by Tara Maya
“D…did I hurt you?” she stammered. “I was trying to be careful, but the gashes need to be cleaned or they will attract bad magic…”
She trailed off in the thundering silence from Umbral.
“What magic were you using on me?” he demanded. “You have broken your word to me!”
“I was not using magic! Not on purpose!” She flushed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know it would hurt you. You told me not to block earlier, so I was trying not to block. I was thinking of the opposite of blocking, reaching out, so to speak,” she made a gesture of helpless confusion, “I don’t really know what I was doing. It seems that I never quite know what I’m doing. I did not intend to hurt you, Umbral. I was only trying to help.”
She could undo me. He had barely escaped the fight with the Aelfae with his life. The creature had been tougher than any opponent he had ever faced as a Deathsworn. Aelfae blood flowed through her veins.
“You didn’t hurt me,” Umbral said. “My back feels better. But do not use your magic against me, even if you are only trying to help. I might react by instinct, before I realized what I was doing, and…” He didn’t add what might happen. She had seen what befell the bog mummy.
“I understand,” she said quietly. “I won’t touch you again.”
I want you to touch me. The hunger throbbed through his body. If he could just have her fingers trailing over his back again without her having to use her magic while she stroked him.
Yet her magic hadn’t hurt him. It had filled him. What would it feel like to embrace her light fully? Given freely?
“Umbral?” Dindi asked in a small voice.
“Yes?”
“Is that how you are going to kill me?”
“How?”
“With that Curse.”
“You’re already mortal.”
“I know but… will you absorb my aura into that…the darkness around you…”
“My Penumbra. Yes. I will take your Chromas for my own. It will give me great power. But that’s not why I have to kill you.”
She was silent, and he hoped she would let the topic go.
She would not.
“Did you get great power from Kavio’s Chromas?”
“It’s not my habit to discuss Deathsworn secrets,” he said stiffly. Damn mucking Kavio anyway. Why was she so obsessed with him?
“But you have all six Chromas—thanks to him.”
“What difference does it make?”
“You have some of Kavio’s abilities…he could breathe under water, and you did the same, in your fight with the Aelfae.”
Watery darkness…a struggle against a huge and terrible foe…as large as a house... a shark.
“Interesting,” he said. “I suppose.”
“Do you…has anything else of him survived? I mean, his personality, his essence…”
“No.”
“But…”
“No.”
She hugged her knees. She had a way of making him feel like a bastard with nothing but a hurt look.
“Let me ask you a question,” he said. “What was Kavio to you that you care so much?”
“I loved him.”
“Did he love you?”
“No.”
“No? Why not?”
“He was my teacher, my Zavaedi. I thought…it might be more. But it wasn’t.”
“He must have been a complete idiot.”
She bunched her hands into fists. “He was not an idiot! He was brilliant. He was kind. He was…”
“…blind as a bat. He had your love for the taking. He threw it away. He had the Vaedi right in front of him. And what did he do? Saunter away on some quest to find…the Vaedi.” Umbral laughed. “Right into our arms.”
“Don’t speak of him like that!”
“Why not? He deserved what happened to him. He was too stupid to live. If he had protected you, I would not have you in my power right now. If he had killed me first, I would not be able to take your life. If the two of you had banded together, I would never have been able to overcome you both. But I can and will destroy you one at a time. Or hadn’t that occurred to you?”
A tear streamed down her cheek. “I hate you.”
“As you should. But you cannot deny the truth. Kavio looked right at you and never saw you for who you really are. I, Umbral, am the one who saw your true colors. I have a part of you that he never will.”
“You will never have any part of me!” She jumped to her feet, as if she might run off into the night, or perhaps tear his head off. He did not move from his spot by the fire, but he tensed, prepared to chase or fight.
She sank again into the moss, wilting into a miserable heap. She whacked the tear off her cheek with a grimace of self-loathing he recognized too well.
“I’m sorry,” he said in a low voice. “That was gratuitously cruel. I should not have mocked you.”
“You should not have mocked Kavio.”
“That I will not apologize for.”
Umbral packed up the camp and put out the fire. Dindi helped him in silence. It was only mid-day, for all the good that did. The sun refused to shine on him. It sulked behind gray rain clouds. Umbral was sick of sloshing through swamp and tired of trudging through mud. It had taken them too long to get this far, and would take too long to reach the mountains, if they kept knocking their boots on dirt the whole way.
By then Finnadro and his hounds might overtake them. Umbral had no wish for the confrontation.
“No more Boglands,” he said, standing up. “Put on your warmer garments. We are going to travel to Orange Canyon the way the Raptor Riders do. By wing.”
“Uh…really?” Dindi bundled into her feather parka. “Which wing, exactly?”
Umbral unleashed the Shadow pent up in his Penumbra. The dark energy crackled and billowed. Shapes extended from the sides and turned into feathery wings. A bulb in front became a head, a fan in back turned into a tail. The empty rift in space took on the illusion of solidity as a huge, black raven, with blood bright eyes.
“Our ride, my Vaedi.”
“But…”
“Don’t be afraid. It’s perfectly safe. Unless the dark energy disintegrates unexpectedly while we are in the air. In that case, we would both plunge to our deaths.”
“Nice to know. But that wasn’t my concern.”
“Well?”
“Aren’t you going to…purify yourself? You…killed the Aelfae.”
“I know,” he said. “No, I won’t be purifying myself.”
She didn’t ask, but he knew she wanted a fuller explanation.
“For some deeds,” he said tonelessly, “There can be no expurgation.”
Dindi
Dindi wondered what other excuse she could use to distract and delay Umbral. If he would not dance purification, she needed some other pretext to keep them both grounded.
She had picked up the first hint that someone was following them back at the hobgoblin clanhold, but she had not recognized it for what it was. Here, for some reason, the tail of magic wagged clearly, unobscured by the usual thickets of other Patterns. She could not be sure, but it seemed familiar. She picked up a misty image from the thread, of a man with a bow, with wolves trotting at his heels like dogs. It could only be Finnadro.
Could it be that he knew of her capture? Was it possible he was trying to rescue her? Much more likely, he sought to free the White Lady. Nonetheless, if he crossed paths with Umbral, perhaps he could help Dindi escape. Finnadro was the only one other than the White Lady herself who might be strong enough to defeat Umbral, or cunning enough to outwit him. If only there were some way to leave spoken words behind like footprints. She could leave him a warning.
If they rode on the shadow raven, however, Finnadro would have no way of following them. She had to hinder their departure as long as possible.
“Get on the bird,” Umbral ordered impatiently.
“Wait!” she said. “Shouldn’t I try to dance up a Vision of the White Lady b
efore we go? We need to know which direction to go.”
“We know where they are taking her. To Cliffedge, the Orange Canyon tribehold.”
“I’m not sure they are. Last time I had a sense of…of some place else.”
He didn’t look convinced.
“The Kiva Beneath the World,” she blurted.
His expression changed.
“Orange Canyon must be behind the dark magic that resurrected the Aelfae,” he muttered, more to himself than to her. “But what is the White Lady’s role in all this?” He frowned. “I’d rather not delay. We’ll approach the tribehold first, then try another Vision. The Kiva Beneath the World is north of Cliffedge.”
Dindi felt another brush of Finnadro’s magic, but she tried not to draw attention to it. Instead, she nodded solemnly and plucked the air, as if feeling for the White Lady’s memory. She wasn’t sure if she would experience any real Vision at all, since the air felt uncomfortably stretched and stale.
Umbral picked up the packed bags, and, with streams of dark ropes from his Penumbra, strapped them to the raven. While he was busy with that, Dindi bent down in the dirt and scratched her clan symbol, a swan, in the mud behind some a thicket of weeds. Next to that, she sketched a skull: Deathsworn. But how could she indicate flight? She thought of the movement that a dancer made in a tama to indicate that he was flying, a V with the arms and one leg extended. She drew a stick person in that position. She bent the weeds down to hide the drawings and went to mount the giant black bird.
Umbral did not show any sign he had noticed her treason. He lifted her onto the raven and climbed on behind her.
Air rushed though her hair when the raven flapped its wings. Umbral tightened his arm around her waist, and she felt nausea rise in her gorge, made worse when the bird lifted into the air and her stomach turned into a falling rock. She shut her eyes to stop the world from spinning.
Behind her, Umbral’s deep chuckle rumbled against her back.
“Open your eyes, Dindi,” he urged. “Look at the world with the eye of a bird.”
The sky reappeared. Surprisingly, the clouds didn’t look any closer from here than before.
The ground, however, looked much, much farther away. Once, back in Yellow Bear during her year of Initiation, she had climbed a sequoia all the way to the top, just to see if she could. When she had looked down, the ground had spread out under her in all directions. The wind had whipped by her so fiercely that she feared she might be blown off to plummet endlessly. It looked like that now, and the wind was even fiercer, as abrasive as scaly serpents gliding over her skin. Serpentine gusts of wind glided over her skin, rough as scales. She gulped at the ether vigorously, but she couldn’t quite swallow enough of it. The air tasted dilute. If it had been mutton stew, she’d have complained it had more water than mutton.
She could see their last campsite, the lake where the Aelfae mummy had attacked them, snaggles of thickets and rolling hills, and the sparkle of more remote lakes. She imagined she could even recognize the hobgoblin clanhold in the far distance.
She had to admit the earth looked beautiful from the vantage of the sky.
Then the bird plunged into a fog so heavy that the air around them turned white. She could no longer see the ground. When the raven flew out of the fog, she saw they had passed through the heart of a cloud, which now floated beneath them. A gaggle of shocked sylphs, who had been reclining on the cloud, hopped and pointed at them, keening unhappily about the dark creature that had disrupted their cloud home. Several white, winged sheep took off from the cloud and darted away. The sylphs flew after them.
“Did you ever think you would see the top of a cloud?” Umbral asked. “Or glimpse the winged sheep once herded by Cero Skylord and Gaya Earthdancer?”
He spoke close to her ear, so she could hear him over the wind.
“They must be dead now,” Dindi said sadly. “Like all the other Aelfae.”
“It is not that they died, but how they died, and who killed them, that matters. It is a History danced often in Orange Canyon.”
“Tell me.”
He began the story, in a lilting cadence. His deep, pleasant voice, Kavio’s voice, sent shivers down her spine.
“Ninhago was a hunter, who could follow any track. His brother loved a faery, but she did not love him back. ‘Lead me, brother, lead me,’ his brother would plead. ‘Just this once, hunt for me, this is all from you I need.’ So Ninhago tracked the faery and led his brother to her lair. But when his brother tried to kiss her, both brothers were attacked.”
As Umbral murmured the tale, the ground sailed by below them, hidden by cloud, suddenly revealed, then hidden again, a motley quilt of sepia and olive and white.
“At Ninhago’s home, his wife and daughter waited. But instead of the return they anticipated, their home was visited by the Lady in Black. ‘Cero Skylord killed them and they’ll never come back,’ said the Lady with ravens in her long, dark hair. But she swore they could avenge him the way that she related.
“Ninhaga was his daughter and even then she knew that she must avenge her father. Every day she grew, she blazed and burned with hate that could never be sated. No revenge torments one more than revenge belated. Cero Skylord lived out of reach, high in the air. But she had magic of her own. As an eagle, she flew, yes, she flew, on eagle wings, until she reached the sky.
“There she found the home of Cero and Gaya, so high above the human world that she knew. The Black Lady had warned her, ‘Hide what’s true. Give a lie as your name, or else they will know where you have come from, as well as who you hunt and why.’
“So Ninhaga pretended that she too was fae. Deceived, her foes welcomed her and bid her to stay. She met their son, Ovin, whose charming smile made her shy. When he made her laugh, she began to hate her lie. For a moment, she questioned her whole purpose there. She almost abandoned her revenge to sneak away.
“But then she was reminded of why she came. They boasted of killing her father, without any shame. Cero and Gaya laughed as they recalled that cruel day. That’s when Ninhaga stood up to draw her bow and say, ‘Murdering fae! Bid your son farewell and prepare! Ninhaga daughter of Ninhago is my name!’
“Before they could attack her, she shot them both dead. Two black arrows plucked two wide eyes from two fae heads. Ovin shook them and said, ‘Awake! What is this game?’ ‘They will not awake,’ she said. ‘They are to blame for my father’s death. Therefore it is only fair to pay death for death, to spill new blood for old blood shed!’”
Umbral paused dramatically.
“Where do you learn all these Histories?” Dindi asked. “How does a Deathsworn know the secret tama from so many different tribes?”
Umbral pulled back a finger width from her, as far as he could without letting go of her waist, but even that crack allowed the wind to sweep between them. Dindi rocked in her seat. Instinctively, she clenched her knees more tightly around the bird’s neck. The immense feathers rustled under her legs. The Deathsworn raven did not smell like bird. The musk was heavier, like smoke. Or blood.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said at length, and after that he was stiff and silent.
Below, the landscape frowned, bulbous and melancholy. Flattish boglands gave way to a rumpled blanket of foothills, followed by peaks of jagged magnificence. These giant old men had white heads and white beards that tumbled down their sienna robes.
The Shadow raven had borne them steadily east for most of the flight, but when they came to the peaks, the raven turned, and followed the wall of rock and ice northeast. The wind grew noticeably colder. The weedy air strained her lungs. To their left, the sun sank into crevice between the stacked bowls of sky and earth, herding a flock of pink sheep clouds.
“We’ll keep flying,” Umbral said. “We can make it all the way to the base of the Orangehorn Mountain.”
“Was that the end of the story?” Dindi asked. “What did Ovin do after Ninhaga killed his parents?”
“There is
more, if you wish to hear it.”
“Please go on.”
“Very well.” Umbral’s deep voice rumbled against her neck again. “Ovin pulled the arrows from his father and mother. He saw the shafts were black, both one and the other, black as Lady Death, except where stained blood red. Only then did he grasp that they were truly dead.
“He leapt at Ninhaga. She hit him back with flare. Furiously, they fought and bit one another. She grabbed one black arrow, while he held onto its twin.
“As they circled warily, bows drawn, she had to grin. ‘I would have preferred to take you as a lover, you handsome fae, but if we must kill each other, instead of kisses, black hisses of death we’ll share. As for me, my task is done and I welcome my end.’
“‘Listen, Human huntress!’ Ovin said. ‘We don’t need to bring each other grief, to make each other bleed. There is another way…’”
Umbral broke off in midsentence; his body shook uncontrollably. His arms fell limply to his side, and a blink later, his whole weight shifted, slid and plummeted off the raven.
The raven itself disintegrated into black wisps. Dindi plunged through open air. Nothing remained of the bird.
Dindi and Umbral fell from the sky into immeasurable emptiness, toward the jagged rocks of a mountain, as the ground rushed up to meet them.
Chapter Six
Knot
Dindi
I am a cloud, suspended between sky and ground, empyrean and abyss
…falling,
…falling,
…falling,
and I feel nothing, no pain, no roiling stomach, only a strange bliss, inseparable from pain and
…falling,
…falling,
…falling,
as if it had to come to this, as if there were no other way it could end other than half-way between darkness and light, truth and lies, Kavio and the man who killed him….
For he is falling with me. The man in black. The man in Kavio’s flesh. Kavio’s killer, Kavio’s shadow.
Umbral.
Ever since Umbral abducted me, I have been falling. I see that now. So how could it end any other way than with me crashing to the earth? How could it end other than this, with my death, and his?