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  MAZE

  EPIC FAE FANTASY

  THE UNFINISHED SONG

  BOOK 9

  TARA MAYA

  CONTENTS

  About This Book

  Prologue

  1. Backwards

  Dindi

  Zumo

  Kavio

  Svarr

  Dindi

  Svarr

  Dindi

  Kavio

  Finnadro

  Svarr

  Kavio

  Dindi

  Kavio

  Dindi

  2. Forwards

  The Wind

  Downstream

  Downstream

  Downstream

  Crossing the River

  Upstream

  A Fork in the River

  Leaf

  Rill

  Source

  Midstream

  Meeting the Dreamer

  Bend in the River

  Dam

  3. Below

  Dindi

  Dindi

  Zumo

  Dindi

  Tamio

  Kemla

  Tamio

  Hawk

  Tania (Fox)

  Meira

  Hawk

  Nilo

  Gwenika

  Finnadro

  Nilo

  Finnadro

  Tania (Fox)

  Kia

  Svarr

  Kavio

  Dindi

  4. Left

  Thief

  Monster

  Time

  Bargain

  Trade

  Blindfold

  Harpy

  Food

  Hand

  Warmth

  Cold

  Sight

  Bride

  5. Right

  Umbral (Nightmare)

  Umbral

  Dindi

  Mrigana (Fork in the Path)

  Nameless (Other Path)

  Sombri (Other Path)

  Sombri (Other Path)

  Kavio (Other Path)

  Umbral

  Sombri (Other Path)

  Kavio (Other Path)

  Sombri (Other Path)

  Mrigana

  Umbral

  6. Above

  Mrigana (Upstream)

  Vessia

  Mrigana

  Svego

  Hadi

  Kia

  Dindi

  Kavio

  Dindi

  Kavio

  Dindi

  Kavio

  7. Center

  Mrigana

  Dindi

  Svarr

  Vio

  Kavio

  Sombri

  Finnadro

  Umbral

  Vio

  Svego

  Vessia

  Dindi

  Finnadro

  Umbral

  Kavio

  Dindi

  Dindi

  Kavio

  Mrigana

  Dindi

  Contact Me

  Also by Tara Maya

  Acknowledgments

  ABOUT THIS BOOK

  The Unfinished Song Epic Fantasy Series

  An ancient war between humans and fae brought a terrible Curse to the land. Now the only two who can end the Curse are an untried young woman and an exiled warrior. They must battle High Fae, Deathsworn, and an immortal evil that threatens to devour the whole world…

  * * *

  The Windwheel, created long ago by the Aelfae, just may hold the magic Dindi needs to honor her pledge to resurrect them. Unfortunately, the Windwheel is secreted deep in the Labyrinth, guarded by a terrible monster.

  Maze

  All power and glory shall go to the winners of Vaedi Vooma...

  * * *

  This contest is a test of magic, a competition of dancing, and a fight to the death. Seven couples will go to the stage to display their virtuosity, but only one couple can win.

  * * *

  Will it be Dindi and the man she loves?

  * * *

  Even if she finally proves herself, might the cost be so high that her victory turns into a nightmare?

  PROLOGUE

  MRIGANA

  Water bubbled into the Looking Bowl, and an image shimmered on the clear, dark surface. I leaned over the bowl, watching with Dindi, as a newborn babe, not even fully gestated, still ruddy and sticky, was lifted from between its mother’s legs. The mother and father weren't visible—they didn't matter. What mattered was the identity of the sacrifice whose death could end the storm of all other deaths. The Looking Bowl focused on the baby as it opened its eyes.

  They were purple.

  The image faded. That was all the bowl showed.

  “I…” I was stunned. “That was obvious in retrospect. It’s…me… To kill me, you have to kill me as a baby. On the very day I’m born.” A shivery shudder rippled through my body. Then I tossed a lopsided, sardonic grin at Dindi. “Do you still think every child deserves to live?”

  Dindi cupped her hand over her mouth, unable to reply. But her silence stung me to the core. Because I knew exactly what she wouldn't say out loud. She must have suspected this all along.

  There are moments when the person you imagine yourself to be turns out to be much wiser, more mature, and more self-sacrificing than the person you are, moments that strip you of the mask you constructed for yourself and force you to see your real face in the mirror as petty, immature, and terrified. The Looking Bowl, a literal mirror and a magical one, stripped me of the resolve I carefully pasted together when I begged Dindi to end my existence. I had to face the truth: all along, I had hoped she would refuse, find another way, or even hug me and tell me she would rather the whole of Faearth fall into a muck-pit than harm me. I had told her I didn’t care if she liked me or not...

  How could I, ever so scornful of how others lied to themselves, fall so easily into doing the same?

  You hate me, I accused her silently. My face hardened, cold and pale, outwardly, but inside I had a snot-dripping nose, red eyes; inside, I lay on my belly, I kicked my feet and pounded the floor; inside, I dissolved into a three-year-old having a fit, as far from the mature and compassionate woman of mystery I had tried to become for Dindi. As disgusted with myself as I was, I imagined she must see through me and be much more overwhelmed with contempt for me. And that filled me with rage and I lashed out at her in my stupid, immature disappointment. You hate me! You always have. You always will.

  I had experienced many kinds of pain in my life. I'd been tortured—to death—over and over—every way imaginable. I fell in love—only to be rejected, betrayed, and condemned. I grew up caged or hunted, hated or invisible, feared or misunderstood, but yet a little thing like this could still rip me open like a fox torn apart by two eagles.

  Dindi once told me that my older selves—Mrigana and the Crone—had claimed that one day Dindi would “love” Lady Death, but what did that mean? I knew that whatever cruel, forced servitude my future self would impose on Dindi, on Kavio, on humanity, would be an abomination. Slavery, spiritual debasement, annihilation of all color and magic. The opposite of love.

  I had tried so hard to avoid becoming that, but now, seeing my tiny past/future self, born prematurely in the Vision in the Looking Bowl, I realized it was all for nothing

  I wasn’t asking Dindi to love me, like my future self Mrigana demanded. I just didn't want to be hated simply for existing. Impossible, impossible.... If Dindi couldn't do it, no one could. And the Looking Bowl had just shown me why. I was condemned from the day I was born. Here I thought I had a choice whether to be good or evil, the choice every human being possessed, but I never did. It didn’t matter if I chose to curse anyone.

  My existence itself was the Curse. br />
  What was the point of fighting it? If the world hated me so much… maybe it was time I grew into someone worth hating.

  The art of feeling nothing during death could also serve me now. I withered away everything inside that dripped or squelched and let the hardness within match my outward sneer.

  “Do you know what?” I asked slowly. “I think I changed my mind. It’s strange, but now that I know I can die… I no longer want to. I want to live. Is that strange?”

  Dindi didn't speak.

  “Maybe you’re right, Dindi,” I mocked. “I have as much right to live as anyone, don't I? Even if I grow up to kill everyone else? I still deserve a chance…”

  “River…”

  “Don't call me River anymore.” I stood up and looked down at Dindi. “Call me Mrigana. I am going to live, and I am going to embrace my destiny. I'm going to become Lady Death. I'm going to rule the world.”

  “River, don't…”

  “River is gone. I am Mrigana now. Thanks to you.” I smiled, utterly mirthless and hollow. “The next time we meet, I suspect you will be willing to kill me after all—no matter what it takes. But I am no longer willing to die.”

  I swirled in a circle and my clothing changed from tight black leather to a gauzy dress of midnight stars, a gown borrowed from an unborn future. I unfurled my wings and dashed out of the tent, into the sky, into the storm, into the dark.

  1. BACKWARDS

  DINDI

  The enemy camp was a maze of tents and fire pits and warriors jogging through the winding pathways. Although Dindi had recently recovered her wings, she could not simply fly out. She did not know how to use them, they were too small to lift her weight, and if she were spotted, the archers could easily shoot her down.

  Wings were not as useful as they sounded.

  Dawn was not far off although the sky was still dark, and the torches still burned. Already slaves responsible for making the morning meal added wood to the fire pits. She could hear the pounding of pestles on mortars and the scrap of flint knives against pelts or fish scales as women prepared meat. Birds in wicker cages chirped noisily and mangy dogs growled over bones near the stinking waste pits.

  The smell of hot red peppers and other more exotic spices from south of the Rainbow Tribehold spiced the air. That pepper in concentrated powder was so powerful that it was used as a weapon in battle to briefly incapacitate enemies, but the Red Spears used it regularly in their food. Dindi had to be careful not to sneeze as she scurried with her head down through the camp, trying to look like one of the female serving slaves.

  The further she traveled from the main tent in the center of the camp, the War Chief’s lodge-tent, the easier she breathed. If she could reach the edge of camp altogether then she would try to fly again. Failing that, which she almost certainly would, she would run back toward the Rainbow Labyrinth camp. Or would it be better to run directly south, toward the tribehold itself? Yes, probably.

  Directly in front of her, an argument broke out between three men, two of them Red Spears tribesmen, and the third, Purple Thunder. At least, Dindi guessed he was from Purple Thunder because his legs bowed from a lifetime of riding a horse. He wore leather garments laced like a second skin all the way from his thigh to his ankle and shoulder to his wrist and his dark hair was plaited into three long braids, after the manner of the Purple Thunder.

  The two Red Spear men were tall and straight, and row upon row of raised scarification patterns covered their nearly naked bodies. The scars were highlighted with either red, white, or black paste when they went into war, but right now, were gleaming lumps of flesh.

  Dindi smelled equine meat mixed with the less pleasant sting of burning horsehair before she saw the dead horse, the focal point of the argument. Horses were new to the Red Spears tribe, at least as companions. These two men had seen the horse as no different than an aurochs, and all indifferent to the sensibility of their ally, whose horse brother it perhaps had been, had killed a horse to butcher and eat it. The Purple Thunder warrior was furious. Amongst their people, the first tribe to steal horses from the fae, horses were buried with honor, like men. But an army never had enough food and there were three armies moving across the prairie now, all headed for the Rainbow Labyrinth tribehold. Game must be scarce.

  The argument grew louder and started to wake up more warriors who were drawn into it. Most of them were Red Spears, but some of them argued on the side of the Purple Thunder warrior, their new ally.

  Dindi realized she needed to go around, or she would get trapped in the fracas. Far too many men were waking up and someone would notice her. She had to go backwards to advance. She backed up from the knot of men and, still facing them, hurried backwards along the path she had just taken. When she returned to a fork in the trails between the tents, this time she headed north instead of south. Perhaps if she tried to leave the camp from the opposite direction expected, she would find it easier to get out. She could always turn south again once she was outside of camp.

  Unfortunately, heading back toward the War Chief’s tent, she skidded to a halt again when an argument erupted there as well. In the east, the sky had lightened to pearl rose rather than purple-black. The longer she took to escape the camp, the less likely her chances of escaping at all. Dindi turned again and this time headed west, away from the light, as if she could outrace the rising sun.

  A third argument broke the morning time, this one in the War Chief’s tent itself, which turned out to be more relevant to her chances of escape than the argument over eating the dead horse. She clearly heard Zumo himself bellowing at warriors. She had first met Zavaedi Zumo five years ago, in Yellow Bear tribehold, at a feast thrown in his honor by the War Chief of Yellow Bear. She had been a serving maiden at the feast. She had been so distracted by seeing the guests from Rainbow Labyrinth, whom she recognized from Visions she had because of a magic Corn Cob Doll, that she had tripped and spilled sugar bread all over the other guest at the feast, Zavaedi Kavio.

  The memory of how Kavio had reacted, how surprised and yet surprisingly patient he had been with her clumsiness, made her smile and blush even in retrospect. Her younger self never could have imagined the twisted paths of fate would have led her here, to this enemy camp, trying to steal back the Looking Bowl from those who had stolen it from Kavio, who had rightly won it in a pit fight tournament.

  Dindi and Kavio needed the Looking Bowl to confront the Lord of Nightmares, who guarded another magical object, the Windwheel, which had been hidden at the center of the Left-Hand Maze under the Rainbow Labyrinth tribehold.

  Mazes within mazes, that was what her life has become. So many pathways that seemed to lead forward only led to dead ends, and just when she thought she was making progress toward solving the faery riddle she had promised to solve years ago, on the Tor of the Stone Hedge, Dindi had to backtrack to the beginning, feeling no closer than she had been at fourteen summers.

  Now, thanks to memories that had resurfaced in her nightmares, she knew that she had not found the doll by accident; she had been given the Corn Cob Doll as a gift, for saving Lady Death from a faery. Three times now, Dindi had saved Lady Death, once from the attack by a bear, and twice from the Bone Cage, the only known cage that could hold someone of Mrigana’s power. Dindi had assumed for the past five years that if she was working on anyone’s behalf, it was on behalf of the Seven Faery Ladies, including Vessia, the Last of the Aelfae. But if Mrigana had been the one to set Dindi on that path in the first place, had Dindi unwittingly been an agent of Death all along? And if so, how could she escape that knot of alliances and choose the side she truly wanted to help?

  Mrigana had unambiguously betrayed Dindi this time, shattering their fragile alliance, and abandoning Dindi in an enemy encampment. Did she intend to betray me from the start? Dindi wondered. Or was she truly struggling against the darkness of her own Curse, and finally surrendered to it? Dindi would probably never know.

  Many men were now awake in the camp. Groups
of seven warriors, septs, started systematically racing along the trails of the camp, punching their heads into tents, kicking over sleeping mats, shouting, and cussing. They were looking for someone.