He tried to gather the vague jumble of thoughts. “Why am I not dead?”
She didn’t answer.
His arm was stiff because it was bandaged, he discovered, and—“Agh.”—almost unbearably tender. But the worst pain was not where the spider had bitten him, but much farther up, halfway between his elbow and armpit.
“I…cut myself? I got the blood out…?” That came in a memory-flash too. Himself, clumsy with the pain, reaching for the knife, fumbling and dropping it, his muscles already too weak. He couldn’t have done it himself.
“You did it,” he said to her through the dark. “You saved me.”
“Yes.” Her voice came like a shrug, dismissive, an unwilling admission. He frowned towards the sound, wishing he could see her face. She’d saved his life, bandaged his arm and put him to bed. More memory was coming back. The ravine, the fight in the river, her threats…her grief. She’d saved him?
“Why?”
She didn’t say anything. But through the darkness, like the gritty wind that comes before a sandstorm, he felt a swirl of confusion and guilt as strong as grief. She didn’t know why she’d saved him, and she hated herself for doing it.
“I owe you,” he said, almost at random, trying for something that would take away the sting of what she must see as a betrayal of her god and her people.
“Hardly.” Her voice was tight. “You could have killed me twenty times over in the last day and night.” She stopped, and he felt, rather than heard, her grit her teeth. “And it’s not repayment. It means nothing. You owe me nothing. There can be no debt-bond between you and I.”
The guilt and confusion roughened her voice, and anger gave it an edge like steel. He was in danger here—weakened and in her power—he’d be wise to agree with her, or to say nothing. But he’d been dying of spider poison, and in more pain than he could ever remember, and she’d stopped it.
“At least, you must know I’ll no longer hold you prisoner. You have your freedom—”
She laughed, a sudden bright sound like sparks scattering against the blackness, and he stopped, realising too late how stupid he sounded.
“How kind.” Her voice sparked too, the laughter glittering all along its edges. “What else will you do for me? Give me food from the stores? Allow me a blanket to take with me?”
“All right. Clearly, you can take whatever you like. I know very well it’s me in your power now.”
“And how does it feel?”
He could have hit her. He was so helpless, so weak he’d struggle to stand, and she was gloating over it. You tell me. At least I still have my gifts. The words rose to burn his lips, then he bit them back. Her laughter might be directed at him, but it had a good sound, a human sound where before there had been nothing but anger and fear. She was talking to him, too, for the first time.
He’d left the mountains to save people, those trapped by the priests’ lies, by their own beliefs. She had never looked as if she needed saving, and she would not believe him if he said she did, but she was as trapped, as blinded as anyone. He could not force her to be free, but if she was at least willing to speak to him…
He took a breath and spoke carefully. “Right now? I’m just glad I’m not dead. I’ll hate you tomorrow, maybe.”
He heard her breath catch on what sounded like another laugh, bitten off. It was a start, she was talking to him, he needed to think of something else to say, a way to start building trust so that she’d listen when he told her what she needed to know about the priests.
But before he could gather his thoughts, sleep came upon him in a huge dark wave, and he slid beneath it, drowning. From out of its depths he heard his own voice asking the one question he could think of. “I should know who I’m hating. My name is Philos. What’s yours?”
Her voice spiralled down through the wave towards him, a bright thread, as clear as her laughter, giving him the first piece of information about herself that she’d offered. “Maya. You can hate Maya.”
The next morning he could stand and walk a little, and when he unwound his bandage his arm was clean, with no sign of infection. The maenad-girl—Maya—boiled water and gave it to him so he could wash the healing wound, her movements jerky with reluctance.
He watched her warily as he did so. He’d been half-dazed last night, but with the morning sunlight came clarity. She had been sent to kill him. He was weak now, she had his knife tucked into a makeshift sheath round her wrist, and there was a good deal of rope in that chest.
When she drew the knife, though, it was only to slice up the dried meat and drop it into a second potful of boiling water. The smell rolled over to where he sat, wrapping a clean bandage around his arm. She’d hardly spoken since he woke, and she had her back to him now.
Was she going to try taking him prisoner? Forcing him back to the priests’ idea of justice? She’d not find it easy, even armed, not without her powers…but his whole body recoiled at the idea of fighting her.
She straightened, lifting the pot from the fire and placing it on the rock. She dipped a bowl into the meat broth and brought it to him. The sight—almost domestic, utterly out of place—made his lips twitch, part mirth, part discomfort.
She went back to the pot, dipped up her own bowlful and sat cross-legged on the ground to drink it. Silence stretched awkwardly between them.
At length, she flipped her hair back, lowered her bowl to her lap, and looked straight across at him, her expression that of someone facing an army.
“I’m not going to kill you,” she said, then continued quickly, as if to forestall anything he might say. “I should. But I could not leave you to die that way, and now I’ve saved you I… It’s wrong, but I cannot bring myself to kill you. And…” she hesitated, “…I am not maenad at the moment, and if I kill in this form there is none of the god’s madness to wash me clean.”
For a moment he wondered if she would admit why she was not maenad, why she could not be maenad, but she slid past that, maybe hoping he would not question.
“I’m going to leave, later this morning. I—” She stumbled a little. “This is not a truce. There can be no kind of agreement between us, and if I see you again I will kill you. This is just…a matter of necessity. You are wounded and can do nothing to me, and I am too weakened to take on my better form and deal with you as I should.”
So that was how she was dealing with it, pretending that the change was temporary only, a matter of fatigue and lack of food. It was a good pretence; he would have believed it were it not for that heart-wrenching despair he’d witnessed, her desperate knowledge that if she could not return to the temple she would never again be able to wield her gift, become… What did she call it? Her better form?
She lifted the bowl to her mouth, but did not drink, turning it instead in thin, nervous fingers. Her eyes flicked to his face. “Say something.” She snapped the words. “I can agree to no truce, but if you’re going to try attacking me I’d like to know.”
He wanted to laugh at that, but clamped down on it. “I am in the same position. Any more fighting… I’m done, I cannot attack you any more than you can attack me. I am more than happy to declare a truce—”
“It’s not a truce.”
That was fear in her voice, and fear spiking through the air between them. Of course, the servant of the god could not make any agreement with a monster, a blasphemer. She was making an agreement, and she must know she was, but she could not admit it.
“Not on your part,” he said. “On mine only.”
She pushed her hair back, another nervous gesture. “Very well. If that’s how you want to see it.”
He didn’t answer, finishing the last of his soup then going to the stream to scoop up a drink. He should do more, tell her she need not go back, that she’d come to freedom and she did not have to give it up. Tell her that others like her, bred to serve as the god’s—the priests’—weapons, had found freedom out here in the mountains, far beyond the temple walls. She wouldn’t listen, t
hough. If Aera were here, or Enneas, who for twenty years had served as a temple guard, they might not be able to persuade her, either, but at least they could prove he was not lying. But by himself, he could prove nothing, and she’d refuse to believe anything he said.
Chapter Seven
Maya watched him drink, cup water in his hands and splash it over his face, run wet fingers through the long strands of black hair. Longer than mine…but then he was not born to be a fighter.
The shame ate at her, that he, a runaway, a condemned criminal, had kept her prisoner this long. It had been only luck and a spider bite that had reversed their positions, nothing to do with her god-given powers or her years of experience running with the maenad pack.
She watched him, an ordinary man, maybe five years older than she. Prettier than most, with the sweep of glossy hair and the dark eyes she remembered staring, terrified, into hers, but nothing that should have made him able to beat her, nothing that should have allowed him to keep her prisoner for a whole night and day.
Except he’s not ordinary. The thought held her still with sudden surprise. I’d forgotten that—forgotten why we were chasing him in the first place. There’s something wrong with him, some unholy power, demon- not god-begotten.
She didn’t need to know. It was nothing to her. In a short while she’d pack up supplies and leave, and if she ever saw him again it would be because he’d been stupid enough to try returning, and she—or another of her pack—would tear him to pieces. There was no reason to want to understand more about him, how he’d been able to overpower her.
There was even less reason to want to make him look at her, now that she was no longer helpless, pathetic and bound. No reason to want to make him remember her as in control, sitting here with the knife ready to her hand, on the spot where she’d successfully saved his life.
And it’s stupid. I’ve already saved him when I should have let him die, am already letting him go when I should march him in chains back to my people. I do not need to talk to him, let him pretend to be a person.
She said it anyway, as she’d known she was going to, and her warring thoughts came through into her voice, making the words shiver and run together so she sounded uncertain and almost afraid. “What is your power?”
He turned. She was looking straight at him, so his eyes met hers. Her question must have taken him off guard, because for a moment his eyes held no wariness, nor fear, only an amusement that warmed his face. It reminded her suddenly of the laughter she’d heard in his voice yesterday, when they were fighting and she’d thought he meant to rape her, then he’d said something silly, too outlandish to take seriously, and she’d known that whatever else he might do, she would never need to fear that from him.
“Did you not wonder before?” he said.
She shrugged, not liking the feeling that his eyes could see into her. “No. I was busy being marched across the desert.”
He smiled, just a little bit, one side of his mouth curling upwards. “I mean before, in the ravine. Did you not wonder why you could not find me when you first came there?”
She blinked. She hadn’t wondered. She’d forgotten those strange minutes in the ravine, when she—in the full flood of the madness, all her senses enhanced—had neither been able to see nor hear nor smell him.
He came over towards her, moving slowly, awkwardly—he would not be setting out today—then put his hand out, resting it on the rock face near where she sat. “Here. This is how. This is my gift.”
She frowned at him. There was nothing, he was doing nothing. Whatever he was, it was not a shifter…
“No.” He smiled again, a little bit more. “Don’t look at my face. Look at my hand.”
She did so. The wide span of his fingers was pressed against the rock, leaving a wet handprint, black on grey. An edge of morning sunlight caught the fine hairs on the back of his hand, making them shine faint gold against the brown of his skin. Calluses showed on the inside of his thumb and forefinger. It might not be a fighter’s hand, but it was not a nobleman’s hand either—it knew hard work.
She was still looking at it, wondering what she was supposed to be seeing, when it disappeared.
She blinked, instinctively shook her head, thinking her eyes must have blurred, but his hand—no, his whole arm—did not reappear. And now the rest of his body, his face, his tunic seemed to dissolve, like a mirage dissolves when you get close to it.
Then all at once her perception shifted. He wasn’t disappearing, he was changing. His skin and hair were taking on the colour and texture of the cliff face, matching each ridge and crack and tiny variation so exactly that if she hadn’t known he was there she’d have sworn she was looking at nothing but rock. The change—and that was stranger than all the rest—even crept out into his clothes, so there was nothing to show that a man stood there, silently, secretly watching.
Only his eyes. They alone did not change, so she had the skin-crawling sensation that something—a demon, something not just half-human but not human at all—peered out of the cliff at her.
She opened her mouth. “That—that’s your gift?”
He nodded—she could see where the bit of the seeming-cliff that was really his head moved.
“And is it just rock? Or can it be…” she made a vague gesture, unable to drag her gaze away, “…other things? Anything?”
“Anything, more or less. Nothing moving—not water or sliding sand. I can’t match it quick enough for it to work. But anything that stays still long enough…yes.”
He shut his eyes for a moment, and it was as if he’d vanished entirely. Almost doubting her own senses, she caught herself from reaching out to touch where he’d been. Then he swam back into visibility, his body seeming to coalesce from the air in front of her, changing to his normal self.
His eyes opened. “It’s not the only part of it. You maenads—you’d have found me if that were my only gift—”
“Not your only gift? You have…more than one?” She’d never heard of anyone having more than one gift…and black envy caught at her throat. If I had more than one, I would not feel so bereft. And why him? Why does he deserve—
She got hold of herself. His gifts were unholy, unsanctioned—not something to be envied, no matter how many of them he had.
She looked back at his face. “You must have sinned appallingly.” The envy, not quite suppressed, coloured her voice with a harsh tone that sounded like contempt.
“What?”
“To have two gifts. It was your sin that brought that on you—”
“It was not.”
She stared at him, incredulous that he’d deny it. “You know it was. That’s why we were sent after you—you’ve been using unholy gifts, trying to conceal them—”
He cut across her. “I know very well what brought you after me. I know my gifts are what the priests call unholy. I’m saying it was not sin that gave them to me.”
At that, she laughed, scornful, a lifetime of teaching making her sure of her ground. “You’re saying you never sinned?”
“I’m saying I got my gift when I was two years old.” His voice was like stone. “You tell me, what sin could I have committed by then?”
For a moment she could think of nothing to say. It can’t be. The unholy gifts—they’re born from sin. It’s why they come at adolescence, when people move away from the innocence of childhood. Only the holy gifts can come earlier, given by the god, blessings rather than curses…
“You’re lying.” She moved away from him, standing with a jerk.
“I am not.”
“You are. You’re lying. That can’t be true. Those gifts come from sin, they can’t come from anything else, they can’t.”
He said nothing, his silence as much of an argument as words would have been. They were done, she and he, they’d not see each other again, why would he bother lying?
She crossed her arms across herself, tight, like a barrier, hating how slight her muscles felt, how her fingers c
losed on little more than skin and bone. I shouldn’t even trouble to talk to him. I shouldn’t want to understand. I shouldn’t care at all.
“How, then?” she said. “How did it happen?”
His eyes met hers, but he didn’t answer. Well, if he was waiting for an apology he could wait a lot longer. She wasn’t going to beg him to tell her if he chose not to.
She lifted one shoulder in a scornful shrug. “As I said, you’re lying. Or it’s just an empty boast. ‘I’m so special, I have two gifts…’”
“It’s not boasting.”
“Really?” The envy came back, choking her. “You’re talking to me, and I’ve lost—” she stumbled over the words, catching herself, recovering, “—I’m too weak to use my gift, I wasted my strength saving your stupid life, and you’re listing all your gifts, and it’s not boasting?”
“No, it’s not.”
The tone in his voice snatched at her, dragging her gaze to his. For an instant she saw a bleakness, a loss in his face that mirrored her own.
“It came when I was two,” he said. “I started doing it without knowing I was, without meaning to. My mother took me to the south wall and showed me the waste-tip. She told me if I ever changed shape again she’d bring me out there and throw me on it. I realise now she was terrified it’d be found out—I suppose she must have thought the only way to save me was to terrify me too.” He stopped a moment, staring at nothing. “It was getting dark. There were jackals howling. And people setting fires at the edges. I—” He gave a little frown and looked across at Maya. “It worked. Which I suppose is what she intended. But…I don’t know… She might have meant it. She was devout—maybe to her it would have seemed better to do…that…than risk the god’s wrath.”
She could say nothing. If his mother had been truly devout, she’d have handed him to the priests or thrown him herself into the fires. They did it sometimes, with babies born with unholy marks, or deformities bad enough that it was clear they could never find favour with the god. But what did she know about what his mother had felt or believed? What did she know about mothers at all? Maenads left that behind as well as everything else.
Blood of the Volcano: Sequel to Heart of the Volcano Page 7
