Mindbond by Nancy Springer

Kor mindspoke me, hiding his amusement.
    Hush , I told him. Oddly, I feared that Tassida might overhear us, though certainly I had never feared that Istas might, or any of the others.
    Kor must have sensed my doubt. He looked at her askance. “Tass, why are you here?”
    Tass had been amiable till then, for her. But the question put her on her mettle at once. I saw her come to warrior alertness on Calimir’s back, as if she carried a spear. “Why not?” she retorted.
    â€œNo reason. But you say you do not wish to travel with us, yet you seem always to be turning up. What—”
    â€œIf you do not want me here,” she interrupted hotly, “I will go.”
    I laughed, feeling more at ease since we were quarreling—our bickering seemed more natural than the silence. “Tass, you have always gone when you wished and come back willy-nilly, like changing weather. What wind blew you here this time?”
    She sighed and let go of spleen for a moment, speaking quietly. “I wanted to see if you are still bent on this witless venture.”
    For answer Kor nodded at the sea. “Greenstone stacks,” he said.
    Weird spires and crags and hillocks of rock rose from the ocean ahead of us, their shapes sometimes round, sometimes mountainous, but stranger than those of any mountain I had ever seen. The day was nearing sundown, the tide running high, and the great rocks stood darkly shining, wet with spray, looming against an orange sky and water of like hue. The steady clamor in my ears, calling of many seabirds and crashing of surf, made me feel lightheaded, as if I were floating rather than riding along at Talu’s jarring trot.
    â€œAnd look,” Kor added, “my cousins.”
    Portions of the dark and shining rock seemed to move, and I blinked, making out the sleek forms of seals, wet and gleaming. They lay basking in the sunset, some sitting upright as if in salute to the fineness of the day, heads pointing skyward, some nudging each other with whiskered noses, swaying into unlikely curves, some lolling in the spray as the rocks wallowed in the waves: the odd, watersheen shapes of the seals echoed the many shapes of the Greenstones. Or perhaps the rocks echoed seal forms. It was as if the rocks stood there, knee-deep in the sea, for no other purpose than for seals to lie on and frolic upon.
    Seals lay at the foot of the cliff to landward, also. Kor dismounted, we all dismounted, and walked softly toward them over the sand of the beach, and they did not flee from us.
    â€œHow can the Otter River folk want them killed!” Kor muttered angrily.
    Kor’s people killed seals sometimes, in need and with reverence, as we of the Red Hart killed deer. But they ate fish so as to spare the seals, and were joyful when they saw that many seals lived.
    â€œOf all creatures, one of the few that has kept the many colors of Sakeema’s time.…”
    The three of us stood looking, the seals nearly at our feet. Indeed, they were of almost every possible creature color, some black, some gray or brown or yellow or russet, and some shone nearly blood-red in the sunset light. Half-grown pups were covered with soft fur as blue as blue fog. Their elders were often mottled and spotted with patches of random color: white ringstreaks, red blankets, brown dapples, yellow specks. I even saw a green tinge on the flanks of some. A grand black bull lifted his head and barked at us—he was as large as I. A gray cow stretched and fanned herself with a flipper. The smallest seal was the size of a small child, but most were middling, about of a weight with a young woman or a youth of the Seal Kindred.
    â€œOn the plains,” Tassida said softly, “horses run in as many colors as these.”
    Except for Calimir, the horses I knew were only brown and dun. All deer were gone except the red, all foxes but the gray, all wolves …
    Kor turned to his yellow dun mare with a sigh and