Kyo stood for a while alone after the Drykas had left. The things the other man had said --"Blackwater make half man strong" "Kyo find self; Kyo find life" "Kyo have family" "Dravite trust Kyo" "Watchman need Kyo's help"-- went rapidly, dizzily through his cold- and pain-addled mind.
He touched tentative fingers to the edges of the sweet-painted wound, and looked down at the grave for his long lost bonded. The rabid part told him to lay in the hole and never again move. The clear-thinking coyote part said to go with Dravite. The him part of him didn't know what to do.
All he knew was the snow was cold, and the air was biting, and Sister and Brother and Pack would be lonely left without him if he did not ever come back to see them again. It was their loneliness that spoke to him; the imagined loneliness, too, of the child Löwe that Dravite had spoken of earlier.
Shivering, he hunched his shoulders up inside the heavy cloak and closed the front of it around him. And then he turned and trudged, human-form, in the direction that Dravite had ridden, still able to see the man on the horizon because of the mostly-flat, uncrowded lay of the land and the tallness of his horse. And the tallness of Dravite himself.
Mostly Dravite had asked for help and had asked to help Kyo, and --boy or aching alone-- Kyo would not deny someone something they might need.
Maybe he should learn not to deny himself.
