Lightning flashed, throwing white-edged reflections into the lair. The Dreamsinger's eyes followed her, shining gray in the shadows. 'You're dead,' Skyfire muttered, mad with torment and fever. 'I will die, your cub will die, and an elf who kills other elves will shelter like a snake in the pack.'

    Her ravings were absorbed by forest stillness. Twilight darkened around dripping trees. Skyfire lay on her back in the mud, talking to stars that shone through sooty drifts of cloud. They did not bring her Sapling, as she asked; neither did they intercede to prevent the dream that racked her over and over: a staggering step into air, and a fall that ended in blood and pain on the rocky bank of a stream.

    Night deepened, and another sort of darkness blanketed Skyfire's thoughts, until even suffering lay beyond feeling.

She awakened, ice-cold, and shivering uncontrollably. Night had gone gray with new dawn, and the wind carried promise of heavy rain. Skyfire opened her eyes. Weakly she attempted to sit up.

    Hard hands shoved her back, crashed her bruisingly onto stone. The impact shot pain from her injury clear down her arm to her shoulder. Shock knocked the breath from her lungs. Through a sucking tide of darkness, she saw a face, and tangled hair, and a raggedy, leather-clad elf. His features were familiar. Through dizziness, Skyfire strove to remember.

    'Stonethrower?' she murmured; and vertigo fell sharply away before memory. This elf was an outsider, an exile, not among the faces of friends who shared the howls at the holt. Fear followed, thick enough to choke: Stonethrower had gone off with Two-Spear, his parting words an oath of undying vengeance for the plight which had befallen his chief at Skyfire's hands.

    'You!' said Skyfire, recognizing through touch the memory of a sending that had ended in a fatal fall. 'It was you who pushed my mate from the ledge!'

    Stonethrower did not speak. But the flash of the stone knife he raised above her body offered answer enough. He had returned only to kill her.

Skyfire rolled clumsily aside.

    'Whelp of a starved she-wolf!' Stonethrower jerked her back. 'You won't escape. You've strayed too far for sending to reach

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