Epilogue #2
“Where are you hurt?” I gently run my hands over the cat, trying not to think of those enormous fangs so close to my fingers, and nudge him to stop licking.
When he raises his head, I see an S shape, larger than the palm of my hand, burned into his shoulder.
The fur is entirely gone in that patch, and the skin looks red and raw.
“How?” I whisper. “What is happening?”
I hold my wrist out in front of me, resting my arm with its new snow leopard design against the unburned fur next to the S-mark. “Is this … normal? Was it meant to happen?”
S FOR SOLITUDE.
NONE OF MY KIND HAS BONDED TO A HUMAN FOR OVER THREE HUNDRED YEARS, SO I HAVE NOT SEEN IT MYSELF.
BUT THE ELDERS TELL STORIES OF THIS.
“Three hundred years?”
Behind me, my friends have quieted as much as six people who are seeing a mythical creature for the first time can. Nobody’s shouting anymore, at least.
“It’s a Valourian snow leopard,” Bern says, awe infusing his voice. “Everybody says they went extinct. Is he like you, Kaelen?”
The cat snarls, and they all jump.
TELL THE TWO-LEGS NOT TO BELIEVE EVERYTHING HE HEARS.
AND NO, I AM NOT DUAL-NATURED.
I convey the message without taking my eyes off my snow leopard. Shock and disbelief infuse the mutterings behind me.
I understand how they feel.
A snow leopard is talking to me inside my mind.
And he understands what I say to him in return.
My arm suddenly feels wet. I look down to see blood seeping into my sleeve from the cat’s flank.
“Elianna! Help me! He’s injured!”
“Healing a wild animal is not in my—”
“Heal him or else,” I snap, cutting her off. “He says he’s mine to protect. Until we learn who sent him, do you really want to take any chances with his life?”
The Air Touched grumbles, then steps around me to the leopard’s other side, kneels down, and hesitantly touches his hip with one finger. When he doesn’t move, Elianna puts her hands over the still-bleeding wound.
“It looks like a spear did that,” Kaelen says, crouching next to me. “Could have been worse. No intestines showing. But—”
INTESTINES ARE GOOD EATING.
“Let’s agree to disagree on that one.” I try not to gag.
“Who would attack one of these mythical creatures?” Chitai stalks over to stand next to Elianna, her knives held at the ready in case she needs to protect the sorcerer.
“Sheathe your knives,” I demand, but Chitai ignores me.
“I’ve read of this,” Kaelen says. “The bond is ancient magic. Hasn’t happened in centuries, since long before the Zhagarn killed all the snow leopards.”
“Clearly, they did not kill them all. There’s you, for example, Prince Kaelen,” Andras says behind me. No doubt he has an arrow nocked, a sword drawn, or knives in hand.
SYLVANS ALWAYS DID LIKE TO STATE THE OBVIOUS.
I slap my hand over the laugh trying to escape at his wry tone. I think Andras might have met his match in haughty arrogance.
The cat lifts his head and bares deadly fangs.
ANDRAS AL’SYLVAN? WE KNOW THIS NAME.
Kaelen’s hand on my shoulder is tight with tension.
“It’s okay,” I insist, based on pretty much zero quantifiable evidence. “I trust my—the snow leopard.”
WISE BEYOND YOUR YEARS, SOLI.
“You know my name. What is yours?”
He closes one eye and makes a rumbling sound, and then he …
puts an image directly into my mind. I catch my breath at the beauty of the clear stream burbling over polished stones, with a gentle breeze playing in the grasses on the banks.
I can actually smell the clean, bright winter’s day and hear the stream.
YES. IN YOUR LANGUAGE, MY NAME IS brEEZE THAT FLOWS OVER THE STREAM TO MAKE MUSIC IN THE SUNLIGHT ON THE MOUNTAIN IN WINTER.
“That’s … a lot of name.”
I glance at Elianna meaningfully, trying to convey that I’m distracting the snow leopard so she can hurry up and heal him before one of us gets bitten.
Elianna presses her lips together but closes her eyes and murmurs in a language I don’t recognize.
A pale golden glow surrounds her hands, then spreads onto and around the wound.
The snow leopard whips his head around and snaps at Elianna.
But I think it’s just a warning. If he’d wanted to get his teeth into the sorcerer, he would have.
Still, it’s scary, and Elianna falls back onto her bottom, trying to get away.
“No! She’s trying to help you,” I tell the cat.
“Lass, maybe arguing with a snow leopard isn’t the smart thing to do,” Sergeant Neville mutters behind me.
I shake my head. “When on this journey have I done the smart thing?”
THE INJURY IS HEALED, BUT I AM VERY TIRED NOW.
He’s right. The wound looks like an almost healed scar. His shoulder still looks raw beneath and around the S.
“Can you heal that?” I ask Elianna, pointing to the burned place on the cat’s shoulder, not realizing everybody will see my own burned-on design when I raise my hand.
More chaos, with everyone talking at once.
“This is part of the bond,” Chitai says, loudly enough to cut through the chatter. “We know this from our elders. You would be wrong to heal it with magic, I think.”
The snow leopard’s shaggy head turns toward Chitai and then back to me.
THE DAWN WARRIOR IS CORRECT.
DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS HEALING ON THE BOND MARKS.
I relay the instruction to Elianna and thank her for healing the cat. She nods, stands, and backs away while I wonder how the snow leopard knew Chitai for a member of the Dawn.
THEY ARE HARD TO MISTAKE FOR ANYONE ELSE.
He’s not wrong, I realize in hindsight. I tell myself to focus, though. Back to the name idea.
“We humans aren’t much for long names. Especially if there’s a battle or some kind of emergency, it would take a long time for me to call for ‘breeze on the stream with the rocks in the winter and the flowers.’”
brEEZE THAT FLOWS OVER THE STREAM TO MAKE MUSIC IN THE SUNLIGHT ON THE MOUNTAIN IN WINTER.
“Right. It’s a lot. For mere humans. Would it be okay to … shorten that?”
He growls.
IT IS MY NAME.
DO NOT DISRESPECT MY NAME.
“No! It’s not disrespect. It’s … what friends do. For example, my friends call me Soli instead of Solitude Grace Graymind.”
AH. THIS I UNDERSTAND.
“How about Breeze?”
NO.
“Stream?”
NO.
NOT SUNLIGHT, EITHER.
HUMANS ARE VERY LITERAL.
I close my eyes and think. The music seemed to be the most important part of the vision he placed in my mind.
YES. MUSIC.
MUSIC IS THE MOST IMPORTANT.
MUSICA UNIVERSALIS: EVERYTHING IN THE UNIVERSE PRESENTS ENERGY AS MUSIC.
LISTEN.
I only have a moment to think that this snow leopard is smarter and more educated than most people I know before he sends me the vision again. This time, I listen carefully. The music of nature’s symphony, with a lilting tone at its base that sounds like a finely tuned lyra harp.
Oh!
“Lyra? It’s the harp that makes music like …” I try an experiment and focus as hard as I can on the sound.
YES. BUT NO.
THE SOUND IS GOOD, THE WORD IS NOT.
LYRA IS TOO CLOSE TO THE WORD FOR WHEN HUMANS TELL FALSEHOODS.
What?
My mind suddenly makes the connection. “Ah. Well, no. That’s actually liar. So—”
HARPER.
“What?”
MY FRIEND NAME WILL BE HARPER.
“That’s a beautiful name. Is it all right for me to tell them?”
YES.
BUT NOW YOU MUST PROTECT ME, SOLITUDE GRACE.
EXHAUSTION OVERTAKES ME.
“Please call me Soli.”
AM I YOUR FRIEND?
“I hope you will be. And I promise I will protect you, Harper.”
When he stares at me with what I’m pretty sure is a healthy dose of skepticism—fair enough, since he’s roughly five times my size—I pull out my knives and show them to him.
“I will protect you, Harper. I have claws of my own.”
After staring at me for a long moment, he drops his huge head onto his paws, closes his eyes, and relaxes against me.
I freeze, afraid to move and disturb him, until a low, rumbling snore breaks the silence between us.
I slowly reach out and put a hand on his side, entranced by the rhythmic vibration beneath my fingers.
Kaelen drops to sit on the ground next to me and puts an arm around my shoulders.
But I don’t speak, not to him or the others, although they’re all asking me questions at the same time. I need a moment alone with the realization that what I told Harper was true.
I do have claws of my own.
And friends.
This quest will succeed.
I take Kaelen’s hand and hold it tightly, then look up at my friends surrounding me where I sit, right there in the middle of the mountain path. One by one, they grow quiet.
And so I say into the silence: “Storms pass.”
“Pain ends,” Bern says staunchly.
And all of them join me in reciting the final line of a mantra that has become as much a prayer as a rallying cry: “We will never quit.”
I make a vow to myself in silence. I will never quit.
And I’ll never be nobody again.
THE END