by Tara Maya
“Thank Lady Mercy!” he said. “I feared the little beasts had killed you.”
He sheathed his dagger in his belt and dropped his spear, to take her arm.
“Your shirt is ripped. They attacked you too! How did you escape?”
She swallowed. He held the arm she had sliced. Blood stained the bandage.
“They seemed more interested in attacking a Deathsworn than me,” she said.
“How did they know I was here?”
“They guessed.”
It was not exactly a lie. Yes, she had goaded them to guess. She had led them to the river of the truth, but the hobgoblins had still had to put the oar to the water.
“They must have sensed my presence. I should have gone farther from the clanhold,” he said. “I put you in danger. I’m sorry.”
He looked so remorseful, she could not help herself, she touched his face with her hand. “It’s not your fault, Kavio.”
Only when she saw the expression on his face did she catch her slip. She snatched away her hand.
“I mean, Umbral. Of course.”
“So you still see his face on me. Even after all these days.”
“Yes,” she said stiffly.
“I’m sorry. I know it bothers you. I told you, I don’t—”
“You don’t control how I see you. I know. You’ve told me. Why should you care what bothers me? You plan to kill me. As easily as you killed all the hobgoblins. Except they will come back to life tomorrow morning. I won’t.”
It started to rain again.
“Wonderful,” muttered Umbral. “Could this night get any better.”
The rain pasted her hair to her ears and her clothes to her body. She shivered.
“I left my parka in Turtleback’s home.”
“Maybe we should sleep there for the night, get out of this rain. The hobgoblins will wake again at dawn, and with my luck, attack me all over again, but in the meantime, we might as well take advantage of their hospitality.”
“You might find hobgoblin huts a trifle snug.”
“I think the house at the end is the largest. Get your warm clothes and meet me there.”
Dindi ran to Turtleback’s house, gathered the bundle of her clothes, and grabbed one of the baskets to hold off the rain when she went out again. Umbral waited for her at the hole in the sod of the large hill at the end of the two rows.
The interior of this house was much larger and more elegant than Turtleback’s hole in the dirt. It was a true lodge. The rectangular chamber was not quite as big as the Great Lodge in the Winter Warrens of the Green Woods tribehold, but the floor plan was similar. The generous height of the room allowed both of them to stand with span to spare. The sod walls were supported by wooden posts, and the floor and ceiling were lined with wood planks. The wood had been carved and painted into fantastic forms. Woolen tapestries were pinned to the walls, and benches lined either side, leading up to a raised wooden dais that might have been an eating platform, a sleeping platform, or both. In front of the platform, there was a real hearth pit, lined with stones, beneath a smoke-hole in the roof. Though the paint was faded and tiny holes riddled the posts and tapestries, the architecture was still beautiful.
“This was not built by hobgoblins.” Umbral said. “Aelfae lived here.”
“The hobgoblins called it the Big House.”
Umbral unpacked their things, including moss and flint to light a fire. He broke up one of the more decrepit benches to add wood to the flames. Dindi moved to warm herself before the hearth. Her wet clothes still clung to her body.
Umbral glanced up at her, cleared his throat and looked away.
“It might not make sense to you, but it is important,” he said.
“What is important?”
“Whether I…bother you. I have to kill you because it is my duty. It is for the sake of all humankind. But I don’t pretend that gives me the right to behave badly in…other ways. I have no wish to hurt you. I am the blade of death. I am a murderer, I don’t deny it, but…”
“And a liar and a thief.”
“A thief?”
“You steal other people’s faces and memories and magic.”
He inclined his head. “A thief too then.”
“So you admit you take pleasure in being a monster.”
“I take no pleasure in it, but neither can I change it. I cannot be more than I am. But I try not to be less.”
Dindi rubbed her arms. She had goosebumps.
“You should take off those wet clothes.”
And be alone with him in this luxurious room stark naked?
“No thank you.” Her teeth chattered.
“I’ll turn my back.” Umbral walked to the other end of the lodge. He lifted the top plank of another rickety bench.
“My clothes will dry soon enough,” she insisted.
“And you could shiver while you wait for that to happen. Or…” He pulled a flowing garment from inside the bench, “You could wear this while your clothes dry over the fire.”
He placed the dress on the dais behind the hearth.
“I’m going to bring the rest of our things in out of the rain,” he said.
After he disappeared outside, Dindi tried not to look at the dress. It was no use. It drew her as a slope draws down water. She simply had to hold it, feel the amazing texture.
It was a sheer, silken sheath of extremely fine, extraordinarily white material, beaded with running animals at the hem and hip. The skirt fell in divided petals, edged with designs. Spangles of gold and pearl made the whole gown shimmer. The gown had no back, only crisscrossed straps, as if to allow room for wings.
By the time Umbral returned, she had it on.
“I found some other items of interest…” he was saying as he entered the room.
He stopped in mid-sentence when he saw her.
“Do I look ridiculous?”
He cleared his throat before he found his voice.
“You look like a faery.”
“Is that a good thing?”
His lips quirked. “Not for me, I suspect.”
“You don’t like it?”
“That’s not what I said.” He held up something. “I imagine this goes with it.”
It was the green-beaded necklace that Turtleback had tried to give her. “That’s hexed.”
“I know. But the hex is feeble. I can remove it.”
He shed his outer garments by the fire and set them out to dry alongside hers. His tunic was soaked, so he unlaced that as well, though he left on his legwals.
Dindi gasped.
Umbral stood up, dagger in hand. “What’s wrong? More hobgoblins? Where?”
Welts and burns crisscrossed his magnificent chest. Horrified and guilty, she put out her hand to trace around the wounds.
“Did the hobgoblins do that?”
“Oh, that. It’s nothing. Those scars are yesterday’s.” He stood very still while she touched him. He was right. The welts had scarred over. The raised ridges of flesh felt hard, almost like antler.
He closed his hand around her wrists. “It’s not safe for you to touch me.”
She pulled back at once.
“The necklace.” He held it in one palm, green beads on sinew strings in a crafty pattern. “Hexed, as you see. But now…”
He passed his other hand over the necklace, pressed his palms together and then began to dance. He danced as he fought, swift and relentless, with hard kicks to the air and aerial flips right across the fire pit. He ended his routine on one knee in front of her, holding up the necklace.
“My Lady. Your necklace is restored.”
It was beautiful. It looked nothing like before. The beads shone like gold, but the color was darker, almost orange, and the metal was harder.
“What are these beads made from?” she asked wonderingly.
“Bloodgold,” said Umbral. “Fashioned by the Aelfae. Some call it copper; it is valued greatly. No human kiln can melt it; no human smith can shape it. The
metal can only be smelted by the breath of a feathered serpent from the heart of a volcano. According to legends, even among the Aelfae, only one man knew the secrets of bloodgold: Lothlo the Golden. He perished in the War against humankind generations ago.”
Umbral stood up and rustled behind her. He smelled of heather and rainwater and other primal, musky things she dared not name. He stroked her hair, then she felt him gather her tresses, still somewhat damp, and twist them into a gentle coil which he placed over her shoulder, baring her neck. He slipped the necklace around her throat. The beads felt cool against her collarbone. The soft skin at the back of her neck tingled at the brush of his knuckles as he fastened the sinew string.
“Turn around,” he commanded.
She turned slowly and looked up at him. He drew in a sharp breath.
“Yes,” he said.
That was all. But his eyes devoured her so powerfully that she blushed and turned her head.
“I should dance,” she said.
“What?”
“Don’t you want me to have another Vision of the White Lady?”
“Oh. Yes. That.”
“It’s the only reason you are keeping me alive, is it not?”
“You don’t have to dance tonight, if you are too tired.”
“I don’t believe I could sleep.”
“Very well.” He gestured to the dais. “Dance.”
She stepped up lightly to the dais, struck an arabesque and held it. The Aelfae dress feathered her skin softly as a baby gosling. Incrementally, she shifted from stillness to movement. The petals of the dress slid over her limbs as she lifted her legs and stretched out her arms. She was aware of Umbral watching her, the delicious taste of his focused attention; and then the Vision blossomed like a flower of light.
Vessia (20 Years Ago)
Vessia tore the belly of the deer with her knife and exhumed the innards. She set aside the pluck (heart, liver and lungs) for Vio, since she knew he loved the bits most people rejected. He examined her work, and she hoped he would notice her thoughtfulness.
“You ruined the pelt,” he said. “Next time, let me skin it first.”
“We’re in the middle of the wilderness, thousands of footsteps from the nearest clanhold,” said Vessia. “We don’t have time to cure a pelt.”
“The deer gave you its life. The least you could do is not waste its body.”
“Quite a few humans gave you their lives recently, but you didn’t hang about to cure their hides.”
“The Deathsworn will find the human corpses.”
“The wild animals will find the deer carcass.”
Vio blew out an exasperated sound. A cloud of white mist accompanied his breath. They were above the snow line. It had not snowed recently, but dirty slush from a previous storm nestled in the lee of the rocks.
“You butcher it then,” she told him. She tossed the bloody knife in the red slush.
“I have no wish to wear a tanned human skin, like a Red Spears cannibal,” he said as he picked up the flint. “But another deer fur would have been welcome to fight this cold.”
Vessia stood in just her tunic and legwals, but she shrugged off the chill.
“It would take fourteen days to salt and oil the fur properly. We don’t have time.”
“I am needed back at the tribehold as soon as possible. Why are you so worried we finish quickly?”
Hadn’t she made it clear yet that they had to hurry? She was tired of repeating herself.
Vio saved what he could of the doe’s pelt and sliced off head, haunches, ribs, flanks, shoulders and rump.
“The offal will spoil quickest,” he said. “We’ll eat that first. We don’t have time to properly smoke the meat. We take what we can, bury the rest. The ice fae will guard it for us until we can retrieve it on the return trip.”
Vessia set up their camp for the night while Vio minced the pluck on a flat rock. From his rucksack, he drew on his store of packed foods: onion powder, leeks, a rock of salt, a clay jar of tiny black balls—mustard seeds—and a bag of dried corn meal. He ground the spices, diced leeks and corn meal into the meat. He sewed the whole mess into the deer’s stomach.
Vessia built the campfire between an icy brook and a fallen tree. She fed the flames with whole branches—cones, needles and all. She liked the smell of the roasting sap. The percussive music of the pinecones, as they popped and crackled in the heat, relaxed her. But she was still hungry. It dismayed her to see Vio unpack his clay stewing pot.
“Why not just throw the venison on the fire?” she asked. “Boiling it will take longer and taste worse.”
“We have time. Sun sets early in the mountains, so it’s not as late as you think. As for taste, nothing beats a good haggis!”
“At least it’s not corn mush,” she muttered.
“I’ve slit a man’s throat for corn mush.”
“I’m sure you have.”
“Why do you hate corn so much?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“I hope I’m not stupid enough that I have to ask after the obvious.”
“You’re not stupid.”
She closed her eyes. A pinecone snapped in the fire, and for a moment, she imagined her old friends gathered around the flames, with her, as they had been on so many evenings. Instead of Vio, it would be Hest who chased her away from the evening’s kill, to roast it over the fire, to braise in his latest experimental mix of spices. Gwidan would be stringing his bow. Yastara and Lothlo would exchange mooneyes, thinking no one else noticed. Mrigana would be knapping flint, or perhaps preparing poison flowers to tip Gwidan’s arrows. Kia would be trying hard to manifest her wings for the first time. And Xerpen… Xerpen would be telling a wry joke, with his smile curled sardonically at the edges. Or Xerpen would be singing a song that had them all laughing and clapping along. Or Xerpen would be playing a heartbreaking tune on his reed flute that brought tears to their eyes.
No matter what else he was doing, though, Xerpen would be by her side.
“Vessia?” asked Vio. “What’s wrong?”
“You asked me why I did not like corn. It was a cob of corn that Lady Death first hexed with the Curse, to trick the first Aelfae to take a bite and die forever. Since then none of my people eat that grain. Our caution was more symbolic than useful, I suppose. The Deathsworn soon found many other ways to sneak the hex in to our homes and holds.”
Vio was silent a long time. “I lost my whole family too, save for my brother.”
“Yes, I know. In the famine.”
The famine caused by Xerpen…by one of us. It had never hit her before. Even Vio himself did not know Xerpen had been an Aelfae.
“Vessia.” His face twisted like a blanket being wrung out by the river. “You know, don’t you?”
“Know what?”
“What grows in my heart for you.”
That wasn’t the direction she had expected him to go.
“I could not lose you.”
“I love you too, Vio,” she said, but the words sounded awkward to her own ears, too cold, too brittle, like icicles, when she had wanted the words to bloom tender and fragrant, like calla lilies.
“Do you? Can you?”
“Of course.”
“You told me once you did not know how to love. I thought you had just not met the right man, and in my vanity, I was sure I could be that man. Now I am not sure.”
Her heart thundered. “Why now?”
“Because you are Aelfae.”
“So?”
“Do the Aelfae love, as we do? Can faeries truly understand love?”
The wind in the woods made a hollow, mournful howl. Her stomach felt as if she were falling from the sky with no wings. She didn’t know how to hold on.
“This marriage thing isn’t working, is it? It’s my fault. I do things wrong; I embarrass you in front of the other humans. I’m not a good wife.” She touched a bit of emptiness like a sore tooth. “Do you want me to leave?”
“I could not lose you.”
“So you want me to stay.”
“Yes, I want you to stay.”
“Then I’ll stay.”
“You make it sound…so…” He shook his head. “As if at any moment, you might change your mind and fly away. But I could not lose you.”
She did not know what to say to that. She could fly away at any minute—well, not fly, without her wings, but leave—but so could he. If he wanted to stay and she wanted to stay, then everything should be fine. So why was it all falling apart?
They sat in tense silence after that, Vio hovering over his haggis, prodding it along like an anxious hen with one egg, and Vessia listening to the fire burn. She found no comfort in it, only memories she did not want. She wished sometimes she could be as she was before, when her true name had been lost in mist.
They both heard the snap in the woods outside their camp at the same time. Their eyes met and shared the same thought: Someone is here.
Vio grabbed his spear and Vessia picked up her bow.
More than a dozen armed men and women jogged into view from behind a spread of boulders. Archers popped up on top of the rocks, bows drawn.
“Drop your weapons!” an older, ax-faced woman commanded them. She wore the ochre face paint and feathered bonnet of a Raptor Rider. A Morvae Tavaedi from the Labyrinth, who had once served under Vio, stood beside her, holding a spear.
Vio snarled at the man. “You traitor.”
“Fa,” said a new voice, “I think that feather belongs in your headdress, Vio.”
Xerpen the Bone Whistler strolled out from behind the boulder. The other warriors parted to let him through.
All the blood drained from Vio’s face.
Umbral
As before, Umbral could only glimpse the edges of the Vision Dindi danced. He saw the White Lady, and something about…sheep?
“What did you see?” he asked when her dance and Vision ended.
“She is heading toward Orange Canyon,” Dindi said. “Then there was some bit about sheep.”
He nodded. “I sensed that too. Well, there are a lot of sheep in Orange Canyon. We’re on the right path. We should get some sleep—we’ll have to wake before dawn, unless we want to fight hobgoblins again. I think if we take down one of these wall hangings, it would soften the sleep platform. We could take it with us when we cross the mountains too—it’s warmer down here, but once we start climbing again, the snow will take another bite. Help me with that corner.”