“Bree, darling, give him time.”
Little gurgling sounds erupted from inside Bria’s sling as Larissa started to wake. Bria put her hand on her arm and started to steer Mariah out. “Let’s get those clothes. You can try them on while I nurse Rissa.” Halfway back to the house, Bria spoke again. “I’m sorry about Xae. I guess he didn’t feel like talking. He’s like that sometimes. He had a pretty rough time before he got here.” The lines on her forehead told Mariah that she was still annoyed, despite her words.
Mariah stopped, and her friend paused to regard her, bouncing and swaying a little to soothe the baby as she did. “He’s Ceo San?”
“Yes. Why else would he be running from Varidian?”
Mariah resumed walking if only to get out from under Bria’s stare. Her friend wanted something, but she seemed afraid to come out and say it, and Mariah was not sure she wanted her to, so she let the subject drop. She still looked back toward the barn as she held open the back door for Bria, wondering where the strange bird had gone. Her thoughts spilled out of her mouth before she could stop them. “But aren’t they worried that whoever is chasing him will end up in Wellspring?”
Bria stopped short and spun around, Larissa already cradled on one arm, nursing contentedly. “Mariah! Since when do you think I care more about that than about the welfare of another? Just because your people gave up the way of the Althamir doesn’t mean that I have. You, of all people, should know better!”
Mariah bit her lower lip, cursing her inability to keep her thoughts to herself. She tasted blood before she forced herself to relax and respond to Bria’s hard stare. She didn’t know if she believed much in these Althamir, but she knew that it was very important to her friend. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking. It just brought back memories…”
Bria’s expression immediately softened, and she put her free arm around Mariah. “It’s okay. I guess I didn’t think about how seeing another Ceo San would affect you either. Let’s just go on in.”
The strange raven was still on her mind when she picked up the bundle of new tunics and pants her friend directed her to and went into the children’s empty bedroom to try them on.
CHAPTER 4
LESSONS
The next morning, before the sun was even above the horizon, Mariah was lying flat on her stomach on the bed with her wings spread out to either side. The night had been filled with tossing and turning. She’d never get used to sleeping in a proper bed. Full consciousness came quickly when a giant paw hit her cheek with a smack. Shaking her head and spluttering, she spit cat hair out of her mouth and sat up on her knees. Wiping at her lips and tongue some more, she looked to see Gwyneth in her cat form sitting beside her bed. If cats could laugh…
“Come on, Gwyn,” she whined. “You know I hate it when you do that.”
The cat growled, rose, and padded out of the bedroom without looking back. Mariah shook her head. She would be getting no apology, of course. Still in her nightshirt, her wings dragging behind her, she followed the cat through the house and out the back door into the cool dark morning. They stopped long enough at the well for Mariah to get a drink and splash water on her face from the nearby bucket before Gwyn started moving again.
As they reached the edge of her property, the cat began to pick up her pace. Mariah started to jog, but after less than a minute, even a full run wasn’t enough to keep up. She spread her wings and took to the air as Gwyn turned northward, paralleling the village borders. They moved swiftly past the houses and barns. The plains turned back into hills, and the trees thickened. Mariah’s stomach rumbled as she kept an eye on the shadowed form of her friend on the ground below. She hoped this little trip was a hunting expedition, but with Gwyn, she could never be sure.
The old woman, still in cat form, finally stopped at the edge of the trees where they became dense enough to be called a forest.
By the time Mariah landed nearby, Gwyneth was human again, her wool dress still intact. Her transformation was smooth and barely noticeable. Mariah had seen it many times before, but it still left her awestruck.
“You’re still holding your hybrid form,” Gwyneth grumbled as the younger woman’s feet hit the earth. “I keep hoping that the safety you say that cave provides you with will aid you in becoming your true self, the ones the gods intended you to be.”
Mariah shook her head. It took a monumental effort not to roll her eyes. “What do you mean? This is my true self. I’ve been this way since I can remember, since I was born! It isn’t a hybrid form. It’s just who I am. If the gods intended me to be someone else, then they’re the ones who got it wrong.” She took a step back as she spoke. Gwyn could be sensitive when it came to talk of the Althamir. Insulting them was just asking for her wrath. It would be better than her constant badgering.
Instead, Gwyn didn’t seem to have caught the barb or, in fact, anything she had actually said. “You forget, child, I come from a time long before Rothgar ordered our histories burned or rewritten before he polluted the people’s memories of the Ceo San. I know better. Your parents’ fear and now yours have caused you to be this way.”
Child? Still? She had passed her twenty-fifth year some time ago. How long would it be before Gwyn finally believed that she could not change, that she was really not a Ceo San at all?
“Listen to me, Mariah. The Ceo San are not hybrids. You are not a hybrid. We’re born to human parents, so we’re as pure of blood as any human. Our gifts, to shift between our human and animal forms at will, are magical, spiritual, divine. The Althamir grant these powers only when—and where—there is a need. They would not have granted them in half-measure.”
“They are not a gift. I’ve told you that before. They are a curse, a freak accident of nature.” Like me. “This gift of mine took my family from me and forced me from my home. Your histories are just stories, something someone made up to console themselves.” Her voice came out like that of a petulant child. Even she could hear it.
“Your family might have been taken from you, Mariah, but you were given a new one. You choose to leave us again and again. Your isolation is self-imposed.”
Why was Gwyn ignoring her taunts about the Althamir and their faithful and instead raking at her and her faults until she felt naked, bared?
Mariah wanted to get up and fly back to the cottage, gather her things, and leave, but she had made a promise to Gwyn. So, this time she remained silent, her jaw tight with unspoken venom.
“Do you remember the stories that I read to you as you healed from your flight from Varidian?”
As the old woman spoke, the memories of her husky voice, rhythmically reciting those very stories, bloomed in Mariah’s mind.
The ancient gods of Whitelea, the Althamir, could appear in any form they wished. They walked the earth as humans but could also assume the form of their chosen animal. There was the hawk, the cat, the bear, the deer, and many, many more. They were stewards of the earth, caring for the land and the animals they represented as well as their human cousins.
Over the millennia, humans came to reject them, and the gods all but disappeared.
The only proof of their existence were the old histories. In Varidian, many of those books had been destroyed shortly before Mariah was born. But the birth of the chosen, the Ceo San, remained.
“Yes, I remember.” Her voice was soft. Since those early days, she had read the stories many, many times in the books Gwyneth had given her. They were tucked away on a shelf in her cave, and she pulled them out often, although she never mentioned that to Gwyn. They told a nice story, a compelling one. Sometimes, she read them for comfort when she felt alone, but that’s all they were. Stories. They weren’t about her, and the Ceo San were just another of nature’s mysteries. Why else did multiple Ceo San in one family share the same animal form? As she had before, she wondered what it would have been like if there had been a little brother or sister for her, someone to fly with. But she was not Ceo San, and she wou
ld not wish the torture of being a half-breed on anyone else.
To believe that she was truly gifted would give her a purpose that she didn’t want, a hope that would only be crushed. A hope that her freakish nature would somehow prove necessary to the world instead of just an excuse for her loved ones to turn their backs on her. At least she knew that Gwyn would never do that. They had suffered the same fate. Gwyn had fled from Varidian as well, although more than a decade before Mariah. However, Gwyn, because she was actually Ceo San, could hide in plain sight while Mariah’s true form left her vulnerable to anyone who saw her.
“Do you remember that when you saw that I could transform completely, you asked me why you couldn’t?”
Mariah remembered, of course, but she couldn’t see where this was going, so instead of answering, she plopped down on the grass. The darkness had almost faded completely, but she threw a hand up over her mouth anyway as a yawn formed.
Gwyneth settled herself across from her student in a much more dignified manner. She looked at Mariah and waited.
“Fine, fine. You told me that it was because I was young, that children did not have the same control. Some remain as hybrids, like me, and others shift randomly.” She had been skeptical about it even then.
“And?”
“And what?”
Gwyneth’s sigh was almost a growl. “And that once you had settled from your trauma, your ability to shift completely should manifest itself. The fact that it hasn’t, even after all these years, tells me that you have been actively fighting it, that the fear is still holding you back.”
Mariah jumped back up onto her feet and began pacing, careful to give her teacher a wide berth. “No, Gwyn, this is me. I’ve never been a hair more human or more bird. Maybe it’s time you accept that I am a freak, not a blessed”—she sneered the word, turning it into a curse—”Ceo San.”
The cat woman remained seated, but her stare was no less effective. “I beg to differ. I, of all people, know what you are.”
“What? Do you see something I have missed all these years?” She twisted her head around and began a mock search through her nightgown for tail feathers. Gwyn would get impatient with her tone and her attitude soon, but she couldn’t seem to help herself.
“Don’t you keep a mirror or ever look at yourself in the water or in a shiny piece of glass?”
Admiring herself was far from her favorite activity. It just made her focus on her differences and what they had cost her. She couldn’t look at her reflection, half-human, half oversized hawk, without thinking of her father, without smelling the iron of the smithy and remembering the injury that he had suffered on the day she had fled. That injury had left a hole in her own heart that still ached. Nonetheless, a woman couldn’t go seven years without catching her reflection. She knew what Gwyneth was talking about, but she remained silent anyway.
“When you arrived at my door for the first time, your eyes were blue like the sky, as blue as Bria’s. I remember thinking that you should be sisters. Your eyes aren’t blue anymore, dear. They are as brown as those of the hawks that roost on that mountain with you.”
“What?” The words almost caught in her throat, but she pushed them through. “I suppose that you’re going to tell me that my hair is turning colors too?”
“No, of course not. It’s still that ridiculous silver that belongs more on a sword or a woman my age than on someone barely more than a girl. It always reminded me of down, though.” There was a smile on her face.
Mariah felt herself let go and sat down across from Gwyneth again. “I can’t change. I don’t want to change,” she admitted. “This form has served me perfectly well this far.”
“Change is coming, child. You must change, or you’ll die. The Ceo San will die.”
Mariah’s eyes widened. Her heart tightened in her chest, and she stared back at Gwyn. No response would come. Her mentor had been vague before, even cryptic, but this was a whole new level of weird.
“You must learn to change your body, and”—she put a finger on Mariah’s temple—”you must learn to change your mind. Soon, very soon, you’ll be needed. Things are changing. The world is changing. You must put aside the past and answer the call, but for now, learning to change your form must be enough.”
“How? As you said, I haven’t done it in all these years, and I didn’t change my eyes on purpose. So how?”
“Let us eat,” the woman answered. “Then we will work.” And as if they hadn’t been arguing, she rose and loped into a run.
Her smooth transformation reminded Mariah of water flowing from rock to rock in the river. One second she was an old woman hobbling toward the trees, and the next she was a sleek, brindled cat whose run was as graceful as it was powerful. Scrambling up, Mariah followed.
Gwyneth had slipped into the trees. It was finally time for the hunt. Mariah’s stomach concurred heartily. She put a hand on her belt. Damn it. She had left Magnus’s knife on the table in her room. She launched herself into the air before Gwyn could go too far. She wasn’t going to be much help, but she followed anyway.
The trees were too dense for her to fly between with her overly large wingspan, but she pumped her wings, scraping branches and rattling leaves in reckless anger until she reached the treetops. As she watched the cat and the progress of her hunt from above, she held back a scream.
No knife—and no talons—to hunt with. Wings too large to fly among the trees but vision good enough to watch a cat prowl along the forest floor from a hundred feet up. Yes, Gwyneth had planned this whole little scene just to show her how limited she was, how much better she could be. However, although her eyes had changed, there was no way that she could just suddenly learn to change them—not to mention the rest of her—back and forth at will. A spark of hope that she truly was Ceo San leapt in her chest. To truly belong somewhere … it was a dream she only rarely admitted and, then, only to herself.
She looked northward and thought she could make out the peak of Edana in the distance. Only her promise to Gwyn kept her from leaving then, flying home to Firebend, supplies and “lessons” be damned. Instead, with one last look at the cat, who had taken off in a sprint, Mariah turned back toward the village and flew toward Gwyn’s cottage. She hoped that whatever the cat was chasing, she would be willing to share.
* * *
Gwyneth returned to the cottage less than an hour later with two dead rabbits hanging from her jaws. Her anger spent, Mariah met her behind the house, and the cat dropped her prey on the ground at her feet before trotting over to the well to wash up.
While she had been waiting for her return, the younger woman had done her own morning cleansing and changed. Her father’s knife was strapped to her waist once again, back where it belonged.
She picked up the rabbits from the grass, heedless of the blood, and took them to a rough wooden table, where she set to skinning the first one. Gwyneth soon joined her and started on the second. As a cat, she had seemed as strong and fast as any other hunting animal, but as a woman, it was easy for Mariah to see that she’d slowed down just in the last few months. Her movements were slower, more careful and deliberate, and maybe a little less sure. Maybe she was right. Maybe things were changing.
They had devoured the first rabbit already except for its bones, and Gwyneth had started boiling them with some vegetable scraps for stock. The soup pot hung over the fire, and Gwyn settled the lid on it. Her fireplace covered almost the entire back wall of the cottage, so Mariah was able to stand next to her and turn the spit, making sure the second rabbit cooked evenly. She was looking forward to more, even if it meant another hunt or vegetable soup for dinner. Perhaps she could scrounge up a bow and arrows from Zach. Preparing and preserving a whole deer for Gwyn would keep her busy while she stayed in Wellspring. It would also keep her from worrying so much about Gwyn when she returned to Firebend.
“Perhaps the problem is that you think of yourself as a hybrid and nothing more.”
>
“What do you mean?” She didn’t really want to talk about transformation anymore, but she had resigned herself to it. Gwyneth was nothing if not persistent.
The other woman moved away from the fire and sat down on a rocking chair, a bead of sweat dripping from her forehead down the side of her face. “It’s hard to explain, even after living with it my whole life, but transformation is actually rather simple.”
“I can’t transform. I’m not Ceo San. You’ll never believe that though,” she muttered. She flushed when Gwyn leveled her gaze at her.
However, the old woman went on as if Mariah hadn’t spoken. “When I change my body from human to cat and back again, it’s as simple as thought. I am the cat. I believe I’m the cat. I need to be the cat. When I want to be human again, I just think it, and I am.” She looked up at Mariah and gestured for the young woman to join her in the matching chair. “You, on the other hand, don’t think of yourself as human or a hawk. You think of yourself as”—her mouth puckered up—”a freak. Maybe that’s what’s holding you back.”
Mariah moved away from the fireplace. There was no room for her wings in the other rocking chair unless she sat on them. That was too painful an option to consider. Gwyn was trying to force her into adapting. So, instead, Mariah chose a nearby stool and pushed it back so that it was a safe distance from the fire. When she sat, she let her wings down so that they brushed the cottage floor. Her jaw set, she looked at them instead of at Gwyneth, pretending to be fascinated by the mottled silver and black and their complex patterns. Their color did make her different from the hawks of the mountain, even if they had a lot in common otherwise. The hawks’ feathers were shades of brown ranging from very pale cream to almost black. She had yet to see a hawk with feathers like hers. She smiled. Sometimes, she actually liked being different. Maybe her fascination wasn’t really imaginary after all.
Raven Thrall Page 4