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Softly along the road of evening, / In a twilight dim with rose, / wrinkled with old age, and drenched with dew, / Old Nod, the shepherd, goes. (Nod, Walter de la Mare)
His breath is hot. His teeth scrape on her knee and his lips are clammy and warm; drool slimes her leg. Pangara remembers the last time she cradled a dog like this. Its breathing comes too quickly. It wheezes. She will bleed it to its death in a little while, but for now she holds him on her lap.
Pangara had already been half-out of dreams when Deshanna had pulled the curtain aside. The Keeper had led the dog through the dark. And Pangara had known at once, sitting up in her cot and looking down. She had dressed slowly.
“You may have been a little shem godling, and you may have led their armies, but here you are still First,” Deshanna had said to her when she’d come home. And technically she still leads armies - but her extended stay in Wycome is a reprieve Josephine has arranged, meant to last only a few months. The clan prepares to replace her. The testing grounds need another week’s preparation. She will play a vital role in the transfer of her duties to another and then… and then she will no longer be First, and the life she prepared to give to her community will be no more.
Deshanna had stroked Pangara’s hair and then she’d left them together. Banlen was still wriggly, even given his age. He’d scented her chamber pot and nosed towards it and she’d had to wrestle and push him back - he vomited every feeding, every drop of liquid and now when she pissed he looked at her eagerly as if he hoped she poured water for him.
Banlen, bulky and gentle and with russet fur. He’d protected the clan ten winters. There was nothing more Deshanna could do for the fists growing under his belly.
He pants now. Pangara knows he is so thirsty. Into the rough spring dawn the sounds of water roll off the hickories and pines. The wind is still from the east, and icy.
She’d led the old hound out of the little encampment. They’d walked side-by-side into the trees and the light rain and she’d not minded the weather. He’d wagged his tail like he was not ill. Clan Lavellan maintained a hunter’s stopover outside the walls of Wycome. Pangara had felt more comfortable staying just inside the forest than in a bedroom in the city. When the Anchor woke her with painful nightmares - eyes and rifts and fires flickering through her dreams - she only disturbed those few neighbors who were gone most nights anyway.
But one of the hunting cores had returned the evening prior, so Faerlin, Davys, and Chel had been out on their porch when she’d walked past with Banlen at her heels. Chel had lifted a hand and waved. Pangara had nodded. Davys and Faerlin kept bent over their arrows - Davys setting a cowhorn nock, Faerlin weighing the deflection of a shaft’s spine. Neither had looked up at her as she passed. Banlen had taken lead, guiding her through the trees.
Faerlin had never forgiven Pangara for kissing Chel when they were ten.
Ten.
More than two decades later and still.
Banlen’s breath comes out with a little bit of whine. Pangara peels a strip of fat from a tail of jerky. She lets him snuffle it from her fingers.
“People don’t like to forget, do they, Banny?” He burps and looks at her, surprised.
The canopy drips overhead. In the distance a call from a diggyhawk caws over the morning. Branches sway and drums of dew drop down to the forest floor, disturbed by one squirrel trying to escape from another. Faint light pops through the shifting pines.
This trail winding alongside the Hookpole Stream has been worn by ages of feet and aravels. The grass is worn aside to bare the fine earth, and the hunters have been tending the branches fallen by winter snow, keeping the path clear - although the clan will summer in the city this year.
Where is he walking now? The thought comes to her banging desperate and caged against the walls of her mind and she actually utters a sound like rage - Banlen senses her changed mood and his breathing stops; he glances up at her, mouth closed, wondering. And then because it feels like Solas is a wandering soldier pacing strides horizon to horizon she digs her fingers into his fur and she releases. She can’t help it. She hates it, but she knows that the thoughts won’t go away otherwise; and so gritting her teeth, she lets her mind trawl the many corners of the land: do his feet crunch into the snow? Does he pull his staff from a pool of mud and grimace? Are his clothes torn, has he bothered to mend them? Are his hands worn and blistered from scrambling up the slope of some hot red bowl of rock, sand smacking into his eyes? Does he smile softly when it rains - does he wonder if it’s raining on her, too. Does he wonder where she is. Does he look at the sky and think of her beneath it.
She exhales a shaky breath.
She wants to know. She wants to know. She tries to direct her dreaming every night, and every night…
Banlen leaks a soft string of vomit onto the shoreline, making little gulping sounds that match her own pathetic sobs. He is like all dogs at their weakest: embarrassed and scared, and trying to move away from her - but she holds him tightly and will not let him go.
That she let herself be made vulnerable to a man who once burned his own ass with fire - to a man who more than once misjudged the amount of ice he was manifesting out of the Fade and had to be knocked free - these are the things that make it so that she cannot truly cry. She can only creak and moan open-mouthed and her eyes are always completely, infuriatingly dry. She used to cry - though, not easily. Usually only when her mind spiralled quicker and quicker and her breath refused to come out of her. Then sometimes she would cry with the fear of it. Or, afterwards, with the embarrassment.
But now she just makes sad noises until what’s coming out of her is strangled laughter. Because he left. He left without saying goodbye. He left.
And the pressure of that rings in her mind like chimes strung between the trees. Always fluttering, then clanging in a harsh cry of: you could have kept him if you could have found him if you could have known if if if if
She lifts her face up to the rain and wants to not feel so much like the pull of the world is all pulling her to him.
Chel had held her. Chel had asked, “Was he nice?” in a way that said she doubted this was the case.
“He’s kind. He wants to be kind,” Pangara had replied. The nightmare had been especially loud. Chel had come in through the window like she always used to do.
“He’s not very good at it.” Chel had grimaced and pushed Pangara’s hair back from her forehead the same way he always would, with his fingers long and every time stained with some different color of paint.
“He tries.” Pangara had said, softly. Why she defended him… why she had been defending him, from the moment he’d pulled away from her so suddenly, she didn’t know.
She knows.
Banlen coughs and gags and the rest of his body is very still except for his tail, which wags when she speaks to him and tells him all the old stories about dogs and their companions.
She remembers the way he pushed her hair back. She remembers him on his knees in the river, looking up at her like a man at worship - like a man desperate for some kind of divinity. She remembers him laughing: winning at chess, the rock in his hips when they danced, his tone trying not to be too eager when he taught her the words that went with the letters she received. She remembers him nights, his sweat and his smell like pine, like pepper - and always something sweet still on his breath.
“He tries so hard,” she’d said to Chel. “I think… I think that’s why. Really. Don’t look at… don’t give me that look. I think he thought he was being… kind.”
Somehow.
The rain is just like the fall of a thousand bells dull into the dirt. It mixes the dirt to mud. The morning passes and after telling him all the hounds’ tales: chasing Fen’Harel off across the Fade, the Mabari at the Hero’s side who drove back the Blight with only the ringing of his bark and the flash of his jaw, the dog who found Chel walking out to sea, she moves on to telling Banlen stories of wolves. The wolves who ran with the Emerald Knights into battle. She removes her knife. She kisses him very firmly on his cheek and immediately feels regret when she sees how it makes his eye roll. She feels instinctively that she’s stumbled onto some sort of aggressive behavior by bringing her mouth so close to his. She strokes his cheek instead and rubs behind his ear until he is somewhat calm again, although he is still breathing too fast, too hot.
She pulls out the little branch she’d snapped off as they’d passed into the deep forest. She wriggles it above his gaze. Banlen’s eyes go bright; his mouth closes, then drops open. She drops the branch and he snaps out and grasps the oak in his jaw and with precision and speed she opens a path for his spirit.
The rain makes mud and the mud is red.
Pangara sits and strokes the fur and when she has no more stories of hounds, she tells the stories of wolves.
And she remembers. And she wonders. She wonders where he is. Where he walks and whether he travels well; where it is he’s going. And she wonders if she will ever look at the world without seeing him: this man forever roaming, head bent beneath the rain, down every red and muddy road.