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

perhaps not in distance, but in spirit, so that it seemed strange to return so quickly. Strange, too, that Inner Heart would appear no different from when he’d left it, the huts and fire pits exactly where they’d been before, the elves going about their everyday tasks as always. Well, that wasn’t exactly true; somewhere in the village there’d be his new hut. But Inner Heart could never have changed as much as he felt he had in the last few days.
    The lookouts raised glad cries when they saw Rowan, Dusk, Val, and Lahti, and they were met at the edge of the village by a crowd of laughing elves waiting to embrace Val and hang garlands of leaves and flowers around his neck, to sweep him off his feet and carry him, laughing helplessly, to the speaking hut.
    It took a little time for the elders to assemble. There always seemed to be so many of them, enough to make Rowan’s large speaking hut—in Val’s lifetime they’d made the hut larger twice—seem crowded. Rowan said it wasn’t that there were so many elders; it was that there were fewer young adults since the invasion. The oldest elves, together with the sick, fertile or pregnant women, and children, had been sent to the human city to shelter and had survived the invasion, while so many of the younger warriors had fought and died in the forest, that sometimes it seemed that half the clan were elders.
    The fire was lit in the speaking hut and food was brought—cold food from the memory feast last night while Val had made his strange journey, although Val knew that even now they’d be preparing a new feast to celebrate his return —and Val spoke quietly of his passage dream. He felt a brief pang as he spoke of his mother. He had never seen her with his own eyes; no elf, to his knowledge, had seen Chyrie since she had brought him to Inner Heart and abandoned him there. Some thought that Chyrie had returned to the Mother Forest in body as well as spirit. Valann didn’t really want to speak of her; he wanted to keep her his secret, his very own vision, if a vision was all she’d been. But if that was the vision the Mother Forest had sent him, the elders had a right to know it.
    One by one, the elders nodded as he spoke. When he finished, Janan, a Redoak almost as old as Rowan, spoke at last.
    “Your mother’s spirit guided you to the Mother Forest,” she said slowly, “and the fire guided you away. What can it mean? Is it that your elven blood will bring you to us, and your human blood lead you away?”
    “We can hardly interpret a passage dream in such a way,” Rowan protested. “Each of us must find our way to the Mother Forest at passage, and each of us must find our way back again. You might as easily suggest that his elven blood leads him into death and his human blood back toward life. What is plain is that he made the journey and returned as he must.”
    Janan was silent for a moment, and Val understood the glances that several of the elders exchanged. They were thinking of fire and human blood and High Circles. Then Janan stood and walked to Valann, tall like most Redoaks so that she met his eyes squarely.
    “When my clan joined with Inner Heart,” she said, “there had been no children born to Redoak for two decades. We feared there would never be more. The Inner Hearts and Moon Lakes and Owl Clans were strange to our eyes, very different than us, but we danced in their High Circles and some of our women were filled again with life, and my daughters have children with the black hair of Inner Heart and children with the pale eyes of Owl Clan.” She embraced Valann a little stiffly. “If the Mother Forest acknowledges you one of us, I can do no less.”
    One by one, other elders rose to give him their embrace. Val knew there were some who left silently without the proper acknowledgment, but he could not manage to care. More than anything, he simply wanted this awkward moment to end so he could have a little time alone.
    When the other elders had