The human murmured something that smelled of regret, then bent to pull the sick human the rest of the way into its dwelling. When the door closed behind them, Little Fur returned to Brownie, who was waiting agog to hear what had happened.
“I told you my human is kind,” Brownie said triumphantly when Little Fur had told him everything.
Little Fur nodded, but she was thinking of the way the black dog had understood the human. Then she noticed something so very strange that it drove both the human and the black dog from her mind. Beside the door of the stable where Brownie and his brothers lived was a small fir tree draped with delicate glittering strands of material and hung with balls of shining colored ice, as well as the small shapes of deer and cats and other animals. At the highest point of the tree was a gleaming, pointed shape like a giant snowflake.
“What has been done to the tree?” Little Fur asked, truly astonished.
“Humans always do that to trees in winter,” Brownie said, seeming surprised at Little Fur’s surprise.
“But…why?” Little Fur asked, amazed that she had never noticed this strange practice. But then she had never gone out of her wilderness in winter, for all of her planting of seeds in the city was done in spring and autumn.
“Humans being mad.” Crow offered his opinion, perched on the stable door.
“I do not think it is madness,” Brownie said thoughtfully. “When my human did that, it smelled of happiness, and when other humans see it, they smell of happiness as well.”
“Perhaps it is winter that makes them do it,” said Brownie’s brother Sateen, putting his long nose over the wooden barrier. “Maybe it is to remind themselves of spring when the trees come into blossom. Maybe that bright thing at the top is meant to be a sun.”
“I think the winter makes humans feel the flow of earth magic, and so they worship it,” Brownie said. “That is why they put a big snowflake on top.”
“Stupidness,” Crow opined. “Crow knowing what for humans doing that to trees. They copying birds to making display for mate. Brownie’s human wanting a mate.”
While Crow went on to boast of the many other ways in which humans copied the wisdom of birds, Little Fur went to the tree and reached through its finery to touch the knobby trunk. She let her spirit flow into the tree’s dream. Though asleep, it was dimly aware of what Brownie’s human had done to it, and not displeased. Little Fur found a memory of the human, touching its branches gently and singing.
Singing!
Little Fur’s toes prickled with excitement, because the beaked house was full of a still magic brought there unwittingly by humans when they came to sing and yearn. Was this garbing of trees another sort of magic?
That night the black dog had not yet returned to the wilderness. Little Fur lay curled in a soft nest in the roots of the eldest of the ancient trees. She told herself that even if the black dog was roaming the city streets, she had the means to protect herself.
But what if staying away from the wilderness was not the black dog’s idea? What if she had been taken captive? Little Fur knew that humans captured cats and dogs in the street, and if humans did not come for them, they were killed. No one knew why.
Little Fur sighed and let her spirit sink into the tree’s spirit, deciding that on the morrow, she would ask Crow to see if he could find the black dog if she had not yet returned.
She slept.
CHAPTER 3
A Song of Hope
Little Fur dreamed.
It was a dream not of pictures, but of feelings and smells. It began with a thick black reek that reminded her of the sticky stuff on the swan’s feathers. Then she felt a terrible sharp pain in her hand, as if someone had thrust a thorn deeply into it. The pain shifted into her chest and became a flabby gnawing pain, which stretched out until she realized it was the link between her and Crow and the gray cat. It was pulling, hurting her.
Then she saw Ginger. He was backed against a stone wall, his fur matted and filthy. His eyes shone with a ferocious light she had never seen in them.
Let me go, he snarled.
Little Fur woke.
It was not yet dawn, and the air was still and very cold. She pressed her face against the thick roots of the Old One until her heart ceased galloping. Then she sat up and rubbed a dusting of snow from her cheeks, telling herself the bad dream had come from touching a human, and from her worry that the black dog had been captured by humans. Ginger was not in danger. He was coming home. Hadn’t she been feeling that for many days now?
But as she rose and padded out into the blue black morning, she rubbed at her chest and shivered.
The sky was very clear, and the few stars remaining sparkled like chips of ice. The pale winter sun rose just as she reached the hill meadow and took the path winding down from it to the tumble of black boulders at the base of the icefall. The sun made the great cluster of ice glitter rose pink.
Inside the cave, Tillet looked up in mild surprise, for usually Little Fur did not come until later. But the hare merely pointed to a bowl of oil filled with leaves. Little Fur checked the leaves, then went over to the bench and began to assemble the ingredients for a bone-setting potion. Tillet was making a mash that dwarfs liked. They worked companionably in silence until Crow skimmed under the icefall, over the sleeping swan, to land on a branch beside Gem. The little owl fluffed her feathers and gazed in adoration at Crow, who ignored her.
“Crow dying,” he announced mournfully. “Crow having heart attacking maybe.”
Little Fur felt a small flutter run through her. “Did you dream, Crow?”
“Crow dreaming and snow dreaming,” Gem chanted.
“Hush, Gem,” Little Fur said. “Crow, did you dream about Ginger last night?”
Crow stared at her with his yellow eyes and gave an uneasy croak.
“Oh, Crow! I dreamed of him, too! I dreamed that he is in danger. It hurt me, too.”
“Gem dreaming danger,” Gem hooted.
“Copying,” Crow sneered.
Little Fur was not so sure. Ginger was the one who had rescued the owlet when her egg had been blown from her nest and cracked open. The gray cat had carried the tiny featherless creature in his mouth from the city to the wilderness, which meant he was the first creature Gem had touched and smelled. That meant he had probably evoked the mother bond in the little owl, and there was power in that.
“I tried to feel where Ginger is this morning, but there are too many dreams in the air,” Little Fur murmured.
“After midwinter…,” Crow began.
“No,” Little Fur said. “I must go and see the Sett Owl now.”
“No usefulness in going to Sett Owl,” Crow said. He preened, then announced in the somber voice he kept for serious messages that the Sett Owl was very ill and seeing no one.
“Then I must go and see if I can help her,” Little Fur said at once. “Do you know what is wrong with her?” She knew that Crow could not have spoken to the Sett Owl himself. The old bird never allowed any crows to enter the beaked house because she had been crippled by crows.
Crow clacked his beak sullenly. “Squirrels tell that Sett Owl leaking,” he finally said.
Little Fur spent the rest of the morning making the tediously difficult bone-setting potion she had begun. There were many ingredients, which had to be added in certain specific amounts and in a careful order. She had chosen this task deliberately, for aside from its being one of her important winter jobs, Little Fur had known that the making of it would consume all of her attention and stop her worrying.
By the time the potion was complete, it was midafternoon. Little Fur was going to wait until the sun set, but Crow told her that the whole city was shrouded in a thick, damp fog and there was not a human or a road beast to be seen anywhere. This meant she would be a lot safer than when she ventured out on her seed-planting expeditions.
There was no sign of the fog outside the cave, but the weather in the wilderness often differed from the weather in the su
rrounding city. Bidding farewell to Tillet and all those patients who were awake, Little Fur lifted Gem onto her shoulder and set out.
When she got to the edge of the wilderness, she saw that the world beyond was indeed swathed in a dense white. It was only a mist, and yet when she stepped out of the protective embrace of the wilderness, she felt a plucking at her hair and a prickliness brushing at her cheeks. It was the winter dreams. Little Fur was glad of Gem’s small warm weight on her shoulder and the soft prick of her tiny talons.
Little Fur had made up her mind that even if Gem was not dreaming of Ginger, it was time she learned to be a proper owl. None of the owls had accepted the small orphan into their nests when Little Fur had last brought her to the Sett Owl as a lost chick, but surely Gem was not to be banned from owldom forever because of an accident of the wind! How was she to learn what it was to be an owl unless she was able to be around other owls!
Little Fur reached the human dwellings bordering the field that led away from the wilderness, and she entered the snowy lane between them. In spring, she could hear the muffled voices of humans, as well as the chatter of birds, the hum of insects and the occasional distant roaring of a road beast. But now there was utter silence save for the soft squeak and puff of snow under her feet.
At the end of the lane, she stopped and gaped to see that the great black roads that lay beyond had almost vanished under a thick pelt of snow. Usually in winter, the snow on a road was soon stained black. There must have been a fresh fall during the night, and no road beast had passed yet.
Being part troll, Little Fur must never lose touch with the earth, growing things or water, lest she be severed from the flow of earth magic forever. Little Fur put her foot gingerly onto the snow and found that, like the smaller black roads that ran by the wilderness, it had earth magic flowing over it. That meant that for the first time, she would not have to crawl through one of the pipes that ran under the road. She would simply be able to walk across it.
“What you waiting for?” Crow screeched impatiently from overhead.
Little Fur took a breath and stepped onto the road. Soon she had crossed all three roads and was making her way along the high wooden barrier that Brownie called a fence. She had never learned the purpose of these fences humans built, and she sometimes suspected that Crow was right in saying that humans did not know why they built them.
The mist ahead was flooded with false light, which meant she had almost reached the beast feeding place. Soon she came to the place where the fence angled away from the road and around the back of the feeding place. It was a dwelling made entirely of the humans’ unmelting ice. A glaring flood of false light flowed into the darkness in all directions. Little Fur had learned that road beasts would not attack unless you walked on a black road in front of them. But there were no road beasts now taking shelter under the great stiff wings of the feeding place.
There was a strange beauty to this dwelling, yet it reeked of the awful liquid fed to road beasts. Crow flapped into her face to ask crossly why she was standing still as if she were hoping to cast roots. Little Fur brought her mind back to the moment. “Can you find the black dog?” she asked Crow.
Crow reluctantly nodded, knowing he would not be welcome at the beaked house, and flew off into the mist.
Little Fur hurried around the fence to the crooked board. She slipped through the gap into the field behind it. Then she stopped and stared—for what had been a wasteland full of poisonous dead patches was transformed by the snow into a pristine plain.
Little Fur crossed it, noting with pleasure the crisscrossing tracks of rabbits, hares, foxes, birds and deer; then she came to the stand of pear trees. She touched one, closing her eyes and letting her spirit go into its wood and into its dream. She saw the six tiny pear trees that had sprung from seeds she had taken from it and that stood close by the Old Ones, flooded with golden autumn light, their branches heavy with yellow pears.
A bell began to toll. It was the bell that hung in the pointed roof of the beaked house, which lay across another snowy field and over a hedgerow. The bell was still ringing as she crawled under the black branches of the great thorny hedgerow and climbed to her feet. She stared in astonishment at the great flock of humans standing in the yard of the beaked house, many bearing candles that shone a soft warmth onto their cheeks and eyes!
Then the humans began to sing.
Little Fur had felt the power of human song before, but she had never heard so many humans singing together, nor had the songs ever been such an outpouring of hope and longing. The music was so beautiful and potent that she felt dizzy with wonder. She crept to the barrier of spiked metal poles driven into the earth, which served as a fence for the beaked house, wanting to see if she could smell what had caused this gathering.
But even as she reached the fence, the song ended and the bell ceased to ring. The humans began to laugh and talk and break up into small groups that moved gradually down the path away from the beaked house. Somewhere she heard the sounds of road beasts groaning and growling reluctantly to life. Behind, on the snow-covered cobblestones, she now saw a grouping of large stone carvings that she had not seen before. After the two black-clad humans that cared for the beaked house had gone away down the path, Little Fur slipped between the spikes and went to look more closely at the carvings.
The stone forms had been arranged facing a she-human carving nursing its youngling. Several of the stone watchers were even beast-shaped! Then Little Fur saw with astonishment that the great tree alongside the beaked house was draped with shimmering strings and glittering bubbles and icicles in a rainbow of colors, just like the little fir tree in Brownie’s stable yard!
She felt suddenly sure that what had been done to the trees was connected to the singing of the humans. Hadn’t Brownie said that his human sang as it draped the tree with finery?
She was about to go to the opening at the base of the wall, which beasts and other creatures lacking wings used to enter the beaked house, when she heard a voice call her name. Puzzled, but unable to see who had spoken, Little Fur went around to the front of the beaked house, where wide steps led up to the doors that humans used to enter. The doors stood ajar. A golden light poured through the gap and lay in a bright strip on the snow.
A tiny black form standing in the light beckoned to her.
CHAPTER 4
A Mystery of Wolves
“The Sett Owl is expecting you,” Indyk the monkey said when Little Fur got to the top of the snowy steps.
Little Fur was not surprised that the Sett Owl knew she had come—nor that another creature had taken up Gazrak’s duties as caretaker, since the faithful rat, like Ginger, had yet to return from Underth. The Sett Owl was a seer, after all, and saw many things with the help of the still magic of the beaked house.
The monkey beckoned to Little Fur again. She stepped through the great oak doors into the still magic. Little Fur was reassured to feel the earth magic flowing through the floor so that she would not lose touch with it. Her ears tingled slightly as the still magic pressed and nuzzled at her affectionately, as if it remembered her from other visits. She had to force herself to pay attention as Indyk explained that the doors of the beaked house were left open two nights in the whole turn of seasons, and tonight was one of them.
“Why?” Little Fur asked curiously.
The monkey frowned and shook his head. “The Sett Owl did not say.”
“I heard that she was ill,” Little Fur said as they entered the vast main chamber of the beaked house with its high, intricate curved roof. The enormous stone giants set about the walls gazed down at her, their expressions as sorrowful as ever.
“The Sett Owl is very ill,” Indyk said.
“I have brought my healing pouches,” Little Fur said stoutly.
“I do not think they will help, Healer,” Indyk said.
“Why doesn’t the still magic heal her?” Little Fur asked.
“She is like a vessel that is very old and
worn, and yet she must contain all of the strange, heavy power of this house. She says one will come who is to take her place. I think it is only wishfulness. Come—she is awake, and you will be able to speak with her.”
He took Little Fur to a window ledge. In the deep shadows perched the Sett Owl. A piece of white cloth lay crumpled behind her, and Indyk tut-tutted as he leaped nimbly to drape it about the Sett Owl, taking particular care with a wing that seemed stiff and uncomfortable.
“Do not fuss, Indyk,” said the owl.
“It is my business to fuss, just as it is your task to endure my fussing,” Indyk said, tucking the cloth in to keep it secure. His brisk kindness reminded Little Fur of Tillet. He leaped down and told Little Fur, “Do not interrupt when she talks. It tires her enough to speak without having to repeat things constantly. It is amazing how few creatures can listen.”
“He is right about one thing,” the Sett Owl said, swiveling her head to look down at Little Fur. “I am tired.”
After a long moment, Little Fur said timidly, “I will make you a tisane for your wing.”
The owl gave a dry croak of laughter. “Why not? The flavor of kindness is sweet.”
“I have brought many other herbs and potions with me.” Little Fur took Gem and set her down, then removed her healing pouches.
“You have brought what I need,” the owl said. “But it is not ready.”
“It will not take me long to mix something if you will tell me what is wrong. Do you have a fever?”
“I am fevered with impatience,” the owl said, and sighed. “Ask your questions.”
“I…I do not want to disturb you,” Little Fur said. “But I have dreamed that Ginger is in danger. Crow dreamed it, too. I want to know if the dream is true.”