The Reawakened
Page 2
He watched out the window. “You and Etarek and Jonek should move in as soon as we leave. Rhia and Marek will be gone soon.”
“You sure they don’t mind us staying at their house? We’re not even kin.”
“Malia is Rhia’s great-niece. Besides, it’ll be easier for her to stay in the same house.”
“But it would be easier on Jonek for us to stay here.”
He held in his frustration at her continuing need to argue with him. “It’s a better house, and Jula will help you with the children.”
“It’ll get crowded when everyone comes back.”
“We’ll deal with that when it happens.” He brushed a dark curl off his son’s forehead. “If it happens.”
“Dravek, before they get here, I want you to know something.”
He braced himself for another harangue. Last night she’d accused him of abandoning their child by going off to fight with Lycas’s troops. It seemed that no matter what he did, it was the wrong choice in her eyes.
“I admire what you’re doing,” she said.
He turned from the window. “You do?”
“I’ve thought about it. We have to get beyond being Kalindons and Tirons and Asermons and Velekons. We’re one people now, and I have to accept that.” She let out a gust of air, blowing a golden curl off her cheek. “So I’m joining the Tiron defense unit. The village needs more protectors, and I have experience from guarding Kalindos.” She raised her arms to the side. “It just makes sense.”
A knock sounded. He gave Kara one last admiring smile. “I did love you for a reason, you know.”
A little laugh escaped her. “I’m sure I loved you, too, Dravek.” She scrunched up her forehead. “Somehow.”
Galen entered, followed by Etarek. Dravek handed his son to the Deer, who stepped back against the wall.
“I still have this,” Kara said. From a side pocket of her pack she pulled the red ribbon that Thera had wound around their arms during their wedding, the ribbon that had bound them to their marital bed. It was wrinkled and dusty now.
Dravek swallowed, then extended his arm beside hers. Solemnly, Galen wrapped the red ribbon around their arms. Dravek remembered the trapped sensation brought on when he’d felt it the first time, how he could barely breathe at the thought of leaving Sura.
When the ribbon was wound tight, Galen stepped back and cleared his throat. “Kara, do you dissolve this marriage of your own free will, without acrimony, and do you vow to provide this man with reasonable access to the child your marriage has produced, so that he may grow up in the knowledge of the love of two parents?”
She looked up into Dravek’s eyes. “I do,” she said clearly.
Galen turned to Dravek, repeating the vow but finishing with, “Do you vow to make every reasonable effort to care for the child your marriage has produced, so that he may grow up in the knowledge of the love of two parents?”
“I do,” he said.
Galen picked up a knife that was lying on the chair nearby. “Pull it tight.”
They moved their arms apart until the red ribbon was taut. The Hawk sliced it cleanly. As the ribbon’s end fluttered around his wrist, Dravek felt a weight lift. Instead of sensing his Spirit’s condemnation and disappointment, he felt suddenly right. His lungs filled with what felt like the deepest breath in over a year.
“Thank you,” they told Galen in unison, then shared a laugh at their mutual relief.
“You’re welcome.” He looked at Dravek. “I’m afraid I’ll need you to witness her marriage to Etarek. Unless you want to drag in someone off the street in your stead.”
Dravek considered it, then decided that dragging a Tiron anywhere would end his life early.
The ceremony was brief but sincere. Jonek cried through the entire thing, despite Dravek’s ministrations.
When Kara and Etarek kissed, she let out a great sigh. Dravek knew from her tone of longing that his wife had remained faithful to him until the end of their marriage.
She turned to him. “Ready to go?”
They made their way down the street, Dravek holding his son while Etarek carried his pack. His steps lightened when he saw Sura outside her door. She was bouncing on her toes, something he’d never seen her do.
Dravek’s steps lightened when he saw Sura outside her door. She was bouncing on her toes, something he’d never seen her do.
“I remember last night!” she yelled as they approached, then pointed to her head. “The holes are gone!”
Her smile rivaled the rising sun. He wanted to throw his arms around her and share her jubilance. Instead he clutched his son tighter and whispered a prayer of thanks to their Snake Spirit.
When he reached Sura, she beamed up at him. “It means we’re doing the right thing by leaving.” Her voice cracked on the last word. Now that he was close he could see that her cheer held an edge of grief.
“Are you ready to go?”
She hesitated, then ducked back into the house without a word. In a minute she reappeared with Malia.
Etarek stepped forward, but Sura made no move to hand off their daughter. She pressed her forehead against the infant’s and closed her eyes. Everyone stood silent. Dravek’s chest tightened. He knew he should be saying goodbye to Jonek, but all he could do was watch his own emotions mirrored on Sura’s face.
Finally she kissed the baby’s forehead and forced a smile. “Be good for Papa. See if you can beat your stepbrother and be first to sleep through the night.”
Dravek looked down at Jonek. “She’s thrown down the gauntlet. Don’t embarrass me.” He kissed his son’s cheek quickly, then laid him in Kara’s arms. She gazed up at Dravek.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
He tucked one of her tawny curls behind her ear. “Just be happy.”
She gave an impish smile. “I already am.”
A sob came from his right. He looked to see Sura, empty-armed, doubled over. Etarek held Malia, who waited only a moment to start bawling.
Dravek bent over beside Sura, with Rhia on her other side. She sat on the ground and hugged her knees.
“Can’t cry, can’t cry.” She rocked back and forth. “If I cry, she’ll think something’s wrong.” She looked up at Etarek with wild but dry eyes. “Go. Get her away from me.” He hesitated, transfixed by her grief. “Go!” she choked.
“Easy,” Dravek whispered, rubbing her back. “If you have normal second-phase powers now, that means you can make people forget.”
She gasped, then hid her face in her arms. Great shuddering breaths racked her body.
He nodded to Etarek. “Best if you go now.”
Etarek and Kara slowly turned and walked back to their home. As their footsteps faded, Sura let loose with a sob, and the tears started to flow. She turned away from him to bury her face in Rhia’s neck.
Rhia held her tight and squeezed her own eyes shut. “I know it hurts.”
“The worst part is—” Sura hiccupped. “—she’ll be better off with them. I don’t know how to be a mother.”
“Nonsense. Malia will never be better off with anyone but you.” Rhia pulled back and wiped Sura’s tears. “So you do your job and get back here as soon as you can. She needs you to be a warrior, and she needs you to be her mother. Mali showed you a woman can be both.”
Dravek felt footsteps approaching. He turned to see Lycas and Vara half a block away.
“Sura, your father’s coming,” he whispered.
She pushed out of Rhia’s embrace and frantically wiped her eyes and cheeks with her hand, then her sleeve. She stood up, brushed off her shirt, and glanced between Dravek and Rhia. “Well? How do I look?”
He gazed at her, grateful that he didn’t have to leave her behind.
“Brave and beautiful,” Rhia said finally, voicing Dravek’s exact thoughts.
Acknowledgments:
Many invaluable resources helped me build the story and world of The Reawakened, including Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife by John A.
Nagl and Guerrilla Warfare by Mao Tse-Tung (translated by Samuel B. Griffith II). Lycas’s concept of the “war of the flea” was borrowed from Robert Taber’s landmark publication, The War of the Flea: The Classic Study of Guerrilla Warfare.
Many thanks to my family, for all their love and faith from the beginning.
I’m indebted, as always, to my beta readers, for seeing what I couldn’t: Adrian Pastore, Terri Prizzi, Cecilia Ready and Rob Staeger. Kudos to the hardworking folks behind the scenes at Luna Books who brought the book to life: Tracy Farrell, Mary-Theresa Hussey, Margo Lipschultz, Marianna Ricciuto and Kathleen Oudit.
Thanks to my amazing, intrepid editor Stacy Boyd, who helped me whittle and trim the Amazing Colossal Manuscript into a novel that can be comfortably held with two hands. My agent, Ginger Clark of Curtis Brown, Ltd., is the sweetest, strongest advocate I could have ever hoped for. I am beyond blessed to have both these ladies in my life.
Thanks most of all to my husband, Christian Ready, for his love and inspiration, and for keeping the Flying Fear Monkeys at bay.
You might as well expect the rivers to run backward as that any man who is born a free man should be contented when penned up and denied liberty to go where he pleases. —In-mut-too-yah-lat-lat (“Chief Joseph”), Nimiputimt (Nez Perce) tribe
CONTENTS
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
PART TWO
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
EPILOGUE
PART ONE
01
Tiros
Dust gritted between Rhia’s teeth as she buried another dead soldier. She tugged the rough cloth covering her mouth and nose, securing its bottom edge inside her collar. As the hot wind changed direction, she shifted, keeping her back to the scouring gusts to protect her eyes.
A warm hand touched her elbow. “Rhia, let me finish.”
She squinted up into the early evening light, at the ruddy face of her husband, Marek. “I need to occupy my mind as much as you do today. Besides, I’m the only one who can deliver them.”
“But you’re not the only one who can shovel.” His blue-gray eyes smiled at her over his own cloth mask, crinkling the lines at their corners. “Save your strength for dancing.”
She wiped the sweat from her temple and looked behind her at the road leading into Tiros. “It’s hard to imagine celebrating in this place.”
Trees had been razed for a mile outside the village’s perimeter to avoid giving cover to the enemy. Their trunks and branches had been used to build watchtowers, two of which loomed behind her, one on either side of the road leading into town. Inside the towers, Eagle lookouts and Cougar archers kept guard.
Few people left Tiros unseen. Fewer entered Tiros unshot.
At Rhia’s feet, the Ilion soldier lay in a hole deep enough to keep the vultures away but shallow enough that the Ilions—or “Descendants,” as Rhia’s people called them—could retrieve the bodies the next time they arrived on a “diplomatic mission.”
In a line stretching to her right lay the soldier’s five comrades—dressed in plainclothes rather than their typical red-and-yellow uniforms—along with the spy who’d brought them. Other Tirons had dug the graves this morning; it was up to Marek and Rhia to fill them in and send the soldiers to the Other Side. No one joined them to pay respects to the dead, for the enemy and its spy had done nothing to earn it.
Marek tossed a shovelful of dust over the Descendant’s face. “If Lycas were here, he’d want to put their heads on pikes on the road to Asermos.”
She sighed at the reminder of her brother’s brutality. “And give the Descendants an excuse for a full-scale invasion. At least with an honorable burial, we can claim our archers killed them defending the town—which is the truth.”
“Doesn’t mean they didn’t enjoy it.” His shovel clanked against a rock hidden in the dust. “Gave them a chance to practice the unofficial village motto: ‘Keep Outsiders Outside.’”
They shared a grim look at the rows of tents sitting on the edge of the village. Tiros, built to hold perhaps a thousand people, had swollen to three times its original size with refugees from the villages of Velekos and Asermos, as the Ilion army pressed northward. The same aspects that made Tiros easy to defend—no immediate water access and flat, dry terrain surrounded on three sides by steep, rugged hills—also made survival difficult. In the twelve years since the Descendant invasion, Tiros had suffered growing pains that threatened to tear it apart.
Marek tapped down the dust over the last soldier with the toe of his boot, then marked the grave with a makeshift Ilion flag—a long stick with a red-and-yellow cloth attached.
Rhia knelt beside the grave, closed her eyes and raised her palms. In the span of one deep breath, she drew a shroud between herself and this world of vigilance. The next breath brought an awareness of Crow, her Guardian Spirit Animal, whose presence had hovered close to her for nearly all of her thirty-seven years. Now He waited to take what was His.
With her third breath, she called the crows.
The chant rumbled low in her throat, and as soon as it left her mouth it was swept away by the wind. No matter, for in this song her voice traveled to the Other Side, where all places were one. She could have whispered it or even sung it inside her mind. They would hear. They would come.
Within moments they approached, their caws riding the wind, whose roar obscured the rush of their heavy wings. Seven birds, one for each death.
Rhia wondered how the Descendants felt about being carried off by Crow, a Spirit they didn’t believe in. Did they search for Xenia, their goddess of Death, lament her absence and finally her nonexistence?
The souls of these soldiers passed quickly, without reluctance. Though their deaths had been violent, they believed they had died for the greater glory of Ilios, just as they’d desired.
The young Asermon spy, on the other hand, resisted. The ache of his regret skewered her as he tried to escape Crow’s embrace. The man, whose name she didn’t know, had betrayed his own people.
His own people. Generations ago, the citizens of the four villages—Asermos, Velekos, Kalindos and Tiros—had divided themselves, focusing on their differences and long-standing tribal rivalries. The disunity had made them easy prey for the Ilions. But now, with their common oppression by the Spirit-shunning Descendants, they stood as one people.
Crow took the spy, completing His passage to the Other Side. Rhia worried the Asermon would linger, full of bitterness and sorrow, in the gloomy Gray Valley between here and there.
The cries of the crows faded, and Rhia lowered her hands. Marek’s fingers under her elbow steadied her as she stood, her knees aching and heart thumping from the last soul’s perilous journey.
He brushed the dust off the crow feather around her neck, then did the same for his own fox- and wolf-tail fetishes. Then he unbuckled the waterskin from his belt and offered it to her. As usual, it was nearly empty.
She squinted at the angle of the sun.
“It’s almost time.”
“Nilik could come back tomorrow, or the next day. A Bestowing might take longer if Raven claims him.”
“Hush.” She rubbed the back of her neck, which always prick-led at the mention of the greatest Spirit. “Don’t assume anything. It shows arrogance.”
“No.” He put an arm around her shoulders. “It shows faith.”
Rhia clamped her lips tight. She couldn’t blame Marek for wanting to believe that Raven would deliver them from occupation. Raven was the only Spirit who had never bestowed a human with an Aspect—a combination of power and wisdom reflecting traits of that animal. An ancient legend said that Raven would one day bestow Her Aspect when the Spirit-people faced their most harrowing hour. Rhia hated to imagine an hour more harrowing than those they lived in now.
Before her son Nilik’s birth eighteen years ago, a deluge of dreams foretold that the Raven child would be born to a Crow like Rhia. Most of her people believed it. Some even hoped this event would spark another Reawakening, when the Spirits would all appear together in this world, to save the people who had served Them for thousands of years.
Some days, the only alternative to faith was despair.
As Rhia and Marek walked hand in hand into the village, a shout came from the watchtower above.
“South!”
They stopped and looked up. Sani the Eagle woman pointed to their left. All five Cougars in her watchtower scrambled into position. Rhia saw the silhouettes of their bows against the azure sky.
“Someone’s coming.” Marek dropped the shovels and ran in the direction Sani was pointing.
“Wait!” Rhia rushed to keep up with him, and only succeeded because he waited for her at the foot of the watchtower. “It could be more Descendants.”
She stood on tiptoe and strained to see what had provoked the alert. The only sign was a rising cloud of dust, small enough that she could block it with her outstretched thumb. It created a tan puff against the darker browns and greens of the background hills.
“It can’t be Nilik.” Marek shaded his right temple against the glare of the setting sun. “Near as I can tell, this person’s on horseback.”