The Unfinished Song: Initiate Read online

  Chapter Three

  Doll

  Brena

  Before dawn, the clanhold of Sycamore Stands already throbbed with the sounds of women pounding nuts. The astringent smell of acorn drifted from the leeching ditches between the clay domed huts. Once Zavaedi Brena made certain her snoopy neighbor, Auntie Ula, was not following her, she urged her two daughters, Gwena and Gwenika, past the clanhold stocade, down the embankment, to a spot hidden by sycamore trees. They did this every morning, yet every morning Brena had to battle all over again to force them to move, as if it were the first time.

  Gwena, the oldest, spent an inordinate amount of time combing her hair. On the way to the woods, she craned her neck to attract the attention of young men burning brush for gardens. Several of the hoolilgans smiled at her like idiots, until they saw Brena and hastened back to work.

  Gwenika, younger by two years, started her whining earlier than usual. “Do I have to practice today?”

  “Yes. You have to practice everyday.”

  “But I’m feeling very dizzy this morning.”

  “Hrmf.” Brena still smarted from her cousin Ula’s admonishments last night. For fifteen years Ula had failed to have children of her own, but she insisted on lecturing those who did. “You’re too soft on the girls, that’s why the little one is so lazy. A good mother wouldn’t put up with that.” In the next breath, Auntie Ula went on to say, “And why do you push those girls so hard? It isn’t natural for a mother to put so much pressure on her daughters to become Tavaedies. What’s wrong if they just want to be wives and mothers?”

  Brena wanted to shake her. Well, which is it? Am I an unfit mother because I’m too soft on them or an unfit mother because I’m too hard on them? She already knew the answer. She couldn’t win either way. A woman, even a Zavaedi, had no business raising a family without a man, and Brena had made it clear to the whole clanhold years ago that one husband had left her bitter enough for a lifetime. The last thing she needed was another man in her life.

  And if my girls become Tavaedies, they won’t be dependent on a having a husband to tend their fields either. After her husband died, what would have been her lot if she had not been a member of the secret society, able to earn gifts from the community by her own skills? With one hungry babe toddling at her feet and a belly full of a babe to come…she shuddered at the memory. It had been hard enough as it was, returning to the troop after she’d quit to raise her family.

  She checked the clearing again to assure they had privacy, then clapped her hands to retrieve her daughters’ errant attention. “Today, girls, I want to see you walk through the Badger and Deer Positions, in both the Still and Moving forms.”

  “Yes, Mama,” they chimed. Warblers chirped overhead.

  “Begin girls!” commanded Tavaedi Brena. “Deer Leaps, from Still to Moving.”

  Gwena flawlessly performed the steps several times. Gwenika, however, slumped through the forms with limp arms. She kicked at the dry leaves on the ground, then bent to pick up one of the spiky sycamore balls that littered the dust of the clearing.

  “Can we dance somewhere else? These keep poking my feet.”

  “No,” said Brena. “This is the safest place. I don’t want anyone spying on us.”

  “How can you expect me to dance with poked feet?”

  “Gwenika.” Every day it was some new complaint. Maybe Auntie Ula is right. I must have done something wrong with this one.

  “Besides, my head is spinning. I’m feeling dizzy again.”

  “Gwenika, I’ve told you—”

  “Also, I’m suffering from fatigue. And my heart is beating more rapidly than usual.”

  “Your heart is supposed to be beating more rapidly. You’re exercising.”

  “Yes, but my face is pale and my lips and fingertips are white. See?” Gwenika held out her hand. “I recognize the symptoms from your Healing stories. I think the fae have hexed me with Feeble Blood Lack. Can I sit down?”

  Beside her, Gwena rolled her eyes.

  “The fae have not hexed you,” said Brena. “No one has hexed you. You’re just not trying. Let’s start that again. Gwena, good job, but keep your toes pointed in the leap. Gwenika, your leap looked like a frog, not a doe. Copy your sister.”

  “I’ve been bleeding in unspeakable places for no reason,” Gwenika said.

  At that, Brena swiveled her head and focused the brunt of her attention on Gwenika. For the first time, she noticed her younger daughter’s slightly swelling chest and widening hips. Oh no. It’s too soon. Where have the years gone? Yesterday, you were still my baby. Today . . .

  Half encouraged, half disconcerted, Gwenika said, “I think the bleeding is causing Feeble Blood Lack.”

  “You might be right,” said Brena.

  “I might?”

  “You should sit down and just watch for a while.”

  “So that means that the fae are hexing me?”

  “No.” Brena pulled her hand through her hair. “It means that you, like your sister, have already had your first moonblood. It means I am running out of time to teach you everything I can before the Initiation.” She paced the clearing and gestured at the sycamore trees. “So little time left! These girls are still not ready!”

  Or is it that I’m not ready for them to be ready?

  “We’re trying to learn as fast as we can, Mama,” said Gwena.

  “Aren’t we supposed to wait until Initiation to learn all the secret dances anyway?” Gwenika asked.

  “Don’t let nonsense fall out of your mouth.” Brena scowled at what trouble Auntie Ula could cause if she had the idea that Brena was actually teaching the dances themselves. “I haven’t taught you any tama. I’ve taught you the basic steps, the hand gestures and the foot positions, the flips, the turns and the leaps. Believe me, without knowing those, you would never pass the Testing. And you also better believe that all Tavaedies teach their children these things. Why do you think that the honor of belonging to the secret society tends to stay in families?

  “It isn’t forbidden for me to teach you what I do, as long as you’re still children. But once you are initiated, I will not be allowed to teach you any more. If you fail the Test, that’s it, that’s your last chance. Do you understand why it’s so important that you pay attention to everything I tell you now?”

  “Yes, Mama,” both girls said in unison.

  “Good.” Brena drew a deep breath. She put her hands on her hips. “Let’s begin again. Gwena, start with your feet in position—”

  “But Mama!” said Gwenika.

  With a toe tapping in annoyance, “Yes, Gwenika?”

  “Gramma says that the best cure for anemia is eggs. Should I look for birds eggs?”

  “Did nothing I said mean anything to you? You must practice, girl, practice!”

  “But Mama, you said yourself, I’m sick…”

  “Are you really going to go find eggs?”

  “Of course.”

  “Not just go play in the woods?”

  “Mama.” Gwenika looked the model of wounded innocence.

  “Fa! Go, then. Find eggs. Take them to your Gramma. I’m sure she’ll be glad to prepare them for you.” By mercy, she coddles you. Meanwhile, your sister will stay and practice. At least one of you will not fail her family honor. Go!”

  Gwenika scrambled away.

  No sooner had Gwenika departed, however, than a niggling suspicion began to plague Brena. “Stay here,” she told her oldest daughter Gwena. “Keep going over the Deer Leaps until I return.”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  It did not take Brena long to find her younger daughter. Gwenika was climbing a low leaning sycamore tree with fist-sized nest built on a horizontal limb thirty-five feet above the ground. Brena was surprised. Maybe she really is after eggs. She recognized the nest as that of a sycamore warbler. The interior of the nest would be lined with last year’s sycamore balls.

  When the girls had been younger, Brena had walked with them i
n the woods, holding up a feather or a leaf, challenging them to guess the name of the bird or tree it belonged to. Brena’s own mother had used the same technique of those guessing games to pass on the shape of every bird, tree and herb in the woods.

  Gwenika apparently hadn’t noticed her. The girl reached the nest. She reached into it—but not to remove something, to deposit something.

  Eeeep.

  Brena heard the tiny cry.

  “There you are, little lost one,” Gwenika cooed. “Safe back at home.”

  The eggs in that nest had already hatched, and one of the baby birds must have fallen out. Gwenika had helped one of the chicks back into the nest.

  Brena shook her head. She’ll learn soon enough that good deeds are repaid with cruelty, sure as offering food to a wolf only leads to lost fingers. Nonetheless, she turned to leave without saying anything to her daughter. Brena didn’t have the heart to yell at her for saving the baby bird instead of practicing.

  Suddenly, Gwenika screamed. Brena ran back to the tree.

  An immense, shaggy blond bear, wounded by an arrow and nursing its bad paw, had crashed through the underbrush and now stood between Brena and her daughter.

  Brena

  Brena stared at the bear, torn between fear and awe. Her tribe used bear hides for rugs and hangings, for door curtains and room dividers, so she knew that bears were large, but she had never encountered one in person. Those lifeless skins hadn’t prepared her for the immensity of a live bear. As large as an aurochs bull, but with sharp teeth, the bear had thick honey colored fur that darkened to cinnamon around its haunches. Black ooze dripped from the arrow wound in its hind leg.

  “Girls,” Brena said, “Walk until you are out of sight, then find your sister and run to the clanhold as fast as you can.”

  “But Mama, what about you?”

  “Go.”

  For once, to her relief, Gwenika did as she was told and ran away through the woods.

  Slung over her shoulder, Brena wore a bark fiber sack where she kept a number of useful things: herbs, a water skin, a rock-like lump of sugar, another of salt, various elixirs in stoppered jars no bigger than a finger.

  “I’ve helped many wounded animals,” she said. She lowered her body to a crouch, with her arms at her sides, as unthreatening as she could make herself. “I can take out the arrow for you and staunch the bleeding.”

  The bear shook its head, as if it understood her.

  “I know what you are,” added Brena. “I know why you approached my daughters. But if you want help, you’ll have to come to me. I won’t let you subvert them with your faery wiles.”

  “Stay away, human,” growled the bear. She had a low, but unmistakably feminine voice. “I’m not so weak yet that I can’t still kill you.”

  Bears did not talk. Faeries did. “I knew it. You are a Brundorfae.”

  The bear shuddered and tried to back away. Instead, she collapsed. Another spasm rippled through the beast’s body and she howled, in terrible pain.

  “Let me help you,” said Brena. “I have herbs. Medicines.”

  “I don’t want your damn help!” said the she-bear faery. Dry leaves crackled under her thrashing body.

  “Then why did you approach us?”

  “Didn’t think you could see me,” wheezed the bear. “Human young see us, but human olds mostly ignore us.”

  “Well, this human ‘old’ sees right through you, faery bear,” said Brena. “I know why faeries prey on virgins. Once a woman has been screwed by a man, she’s not naïve enough to trust your ilk either.”

  The bear made an odd snuffling sound. Almost like chuckles. At the end, however, the sound turned into another roar of pain, and the bear again twisted in a futile attempt to bat away the arrow.

  “Are you going to let me help you or not?” asked Brena.

  “No! I told you to leave me alone!”

  Brena inched forward in small steps. Her heart was pounding so hard she was sure the bear could hear it. A bear was still a bear, and the fact that it was a faery bear only made the situation more dangerous. Once she reached the bear’s side, she knelt and examined the puncture. The bear writhed in pain, too weak to stop her.

  Brena tried to remember everything her mother had taught her about war wounds. Beware the barb. The arrowhead will want to stay under the blanket of flesh to continue its misdeeds. “I’m going to have to cut it out. It will hurt, I’m sorry—”

  “Just leave!” ordered the bear, showing her canines. “It’s poison, it will take your life.”

  Brena took out a stone knife from her satchel. Though she worked as quickly as possible, the bear still shuddered in pain when she cut out the arrowhead. Brena forced herself not to flinch or pause.

  The she-bear groaned.

  The arrow, when it finally emerged whole, was black, both shaft and fletch, with no clan markings. The obsidian tip gleamed like a wicked smile. Brena took care not to touch it. She wrapped it in a leather oilskin.

  The bear still bled, but the removal of the arrow restored her to greater strength. She was able to rise and shake out her fur. She stood up on her back legs, tall as a totem pole, towering over Brena. Her strange yellow eyes glittered with anger.

  “I suppose you think you’ve earned my eternal gratitude and are now entitled to wish for wealth and love and luck and power.” The bear snorted in derision. “But you’ve only removed the weapon, you haven’t healed the wound. The wound cannot truly heal unless that arrow takes a human life. Will you kill someone for me?”

  Brena stepped back. “I tried to help you, and you’re demanding a mariah?”

  “You humans kill one another all the time,” the bear said. “You have two daughters. Do you really need both?”

  “Stay away from them, faery!”

  “You brought this on yourself,” snapped the bear. “I never asked for your help. I begged you to leave. The arrow demands death. An immortal can’t quench the arrow’s thirst. By taking it from my flesh, you’ve taken the responsibility of providing a human sacrifice. If you find a mariah for me, I will be fully healed. If you don’t, I will live in torment. I am at your mercy.”

  “I won’t kill for you.”

  “I will never force you to,” growled the bear. “I didn’t want to foist this choice on you. Despite what you think of the fae, we are not your real enemies. The wound is not mine alone. There is a wound in the world.”

  A crow cawed. The bear shouldered her aside and lumbered away, unevenly, into the woods.

  Dindi

  Tamio recovered his wits most swiftly, in time to pull Dindi off the enemy.

  “Dindi! Stop!” shouted Tamio. “That’s my mother’s brother Abiono!”

  Dindi stopped struggling.

  Coughing and huffing, the leader of the “enemy” Tavaedies removed his mask, revealing Abiono, Zavaedi of their own Tavaedi troop. The other Tavaedies removed their masks too, and all were men and women from the Corn Hills.

  She saw now that the half-dozen Tavaedies and two dozen boys and girls stood on a forested cliff buff with a view of the sea on the far horizon. Pale morning light flooded a lovely expanse of land below them, meadows pimpled by artificial hills. Autumn tinted the fields and trees shades of citron and cinnamon. At the top of each man-made hill, a log stockade enclosed dome shaped houses. Cold tingles skipped down her back when she considered how close she had come to running off that cliff during her blind escape attempt.

  “Abiono! Did you rescue us already?” Hadi asked. He rubbed his eyes.

  “No, idiot,” Tamio said, giving Hadi a disgusted look. “Don’t you get it? The mock kidnapping is part of Initiation. Isn’t it, Uncle?”

  “Yes.” Abiono winced as he adjusted his costume. “Learning to face fear is an important part of becoming an adult.”

  A babble of questions and exclamations followed. Hadi kept repeating, “So we aren’t slaves?” as though he didn’t dare believe it yet. Jensi wanted to know if they could bathe now. K
emla declared, “Fa! I knew the truth all along. Your goat-headedness had better not have ruined our chance at Initiation, Dindi.”

  Dindi burned with an all too familiar feeling of shame and frustration. How did she always mean to do right and still go so wrong? It didn’t seem fair she violated a taboo even when trying to defend herself and others from becoming human sacrifices.

  “It’s taboo to reveal too soon the true nature of your capture. However, since you all know now, thanks to Dindi,”—Abiono heaved a sigh in her general direction—“We may as well distribute the totems. We would have soon in any case. We will be traveling to the Yellow Bear tribehold for your Initiation.”

  “What?” Tamio sounded outraged. “Why go to outtribesmen?”

  “Once we would have taken you to the ancestral tribehold of our own people, the Rainbow Labyrinth,” said Abiono. “But a generation ago, the Bone Whistler took over there and forbade the practice of Many-Banded magic, Imorvae magic. Those of us who were of the age of Initiation had to go elsewhere for our testing and training. I myself went to live with the Purple Thunder tribe. A few years later the three clans in the Corn Hills made a permanent agreement to bring our Initiates to be tested along with the youth of our allies in the Yellow Bear tribe. We have kept that agreement ever since, even after we heard of the fall of the Bone Whistler. Remember as we travel to the place of Initiation, that we represent not just our clan, and not just our clan-klatch, but our whole tribe. It is we who are the outtribesfolk here. Walk with honor.”

  Abiono stared out to sea. He cleared his throat. “Many other secrets you will all learn as you become men and women. Though there are also secrets you will only learn if you become Tavaedies. Now.” He smiled slightly. “We will not let you pass through the lands of outtribesmen as naked as pigs. Look inside your baskets.”

  Blushes passed all around. They had grown so used to it that they’d forgotten their nakedness. Girls and boys instinctively edged away from one another. They unwove the cords that fastened down the top flaps of the baskets.

  “I knew it,” said Hadi, pulling out a number of flint arrowheads, axheads and spearheads from his basket. “I have been carrying rocks.”

  The first thing Dindi saw when she opened her basket was a ball of fur, who stretched and yawned, entirely pleased with himself.

  “Puddlepaws, how did you hitch a ride?” She scooped up the kitten, scratched his head until he purred, then set him aside. He had been sleeping on a long strip of woven cloth, mostly white, but banded in maze-like patterns of purple, blue, yellow, green, red and orange. Below that, she found tools of chert and bone, wrapped in grass—awls, spoons, loom weights and scrappers.

  “Your clans will have provided each of you with your Birthright,” said Abiono. “You should find guest gifts to give to our hosts, the cloth wrap of an Initiate—I’ll show you how to wrap it—a dancing costume, and your totem.”

  Dindi clothed herself again, in the single piece wrap, just as Abiono instructed. Most of the other Initiates did the same. They helped paint themselves. The symbols included black paint across their eyes to represent blindfolds and red paint around their wrists to represent ropes. Then they all dived back into their carrying baskets, to see what other treasures they could find.

  Grass stuffing separated the items in the basket. Dindi kept digging until she found a beautiful beaded costume. Guessing by the exclamations from the others, they found the same. Expensive and ancient, the formal garments were dyed white and embroidered with colored beads and clan markings. Dindi’s dress included a slit skirt, a chest band, numerous hoop necklaces, and a cape and headdress of swan feathers.

  “What’s this?” demanded Tamio routing through his own basket. “I don’t need a girl’s toy!”

  “The dolls are not toys. The doll is the totem of you soul, made for you in your first seven days of life,” said Abiono. “It will be buried with you when you die. It is precious and you must not lose it. You will need it for the Initiation ceremony. Before you become men and women, you must pass the tests we give you. If you pass, you receive a new totem in addition to your dolls. Men will be given a pestle, and women a mortar. Those chosen as Tavaedies will be given a Windwheel.”

  “Oh, mine is beautiful!” exclaimed Kemla. She held up a carved, painted doll made from a corncob. Hers had real horsehair braids and wore a vermillion dress embroidered with luxurious amber and gold beads.

  Tamio’s totem doll wore a purple shoulder blanket and held a diminutive riding hoop. It was quite cute. Hadi’s had a little spear and a rather crookedly painted smile. Jensi’s totem doll had corn silk braids and a bone bead dress, not as polished as Kemla’s, but it carried an adorable miniature water jar on its head.

  Dindi had to dig underneath the formal attire before she found something wrapped carefully in dried grass. Her corncob doll. It looked old, tattered and half rotted. The paint had been worn down so much that the face was just a blank. Holes for roots testified that the doll had once had horsehair, but now it looked bald. The torn dress had no beads left either. This was not why she dropped it as though burned.

  The doll flashed in Dindi’s hand. For one translucent moment, every detail, the blades of grass at her feet, the sun glinting off the distant sea, sprang into vivid relief. Dindi felt she had taken off a blindfold and seen a world of another, brighter sun. The effulgence drove her to her knees, and rushed up to entangle her in another mind, another place, another time.

  Vessia

  A woman opened her eyes to find herself in a field at dawn. Two people stood before her, an old man and an old woman. They wept and smiled at the same time, and touched her, possessively, as if they owned her, gently, as if they feared her. She did not know them. They tried to look into her face, but she stared past them. They did not matter to her one way or another. The sunlight as it filtered through the leaves, now, that she found strange and wondrous.

  When they tried to embrace her, she screamed. Her scream was not one of terror or rage, simply a noise, a discomfort to match the discomfort of their touch, and when their touch withdrew, so ended the scream. After that, her face went still again, as if nothing had happened, and she stared past them, to gaze upon the wonder of the shifting leaves.

  They pulled back, still crying, still smiling, still trying to touch her as much as she would allow.

  “Daughter,” they called her, over and over, now a question, now a statement. “You are our daughter”—as if they didn’t believe it themselves, but would speak hope into truth.

  “You are our daughter,” she repeated. Her words pleased them, not quite.

  The field meant nothing to her. The couple meant nothing to her. So it meant nothing to her when the couple led her away from the field. Gradually, however, a new emotion did bloom a little in her—curiosity. The couple led her to a domed house of baked clay, with a tiny door at the top of a ladder, so tiny she had to crawl through it. Inside the dome, the round room was spacious, with a hole in the high roof to let in light and air. Rugs woven with patterns covered the clay floor. Patterns of light and shadow crisscrossed chevrons and zigzags on the rugs, creating complexities within complexities. It was beautiful. And she was content with that.

  A wildness pulsed inside her, this ‘daughter’ whom they called ‘Vessia.’ She could not stay inside for long periods of time. Outside, she would run, as if searching, and then fling herself headlong into the wind, flipping and twisting to catch the clouds. Instead, the hard ground always claimed her. The old couple loved to watch her, and could do so endlessly, the way one could look again and again at a waterfall, or the sun setting over the ocean, or a baby sleeping, and never tire or cease to amaze at it. If the river itself jumped out of its bed to leap and twirl it would have astonished them no less. Yet her runs and leaps frightened them too, the way that coming face to face with a wild cat or a forest fire fascinates and terrifies. See how she dances, they whispered when they thought she was not listening, never predictable, never repeating
herself.

  She was not trying to dance. She was trying to fly.

  They gave her food, water, a place to sleep. They tried to meet her eyes, but she had no interest in looking at them. They tried to hug her, sometimes, and she would shrug them away, or screech if they pressed her. They clothed her, but she simply removed the garments if they itched. She loved to look at cloth while it was still on the loom, however. Beauty moved her. If she found beauty, for hours at a time it would occupy her. Lights, patterns, colors, movements. Once, the old woman set up the loom before going to bed, and in the morning, found that Vessia had completed the entire weave, a perfect copy of one of the rugs upon the floor.

  “You finished the whole thing in one night!” exclaimed the old woman. “And without a single mistake! You are amazing!”

  “You are amazing,” Vessia repeated without inflection and without looking at her.

  After that, the old couple let her weave often. Other simple chores they tried to encourage, however, did not work so well. She simply stared at the needle they gave her to sew the cloth she’d woven into garments. In the end, the old woman folded and sewed the garments for her, and it was the first dress that she would abide without removing.

  As seasons passed, the old couple wizened like grapes shrinking to raisons, but she did not change. The old couple finally decided it was safe to introduce her to other people. They lived alone in the forest, in their beehive dome house, but there were other domes, other houses, closer together, past the woods, beside a brook. “Our clan,” they told her.

  “They will ask why we haven’t shown anyone our daughter before,” said Old Woman.

  “No,” said Old Man. “Once they see her, they will think they know why.”

  “But she is beautiful,” said Old Woman.

  “Too beautiful,” he said. “Too strange.”

  Vessia went out among the other people, though it was hard for her. They stared at her, spoke loudly to her, tried to touch her, told her all the things she couldn’t, shouldn’t, mustn’t do. She liked market day—she liked to pick up the objects sitting on blankets and play with them. That made the women who guarded the blankets angry. Old Woman told her, “A bargain has two sides,” and gave her small beads of gold to leave in place of the objects she picked up.

  Vessia could not fly, but she could dance, and other people began to notice. Not only did people in the clanhold watch her dance, they could not, it seemed, look away if she started dancing in front of them. This made the old couple nervous.

  “If people ask, you must tell them you are a Tavaedi,” they told her. “You must tell them you are our daughter, and a Tavaedi like us. The Corn Maiden.”

  Once a man, younger than Old Man, who wore a golden torque about his neck and gold bands on his arms, visited on market day. He saw her dance. Afterward, he came close to her, but did not touch her.

  “I love you,” he said and many similar things. “Don’t tell me no.”

  “Why would I tell you no?” she asked. She didn’t like it when people told her no.

  “Then I will go to your parents tonight,” he said.

  He arrived at the clay dome house, just as he’d promised. However, he and Old Man exchanged loud words.

  “She loves me,” shouted Young Man.

  “She doesn’t understand love,” said Old Man. “You don’t understand her.”

  “Do you think I can’t tell where she came from?” asked Young Man. “She’s not your daughter!”

  They bowed their heads, accepting his words, afraid. “Who do you think she is?”

  “She is obviously an Imorvae exile from the Rainbow Labyrinth. She suffered some terrible hurt, and lost her mind. You took her in, you cared for her. I know your history. You tried to have children of your own for many years, and couldn’t conceive. So you adopted this beautiful waif as your own child.”

  Old Man and Old Woman raised their eyebrows. They still looked cautious, but they no longer stank so much of fear. Vessia knew that Young Man had not guessed right. His words did not fit the whole Pattern, only the small pieces of the Pattern that he could see. Yet, to her confusion, they did not correct him.

  “Though I wear the gold bangles of your tribe, I am not one of you,” he continued. “I also am an exile from the Rainbow Labyrinth. The Bone Whistler killed my parents because, like me, they were Imorvae. I fled here, and took work as a healer to the War Chief in Yellow Bear tribehold. I saved his life after a battle, and he rewarded with me with wealth and place. But I wish to marry a girl from my own tribe.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Old Man. “It cannot be.”

  Young Man frowned. “I could heal her.”

  “Nothing can heal her, because she is not broken. She is what she is.”

  Young Man begged, “Vessia, Vessia, please, let me love you.”

  “What does that mean?” she wondered aloud.

  Wetness streaked the cheeks of Young Man, and he left with no further words.

  Long after, she puzzled over her many names. Daughter. Vessia. The Corn Maiden. Yet when she reached inside herself she encountered no solid sense of self, only mist and fog. I am missing myself, she realized. I am a husk hungry for my core.

  “Who am I?” she asked the old couple one day. “Who are you? Where did I come from? Why am I here? I am not like other daughters. Am I an ‘exile’, as Young Man said?”

  “Danumoro the Herb Dancer? The healer? Vessia, were we wrong? Do you love him?”

  She shrugged. They looked disappointed. Why? There was still so much she could not grasp.

  “He was wrong and right,” Old Woman said. “You are not an exile. But you are not our blood daughter either. You are unique.”

  “Once we did a favor for the White Lady,” said Old Man. “She asked us how she could pay her debt, and we told her we wanted for nothing, except a child, which she could not give us. She told us we would have a daughter, and gave us this.” He reached up to a jar tucked in the rafters of the house. From this he pulled a strange corncob doll. “The next day, we found you.”

  Vessia took the doll. It had no face. It was blank, like she was. “A bargain has two sides. What did the Lady ask of you?”

  “Only that we protect you,” said Old Woman. “And—”

  “Which we have tried to do,” interrupted Old Man. He shook his head at Old Woman. She placed her hand on his leg.

  “And,” finished Old Woman, “That we let you go when you were ready. Are you ready, Vessia?”

  “Yes,” said Vessia. She did not know what she would do, or where she would go, but she knew she had to find the missing pieces of the Pattern. Tears streaked Old Woman’s face. “You see, you really are our daughter. Only children can please their parents by leaving, and at the same time, so break their hearts.”

  Dindi

  Excess light cleared. Dindi stared upward at tree branches against vivid blue sky. She rolled away, gasping. The corncob doll had fallen into the grass beside her. Puddlepaws hissed at it and backed away, tail and fur spiked.

  You did this, Dindi accused it silently.

  The doll stared facelessly back at her.

  Laughter roused Dindi from her daze. Kemla and a few other girls were pointing and sniggering at her. Jensi and Hadi knelt by her side, concerned.

  “Dindi, what happened?” Jensi asked.

  The confusion—and, in Kemla’s case, derision—in their faces told Dindi they had not seen the light, or the Vision. The doll had magic, which, like the fae, only she could see. Dindi knew better than to speak of seeing of the fae, and so she pressed her lips together and said nothing about the Vision either.

  “It’s been a difficult journey,” Abiono told her, not without sympathy. “But soon we will meet up with allies. Until then, we must conserve our food and water. Remember as we travel to the place of Initiation, that we represent not just our clan, and not just our clan-klatch, but our whole tribe,” warned Abiono. “And it is we who are the outtribesfolk here. Walk with ho
nor.”

  Rthan

  Rthan’s canoe was a bark boat shaped like folded hands, light enough for a warrior to carry on his back during portage, long enough to hold three while rowing. Or, in this case, Rthan, his prisoner, and two packs of supplies.

  They’d been paddling downstream without stopping for meals, but they’d come to the first of several cataracts soon, and Rthan knew they needed to eat before they portaged. Past the cataract, they’d be in Yellow Bear territory.

  Rthan signaled the others and the seven canoes pulled into a still pool in the river, guarded from sight by drooping willows. None of the warriors left their boats, only anchored their paddles through the handle of the canoe post-down in the mud.

  The captive tried to lift his head over the edge of the kayak to see where they were. Rthan slapped him back down to the bottom of the boat. The boy endured the latest bruise without speaking, though his wary gaze locked on Rthan.

  Rthan rubbed his thumb over the boy’s purpling jaw. “You shave, how often? Your mother shouldn’t have let you out of the clanhold until you stopped nursing.”

  The boy jerked his chin away, about the only movement he could make, since he was netted claw to tail like a lobster in a trap. Rthan wondered how much of Kavio’s reputation wasn’t simply borrowed from his father. The boy didn’t look particularly intimidating. True, his little trick might have fooled Rthan’s men if the Blue Lady hadn’t tipped him off, but Kavio struck him as just another dryfoot, more mouth than meat.

  Speaking of meat, none of them had eaten in several days. In his oiled leather pack, Rthan pulled out a treat he’d been saving the whole trip. His mouth watered just peeling away the gut he’d wrapped it in.

  Kavio recoiled. “That is foul!”

  “Did crabs eat your nostrils? This is hakarl!”

  “Kill me now, but do not make me eat that.”

  “I wasn’t about to let you eat it.” Rthan cradled his hakarl. “I hunted the poison shark myself, buried it in the gravel by my house and waited six months for it to rot just right.”

  “Most of us prefer food which doesn’t involve the words ‘poison’, ‘gravel’ or ‘rot’.”

  “Hakarl was given to our tribe’s first War Chief Hathan by the Shark Lord.”

  “A botched assassination attempt, as I recall.”

  “No!” Rthan waved the fermented meat in front of Kavio’s wrinkled nose. “It was the first sacrifice. The human warrior Hathan befriended the Merfae. One year, during a famine, Hathan’s family was on the verge of starvation, so he decided to trick his faery friend. He proposed they throw bones and whichever tossed the knuckle would kill himself to feed the other. Hathan cheated and gave the Shark Lord a pouch with nothing but knuckle bones, so the faery lord allowed Hathan to kill him, bury him and then eat him. However, the next dawn, the Shark Lord returned to life, and told him, ‘I let you kill me and eat me, now you must do the same for me.’ Hathan had no choice but to agree to pay the deathdebt. Just then his daughter Mariah ran up and…”

  Rthan stopped speaking. He no longer had a taste for either banter or hakarl.

  Kavio caught his mood at once. “She threw herself to the shark in place of her father.” He added quietly, “You have tattoos on both cheeks—you’re married. Do you have any children, Rthan?”

  Rthan punched Kavio across the jaw. Kavio spit blood into the brine that pooled in the boat bottom.

  Rthan cracked his knuckles. “So what was it you wanted to tell Nargano? Before you try to convince me you would betray your father, I think it’s fair to let you know there’s nothing I hate worse than a man who turns against his own blood.”

  “Nargano will tell you after I’ve told him.”

  Rthan hit him again, harder. “I don’t bite hooks. I’m going to kill you unless you give me one good reason not to, and it better be more than that you’re willing to switch sides and slice bellies for us. I don’t need or want you on our side. I just want you dead.”

  “Kill me, then.” Kavio flicked his tongue over the blood on his lip. “What I have to say goes to Nargano or dies with me.”

  “Fa!” The boy was bluffing. Time to bone the fish. Rthan wouldn’t ask his tribesmen to increase their own risk by dragging a captive all the way across enemy territory. He hefted his knife.

  In all his wriggling, Kavio had wedged himself into the curl of the boat, and he used that leverage to kick both legs square into Rthan’s chest. Rthan went overboard, found his footing on the riverbottom and came up, just in time to have the paddle smack him in the face. Kavio had somehow untied himself. The boy pushed the canoe into the current.

  The men in the other boats grabbed their paddles.

  “Two men to a boat!” Rthan shouted. “One spout, one fin!”

  He jumped into the canoe of his second in command. His men doubled up on the boats without supplies, as they’d often practiced. In each case, the second man crouched behind the man paddling, legs balanced on either side to keep from toppling the craft, while he fired arrows. Rthan had lost his bow with his boat, so he used his second’s weapon.

  To Rthan’s surprise, Kavio had obviously rafted before. He drove his canoe to the white water, and shouted catcalls at the nixies and water sprites to incite them to surge after his boat, pushing it to insane speeds.

  “Lady, aide me!” Rthan cried. Beneath his canoe, the water churned and lifted his boat forward on a blast of white water after Kavio. The two boats of his men jostled on the frenzied froth right behind him.

  Just when Rthan had been silently giving Kavio credit, the idiot boy steered his boat toward a low hanging tree. At his unnatural speed, the crash would kill him.

  Kavio’s boat surfed the spray over a rock just before the tree and sailed over the trunk.

  The two men in the boat to Rthan’s right didn’t bounce off the rock at quite the right angle. They hit the tree. Their canoe splintered into pieces, the men themselves careened through the air. The tree caught one, the river the other, but before Rthan could check to see if they’d survived, he and his partner reached the tree too.

  “Flip!” Rthan shouted. As one man, they shifted their weight and the boat turned in the water. The bottom scraped under the tree. The boat continued to rotate and they landed upright again, still bucking the rapids.

  Kavio leaned back in his boat. He notched Rthan’s own bow and shot several arrows in quick succession. The Blue Lady sent a wind that snapped across the river and blew the arrows off course. Kavio shot another volley of arrows, and he must have called upon Red fae Rthan couldn’t see, for the arrows burst into flame. The other boat caught fire. Rthan’s men dived into the river. But Kavio couldn’t shoot again. A wicked run of rocks forced him to turn forward again to steer.

  Rthan recognozied the rock formation. “Turn to the shore!”

  He joined his fin man in paddling. The lower fae were beyond control, even of the Blue Lady, and they wouldn’t release their grip on his kayak. Rthan crashed the boat on the rock rather than ride the rapids through the narrows—he and his second both scrambled to climb onto the boulder to dry rock.

  From that vantage, they watched Kavio’s kayak shoot out of the narrows like an arrow from a bow and arc into free fall over a thousand foot waterfall.

  Rthan felt no triumph, only weariness. He still had to find those of his companions who survived, portage the boats they’d left behind down the cliffs and make the rendezvous with War Chief Nargano before the Autumn Equinox.

  Blue light flared, and, impossibly, he smelled the ocean. His little girl Meira climbed next to him on the rock.

  “He’s not dead,” said the Blue Lady. “You have to go after him.”

  “No human could have survived that fall, my Lady, but even if he sprouted wings like a fae lord, I must tend my men first.”

  “If you ignore my warning, you will suffer.”

  “Is that a threat?” He frowned. “Or a prophecy?”

  “Water rolls downhill to the sea. Is that a thr
eat or a prophecy?”

  Kavio

  In answer to his call, slyphs buffeted Kavio’s boat with their zephyr breath, guiding it past the thundering spume at the foot of the falls. The canoe skipped on the water like the rocks he’d thrown at ponds as a boy. Finally, it snuggled into a gentle current.

  He looked up at the top of the cataract, but he couldn’t see Rthan. Leaning back in the canoe, he let tension drain from his body, though even now he did not relax completely. He wondered how he could remake himself if everywhere he went he kept stumbling upon the vipers left to nest by his father.

  Once already he’d underestimated Rthan, he would not do it again. Despite his desire to rest, he forced his canoe to the fast currents, and where there were none, paddled hard. Settlements occurred more thickly with each day he spent on the river, with less no man’s land between; the totem poles he passed were engraved with the symbols of three, four, five clans at a time, and the moss growing on the weathered wood testified these clanklatch alliances had stood firm for generations. He was seeing what the Rainbow Labyrinth tribe might have been, if not for the rise of the Bone Whistler and the civil war between the Morvae and the Imorvae. Several times he had to duck warning arrows from warriors in bomas, but at least the closer he got to Yellow Bear tribehold, the less chance he would encounter the Blue Waters tribesmen. Even they would have better sense than to attack the tribehold itself.

  Occasionally Kavio saw groups of women rinsing roots and filling water baskets at the river’s edge. If the women spotted him, they fled, for a warrior paddling a kayak was not a welcome sight. Outtriber, exile or scout for a war party—he could be up to no good as far as they were concerned.

  All the more strange, then, that one afternoon a lone woman standing on the shore caught a glimpse of his canoe and ran toward the river, shouting.

  “Hey ho! Hey ho!” She waved both arms. Flaps of loose skin jiggled under her arms and chin, giving the impression of a once nicely plump woman who had eaten too little for too long. Her skirt was ragged too, a shaggy mane of raccoon tails and bark felt tassels that ended in knots. She hid her sagging, wrinkled breasts with necklaces of twisted robes made from the same material. Nothing else. Not a single bangle of gold, which was odd for Yellow Bear. The womenfolk here treasured their gold more than their children.

  “Stranger, hey ho! Come nigh, I wish you no harm!”

  His first thought was that she was a hexer, and a cannibal. Nonetheless, his curiosity overcame his sense, and he paddled his canoe to the shore. The mud was slick and carpeted green with fuzz that tickled his bare feet.

  “Are you a Tavaedi?” she asked. Up close, he could smell the fetid rot from her mouth.

  “I am an exile,” he answered cautiously. “I have no tribe or clan.”

  “I guessed as much already. I don’t care, nephew. My need is too great. I saw the glow about you, even from the across the river. Do you dance Yellow? Can you heal?”

  She had a small daub of Yellow in her own aura, probably not enough to be a Tavaedi, but enough to recognize magic in others. He deemed it for the best she could not see the other Chromas in his aura.

  “I know a few healing dances,” he said. Better to understate the case. “What is your need?”

  “My son.” She tugged on his arm. Her fingers felt like dry sticks. “He is sick. Come to my house and I will give you a ringlet of gold if you can heal him.”