The Unfinished Song: Sacrifice

by Maya, Tara

  Her feeble blow had no discernable impact on the doll.

  She glanced up at the torch on the palisade.

  Gwenika

  “There you are!”

  An arm reached out and yanked Gwenika into the shadows. Her heart leaped like a rabbit fleeing a hawk. The rows of thatched lodges, the bonfire surrounded by dark, gyrating bodies, the thud of drums and feet on dirt, these things dimmed for a moment, and in their place she saw huts of oiled skins and, pacing between them, warriors with spears. Blue Waters warriors, tattooed like ogres. They were going to kill her.

  No.

  It was only her older sister, Gwena.

  “I need to warn you,” said Gwena.

  Gwenika’s heart was still galloping. She laughed nervously. “Warn me? Are we under attack already?”

  “This is serious. I’m not talking about that phony war the boys are whooping about. I need to warn you about a real danger in the here and now.”

  “Like what?”

  “Follow me.”

  Gwena acted so furtive that Gwenika felt compelled to tiptoe after her. They headed for a different lodge, the one which Gwena shared with Kemla and Jensi and the older girls of the cohort. The hearth fires inside burned low, and the reddish glow of the embers bathed most of the room in flickering shadows.

  Without a word, Gwena walked to a pile in the corner and pulled back a cloth to reveal a clownish mask. Gwenika picked it up and examined it: bulging eye slots, exaggerated billed beak, extended green and brown wings on the headdress. Most masks had less material in the back, but this one was fitted leather all around, and, beneath the feather frills, looked as though it would fit quite snuggly, perhaps even uncomfortably.

  “That’s the big danger?” Gwenika asked incredulously. “A duck mask?”

  She wondered if her sister could even begin to imagine what she had gone through, journeying through enemy territory and coming out alive. Obviously not, if this was supposed to scare her.

  “That’s the Duck,” Gwena said grimly.

  “Right. So?”

  “You really haven’t heard of it? You haven’t spoken to any of the folk who are in the age cohort just above ours? The ones who went through Initiation three years ago?”

  “No.”

  Gwena blew a raspberry of mingled frustration and disgust. “This is exactly why your name was on the hand.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Gwenika said. Her head prickled. Rubbing her forehead, she said, “I’m tired, a little drunk, a lot sick, and there’s a party going on out there in my honor, so unless you have a point to make, I would like to return…”

  “You think that party is really to honor you?” scoffed Gwena.

  “You’re jealous.”

  “I’m trying to protect you. Listen carefully to me. There is one tradition that is not handed down by the teachers. It’s passed from cohort to cohort, directly. Every Initiation, a Duck is chosen. Usually, it’s at the beginning of the year, you know, during duck hunting season in the autumn, but our cohort was slow to pick one because of the attack on the night of our Testing. Now that things are settled—”

  “Settled? Are you crazy? There’s going to be a war.”

  “So they say, but who knows? It doesn’t matter, because in time of war, it’s even more important to Hunt the Duck.”

  “Why? What’s a Duck?”

  “The Initiate who drags down the rest of the cohort. The most useless, disliked, unwanted person among us. Every year, those in the know name a hand of candidates. We study those five until we decide which is the worst of the worst. Then we make a blind for that person, set the decoy, and unleash the arrows.”

  Gwenika sucked a sharp breath between her teeth. Beer and vomit had left an acrid aftertaste in her mouth. “Are you talking about human sacrifice?”

  “No, it’s forbidden to kill the Duck. Directly. But it’s considered good luck for the cohort if the Duck can be…driven to take his own life. It happened in the cohort before ours. The Duck that turn was a boy, a clumsy oaf who couldn’t hunt a legless rabbit. The best hunters in the cohort told him that they would teach him to hunt, and several girls secretly promised him that if he were successful, they would share a mat with him. The hunters convinced him he needed to fool the other fowl by wearing the Duck mask, and he fell for it. That’s one of the rules, the Duck has to agree to put the mask on himself. Then the Initiates led him on a merry chase through the woods, and he tripped the net and ended up dangling from a tree. The mask isn’t easy to take off once it’s on. It isn’t like Tavaedi masks, but is sewn right on. You’d need a knife to cut it off. Anyway, while he was hanging there by his feet, they stole all his clothes except the mask, and then they all laughed at him.

  “You’d think that would have been a clear enough message to him, but he didn’t kill himself right away. He kept trying, for months, to get over being the Duck. But that’s the thing. Even after they cut him out of the tree, and cut the mask off his face, he was still the Duck. Once the Duck, you’re always the Duck. Everywhere he went, the Initiates blew duck whistles at him. They called him names. They fouled his nets, put bugs in his food, thorns on his mat. When summer finally arrived and it was time for everyone to return home to their clans, they found him in a tree, hanging by his own bowstring. He had put the Duck mask back on, by himself. He’d finally gotten the message.”

  “That’s horrible!” Gwenika paced the dark lodge, nearly hyperventilating. “And you say my name was on the hand? Those ‘in the know’ consider me one of the five worst people in our cohort?”

  “Yes, Gwenika,” Gwena said savagely. “What did you expect? With your constant whining, your imaginary diseases, your interminable babbling, your stupidity, your weeping, your ugly, pimply face!”

  Gwenika recoiled.

  “Of course we had to put you on the list!” hissed Gwena. “You brought it on yourself!”

  “You keep saying ‘we.’ Were you one of the people ‘in the know’?”

  “Yes.”

  “You knew I was on the list to be tormented like this? How long?”

  “Since the day we arrived in the Tors.”

  “And you never told me!” Gwenika balled her hands. “I hate you! I’ve always known how you really felt about me, Gwena, but I didn’t know you were as wicked as this! Even animals protect their own kin better than you!”

  She waited for another nasty insult, perhaps even a physical attack. Instead, she heard a gasp and a sob.

  “I know.” Was Gwena actually crying? “I was stupid and selfish. I was so worried about you dragging me down, that I didn’t even think what it would be like if I lost you. Then you left with Mother, and all I could think was what if I never saw either of you again? That’s why I’m telling you this now. Fa, I don’t blame you for hating me. But I need you to listen to me. I can prevent you from being named the Duck if you let me, if you’ll take my advice for once in your life.”

  “I don’t understand you. First you call me stupid and ugly, next you say you want to help me. Some help.”

  “Please, please, try to understand. I was so happy when I found out that I was one of those in the know. At the same time, I did not want to be rejected by the others. They taunted me every time you did something nauseating. I used to curse the blood that connected us.”

  Before Gwenika could complain again, Gwena held up a forestalling hand. “Wait. I’m not finished. After you left with Mother, I realized I had it backwards. Blood comes first. We’re sisters. My duty is to protect you, come flood or fire. I don’t know why it took me so long to see that. I won’t forget again. You have my oath of honor, Gwenika.”

  Gwena pulled her stone dagger out of her belt and cut her palm, dribbling blood on the dirt. The globules gleamed in the dust like black pearls.

  “What do I need to do?” Gwenika asked.

  Dindi

  Clearly, she needed to do something more drastic.

  It was strange. Though on
ly moments before Dindi had been mourning the loss of the corncob doll, this freakish reappearance convinced her as nothing else had that she did need to destroy the doll.

  If she could.

  Dindi stood on tiptoe on the big rock, doll in hand, and tossed it up into the shallow stone bowl of the torch. The dried cob burst into a pretty flare at once, and crackled nicely for a long while after that before finally, when Dindi poked around with a stick, she found nothing but ashes.

  Then light flared in Dindi’s face.

  Vessia

  “You can’t be rid of me that easily.”

  The voice was unexpected. Vessia whirled around to see Nangi watching her.

  Vessia felt a frisson of resentment shudder through her. It had been so long since she had run through the meadows alone, as she’d used to when she lived with Old Man and Old Woman. She missed the smell of heather under open sky. She needed wind to lift her hair off her neck, she needed to swing her arms without anyone touching her shoulder to calm her. The land they were passing through now was hot, dry and dead, closed up into canyons of striated rock. Trekking through the stone passages, where sometimes the overhang was so high it blocked the sun, was like traversing caves, or tombs. When she’d told Vio she wanted to leave and be on her own for a while, he had only laughed and told her that being a prisoner meant not being free. She had retorted, “But am I not your wife?” and either because of that or because he noticed the mad itch in her, he relented. He let her go alone to a cool gathering of water in the rock, a place where aspen grew around the water’s edge and swans paused on their migration to swim. And now, just when she thought she was alone, she discovered Nangi had followed her.

  “I can eat your thoughts, you know.” Nangi smiled a nasty smile.

  Vessia had seen her do this with others; she would sidle up to them, hiss at them that she could eat their thoughts, and then grin while they broke into a sweat and began to stammer. Vessia didn’t understand why they feared having their thoughts eaten.

  “Do they taste good?” Vessia asked. This was something she had always wondered.

  Nangi’s eyes narrowed like a cat’s. “How do you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Shield your thoughts! How do you do it? Stop it at once! It only proves you have something to hide! Let your thoughts out at once or I shall report you to my father!”

  “But I’m not hiding anything,” Vessia said.

  Nangi pursed her lips. “Prove it. Tell me—what are you thinking right now? Tell me!”

  “Shhhh.” Vessia pointed across the pool to where a small deer nibbled on a sapling. “Do you see her?”

  “A deer, so what? Are you hungry?”

  “You asked me my thoughts. I was looking at that doe and wondering what she would do if a man captured her, and instead of slitting her throat and scraping off her skin, he told her that she was not an animal, but his wife. I wondered if the deer would be confused, if she would put on clothes and go along with it, or perhaps run away, thinking it would be better to be killed and eaten outright rather than live in a tomb-house and walk on two feet and pound corn in the morning and evening, and never run again. That’s just what I was wondering when you asked me my thoughts.”

  “No wonder I cannot eat your thoughts. You are mad.”

  “I answered your question. Now answer mine.”

  “It doesn’t work like that. I ask the questions, I don’t answer them.”

  “A bargain has two sides.”

  “I don’t trade. I take.”

  “What is it like to eat thoughts? What do they taste like?”

  Nangi’s cheeks tightened. “You really want to know? Fine. I see the Orange light in a person’s aura, like a string winding puzzles around them. Some people have tangled strands. Others look neat and boxy. I pluck the string from the air and taste it, and the tastes are different too. And to answer your question, no, they do not taste good. They are always bitter, or sour, or vile. They always taste of lies and fear and loathing.”

  “Maybe you are eating the wrong thoughts,” Vessia said.

  “The worst part,” Nangi’s lip curled up in disgust, “is that even though they know I can tell what they are thinking, everyone lies to my face and tells me how beautiful I am, when all along they are thinking: Ugly, Ugly, Ugly. I know the taste of that word by heart.”

  Vessia turned back to the pool to watch the swans. Their reflections doubled them on the mirror surface of the pool, which reminded her of Nangi’s reflection in the Looking Bowl.

  “But I’ve seen your real face, Nangi,” Vessia said. “You are beautiful.”

  She drew a string of tangerine light from the light around her and held it out to Nangi. “Taste my thought and know it is true.”

  The other woman’s nasty smile returned. She pawed the string out of Vessia’s hand greedily, with a chuckle at the back of her throat as if she had tricked Vessia out of something. She yanked it with her teeth and pulled, the way a mountain lion would pull the haunch off a femur. In response to her furious tugging, Vessia let go of the tiny string, and the orange light turned into a rushing river of light, a blast of power that knocked Nangi off her feet and threw her backwards onto her back. She landed heavily. Though her buttocks absorbed most of the blow, she bruised her thighs and elbows on the sharp rocks in the gravel.

  Furiously, she scrambled to her feet. “How did you do that?”

  “You tried to take too many thoughts at once.”

  “But how can you have such strong Orange light in your aura? Only an Orange Zavaedi … and I haven’t seen any Orange in your aura before this. I thought you only danced Yellow and Green. You tricked me! You are not what you seem, Corn Maiden. You Imorvae hexer! You witch!”

  “You shouldn’t take things that don’t belong to you. Though, truthfully, I never realized I had so many thoughts. They come and go so quickly! I am sorry my thoughts knocked you down.”

  “Oh, you’ll be sorry,” Nangi promised. One didn’t have to eat thoughts to know it was a threat. Not satisfied with that, she chucked pebbles at the swans until the birds fluttered their wings and half-splashed, half-flew to further out on the water.

  “I hate swans! Filthy stuck-up things think they are better than other birds because they’re sooooo pretty, but what are they really? Just ducks with long necks.” Nangi wagged her finger. “You made a mistake. You threw a thousand wild thoughts at me, but I’m quicker than you think and I found out more than you know just now. I’ll be watching you.”

  She stomped away, which relieved Vessia. Finally, she could enjoy solitude. But for some reason, she could not take the same joy in it as before. The swans had fled, and the water reflected only the inescapable walls of dead stone.

  Dindi

  Dindi sat straight up. She’d collapsed in the grass when Vision had hit her. She had the eerie feeling the precipitous Vision was blowback from trying to have burned the doll. The corncob doll was back, looking as old and nearly-rotting and yet perfectly intact and not-burned as it could be.

  What could she do? She couldn’t leave it here, for some other innocent victim to find. She couldn’t smash or burn it. She would have to keep it with her until she could find a way to destroy it—every magical thing had its weakness, Kavio had told her once. She would find a way. There was no more doubt in her mind that she wanted to destroy it. She just couldn’t. Yet.

  So why did she feel a tickle of relief when she tucked the doll back into her blouse?

  Kavio

  Maybe it was presentiment or maybe it was just paranoia, but Kavio spent that night awake, sitting in the rafters of the thatched roof, over the door of the hut he had been given by War Chief Vultho. His henchman Gremo was asleep outside his door. The man felt guilty about his earlier failure and had been eager to play loyal guard.

  But the attack didn’t come until the next morning, when Kavio went to the piss pit by himself. A dozen warriors, painted black with coal and ash, jumped him and trussed hi
m to a pole like an animal, while he cursed himself for not anticipating just such an ambush. They jogged with him, quickly and surely, out of the Tor, down the hill, across fields and along the river. The morning fog hid him from curious eyes, if anyone would have even cared if they had noticed his plight. Vultho was going to get away with murder, thanks to acting without hesitation, but how would he explain Kavio’s death? How would he prevent Kaivo’s allies from retaliating?

  This was the problem when you dealt with stupid people.

  They carried him all the way outside the valley to a small clanhold called Quarryhold, located, not unexpectedly, next to the quarry. The warriors cut Kavio loose. He rubbed his arms, surprised, re-thinking his chances at survival.

  The houses here were all built of big slabs of stone and packed earth. Incurious women bent over pestles, pounding corn with big sticks, thump, thump, thump, to the tune of a song they all droned, the words of which he couldn’t quite hear. Even though this clan lived so close to the Tors of Yellow Bear, they wore their hair in a unique local style, two coiled buns packed with mud, and each had a stripe of yellow paint smeared down the middle of her face: forehead, nose and chin, all neatly bisected.

  Quarryhold had been Hertio’s birth clan, so maybe Kavio shouldn’t have been as astonished as he was to see Hertio stride out of a rock house.

  Hertio punched him across the jaw. “You double-crossing snake.”

  “Nice to see you too.” Kavio rubbed his jaw. The old man still knew how to throw a punch that hurt like a horse kick to the face.

  “How long were you in league with my nephew to overthrow me?” Hertio shouted. “Before or after you journeyed with him? And why? Why would you repay me with treachery?”

  “I’m not in league with Vultho.”

  “Yesterday, you said…”

  “I wanted people to think I was in Vultho’s favor, and obviously it worked,” Kavio said. He checked for loose teeth with his tongue. “Maybe a little too well. Actually, the whole way home from Sharkshead, I was wondering how I would convince you to punish him for his actions at Jumping Rock. When your men came to extend your invitation to chat, I thought Vultho had decided to have me killed despite my play last night.”