within her at odd moments, like an echo never entirely lost. And as was her habit in the old days of Two-Spear's strife, Skyfire wandered often. Perhaps not by chance, she found her way back to the clearing. There, yet again, she waited for something she could not name.

    This time clouds shadowed her vigil. Rainfall slicked her hair on her shoulders and dripped coldly down her back and groin. She shook herself like a wolf, licking irritably at the runoff. Long hours she listened between the patter of droplets over leaves, but no song reached her save the shrilling of peepers in the damp and the puddles. Shivering, saddened, but never quite miserable enough to leave, Skyfire finally dozed.

    The song returned in her dreams. Notes tripped and spilled between thorn brakes where no rain fell, and the forest lay dappled with sun like high summer. In dream, Skyfire leaped up and pursued. The song flowed like sending, and images swept through her sleeping mind. Though the singer used no words, his music spoke of other times, of taller, fairer elves than those who ran with the wolves. They wore beautiful, many-colored clothing. Beyond them Skyfire beheld strange dwellings, then stars sprinkled uncountably across blackness deeper than night. She saw suns that blistered her eyes, and moons silvery as the trinkets that humans cut from mussel shells. And yet there was sorrow beneath the beauty of this song. Woven through the strangeness and wonder of the images lay a memory of cold, like death. In the dream, Skyfire started. The stars and the moons abruptly vanished, and dark against the silver-ice light of new dawn, she beheld the singer.

    He stood before her, clad in grey. A wolf of the same hue lolled at his side. The eyes of wolf and rider were eerily alike, deep and light as mist. But the elf-singer's hair was black, hanging tangled and unkempt down his back.

    Convinced she had awakened, Skyfire surged to her feet, all grace and speed and anger. Nobody, wolf or elf, ever sneaked up on her like that, far less a stranger in territory hunted by her tribe and pack.

    Yet even as she raised her spear and called challenge, the singer and wolf both vanished. Skyfire checked. The dream dissolved around her and she woke in reality, to chilly rain and daylight. Her breath came painfully to her chest. On the

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