The Warrior's Path by Catherine M. Wilson Read Free Book Online

where the shadow had moved under the trees, so I depended on my ears. For several minutes I heard only the sounds I had become used to. Then I heard a sound no animal would make. It might have been the sound of water trickling over rocks, but there was something familiar about it. It was a sound I had been hearing for weeks without being aware of it. It was the gentle clicking of a buckle. It was my warrior.
    Still I didn’t move or make a sound. I didn’t understand why she hadn’t called to me, why she had approached the grove so silently. Until I understood I would stay where I was.
    “You can come down now,” she said.
    I didn’t answer her.
    “Were you going to stay up there all night?”
    She struck a light from her firestones, and a spark fell into a nest of dry grass. In a few minutes she had a small fire burning.
    “Aren’t you coming down?” she said.
    Climbing down was going to be more difficult than climbing up had been. “I think I’m stuck.”
    She came over to the tree and looked up at me.
    “Do the best you can,” she said. “I won’t let you fall.”
    I couldn’t see where to put my feet, but I managed to climb down part of the way. Then I came to a place where I could find no foothold.
    “Slide your foot down the trunk,” she said.
    I did as she told me. When my hands were about to lose their grip, I felt her hand under my foot.
    “Bring the other foot down,” she said.
    I rested as much of my weight as I dared on her hand while I searched for a new foothold. I thought I had found one, but when I put my weight on it, my foot slipped, my hands lost their grip, and I fell. She caught me as if I weighed no more than a sack of barley and set me on my feet.
    I didn’t know whether to thank her or be angry with her.
    “Where were you?” I asked her.
    “Are you hungry?” she said.
    She found our pack and took from it the flatbread we’d baked that morning and some sour apples, picked from a wild apple tree. After we had eaten, she said, “Tell me what you learned.”
    Then I understood that by leaving me alone there, she had meant to teach me something. I thought about what I had done, but first I wanted an answer from her.
    “Where were you?” I asked her.
    “Close by,” she said.
    “Where?”
    “Within sight of this grove. I’ll show you the place in the morning, if you like.”
    “You were watching me?”
    “I saw you when you came out to look around. I couldn’t see you when you were under the trees, but I could see the grove and anyone who might approach it.”
    I didn’t understand then what I was feeling that caused me to question her, but I believe she did understand.
    “I wouldn’t have left you alone,” she said.
    Her words cut the string of doubt that bound my heart. My fear had made me feel that she’d abandoned me, and when I understood that she had been there all along, watching over me, I could have hugged her for giving me that reassurance.
    “Did you sleep?” she asked me.
    “No.”
    “Why not?”
    “It felt dangerous.”
    “You have good instincts,” she said. “What did you do?”
    “What you saw. I watched for anyone approaching.”
    “What did you do when it got dark?”
    “I sat still and worried that something had happened to you.”
    I saw a smile lift the corner of her mouth before she turned away.
    “Is that all?”
    I remembered my fear, and now it seemed so silly that I had to laugh at myself. “I watched my mind make a wolf out of that rock.”
    I pointed to the rock beside the stream and to the fern frond beside it.
    “Look,” I said. “It even has a tail.”
    “You saw a wolf there?”
    “Yes.”
    “Is the wolf your guardian?”
    I had never heard the word before. “My guardian?”
    She shook her head at me and made a tut-tut sound. “You tell me I must know my clan, and you don’t know your guardian?”
    “No,” I said. “What’s a guardian?”
    “A protector, and something more. They remind us of what we once were,