by Tara Maya
Dance for me, Dindi.
Did he repeat the words or could she just feel them reverberating in her pounding heartbeat?
Dance.
Dindi took off her heavy parka and gutskin legwals. The morning was warmer, and the fire strong, but mostly just because it didn’t feel right to wear the heavy garments for fae dancing. Underneath, she wore a short tunic, tightly laced to keep her breasts from bouncing too much, and legwals unlaced up to her thighs. She blushed and wished she had thought to lace those up before removing the outer legwals, but to fiddle with the laces now, she felt, would just draw attention to them. Maybe he wouldn’t notice.
She began with a pose from an established Pattern, because she was nervous and she had to begin somehow. Her first steps were slow, deliberate. She imagined the ponderous beat of a drum ordering her from one pose to the next. As the movement allowed her body to release her mind from its worries, everything began to flow. Fear and anguish were forgotten; dread and embarrassment dropped away like unwanted clothes to the frosted ground. Motion turned liquid and carried her away into a waking dream in which she was one with the flickering firelight, with the frosted trees and even with the man who watched her, transfixed.
Then, as if from afar, she heard him command: “Find the White Lady.”
At that trigger, the Vision exploded around her.
Umbral
Watching Dindi dance, Umbral began to shake.
There was no doubt left who she was. Whatever spell had hidden her before no longer worked on him. Her faery blood was evident in her every pirouette and leap. If she had unfurled wings and fluttered into the air, he would hardly have been shocked. Magic pooled around her as she danced. There was no doubt that she danced a Pattern she had not been taught. Her unfettered gyrations owed nothing to some humble clan dance meant merely to keep bugs off corn. This was fae magic, deep as the earth and free as the clouds, and it welled out of her very being. She hadn’t just invented this dance. It was Dance that had invented her.
Had Umbral’s presence not frightened them off, every fae in the region would have been dancing about her in a circle by now, drawn like moths to flame by the sweetness of that magic.
He should stop her now, before she gathered too much power about her, power she might think to use against him.
Yet he didn’t stop her. He couldn’t. He wasn’t sure if it was because she was already weaving some spell around him, or if it was simply because he couldn’t bear to turn away from the vision of her in her element.
She had created her own music. Throbbing drum and soulful flute echoed in the dell, though there were no musicians. The earth and trees themselves sang to her. She shone with a luminance that increased with every whirl, and rainbow dewdrops glinted over her limbs like sequins. Mists of all colors floated around her like veils, now hiding her, now revealing her. Crimson and gold. Azure and emerald. Lilac and apricot. All the tints of the rainbow. All of them.
Surrounded by her colors, she was not afraid, though her position was uncertain and she knew Umbral was her sworn foe. She had been afraid before, but while she danced, nothing could touch her. She was a fountain of inexpressible bliss. Her innocent joy touched everything around her, including him. It was an emotion he had not felt in a long, long while.
At the same time, her body was sheened with sweat. Her breasts bobbed under her tightly laced leather top. When she kicked or leaped, he caught a glimpse of her naked thighs under her split skirt. She was human, with all the carnality inherent in mortal flesh. When she bent back her head and he saw a rivulet of sweat trail down her arched throat to the dip between her breasts, Umbral felt his own flesh stir in eager communion.
He had told himself that it was necessary to make her dance to help him find the White Lady. Now he knew that he had just needed to see her dance, with all her colors, just once.
Just once before he killed her.
He had not promised her anything different. Only to spare her as long as she was of use to him.
His mind had gone twisting down other paths, other alternatives. Why not turn her to the Shadow instead of killing her? But seeing her dance, the pure joy she took in it, he knew she would never turn. Not only would she never agree to it knowingly, but to take her over to the Shadow by force would murder all that was precious in her. It had been different for him. He had already lost his memory when the Deathsworn put him through the Dark Initiation. Embracing the Shadow had been just one more loss, no worse than the rest, at least once he had accepted it.
Ripping all six Chromas from Dindi would be like ripping the wings off a butterfly. Even if she survived it physically, she would be dead in all the ways that mattered most to her.
Better just to kill her outright, he thought. Far better.
His stomach knotted. He belonged to the side of Death now. He had pledged his loyalty to Lady Death, and would not break his oath.
He would kill the Vaedi, whether she could find another Vision or not, whether she helped him find the White Lady or not.
But not yet.
Not yet.
“Find the White Lady!” he commanded her.
At that trigger, the Vision exploded around her. He tried to grab it this time, so he could see for himself what she saw.
Vessia (20 Years Ago)
All around Vessia, the tribehold burned and bled, but she noticed none of it anymore. Memories flooded her mind like a tide returning to the sea.
Vessia crashed to her knees. For the past twenty years, she had lived as a human. An outsider, a stranger, she had never quite fit with humans, never quite belonged, yet she had counted herself one of them, loved two of them as her parents. She had learned to love two human men—Danumoro as a friend, Vio as a husband.
Those few years were but a handful of sand against the mountain of years she had lived before, as an immortal, as a warrior and then a War Chieftess of her people, a leader of armies against the humans in the terrible War between their kind and hers. The White Lady had been her Shining name. White was the armor she had worn, bleached leather and human bones, and some called her by the longer name: Vessia the Bone White Lady. For centuries, she had protected her people against the murderous human beasts. During those years, she had fought fiercely and loved freely, taking many men as lovers—fae and human both, for human males had flocked to her beauty like moths to a flame, despite her contempt for them. Only one fae lord had always been by her side, the one lover she returned to most often.
And after the final treacherous genocide, when humans had awakened the monsters of the deep to massacre all of her friends before her eyes, only one other of her kind had survived and escaped with her. They, the two Last Aelfae in Faearth, had sworn blood vengeance against the humans.
Xerpen.
“Xerpen! Xerpen!” Hard, sob-like gasps wracked her body. “Ayaha, Xerpen! What have I done?”
“Now you remember,” Xerpen said.
“I remember,” she said. She clutched her hair as if she would tear it out. “I wish I did not. I bless whoever took this burden from me. I was happier before.”
Gwidan. Kia. Lothlo. Yastara. Mrigana. Hest. The faces of her dead friends swam before her eyes, whether she opened or shut her lids. “What am I to do with such memories?”
“Help me,” he said.
“Help you?” She spat on the ground before him. “You have become one of them—their leader! You have become everything we swore to oppose! You are worse than the worst of them!”
“They cursed me. I became as they made me. I became what they wanted, though for my own ends.”
“You can justify it!”
“You loved me once.”
“Did I?” She shook her head. “I called it love, derisively, at the time, but even then I knew it was less than that. Play, pleasure, self-indulgence, a way to pass time, and a convenience, but there was no commitment, no mutual responsibility, no sacrifice.”
“No pain, no distrust, no jealousy. How terrible!”
/>
“Can you have trust without the possibility of distrust? Can you really be said to need someone if separation does not bring pain? Can you really love someone without changing yourself in response? It took a human to teach me what real love is.”
“Listen to yourself. You rant like a lunatic. Do you hear what you are saying…that you must suffer to feel pleasure, that you must change what you are to earn someone’s affection? This is madness, Vessia. He has hexed you. He has used you. He danced a love spell and ensnared you as surely as the swain hexed the maiden who spurned him.”
A gust of cold air cleared the ash from the air for a moment. She shivered. “That is absurd.”
Xerpen’s eyes glowed with fever hate. His voice slithered over her like the sibilant melody of a flute.
“Before you go to him, let me tell you a few things.
“What you call love is really a cage. If you trade in your freedom, expect pain as your wage—a trap of four walls, a net of soft lies, tied to his hearth, his pet, his slave. That’s what it means to be a human wife. Night after night, he will seed you. His brood will burst your belly and bleed you. Your breasts will sag, your hair will gray, until one night, he’ll no longer need you. You know it’s true. I do not lie. He’ll sleep with younger girls, will you or nil you, but if you lie with another man, he’ll kill you. That’s what it means to live a human life. You will pound grain, you will knead bread, you will hew wood. You will not fly. You’ll beat rugs, brush furs, spin wool, make beds, cook, clean, lack sleep, mash, mend, scrub, sweep, break, bend, fall, weep.
“And he will steal your wings.”
Tears streamed down her cheeks. She clapped her hand over her mouth, unable to fight the future he painted.
Xerpen pulled the stub of the spear shaft from his shoulder. The stone tip was still fixed to it with gut string. He held out the weapon to Vessia.
“But if you still prefer him to me, then give me to the Black Lady,” he said. “For she is the real enemy, the one we have fought all these years. The one I was still fighting, even here, though you could not see it any better than the human fools. The Curse is already on me, you know that. If I die, I cannot come back, any more than the rest of our kind. Pluck me from Faearth. Let Lady Death have one more Aelfae. Then you will finally be alone.”
Vessia clenched her fists. Xerpen: Xerpen the Singer of Light, had once been his Shining Name; he had always been silver voiced. His other name was Xerpen the Two Tongued, for he could talk to two people at the same time, stretch truth in opposite directions in two different tales simultaneously, and each would only hear what Xerpen wanted them to hear. She had always been the warrior, and he her bard. With his song he could charm birds to the rivers and fish to the trees. With reed flutes, he had made beautiful music.
He’d made himself a new flute since then.
If she had not lost her memory, she should have guessed the identity of the Bone Whistler long ago.
“Give me the Bone Flute,” she commanded.
His smugness slipped. His tongue darted to the corner of his mouth, lizard-like. “I don’t have it.”
She took the spear from his hand and smacked him across the face with it. “Give me the Bone Flute!”
“Oh, here it is after all.” He smiled sickly and produced the flute.
She freed it from his grip.
“This is my offer,” she said. “Leave now. Flee and never set foot again in the Rainbow Labyrinth. Change your name, live in hiding, and do not seek to regain the power you have lost. Tell no one who you are. Seek no revenge. Live out the few years left to you, before the Curse claims you, dwelling in quiet despair over the misery you have wrought on Faearth.
“I will not kill an Aelfae,” she conceded. “But if you betray my trust, I will tell the Skull Stomper you are alive, and how to hunt you down, and he will kill you. Now go!”
Xerpen the Singer of Light, Xerpen the Two Tongued, Xerpen the Bone Whistler, staggered away, down the alley. Just as he disappeared from sight around the corner, he shouted back at her.
“How will you hunt me down without wings, Vessia?”
She ran after him but all she found was the echo of his laughter and smoke. Bloody footprints on the pavement tracked halfway down the alley then simply stopped, as if he had taken flight.
Panic stabbed her. Her fist closed around the small bag with the opal inside, the shimmering stone into which she had folded her wings. Her fingers closed around something hard. She enjoyed a trickle of relief, but it lasted only a moment, before worry compelled her to open the leather bag and slide out the stone.
The stone in the palm of her hand was dull grey—an ordinary rock.
Fool, fool, fool that she was, she had released a monster. And to thank her, he had stolen her wings.
Umbral
Umbral could see the ribbons that wove the Vision around Dindi, and he even caught a glimpse of the White Lady. Excited, he tried to close his fist around the wisp of light.
It was like trying to clench snow with fire. The Vision only melted faster the harder he tried to grip it.
He refused to accept failure. If he could not pull the Vision to him, he would cage it. He carefully grew prickles of darkness around the waves of light, like a forest of thorny brambles around a captive sun.
The void in his Penumbra snuffed out the sun. The Vision vanished.
Dindi
The Vision popped like a bubble.
Panting with exhilaration, Dindi came to a rest in the same semi-supine pose which she had used to initiate the dance. Her intricate spiraling frolic had brought her only inches away from where Umbral sat. Her transport into a sensuous world of bliss faded, leaving her with a dying fire behind her, cold midnight stars overhead, and a man whom she detested before her.
His skin was as sheened with sweat as hers, his respiration just as labored. He crouched like a wolf ready to leap, muscles taut. For a moment, they stared at one another, inches apart, breaths mingling. Then Dindi gave a small cry, and stumbled back.
“Careful!” Umbral shot out an arm to steady her before she could flounder into the fire pit.
Dindi no longer felt the winter chill. But she felt the utter coldness of the void around Umbral when he touched her arm. She felt the nausea his closeness evoked in her. Yet she steeled herself not to pull away from his grip.
When he reached out and caressed her face, she stood stock still, compelling herself with stony resolve not to shudder.
Umbral let his hands drop from her. He turned his back and walked to the far edge of the camp, restless and palpably angry.
“I’m trying my best not to fight it,” she said through grated teeth. “If you’re going to take me, do it now.”
He managed to glower with his back, since he would not turn to face her. “I already have what I want from you, Dindi.”
“You do?” she demanded incredulously. “But…you haven’t…”
She trailed off, too embarrassed to finish the thought out loud.
“What did you think?” he asked dryly.
What had she thought? What else could she have thought? Had she not caught him peering at her, when he thought she didn’t notice, with naked lust in his eyes? Or had she misread him? What did she know of the lusts of strange men, after all?
“I told you already,” he said with a touch of impatience, “I am Deathsworn. There is nothing you have that I am permitted to use…except your magic.”
“My magic,” she repeated flatly. Ever since her failed Initiation Test, she had yearned for someone to recognize her magic and ask her to dance.
But, mercy, not like this.
“Orange Canyon has captured the White Lady. I know you had a Vision of her yesterday, and another one just now. I need your Visions to track her.”
“To help you capture her? To throw her from the mouth of the dog to the mouth of the wolf!”
“No, Dindi. I wish only to free her. I don’t know what Orange Canyon intends to do to her, but I ass
ure you it will be worse than anything the Deathsworn desire. The White Lady is not a threat to us; she has already accepted the Gift.”
“She has already been Cursed to die, you mean.”
He shrugged. “However you prefer to phrase it. My guess is that Orange Canyon plans to sacrifice her at the Paxota.”
“What is that?”
“A ritual offering of tribute, held during the spring equinox. Both animals and humans are slain as sacrifices, and the more powerful the blood sacrifice, the more powerful the magic. Powerful prisoners of war are highly valued tribute offerings. This equinox will be unusual, because it will coincide with a full eclipse of the sun, so Deathsworn on Obsidian Mountain have prophesized. It is likely Orange Canyon Tavaedies have foreseen the eclipse as well. It’s hard to imagine a more powerful sacrifice than the last Aelfae. We have a common goal in preventing that. The winter solstice has just passed, so we have three moons at most to rescue her.”
She did not believe him, though she wanted to. She dared not believe him because she wanted to. He had perfected the art of showing people the face they wanted to see. He would tell her whatever she wanted to hear, anything to trick her into helping him. The only thing she believed was that he needed her willing cooperation, because otherwise he would not have asked. He would have simply taken.
Dindi wished she were not so afraid. Her thoughts felt sticky and tangled like a spider web poked with a stick. She wanted to stay alive to see Kavio avenged. Or did she just want to stay alive? She was sure, without knowing why, that she was the only one who knew that Umbral had murdered Kavio. Umbral was too powerful for her to fight alone, so any dream she harbored of paying Kavio’s deathdebt herself was vain.
The White Lady, on the other hand, would surely unleash the molten bowels of the mountains and the blazing bolts of the storm clouds on her son’s murderer. If Dindi could just tell her. If Dindi could just free Vessia from those who held her captive…without delivering her to a worse fate.