“Who are you?” The woman did not lower her wand-spear. I believed that were I to make some hostile move, I would speedily discover it far more than a peeled branch with only a leaf at its tip.
I could shape no words. When I tried, there was only that sound akin to a strangled grunting.
She held her head a fraction to one side—as if she listened.
“Sorcery,” she spoke again. “Strong of the Power, but not well done. In the night I felt you come. Now—you draw that which is not of our world. That we cannot allow. To let even a hint of Darkness brush close to us—No!” She shook her head vigorously.
I gave my beastly cry for help. If this Wise Woman had destroyed Ursilla’s attempt to reach me (for I was certain she had been the one to rend apart the Shadow world), then perhaps she could save me—point a way to my escape from this body.
Slowly, I drew myself forward. Out of the bush where I had sheltered, I crept belly down. Perhaps with my body I could display my need, ask voicelessly for her aid. Thus I abased myself as best I could.
The leaf point was no longer held unflinchingly aimed at my head. In her hands the wand swung a little, back and forth. Bright as the day was, its tip wrote on the air symbols in trails of green smoke that quickly dissipated. “No,” she denied me. “When the Dark strikes and evil walks the land, then we do not open our gates to any sorcery that carries the stench of the Shadow about it. I know not who you are, nor why you have brought your trouble hither. And there is naught that I can do for you. To let you remain—Even,” she hesitated, “even if you could. I do not believe that one such as you can enter into our safety. If you can—then that might be another matter—”
Her first firm denial appeared to weaken a little. I crept on. But, as I would set paw upon the edge of that same path in which she stood, there was a flash of green. The glimmer did not spring from her wand, but from the ground before me, while the paw that I had so reached out tingled with pain. I had stubbed it against some unseen wall of protection. What she had said was plainly the truth, her circle of Green Magic rejected me.
The shock of the rejection loosed the control of my man nature. For a moment I was no longer Kethan encased in a beast body that was a prison. Rather, I was a pard aroused to the full anger such a creature felt when its fierce desire was thwarted. My tail lashed, I raised my voice in a roar of animal rage. I sprang, only to be defeated by that invisible defense.
Now the woman’s expression changed. She raised her wand in one hand and brought it down in a lashing blow on the air. But across the painful scratches the bird had inflicted on my back there was a sudden hot agony, although her wand had been far from physically touching my body.
I screamed a cat’s full-throated scream, the pain feeding my anger, pressing the man back into close confinement in my mind. Kill—Kill! Almost I could hear the words as if such a command had been shouted in the ears now folded back against my skull. Again I snarled and struck out at the barrier that kept me from what was now surely my prey.
Once again her wand lashed the air. The blow fell truly across my wounded back and flanks. Dimly, even the beast could recognize that I was helpless, that to continue our unequal struggle would mean only more pain for me. With a last snarl, I slunk in retreat to the woods. Nor did I look back.
As I went, the man once more fought his way to freedom. The pard was under my control. My sense of failure was as grievous to my mind as the strokes had been across my body. My aborted attack had certainly closed all ways of communication with those in the Star Tower. And I was as certain, as if the woman herself had sworn it by some Name of the Power, that only there I might have found a measure of aid.
Now I did not care where I went. There was no lasting hope I might locate some other inhabitant of the forest who would be willing to play my friend. There were others who might offer me shelter—for their own purposes. But those I must avoid with as much energy as I would Ursilla.
The woman of the Tower had delivered me from Ursilla’s attack. However, she had done that only because the stir of such sorcery had in some way threatened her own safety. That I could count on such a gift of Fortune again, I greatly doubted. Ursilla might not weave the same spell, but she had others as powerful, perhaps many of them.
My unplanned wandering had brought me back, I saw, to the small glade where the pillar and the moonflowers stood. In the sunlight, the latter were tightly closed, showing only gray-green buds and a few badly withered, dead flower heads, while the pillar itself lacked the core of fire that had blazed high during the night. I hesitated under the branches of one of the trees that made up the walling of the enchanted place. Was this also closed to me? I had the haunting belief that some Power that was benign might shield me from Ursilla’s seeking. Where I could find such—?
I sank to the crouch the pard used preparing for a leap upon a quarry. Then, as I had done when I uselessly abased myself before the Wise Woman of the Tower, I crept forward inch by inch.
This time there was no heady perfume from the tightly closed flowers, no sense of enchantment and beauty. It would seem that the sorcery had departed, for I was able to enter into the moon garden, even reach the pillar, feeling no discharge of energy as I had the night before.
I touched nose to the pillar. It was stone, not crystal—dead stone. Nothing lingered here any longer to feed my hope.
Slowly, I retreated. The river again—for I was hungry. However, my hunger was only partly of the flesh. All my life, though I had lived close among my fellows, I had been as one set apart. That loneliness I had only half known for what it was, but in this hour the full desolation of it settled upon me, as a yoke of sword steel set about my throat, chaining me to that which was myself, which could never be one in thought or life with any other.
There were the Wereriders—
Dully, I considered whether I might search them out, hope to claim a measure of acceptance from those who also were two shapes throughout their lives. But they were shape-changers by inheritance and choice, bred to that strangeness. Whereas with me it was truly, as my mother had warned me, a curse to separate me from the normal world.
Was this of the Lady Eldris’s planning, so that I should be removed from Maughus’s path by this estrangement? I could accept that. Just as I accepted Thaney’s cry of “Kill!” when she had looked upon me over her brother’s shoulder and his sword was bared ready to slay. I had no tie with my betrothed to regret.
My mind picture of Thaney as I last saw her faded. There was another now, so sharply etched in my mind that I might be viewing her again just as I had watched her in the moonlight, all crystal and life, holding her basket of flowers on high. Witch Girl—Moon Singer—Yet she was of the Star Tower, firm closed against me.
The river flowed below. I went down upon an out-thrust bar of sand that near divided the stream at that point, dropping my muzzle into the water’s coolness, drinking deep. Perhaps it was the assuaging of a thirst, I had not realized I had, that banished all fancies to the back of my mind, alerted me to the necessity of living by the hour that was present, not in the past, or anticipating what might be a darksome future.
Once more I fished and found that Fortune favored me with two scaled bodies that I devoured eagerly, leaving not even an edge of spiky fin for any scavenger. The life about me was that of the normal forest world. I sensed no enemy, neither hunter, nor of the Power.
Jutting from the earth at an angle, I found a rock that was shelter from the heat of the sun. Beneath that I lay down, though I feared to sleep, lest I return into the dream Ursilla had spun for my entrapment. If Kethan so feared, the pard’s body was oblivious to such dangers. It is natural for any cat, large or small, to sleep more hours than a man. And I could not escape the needs of my present shape.