Ushahin had heard Oronin’s Horn. It had blown for him when he was a child and his broken body had lain bleeding in the forests of Pelmar. Somewhere, there was a death waiting for him. But the Grey Dam had claimed him, grieving for her lost cubs, and whispered, not yet.

So she had claimed him, and taught him. Yet he was not Were, and their magic twisted in his usage. The Were, like the Fjeltroll, could smell Men’s fear; unlike the Fjel, they could hear a Man’s heart beat at a hundred paces and taste the pulse of his fear. Ushahin, in whose veins ran the blood of Haomane’s Children, could sense Men’s thoughts. And it was their thoughts—their dreams, their unspoken terrors and wordless joys—that formed the pathways along which he traveled. It was a network as vast and intricate as the Marasoumië, yet infinitely more subtle. He had walked it many a time. This was the first time he had ridden it.

Ushahin-who-walks-between-dusk-and-dawn.

Thus had the Grey Dam Sorash named him in the tongue of the Were, who had no other words for what he was. It was his name, the one he had borne for many times the length of a mortal lifespan. Although the Were reviled him and the Grey Dam Vashuka had repudiated his claim upon their kinship, it was the name he would keep.

It had been given him in love.

Once, he had had another name; a Pelmaran name, given him by one long dead. His father’s mother, he thought; there was some vague memory there. A widow of middle years, with hair gone early to grey, a lined face and a sharp tongue. After all, we’ve got to call him something. His father, a tall shadow, turning away with averted face. The Pelmaran lordling, his life ruined for a moment’s passion, did not care what his son was called. He retreated into memory, reliving the moment. It was something few Men could claim, to have expended a lifetime of desire on Ellylon flesh.

That, Ushahin remembered.

Not what they had called him.

When he tried, he saw light; bright light, the light of Haomane’s sun. It had stood high above the marketplace in Pelmar City the day the other children had run him down and held him at bay. He’d stood his ground for a long time, but in the end there had been too many of them. The children of Pelmar City did not like his bright eyes, that saw too keenly their squalid thoughts; they did not like his pale hair, the way his limbs moved or his sharp cheekbones; slanted, strange and unfamiliar. It made them afraid, and they knew, in the way children know things, that his father’s guilt would keep his lips sealed, and his mother’s people had gone far, far away.

Better none of it had ever happened.