by Tara Maya, Elle Casey, J L Bryan, Anthea Sharp, Jenna Elizabeth Johnson, Alexia Purdy (epub)
“You are amazing,” Vessia repeated without inflection and without looking at her.
After that, the old couple let her weave often. Other simple chores they tried to encourage, however, did not work so well. She simply stared at the needle they gave her to sew the cloth she’d woven into garments. In the end, the old woman folded and sewed the garments for her, and it was the first dress that she would abide without removing.
As seasons passed, the old couple wizened like grapes shrinking to raisons, but she did not change. The old couple finally decided it was safe to introduce her to other people. They lived alone in the forest, in their beehive dome house, but there were other domes, other houses, closer together, past the woods, beside a brook. “Our clan,” they told her.
“They will ask why we haven’t shown anyone our daughter before,” said Old Woman.
“No,” said Old Man. “Once they see her, they will think they know why.”
“But she is beautiful,” said Old Woman.
“Too beautiful,” he said. “Too strange.”
Vessia went out among the other people, though it was hard for her. They stared at her, spoke loudly to her, tried to touch her, told her all the things she couldn’t, shouldn’t, mustn’t do. She liked market day—she liked to pick up the objects sitting on blankets and play with them. That made the women who guarded the blankets angry. Old Woman told her, “A bargain has two sides,” and gave her small beads of gold to leave in place of the objects she picked up.
Vessia could not fly, but she could dance, and other people began to notice. Not only did people in the clanhold watch her dance, they could not, it seemed, look away if she started dancing in front of them. This made the old couple nervous.
“If people ask, you must tell them you are a Tavaedi,” they told her. “You must tell them you are our daughter, and a Tavaedi like us. The Corn Maiden.”
Once a man, younger than Old Man, who wore a golden torque about his neck and gold bands on his arms, visited on market day. He saw her dance. Afterward, he came close to her, but did not touch her.
“I love you,” he said and many similar things. “Don’t tell me no.”
“Why would I tell you no?” she asked. She didn’t like it when people told her no.
“Then I will go to your parents tonight,” he said.
He arrived at the clay dome house, just as he’d promised. However, he and Old Man exchanged loud words.
“She loves me,” shouted Young Man.
“She doesn’t understand love,” said Old Man. “You don’t understand her.”
“Do you think I can’t tell where she came from?” asked Young Man. “She’s not your daughter!”
They bowed their heads, accepting his words, afraid. “Who do you think she is?”
“She is obviously an Imorvae exile from the Rainbow Labyrinth. She suffered some terrible hurt, and lost her mind. You took her in, you cared for her. I know your history. You tried to have children of your own for many years, and couldn’t conceive. So you adopted this beautiful waif as your own child.”
Old Man and Old Woman raised their eyebrows. They still looked cautious, but they no longer stank so much of fear. Vessia knew that Young Man had not guessed right. His words did not fit the whole Pattern, only the small pieces of the Pattern that he could see. Yet, to her confusion, they did not correct him.
“Though I wear the gold bangles of your tribe, I am not one of you,” he continued. “I also am an exile from the Rainbow Labyrinth. The Bone Whistler killed my parents because, like me, they were Imorvae. I fled here, and took work as a healer to the War Chief in Yellow Bear tribehold. I saved his life after a battle, and he rewarded with me with wealth and place. But I wish to marry a girl from my own tribe.”
“I’m sorry,” said Old Man. “It cannot be.”
Young Man frowned. “I could heal her.”
“Nothing can heal her, because she is not broken. She is what she is.”
Young Man begged, “Vessia, Vessia, please, let me love you.”
“What does that mean?” she wondered aloud.
Wetness streaked the cheeks of Young Man, and he left with no further words.
Long after, she puzzled over her many names. Daughter. Vessia. The Corn Maiden. Yet when she reached inside herself she encountered no solid sense of self, only mist and fog. I am missing myself, she realized. I am a husk hungry for my core.
“Who am I?” she asked the old couple one day. “Who are you? Where did I come from? Why am I here? I am not like other daughters. Am I an ‘exile’, as Young Man said?”
“Danumoro the Herb Dancer? The healer? Vessia, were we wrong? Do you love him?”
She shrugged. They looked disappointed. Why? There was still so much she could not grasp.
“He was wrong and right,” Old Woman said. “You are not an exile. But you are not our blood daughter either. You are unique.”
“Once we did a favor for the White Lady,” said Old Man. “She asked us how she could pay her debt, and we told her we wanted for nothing, except a child, which she could not give us. She told us we would have a daughter, and gave us this.” He reached up to a jar tucked in the rafters of the house. From this he pulled a strange corncob doll. “The next day, we found you.”
Vessia took the doll. It had no face. It was blank, like she was. “A bargain has two sides. What did the Lady ask of you?”
“Only that we protect you,” said Old Woman. “And—”
“Which we have tried to do,” interrupted Old Man. He shook his head at Old Woman. She placed her hand on his leg.
“And,” finished Old Woman, “That we let you go when you were ready. Are you ready, Vessia?”
“Yes,” said Vessia. She did not know what she would do, or where she would go, but she knew she had to find the missing pieces of the Pattern. Tears streaked Old Woman’s face. “You see, you really are our daughter. Only children can please their parents by leaving, and at the same time, so break their hearts.”
Dindi
Excess light cleared. Dindi stared upward at tree branches against vivid blue sky. She rolled away, gasping. The corncob doll had fallen into the grass beside her. Puddlepaws hissed at it and backed away, tail and fur spiked.
You did this, Dindi accused it silently.
The doll stared facelessly back at her.
Laughter roused Dindi from her daze. Kemla and a few other girls were pointing and sniggering at her. Jensi and Hadi knelt by her side, concerned.
“Dindi, what happened?” Jensi asked.
The confusion—and, in Kemla’s case, derision—in their faces told Dindi they had not seen the light, or the Vision. The doll had magic, which, like the fae, only she could see. Dindi knew better than to speak of seeing of the fae, and so she pressed her lips together and said nothing about the Vision either.
“It’s been a difficult journey,” Abiono told her, not without sympathy. “But soon we will meet up with allies. Until then, we must conserve our food and water. Remember as we travel to the place of Initiation, that we represent not just our clan, and not just our clan-klatch, but our whole tribe,” warned Abiono. “And it is we who are the outtribesfolk here. Walk with honor.”
Rthan
Rthan’s canoe was a bark boat shaped like folded hands, light enough for a warrior to carry on his back during portage, long enough to hold three while rowing. Or, in this case, Rthan, his prisoner, and two packs of supplies.
They’d been paddling downstream without stopping for meals, but they’d come to the first of several cataracts soon, and Rthan knew they needed to eat before they portaged. Past the cataract, they’d be in Yellow Bear territory.
Rthan signaled the others and the seven canoes pulled into a still pool in the river, guarded from sight by drooping willows. None of the warriors left their boats, only anchored their paddles through the handle of the canoe post-down in the mud.
The captive tried to lift his head over the edge of the kayak to see where th
ey were. Rthan slapped him back down to the bottom of the boat. The boy endured the latest bruise without speaking, though his wary gaze locked on Rthan.
Rthan rubbed his thumb over the boy’s purpling jaw. “You shave, how often? Your mother shouldn’t have let you out of the clanhold until you stopped nursing.”
The boy jerked his chin away, about the only movement he could make, since he was netted claw to tail like a lobster in a trap. Rthan wondered how much of Kavio’s reputation wasn’t simply borrowed from his father. The boy didn’t look particularly intimidating. True, his little trick might have fooled Rthan’s men if the Blue Lady hadn’t tipped him off, but Kavio struck him as just another dryfoot, more mouth than meat.
Speaking of meat, none of them had eaten in several days. In his oiled leather pack, Rthan pulled out a treat he’d been saving the whole trip. His mouth watered just peeling away the gut he’d wrapped it in.
Kavio recoiled. “That is foul!”
“Did crabs eat your nostrils? This is hakarl!”
“Kill me now, but do not make me eat that.”
“I wasn’t about to let you eat it.” Rthan cradled his hakarl. “I hunted the poison shark myself, buried it in the gravel by my house and waited six months for it to rot just right.”
“Most of us prefer food which doesn’t involve the words ‘poison’, ‘gravel’ or ‘rot’.”
“Hakarl was given to our tribe’s first War Chief Hathan by the Shark Lord.”
“A botched assassination attempt, as I recall.”
“No!” Rthan waved the fermented meat in front of Kavio’s wrinkled nose. “It was the first sacrifice. The human warrior Hathan befriended the Merfae. One year, during a famine, Hathan’s family was on the verge of starvation, so he decided to trick his faery friend. He proposed they throw bones and whichever tossed the knuckle would kill himself to feed the other. Hathan cheated and gave the Shark Lord a pouch with nothing but knuckle bones, so the faery lord allowed Hathan to kill him, bury him and then eat him. However, the next dawn, the Shark Lord returned to life, and told him, ‘I let you kill me and eat me, now you must do the same for me.’ Hathan had no choice but to agree to pay the deathdebt. Just then his daughter Mariah ran up and…”
Rthan stopped speaking. He no longer had a taste for either banter or hakarl.
Kavio caught his mood at once. “She threw herself to the shark in place of her father.” He added quietly, “You have tattoos on both cheeks—you’re married. Do you have any children, Rthan?”
Rthan punched Kavio across the jaw. Kavio spit blood into the brine that pooled in the boat bottom.
Rthan cracked his knuckles. “So what was it you wanted to tell Nargano? Before you try to convince me you would betray your father, I think it’s fair to let you know there’s nothing I hate worse than a man who turns against his own blood.”
“Nargano will tell you after I’ve told him.”
Rthan hit him again, harder. “I don’t bite hooks. I’m going to kill you unless you give me one good reason not to, and it better be more than that you’re willing to switch sides and slice bellies for us. I don’t need or want you on our side. I just want you dead.”
“Kill me, then.” Kavio flicked his tongue over the blood on his lip. “What I have to say goes to Nargano or dies with me.”
“Fa!” The boy was bluffing. Time to bone the fish. Rthan wouldn’t ask his tribesmen to increase their own risk by dragging a captive all the way across enemy territory. He hefted his knife.
In all his wriggling, Kavio had wedged himself into the curl of the boat, and he used that leverage to kick both legs square into Rthan’s chest. Rthan went overboard, found his footing on the river bottom and came up, just in time to have the paddle smack him in the face. Kavio had somehow untied himself. The boy pushed the canoe into the current.
The men in the other boats grabbed their paddles.
“Two men to a boat!” Rthan shouted. “One spout, one fin!”
He jumped into the canoe of his second in command. His men doubled up on the boats without supplies, as they’d often practiced. In each case, the second man crouched behind the man paddling, legs balanced on either side to keep from toppling the craft, while he fired arrows. Rthan had lost his bow with his boat, so he used his second’s weapon.
To Rthan’s surprise, Kavio had obviously rafted before. He drove his canoe to the white water, and shouted catcalls at the nixies and water sprites to incite them to surge after his boat, pushing it to insane speeds.
“Lady, aide me!” Rthan cried. Beneath his canoe, the water churned and lifted his boat forward on a blast of white water after Kavio. The two boats of his men jostled on the frenzied froth right behind him.
Just when Rthan had been silently giving Kavio credit, the idiot boy steered his boat toward a low hanging tree. At his unnatural speed, the crash would kill him.
Kavio’s boat surfed the spray over a rock just before the tree and sailed over the trunk.
The two men in the boat to Rthan’s right didn’t bounce off the rock at quite the right angle. They hit the tree. Their canoe splintered into pieces, the men themselves careened through the air. The tree caught one, the river the other, but before Rthan could check to see if they’d survived, he and his partner reached the tree too.
“Flip!” Rthan shouted. As one man, they shifted their weight and the boat turned in the water. The bottom scraped under the tree. The boat continued to rotate and they landed upright again, still bucking the rapids.
Kavio leaned back in his boat. He notched Rthan’s own bow and shot several arrows in quick succession. The Blue Lady sent a wind that snapped across the river and blew the arrows off course. Kavio shot another volley of arrows, and he must have called upon Red fae Rthan couldn’t see, for the arrows burst into flame. The other boat caught fire. Rthan’s men dived into the river. But Kavio couldn’t shoot again. A wicked run of rocks forced him to turn forward again to steer.
Rthan recognized the rock formation. “Turn to the shore!”
He joined his fin man in paddling. The lower fae were beyond control, even of the Blue Lady, and they wouldn’t release their grip on his kayak. Rthan crashed the boat on the rock rather than ride the rapids through the narrows—he and his second both scrambled to climb onto the boulder to dry rock.
From that vantage, they watched Kavio’s kayak shoot out of the narrows like an arrow from a bow and arc into free fall over a thousand foot waterfall.
Rthan felt no triumph, only weariness. He still had to find those of his companions who survived, portage the boats they’d left behind down the cliffs and make the rendezvous with War Chief Nargano before the Autumn Equinox.
Blue light flared, and, impossibly, he smelled the ocean. His little girl Meira climbed next to him on the rock.
“He’s not dead,” said the Blue Lady. “You have to go after him.”
“No human could have survived that fall, my Lady, but even if he sprouted wings like a fae lord, I must tend my men first.”
“If you ignore my warning, you will suffer.”
“Is that a threat?” He frowned. “Or a prophecy?”
“Water rolls downhill to the sea. Is that a threat or a prophecy?”
Kavio
In answer to his call, slyphs buffeted Kavio’s boat with their zephyr breath, guiding it past the thundering spume at the foot of the falls. The canoe skipped on the water like the rocks he’d thrown at ponds as a boy. Finally, it snuggled into a gentle current.
He looked up at the top of the cataract, but he couldn’t see Rthan. Leaning back in the canoe, he let tension drain from his body, though even now he did not relax completely. He wondered how he could remake himself if everywhere he went he kept stumbling upon the vipers left to nest by his father.
Once already he’d underestimated Rthan, he would not do it again. Despite his desire to rest, he forced his canoe to the fast currents, and where there were none, paddled hard. Settlements occurred more thickly with each da
y he spent on the river, with less no man’s land between; the totem poles he passed were engraved with the symbols of three, four, five clans at a time, and the moss growing on the weathered wood testified these clanklatch alliances had stood firm for generations. He was seeing what the Rainbow Labyrinth tribe might have been, if not for the rise of the Bone Whistler and the civil war between the Morvae and the Imorvae. Several times he had to duck warning arrows from warriors in bomas, but at least the closer he got to Yellow Bear tribehold, the less chance he would encounter the Blue Waters tribesmen. Even they would have better sense than to attack the tribehold itself.
Occasionally Kavio saw groups of women rinsing roots and filling water baskets at the river’s edge. If the women spotted him, they fled, for a warrior paddling a kayak was not a welcome sight. Outtriber, exile or scout for a war party—he could be up to no good as far as they were concerned.
All the more strange, then, that one afternoon a lone woman standing on the shore caught a glimpse of his canoe and ran toward the river, shouting.
“Hey ho! Hey ho!” She waved both arms. Flaps of loose skin jiggled under her arms and chin, giving the impression of a once nicely plump woman who had eaten too little for too long. Her skirt was ragged too, a shaggy mane of raccoon tails and bark felt tassels that ended in knots. She hid her sagging, wrinkled breasts with necklaces of twisted robes made from the same material. Nothing else. Not a single bangle of gold, which was odd for Yellow Bear. The womenfolk here treasured their gold more than their children.
“Stranger, hey ho! Come nigh, I wish you no harm!”
His first thought was that she was a hexer, and a cannibal. Nonetheless, his curiosity overcame his sense, and he paddled his canoe to the shore. The mud was slick and carpeted green with fuzz that tickled his bare feet.
“Are you a Tavaedi?” she asked. Up close, he could smell the fetid rot from her mouth.
“I am an exile,” he answered cautiously. “I have no tribe or clan.”
“I guessed as much already. I don’t care, nephew. My need is too great. I saw the glow about you, even from the across the river. Do you dance Yellow? Can you heal?”
