But the larva had her own ideas. “He’s not dead,” she said, and it took Shea a moment to realize that she was talking about Yashu-Diiwa over there. “And the Dog Lady isn’t either.”
“Oh?” Shea said, and could not repress a teeth-baring sneer. “And pray tell, what do you know about the Dog Lady?”
Día looked away, and while Shea would never believe the girl capable of lying to her, she might very well be deciding how much of the truth to tell. “Well, I know that she misses her child. And I know that she did some terrible things while she was trying to find him. And that she had him in order to defy the people who didn’t want her sheltering the –”
“No,” Shea said, instantly revolted by the idea. “No, no, no.” Who had been filling her head with such nonsense? Obviously Shea was going to have to clean out these garbage half-truths and start over. “Listen,” she said. “What did I just tell you about her?”
Día frowned. “That her people were the Ara-Naure... that her home was the Etascado river valley... that her domain was healing and pleasure and the love of tame creatures –”
“Yes, exactly,” Shea cut her off: how had she ever had the patience for this? “And how does one tame wild animals? No, don’t waste my time – I’ll tell you. You start with the most timid ones first. You feed them. You teach them to trust you.”
“The refugees,” Día said, incredulous. “She was trying to tame the white settlers, so they wouldn’t keep stealing land.”
“Yes, exactly,” Shea said. “Now don’t interrupt me. So you tame the timid ones first, and send some of them back out to coax more of the wild ones in – but they aren’t really tame, of course. No matter what you do with them, they’re still wild creatures at heart. If you really want to be able to trust them –”
Día put a hand over her mouth. “– you start breeding your own.”
Shea gave her the eye, but only for propriety’s sake – the girl always had been a quick study. “What did I say about interrupting me? Anyway, she made a grand pronouncement about it – that the Ara-Naure would bring forth a child of two worlds, one who would unite them. You know, something grand to stir up the people and buy more time from her allies. And then she got down to business.”
And God, what a business it had been. Shea could still recall that rich laugh of hers, that flushed, panting, delighted face, the way she’d accost and all but drag some milk-faced man right through the middle of the camp, romping and rolling with him through every hour of the day and night, dog and woman and dog-faced woman, until he inevitably collapsed in a sweat-streaked human heap, perfectly content to die there.
“Did she love him?” Día asked – adorably assuming that there had been only one ‘him’.
“Of course she did!” Shea snorted. “She loved everyone. Everything. She was drunk on it, sick with it, just – just stupidly besotted with the whole world.”
And if Día wanted proof that U’ru had been criminally undiscriminating in her affections, she was staring right at it. The Dog Lady, great glorious foolish innocent that she was, had even loved Shea.
Needless to say, it had been a fatal mistake.
There was a thing in Shea’s chest, like an heirloom glass, long ago packed for moving and accidentally smashed in transit. She’d been so careful, wrapped it so well beforehand that the little package still held its proper shape... but every now again she could feel it jostle, the broken pieces inside shifting and grinding, threatening to rip right through the taped paper. She would be all right, if she could just keep it still. She would be all right, if she could just pretend that the thing inside her was still whole.
“... Miss du Chenne?”
She opened one eye and glared at Día, irrationally irritated by that hoary old spinster-name. “What are you mewling about now?”
“The baby,” Día repeated. “What happened to U’ru’s baby?”
“For god’s sake, what does it look like?” Shea snapped, flinging her arm out at Yashu-Diiwa’s vast, insensible weight.
Día followed her gaze, damnably calm and rational. “It looks like he’s a horse,” she said. “But I don’t see how that could –”
“Oh, don’t you?” Shea replied with acid contempt. “Don’t you know, with your pretty little necklace and your fire-starting feet and your ridiculous silly hair? Don’t you know, with your dear doting papá?” And then in Marín, since Fours would never teach her Fraichais: “Don’t you know better than anyone?”
Día fixed her with an icy stare. “If you have a point to make, you’re doing a terrible job of it.”
And if Shea had any hair of her own, she would have torn it out. “Girl,” she said, with the last bottom-scraping dregs of patience and civility, “you are a human being. You are not merely the product of a sexual act. You are as much a reflection of the people who raised you as the ones who birthed you – and so is he.”
Día glanced back over at the boy, and Shea did likewise. This time, she saw past his monstrosity, taking in his stained pants and his cowlicked brown hair and that horseshoe-C brand at his arm, which had once given her so much hope. They treated him like property, it had promised her. They left him empty.
“His ‘folks,’” Día said, almost idly. “The people he was selling the horses for. He was so anxious to get back to them. They must love him.”
“They RUINED him!” Shea cried, though it amounted to the same thing. “They took a filet mignon and fed it to their pigs – cut down a thousand-year tree to make room for their sty – found a priceless book and tore it up for the latrine! They took all that she’d given him, all his power and divinity and potential, and – and made him THIS...!”
“How?”
Shea stopped, caught off guard. “How what?”
Día raised her eyebrows, her voice too slow to be casual. “How did they find him? How were they allowed to raise him in the first place?”
She couldn’t suspect the truth of course – she couldn’t have the least idea about any of it – and yet Shea’s guilty heart skipped. She gestured to the brand on his arm. “Obviously they bought him! What makes you think I know?”
Día rose to her feet, her expression hardening. “Well, teacher, you seem to know a tremendous amount about everything else – about her, and what she was like, and what she was planning and why. And you’re as far from home as I am, just-so-happening to have camped out within kicking-distance of the child she’s spent twenty-odd years hunting for. So I couldn’t help but wonder –”
“– if it’s my fault?” Shea interrupted, rising with equal indignity but not even half the grace. “Is that it?”
Día folded her arms. “If you ran out on her like you ran out on us.”
Shea stood rooted to the spot, darkening to a livid blue-black. “Why, you atrocious little shit –”
A psychic scream knifed through her mind, so sharp and sudden that Shea camouflaged in an instant. That was U’ru. Something was wrong.
“What’s happening?” Día cried, hands over her ears in a futile effort to ward off a noise that had completely bypassed her hearing.
Dumbstruck as she was, it took Shea a moment to understand that. “You can hear her too?”
Before Día could answer, another scream ripped through Shea’s mind, and spread out from there. Suddenly she was tasting fresh dirt, smelling foul water – and all but deafened by a multi-throated amphibious war cry.
Oh, shit.
“Where is she?” Día cried, shaking her head as if to clear it. “How do we get to her?”
“You’re not going anywhere,” Shea snapped, loping over to the western slope as fast as her wounded lung and foreshortened feet could take her. “You stay and watch him, and I’ll –”
A cavernous, rumbling FRRRROOOOOOOAAAK crashed through Shea’s mind – and also reverberated off the western hills.
Just like that, Día took off running.
Just like that, she had bounded effortlessly over the ledge and disappeared down the f
arther slope.
Just like that, Shea was left in the dust.
“God DAMMIT.” Swearing in three languages, Shea hurried after her, with no more thought to spare for the boy: if U’ru’s last child were slain, it would destroy her – but if Prince Jeté’s cohort caught her now, trapped in mortal form during the daylight hours, they would kill her. And if Fours ever found out that Shea had let his errant foster-daughter get herself killed likewise – by every god, Shea would never hear the end of it.
So she hopped and hustled and skidded along: too old to keep up, too cynical to hold any hope, and too bloody-minded to let the world go to hell without her.
WHERE ARE YOU? Día steeled herself for the answer even as she asked the question.
The reply was an avalanche. Cave. Hiding-cave. Dirt-sticks-water-dark-yell-snap-bite –
Wait. Día cut her off for her own sanity. Wait – don’t drown me – I’m coming. It was a poor formulation, one only half expressed in words: Día was running at breakneck speed, bounding between rocks and sliding down sheets of foot-biting gravel, and she absolutely could not afford any confusion of her senses.
Even so, there was no telling which of them was responsible for the terror swelling in Día’s heart, save to know that it belonged to someone in immediate fear for her life. As she raced the little mountain creek downstream, drowning out everyone’s thoughts with a constant, wordless prayer not to put a foot wrong, Día imagined the hand of the Almighty closing around her, as it had back at Yaga Chini: His palm at her back, His fingers folding over her shoulders, His grip gentle and firm and unyielding. She did not stop to imagine what would be waiting for her, or what she would do when she found out. She did not speculate on what would happen if she failed. Instead, the small part of her not busy negotiating between her feet and the ground gathered up the fear that belonged to her, and the fear that didn’t, and offered them both to a higher power.
“STOP!” The word was out of her mouth before she even knew what she was doing – before she saw anything more than a crimson-black swarm massing at the foot of the hill.
There was a peculiar echo to her voice, the sound coming through the Dog Lady’s ears as much as through Día’s own skull-bones, and maybe the prince of the mereaux heard it too: he turned his leviathan bulk in Día’s direction, and froze everyone on the spot with a single sonorous HRUM.
That included Día. She stopped, helpless not to stare – at him, at his glistening muscular mass, at his pulsating throat-pocket and cold amber eyes, at the way the others gathered around him like so many tadpoles hiding in the shadow of a century toad.
And now that she had the attention of this primordial titan, Día had very little idea what to do with it. “Thank you,” she said for starters. Where are you?
She felt the answer like a heat-beacon: there was a little rocky overhang not twenty feet to Día’s right, a cave with a mouth like a tight-lipped grimace, so narrow that Día would have had to lie down and flatten herself to get inside. No wonder the mereaux hadn’t gotten to the Dog Lady yet – but she was truly trapped.
Come out, Día thought at her, and edged closer to it. Come to me. “I’m sorry,” she said aloud. “I came to tell you that I’m sorry – WE’REsorry.”
The mereaux stared at her, their blood-feud colors fading not at all, and Día noticed that their weapons weren’t spears and tridents, as she’d first thought, but rakes and hoes – garden tools repurposed for war. Where on earth had they all come from?
Their prince settled back onto his vast thighs, and made a sign with his hands – something that looked like a bird in flight.
Día glanced up, half-expecting to see crows flying overhead. It’s me, she belatedly realized, and looked back down at her hands – the ones whose color had so nicely complemented Weisei’s. They think I’m a’Krah.
That might be useful, especially if they understood that they were guests in Marhuk’s domain. And she didn’t need to live the lie very long – just long enough for Miss du Chenne to catch up and sort this out... somehow.
So Día put her wrists out in the gesture of supplication Weisei had showed her, and tried to remember the words that went with them. “Kalei ne ei’ha,” she said, even as that foreign canine second-mind flattened and pressed and rolled itself between a dirty floor and a rocky ceiling. “Please see me kindly.”
But what the mereaux saw was the person – the being – who was currently inching her way out from under the lip of the overhang, and the first glimpse of her was enough to incense the prince all over again.
“HRRRRK!” At his first enraged bellow, the other mereaux surged forward, garden-weapons raised for a brutal, messy kill.
Día leapt forward to put herself between them and the cave, holding her arms out and sending a great burst of fire through the soles of her feet. It didn’t catch – there was nothing very much to burn – but the smoke and stench and sheer pyrotechnic surprise was enough to halt the attackers again.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated, in Ardish this time, wishing to high heaven that Fours had taught her Fraichais or that Miss du Chenne would hurry up. “We’re sorry. We’re very sorry. Please don’t hurt us.” Día ransacked her memory for the collection of Fraichais words she knew had to be in there, struggling to wring something relevant out of all the hours she’d spent poring over the works of Glaçure and Fondre – but for all their groundbreaking investigation into the nature of energy transfer and matter conservation, none of their research had yielded anything as useful as an apology.
Sorry? The questioning voice bloomed in her mind. Día looked over, astonished to see a human woman standing beside her.
From a distance, Día would have seen just a plain native woman: dark eyes, russet skin, and a plump matronly figure wrapped in a brown fur robe. But here, not even an arm’s length away, there was no mistaking her for an ordinary person. From her baby-soft bare feet to the dead leaves stuck through her disheveled black hair to her long, deep-nosed face – a feminine copy of Elim’s – the Dog Lady was exactly what she appeared to be: an ageless, frightened spirit in human form, staring at Día with fathomless confusion. Why sorry?
She must not have understood, or maybe she didn’t remember. You – you and I, we hurt someone, Día thought, reviving her memory of that sudden, arresting blood-lust, that snarling plunge into the water, the thoughtless, heedless rage with which they had closed their jaws over living flesh and shaken it like a dog snapping a hare’s neck. The Dog Lady probably didn’t know any more than Día who that had been, or what had become of them afterwards, but they surely were some relation to this angry mob here. We have to tell them we’re s –
NO. The answer was so loud and hateful that Día flinched. For a moment everything in her was outrage – outrage at the water-babies who had netted and dragged her stolen puppy away, outrage at the water-daughter who was even then carrying him away across the river, outrage and blind murderous fury for everyone and everything between her and him –
“STOP!” Día cried aloud, earning a blink from the prince of the mereaux, and resisted the urge to turn and berate the mute mother-goddess beside her. You don’t have any idea what you’ve done – you don’t even realize what you’ve gotten us into –
“He can’t understand you,” came a faint voice from far in the back of the amphibious mob. There was someone there, a human man, almost invisible in his dirty earth-colored clothing. “And they won’t listen. He’s done something to them.” He was a gray-haired native, plain and average except for the black cloth over his eyes and a sickly sheen over his brown skin. This had to be the a’Krah’s missing manservant – what was his name?
The mereaux prince turned, rumbling a warning at this impertinent interruption, but Día had to try her luck. “What do I do?” she called back. Help me, she begged U’ru. Help me get us out of this.
She spared only a glance for the Dog Lady, whose long features reflected a slowly-dawning concern – as if she were only then realizing that
what happened now mattered to people outside herself. Sorry, she said, though it was impossible to tell whether anyone but Día could hear it – or what she was apologizing for. Help.
“One of them is a translator,” the man called back. “If you can get its attention –”
He was cut off by a wet snarl from the prince. Call her here, Día thought, with as strong an image of Miss du Chenne as she could conjure. Tell her to hurry.
“Which one?” she called, as much to wrest the prince’s attention away from the man as anything else.
It worked all too well. The frustrated prince flushed blood-red and sucked in a breath for the battle-cry that would end the unauthorized parley and unleash his cohort...
... and Día, in a moment of divinely-inspired panic, touched her thumb and fingertips together and then sent them from her lips.
I love you. It was the only freshwater sign she knew. Fours, in wisdom and paranoia, had refused to teach her any other signs, knowing that the least suspicion of her being in league with the hated ‘fishmen’ would ruin her. But her papá was also a lonely soul, a forgotten spy thirty years removed from his own home and kin, and the love-sign he shared with his secondhand daughter was his one act of defiance – a secret, silent familial code.
The prince’s throat-pocket deflated, his colors fading in confusion. He sat back again, replying with a long string of signs whose meaning Día couldn’t begin to guess. She repeated the love-sign again, making eye-contact with each of the mereaux in turn – a glass key trying one iron lock after another. Which one was the translator?
Coming, U’ru thought, and for a moment Día’s webbed toe-stumps were limping along on the same painfully sharp stones she had kicked up not five minutes ago. Water-Dog coming.
Dreams of the Eaten Page 10
