But he wasn’t looking at the town.
She had her back to him. Her wolf-hide cloak was gone, replaced by a simple tunic of woven nettle-fiber, but her face was still striped with the red clay of her clan.
“And you?”
“A wolf does not care what a badger fashions from stolen metal,” San snarled. But it was a reflex. The venom had no fang behind it. princess mononoke
She turned and walked into the trees. But her voice floated back, softer than he had ever heard it.
He descended into the forest.
“You shouldn’t come here,” she said, her voice the rasp of a river over stones. “You smell of iron.” But he wasn’t looking at the town
“Permitted?”
Ashitaka stopped. “I haven’t touched iron in a week. It’s the wound.”
San had not spoken to him in three days. Not since the head of the Forest Spirit had been returned, not since the land had begun its slow, painful crawl back from the brink of decay. The green was returning—new moss on blackened stones, timid shoots of bamboo pushing through ash—but something between them had turned to stone. “And you
“To walk beside me.”
“Moro’s tooth,” San said. “And moss from the den where I was found. Wear it. It will remind the spirits that you are… permitted.”
Ashitaka looked at her. Really looked. The human girl raised by wolves. The princess who was no princess. A creature of tooth and claw who had learned to weep when she thought no one was watching.
San almost smiled. Almost. “Tell him the elk chooses the rider. Not the other way around.”