by Maya, Tara
“We keep walking forward,” said Kavio.
Dindi
Alone on the dirt path, Dindi wove excuses as if they were reeds for a basket. No one can know about us. He’s just trying to protect me. He’s worrying over the nasty things the Blue Lady said to him. It still hurt, the way Kavio had stared right through her when they passed each other on the path, the way he had quickened his step and hurried away from her, the way a man would sidestep a dead bird crawling with ants. She reminded herself that she had no right to his attention. Her life had been forfeit when he caught her dancing the secret Tavaedi tama. Every breath she took was his favor to her. She had no right to ask for more. If only she could untwist the knot in her stomach and erase his cold expression from her memory.
Kavio had long since disappeared further down the path when Gremo, who usually walked a few paces behind him, as befit a henchman, returned and yelled back to the straggling line of travelers, “Rest! Rest.”
She did not want to rest. She wanted to catch up with Kavio and find out why he would pause now, in the middle of the day, when they were so close to the tribehold. But Kavio obviously didn’t want to talk to her, so she followed Gremo to a clearing by the river where a number of large, flat boulders provided easy seating. She rinsed her face in the cold water, squatted on a rock and dug a tuber out of her rucksack. She had dug up a few edible roots yesterday, and nibbled one now. It tasted starchy and faintly bitter.
More of the travelers in the failed peace party arrived in the clearing. The half-dozen Yellow Bear warriors looked bored and impatient, but the thirty-two Shunned looked glad for the break. They were a thin, timid bunch. After their initial joy at freedom wore off, they had seemed daunted by the journey. She couldn’t blame them for being frightened. They were seeking sanctuary in the territory of their people’s hereditary enemies.
Gwenika entered the clearing. She knelt on the same rock as Dindi to wash her face.
“The Shunned aren’t doing too well,” Gwenika said, echoing Dindi’s silent thoughts out loud. She combed her wet hands through her hair, which was a tangled mess. Gwenika looked exhausted. Her skin was waxy and her forehead was beaded with sweat. “I’m worried about them.”
Dindi clucked sympathetically. Gwenika leaned closer so she could lower her voice. “Some of them have new skin lesions.”
“I thought you and Gremo cured them?”
“We did. It’s so frustrating. Recrudescence. That’s what my mother called it. When a disease comes back after it was supposed to have been eradicated. I haven’t been feeling too good myself, either, actually. I always thought the Shunned were not contagious, but now I am beginning to wonder.”
“Is there a cure for recrudescence?” Dindi asked.
Gwenika said, even more hushed, “Amputation.”
Dindi could hear the Shunned shuffling to and from the river. Their thin feet squelched in the green mud. Most of them still wore their rags. They ducked their heads, hid their faces, from habit. They squatted in clumps of two or three at most, with their backs out like blank shields.
“But…Gwenika, some of the Shunned had the pustules on their faces. Their… Over their whole bodies!”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Gwenika hugged her knees and rocked on her heels. “The worst cases might have to be given to the Deathsworn. Can you imagine? After everything we went through, after everything Zavaedi Kavio did to save these people, if we have to give them up for dead anyway?”
“There has to be another option...” Dindi began.
“No! Not that! Not now!”
Dindi blinked in surprise at Gwenika’s vehemence. “Not what?”
“Put it away! NOW!”
Gwenika slapped Dindi’s hand. To her shock, Dindi found herself clutching the corncob doll. She hadn’t been aware of slipping it out of her blouse. Reddening, she shoved the ragged, blank-faced doll back between her breasts.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know why I did that.”
“My mother still doesn’t know about your role in what Gremo and I did,” Gwenika said. “She must never know. It might go...badly…for you, Dindi.”
“Where is your mother?” Dindi darted a nervous glance around the clearing, but Brena had not arrived at the riverbank yet.
Instead, someone else arrived who commanded Dindi’s instant attention.
Kavio.
He filled the clearing with the force of his presence. He was so handsome, so in command of himself, that she couldn’t help it. Her heart pirouetted. She bit her lip and stared at him until his gaze brushed in her direction. Then she tucked in head to her knees, to avoid meeting his eyes. She needn’t have bothered. He wasn’t looking for her. He wasn’t even looking at her. His lips moved silently as his attention bounced from head to head. He was counting everyone. He did that a lot.
“Gremo?” he called.
Gremo hurried to Kavio’s side. “Zavaedi?”
“How would you like to stretch your wings again?”
“Give the word, Zavaedi. But how will that help us?”
“I’d like you to fly over the Tors of Yellow Bear right now and report back to me so we know what to expect before we get there.”
“What to expect?”
“Is there any unusual activity? Ceremonies or gatherings? Warriors ready to ambush us? That sort of thing. You should be able to see it from the air before they can spot you. Will you do it?”
“Gladly, Zavaedi. Except…”
“Except what?”
Gremo was a big man, taller and more muscular than Kavio who himself did not lack for muscles. Gremo’s long hair fell in a thick braid down his back, in the fashion of an Olani, except on him, the hairstyle didn’t look girlish, it looked like a club. It was hard to believe he had spent the greater part of the last fortnight in the shape of a giant seabird.
“Except nothing,” he said. “I will not disappoint you.”
He hunched in on himself. Kavio crossed his arms. Neither man otherwise moved.
“Now would be the preferred time,” Kavio hinted after a long pause.
Gremo hunkered down further. His jaw muscles clenched and throbbed; color flooded his face all the way down to his neck. Meanwhile, his arms quivered, as though he strained to lift some immense weight. One knee folded, then the other, and he collapsed in on himself. His back bulged like a malignant thing, but no wings sprouted. Instead, a gruesome knot of flesh expanded from his spine and hardened into a big rock. The rock kept growing until Gremo collapsed under its weight. His eyes bulged, moist with shock, and his mouth opened and closed, gasping for breath. Not a bird, but a grounded fish. The boulder was crushing him.
“Gremo!” Kavio shoved his shoulder and pushed at the boulder. He called aloud, to everyone in the clearing, “Help me free him!”
Svego was the first to help, then a few of other warriors lent their shoulders and together they all shoved the huge stone off of Gremo. His legs ought to have been crushed, but they weren’t. However, shame burned in his face.
“I thought you were past this, this, this rock,” Kavio said angrily.
“I’m sorry, Zavaedi,” Gremo said. “That first night after I found myself a man again, I tried to shift back to being a bird. But I couldn’t find my wings a second time. I thought I was just tired, that with food and rest, I would be able to fly again. But I can’t seem to...I can’t find them. My wings are gone. When I reach for them, all I find is rock. The harder I try, the bigger the stone.”
He hung his head.
“If you did it once, you should be able to do it again.” Kavio kicked the stone, scowling. “You picked a poor time to relapse.”
“I’ll keep trying, Zavaedi.”
“I was counting on you,” Kavio said coldly. “Obviously, that was a mistake.”
“You shouldn’t be so hard on him, Zavaedi,” Svego accused. “After all he’s done.”
“Yes, let’s discuss all he’s done,” Kavio said in the same cold tone. “Performing hex
craft with Brena’s daughter, behind my back, and against my express wishes. Has it occurred to you that if you had obeyed me in the first place, perhaps none of us would have needed to depart Sharkshead so hastily?”
Gremo’s face turned ashen.
Svego snaked an arm around his shoulders, but Gremo shoved it off and stomped away from the clearing, into the privacy of the woods. Svego ran after him, calling his name like a supplication. Those still in the clearing, including the warriors who had just helped Kavio free Gremo from the rock, dealt with the awkward silence by feigning interest in tasks that had suddenly become deeply engrossing.
Beside Dindi, Gwenika made a strangled sound.
“What if he’s right, Dindi?” she asked. “What if Gremo and I ruined everything?”
“You healed those people,” Dindi said firmly. “That wasn’t wrong.”
“Except we didn’t really heal them, did we? They are getting worse again. So, in the end, we destroyed our tribe’s only chance at peace for nothing.”
Dindi wanted to reply, but the air felt so thick with tension, she choked on the words. Thorny vines of magic smothered the clearing, prickling Gwenika, lashing out from Kavio, cocooning the Shunned… everywhere, spikes and barbs.
Brena arrived at last in the clearing. She went to speak to Kavio. Whatever she said to him, she kept her voice low, so their conversation did not carry across the clearing as the previous confrontation with Gremo had.
Dindi watched them. Whatever Kavio told Brena upset her greatly. It was hard to keep them in focus, however. The thick air tasted starchy and bitter.
“Dindi!” Gwenika hissed. “What are you doing? I thought we agreed you would put that away! Everyone can see you! My mother is staring right at you!”
“Wh…?”
Dindi’s lips felt numb. Once again, she realized, without meaning to, she had taken out the corncob doll. Heat radiated against her skin, dry, dry heat that tasted of death and dust. All around her, light scorched her eyes, which burned the way looking into the sun destroys sight, forcing her to throw her arms before her face, against the unbearable. She lost her balance and fell from the rock into the Vision.
Vessia
Skeletons painted red with dust lay crumpled in doorways and draped over adobe balconies. Not a living soul walked the dried out gutters between the cubish clay houses. An irritating wind, bitter like chicory, tossed tumbleweeds through the abandoned clanhold, and prickled Vessia’s nose. The sun was relentless. She could feel her shoulders and nose reddening in the glare.
It reminded her of one of her days with Old Woman and Old Man, when they had fired up the outside oven to smelt gold. She had ignored their warnings to stand back, savoring the almost physical pressure of the heat on her chest and cheeks, the sparks that scratched her like hissing cats. Her reddened flesh, scored with dozens of tiny burns, had itched for a day afterward, and Old Woman and Old Man had fretted her skin might be permanently marred. But by the next morning, it had healed, smooth, pale and flawless as always.
Today Vessia did not welcome the heat on her skin, and she would have turned away from this oven of a day, this burnt out wisp of a clanhold, if she could have. She would have averted her face from a very tiny skeleton lying with miniature arm and finger bones stretched out, almost, but not quite touching the larger skeleton lying beside it in the dust. But she couldn’t tear away her gaze.
Ever since they had crossed over the mountains and descended through the rocky desert lands on this side, they had passed more and more clanholds like this one. Inhabited only by the dead, infested with scorpions and rats. And bones. So many bones.
“What happened here?” she asked Vio the Skull Stomper. She wasn’t supposed to think of him as the Maze Zavaedi least Nangi eat her thought and learn the truth.
Vio walked at her side, but he never glanced at the bones. He looked neither right nor left, simply marched forward.
“Who knows?” He shrugged. “Famine. War. Disease. People die easily in these lands, in these days.”
“You don’t care.”
He paused mid-step. “And you do?” He searched her face. “I had the impression nothing touched you. You always seem so…”
“What?”
“Above it all,” he said. “As if you could fly through fire and not burn.”
“The Bone Whistler caused this?”
Vio’s face tightened. Brittle sparks of magic radiated off him. “Yes.”
“But why?”
“He hungered for power. He gorged on power. He filled his belly, and scattered the desert with bones. ” Vio’s lip curled. “These fools welcomed him. They let it happen. They deserved him.”
She bent to pluck the baby’s skull from its vertebrae stem. “This one too?”
He snatched the skull from her hand, dashed it to the ground and smashed it with his sandaled foot. The violence of it made her flinch. The kohl and calcium lines of his war paint had crackled and flaked in the heat, and dust had subtly darkened and mutated the colors into something monstrous. His face twisted into an ugly sneer that hardly seemed human.
“Don’t forget, they call me the Skull Stomper. I welcomed him too. Once.” He glared at her. The paint, the dirt, the scowl could not hide the grief in his eyes. “What do you want me to say? I have sworn to kill him. Isn’t that enough?”
“Is it?”
“I have to start somewhere.”
The wind moaned around them, kicking up so much dust that though he only stood a handspan from her, she could hardly see his face in the haze. But she heard him clearly, and his voice was so deep and hot that it felt like something melting her skin from her bone, searing the deepest part of her.
“I earned my Shining Name in blood and pain, Vessia,” he said. “I may have made you my wife in name, but I know you can never love me.”
“No, probably not,” she said.
The dust passed and she saw him more clearly, caked reddish gray in the residue. He bowed his head and clenched his fists.
“Not after what I have become.” It was not a question.
“It is not because of anything you were or are,” she said. “It is me. I’ve told you. I can’t love. I don’t know why. I just don’t feel such a thing. It made the Old Woman and Old Man sad that I could not love them, and they did not even serve the Bone Whistler. It made Danumoro sad. There is something missing from me.”
“No,” he said. “It’s missing from us. You are the only perfect thing in the world. It is the world that has failed you.”
“I don’t feel perfect. I feel as if I’ve forgotten the one important thing.” She had never spoken of this to anyone, not to Old Man and Old Woman, not to Danumoru. She clawed for words. “It’s like a familiar taste on my tongue, but I can’t recall the name of the food. It’s like something swimming under the water, about to resurface. Sometimes, as now, I feel it is walking right behind me, and if I turned around fast enough, I could catch it. But when I turn around, there’s nothing there. I turn in circles, uselessly, and there’s nothing, nothing, nothing.”
“Danumoro told me you have no memory of your childhood. You must have lost your family and fled the Rainbow Labyrinth when you were very young. You must hate the Bone Whistler for what he did to you.”
“Not for what he did to me, but standing here, seeing what he has done to these clanfolk… to Danumoro… to you…” A strange hurt throbbed in her chest, as if her clothes were too tight. “I think I do hate him,” she said slowly. “I am glad we are going to kill him.”
Vio’s lips quirked. “Vessia, I think maybe you are learning to love.”
“Not at all. Seeing this…I think I grasp hate. Not love.”
“You have to start somewhere,” he said.
Brena
Ever since dawn, when Brena had been awakened by the Banshee’s scream, she had known she would see the Golden Lady again. Sure enough, once the party began walking, and Brena separated from the others, the blonde bear shambled through t
he trees and limped alongside her. The bear’s injured leg stank, fetid, and the wound oozed with maggots. It was getting worse.
“You heard,” the Golden Lady said. Her bear voice always sounded like a growl, yet distinctly feminine.
“The Banshee’s cry.” Brena stroked the bear’s fur. “Who will die?”
“That depends on you,” said the Golden Lady.
“It was for you? Is that why I was able to hear it?”
The bear growled, which might have been agreement, or something else. It was hard to tell with faeries.
“I want to help you,” Brena said, “but what you ask…to take a life in cold blood…I can’t do it. I heal people. I don’t murder them.”
The bear glowed pale yellow, the shade of pulp in a bitter melon, and changed into a woman. The woman, like the bear, had an injured leg. Her blonde hair fell lank against the wrinkled, limp wings folded down her back. The faery gripped Brena’s arm.
“If the Brunderfae fail, so too will your people fail to defeat your enemies in the upcoming war.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Nothing about Death is fair. I am as much her victim as you.”
“I’m truly sorry. But it is not my place to take another’s life to spare yours.”
“You carry the Black Arrow,” the Golden Lady said. “But there is one who carries another of Death’s Weapons. If she keeps it, she will meet Death.”
“Another of Death’s Weapons?”
“There are three,” said the Golden Lady. “Made to destroy faerykind. And in turn we made three Shields to defend against the weapons of the Deathsworn.”
Brena drew in a sharp breath. “Why didn’t you tell me this before? If there is some way I can counter the Black Arrow without sacrificing a life…”
“Yes, a Shield could counter the Black Arrow, but alas, our Shields have long been lost to us,” said the Golden Lady. “Without a Shield, you have no other choice. A life must be given to Lady Death. But the one who already carries Death’s gift is doomed to fall under Death’s shadow no matter what you do. If she were struck with the arrow…”
