I lay like a flayed fish and the Skill swept past me, carrying off bits of me. It suddenly seemed as if all my walls had not been protection but barriers that had confined me and cut me off from all that was best. It was not even that the Skill-flow was heady and intoxicating; it just seemed inevitable now, the ending I had always been destined for. It would obliterate me and let me forget what I had been and what I had done. That seemed an impersonal kindness, but one I longed for.
Verity was here, somewhere. I could sense him like a fragrance that had almost been forgotten until a sly waft of wind brings a hint of it to the nose. Verity, yes, and others, older and wiser and calm. So calm, the Elders of the Skill-stream. All was peaceful. Then there was a frantic stirring and someone nattering to someone else, speaking so swiftly that I could scarcely follow the thoughts. They were seeking someone who was lost, a girl, no, a man, no, a girl and a man, carried off by the tide. Such a shame, but nothing to do with me. Nothing to do with me. I wished they would stop their worrying of it and let themselves go and join us. Why did they struggle against such peace and oneness as they could know here?
Shame on you. He set his teeth in me and worried me wildly. Shame on you, letting the cub drown. You would have come after me, and I would have come after you. Shame upon you, letting her go. Are we not pack? If you do this, you leave me behind. Do you know that? Do you care? Were you ever a wolf at all?
And that question stabbed me sharper than fangs and woke me to the struggle. Chade and Dutiful and Thick were there, linked as a coterie, searching for us. They were doing it all wrong, like a man bailing the sea with a sieve in hopes of catching a fish. Chade made a random search for Nettle, for none of them save Thick knew well the shape of her in the Skill-current, and neither Chade nor Dutiful had thought to ask the little man to locate her. I struggled to find enough of myself to reach them. It was like working in a dream, where the sequences of events make no sense and every moment the reality changes. I touched Thick at last, a touch like a thread settling on his sleeve, and whispered, Find the woman who helped the kitten. That is what she looks like here. Find her!
And he did. We had known he was strong, but we had never measured him here, where his navigation of the Skill was all that mattered. He sang the song that was Nettle, and she coalesced around the notes. He did not seek her so much as summon her to fill the shape that he had made for her. And then, as if he were restoring a glass figurine to a shelf, so he carefully restored her to his dream of her. Had ever a woman been regarded as so precious? For a moment I glimpsed the inside of the traveling wagon and then the kitten on the bed told the limp woman sprawled beside him, It's all right. Rest for now. You know the way home from here. Rest for a time, and then go home. You are safe, now. You know I love you.