But only the unseen wolves answer from somewhere on the higher hills, scoring the wash with cries of their own. Mocking her. Owoooooo! Poor little slit! Owoooooooo! Their laughter stings, but she is used to it, the hilarity of those who celebrate her pain. She has long ago learned how to break it into kindling, to cast it upon the bonfires behind her eyes.

“Teach me!”

Thunder cracks—the God’s hammer striking the shield of the world. It echoes through the hiss of rain across the granite slopes. Hiss-hiss-hiss, like a thousand serpents warning. Mists rise like smoke.

“Curse you!” she shrieks. “You will teach me!”

She pauses in the marauding manner of those well practised at provocation, searching for any sign of reaction. Then, through the veils, she sees it. The great door opens, rimmed by an upside-down L of interior light. A shadow watches her for several heartbeats, as though weighing her lunacy against the chill. Then it slips out into the rain.

She knows that it is him immediately, from his hobbling gait, from his bent shape, from the burning in the pit of her throat. From the deep, sorcerous bruise, like a darkness untied to any worldly light. He leans on a staff, setting it in the crooks between boulders to keep from slipping. The rain parts about him like string, and she can see it, the sense of eyes angling, of something not quite complete, that mars all sorcery from the epic to the petty.

He descends the slope like a stair, halting only when he stands immediately before and above her. They stare at each other for a moment, the young woman, standing as though risen from the sea, and the old Wizard, waiting between the lines of falling water. She swallows at the impossibility of him, his beard frayed and feathery, his cloak dust dry in light of her fire. The forests roar about them, a never-ending rain-world.

His eyes are hard and incurious. For a moment, she struggles with a strange embarrassment, like someone caught cursing an animal in tones reserved for people. She spits water from her lips.

“Teach me,” she says.

Without a word, he hefts his staff, which she could now see is made not of wood, but of bone. Quite unprepared, she watches him swing it like a mace—

An explosion against the side of her skull. Then sliding palms, knuckles scraped and skinned, arms and legs tangled rolling. She slams to a stop against a molar-shaped rock. Gasps for air.

Stunned, she watches him pick his way back up the shining slope. She tastes blood, bends her face back to let the endless rain rinse her clean. The drops seem to fall out of nowhere.

She begins laughing.

“Teeeach meeeee!”

CHAPTER THREE - Momemn

CHAPTER THREE

Momemn