by P. C. Cast
Mari felt the wind whipping around her, lifting her hair and caressing her body as if to encourage her. Holding the image firmly in her mind, Mari spoke the invocation to the moon.
“By right of blood and birth channel through me
That which the Earth Mother proclaims my destiny!”
Power such as she had never before known flooded Mari, filling her … filling her … filling her until she overflowed—and that overflow spilled into the waiting women, Washing through them, and carrying away the despair that had clung to them like a rancid smell.
When the power was drained completely from her, Mari opened her eyes. Everyone was staring at her. The silence was so profound that it seemed to be deafening.
And then a woman whose face Mari recognized as one of the Clan, but who had gone missing so many winters before that Mari couldn’t recall her name, let loose her neighbor’s hands and stepped forward.
She spoke simply, though her face was alight with joy. “Thank you, Moon Woman.” She bowed deeply, reverently, to Mari.
All around her the women mimicked her actions. Each spoke their gratitude, and then showed homage by bowing deeply to Mari.
Mari stood on the impromptu podium, tears of happiness overflowing her eyes, as she accepted their thanks as simply and honestly as her mother would have accepted them.
Then one woman spread wide her arms as more wind whipped around them. Laughing, she began to dance, her feet tapping a fast, joyous pattern on the dock. Other women joined in the dance, until the music of their feet vibrated across the dock, lifting into the wind with their laughter.
Mari searched over the sea of dancing women until she found Nik. Their eyes met and she felt the touch of his gaze like a caress. He smiled and nodded his head, mouthing the words well done Moon Woman to her.
“Get back in your houses immediately and no one will be hurt!”
At the sound of the shout, Mari whirled around. Kayaks filled with Companions and their canines surrounded the floating houses. Each had a crossbow lifted, aimed at the crowd of dancing women.
Sol began pushing his way through the crowd, heading for the far side of the dock facing the throng of boats. Nik hurried to Mari. He reached her as the women’s dance faltered and they began to mill around in small clusters.
“Wilkes, I am in charge here!” Sol’s deep voice echoed across the water, stilling the frightened voices of the women behind him. “These women, these captive women we call Scratchers, but who are really Earth Walkers, have been mistreated by the Tribe for generations. Their melancholy, which grows so great they will their lives to end, is unnatural, and only occurs because they are prisoners. It is unjust and inhumane. As your chosen Leader and Sun Priest, I cannot, in good conscience, allow their abuse to continue.”
“So instead you would consign your own people to death?”
Sol searched the faces before him until he found Cyril. “No, my old friend, instead of allowing their abuse I would ask my people to do the right thing.”
“Take me to your father,” Mari told Nik. Without questioning her, he quickly guided her through the clustering women. They stepped beside Sol, Rigel and Laru flanking them. She faced the old man who had been speaking, and raised her voice so that it would carry over the wind and water to all of the watching Companions. “I can cure your blight.”
One voice, fueled by hatred, could be heard over the disbelieving outcry. “That’s her! The mutant who is not of the Tribe, but who has lured a canine to her!”
“Ah, so this group is here because of your poison, Thaddeus,” Nik said. “I should have known.”
“This group is here because Thaddeus had the presence of mind to come to me when he discovered you and your father had allowed an intruder among the Tribe—one who is here expressly to rob us of our Scratchers!” Cyril shouted.
“They’re Earth Walkers! And they’re people, not property. They cannot belong to you,” Mari told the old man.
“Young woman, you should learn your place and not speak back to your elders,” the old man said.
“Is that how you rule in the Tribe? Through intimidation and ignorance?” Mari’s questions shot out.
“That’s enough! Silence that creature and get the Scratchers back in their houses,” Cyril commanded.
“Cyril, Mari is here by my invitation and under my protection,” Sol said.
“Then you choose her over your own people!” Thaddeus sneered. “I see where your son gets his twisted propensities.”
“By choosing to protect Mari I am choosing my own people,” Sol said. “She is Earth Walker and Companion. She is both in one. You know my words are true, Cyril, and you know why they are true—even if you will not admit it. Mari can also heal the blight. I have witnessed it.”
“If all that is true, why are you and Nik hiding her from us?”
Nik searched the faces until he found Wilkes, but before he could respond to the Leader of the Warriors, Mari spoke.
“They were hiding me because I told them if they didn’t I wouldn’t come—I wouldn’t heal O’Bryan of the blight. There is such a history of violence and mistrust between our peoples that I was unwilling to share the cure with you.”
“That’s cruel!” shouted another Companion.
“More cruel than enslaving the women of my Clan and slaughtering our men?” Mari countered with.
“What does she propose?” Cyril asked Sol.
“She can answer for herself,” Sol said.
Mari lifted her chin and faced the old man. “I don’t propose anything. There is only one truth here, and it’s a simple one. If you want the blight that infects your Tribe to be cured you will let the Earth Walkers go free, and swear never to enslave them again. If you don’t, the blight can continue to kill you and I’ll say good riddance to a people so driven by their own selfishness that they deserve to be culled from the earth!” Mari shouted at him.
“There’s one other truth,” Cyril’s voice was granite. “You will not be allowed to destroy our world. Kill her and get those Scratchers back in their cages!”
“Cyril, you must do the right thing! We are not monsters! We cannot continue to—” Sol began, but in a motion blurred with inhuman speed, Thaddeus lifted his crossbow and fired. Sol surged forward, knocking Mari to the ground, and the arrow meant for her pierced him through the chest.
“No!” Nik cried and fell to his knees beside his father. “No! Father! Father!”
From the kayaks, men and canines began to leap to the dock, closing on the women, and on Mari, Nik, and Sol.
Suddenly Laru and Rigel were before them. Hackles raised, teeth bared, they formed a wall between them and the encroaching Companions, who hesitated, as even the angriest of Warriors could not abide harming a canine.
From her hands and knees, Mari watched in horror as panic rippled through her people. Screaming, they tried to flee the Companions, and in the midst of their hysteria the torch was knocked to the ground. Mari saw it roll into the straw-floored house and with a whoosh it caught flame.
Heart hammering, Mari turned her attention to Nik, who was sobbing over his father.
She crawled to Sol, feeling for his pulse, though when she saw that the arrow had gone through his body, skewering his heart, she knew she would not find one.
Nik was shaking his father’s body. “Wake up! You have to wake up, Father!”
“Nik!” She took his face in her hands and forced him to meet her eyes. “He’s gone.”
He stared at her, at first unseeing, and then his vision focused. “Save him, Mari! Please, save him,” he wept brokenly.
“I can’t, Nik. Your father is dead. I can’t save him any more than I could save Mama.”
There was an explosion behind them that rocked the dock as the first house was engulfed in flames. The roof collapsed inward, and the walls began to blaze, setting the house beside it aflame as well. With an incredible rush of heat, the next house and the next caught as the fire roared.
&nbs
p; The heat was terrible. It drove the Companions back to the Channel, and had the women milling around the edges of the dock in panicked groups.
Mari stood, and in a voice amplified by the horror of what was happening around her, she shouted above the blaze, “Earth Walkers, flee! Go to ground! Go to the burrows!” Her words were all they needed. The women leaped into the channel and began to swim for the far shore.
“You bitch! You caused this!”
Mari looked up to see the Companion called Thaddeus standing in his kayak, another arrow notched and aimed at her.
Growling fiercely, Laru and Rigel backed against her, shielding her with their bodies.
He fired his crossbow, but the young Companion who was paddling the kayak, and whose blond Terrier was barking fiercely at Thaddeus, had swerved the boat in time, and the deadly arrow flew harmlessly over the canines’ heads.
“Thaddeus! What are you thinking? You can’t kill the Shepherds!” the young man shouted at him.
Thaddeus ignored him. His sole focus was on Mari. “You have to stand up some time, and when you do, I’m going to kill you!”
There was another explosion, as more of the houses imploded, and the blast of heat forced Thaddeus and the other Companions to cringe away from the flaming dock.
“We have to get out of here, Nik,” Mari said, pulling on his arm. “Come on! Get to the boat with me!”
Nik looked unseeing at her.
Behind him the wind suddenly whirled with a violence that was almost sentient, pulling at the ravenous flames, feeding them, encouraging them, and finally carrying their sparks up and up, until they paused there, hovering to form the voluptuous shape of a beautiful, earthy woman. The watching people, Companions and Earth Walkers alike, gasped in amazement. Then, with the sound of a sigh, the figure moved over the channel, re-forming into fire. All eyes followed the progress of the column of flame as it found the bank. There was a portentous pause, and then the bank erupted into a blaze that lifted, lifted, enveloping the first of the massive pines—then another—then another. As they watched, like a living being, the fire converged on the city in the trees.
“Go! Go! Go!” Cyril shouted. “Get us back there! We have to stop that fire!”
“Nik, listen to me! We will burn if we stay on this dock. Laru and Rigel will die with us.”
His eyes met hers then. She understood the depth of despair she saw within them and her heart broke for him, and she said the only thing she thought might reach him.
“Your father would want you to live.”
He nodded woodenly. “Go. I’ll be behind you.”
“Rigel, with me!” Mari called as she sprinted across the dock. She unwound the rope that tied the little rowboat to it. Rigel jumped into it, and then Mari followed him.
Nik was still crouched beside his father’s body with Laru nearby. There was another terrible explosion, and the dock trembled. Then it, too, erupted into flame.
“Nik! Run for it!”
With flames licking at his feet, Nik ran, skidding into the boat beside her. Bending over the oars, Mari pulled with all her strength, trying to gain some space between them and the inferno that was the dock.
“Laru! Come to me!” Nik called.
The big Shepherd was standing over Sol’s body, completely surrounded by flame. The Shepherd’s head bent. He touched his muzzle to Sol’s cheek and closed his eyes. Mari watched as the tips of his sable fur began to curl and singe and then she looked away, unable to bear to see the loyal canine’s end.
“Laru, I can’t lose you and Father! Please choose to live! Please come to me!” Nik roared in a voice that sounded so like Sol’s that it sent chills skittering up and down Mari’s arms.
Laru’s eyes opened. And then, as if shot from a bow, the Shepherd gathered himself and leaped through the flames, ran across the deck, and dove into the water. Surfacing in moments, he swam for the boat.
An arrow plunked harmlessly into the water several feet in front of them, and as Nik wrapped his arms around Laru and hauled him into the boat, Mari saw Thaddeus.
All of the other Companions were paddling wildly for shore, determined to beat the fire to the Tribe—determined to save their families. Thaddeus was standing in his kayak, facing the opposite direction. Though his young partner in the little boat was paddling them toward the shore, Thaddeus continued sighting his crossbow at Mari and letting arrows fly, one after another, even though they were clearly out of range. She could see that his face was red with rage—his expression so twisted by hatred that he looked less human than monster.
“I’ll get us out of here.” Nik took her place and began rowing them farther into the Channel, farther away from the Companions and the burning forest.
“This isn’t over!” Thaddeus shrieked his rage at them. “I will hunt you down and kill you! That I swear on my own canine’s life!” Then smoke, black and thick, spread across the Channel, shielding them from more of his venom.
Nik continued to row, bending his back to the task as if he was attacking the water with the oars. Mari went to Laru, feeling all over the Shepherd for injuries. Finding nothing except singed fur, she sank to the bottom of the boat, trembling with relief and holding tightly to Rigel.
Minutes or hours could have passed as Nik continued to row. They were alone on the water. Mari looked to the east. Where the sun should have been rising there was a wall of flame.
Laru stood, and on legs that shook, he staggered to Nik. Nik dropped the oars and pulled the Shepherd into his arms, saying, “I know this choosing wasn’t the same as when you bonded with Father, but thank you for answering my call and coming to me. Laru, I accept you and I vow to love and care for you until fate parts us by death.” The Shepherd rested his head across Nik’s chest, sighed, and closed his eyes, nuzzling as close as possible to his new Companion.
Mari watch Nik look from Laru to the dock, which was completely ablaze, to the fiery ridge. As if he felt her gaze on him, his eyes found hers.
“My world is burning,” he said.
She leaned to him, grasping his hand in both of hers. “Then let’s build a new world. Together. Where everyone is accepted—where everyone can belong.”
“I don’t know if I believe that is possible,” Nik said.
She moved forward and took him and the big Shepherd into her arms, holding them, comforting them. Rigel joined them then, completing their circle of love and loyalty.
“Then I’ll believe it enough for both of us until you can, too. Trust me, Nik. I have your back. I’ll always have your back.”
* * *
Dove woke him with three words that changed everything. “Something is happening.”
Dead Eye was instantly alert. “What is it?”
“I’m not sure. I sense a change. Can you smell that? The air has an odd quality to it. My Champion, we must go to the balcony. You must be my eyes.”
“That I will always be,” he said. Taking her hand they left their sleeping pallet and walked quickly through the chamber to the God’s balcony. He helped her step up on the ledge with him as he gazed out at the morning, instinctively turning to the northwest.
At first it seemed something was wrong with the clouds—that they were being formed in the distant forest ridge instead of the sky and rising from it. Dead Eye stared, baffled. The wind shifted, allowing him to see a black column of smoke with an orange glow in the center of the billowing white. Thick and ominous, it spread, staining the perfect cerulean sky with darkness. Dead Eye was filled with excitement.
“What is it, my Champion? What do you see?”
“Our future. I see our future!”
With the grace and strength of a stag, he lifted Dove off her feet, pressing her naked body against his, twirling her round and round as the two of them laughed with delight while the Reaper God loomed silently behind them. Her copper eyes stared out at the distant forest as if she, too, was gazing at their future. In her frozen expression there was no delight, no anger, there was on
ly a waiting, watching stillness frightening to behold.
The End. For Now.
EPILOGUE
Bast was the only reason Antreas didn’t get trapped in the inferno. His Lynx saved him. Again. The big feline had pawed and pawed at him with her huge pads so insistently that she’d frightened the curvy Tribeswoman he had finally managed to convince to join him in the visitors’ nest for a private drink. Antreas had been so irritated by Bast that he’d slipped into normal, denlike behavior and had hissed at the Lynx, which was when the girl had fled the visitors’ nest, sending him and his feline horrified looks over her shoulder as she disappeared into the night.
“I suppose you’re going to be smug about that,” he’d muttered at Bast. “Because if she’s scared away by a little pawing and hissing she’s definitely not mate material.”
Bast had rubbed against him then, twining around and through his legs, and purring mightily before padding to the door and looking back at her Companion expectantly.
Antreas sighed. “All right. Might as well hunt with you since my chances of any other kind of sport are over for the night. Truthfully, Bast, after that one spreads the word, we’ll be lucky if any of the Tribeswomen agree to be alone with me.”
Bast had simply pawed at the doorway and made the unique, almost owl-like cough that signaled her impatience.
Sighing heavily, Antreas followed his feline.
It had been late, and the two of them, Lynx and Companion, hadn’t seen anyone until they’d come to the main lift.
Antreas hadn’t had to knock on the nest’s doorway to get the lift sentry’s attention. The low, warning growl that came from the Shepherd within had already alerted him.
“Oh. It’s you,” the man stepped from the doorway of the nest to frown with disdain at Antreas and Bast.
The Mercenary kept his expression placid, though the arrogance of the dog men was beginning to grate on his nerves. “Bast needs to hunt. I’d appreciate it if you lowered us to the forest floor.”