“Yes, ma’am.”
Danner checked the weather reports and thought furiously as she waited for Day and T’orre Na and the others to arrive. When they did, she could tell by their faces that they had already heard her orders.
“You can’t do this!” Day said. “You know what Marghe said. If you’re there, armed, they’ll attack.”
“Nyo isn’t here,” Danner said. “I doubt she’ll reach us before we meet with the tribes. And the latest weather report suggests we, the storm, and the tribes will all meet at the same time. Which means none of our weapons will work anyway. So, technically, we won’t be armed.”
“Then why–”
“We’ll rely on our armor. You know what it can do. If we’re properly armored up, nothing these savages can throw at us can get through. Modern weapons, yes, because of the heat, but impact weapons, especially low‑grade items like stones and spears, will just bounce off. If they got us on the ground, they could probably beat us senseless. Even a helmet can’t stop the brain being rattled inside the skull with enough pounding. But if we stand together… It should work.”
Day opened her mouth to say more, but T’orre Na held up her hand. “Hannah, are you saying that you intend to simply stand, empty‑handed, while Uaithne and the massed Echraidhe and Briogannon charge at you?”
“Only if necessary. And we’ll have our sleds, and the crossbows. Look, Marghe and Thenike might need us. It’s possible that these riders have at least one hostage. Do you want me to let civilians take care of this mess? I’m a Mirror, these are my people. I’ve been trained to deal with situations like this. And the storm won’t last forever. When it’s blown out, we’ll have our sleds, our weapons, our skills. These tribes need to know that.”
She ran a hand through her hair. “Day, T’orre Na… We have to make our way on this world. People need to know that we can’t be pushed around.” She looked at them, unable to tell what they thought. “The sleds might be the only things that save Marghe. And Thenike. I can’t not go.”
Chapter Seventeen
THE NIGHT WRAPPED hot and close around Marghe and Thenike as they galloped north and west from Holme Valley toward Singing Pastures. The pastures did not sing with wind now; the clumps of trees and the long grass hung silent and dark and still. The hooves rushing beneath them kicked up dusty scents of parched grass, despite the storm of two days before. Marghe’s throat was dry.
This isn’t going to work.
She concentrated on urging her mount forward, but with every thud of hoof on turf, the sick feeling in her stomach grew worse. This just isn’t going to work.
The thud of the horses’ hooves changed; they were galloping through a field of flowers, bursting open flower heads closed for the night, crushing the leaves and flattening stalks under hard hooves. They were suddenly drenched with the tight, sweet smell of olla. The smell of fear.
Marghe reined in suddenly. She could not do this. Thenike’s horse slowed, turned, came back.
“What’s wrong?”
“I can’t do it. It won’t work.” Her horse snorted and shifted restlessly.
“He doesn’t like the flowers.” It was too dark for Marghe to see Thenike’s expression. They guided their horses out of the broken blooms.
Marghe broke the silence. “It won’t work. It just won’t. I can’t do it, Thenike, I’m not good enough. They won’t listen to me. They’ll laugh, or ignore me, or…”Or they would kill her, or capture her. Not again. “What if we’re wrong? What if they won’t believe I’m their Death Spirit?”
“If they believe Uaithne, they have to believe that what you say is at least possible. As you said to Danner, they’re living a legend now.”
“But what if that isn’t enough!”
Silence. “Do you want to go back?”
Yes! Marghe wanted to say, and nearly leaned from her saddle and reached out into the soft dark to take Thenike’s hand. But if she took Thenike’s hand now, all her resolve would crumble, and she would say, Yes, let’s go, I was a fool to even think I could pull this off. She kept her arms by her sides.
“No.” She would go on, she would try. She had to try. If only she had Thenike’s skills and could use song and drumbeat to drive her words like barbs into the flesh and minds of the Echraidhe, drive them deep, tangle them about so that they could not escape. Thenike could do it, if she were Marghe. But she was not. Marghe was the only one the Echraidhe might listen to, the only one who had lived with them and who was from another world. The only one they might believe. And all she had was her self, and her story. It did not seem much with which to face a hundred spears.
Thenike looked about her. “Here might be a good place for me to wait for Danner.”
Danner would come, they knew. She was a Mirror; she would not be able to help herself. It would be Thenike’s job to stop her, if she could.
They dismounted. Marghe felt as though she had swallowed something so cold it was turning her stomach to ice. She put her hands on Thenike’s shoulders; the bone and muscle felt warm and strong. They pulled each other close, and Marghe buried her face in Thenike’s hair.
When they remounted, the rim of the sun was just touching the eastern hills with orange. The horses’ legs were covered with pinkish yellow pollen. Thenike’s saddle leather creaked as she turned this way and that, sniffing the air. “The storm will come today.”
Marghe knew Thenike could not be smelling anything through the thick scent of olla; it was another sense she used. Marghe herself could feel that crawling under her skin, that ripe sensation she had felt before the last storm. “The sky’s clear.”
“I don’t think it’ll bring rain. Just hot wind and lightning.”
“How soon?”
“Afternoon, maybe. We’ll need to find shelter before then, some rock. The grass is dry enough to burn, without rain.”
They were silent a moment, Marghe’s mount facing back the way they had come, Thenike’s facing Marghe. Their horses whuffled at each other’s necks. Marghe pointed to a clump of trees. “If Danner doesn’t come, wait for me down there. I’ll be back.”
“I’ll wait,” Thenike agreed. “But before the storm, Danner or no Danner, I’ll come looking.”
Marghe knew it would be pointless to argue. She gathered the reins awkwardly in her maimed left hand, preparing to wheel and head north. She wanted to tell Thenike to be careful, tell her how much she loved her. She could not find the words. “If she comes, make her wait. Make Danner wait.”
“Your wait, at least, is over.” Thenike nodded ahead, and Marghe twisted in her saddle to look. The western horizon was hazy with dust, dust kicked up by a hundred horses.
Thenike turned her horse. “Speak well, Marghe Amun. And remember, I’ll come looking, before the storm.”
Then she was gone.
Marghe turned her own horse to face the dust.
She was waiting, reins tucked under her thighs, hands free, and the sun almost fully risen behind her, when the riders came over the horizon. Dawn underlit their faces, orange and alien; their sweat‑sheened mounts gleamed like creatures of molten metal.
The massed tribes were in a long, straight line–a skirmish line, Danner would call it. Slowly, the line wheeled about its center, where the sun picked fire from Uaithne’s braids, and continued to advance, facing Marghe head‑on. Next to Uaithne, tied to the saddle and slumping like a gray sack of grain, was a Mirror. Her armor had been ripped off to reveal fatigues, and there was dried blood on one cheek. Captain White Moon. She did not seem more than half conscious.
Marghe breathed slow and deep, keeping a steady rhythm, hands relaxed on her thighs. They would not capture her again. She would make them listen. A slight breeze lifted the mane of her horse and blew it across the backs of her hands, tickling. Her mounted shadow stretched long and umber across the grass between her and the Echraidhe and Briogannon. The tribes would see her as a huge, dark silhouette, backlit by the rising sun.
They halted a hundred
and fifty yards away in a whispering of grass and chinking of bits.
Now.
Everything Marghe had learned, from the death of her mother, from the biting cold of Tehuantepec, and at the hands of Thenike–everything that made her who she was–came together in one hot focused point in her center, flooding her with adrenaline, tightening her skin, raising goosebumps. Her hands felt heavy; she remembered the ammonites. She was Marghe Amun, the complete one.
She held out one hand, palm out, as she had in the storytelling tent of the Echraidhe. Her voice cracked across the grass.
“You have amongst you a liar and a deceiver, one whose heart is twisted and empty, who leads you to a destiny that is false. Uaithne, murderer and betrayer, claims to speak for the Death Spirit. She lies. She claims to know my will, mywill, and lies.”
They were listening. Or at least they were not charging at her. Her blood surged powerfully. She nudged her horse to a slow walk, along the line, timed her words to fit her mount’s steady hoofbeats, sent them rolling away from her, unstoppable.
“Listen to me now. Iam the one who has traveled the black void between the stars to come to you; Iam the one who has wandered the white void, the plain that stretches its hand between the worlds of the living and the dead; Iam the one who has spoken with the spirits of the ancestors in the sacred stones. Iam the one who came amongst you and learned, like a child, the ways of my tribe; Iam the one who left, like a ghost, when I had learned all I needed; and Iam the one who survived winter alone on Tehuantepec, and who returns to you now.”
Her words were steady and hypnotic, falling in a strong cadence, up and down with her breath and the beat of her heart until she found strength building behind those words like a living thing: powerful, straining to be unleashed, to bound away to the tribeswomen astride their horses and tear away their masks.
“Uaithne laid the path. Uaithne brought you together before me. Before me, I say. For Uaithne is my tool, no more. A flawed tool. One that would twist in the hand of any who lean upon her promises, and break.”
She did not look at Uaithne, but caught the eye of Aelle, of Marac and Scatha sitting together, of Borri. She had their attention. There was no sign of the Levarch. Dead? Then Aoife would be leader, Aoife who was staring at the grass between her mount’s legs.
Lift that head, Aoife, look at me.
“You seek death, and I say to you: it comes. I am its herald and its shepherd. But you are my tribe, you will die as and when I decree, in the way I shall set down. And I tell you now: this is not the way. For this throwing of yourselves upon strangers is merely seeking death of the flesh.” She waved her hand dismissively. “A small thing, an easy thing.”
The energy that had been building inside her climbed to the back of her throat, so that she could barely contain it. She rose in the saddle and lifted both hands, palms out. A peremptory gesture demanding attention. “It is notthe death I have traveled the void to witness!” She slammed the sentence home with a double palm strike to the air. The Echraidhe jerked.
“My journey was hard beyond belief!” All the rage she felt at having been held captive and treated as something inhuman came pouring forth, making her words twist and roar. “The death I demand of you will be harder still! It means nothing to me that you prepare to die one by one in blood and heat. Nothing. I demand of you something more, much, much more. I demand of you the Great Death. The death of change.“
She saw a small movement, so tiny she almost missed it: Aoife, lifting her head. Yes, Aoife. Look at me, listen to what you would not hear before, The sun was warm on her back now, and the smell of olla overpowering, but she did not care, she was carried away on a tide of her own power and her words were hammer blows.
“The death of change,” she said again, “the death of your way of life, the death that is not just an ending but a great and terrible new beginning. Thisis what I ask of you!”
Oh, she had them now. They breathed with her, blinked with her, sat their horses as still as rocks.
“This, then, is my demand.” And now her words were implacable. “That you lay aside this crusade, that you move your grazing grounds south and west, that you leave Tehuantepec to the snow scuttlers and creeping plants.” She softened slightly. “You are not stones to endure the wind and the ice, you are people. You need light, warmth, food for your children. You need others of your own kind from whom to choose lovers and friends. Ah, but the finding of them will change you.”
She surveyed the silent women. Uaithne’s eyes glittered.
“You,say ‘Tribe before self,’ and mean ‘Tribe before anything’, because deep inside your selves you have a barren place that wails, ‘Nothing is real but the tribe, there is no one here but us.’ You are wrong.” She spoke directly to Aoife now, who was studying her intently. “Lift your eyes from the barren place and open your ears, see and hear the world I have made ready for you. You will find a place where your herds will grow sleek and fat, where your children’s hair will be glossy and their eyes bright, where you will not have to listen at night for the breath of the ice wind and the coming of the goth.”
Silence.
“It waits for you, if you but have the courage to face this greatest death of all. This death of change.”
Aoife frowned, and for one moment Marghe thought she had gotten through, that the tribeswoman had heard, but then Uaithne’s laughter splashed over them all like cold, bright water.
“Death,” she said lightly, “is no thing of doubt and struggle, but a thing of heat and bright and red glory.”
The wind rose again as Uaithne spoke, and stirred the hair on the back of Marghe’s neck. The air seemed to hum with it.
Uaithne laughed again and pointed behind Marghe. “And there is our death, come to greet us. We must ride to meet it.”
Marghe twisted quickly in her saddle. The hum was not the wind.
Forty or more Mirrors, visors glittering and black armor dusted with pollen like the exoskeletons of alien insects, crested the rise in a lazy, bunched swarm. Sleds hummed, one on each side of the closely packed Mirrors, one behind. In front of them, her back to Marghe, was a single rider. Thenike. When the Mirrors started forward, Thenike did not move. The Mirrors shifted direction; Thenike shifted to meet them. One woman facing down forty.
Thenike. Later.
“No,” Marghe said to Uaithne, “not this time.”
“Oh, yes,” Uaithne said, and couched her spear.
Marghe pulled the reins out from under her thigh and wrapped them around the pommel. The humming changed behind her but she did not dare turn. She breathed deeply, slowly, and sent oxygen fizzing through her arteries into her long muscles. This was not Tehuantepec. She would be ready this time. This time she would fight. She would never give in again.
But Uaithne was not charging. She lowered her spear, slid it into its sheath. For one dizzying moment, Marghe thought she had won after all. But then Uaithne laughed again, snatched out her knife, and in what seemed like one movement pulled White Moon’s horse toward her and slit the Mirror’s throat.
Blood gushed shockingly red. The Mirror’s mount whickered and sidled; blood pattered on the grass.
Uaithne clamped her red, red knife between her teeth and took up her spear in one hand, her reins in the other. Then she thumped her heels into her horse’s ribs and was charging across the grass, the tip of her spear coming up, up, pointing straight for Marghe’s throat.
Behind Uaithne, the tribal line rippled and tightened. Marghe could not spare a glance for the answering tightening she expected from the Mirrors.
She did not move. She had put everything into her words, and now all that was left were her hands, and it was all going to end in blood.
But then she saw movement behind Uaithne: Aoife, whirling something around her head, straightening her arm with a snap. For a moment nothing happened, and Marghe thought that Aoife, accurate to nine nines of paces with her sling, had missed.
Then Uaithne oofedas though
someone had hit her in the back, and the creamy line of scalp showing through the part in her hair bloomed red, redder than her braids. But she managed to hang on and was still coming, and behind Marghe, muffled by the growing hiss of the wind, no doubt the Mirrors were readying their weapons; Aoife had left it too late. Nothing could stop the blood now.
Marghe watched as Uaithne’s horse came on, hooves thundering, foam flying from its muzzle. She tightened her thighs, ready to lean, to kick; felt capillaries opening in.her shoulders, ready for the strike and twist that would send the spear spinning.
But Uaithne’s knuckles were white, and she was slipping, slipping.
Two lengths from where Marghe sat her mount, Uaithne slid sideways and fell in a jumble of weapons and limbs. The riderless horse swerved, passing close enough to spatter Marghe with warm saliva. Uaithne tumbled loosely over the turf to the feet of Marghe’s mount.
Marghe jumped from her saddle, panting, trembling with the adrenaline and the effort of not smashing her heel into Uaithne’s unprotected throat. She knelt. Uaithne tried to lift her head.
“No. Shh. Keep still.”
But Uaithne blew a red bubble of laughter at Marghe’s concern, and died.
The grass was making Marghe’s knees itch, but she did not move. She did not know what to do. She had been ready and Uaithne had… She looked at the body before her. Uaithne had died. The woman who had been about to try to kill her could not hurt her anymore. She did not know how to feel. Everything seemed a long way off.
Something nudged her shoulder: Uaithne’s mount, come back for its rider. The grass hissed in the soft morning breeze, then stiffened as the breeze blew hotter and harder. The storm was coming.
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