by Holly Lisle
Birra bowed. "Yes, Vodi. I will be on my way. Please pull the bell-cord when you are dressed; a lovely breakfast awaits you in the solar, along with allies of the veyâr who came to meet you. You need do no healing today—this is the Sixteenday, and all of Ballahara rests."
She bathed, she dressed, and all the while she tried to decide if Birra's story about the creatures that spoke to the soul was a genuine warning or a tale he'd made up to scare her out of any more escape attempts. It had a real beware-the-bogeyman feel to it. But then, she wouldn't have believed in the rrôn had she not seen their aftermath.
She sucked on a piece of chocolate while she picked out clothes. Clothes in this place were complicated enough that she almost wished she had an assistant to help her get into them. She felt pretty sure she put everything on right, but since she could only see everyone's outer garments, she was reduced to guessing about the purposes of some of the odder underthings. When in doubt, she skipped pieces entirely.
She tugged on soft brushed-cotton bloomers and breast-binder, took another stab at a corsetlike contraption that held everything else together, and noticed that all the lacings on it were way too loose—so someone had been in her clothing while she slept.
Tiger trap, goddammit. They weren't going to be sneaking into her room while she was asleep. She would not have that.
She tightened the laces and began attaching skirts to the rows of hooks that went from hips to just below the waist, one skirt per layer. All the skirts were silk, all diaphanous and very light, but when she'd added the seventh layer, she could feel the weight of them. Then two light silk blousons, a black underblouse, and on top of that a sheer white one. Each of these had a ruffed collar that had to be layered correctly. Then the outer robe—for this meeting, she chose one as copper as the room, with a rich mahogany undersheen, covered with embroidered emerald-green vines. At the end of each vining curlicue was a gemstone bud—she would guess rubies from the deep redness of the stones and their astonishing depth, but she supposed they might have been garnets, too.
The sleeves seemed a bit short—her wrists came out the ends. She sighed, not willing to go through the ordeal of another outfit, and rolled up the sleeves.
She added knitted-cotton hose and a pair of woven flats, and when she'd finished tying all the ties in the right places and pulling her hair into a single braid down her back, she checked the floor-length mirror. And frowned.
Her hair, always a rich brown, in the mirror now looked almost copper. Her eyes, always hazel, now looked pure amber, and her once-pale skin had an amber cast to it, too. She would have blamed this on the color that light reflected in a copper room, except that she could see that the bone structure of her face had changed, too. Her eyes tilted upward at the outer corners, her cheekbones were more pronounced, and her neck looked both longer and more slender. For that matter, she was too tall for the mirror. It had been angled correctly the night before, but until she moved it to get a better look at herself, it cut off a good six inches of her head. And she could see her ankles at the bottom of the bottommost skirt, whereas previously the skirts had hung no more than a half inch above the ground.
She stared at the mirror, and something that had been niggling in the back of her mind while she was talking to Birra suddenly resolved with crystal clarity. When she talked to him, she had looked him in the eye, but she hadn't had too look up in the neck-straining manner that she had previously.
"I quit growing when I was sixteen," she muttered, but she could tell just by looking at her reflection that she had grown. A lot. She'd gotten taller and thinner, and she'd done it overnight.
What the hell?
She rang the bell for Birra. She hoped he had an explanation for this, because she was goddamned tired of weirdness and surprises.
Cat Creek
Lauren, making Jake a snack, saw Eric drive by with one of the Weird Sisters in his squad car. Lauren squinted through the glass. June Bug. The old one. She wondered what they were up to.
June Bug was a Sentinel, so the two of them were doing something that she could expect wouldn't be good for her. Still, she found that she had a hard time thinking of Eric as the enemy. They'd never been friends in high school—he'd been the Designated Bad Boy, and she'd been the Designated Good Girl—but they had walked home from classes together sometimes, in those on-again, off-again times when Eric had been suspended from driving the family car. They'd talked, and the talks had never been about the people they went to school with, or the miserable performance of the football team. They'd really talked.
Funny. She spread peanut butter and jelly on the whole wheat bread and cut the sandwiches into triangles—Jake called them "tragadals," and insisted on them. She could still remember what she and Eric had talked about, some of those days. About his dreams of going to West Point, of becoming the reincarnation of some of his heroes; Robert E. Lee, George Patton, Douglas MacArthur, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and of course Lieutenant Alexander R. Nininger, good Georgia boy, whose one-man stand in the Philippines had seemed to Eric the perfect military career. He'd been an avid reader of military histories, something that amazed Lauren since Eric never read anything assigned for class and never, ever did homework. Which had probably been what had kept him out of West Point. Or had it been the fact that he was slated to become a Sentinel—that his father wouldn't let him even consider making the military his career? She did remember them fighting a lot about Eric not becoming an officer in the Army.
And she and Eric had talked about her uncertainty over her own future; her absolute dedication to not learning to type because she'd made up her mind that she was never going to be part of someone's typing pool somewhere, her hunger to see other places, her restless feeling that she was missing something—that she was supposed to be doing something important with her life but that she couldn't even imagine what that something might be.
Eric had smiled sadly when she discussed that hunger, and had seemed to understand her. She'd liked him for that. A lot. They couldn't date, of course—because in a town as small as Cat Creek, people kept to their roles. Her role was to be the Good Girl, virginal and studious, and his was to be the Bad Boy, driving too fast, drinking, smoking in the rest rooms, keeping company with the girls whose names parents only whispered. Even when they were very young, they had understood the importance of roles.
But they'd kissed once, when they were standing by her father's workshop in back of the house. Just talking, and they hit a lull in the conversation and made the mistake of looking into each other's eyes. And then he was holding her, and she was holding him—tentatively, cautiously, like people who might be looking at something they could keep—and standing in the kitchen all those years later, when she closed her eyes she could still remember that kiss.
Then they'd backed away, because she wouldn't have been good for his reputation, and he wouldn't have been good for hers. And not long after that, he got permission to drive to school again, and not long after that she graduated and moved on.
She'd never talked about Eric with Brian. There had just been the one kiss, and it hadn't meant anything to either of them.
Except, standing in the kitchen right then, knowing what she knew about the Sentinels, about Eric, about her parents, she could still catch a glimpse of Eric driving by and remember the boy with the dreams of greatness, and the feel of the sun on her cheeks when he kissed her.
Copper House, Ballahara
Birra could offer Molly no explanations. "You do perhaps seem taller, but perhaps it is just your shoes."
She showed him the flats.
"Well, perhaps not the shoes, then."
"I'm taller," she said. "My face has changed, my hair is a different color, my eyes are a different color. I want to know what is going on!"
Birra held one long-fingered hand to his forehead and closed his eyes. "The Imallin will be returning soon. Soon. Perhaps he will have the answers you require. But I, Vodi, I do not have them. I am a humble servant of the h
ouse—"
"Bullshit. You're neither a servant, nor are you humble. I put you second-in-command here, if not in charge of the armed forces, then at least high enough in rank that everyone present bows to you and you bow to no one. Except me. I know bureaucracies, I know military hierarchies. And I know bullshit when I'm being fed it."
Birra's demeanor changed. He stood straighter, took a deep breath, and nodded somberly. "Very well. You are quite correct; in your position, I would wish the same honesty you demand. Here, then, the truth. My orders are that I not discuss the nature of the changes you are experiencing; this is the duty and privilege of the Imallin. You understand orders?"
Molly nodded. "Orders, I understand."
"Then please—come with me, enjoy meeting our guests, enjoy the feast that has been prepared for you, and I will do what I can to hurry the Imallin back from his post. I will give him to understand that the situation is urgent, requiring his soonest attention."
"Your word on it?"
"My word of honor."
"I'll accept that."
Molly had expected the guests to be more veyâr. That wasn't who, or what, she got. Three short, rotund, beautifully furred creatures in elegant tabards and belts sat at one end of a long table, sipping daintily from cups and conversing with a half dozen wrinkled, gray-skinned knuckle-draggers whose speech sounded to Molly like they were trying to gargle and sing at the same time. As she and Birra stepped into the room, the conversation died and everyone stood up.
The knuckle-draggers bowed so deeply their pointed chins touched their bare, knobby knees. They whispered, "Welcome, welcome, Vodi," and kept their eyes on the floor, as if they dared not even look at her. The furry little creatures were less shy—they, too, bowed low to the ground, but when they straightened up, they lifted their heads and met her gaze directly. "You don't look like the Vodi," one of them said, and was quickly hushed by the veyâr and the gray-skinned creatures.
He gestured to the three furry creatures. "I give you The Dark, The Bright, and The Deep, of the Tradona People." With a nod to the still-bowed-over gray people, he said, "And Neighbor-Winter Son of River-Winter, and Down-The-Long-Path Daughter of Hollow-Fire, of the Faolshe."
She returned the bows of the creatures who greeted her.
Then she turned to Birra, and whispered to him, "Are those names—The Dark, The Bright, The Deep?"
"The low Tradona have names," Birra told her, "but these are the highest of the high Tradona. They have places—The Dark presides over the Tradona colony in Mourning Forest; The Bright over the colony in White Hold, in far Ayem; and The Deep over the grand Tradona city of Grimarr in the Silver Chain. They are the three greatest of the Tradona, as demonstrated by the simple form by which they are known."
She nodded and moved to take the seat offered her at the head of the table.
The Faolshe were a mystery of another sort—she wondered why they were so frightened of her. Who was she to them? What was their story of the Vodi about, and how was she supposed to fit into it?
That, really, was the question she had to ask about all of Oria. Who did these people think she was, and what, exactly, did they expect her to do?
Servants appeared as soon as she sat, carrying platters of steaming vegetables and a large cup of tea, which they set before her. The two Faolshe stared at their plates as if salvation lay within the food. The Tradona, on the other hand, studied her with unblinking, unnerving stares.
"You're sure she's the one," The Dark asked Birra.
Birra bowed his head. "Great Dark, we are as sure as we are that the sun rises in the east, that the sea is deep and cold, that the Forest is vast and deadly." Molly would have sworn that his last statement held some sort of barb in it, so sharp was his tone, but his face remained neutral and his position remained relaxed.
"Indeed," The Dark said. "Such dangers as we all face do not lie within the sole domain of the Forest," and his tone was even more clearly strained than Birra's.
There had been a barb, then—but one she couldn't begin to guess at.
What she did guess was that she wasn't what any of them had come hoping to see; the Tradona clearly didn't care for her, and she frightened the Faolshe.
"What is the Vodi supposed to be?" she asked them. She saw Birra wince, and the Faolshe cringe. The Tradona, however, burst into laughter.
"Sure as the sea is wet, eh?" The Bright asked. "You would have us believe she will clear our world of unnatural death, return the True Folk to power and send rrôn and keth back to the hells that spawned them?"
The two Faolshe buried their faces in their hands and uttered frightened cries at that, and the other two Tradona turned to stare at their compatriot. Even Birra blanched and said, "Such words are not to be spoken in this house. What you call down upon your own homes, only you decide. But They will not be mentioned here again.
The Dark shrugged. "What I have to say remains the same, whether I mention…Them"—he gave Birra a condescending nod of acknowledgment—"by name or not. You would have us believe she is the Vodi. As easy to believe she could reseat fallen stars in their sockets, or turn out the light of the moon with a wave of her hand. She doesn't even know who the Vodi is."
"She has passed every test we have so far given her."
"She isn't one of us. She's an outsider."
"You don't know her. You have not seen her. You cannot understand. She is one of us."
"The proof lies in the future. If she is who you claim she is, it will become plain soon enough, won't it?"
Birra rubbed his temples in a gesture that reminded Molly oddly of her adoptive father, back when she was little and he spent a great deal of time worrying about how he was going to pay the bills. Oddly, the reminder didn't upset her the way she would have expected—instead, for just a moment, she felt pity for the man who had, at least in the early years, tried so hard to raise her, even though she was not an easy child to raise or even to love.
She patted Birra's arm gently, and he turned to her with amazement on his face, as if…
…as if she had healed him. It was the same expression she saw on the faces of the supplicants who came to her every day.
…as if he had been touched by God.
That's part of who I am to him, she realized. She hadn't really considered how her captors thought of her before. They were too alien to her, and in ways both too intimately connected to the circumstances of her abduction and too much in control of her present and future fate for her to have allowed herself to wonder about their "human" side.
Yet suddenly she was looking at Birra and wondering whether he had a wife and kids at home, and what it was that he hoped she was going to do for him and his world that he couldn't do for himself.
Suddenly she was annoyed at those smug little Tradona bastards for having the temerity to doubt her—and she didn't even know why she was in Oria.
She'd heard of people identifying with their captors. She'd taken survival-school training on how to handle interrogation and torture and more and how to come out the other side of it not too scrambled—assuming survival, of course.
She recognized signs in herself that she didn't like—signs that she was identifying with her captors.
She needed to get away, fast.
But she wasn't entirely certain anymore that she wanted to.
Cat Creek
Eric and June Bug sat in the squad car about two miles outside of Cat Creek, on a dirt access road that paralleled both Hepner's Road and the old MaCready cotton fields.
"Not going any closer to Rockingham?" June Bug asked him.
"Not yet. Not sure what we have going on here, and I don't want my enemies at my back when I deal with that."
June Bug nodded. "I know it wasn't you who cast that spell, and I know it wasn't me. You get any read on who it was?"
Eric shook his head slowly and studied his hands, gripping the steering wheel so hard the knuckles were blanched white as steamed almonds. "Son of a bitch has us, whoever i
t is. He can go where he wants, do what he wants—"
"—Could be a she," June Bug interjected.
"I'm using he in the universal sense."
"That's fine, then. Just don't let it blind you to the possibilities."
"I was saying." He looked over at her to make sure she was going to let him finish this time. She met his gaze with calm, unwavering eyes and said nothing. He cleared his throat. "I was saying…whoever has done this can go where he wants, do what he wants, and because he…or she…knows who we are and where we are and how we work, he can walk around us like we weren't even there. We're blind, and he has twenty-twenty vision and goddamned radar, sonar, and night vision."
"Right now we know one thing he doesn't know," June Bug said.
"And that would be?"
"That he's one of us."
