She had been too confident before, almost comfortable with its silent, terse companionship. Over the past few weeks she had, improbably, lost her fear of death. It had returned with a vengeance in the past few minutes, however. She had to remember that she needed to stay alive-not for herself, but for her mother. Instead of jokingly binding it with children's riddles, she needed to think of something that would keep her safer longer. She thought about it for a long time, periodically losing her train of thought in the cadences of the music and then dragging it back again. Nearly half an hour later, the corner of her eye caught on her worn canvas bag. Some of its contents had spilled when she had groped at it before, including the more than a dozen seeds that she had spent the past few days collecting.
Her fingers nearly skipped a note.
The seeds. There had to be a way to use them to bind the death. In the first few weeks of the death's chase, the thought of making up her own geas had terrified her, but soon she had realized that it would be her only means of survival. She thought about the phrasing for a few more minutes and then let the melody she was playing peter out, its final soft note ringing in her ears. This would have to work.
"Life is no more anathema to death than light is anathema to dark. They both require each other to exist. Yet, death only holds the key. It doesn't know-"
Lana broke off abruptly at the sudden shift in the death's attitude. It had gone from merely watchful to anticipatory. The grubs beneath its translucent body grew still and the banked light in its eyeholes made it look almost ... wary. She swallowed nervously and continued.
"It doesn't understand the essence of life-the only lives it can take are those that have already started living. The seed is death's paradox: death cannot take it-a mere seed can't go past the gatebut within the seed is the ultimate potential for living. A seed is the life that denies death."
The death settled back into its sitting position. Its wooden mouth began angling up into its customary mocking expression. Could it be relieved? "What do you want?" it asked.
"A day for each seed," Lana said. "A day for each life you can't yet touch."
After a moment, it nodded. "That's fifteen days."
The bindings fell into place and pulled taut. After a moment to catch her breath, Lana stood up and walked on shaky legs back to the tree. Incredibly brave or dangerously hungry, whichever she was, she realized it made no difference. She picked a fruit and tore into its sweet flesh with her teeth.
On the twelfth day, she reached the wind shrine.
It was an ancient, dilapidated structure built in an even older tree at the top of a long-dead volcano. She caught a fish that morning, after spending nearly half an hour crouched as still as she could manage in the shallow, muddy banks of the river. She roasted the strange blue and orange striped creature over the fire, ate as much as she could get down, and then packed the rest of it away in her bag for later. She spent the rest of the day climbing to the base of the tree. Most of the path had been washed away, forcing her to cling and scramble from tree to vine just to haul herself up the side. The midday rains began while she was halfway up, and for several moments she was terrified that it would wash her right back down the hill with the mud. The warm, earthy smell of the steam rising from the mud and the innumerable calls of frogs, birds, insects, and monkeys piercing through the rain patter made her feel inexplicably nervous, even though these were the normal sounds of the forest. The wind temple had been an arbitrary destination-a place to go that she knew was far from human contact. But what would she find when she got there? The path had lost all signs of recent human habitation a few days ago, but was it possible a caretaker still lived up in that ancient tree? After all that had happened to her, she didn't like the idea of walking into the unknown. Her life was frightening enough already without losing the little bit of control over it she still had left.
Still, what was she supposed to do? Turn around?
She reached the base of the enormous tree a few hours later, just when the rains began to stop. She took the water skin out of her bag and drained half of it in nearly three gulps. She panted as she put it down and wiped her mouth. She wanted to drink the whole thing, but that wouldn't be smart this far away from the river. She had no guaranteed freshwater source up here.
"Are you going to visit the spirit?" The death was floating a few feet above her. It was the first time it had spoken to her in days.
Lana looked at it as she caught her breath. "No reason not to," she said finally. "Although I doubt that it will deign to reveal itself to me."
It didn't respond and Lana stood up. She walked around the base slowly, noting in amazement that it was more than fourteen feet in diameter. She had never seen a tree so big in her life. On the opposite end from the trail, Lana saw that a series of steps so steep as to form a virtual ladder spiraled up the tree and ended right at the rickety wooden platform of the temple. Lana sincerely hoped that someone had been here sometime in the past century. After the wind spirit had broken free five hundred years ago and wreaked its bloody revenge, most of the wind temples had been burned and the ashes pounded into the earth. This one's inhospitable location was probably the only thing that had saved it from the same fate. Carved in the bark just beside the first step was a symbol that Lana knew was supposed to represent a jagged knife edge, but she had always thought it looked more like a sideways lightning bolt.
She stared up the spiraling staircase again and felt her trepidation intensify. She had never been afraid of heights, but she knew that if she climbed this tree, falling would be a real possibility. Still, curiosity gripped her when she looked at the half-hidden temple. She wanted to find out what was there-to do something, finally, besides just run. Before she could rethink her decision, Lana approached the first step and began, gingerly, to climb to the top.
The wood was strong, but the steps had been carved unevenly and she lost her balance a few times before hauling herself over the platform. Even back when the wind spirit had first been bound, how could anyone have dared make the trip here? Perhaps people had been more devoted back then, more faithful. Although she hadn't seen it from the ground, the platform opened directly into the shrine itself. There were no walls to speak of-it was entirely open to the elements. The floorboards, she noticed as she gingerly walked inside, were still drying from the rain. Any item that might have indicated this place was something more than an empty shell of a tree house had been nailed down. With good reason, she thought, considering the strong wind that blew the smells of the forest below to her nostrils. The death floated outside the temple, beside the staircase that had led her here. Looking around, she saw no overt signs of habitation aside from an unnatural cleanness to the place. The nervousness that had plagued her during her trip up the tree began to fall away. This shrine felt oddly peaceful. She walked forward until she was nearly at the unguarded edge of the structure. At her feet she saw a broken blade nailed into the wood and she wondered how it remained unrusted after centuries of pelting rains.
An odd clicking noise behind her made the hairs rise on the back of her neck. She whirled around, only to come face to face with a massive bird-eating spider, nearly the size of her head. Though she knew it was impossible, something in the way it clicked its mandibles together made her feel as though it was grinning. Lana screamed and stepped backwards, only to scream again when she realized that she was toppling over the edge. She managed to grab at the planks of wood before she went down.
She hung there with sweaty fingers for several moments, mind bubbling with fear while she tried to figure out what to do. The boards themselves began to vibrate with the impact of someone moving slowly across them. Lana thought she heard a woman's voice muttering something. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the death waiting below her. She cursed silently and hoped whatever was walking toward her was benign.
"Help!" she screamed. "I'm going to fall!"
The pace of the steps didn't increase. "Hold on, hold on," she heard a voice say.
It sounded rough and quavering, like that of an old woman. Lana almost forgot her fear in disbelief. How could she have not noticed another person in this small temple?
"... get so few visitors, these days, I always forget to put out the security rope," the woman was muttering. Lana's fingers were beginning to weaken and she prayed silently that the woman would finish her slow trek across the temple floor. A few moments later, Lana saw a rope end fall to her right side and she grabbed it gratefully. She hauled herself up over the edge of the temple and lay on the still-damp floorboards, panting and shaking.
"My, my," said an old woman, leaning over her on a gnarled branch of a cane. "You should have called for help sooner. It wouldn't do to have all my visitors falling out of the tree, now would it?" She let out a highly inappropriate chuckle.
Lana forced herself to sit up and look at the woman. She was even older than Lana had suspected-her craggy face and wispy white hair made her look at least ninety. How could such an old woman survive in this kind of place?
Lana thought she heard a clicking sound and she looked up frantically for the spider, but it had disappeared. She only saw its massive web, covering half the ceiling. She shuddered. She didn't want to think about where the spider could be.
"So what brings you here, my dear? I haven't had a real visitor for ... why, it must be these past thirty years. And you look like you have a problem a bit larger than normal." She gestured toward the death, waiting beyond the temple boundaries, its mask at its most unreadable.
Lana's eyes trailed to the woman's stick, which had a design vaguely reminiscent of a spider carved into its head. This woman radiated a subtle power, and Lana wondered if she could possibly help her.
"I need help ... to stay alive," Lana said slowly, looking into the woman's surprisingly sharp black eyes. "I don't know how much longer I can do it on my own. It's not just my own life I'm guarding. I have to save my mother."
"I suspected as much." The old woman's voice suddenly sounded far less crotchety. "But it's been many, many years since I even heard of such a geas. You're a young girl. You must have trained with someone who knew the old ways. Yes, someone ..." The woman gave her an appraising stare and then shuffled to the back of the temple, where she opened a rough-hewn wooden cupboard. After a moment's deliberation, she removed a long, narrow bottle made of glass with a cork stopper and walked back to where Lana was sitting.
"You should make a supplication directly to the wind spirit," she said, sitting down with a creak of bones. "It hasn't been done in five hundred years, but you don't look to me like you have better options. Besides, I think it wants to see you.
The woman winked and bit into the cork.
"It ... wants to see me?" Lana asked, suddenly nervous again. How could the wind spirit even know who she was?
"Just a hunch," said the woman indistinctly. After a moment's more of wrestling with it, her remarkably strong teeth managed to yank out the cork. Wind rushed out of the bottle with a sound like a mournful lament, howling briefly around the room before leaving through the open sides.
The old woman sighed wistfully. "I really did like that one. I was keeping it for a special occasion. Ah well. You can't keep them bottled up forever. So, do you agree?"
The change of subject was so abrupt it took Lana a few moments to even understand what she was asking. "Well ... how do I bind that when I make the pilgrimage?" Lana asked, gesturing toward the death spirit.
"Oh, don't worry. So long as you're on the pilgrimage, you're under the jurisdiction of the wind spirit. Only the spirit itself will have the power to kill you."
Lana hoped that was reassuring. "I'll go, I guess. I don't really know what else to do."
The woman smiled briefly at her, and then licked her finger to test the wind. "Just a light breeze," she muttered to herself. "Iolana, do you know how to call a wind?"
Lana's breathing grew shallow. How did the woman know her name? After a moment she shook her head silently.
"Sailors used to do it, back before the wind spirit broke free. Now only a few of us can. Those chosen by the wind. But I think you could learn, if you wanted to."
"How?" Lana asked. It was almost surprising how, after everything, her natural curiosity could still be piqued. But then, Akua had always taught her that even the most minor knowledge was its own kind of power. And Lana knew she was in too deep to refuse whatever help was offered.
"Have you ever heard the way the wind howls at night? The way it rattles doors and shrieks and moans? The wind is a melancholy, powerful spirit. No geas can call it, though they can bind it. Call ing it is a different sort of skill-to call the wind, you must feel its melancholy in your soul and match it."
"With the flute?" she asked, after a moment's thought.
The woman's face broke out in a bright grin, revealing a full set of teeth. "That would be brilliant. More appropriate than you know. Yes, try it now, with the flute. If you call a wind, I'll bottle it."
Lana sat with the flute poised above her lips for a long time as she tried to get the image of what she wanted to convey just right in her head. The woman had told her to match the wind's melancholy, not simply imitate it. When she finally thought she was ready, she began to play. The notes dipped and swirled like no other melody she had ever played-in fact, they didn't sound very much like a melody at all, and yet they were somehow still musically cohesive. She did her best to echo the wind's melancholy, playing in its silent and violent places alike until she had created something both sad and powerful. She felt the wind enter the temple, softly at first, and then more strongly, until it seemed to be playing with her. It howled past her ears with a shriek that was almost joyous. She played until the wind was merely another whisper in her ear, and then the woman had corked the bottle.
The woman was staring at her with a strange, almost shocked expression. "You may just survive. You're followed by more than you know, and yet ... you may just survive."
Lana's smile was half-derisive, half-sincere. "At least I'm a quick study."
The woman nodded, bemused, and handed Lana the slim glass bottle. It looked empty, but she could feel tremors against the fingers that gripped it. "Keep this with you at all times. Go to the wind island, and get the tribespeople there to take you to the ruins on the mesa. Uncork the bottle. The spirit will come to you."
Lana took the bottle from the woman. "I understand enough to know I don't know a thing," Lana said, impulsively, as she slid the bottle inside her pack. The top stuck out. "But ... I'm grateful for this."
"A thousand drips will fill a bucket," she said, which Lana supposed was better comfort than none. She then rose with a speed Lana thought should be impossible for a woman her age. "You must leave now. It's time I had my dinner and you should leave this hill by sundown."
Lana walked back to the porch. "But wait," she said just as she put her foot back on the first step. "Who are you?"
The woman smiled. "Caretaker of this humble temple, servant to the wind spirit, and ... an acquaintance of a mutual friend. Now go."
The dismissal had no sting to it. Lana nodded and began climbing back down the tree. She froze a few steps down when she thought she heard the unmistakable cry of a bird in its death throes. A sharp clicking, like that of a bird-eating spider, followed it. Lana shivered and climbed down the rest of the tree as quickly as she could.
The few traders at the outpost looked shocked when she staggered back in fifteen days later, covered with mud and considerably thinner than she had been a month earlier. They told her that a ship wouldn't be arriving for another three days, and Lana, so exhausted her teeth hurt, decided she could risk staying in town and relying upon the kindness of a medicine trader's wife who had been among the ones to witness her arrival in the settlement. She was a thin woman, baked brown by the sun and a difficult life. Her eyebrows were thin blond lines across her forehead, and her hair was light blond streaked with white. She could have been anywhere between thirty and fifty-the salty air and the sun out
here had a way of preserving people. She opened the door of a tidy two-room house made of birch wood. The logs had been dried and sealed carefully, but Lana guessed that they couldn't have been more than two years old. In fact, most of the houses in the traders' village looked relatively new.
The woman paused in the entrance and took off her shoes. "It's all the rain," she said, half apologetically. "It gets so you don't know what you're bringing in. I hope you don't mind."
Her Essel accent made Lana wonder what had brought her to this isolated place. "Don't worry," she said. She bent down to untie the laces of her sandals and tried to ignore the sudden sharp pain when she reopened a cut on her back. She stood up and looked behind her to make sure that the death hadn't crossed the threshold. It waited like a sentinel outside the door, mask expressionless. That had been her first geas-it couldn't cross the threshold of a place that Lana herself had been invited into. Even though it was also bound by her pilgrimage, the thought of it looking into this woman's house made her nervous.
"Can I shut the door?" Lana asked, carefully polite.
"Oh, of course." The woman opened the larder and began pulling out some food while Lana closed the door. It would be good to spend a few days without the death as her constant companion.
"Why don't you go and wash up? We don't have much-just a pump and a bucket outside, but I thought you might want to get rid of all that grime ..."
Lana smiled ruefully at the slightly appalled look in the woman's eyes. She could only imagine how grubby she must look. It had been months since she had last seen her own reflection in something clearer than a muddy puddle. "I would love that," she said.
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