that?” She pawed carefully at the Staff of Earth, being careful not to touch its glowing length. Hreeza turned on her, one paw uplifted in threat, “Stay out of this!” she hissed. Hesitantly, she advanced toward Shia—and ducked her head to rub faces. “I never thought to see you again!” Her mental voice was gruff with emotion.
“Nor I, you.” Shia was purring with delight, but the older cat was ill at ease, and Shia guessed that the chief cause of Hreeza’s wariness was the Staff,
Sure enough, her mother’s former den mate raised worried eyes to Shia’s face, “What is that thing?” she asked, Shia did her best to look unconcerned. “A wretched piece of work, is it not?” she said brightly, “Human nonsense, of course. Soon it will be gone, Hreeza, I promise you. It need not concern our people. Who is First Female now?” she added softly.
“Gristheena!” The word was a hiss. “Shia, do you seek to contest the leadership! In your condition?”
Shia gave her the mental equivalent of a shrug. “Why else would I return?”
“Shia, you cannot!”
The great cat sighed—a bad habit that she had picked up from her human friends. “It may not be necessary. I hope it will not, for as you say, I am in no condition to fight But I have a promise to keep—a debt of honor, to a friend who saved my life. All I need is safe passage through your lands—if Gristheena will consent?”
Hreeza snarled. “You know she will not! You saved us all from the human hunters, Shia, with your courage and your sacrifice. To Gristheena, you will ever be a rival and a threat—and what better chance for her to finish you than now, while you are in this weak and weary state? Turn back, I beg you, before she finds out you are here!”
“Too late.” Shia’s eyes glanced significantly over Hreeza’s shoulder. The younger cat had vanished.
Though the vegetation on the lower slopes of Steel-claw had once been burned away in the cataclysm that destroyed the peak, a new and vigorous growth had eventually come to take its place. Before this winter, the feet and knees of the mountain had been swathed in lush green skirts of aspen, pine, and mountain ash. Dappled deer had sipped from limpid forest pools and salmon had flashed like slips of rainbow through the silver foam of the tumbling streams. The woods had been alive with birdsong, and squirrels had scampered with swift and fluid ease from branch to branch.
Now, Shia could barely recognize the place. Hreeza led her up the mountain between the shattered trunks of frost-cracked trees that leaned like dead black sticks, groaning beneath their burden of snow. The streams and pools were sealed and fettered in a prison of ice. No creatures moved within the stilted, brittle underbrush, or flickered through the straining boughs above. All was silent, still and dead; all color, all life, all hope, had been killed by winters white mailed fist. There was no need for stealthiness on these lower reaches. No cats hunted here now—what was the point? Shia and Hreeza might have been the only living creatures in the world. Had the great cat ever wavered in her determination to help Aurian and Anvar, all such thoughts had vanished now. Gripping the Staff of Earth more tightly between her jaws, she snarled low in her throat, and vowed vengeance on those who had done this to her land. The truncated peak of Steelclaw was shattered and pitted into a labyrinth of canyons and caverns. Crevices and channels honeycombed the rock where thick veins of ore had melted and run off in the intense heat of the mountain’s destruction. Not that the cats were aware of Steelclaw’s troubled history—they simply found the peak a safe and perfect place to make their dens and rear their young.
Hreeza still dwelt in the same old den—a cavern that looked down into the rock-strewn shadows of a narrow draw—where Shia had been born and raised. As she tottered across the rocky threshold, the memories came flooding back of her mother, Zhera, long dead at the hands of the hunting Skyfolk, and her two siblings, brother and sister, who had both perished in the Khazalim raid that had made Shia a captive. Firmly, the great cat shrugged the memories away. She had no time, now, for such self-indulgence!
Hreeza was digging in a pile of dirt and stones at the back of the den, and emerged within moments, dragging the entire carcass of a mountain goat. “Here,” she commanded. “Eat! You have little time!”
Shia looked at the dead goat in startlement, then, at Hreeza’s urging, fell upon it ravenously, “You are well supplied,” she said, “I feared that during this winter, there would be hardship for the Colony,”
Hreeza licked at one of Shia’s lacerated paws, “There has been great hardship,” she said harshly. “Gristheena has made many of our people Chuevah—mostly her own enemies.” She spat. “In addition, the Winged Folk have attacked us many times, hunting for furs, until only a handful of our folk remain!”
“then how come this? A whole goat? ” Shia indicated the diminishing carcass, in her mind, she felt Hreeza’s cat equivalent of a shrug. “We were fortunate,” the older cat told her. “Some days ago there was an avalanche down the side of the western ridge that brought down an entire herd of the stupid creatures—all we had to do was dig them out! For a brief time, there has been enough for all.”
For a time she was silent, grooming Shia while she ate, restoring warmth and circulation to the big cat’s muscles with a brisk and rasping tongue. “Shia, how did you come to return to us?” she asked at last. “How did you escape?” She nodded at the Staff of Earth, which pulsed like a slender green serpent in the corner. “And now did you come into possession of that dreadful thing?”