Dreamsnake

“You mustn’t punish her for my clan’s error,” he said again.

Silver shook her head. “It is not a question of punishment. But she cannot be a healer without a dreamsnake. I have none to give her.”

They sat together in silence. After a few minutes Arevin wondered if Silver had fallen asleep. He started when she spoke to him without glancing away from the view out her window.

“Will you keep looking for her?”

“Yes,” he said without hesitation.

“When you find her, please tell her to come home. The council will meet with her.”

Thad rose, and with a deep sense of failure and depression Arevin understood that they had been dismissed.

They went back outside, leaving the workrooms and their strange machines, their strange light, their strange smells. The sun was setting, joining the long shadows together into darkness.

“Where shall I look?” Arevin said suddenly.

“What?”

“I came here because I believed Snake was coming home. Now I don’t know where she might be. It’s nearly winter. If the storms have started…”

“She knows better than to get stuck out on the desert in winter,” Thad said. “No, what must have happened is somebody needed help and she had to go off the route home. Maybe her patient was even in the central mountains. She’ll be somewhere south of here, in Middlepass or New Tibet or Mountainside.”

“All right,” Arevin said, grateful for any possibility. “I will go south.” But he wondered if Thad were speaking with the unquestioning self-confidence of extreme youth.

Thad opened the front door of a long low house. Inside, rooms opened off a central living-space. Thad threw himself down on a deep couch. Putting aside careful manners, Arevin sat on the floor.

“Dinner’s in a while,” Thad said. “The room next to mine is free right now, you can use it.”

“Perhaps I should go on,” Arevin said.

“Tonight? It’s crazy to ride at night around here. We’d find you at the bottom of a cliff in the morning. At least stay till tomorrow.”

“If that is your advice.” In fact, he felt a great heavy lethargy. He followed Thad into the spare room.

“I’ll get your pack,” Thad said. “You take a rest. You look like you need it.”

Arevin sat down slowly on the edge of the bed.

At the door, Thad turned back. “Listen, I’d like to help. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“No,” Arevin said. “Thank you. I am very comfortable.”

Thad shrugged. “Okay.”

The black-sand desert stretched to the horizon, flat and empty, unmarred by any sign that it had ever been crossed. Heat waves rose like smoke. There was no steady wind yet, but all the marks and detritus of the traders’ route had already been obliterated: erased or covered by the shifting breezes that preceded winter. At the crest of the central mountains’ eastern range, Snake and Melissa looked out toward their invisible destination. They dismounted to rest the horses. Melissa adjusted a strap on Squirrel’s new riding saddle, then glanced back the way they had come, down into the high valley that had been her home. The town clung to the steep mountain slope, above the fertile valley floor. Windows and black glass panels glittered in the noon sun.

“I’ve never been this far from there before,” Melissa said with wonder. “Not in my whole life.” She turned away from the valley, toward Snake. “Thank you, Snake,” she said.

“You’re welcome, Melissa.”

Melissa dropped her gaze. Her right cheek, the unscarred one, flushed scarlet beneath her tan. “I should tell you something about that.”

“About what?”

“My name. It’s true, what Ras said, that it isn’t really—”

“Never mind. Melissa is your name as far as I’m concerned. I had a different child-name, too.”

“But they gave you your name. It’s an honor. You didn’t just take it like I did mine.”

They remounted and started down the well-used switchback trail.

“But I could have turned down the name they offered me,” Snake said. “If I’d done that, I would have picked my own adult name like the rest of the healers do.”

“You could have turned it down?”

“Yes.”

“But they hardly ever give it! That’s what I heard.”

“That’s true.”

“Has anybody ever said they didn’t want it?”

“Not as far as I know. I’m only the fourth one, though, so not very many people have had the chance. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t accepted it.”

“But why?”

“Because of the responsibility.” Her hand rested on the corner of the serpent case. Since the crazy’s attack she had begun to touch it more often. She drew her hand away from the smooth leather. Healers tended to die fairly young or live to a very old age. The Snake immediately preceding her had been only forty-three when he died, but the other two had each outlasted a century. Snake had a tremendous body of achievement to live up to, and so far she had failed.

The trail led downward through forever trees, among the gnarled brown trunks and dark needles of the trees legend said never bore seeds and never died. Their resin sharpened the air with a piny tang.

“Snake…” Melissa said.

“Yes?”

“Are you… are you my mother?”