Read Online Wild Blood (Book 7) by Anne Logston - Free Book Online

your food and fire,” Val said, a little awkwardly. “May joy and friendship be my contribution.” He appreciated Rowan’s recognition of his adulthood, but it seemed a little foolish to mouth the formalities as he stood there with a half-eaten piece of meat already in his hand and Lahti trying to keep from chuckling at his discomfort.
    Rowan chuckled a little too, and Val felt a bit less awkward as he sat down again, eager to stuff more venison into his achingly empty stomach.
    “I hear Dusk was unwell last night,” he said between bites.
    Rowan sighed and nodded, but said nothing. There was little enough to be said. Beast-speaking was the oldest and best developed of Dusk’s gifts despite his skill as a healer.
    The Gifted One had been flying in the mind of a hawk during the barbarian invasion sixteen years earlier when a human spear had struck his body, prematurely severing the link between man and bird. Dusk’s body had been long in mending, and his spirit had never fully recovered. Sometimes he took strange fits in which his body jerked and twitched; more often his spirit wandered to strange places, sometimes bringing back powerful visions but more often only leaving Dusk mist-witted for a time. There was nothing to be done for the Gifted One but to honor and care for him and pray to the Mother Forest that his spirit would continue to return from its strange journeys. Still, Val had never known Dusk any other way, and Dusk’s visions had often spared the clan great hardship.
    “He’s sleeping easily now,” Rowan assured him. “I sent the other elders back still infuriated that Dusk had gone ahead without their consent. All the quarreling served no purpose but to upset him further. And you have returned from your spirit journey safe and strong as Dusk said you would. When we return I’ll call the elders to my speaking hut and you can tell us your passage dream, and then there will be an end to all this wondering and arguing.” She patted Val’s shoulder and her eyes twinkled over her smile. “And an end to your waiting. Lahti has acted as elder sister for you. Come, we’ll tidy the camp and ready the packs before we wake Dusk.”
    To Val’s relief, Dusk was clear-headed and cheerful when they woke him. The four of them had to carry the packs a good distance on their backs, but once they had left the smell of roast venison behind them, Dusk was able to summon graceful spiral-horned deer to bear them back to Inner Heart.
    For Val, the ride was something of a triumphal procession; he had ridden out of the village a boy and was returning a man. While he was gone, the elves of Inner Heart would have prepared a symbolic feast of memory, as if for a death, to acknowledge Val’s return to the Mother Forest. Many elves, Val knew, feared (he prayed to the Mother Forest that none had actually hoped) that because of Val’s youth and his human blood the feast would be more than merely symbolic. His friends in Inner Heart, he knew, had been praying and offering to the Mother Forest for his safe return and would be deeply relieved that he lived; some, however, would find his very return a new source of worry.
    And one of the clan’s women would be preparing, too, to come to Val in his new hut and teach him the ways of man and woman. Ordinarily it would fall to a man’s oldest sister to choose his teacher, or, if he had no older sister, his mother. It was very like Rowan that she would not usurp the role of Chyrie, Val’s true mother, but it was not unfitting that Lahti, his dearest friend, would, as Rowan had joked, act as his older sister. And yet there was a little bitterness to the joke, for he would have chosen Lahti above any woman in the village, but until she passed from childhood, like a real sister she was forbidden to him.
    Riding the deer until they were near the village, it took only part of the day to reach Inner Heart, something which faintly surprised Val. He felt he’d journeyed far from home,