Fairytale about a girl growing up with bears, with dragons, ... and finally with humans, but still talking to all animals.
Supports three humans, stays with one. They fight off invaders, he finds a girl, she goes on.
Not a happy ending, not a sad ending. Great story.
The dragons did not sing and Halla had never sung. But now she would mimic the birds, trying to repeat and answer their memory songs. Yet for all this beauty she could not want to be a bird.
For a little while she was happy with the squirrels who had their treasures, who laboured and hunted and hid. But it was without thought or plan. Memory held them too. And it was the same with the other hoarders of the woods, the mice and voles. They seemed to be busy, but it was a business of the paws and teeth, not of the mind.
Or Tarkan Der turned his back on it, staring out, instead, over the enormous unbounded sea on the other side. This went on for two days, and then Roddin and Kiot began to get their bundles together. Each in turn, they tried once more to persuade Tarkan Der to come back with them. He would not come. And now they were turning inland into Marob harbour. He hid himselef in under the foredock among ropes and sails. Halla went to look for him; he had turned bearish, in a den, head buried between paws. When she spoke, kneeling beside him, he pulled her down suddenly on to the cold sail, arm heavy on her neck, his wet cheek by hers. For a time they stayed so. If he could sleep, she thought, sleep through the unhappy months, the heart's hunger, the months of death and cold and not having what you most want, and wake with time gone past and blurred and a new year coming.
