by Kate Elliott
Rays splintering off the rising sun caught a gleam within the wreckage of the main tent, and Kirya jumped back, fearing she had uncovered her mother’s bones, although she had tried to keep away from the area within the tent where her mother had died. But this had a more silvery shine than bone. It fluttered as if a rat crawled beneath it. In its shimmering, restless billow, mist breathed out of the dead hulk.
“Gods,” she breathed.
Mariya set down her rake. Her face was drawn with pain, aged by grief. “The demon still lives.”
“No, it’s just the wind.” Kirya scrounged for scraps of cloth and wound them around her hands, then cleared a path for herself into the hot ashes and grabbed for the cloth. She heaved it up, skipping backward, and the cloak unfurled like a great wing, ash and flakes of soot spinning away from it.
Even caught in the fire, unprotected, it had not burned. It showed no stain at all, no soot, no blackened edges, no discoloration where the heat should have browned it.
She looked at Mari. Her cousin straightened, squaring her shoulders. Now the accusation would come: the demon cloak had brought this down on them. They were tainted, and Kirya had been the cause.
“Did you see the raiders?” Mariya’s voice was hoarse from shouting and crying all night.
“No.”
“They wore the Vidrini patterns. That boy made eyes at me, and flattered me with trivial gifts, and then went back to his tribe’s council and told them everything there was to know about what an easy target we’d make. Then maybe some woman talked to Uliya or Yara, and that is how we were betrayed. But I took the first step, wanting a pretty boy to smile at me even if I did know a Vidrini boy couldn’t possibly be serious about me.” She touched the lapis-lazuli beads that bound the ends of her hair, meaning, perhaps, to fling them to the ground. But she lowered her hand, leaving them in place, and glanced toward Orphan, seated on their last milking stool, working with quiet efficiency.
“I know what we have to do.”
“IT’S THE WAY of things when a tribe is dying,” said Mother Oliski, come to survey the ruins. An amazing number of people had walked out from the main encampment to survey the aftermath of the raid, all those people who had refused to look at them yesterday. “The stronger takes what it needs from the weaker. The wolf picks off the diseased. It’s for the best.”
Aunt stared straight ahead, not speaking, not hearing. Mariya confronted the visitors.
“We no longer have anything you want, Mother Oliski. Why have you come, except to pick at the bones?”
“Tssh! You should be grateful for any offer you get, girl. We’d be willing to take your remnant into our tribe as servants. Your mother is a good weaver, if her hands aren’t ruined. If you’re obedient and work hard, we might allow you to marry Laoshko despite your low position. It’s the best a girl like you can hope for.”
Edina hissed.
Kirya began to speak, a bleat of anger more than a true word, then bit her tongue. Mother Oliski was right. She was only glad her mother had been spared this final dishonor.
Mariya stood beside her mother, squinting as though trying to identify an unpleasant flavor. “What makes you think, Mother Oliski, that we are interested in negotiating with you?”
“Hah! You have nothing with which to negotiate, girl. A wagon, a pair of broken-down horses, a straggle of a herd, a single chest of poor possessions. You have no man in your tribe, not even sons who can grow.”
“Kiri,” said Mari in an undertone. “Fetch Feder’s saber and give it to Orphan.”
“Heh?”
Mari threw her a stinging look. Kirya was so startled by the intensity of that gaze that she obeyed. She scrounged in the wagon as Mari kept talking, raising her voice so everyone who had gathered to gloat could hear her.
“You can all go back to the confluence unless you have come in good faith to negotiate. The Moroshya tribe is departing today, so if you wish to speak to us, be quick about it.”
Some laughed, while others scoffed. They were vultures, waiting for the dying corpse to stop twitching, only there was nothing holy about their intentions. Kirya walked around behind the wagon, where Orphan hovered well away from Aunt and the other women. She offered him the saber. He stared first at the blade, then at her. She indicated Mariya and pressed the saber against his arms until, reflexively, he took it from her.
Mari said, in a loud voice, “You may all as well witness. That you rodents all scurried over here to sniff for food interrupted my betrothal.”
She turned to look at Orphan, whose eyes grew almost round as he stared at her in surprise. Women have no choice in marriage, of course. While any man, however powerful or poor, could walk up to any woman, however well- or ill-connected, few marriages were founded on such unstable earth as sexual desire or the impulse of a moment.
Mariya could be silly, vain, self-centered, and vague, but the desperate gamble she threw now made her entire body seem larger and more imposing; she was a daughter of the gods, loosing the last arrow left in her quiver.
Orphan caught the shaft at once. He frowned mightily, but his body became taut with expectation and joy. He unsheathed the blade and, like steel taken life, cut past the onlookers to stand in front of Mari with blade extended. She lifted her chin expectantly. Kirya wept silently, and she did not know why.
In the gathered crowd, some tittered, while others drew back as though they could not bear to witness the shame of an orphan marking a headwoman’s daughter, even in a tribe so cast out that it now consisted merely of two adult sisters, a daughter and a niece, and what remained of their paltry herd.
Orphan rested the tip of the blade on Mari’s cheek. She stiffened, preparing herself, and he sliced a short mark, not too deep, into the skin. Blood welled, sliding to her jaw. He did not smile. If anything, he looked more grave.
Mari said, through the pain, “Now you see we have everything we need. A headwoman, her daughter properly wed, and our own herds intact. We may be a poor tribe, but we are not dead. If you have nothing further to say to us, then go.”
Kirya would not have expected every onlooker to depart. After all, there might be a great deal of entertainment in watching them load their solitary wagon and lumber off shrouded in the tatters of their doomed pride. But the taint of demon’s breath rested heavily on the scene.
When the last of them was out of earshot, Mari shook herself, although she did not touch the mark on her cheek or the blood on her skin. “We have to get the children back.”
“How are we going to do that?” Kirya twisted her hands into her belt. She didn’t know whether to slap Mari, or embrace her.
“This is how we’re going to do it,” said Mari in a calm voice, just as if she were headwoman. “I have to remain separate from Orphan now anyway, and I’ve no tent to go into seclusion. You and I will ride after the raiders. We’ll take anything possible to ransom back the children. We’ll claim kin-right to the things they’ve stolen, like Feder’s winged kur.”
“We have no power to make them give anything back.”
“We’re going—you and I—and that’s all there is to it. Orphan will stay with Mother and Edina and the herd. They’ll travel to that swale where we hunted the gar-deer, and wait for us there. He knows how to survive, and he can do anything that Feder and Uncle Olig could do, maybe not as well, but he learned from them.”
Orphan was a clever youth, always learning, the hardest worker Kirya had ever met. That he was a good-looking boy always off-limits to her, and now married to her beloved cousin, must not cloud her judgment. She did not want to become a servant in another tribe where she would be assigned the most arduous or tedious tasks like churning and cleaning skins and smoking meat and hauling night pans out of tents every morning, given the worst cut of meat at mealtime and the last curdled ladle of milk, and left to sleep at the edge of camp under a wagon no matter the weather.
Reluctantly, Kirya nodded her agreement. “If we can get the children back, we can stay far
from the other tribes. With Orphan’s skills and our hunting, we can survive until the children are grown. But I don’t know how our tribe can grow.”
“I do.” Mari’s gaze slid over to rest on Orphan. In Mari’s look Kirya saw a softening that abruptly spoke its secret: Mari had also long admired the handsome orphan the gods had tossed into their midst, but she had feared her mother’s anger too much to do anything about it.
Now she had him. And Kirya didn’t.
“Why shouldn’t we take in other orphans?” asked Mari.
“It’s bad luck to take in orphans.”
“Bad luck?” Mari gestured to the wreckage surrounding them. “What does that matter now?”
OUTRIDERS MET THEM before they came into sight of the Vidrini camp. That one was the youth who had gifted Mariya with the lapis-lazuli nets was evident from the way he jeered with more blustery force than his young comrades as they galloped in circles around the two girls but did not, of course, make any move to touch them.
“What are those? What are those? Beggars and servants, beggars and servants. Orphan, orphan, will you come out to play? Pick up my boots, grease my harness! Here’s the scum from the broth for your licking.”
Kirya and Mariya had ridden for five days on the trail of the Vidrini tribe, and Kirya was too hungry and too exhausted from grief to shout back in kind. Mari kept her gaze fixed forward, ignoring the youths. She might have been a daughter of the Sakhalin, with that proud gaze and contemptuous expression.
People stared as the two girls rode into camp. Here were fine tents, and a blacksmith’s portable foundry pouring its rich offerings of smoke to the heavens. The Vidrini had no Singer, but they had churns fitted with copper trimmings, weavings hanging in profusion, men strutting around in brightly embroidered shirts, and women wearing everyday jewelry like bracelets and silver necklaces because they were wealthy enough to show off their riches even as they went about their daily chores. Or perhaps because they had servants to do the chores for them.
Mari’s glare cut a passage right up to the awning of the headwoman’s tent. Mari dismounted while Kirya remained in the saddle, scanning the camp for any sign of the children.
Shockingly, the Vidrini headwoman was a foreigner. Like Orphan, she had demon-scratched eyes, not round but slanted as though a demon’s claws had raked them into her face. But she had a much more foreign look than Orphan, a real Easterner with hair as black as soot, eyes as black as night, and flat features marked particularly by a cruel mouth. Seated on a plush pillow, she did not rise to greet them. Feder’s winged kur was propped on a stand beside her, and a small girl child with similar eyes but lighter hair sat on a pillow next to the kur, dressed in unspeakably rich silk robes.
Mariya marched to the edge of the carpet, and spoke in a clear, carrying voice. “It is easy to steal servants from tribes that cannot defend themselves. No wonder you Vidrini have become rich.”
Many folk, both male and female, had gathered, but it was women who hissed at Mari’s bold insult.
“That which is dying is prey,” said the headwoman, her words clipped off by a foreigner’s way of speaking. “What do you want?”
“My kinsmen returned to me. My tribes-folk released.”
“Those who came of their free will cannot be ‘released,’ ” said the headwoman with the scorn wielded by the powerful. A man sauntered out of the crowd and ducked under the awning, to kneel behind her. He was the war leader they had seen at the confluence. He whispered into her ear, and she nodded without taking her gaze off Mariya.
“Then the Moroshya tribe claims compensation for their migration into the Vidrini tribe.”
The Vidrini headwoman laughed mockingly. “How do you mean to enforce your claim?”
“I am here as representative of the headwoman of the Moroshya tribe, who is my mother. I negotiate on her behalf for the return of two sons of the Moroshya tribe. Furthermore, you have taken two daughters of the Moroshya tribe against their will. That is a grave violation of the laws of the gods.”
“You say so only because yours is the weak tribe, and mine is the strong. Do you mean to trouble me longer, or will you go, so I may be at peace?”
Mounted, Kirya was able to see over the heads of the crowd. Trying to hide around the curve of a tent stood Yara, the bitch, looking anxious as she surveyed the assembly. Over a distance, two gazes may meet. Yara jolted back, vanishing behind the tent.
Betrayed by their own tribesmen.
“The gods will judge in the end,” said Mariya.
“So they will. Are you finished?”
“We have brought ransom.”
The war leader snorted, and people guffawed and chortled.
The Vidrini headwoman smiled. “Do you mean to return to my cousin’s nephew the pretty baubles he gifted you? I see you wear them still. I gave them to him myself, when he told me of his plan.”
Mariya ignored the laughter and gaily spoken taunts. She waited for a proper response.
“What can you offer us? We relieved you of everything of value, except the piebald mare. I hear it bolted when the gelding broke free.” The headwoman ran a covetous hand over the belly of the winged kur. Kirya found her teeth on edge, her jaw tight, wanting to crush that hand and knowing she could do nothing to get Feder’s kur back.
Mari said, “We have cloth worth the ransom of the children. We’ll trade it to you, in return for them.”
Her proud expression grew cunning. “Hu. I doubt it, but let’s see. I’m willing to bargain. It would amuse me.”
The man smirked, and Kira had a sudden idea that these two were lovers, even though the headwoman of a tribe and her war leader ought not be engaged in such a way. Desire clouded judgment, everyone knew that.
“I need to see they are safe and unharmed before I make my offer,” said Mariya.
“Very well. Go get them.” Her war leader did not move, but a ripple stirred the assembly as someone else hurried off into the camp. While they waited, Kirya examined the man boldly, knowing he had no right to look directly at her. He was a very good-looking man, with golden-white hair and light blue eyes, an arresting face, broad shoulders, and lean hips. Although not as handsome as Orphan with his black hair and leaner face, he was a man in his prime. Had he lured the foreign woman into the tribes with the promise of power and position? Or had she followed him out of lust, and ripped the leadership of the Vidrini tribe away from whatever hapless woman had held it before her? Feeling the pressure of Kirya’s gaze, he glanced toward her and, with a frown, looked away.
“Kiri! Kiri!”
Kirya rose on her stirrups. The gelding sidestepped, sensing her spurt of joy and relief. “We’re here.”
Three children came running, sobbing as they saw Mariya, and tumbled to a halt beside her. Her grim expression never wavered from the Vidrini headwoman.
“Three children,” said Mariya, without acknowledging them. “Where is the fourth? The older boy?”
Oh gods. Kontas.
The headwoman’s smile was meant to wound. “We traded him away yesterday. Got a good offer for him from an eastern merchant who was passing on the Golden Road, south of here. They liked his gold-silk hair and pretty face.”
Kirya was off the gelding in an instant, but Mari’s curt command slapped her.
“Kirya, stop there. Don’t move!”
Shaking, Kirya found an arrow in her right hand and her bow gripped in her left. Men had pushed forward. She was not dead only because she was female; a man would have been cut down for the impiety.
“You must have known it was likely we would come after the children to redeem them. It goes against the laws of the gods to trade him away so quickly.”
“You are a foolish, foolish girl. We would have traded away the other boy, too, but the merchant only wanted the blond one. Now, take your complaining and depart, or make your offer and I will consider it.”
“The gods will punish you,” said Mariya, so gray that she looked half dead. But wasn’t th
eir tribe already half dead, thrashing about blindly as the lifeblood drained out on the ground? Oh, gods, how terrified Kontas must be! And their mother dead in the fire—an honorable death, sent to the gods, certainly, but dead is dead. Kirya could not speak for tears, knowing herself half an orphan already although she had cousins to succor her. And yet what did she have to look forward to? Orphan was taken. What man would accept her Flower Night, now that her night with Orphan had been interrupted in such a illomened manner? The gods had cursed her. What did she have left?
Nothing.
“Mari, it’s as she says, take it or leave it.” She had worn gloves as a precaution, and she unslung the quiver from her back and untied the bundle, heedless of those edging close to shield the headwoman, whom they all obviously feared and obeyed even if she was a foreign monster with demon eyes. She grabbed the cloak with her gloved hands and shook it free.
They shouted with dismay when the silver cloth snapped out like the unfurling wings of one of the gods’ holy steeds. Only the headwoman and her war leader did not shrink back. The silk-adorned girl child covered her face and began to cry. Her mother grabbed the girl’s wrists, pulled them down, and slapped the little thing in the face.
“Never snivel! Don’t show fear.” She looked up at Mariya. “Give us the cloth. Take the children. It’s a fair bargain. They’re worth nothing to us, just more mouths to feed.”
“What of our other goods? The winged kur belonging to our war leader? The worth of those of our tribe members who have crossed the lines to join your tribe? We’re owed something in recompense.”
“You’re owed nothing. You are fortunate I am in a generous mood today.”
“Give the cloth to her, Kiri,” said Mariya without looking toward her cousin. “Children, start walking out of camp. Stanyo, Asya, keep Danya between you, as she is smallest. Steady.”
