“Didn’t we decide you’re not to call me mortal names? You’ve found me in other lives, did you not? You haven’t left my side in this one. How weak do you think my faith is if I wouldn’t trust that you’ll find me in the next? I won’t be Yuka then.”
“I’m not ready.”
“Call me by my name,” she said. “And let me follow the North Star home.”
A chilled tear fell. “Please, Love.”
“You have to let me go,” she whispered.
The weather seemed to agree. The edges of the tent trembled as a late-season storm moved the sealskin furs. The first drops of rain threatened to turn our peaceful night into something else. “My beautiful wolf. My savior. The star who became a man. My time has come.”
I shook my head. “You don’t have to die. You can finish your mortal cycle. Come with me. We can go to my realm together. You won’t grow old, or tired, or?—”
“No,” she said quietly. “I did good in this life, and I’ll do good in the next.”
“I don’t think you understand.” I didn’t care if it was insulting. Call it denial, call it bargaining, I wasn’t ready. “I’m not telling you to remain one hundred and thirteen on the ice. I’m saying you can join immortality. It’s not the afterlife humansdescribe. This would be us. You and me. It’s like…it’s like becoming a god. It’s like?—”
I couldn’t think of a time I’d rambled before this moment.
Tears were still unfamiliar to me. I wasn’t sure as to the sensation when uncomfortable heat spiked along my eyes. I grimaced against the pain as it slithered into my chest. “Please,” I said quietly. “I’ve asked so little of you. Yuka?—”
“Three names, yet none of them feel honest on your lips. In each life, you call to my body, but not my soul. Look at me,” she smiled, wrinkled lips cracking, eyes crinkling. “I was beautiful once, perhaps. But you aren’t here for my body. Name my soul. It’s her you seek.”
My lip quivered. “I’m supposed to be the one who gives advice.”
Bent, papery fingers brushed against my face as she cupped my cheek, wiping my tears. “I have a plan. We’ll play a game, you and I.”
My hands slid over hers, tender against knobby knuckles and thin, loose skin as I tightened her hold against me.
“Shh, shh. This body’s time has come. You were wolf, you were man, you were spirit, you were god. You remember all things, but perhaps I remember, too.”
I didn’t want to tell her that no, humans did not remember.
She would forget me the moment her soul passed. I would be left to grieve, to mourn, to be abandoned once more the moment she escaped my hold. She would be on to new things, and I would be trapped for one hundred years more in my desperate cycle.
“I’ve always liked snow hares,” she said. “Peaceful, curious. They look like messengers from the underworld, don’t you think?”
“Hares?” If I hadn’t fought for her healing, I would have been worried she was battling confusion.
“The game.” She smiled. “Pay attention.”
“Snow hares,” I repeated.
I wrapped my free arm around her, cradling her as she began to drift backward. Raindrops began to pelt the tent with methodical beats. It wasn’t a fall, not truly. It was more like sleep called her name, and she listened to its soft voice.
“A wolf would be too easy,” she said, voice growing softer as her lids flitted shut. “A hare, however. That would be quite the trick.”
“Yu—” I bit the name off. I couldn’t bring myself to dishonor her wish. “I’m as old as time,” I told her. “I didn’t begin to number the years until I met you, for they were meaningless. I didn’t know what it was to be mortal. I didn’t know what it was to love.”
I wasn’t finished with my speech. My chest ached with unspoken words. I had so much to say, to confess, to hope and demand and beg, but her muscles slackened.
“Love,” she repeated, echoing my final word. “Only Love, from this life until the end.”
It was the last thing she said on the earth before her ghost joined the pink and green slashes of the Northern Lights, another spirit in the Arctic to dance above the ones who’d lost them.
When I wept, the sky joined me.
Chapter Nine
