Given to the Earth

by Mindy McGinnis

  “Child,” the Curator huffs, and eases himself onto the floor, exhausted, “the king’s own deeds lie here, freshly inked. He has handled the present well; trust him to weather the past.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Dara

  I wake alone, or almost.

  Kakis sleeps beside me, one leg thrown over my waist and her tail twined around my own, as if I were her littermate.

  “Get off,” I say, shoving her leg when I find it too heavy to lift. The big cat only yawns, her jaws snapping uncomfortably close to my face, then rolls to her other side. I brush Tangata fur from my cloak and look to what’s left of the camp we made last night.

  Faja is gone, Famoor as well. In a tree I spot what remains of his bridle, slashed to uselessness. I swear in Indiri and kick at the ashes of my fire. Faja is Indiri, and raised by cats. I’ll find no sign to mark her path through the forest. Even if Donil were with me, I doubt he could track her.

  And why should I try? I wonder, even as I make a cursory circle to be sure I haven’t missed anything. Faja was no help to me, and her cat a hindrance. At the thought of Kakis, I return to what’s left of last night’s fire, giving the Tangata a glare that would have sent a Stillean swordsman to the privy. She licks her paw and wipes an ear, unconcerned.

  “I . . .” I bite my lip and look off into the forest, feeling a fool. I clear my throat and try again. “Where did she go?”

  Kakis cocks her head, looking for all the earth like she hasn’t any idea who I’m talking about.

  “Faja,” I say. “Your . . . mistress, littermate . . . the . . .” I point to my own skin, though my spots are lighter with youth than Faja’s were. “Her.”

  A deep purr emanates from the cat, and her paws knead the ground. Mock me she might, but I do believe the cat understands what I say to her. I switch to Stillean, a test.

  “Where is your mistress?” I say, and the cat goes still, watching me warily.

  “Where has Faja gone?” I use Indiri now, and Kakis crosses the space between us at her littermate’s name. She reaches forward with one massive paw, delicately resting it on my knee. I bend down, for I think this is what she requests of me.

  “Faja,” I repeat, and Kakis stretches her neck to bring her nose to mine. It rests there, cold, wet, smelling unmistakably of Tangata.

  I’d asked Faja what Kakis’s name meant, and she’d told me to ask my ancestors, and so I had, diving into my memories for any recollection of the name. I’d found it and its meaning, which I remember now as I feel the cat’s flesh against mine.

  Loyal to only one.

  “Tides,” I mutter to myself, and Kakis sneezes into my face.

  * * *

  “Begone,” I shout at the cat as I pass through the forest, but Kakis marches beside me as if I had not spoken. She’s followed me since midmorning, after I covered what remained of our fire and strode for the edge of the Forest of Drennen. I am close now to the plains that stretch through the middle of our island, and in a few suns will see Dunkai, where my people were slaughtered. I have not revisited my birthplace since I crawled from the pit where my mother died, and do not intend to return with a Tangata trailing me.

  Whatever Faja said to Kakis—and I shake my head to even imagine the conversation—it has stuck. Kakis will not leave my side, even when I unhook my bow from my shoulder and swipe at her with it. She only runs ahead of me slightly, tail stuck high in the air, as if to let me know how unconcerned she is.

  “I have no patience for you,” I spit at her, but notice that she’s found a break in the brush, one that I hadn’t spotted. I follow, somewhat chastened. The cat turns to face me, and I am about to speak when she shakes her head. I fall silent and listen. I hear breathing, heavy and male. I hear horses, shifting where they stand. I hear a sword, easing quietly from a scabbard. I hear people, waiting to hear me.

  Kakis slides smoothly back out from the brush, her tail bushy with alarm and ruff raised. She glances at me, and I nod that I understand. The cat’s lip curls minutely and she makes a low, deep sound. I recognize it as a hunting call, one I’ve heard in the woods more than once.

  “It’s only the cats,” one of the men says to the other, his voice carrying.

  “Do they use words now? I heard a voice.”

  “Maybe it was your mother calling you home to dinner.”

  “Maybe it was your wife calling for something else,” the other shoots back.

  There are only the two of them, for if there were a third, he would have shushed them by now, their squabbling giving me plenty of time to circle around the large tree they have camped under.

  Camped under for some time, I think, looking at many nights’ worth of ashes between them, Pietran armor in a pile nearby. Their horses are hobbled, but even given freedom, they would not go far. They are bone thin and weary, their ears not perking when Kakis gives a call from her side of the woods. The Pietran soldiers react quickly, if somewhat stupidly, both of them giving their full attention to her distraction.

  The first does not hear my step, but slaps at his neck as if expecting to find a ninpop bug there instead of the open wound I’ve left behind, his lifeblood leaving in a torrent. He’s on the path of the dead before the second even notices, but I don’t give him long to grieve.

  Kakis emerges to sniff the bodies, her paws sinking deeply into the bloodsoaked ground around them. She chuffs over their corpses, then tosses dirt across them with two quick kicks of her back legs before she joins me by the horses.

  They raise their heads slightly at her wild scent and spattering of their riders’ blood, but only just. There is nothing left in these beasts, and I spot a crust of sea salt on the trailing end of one bridle. These animals were on the beach, then, the same night as I. They survived the wave and moonchanges of travel eating only what they could graze, and by the smell of them, have resorted to rankflower.

  There is nothing of Famoor in these beasts. I unhobble them anyway, leaving them to go where they will. I will not trouble them with a rider, and they could not keep my pace. I hear Kakis fall into step behind me, her pads soft on the forest floor, a light purr in her throat. Welcome or not, I have a traveling companion.

  I turn to face her, and she stops, one paw raised in midair. The forest is quiet around me, aware that death has occurred. The sun warms my back, streaming through the thinning canopy. We are near the edge of Drennen, about to leave the woods the cat knows so well.

  “To Dunkai?” I ask.

  And she steps forward to join me.

  CHAPTER 16

  Witt

  Some Pietra found home before the army itself returned, running from the wave like panicked wood animals from an arrow, too frightened to regroup with their pack later. Others wander back to our shores slowly, most on foot, a few holding the slack reins of horses too tired to carry them. The Lithos before me might have punished those who ran home without searching for their brothers in arms, but I cannot afford to do so. Punishment breeds either respect or resentment, and there is already too much of the second in my army.

  “The Feneen suffered little,” Hadduk says. As Mason, he sits to my right, my other commanders circled around me as we toss words across a stone table. They echo in this room, bouncing back from the high ceiling and sounding even more empty than when they were spoken.

  “Though we lost few fighters, it was not for lack of bravery,” Ank responds in his people’s defense. “It was the Lithos’s own plan that sent us to the gates of Stille and Pietran feet to the beach.”

  He speaks truth, one that rankles even now. Though I had accepted Ank’s offer of Feneen fighters, I had also sent them into the more dangerous situation, charging the freshly reinforced walls of the city, with arrows pouring down on them. I had expected his men’s backs to sport more feathers than a flock of oderbirds, and the brunt of the loss to be theirs. But then the wave came, wiping the beach clean of my
men. I find myself leading an army of strangers who are hard to look upon.

  Yet they are still my army.

  “The Feneen did as they were told,” I say. “If there are harsh words to be said about what happened, they can be said to me.”

  My commanders glance at one another, but remain still.

  “There is nothing to be gained by ill feeling among my army. We marched as one, you’ll remember, our feet treading on the hands of the Feneen so that we could cross a river and set foot on land unknown by Pietra. They stood firm under our weight, holding us even as they drowned. Did they not?”

  I glance around the table and see Ula nodding and Fadden watching the others to see how the wind will blow. But the Pietra know courage when they see it, and none would call the Feneen cowards.

  “I know, brothers,” I say, rising from my seat to circle behind them. “I know their ways are not ours. Some fight one-handed or standing on three legs. They fight with seven eyes, looking in all directions. They fight with teeth that slice, found where no mouth should be. They fight sewn to cats and ride to their deaths. They fight alongside women, each one of them a terror. No, they don’t fight like us . . . but they do fight.”

  Hadduk claps a hand onto the table in solidarity, and a few others follow.

  “What happened in Stille was chance gone ill. Will you have it be said that bad luck sent the Pietra back to their stones to starve?”

  A round of slaps, naked palms against stone.

  “Will you have it be said that the Pietra—a people who walk beneath bladed Hadundun leaves—were too afraid of the warm shores of Stille to return?”

  More slaps, one of them hard enough to pop a knuckle.

  “Will you have it be said that the Pietra would not fight alongside the Feneen a second time . . . perhaps because they had seen their might and could not stand on a field beside them with pride?”

  All the hands strike, this time in unison, the reverberation of their agreement filling the room.

  “We are Pietra,” I say, eyeing my commanders in turn, and landing on Ank. “All of us.”

  * * *

  “Nice speech,” Hadduk says as we leave the chamber. “Though you said little regarding an actual plan.”

  “I need them as one, if we would march that way,” I tell him, as we make our way to the armory. “Though we headed for Stille together last time, we did so knowing that we would not fight side by side. If we would fill holes in our ranks with Feneen, I need the man next to him to see him as a brother.”

  “What if the man next to him is a woman?”

  “Then as whatever suits him best, if he’ll fight alongside her.”

  Hadduk makes noise in his throat and adjusts the front of his breeches. “There’s a few among the Feneen I’d not mind some swordplay with.”

  “Often I think you’d have made an excellent Lithos,” I tell him. “And then you open your mouth.”

  “Oh, I would have,” Hadduk agrees immediately. “Except I knew early on that I wanted women more than the distinction. Mason suits me well. Plenty of both.”

  I shake my head as he pulls open the armory door, and we eye what little is left of our weaponry. “You’re a good reminder of why the Lithos is not to be distracted,” I tell him. “I cannot speak to you of battle plans longer than a few breaths before you have a tale to share of some woman you’ve bedded.”

  “Aye, well.” Hadduk hefts a spear from the wall, testing the balance. “I’m not fishing for a fight, my Lithos, but you’ve been doing a lot of talking, and I’ve not heard a battle plan yet. So I’ll tell you of my conquests in the bedroom, if you’ve got nothing larger in mind.”

  It’s well he’s not fishing for a fight, for it’s the Lithos he’s luring, and I know better than any man how to quell my temper or quash a kind word. I’m of the Stone Shore, and stone I must be.

  “Would you send a Pietra into battle with this?” I ask, pulling a sword that’s meant only for practice from a pile in the corner.

  “I wouldn’t send a Lure against a fish with that,” he says.

  “Or a Feneen with this on their arm to protect them?” I ask, hefting a stone shield with a crack in it that widens even as I lift it.

  “Which Feneen?” he asks. “The one with the hump in his back needs no shield, only to turn his arse to the enemy. That thing is hard as my skull.”

  “Which I’d gladly use for a battering ram,” I tell him, something he seems to view as a compliment.

  “I take your point,” my Mason says, raising his hand to stop me. “We need to recuperate. Train the Feneen. But Stille was a clam open to us before, and we said it would take three Stilleans to face one Pietra. Now, I fear they fight with a victory behind them—unearned as it may be—and truly, there may be three of them for every one of us.”

  “And two Indiri,” I add, remembering the girl on the beach, her mad race to fight our entire army alone cut short only by the wave.

  Hadduk spits. “Those two I’ll end myself, finish what was begun at Dunkai.”

  “You’re not wrong, though,” I tell him. “Stille will fight with warm bodies in their favor, and the memory of a cold sea at their backs. We came for them once, and they’ll look for it again.”

  “And so?” Hadduk eyes me.

  “We let them come to us.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Ank

  Stille would not chance it,” I tell the Lithos, my words cold, though we are in his chambers, where the fire burns bright. “You lifted a rock and disturbed the ants; you cannot expect that they will crawl out from underneath to see if you still stand by.”

  Witt betrays nothing, though I know my words have taken some hope from him. I do not envy him. He leads a patched army in a dying land and would rather Stille make a move in error than relive the losses the Pietra suffered.

  “Are you not bold?” I ask. “Since when do the Pietra wait for the battle to come to them?”

  “Since the sea swept their legs out from under their feet,” he says, eyes focused on the fire. I know what he sees there. I’ve led many to their deaths and yet lived to see their faces. As Lithos, he cannot stoop to asking a Feneen what should be done. And so I spare him the question.

  “Did I tell you my mother is Stillean born?” I ask, my words bait on a line for him to grasp.

  “Perhaps.”

  Though he speaks slowly, I know the Lithos is far from slow-witted. I’ve seen him half answer men before, only to give them enough rope to tangle themselves in. But a knot of my own making is one I can undo at will.

  “It is not common among the Feneen to keep ties with those who cast them away,” I go on. “But my mother would send for me, at times. My caul kept me from seeing her face, but I knew her voice and her hands, the smell of her.”

  Witt watches the fire still, but his eyes are focused now. “How did you enter the city?”

  “No one wishes to look upon the Feneen,” I say. “We know well how to move among the hidden.”

  He nods as if I had answered him, but he’s sharp as a Hadundun leaf, that one. I’ll be sharing what I know of the tunnels within a handspan of the moon outside, and he remembering every word I say without a single stroke of a quill.

  “Was it hard to be near her, knowing she’d given you for dead?”

  That I did not expect. I take my own moment, as if the fire has called to me as well. I’d be wise to remember that this Lithos knows the weight of emotions, even if he hides them.

  “I could not look upon her until my thirtieth Arrival Day, for my caul did not pass until then,” I tell him. “By then I was a man, and many things had been buried between us. But yes,” I go on, wanting to give him something of honesty, “when first I felt the touch of her hand, I did not know if I would clasp or kick.”

  “On which did you settle?”

  “I was held
,” I admit. “And so I held back.”

  “You know Stille well?”

  “The dark places.”

  “Dark places are what interest me,” he says, leaning forward. “From them much can be overheard. We made a mistake in placing all our trust in might, knowing nothing more of Stille than their love of peace and warm tides. My army lost more than men in that wave. Gone now is the element of surprise, and we cannot rely on brute force a second time.”

  I remain silent, hand at the caul around my neck, waiting for the Lithos to arrive at the conclusion I directed him toward.

  “They have the advantage in numbers now,” he goes on. “And the sight of living Indiri cast a pall across more of the men than I’d care to admit. We were told they were gone, an enemy long vanquished. I saw their blood stain the grass as a small boy, and have been raised learning the songs of that victory. Yet a spotted girl charged the entire army of Pietra alone, and a wave came at her heels.”

  “Perhaps pulling her in as well,” I remind him, though I doubt it. My hand tightens on the caul as I think of the twins. “Do not be overly troubled by the Indiri, Lithos. They are only two.”

  “Maybe so,” he concedes. “But the sight of them recalls a battle we thought finished, quickly followed by one we most definitely lost.”

  The Lithos rubs his hands, still stiff from pushing many into the sea this past Culling Day. The line had curved up the cliffside, many of the Pietra bringing nothing more than a chest-breadth of bark pulled from Hadundun trees to drop at their Lithos’s feet, then declaring that they had made a boat. I told myself it did not matter, that those who had torn apart the trees with their bare hands had the same fate as Elders who had spent their dwindling years carving true boats. The Lusca would take them all.

  Still, some who went on hastily built crafts were guided by grief that would have subsided in time; their deaths were not called for. I knew this, as did the Lithos. It was a long Culling Day, and the Lusca ate well. Witt has fallen silent, hands cupping each other, and I know he thinks of the boats that were not boats, as I do.