By the time Ysabet reached the second ring of sunken boulders, the golden-grey pollen hung thick enough in the air to blur the outline of the mountain peaks above the basin.
Her lungs burned from the thin air, and her scarf had slipped down below her chin when she ducked under a tangled elder bush. Ahead of her, she could still feel Pip’s frantic, six-legged scrambling through the bond—digging at an empty burrow mouth where no badger had lived since her grandfather’s time—but when she turned to go around a breast-high drift of pale bells, another sound stopped her boots in the grass.
It was a low, deep vibration that seemed to come up through the soles of her feet before it reached her ears: the resonant, three-toned chest hum of a glassback lion when the crystal plates along its throat are whole and vibrating in quiet welcome.
Ysabet froze. The breath went out of her in a warm rush that opened a dozen more white blossoms around her knees.
Between two tall clumps of stems, ten paces away in the shimmering yellow haze, stood Oru.
He was broad-shouldered and tawny in the grey mountain light, his heavy glass back-ridges catching the sun without a single chip or scar. When he took a step toward her through the parted flowers, he walked evenly on all four broad paws; his fourth right claw did not drag sideways through the dirt the way it had dragged on the afternoon they carried him…
