by Maya, Tara
Kavio chuckled. “I wouldn’t want to inconvenience you. Or poor Svego. I promise I’ll do something to remove the pot from the heat before the clay cracks.”
“You want to tell me what you plan?”
“And have you curry favor by repeating it word for word back to Vultho?”
“I wouldn’t do that!”
“But you’d be tempted, and have to wrestle with your conscience, which is pretty weak to begin with. Let’s not overtax it.”
“Thank you very much!” Tamio said sarcastically.
“No, thank you, Tamio.” He was serious. “Thank you for bringing me this warning. I know you did not have to.”
Tamio felt his face heat. “Yeah. Well. I better get going.”
He whistled to the guard he’d bribed to lower a rope so he could climb out. He glanced back at Kavio, who still leaned against one wall, radiating calm confidence. Tamio felt a knot in his back loosen. Kavio had a plan. The man always had a plan.
Brena
Brena stood toe to toe with the stubborn sept leader in charge of the warriors guarding the pit.
“I’m a healer, and a Zavaedi, and I have a right to see the prisoner!”
“The War Chief’s orders are no one is to talk to him,” insisted the sept leader.
“I’m not a warrior and I don’t take orders from the War Chief,” she said. “And if you don’t get out of my way, I’ll summon the fae to remove you from my way.”
He exchanged an unhappy look with his men. One of them muttered, “The War Chief can’t order us to mess with Zavaedies and their magic.”
The others nodded. After a moment, so did the sept leader. Silently, he stepped out of the way.
“Aren’t you going to throw down the rope?” she asked.
“I won’t stop you, but I’m not going to help you.”
She snorted.
The rope was heavy and she had to exert herself to uncoil it from around the wooden stake on the lip of the pit. Knots in the rope provided the only hand and footholds. Once she was two-thirds down, Kavio lifted her by the waist and helped her to the ground.
“Thank you for coming,” he said quietly. “I apologize for asking you, but I don’t know of anyone else the guards would have allowed to pass. Danumoro already tried, but he lacks your, ahem, fierce eye.”
“I would have thought I’d be the last person you’d want to see right now.” The unknown hexer had been tried in absence by the Tavaedies and sentenced to death, over Kavio’s objections. Brena had argued for execution. “I’m sorry, but what you did was wrong, Kavio. You should not have broken the law of light and shadows. No one is above the law. The taboos exist for a good reason.”
He paced away from her. It had been three days now that he’d been in the pit with no food and water. It was well known that the fae brought him water, and what nuts and berries their little hands could carry, but the exposure had worn him down. Stubble roughened the lower half of his face. Though he had kept his dailies in a single neat pile against one edge of the pit, the rank smell permeated the congested space. The air here tasted dense and foul. Out of courtesy, she did her best not to wrinkle her nose.
“I need a favor, Zavaedi Brena,” he said, and she heard the ragged edge to his voice. “I have no right to ask you, but there is no one else.”
“Anything within my power and my honor, Zavaedi.”
“Go to my house in Hertio’s compound and look inside a white bowl wrapped in rabbit skins. You will find the Black Arrow. Take it back.” He met her eyes. “Before I finish the Gauntlet, I want you to kill me.”
Gwenika
Warm darkness and familiar scent of smoke and thatch reassured Gwenika. She lay on her mat in the lodge, snuggled in blankets. Her friend Dindi sat on one side of her, holding her hand. Everything felt right.
Obviously, I’m dead.
Gwenika tried to sit up. Pain shot through her abdomen, followed by the no less visceral pain of loss as she remembered what had happened. Tears painted stripes on her dusty cheeks.
“Are you still in pain?” Dindi asked anxiously.
“Oh, Dindi. I’ve been such a fool.”
Without a word, Dindi hugged her and let Gwenika sob into her shoulder.
“How could you ever stand me, Dindi?” Gwenika asked. “Even on the first day you met me, I was such a whiny lump. Always boring everyone with imaginary sicknesses. I thought I really was sick, but now I know I did it to myself. I did everything to myself. Everything he said about me was true. I bet you wish you had never befriended me. I’m so, so sorry. I wish I could take everything back, but I can’t. I ruined everything.”
Dindi stroked her hair.
“No, no,” she said, “Gwenika, whatever happened, it’s my fault. You yourself said it the first time you saw me with the corncob doll – I was using the magic of a hexed thing to make up for the magic I did not have. And this is the consequence, both of us almost died. I was horrible and selfish and thinking only about what I wanted, not what was best for anyone else. But I think I know what caused your hurt.”
Gwenika grew still. She tugged out loose strands in the mat. “Who?”
“Not who, what. The corncob doll belonged to a powerful dancer who was killed by the Bone Whistler. When the dancer was murdered, her death agonies must have left some kind of curse on the doll. It nearly killed you.”
“No, Dindi. I brought my problem on myself.” The hearths in the lodge had been extinguished, but a wisp of dying smoke emerged from the embers.
“As did I,” said Dindi.
“You saved my life.”
“No, no. The others did. I just happened to know the tama, though I had no right to it.”
“You saved my life,” Gwenika repeated, “I was in pain, and everything was a blur, but I was not so lost to darkness that I did not understand what you sacrificed to save me. You saved my life, at the risk of yours.”
Dindi blushed and looked away. “If it was at risk, it was only because of the wrong I did. You and the other Initiates chose better than you knew when you made me the Duck.”
“I never wanted to do that to you,” Gwenika said. “I just didn’t want them to do it to me.”
She hoped that Dindi would say, I understand, or I forgive you. She wanted to be friends again so she could unburden her secret and tell someone the real reason she had fallen, bleeding, on the ground.
“They won’t protect me forever.” Dindi rested her chin on her knees. “They will remember that they hate me and someone will turn me in. Then the leaders will offer me a choice of how I want to die: to be thrown into the bear pits and stoned, to be given to the Deathsworn with my throat slit, or to step into the faerie ring on the Tor of the Stone Hedge to dance to death.”
Gwenika felt guilty that she had still been thinking only of herself and her own loss when Dindi could be killed at any minute. She tried to focus.
“There must be a way you could become a Tavaedi,” Gwenika said. “I can’t believe you could dance Yellow so well and not be a healer. How do you know it was only the magic of the others who healed me? How do you know it wasn’t your magic too?”
“I don’t have magic. The thread ends there. There’s nothing left to weave.”
“No, I can’t believe it.”
“Things aren’t just the way we want because we believe it or don’t.”
“That’s not true! I made myself sick because I believed it. The Blue Waters tribesfolk made the Shunned sick because they believed they were evil. If it can work for bad beliefs, why not good ones?”
Dindi just shook her head.
“Fa! I have it!” Gwenika clapped her hands together. “You do have Yellow healing magic. You have to. And I know why no one saw it before now!”
Dindi arched a brow.
“Just listen, just listen!” Gwenika flapped her hands in the air in excitement. “Danumoro and Gremo and I have been working with the Shunned, trying to heal them. Remember when I told you that many of them kep
t getting sick again? We couldn’t understand why. Danu finally figured it out. Many of them dance both Blue and Yellow. And their Blue and Yellow Chromas are so perfectly balanced, that the colors cancel each other out, so they both look invisible in their aura. Is any of this making sense to you?”
Dindi nodded.
“Good, good! So anyway. They had not just been made bodily sick, an affliction of Yellow magic, they had been made sick of soul—impure, ashamed and depressed—an affliction of Blue magic. It wasn’t until we found Tavaedies who could do Purifying Blue dances for the Shunned as well as Healing Yellow that the cure took hold and stuck. Fa, don’t you see! You must dance Blue as well as Yellow! The Chromas cancel each other out and can’t be seen in your Chroma…”
“How did you find out that the Shunned had both Blue and Yellow?” asked Dindi.
“It took a Tavaedi who also had both Blue and Yellow to see it,” said Gwenika.
“I’m afraid that’s the hole in your water gourd, then. Kavio was my teacher. He has every Chroma, and he tested me many times. He found nothing. If he could not find magic in me, no one could.”
“Oh.” Gwenika deflated.
“Thank you for trying, though.”
Outside, a tremendous commotion drew their attention. Jensi ran into the lodge.
“Dindi, Gwenika, if you are well enough, you must come now! The war chief has made true his threat. He is making Kavio run the Gauntlet!”
“I have no wish to see him humiliated,” said Gwenika. “And I’m still not feeling up to the trip. I will stay here.”
“I understand,” Dindi said. “I hope you understand why I must go.”
“Must you? The best thing you could do for him now would be to leave this place. Convince your kin to flee with you back to your clanhold.”
“And leave Kavio to defend me in my absence?” Dindi shook her head.
“It’s not as though you can help him now.”
“Maybe.”
Dindi stood up, but Gwenika held her hand. Something about the determined gleam in her friend’s eye made Gwenika queasy. Dindi squeezed her fingers.
“I hate the bitterness that grew between us. Are we good again, Gwenika?”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
“I am glad.”
Dindi freed her hand gently. When she walked to the door, backlit by the bright spring sunshine, she looked like a faceless shadow, and Gwenika felt the shiver of a terrible omen.
“Don’t go, Dindi,” she begged one last time.
But Dindi was already gone.
The noise waxed clamorous outside as all the Initiates called to one another to go to witness the Gauntlet, then waned into silence. Everyone had gone, except Gwenika. Although she still felt weak, she wished she had gone after all, just so she did not have to be alone.
The little one inside her, whom she had desperately loved despite everything, was gone now. No one else even knew he had been there. She wept quietly in her solitude.
Kavio
The Gauntlet.
Every man of every sept in the Yellow Bear army stood there. Where before mats for a feast in his honor had stretched from the stage to the bear pits, now two rows of men stretched out before Kavio. Each warrior held a slender tree branch stripped of leaves. Their painted faces twisted their expressions into something ferocious but under the colored grease, many looked uneasy. Overhead, the cloudless sky was a perfect cerulean.
Kavio undressed in silence. He tossed his leathers at the feet of the other war leaders, with no effort to conceal his contempt. Hertio, although he had no official rank, stood with them. The older man was furious with Kavio.
“Just give the bastard what he wants,” urged Hertio. “This is the perfect opportunity for Vultho to have you ‘accidently’ killed. Better to sacrifice one girl—she isn’t even a Tavaedi, she’s nothing!—than to lose you. You cannot be so selfish, Kavio.”
Kavio removed his last garment except for a single loincloth on a flimsy belt around his hips.
“You know as well as I do that she’s not worth it,” Hertio added. “If she were, you wouldn’t have hidden her in the first place.”
Kavio smiled at him tightly. He didn’t bother to reply.
Chanting began. The time had come.
He took his place at the head of the Gaultlet, where Vultho, flashing his golden robe and headdress as usual, waited for him.
“If you cannot take it and fall to your knees, begging for mercy and the chance to reveal the transgressor’s name, we will stop the punishment, Kavio,” Vultho said, loudly enough for all the warriors to hear. “We must punish your insubordination, but I do not wish you ill.”
He smirked. Probably after the warriors crippled Kavio, Vultho would act outraged and punish the perpetrators. He leaned forward. “Not so mighty now, are you, outtriber?”
The restless hum of the multitude swelled around them, crying out for the Gauntlet to begin. Kavio searched the mass of twisted faces for just one.
It wasn’t hard to single her out. She stood somehow apart from everyone around her, tightly though the bodies were packed everywhere else. Her face was drawn and pale, her eyes huge and darker than indigo.
Vultho lifted his arm and his voice over the drone of the onlookers. “You will run through the Gauntlet when I lower my arm.” He addressed the men directly. “Though this man has been like an Uncle to you, he has slipped as on wet stones and dropped his honor. Only pain will teach him to pick it up again. You will help him best by beating him hardest.”
He dropped his arm. “Hu!”
Kavio stood unmoving long enough for a murmur to arise among the men, long enough for the war leaders to exchange glances, wondering if they would have to force him through the gauntlet. Then, a second before anyone could speak, he stepped between the two rows of men.
The crowd burst into jeers.
Switches rained down on his chest and back as he walked down the gauntlet. He did not run. Each footfall drummed a steady pattern not hastened by the patter and thud of blows smacking his bare flesh. He looked each man in the eye as he walked by to receive that man’s lash. He knew them all by name. Though he said nothing aloud, neither a word nor a cry, he noted who smirked back at him, who glanced away in shame, and who met his gaze with a wordless challenge of his own. The crowds who had come to witness his public humiliation had fallen silent, stunned by his display.
But Kavio knew that once he reached the second half of the Gauntlet, Vultho’s hand chosen goons would be waiting to inflict much more than a reprimand.
He looked up, searching for Brena. She had not let him down. There she was, hidden in the shadow of the stone steps that led to the chief’s compound, with her bow notched.
He nodded once, and she nodded back. She let fly the Black Arrow.
Dindi
Swarms of people swatted each other out of the way to have the best vantage of Kavio’s public degradation, until a veritable human honeycomb of jabbing elbows and bobbing heads lined the summit of the Tor of the Sun. The warriors kept the horde back from the Gauntlet.
Dindi despaired. There were so many men lining the Gauntlet. Every warrior held a switch of willow. How could any man endure that whole length of abuse?
Tavaedies started in to chant, accompanied by deep, ominous drums. Dindi drew in a sharp breath when she caught sight of Kavio at the head of the Gauntlet. Stripped to nothing but a loincloth, his muscles bulging and gleaming with sweat, he looked every inch a warrior. If any man could survive, it would be Kavio. But at what price?
He had asked for her promise that she would not turn herself in, but she had never given it. Never, never would she let him suffer on her account.
Kavio began his ordeal. Step by step, he walked, straight and unflinching, through the rain of blows. At the same time, Dindi weaved through the crowd. Angry tribesfolk shoved back at her, but she only ducked under their blows and pressed on.
She saw him stumble. He forced himself on, but now the ac
cumulating hurt he suffered was beginning to tell. No longer unflinching, he winced under the blows that snapped at the raw bruises already coloring his back. Her blood raced through her, and she picked up her pace. She pushed men and women out of her way as if they were hay bales. Her white dress fluttered behind her, and the corncob doll, in its old spot on a cord between her breasts, felt heavier than usual, though it manifested no magic Visions to save Kavio.
He was almost halfway through the Gauntlet. But she had almost reached him.
“Stop!” she shouted. No one heard her over the buzz of the crowd except those closest to her.
However, when she burst out into the clearing where the warriors stood in two parallel lines, the multitude fell silent in astonishment, and all heard her cry.
“Stop! Free him! I am the one you want!”
She flung herself in front of Kavio. He had to stop or run into her back. The warriors, who had their arms raised to lash him as he passed, froze, flabbergasted to see a young girl standing in their way.
An arrow hit her right over her heart.
Daylight melted into amber. Everything slowed as if caught in sticky sap.
She fell backwards. Kavio clasped her in his arms before she hit the ground. He was screaming No! but it sounded slow and deep and strange. A scarlet flower bloomed in the center of her chest. Dindi marveled at the strange sight. But when she tried to pluck it and show its beauty to Kavio, her hands clutched the shaft of the arrow and were bathed in warm, hot blood.
Vessia
Vessia sensed earth and rock pressing in around her, but they had blindfolded her so she could not see. Left turns alternated with right turns at such frequent intervals that she knew that the prisoners were being escorted through the fabled maze of the Rainbow Labyrinth tribehold. Other than that, she could only guess at her surroundings. Only the occasional touch of Vio’s hand on her arm reassured her. Though her hands were bound behind her back and she was entering the stronghold of a tyrannical lunatic, she knew Vio would do everything he could to protect her.
