The Golden Swan by Nancy Springer Page B

Wolfwit ran strong in him, stronger than we could well imagine, but the great weaver was demanding his first loyalty; he was fated to be merely and dearly himself.
    I want never to leave you again , he said to Frain, and I was hard put to keep my voice steady as I relayed the message. For it was not to be so, and perhaps he knew that even then. But it was the hope of his heart.
    By the next day Dair was up and about a bit, scorning pain. We rubbed oil on his scabs to keep the skin from tightening. All the wounds were healing cleanly. The wolves sang at dusk again that night, and we watched Dair uneasily, but he ignored them.
    Within several days we were walking along again, and Dair was nearly as supple as ever. That was to his own credit, for he made his limbs stretch and move in spite of pain, and after a while the pain left him. Scars remained. He reminded me more than ever of Trevyn, with his scars.
    We went on through evergreen, oak and scrub pine and into tamarisk, and Frain seemed much the same troublesome youth as ever, and Dair none the worse for his escapade. But looking at him I sometimes felt a shadowy presentiment of further pain to come. Suffering for the son of a king.

Chapter Three
    â€œI still do not understand about changing shapes,” said Frain some few weeks later as we sat after food in the evening.
    So that was why he had been so silent. I had thought he was tired, though of course he had not said so; he never complained of physical woes, and he had walked doggedly even when he had been weak from sickness.… I knew I was tired. It had been a tiring day, a hot and dusty one full of the sizzling sound of locusts in the acacia trees. But his question made me set weariness aside.
    â€œIt is a matter of taking not a false form but another true form,” I started importantly. “If you were to change to—do you ever dream of being something?”
    â€œA bird,” he said. “A flying thing.”
    â€œYes. Well, you would be.…” I lost my voice and my nerve. Already I was sorry we had gotten into this.
    â€œA crippled bird,” he said.
    â€œYes.” I plunged on. “Well, when Dair became a horse, that was not a falsehood or a deception. It was Dair, the horse form of Dair. It was male, as he is. It was young, as he is. I would make an old gray mare.”
    â€œBut how did he do it?” Frain pursued.
    It was very difficult to explain anything to him. He thought in such stark terms, and I in far softer ones. There is a way of seeing a faint star by looking just to the side of it—but he had a mind like a sword, always darting swiftly to the point. I sighed.
    â€œTo be a creature—let us say a horse—”
    Oh, and in this plodding language of his, too. It was awful, it made everything sound like blacksmithing.
    â€œWell, to be a horse you must feel true desire to be a horse, and you must be in sympathy with the horse—a sort of liking, but more than liking—and then you must be able to let go of your human form.”
    â€œBut—you mean completely become the other thing, body, self, everything?” I think he had envisioned the process as something akin to climbing into a dead skin. I nodded.
    â€œYour human form is your own. In the same way, any other form you take will be your own. When you change forms, your essence goes with you, just as when you die it flies and becomes spirit.”
    â€œBut—” He floundered. “But it is monstrous!” he burst out. “Changing shapes, I mean. It is—it is unnatural!”
    How bound within walls he was, walls of his own making. “It is completely natural,” I said. “The goddess is a shape changer. Aene can come to us in any form.”
    â€œBut the goddess—”
    He stopped, thinking. When he spoke again it was coolly and very carefully.
    â€œShamarra is a goddess,” he said, “and she has been changed to a night bird by