by Maya, Tara
“The girl deserves time to bid her kin and cohort farewell,” Brena said. “She may have seven days to prepare herself.”
“One day, seven days, the results will be the same,” said Vultho. “Kavio’s witch will die.”
Kavio
There was no longer any point hiding the fact that he knew Dindi, so Kavio wanted to escort Dindi back to the Tor of the Initiates. She refused; she kept fussing over the welts on his back, and pleaded with Danumoro and Brena to tie him down to heal him, if necessary. Finally, he gave in and promised he would let them help him, if Dindi would give him a moment to speak with her properly.
Warriors who were more loyal to him than to Vultho forced the curious onlookers to back away. Kavio walked with Dindi halfway up the steps to the chief’s compound, where his hut was, and the healers waited. The couple was still in sight of dozens of people, and Kavio was careful not to touch Dindi in any way that implied an intimate relationship. He did not mind acknowledging that he had been her teacher, but the idea that people would assume something more sordid irked him.
“Your request to dance on the Tor of the Stone Hedge was inspired,” he told Dindi. “It means I can still save you.”
“How?”
“I have six Chromas. I can dance in your place, and survive.”
She shook her head. “You don’t know that. Especially not when you’re injured.”
“I told you, it’s nothing. The warriors in the first part of the Gauntlet did not strike hard. Vultho’s supporters were grouped toward the end. And don’t forget, I heal fast. I will be fully recovered in seven days.”
“I didn’t ask to go to the Tor so you could stand in my place, Kavio.”
He wanted to take her hands in his and kiss her palms, but he did not. “Dindi, I am going to save your life, and I am going to marry you.”
“I won’t let you,” she said. “I know you are only saying this to me because you think I am going to die.”
“Over my dead body.”
“You deserve a woman who is your equal.”
“I want you.”
“For now.” She couldn’t look at him. “But for how long? You shine so brightly, and I shine not at all. How long could such a marriage last? Marriage is a life long dance, not a spin or two around the square.”
“You give me little credit, Dindi. If I gave you the pledge of devotion, I would not break it.”
“I know. Long after you outgrew me, you would remain bound to me, like an eagle caught in a pigeon snare.”
“You refuse me?” A terrible fear made him speak stiffly. “Is it because you feel you are not worthy…or because you don’t love me?”
“I refuse to tie you down because I do love you. To accept would be to betray you. What if your father had married the Corn Maiden? As much as she loved him, she was not the one destined to help him overthrow the Bone Whistler. If she had survived, she would have only been in his way.”
“You love me.” His whole face lit up. “Then nothing will stop me. I will bring you a bowl of fruit as a sign of my intentions. Don’t break it because you fear to take a chance on us. You were brave enough to die for me. Be brave enough to live with me. You will be my Corn Maiden and my White Lady.”
Her eyes glimmered with unshed tears and her lower lip trembled. She bent her head, with her lashes against her cheeks.
“If you change your mind,” she said. “Don’t give me your reasons. We both know them already, and I couldn’t bear to hear again how I am not worthy of you. Just break the bowl and walk away. Pretend you don’t know me.”
“You fool girl, I love you. I give you my word: I am going to stand by you, Dindi. Not all the Seven Faeries or even Lady Death herself is going to stop me.”
Brena
The spell of deepest healing required a minimum of two dancers to shape the bridge formation over the patient’s body. At Danumoro’s request, Brena, the strongest healer in Yellow Bear, joined him in healing Kavio. At the end of the long and draining weave, Danumoro sat beside Kavio’s bed and Brena stepped outside the hut for air. In a boulder gray sky that threatened to storm, seagulls circled and cawed. Lonely wind whistled through the compound, knocking over a tower of baskets. A few moments later, Danumoro joined her. She could hear Kavio’s snores from inside.
“Old friend.” Danumoro put his hand on her shoulder. “How is your health?”
“Mine?” she asked in surprise. “Why would you ask? I’m perfectly healthy.”
“Are you?” He studied her intently. “Brena…forgive me for intruding where I have no claim, but…it seemed as though you cared for the slave.”
Shocked into wordlessness, she could only gape at him. Then she blinked back the wetness in her eyes. All at once, her strength deserted her. She crumbled against his chest and he patted her back, both awkward and comforting, while she swallowed the animal sound in her throat that wanted to be a sob. She shuddered, blinked and wiped her eyes, and withdrew from Danumoro. She forced herself to smile, for his sake.
“I’m fine. Really.”
Dindi
The day she was to die, Dindi smoothed on her swan-feather dress. Unused all this time, it smelled musty, of cloves and dried honeysuckle. Her friends, and girls she would not have thought were her friends, helped her in silence. Gwenika and Jensi were there; so were Kemla and Gwena, and a half dozen others. They fastened heavy gold bell bangles around her ankles, tied on beaded armbands, slipped bracelets onto her wrists and pinned earrings into her lobes. How often had these same girls pinched or pushed her? Now their fingers pitter-pattered over her skin as gently as fluttering sparrows.
They brushed Dindi’s hair until it fell thick and shinning down her back. She refused to wear a mask. The need to hide had passed, and putting anything over her face reminded her viscerally of the Duck mask. With pins and combs, the girls crowned her with a headdress of gold stars and white feathers against an indigo backdrop; the design invoked swans sweeping through a starry night sky. The headdress was new. The Initiates, including the goldsmiths, had crafted it for her.
She still possessed the corncob doll and the black arrow. Though their magics had, apparently, each cancelled out the other, the hexed objects were eternal, and had not been destroyed. The Tavaedies had decided to let Dindi carry them with her to her death. If she gave them to someone else, she would only pass the curse on to a new victim. If she took them with her into the dark, they would be buried with her. She accepted this logic. As a result, she held one hex in each hand. The corncob doll felt scratchy, yet comfortably familiar clutched in her palm. The arrow felt too smooth and thin and deadly. It made her nervous. Perhaps the doll had drawn off its poison, but perhaps not. When Dindi examined it, the arrowhead glittered wetly with bitter-smelling ichors.
After the dressing was complete, Gwenika waved away the other girls. She took Dindi by the shoulders.
“Dindi, I want you to remember something.”
Gwenika looked fierce as she said it, but also desperate, and Dindi felt no leap of hope. Only hollow.
“What?” she asked, more to make Gwenika feel better than to grasp at crumbs.
“Remember what I told you about the Shunned, and how the Blue in their aura was cancelling the Yellow healing we tried to dance for them?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I forgot to tell you that the Shunned themselves were weaving the Blue magic that was sabotaging them. They didn’t start out hexing themselves, but they had been hexed and hurt so long by their own kin that even after they were free and others were trying to heal them, they didn’t know any other way to be. Do you see? It was just like me, when I was hexing myself, or like Gremo, when he was cursed to walk in circles, but worse.”
“How does this help me, Gwenika?”
“We each have so much power we don’t even know we have. If we can do ourselves such harm, what can’t we do to help ourselves with the very same power?”
“I don’t understand.”
Gweni
ka took her hands and squeezed them. “Then just know this. I believe in you, Dindi.”
A sting prickled behind her eyes. “Thank you.”
She emerged from the lodge. All the Initiates, and their teachers, had assembled to see her off. They silent crowd parted respectfully for her as she walked toward the palisade gate. A group of Tavaedies and warriors waited for her there, to escort her the rest of the way to the Tor of the Stone Hedge.
Brena
Gwenika burst into tears. Brena reached a hand toward her daughter, as if to offer comfort, then dropped it. Her face grayed a shade.
“You have to stop her,” Gwenika said.
Many of the Initiates cried as they waved goodbye to Dindi.
“Let her go,” Brena told them. “She’s made her choice.”
Ignoring Gwenika’s sobs and the excited gossip of the crowd, Brena hurried away. She needed to be alone, to lose the curious tribesfolk who tried to stop her to ask her what was going on.
She had never before summoned the Golden Lady. She wasn’t sure she even could. But she could think of no one else who could help Dindi.
The golden bear ambled from behind a house to nuzzle Brena.
“O my Henchwoman,” asked the she-bear, “What is your need?”
Brena explained about the girl with no magic, the violation of the law, the trial upon the tor with the fae.
“Will you be there?” Brena asked.
The Golden Lady growled. “Oh, yes. Definitely. But do not fear. I will also be here to protect your tribe if your enemy attacks.”
“How? You can’t be in two places at once.”
“All fae are always present in the faery ring, even as we live out in the world. Time flows in a circle in the ring, while outside the circle, it flies straight, like an arrow. We can’t be in two places at outside the circle any more than a mortal could, but the faery ring is beyond time.”
That was too crazy for Brena to wrap her understanding around. Right now, she only wanted to know one thing. “Can you help her?”
“She goes there to dance with the fae, does she not?” A laugh rumbled from deep in her chest. “We will dance with her.”
“I beg you—as a favor to me, do not take her life. I know she has caused you deep offence by dancing without a Chroma, but she is so young, surely you can have mercy?”
“Mercy is a human thing. We neither need it nor grant it.” The amber eyes looked straight at Brena. “My Henchwoman, this is not a matter between you and me. It concerns the circle itself. She is the one who chose to dance.”
Rthan
Rthan stood alone, at the edge of the new campsite, where river and land shoved continuously for supremacy. The Blue Waters army had laid claim to the Dam, a tangle of rotted wood and soggy silt that had dammed this portion of the river for centuries. A flotilla of lesser pseudo-islands bobbed in the waters around it, pushed about the main mass by the currents. The river channels in the swampy islets where the warriors bivouacked mingled sweet with salt waters. The squawks of ducks and splash of river otters pierced the floating reeds. In the dusk light, the dammed up water, broadened into a lake, sloshed like golden apple cider in an overfilled bowl.
War. His people were poised to launch the attack. If he spoke against the adventure, would he be heeded?
Salt dew tears touched the air, foam tipped waves of blue light crested and crashed, finally dissolving into the form of a tiny, sad-eyed girl. She gleamed, living sapphire.
“Daddy, why have you forgotten me?” she asked forlornly.
“I haven’t forgotten you, my Lady,” he said.
“Why do you not call me Meira, as you used to?”
“You’re not my daughter.” Yet seeing her face again, her long black hair and long black lashes, her helpless face, he felt the old loss drown him anew. “Meira, Meira, I could never forget you.”
“But you did. For whole days, you never even thought of me. You thought only of her. The enemy.”
Brena. He crushed his fist into his palm.
“You let her soften your grief,” said the glowing azure faery child. “You, who once had the purest sorrow of all. What use to me are you healed of your loss? For I am fae, and I cannot heal of my loss. My last Aelfae sister will be taken from me by the Curse, lost forever to me as your family was lost forever to you. How can you help me save her if you cannot understand the eternity of my bereavement?” Scorn iced her voice. “You call us fickle. You are the ones who forget. Let me remind you what those enemies you pity did.”
Before his eyes, the side of her head turned into a pulp of blue and black bruise. Dark blood streaked her cheeks, her arms, the rags dangling from her too thin form. She held out her arms, as if begging him to pick her up. She repeated the exact words, in the same intonation, as his daughter had cried out to him as he set sail for a voyage, the last time he saw her alive.
“Daddy, don’t leave me! Don’t forget me!”
Fire engulfed her body and she screamed.
“Stop it!” he shouted.
“Are you such a coward you cannot even watch what they did to me?” she spat, as the flesh blackened and curled off her face, revealing raw bone beneath, until she leered at him from a blackened skull. “No wonder you are too afraid to avenge me!”
His gut clenched. It was true. He had betrayed the memory of his first wife and daughter by allowing Brena to soften his rage and pain.
“How can I help you?” He spread his arms. “Meira, I failed you then, I will surely fail you now.”
“There is a wound in the world,” she said. “Sorrow deeper than the sea.”
“What more can I do?” he asked. “There must be an end to this pain.”
“Wash it clean. First wash away Yellow Bear. And when they can no longer attack our rear, march on, over the mountains, to wash away the core of the rot. The Rainbow Labyrinth. You must conquer it, Daddy. For Mommy. For me.”
Her tiny fingers brushed his cheek. He clutched her hand and kissed it.
It began to rain.
Rthan joined the other Blue Tavaedies.
“The Blue Lady has spoken,” he said. “It is time.”
An immense drum took up the war beat. More than one hundred Blue Tavaedies began to dance in unison.
Beneath their stomping feet, the Dam began to quaver.
“Ayaha!” sang the Blue Waters warriors. “Ay! Ay! Aya-HA!”
The Dam burst.
Kavio
Kavio still ached but he forced himself out of bed. Dawn was still a handspan away, but Dindi would have already been escorted to the Tor of the Stone Hedge, to face the faery circle with the coming of the sun. War Chief Vultho had forbidden Kavio to accompany her. He snorted. Let Vultho posture, it didn’t matter. Kavio intended to slip away unnoticed now that her escorts were gone.
Outside, the compound was deserted but he heard sounds from below, the dull murmur of a somber crowd. Grey blue drizzle misted the air. His feet sank a little with each step, the packed earth of the courtyard having turned sticky. He climbed up on top of his hut. From here, he could see the whole valley and the other tors, including the one crowned with a ring of megaliths. He could just make out a lone figure in white standing in the middle of the stone ring. As if it were yesterday, he could still hear her innocent questions while he’d tried to explain why standing there was taboo.
What if only one stone matters?
Tiny fae herded snails and earthworms over slick stone steps leading down. To Kavio’s alarm, War Chief Vultho, Hertio, Thrano and the other war leaders had already gathered in the feast area, in war paint and paraphernalia. The whole army of Yellow Bear assembled in the clearing, grouped in clumps. Male and female Tavaedies wore their costumes of bear pelts and gold bangles. The elite warriors, the Bear Shields, stood apart. The ordinary adult men gathered with their kin-by-marriage, and the Initiate warriors, all unmarried boys, strutted together. Aunties and maidens fussed over the warriors, to make sure the men had ample field provisions of
salted fish, corn cake and cider.
War. It’s begun, Kavio realized. If the Blue Waters are in the river already, I won’t be able to reach Dindi until we clear them out of the valley.
He glanced in the direction of the Tor of the Stone Hedge, though from here, he could no longer see it, or her. For a moment, he toyed with the idea of leaving Yellow Bear to defend itself, while he dropped everything and ran to rescue the woman that he loved.
But he was the only one who suspected what the Blue Waters planned. He could hardly trust the knowledge to Vultho, even if the War Chief believed him, which was unlikely. Kavio himself wasn’t certain his fears would be proven true.
Dindi, I will keep my word to you. He tried to send his love to her on silent wings. Don’t give up. Just hold on until I reach you. Just keep dancing.
“Gather everyone into the Tor of the Sun, to prepare for the sortie,” Vultho ordered Thrano. “Set the Initiate warriors to guard the women and children in the central lodges. Station the rest of the warriors around the perimeter of the palisade.”
He paused when he saw Kavio. For once, he did not sneer. “The Blue Waters have thrown down the blooded spear. My spies report they are on their way upstream now. They think they will surprise us before we can get everyone gathered into the Tor.” He and the other men laughed. “Once they arrive and find us safely fortified on the high ground, they will see they came here just to die. Not even your father dared attack the Tors of Yellow Bear except by siege, and the Blue Waters tribe cannot hold disparate clans together long enough for that.”
“Agreed,” said Kavio. He slicked back his wet hair, impatient with the water dripping in his eyes. He located the weapons piled under an eave and picked out a tall spear. “But they wouldn’t attack without some plan to overcome the advantage of the high ground. Let me take a war group out of the Tor, just in case.”
