Yes, it will, Rhia thought, but not your plan.
Rhia took a last long look at Coranna’s sleeping face before shutting the door behind her.
Her hastily prepared pack left her off balance as she tiptoed across the rope bridge connecting Coranna’s and Marek’s homes. She may not have even packed sufficient supplies, but it didn’t matter. If Marek said yes, he would make up any deficiency. If he said no, she’d be on her way back to Coranna.
Back to death.
A wooden slat beneath her feet creaked. She held her breath and glanced back at Coranna’s home before moving on to Marek’s door.
It opened before she could knock on it. She stared into darkness.
“You shouldn’t have come.” Marek’s voice cracked on the last word. An invisible hand grasped her shoulder and pulled her into the house.
“I couldn’t—I can’t—”
“Shh.” Marek folded her into his arms. She clung to him and sobbed without tears.
“Coranna wants to kill me.”
“I know. I know.” He caressed her back in long, soothing strokes.
“There must be another way. I can study her methods, learn by watching—”
“You can’t just grasp it with your mind.” He held her at arm’s length. “Your soul has to learn it, too, that death is nothing to fear.”
She wished she could see his face. “What if it doesn’t work? What if she can’t bring me back?”
Marek fell silent. Even his breath stilled.
“I heard you ask her yesterday,” Rhia said. “You said, ‘What if you can’t?’ Marek, could she make a mistake and leave me on the Other Side?”
“With the right conditions, Coranna can bring anyone back. She’s done it before for other Crows.” He brushed the hair out of her eyes. “But when you come back, part of you might stay over there. And the part that is here might wish it wasn’t.”
Her spine went cold. “Why?”
“Death seduces. It brings peace, they say, and contentment and so many other things we spend our lives trying to find.”
“So they say.” She gave an impatient sigh. “But if death is some kind of paradise, then why do we all fight so hard to avoid it?”
“Good question.” He touched her pack. “What’s in here?”
“Everything I have.”
His voice turned cautious. “Are you moving in?”
“No, I’m leaving Kalindos.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because Coranna’s going to kill me.” She struggled to keep the panic from her voice.
“You can’t run off on your own.”
“I know. Take me away.”
Marek’s breath caught, then he let it out in a huff. “Where would we go?”
“Anywhere. Just don’t let me go to the Other Side.” She grasped his shirt. “I want to stay here. With you.”
He pulled her close again, the intensity of his embrace no doubt reflecting the turmoil inside. She hated herself for asking him to betray Coranna, but she had to live.
“Save me,” she whispered. “Please.”
He let go of her abruptly, almost pushing her away. “Help me pack.”
They scrambled for as many necessities as they could gather in a few minutes. Marek slung the pack in front of his chest, where it disappeared into him, followed by his bow and arrows.
“You’ll have to climb on my back to take on my stealth. Scouts always patrol at night.”
He squatted so she could wrap herself around him. After she had disappeared, he stood and opened the door.
“This ought to be fun,” he said dryly, at the top of the ladder. He gripped the rungs hard as he descended, while his labored breath slid between his teeth.
When they reached the ground, he trotted north through the village. His footsteps glided over the soil, disturbing not so much as a pine needle. Rhia pitied his prey, who would be hard-pressed to detect his approach.
The same could not be said for his fellow Wolves. Two patrolled the outskirts of the village. Marek stopped when he saw them, then changed course so that he and Rhia would travel downwind of the sentries.
He was so occupied with avoiding humans that he ran into the path of a prowling cougar. Marek leaped to the side, startled. Rhia lost her grip and fell backward onto the ground. The cougar spied her, shook off its own surprise, and gathered itself to pounce.
Rhia’s arm shot up to protect her face, though she knew it was useless. Marek shrieked her name.
A sharp twang, accompanied by a muffled crack, came from the right. A heavy weight thudded in front of her.
Rhia lowered her arm to see the cougar lying in the dirt not two paces away. Its gaze fixed on her, then dimmed as it gave a last tremor.
She sat up. An arrow, still quivering, protruded from the back of the cougar’s neck. It had severed the spine in an instant, the same way the creature would have killed her.
“What are you waiting for? Run!”
Rhia looked up to see Alanka lying on top of a large flat rock, the bow vibrating in her hand.
“Thank me later,” Alanka said. “If I see you again.”
A hand grabbed Rhia’s shoulder. She scrambled to her feet and climbed on Marek’s back.
“Now we’re even,” he said in Alanka’s direction. Then he began to run. Behind them rose a plaintive song for the cougar’s spirit, a hunter’s tune that mixed triumph and mourning. Alanka’s vibrant voice faded as they ran, and Rhia wished she had had the presence of mind to tell her goodbye.
Over the crest of a steep hill and down the other side they flew, silent as snow, until Kalindos lay miles behind them. Her arms and legs ached from gripping his body.
Finally Marek halted behind a thicket of brush and waited. If he had been a real wolf, his ears would be twitching back and forth, listening for the faintest noise.
“We’re safe for now.” He let her slide off his back, then collapsed, panting, on the forest floor.
“Do you think Alanka will tell Coranna?”
“If Alanka wanted to keep us in Kalindos,” he said, “she would have escorted us back.”
“You told her you were even. Did you save her life?”
“Once or twice. We all make mistakes in our early hunting days. Alanka’s, er, bolder than most.” He chuckled with the little breath he had. The pack appeared, and two blankets were drawn from it. “We’ll rest here for a bit. Keep warm.”
They shifted together, drawing the blankets around their huddled forms.
“Where are we going?” she asked him.
“A trapper’s shelter, about a hour’s walk from here. Near the river, way upstream. Depending how frozen it is, maybe we can escape by water.”
She took his hand. “Marek, I made you betray Coranna. I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t make me do anything. And you’re not sorry.” He drew her close. “Neither am I.”
They sat together a while longer, gathering warmth and strength, then set out again more slowly, side by side into the waiting darkness.
Every time she shivered, Rhia remembered the fate that would have awaited her in the mountains. A death without pain, perhaps, but not without suffering. She remembered a lamb in Dorius’s flock that had frozen in a late frost. It was stiff and gray and hard, like a stone sculpture of itself. She imagined her body’s heat leaving her—the chill would start at her hands and feet, then move up her limbs until it reached her heart, which now pounded in protest at the thought.
Yet her people needed her. If dying was the only way…
She tried to calm her mind, to reach out to her Guardian Spirit for answers, wondering if even Crow himself could convince her to undergo the ritual. But no Spirit’s voice rose above the storm of fear inside. Instinct drove her onward.
But what drove Marek to help her? Why did he place his allegiance with a woman he’d known only five days, rather than the one who had given him both a home and a purpose?
“If Coranna can bring people back to
life,” she asked him as they walked through the dark forest, “why doesn’t she do it more often?”
“It has to be special circumstances. She obviously can’t bring everyone back.”
“But how does she decide?”
Marek uttered a sour laugh. “If I knew that I’d be Crow.” He lowered his voice as if talking to himself. “Maybe not even then.”
Rhia sensed that they were dancing around a place of pain. A picture of the situation was forming in her mind, and she began to grasp the complexity of Marek’s devotion to Coranna. She had been either unable or unwilling to revive his mate and child.
“You would have liked Coranna,” he said, “if you’d come to know her. She seems aloof, but it’s only because the life has made her that way.”
“Life as a Crow woman?”
“A Crow woman in a place where death is everyone’s neighbor. In Asermos you would have found it easier.”
She thought of her home, of her family and of Arcas. Already they felt far away and less familiar than this forest and this man. Could she ever return to her village? What kind of life would she lead without the full use of her powers? Her heart grew leaden in her chest.
Marek squeezed her hand. “It’s not far now.”
A soft gurgle of water floated beneath the hiss of wind in the pines. The tree cover thinned enough for Rhia to see clouds loom high in the sky, illuminated by the sinking gibbous moon.
A battered hut sat on a flat piece of land about twenty paces from the river. Part of one wall had caved in so that from a certain angle the hut looked more like a lean-to. A rickety canoe lay on its side on the icy bank.
“Winter hasn’t been kind to this place,” Marek said, “but at least it has a roof.”
They crept inside and huddled together against one of the sturdier walls. Now that the wind was no longer stripping away their body heat, Rhia could imagine becoming warm.
Marek’s pack appeared, and he withdrew some dried venison. “Tomorrow I’ll catch fish.”
“Thank you.”
She felt his shoulders move in a shrug. “It’s what I do,” he said.
“No, I meant thank you for bringing me.”
“Couldn’t let you go off wandering alone in the forest.”
She wondered if he really believed she would have left Kalindos without him. If he had refused, she would have gone back to Coranna. At least the ritual offered a chance to return to life. A night this cold could kill forever.
“Here’s the plan.” Marek bit a piece of venison and chewed for a moment. “We’ll take the canoe down the river to Velekos. Coranna’s last apprentice lives there. Maybe he can train you.”
Another Crow! Perhaps she could yet fulfill her duties. “What phase is he?”
“He might be second phase by now.”
“Oh.” Rhia bit her lips, dry and chapped from wind and fear. She wouldn’t have to die. But could this Crow man teach her everything she needed to know?
“Then again,” Marek said, “if he had entered the second phase, he would have returned to train again with Coranna.” He took another bite. “But he may be able to help you anyway.”
Rhia didn’t respond. The meat felt dry as dust in her mouth.
“I can find work on one of the Velekon fishing vessels.” He put an arm around her shoulders. “We’ll be fine.”
She nodded without conviction. In Velekos she would be alive, but what else would she be? Could her Crow powers soothe the dying if her own heart still harbored a fear of death? How could she assure them that beauty and peace lay on the Other Side if she had never journeyed there herself?
They would see through her lies. They would die afraid.
And someday, so would she.
Marek turned her chin toward him. She sensed the intensity of his gaze, as though he were searching her face for something he feared.
“What’s wrong?” she asked him.
His breath rasped in the silence as he whispered her name. Suddenly he kissed her, hard, with a hunger that bruised her lips and obliterated her dread. Past and future faded as she gave herself over to the moment and the feel of his hands on her body. Whether it was wrong or right, it was life—something she craved without shame.
They clutched each other in an embrace that was more than a pure, naked craving, more than an ethereal joining of spirits. Rhia wanted to call it love, but that was impossible. Love was kind and content, always giving more than it took. What lay between her and Marek burned whatever it touched, and she wondered what it would leave in its wake.
Despite the cold, or maybe because of it, they shed all their clothing. Rhia needed to feel every inch of his skin against hers. They lay facing each other on his spread-out cloak. She traced the outline of Marek’s face and nearly wept with the desire to see his eyes.
Suddenly he appeared, gazing at her with a mixture of trepidation and the thing-she-wouldn’t-call-love.
She gasped, and he shimmered into invisibility again.
“I saw you,” she said.
“It worked?”
She nodded.
“Because of you,” he said.
He touched every part of her, fingertips filled with fascination, as if memorizing each detail of her body. The warmth of his mouth and hands marked a map on her skin in the bitter air, each kiss or caress leaving a trace of itself behind.
Rhia ached for release, which came the moment he entered her. She felt his gaze on her face as she cried out.
They clung together afterward, limbs shaking with cold and exhaustion, finally parting to dress quickly and wrap themselves in every blanket they’d brought.
“I can’t make you leave your home forever,” she whispered. “I can’t do that to you.”
He placed a finger across her lips. “Listen to me. I feel more alive, more of a man with you than I’ve ever been. You can’t take me from my home, Rhia. You are my home.”
With no words to reply, she drew him close, craving his heat, for it seemed the sole source of life in this harsh world.
As her consciousness tumbled into slumber, a thought rattled within her mind, that Marek had made love to her as if it were the last time.
A crow yanked Rhia out of sleep. She jerked to a half-sitting position, nearly knocking her head on a jutting plank.
The bird called again. Through wooden slats Rhia saw nothing but white, and her disorientation grew. Was she dead already? Was the Other Side on the other side of these walls?
Something stirred beside her.
“It’s late,” murmured a familiar voice.
She turned to see a sleepy-eyed Marek, and reality flooded back in an instant. They were running from her destiny.
Without answering, she crawled over him and pushed open the door. Fresh snow covered the riverbank, and the bright morning sun stabbed her eyes from all directions. Her stomach felt heavy and sour.
She shaded her eyes and stumbled outside. The startled crow hopped away, flapping its wings to hasten its escape. At the edge of the icy river, it threw her a cautious glance, then ignored her to continue its search for breakfast.
No other birds had ventured out into the brittle morning. Rhia recalled the stifling summer afternoons when crows alone would ignore the heat, refusing to let any weather interfere with their plans. Blustery days made them cavort and dance in the winds, not cower in their nests for shelter.
They waddled the world as if nothing could harm them.
Marek appeared in the doorway. He rubbed his eyes and said, “We should take a look at that canoe.”
“I can’t.”
Rhia found herself sitting on the snowy ground as if she had melted there.
“I can’t run away, Marek.” She covered her eyes. “But I can’t go back. I’m so scared.”
“I know. I’m scared, too.” He knelt beside her. “I can’t lose you.”
The mirror of his fear suddenly made Rhia feel like a child. If she left now, she would always remain as she was, alive but incomp
lete, untrusting in her Spirit and in her own powers. Like Marek.
The path she now trod was her own, not Crow’s. Only she had the power to merge them into one.
She drew what felt like the deepest breath of her life. “Take me back.”
Marek stared at her for a moment that seemed to stretch into the afternoon. His hesitation unnerved her. Would he refuse? Without him she could never find her way back to Kalindos, much less to Mount Beros.
His eyes grew wet. He looked down at her hands and grasped them tight in his own. “Let’s go.”
Breakfast was cold, and the air colder. Rhia and Marek ate as they walked. Her stiff legs pained her but loosened after about an hour of steady movement.
Movement that slowed as they climbed higher. The slope of the hill confused her.
“Aren’t we going back to Kalindos?” she asked him.
His face was stone. “We’re going to the mountain.”
“How will Coranna know to meet us there?”
“She already knows.” His jaw tightened. “She knew you would run, and she knew you would change your mind. Hoped, at least.” He looked at her. “She trusted you to return, and she trusted me to bring you.”
He didn’t need to add, “I almost didn’t.”
Rhia understood his reluctance, for she shared it. Her Bestowing had taken her to the end of her spiritual and physical endurance, and she had survived, surely stronger. But the Bestowing was not death. Her lungs ached as if already straining for a last breath.
Her mind fought to distract itself. It observed the way the trees grew shorter and sparser here, and how the snow was drier, curling in wisps through the air, which held a sharp, bitter taste.
These observations numbed her thoughts until she and Marek began to climb the steepest ridge yet. They clambered up using roots and rocks as toeholds and had to remove mittens to maintain their grasps.
Finally the ridge leveled out onto a meadow, which seemed to cower in the shadow of a mountain whose distant profile Rhia had known her whole life.
The silver-white peak of Mount Beros pierced the sky, jagged and unforgiving. A fresh sheen of snow blanketed the meadow, thin and soft, like flour on a kneading board. Tiny purple flowers poked their heads through the snow, but rather than adding cheer, they only served to accentuate the starkness of the landscape.
Eyes of Crow Page 18