“Philos, you made it back!”
“Philos, do you know how many you saved—”
“—how many you sent us?”
“I thought you’d be back months ago—”
“I dreamt you were dead over and over but I never believed it—”
“She would have if Leos hadn’t insisted you were too sly—”
“And you brought another. Welcome, little one. What’s your name?”
For several instants Maya didn’t hear the words as directed to her. They were just more noise, more noise dinning in her ears. Then they seemed to sink in. You brought another. And, little one.
It was one of the women who’d said it. A tall woman with a curved nose like the beak of a bird of prey, wearing a dress the deep bright blue of the ocean at midday. Little one?
Maya spat, without thinking about it, without thinking about whether it was wise or whether she was putting herself in danger, full in the woman’s face. And when she spoke her voice rose to a shriek, cutting through the murmurs as they grew from interested to shocked.
“Don’t speak to me! I’m not another. I’m not here of my free will.”
Infuriatingly, the woman’s eyes turned to Philos, and her shock was directed at him rather than—as it should be—at Maya. “Philos, what did you do—?”
Maya jerked her arm free from the animal man’s relaxed grip and reached out to grab the woman’s arm, force her to look at her. “He took me prisoner. I’m a maenad. I’d have killed him if he hadn’t tied me up. I’m no one’s little one.”
Silence. The woman didn’t try to get her arm away, she simply put up her other hand to wipe her face. She was looking at Maya now, not Philos, but no fear showed yet in her eyes. She knows what I am and yet she’s not afraid. What unclean power does she have, to make her unafraid of the maenads?
She threw a glance around her, at the silenced crowd. For an instant she’d thought their silence meant shock, fear, all the things she was used to. But instead…
Instead she saw lips quirking into suppressed smiles, and other faces softening with pity or stiffening with embarrassment. Behind Maya, Leos’s chest moved in what could have been a gasp but that sounded, disconcertingly, like a stifled laugh.
A murmur came to her. “Poor girl, she’s mad…”
She gaped at them. She’d been prepared to face imprisonment, execution, all the things that could happen to a dangerous prisoner of war. And now this, this— They didn’t believe her. They didn’t believe what she was.
Panic swept over her, a prickling wave that brought sweat out on her forehead, the back of her neck, up under her hair. It was like being taken back ten years, to when she was just another in a long line of unwanted daughters. It was as if half her life had never happened, as if the storm of madness had been nothing but a blazing, fiery, wonderful dream and now she must wake, return to a world that was drab, sand-colour, featureless—where she was drab and sand-colour and featureless, where no one would fear her or notice her or see her ever again.
She hardly noticed when Leos let her other arm go, hardly realised that her knife hand was free now, and they were all in their human shapes, no shifter abilities to protect them. They think I’m nothing but a human. They don’t believe me. They don’t know who I am.
“She’s not mad.”
Philos’s voice. The panic had swept him away too, pushed him aside while she struggled under it, but now his voice cut through the murmurs, dragged her up and stood her on solid ground, where she knew who and what she was, where the world made sense.
“It’s true,” he said. “She’s a maenad. And my prisoner. They sent her after me, and she nearly killed me. Leos, don’t let her go.”
The animal man’s—Leos’s—hands closed again about her upper arms, but tentatively this time, hardly a grip at all. “She looks nothing like a maenad, Philos. What are you talking about, man?”
“It’s not a permanent change?” said someone else in the crowd. “They’re…shifters?”
“Like us?” said Venli, from somewhere behind Maya, and it flickered across her mind to wonder what power that smooth, pretty girl had, to enable her to say “us” like that, putting herself on a level with the men’s impressive shapeshifting abilities.
“I…don’t know,” said Philos. “She was maenad when she chased me across the desert. We fought—she nearly killed me—then she was knocked unconscious and the change left her. She—” Maya felt him glance at her, “—she won’t tell me how, or why, or whether she’ll be able to change back once she’s had food and sleep. But believe me, before we find out she needs to be chained.”
And gloriously, all at once they were afraid. She could smell it, even with her useless human senses, see it in the way the pity drained from their eyes, see it in the way they stiffened, holding themselves distant from her. Leos’s hands stiffened too, and his grip altered until his fingers bit painfully into her skin. That’s better. Be afraid. Remember the stories you’ve heard—the stories you maybe saw unfold in front of your own eyes. That was me. That’s what I am. Never pity me again.
For that moment, seeing the fear rise in their faces, it didn’t matter that it was based on falsehood. Although he didn’t know it, Philos had lied for her. She didn’t need to be chained. A rope would be more than enough.
She let her gaze sweep over them, lingering on the ones who’d pitied her, longer on the ones who’d smiled, committing their faces to memory and letting them know that’s what she was doing. Never laugh at me again. Chain me up, quick, before you see what I can do to you.
They wouldn’t see, of course. Not until she got free and escaped to the temple. And I will. I will. I’ll come back fired with madness. I’ll come back and make you sorry you laughed, sorry you pitied me, sorry you needed Philos to say it before you believed me.
Even the woman who’d called her “little one”, she looked afraid. But sorry too, with that same insulting concern Philos had shown from the moment the change had left her.
Maya glanced away from her, and her eyes met Philos’s. He was watching her, frowning, wary, his expression no different from how it had been during the long trek across the desert, but all the same, without warning, the thought came. Not you. I can’t kill you. You fear me, and I’m glad of it, because if people don’t fear me I cannot live, but you needn’t. You needn’t fear me anymore.
The panic swept back over her. No, that’s wrong. It’s not my place to show mercy, to decide who I kill and who I do not. If I get the chance I will kill him. I must, or I will no longer be maenad. Nor will I deserve to be.
They produced rope and tied her hands behind her, but she hardly noticed. She was fighting the shivering, and a wave of nausea that made her dizzy. What have I let happen? What has being captured—what has meeting him—done to me? And then, a cold slash of a thought that seemed to come from somewhere so deep, so dark she hadn’t known it was there. Even when I get back, will I ever be able to be a maenad again?
Chapter Ten
Philos had known he’d have to answer for it, but it came sooner than expected. Venli walked up to him midafternoon, grimacing in too-obvious, unwanted sympathy. If he was to be reprimanded, he’d as soon the whole camp didn’t hear about it. “Coram and Aera want to see you. At the head of the valley.”
“Aera’s here?”
“She just arrived. Philos…”
He was already turning to go, ready to get it over with. He glanced back. “Yes?”
“You did save her. That girl. She doesn’t know it yet, and everyone is…no one knows what to do with her, but you did save her.”
After all that had passed between them, the confusion, the loss, the anger she still felt towards him, even so, from time to time she surprised him with a flash of understanding, of disinterested kindness. It was one of the things that had made them friends, before she fell in love with him and his empathy confused—then ruined—everything.
“Thank you, Venli.”
; She shrugged. “It’s true, that’s all.” She hesitated, her lashes flickering in that look that meant she was deciding whether to say something else or not, then lifted her eyes to his. “And she trusts you. I don’t think she knows that, either, but you can see it.”
He asked the question before he meant to, hadn’t wanted to expose himself to anyone, especially not the girl whose heart he’d broken. “How?”
Her eyelids didn’t flicker this time, but her jaw set, as if she was having to make herself tell him. “She relaxed when you arrived. I was behind you and I saw. She was all…coiled up, and the moment you spoke I saw her hands relax. I…” she shrugged again, “…I thought you should know. If we’re not to kill her, we need her to be on our side, and you might be the only one who can get her there.”
She trusts me. After all, Maya does trust me. Inside him, a knot seemed to loosen. Stupidly, he wanted to break out into a grin, but that would expose himself more than he wanted.
“Venli. Thank you.”
She gave him a fleeting smile. “Well. We could do with a maenad in our army. You should go now, though—they’re waiting to shout at you.” She screwed her nose up at him. More sympathy, but this time he didn’t mind.
“I’m going.”
Walking to the head of the valley, he had to make himself suppress the smile threatening to break across his face. She trusts me. That moment on the cliff edge, it hadn’t been illusion…and he hadn’t broken it by retaking her prisoner. She trusts me. We can build on that. Talk again. I’ll do it better next time, explain things better, so that when she meets Aera she’s prepared to understand.
He didn’t go beyond that, wasn’t going to let himself remember the way she’d felt against him for those brief, brief moments in the gully, wasn’t going to think that, after all, she had saved his life, and that it must mean something. She was a maenad, a maenad, sworn to death and to the volcano-god—he wouldn’t imagine what her skin would have felt like if, instead of letting her go he’d pulled her closer, slid his hand up behind her head, into the silky fall of her hair…
Glancing up, he could see the ledge from where Coram and Aera could look down the full length of the gully. He climbed to them, wincing as his arm and chest pulled and throbbed. She didn’t give me only surface wounds. I’m going to bear these scars forever. The thought brought a stab of…something not pain, unexpected, disconcerting, and he shoved it aside as he reached the ledge. I’m tired, disoriented, thinking things that make no sense.
He climbed onto the ledge.
They both stood waiting for him. Coram, a head taller than most men, almost as broad as Leos, his eyebrows drawn together in a frown that was not, yet, quite anger. He wore, as many of them did, a toga-tunic made of handwoven sandy-brown cloth, and leather sandals tied halfway up his calves.
Next to him in the sunlight, Aera stood barefoot, the flawless silver-white of her shift-dress reflecting the sun so she glowed like a pale candle flame. She looked at him. Trained in ways the rest of them had no knowledge of, she never let her control slip, never let her gift manifest except when she meant it to. But all the same, when he met her eyes he seemed to feel the flare of heat touch his face, a sensation like looking into the heart of the volcano.
“So,” she said. “You’ve brought us two more fugitives. And a captive. Although none exactly by choice.”
He bowed his head in a nod.
“That boy…well, you don’t need me to tell you how glad we are to have him, how much difference he can make to our plans. So, for him, thank you.” She paused, looking away briefly. “But the maenad… Philos, we’re on the march. We’ve finally come to the point of making our move. We’re…” She brushed hair from her face, a calm, very controlled movement. “People are on edge. Keyed up to a battle we’ve spent years preparing for. And into that you bring…” she glanced at Coram, “…what was it? She nearly killed me. She needs to be chained. You bring a maenad into the camp, you display her to everyone, and you remind us all how dangerous she is—how dangerous they all are. You remind us how much power the priests still wield. What happened? Were you not thinking at all?”
He had been thinking, but he didn’t want to tell them about it. Nor could he bring himself to apologise and be done with it. He remembered how Maya’s face—how her whole stance—had changed, and he wasn’t sorry.
“Look,” he said. “She told them herself, and they didn’t believe her. They thought she was mad, a joke—they weren’t going to be careful. Should I mislead my own people, let them be in danger for the sake of not scaring them?”
“No. Of course I’m not asking you to lie.”
“Well, then? Given that she was here, and she is maenad? Should I have murdered her instead, while she was in her helpless, unchanged form, dragged her here so I could prove look, they can be killed?”
His voice rose so he was almost shouting, and he saw Coram’s face set. But the stone-shifter said nothing. Aera had won the respect of everyone in the refugee camp five years ago, and held on to it ever since. She didn’t need Coram’s defence.
The bright-flame look grew in her face now, a tiny trace of gold flickering in her eyes, but her voice stayed calm. “No, Philos. I understand—gods, who better?—why you could not kill her. But, look, Leos had her safe, and she doesn’t look maenad, why did you have to say it right then, and like that? You know what even the word does to people, and we’ve had more refugees while you’ve been gone—some of the people here ran from the maenads only a month ago. Coming here, where people need to feel safe, and saying it that way, making the danger so very clear…”
She sighed. “It was badly done, Philos, that’s all. She’s a maenad, and dangerous—of course we needed to be warned, we needed to hear she was not a refugee. But you had her bound, the danger was not immediate—”
He couldn’t do it. He hadn’t lied, but he had let her think he’d been driven by concern for their people, and he couldn’t carry on. Aera—and Coram, but mostly Aera—had come to the ragtag straggle of refugees five years ago, drawn them together as one people, fired them with her own conviction, made them into an army. She deserved respect and loyalty and truth.
“It was not to warn them of the danger. Making them afraid…I didn’t intend that, and I’m sorry I caused it. I wasn’t thinking of that.”
“Then what?” Aera just looked bewildered now. “If it wasn’t that, why did you say it at all? If you weren’t warning them of the danger—”
“I didn’t do it for their sake—”
“Then what—”
“I did it for hers.”
“For her—for the maenad’s?”
“Yes.”
Aera stared at him, speechless for a moment.
“What?” said Coram. “She’s your prisoner, she tried to kill you. You said so.”
He hadn’t wanted to tell them, would have been glad to somehow avoid the issue. But these two, of all people, deserved the truth.
“She’s lost her power.” His voice was low. “She lost it all, just like that. What I said before—it was true, she nearly killed me, she had all that strength and speed, claws and teeth and a scream like the scream of a bird of prey. She was the most terrifying thing I’d ever faced. And then…it left her. All that power—as if she’d smashed and it’d all spilled out. When I hit her it took her off her feet. I tied her up and marched her here, and she couldn’t fight because she no longer had the strength. Then I showed her to you and Lilia called her little one, and no one was the slightest bit afraid. No one believed her when she said what she was—”
“So you frightened everyone in order to pander to her pride?” Coram’s voice was cold, as heavy as rock. “Since when do we consider what a maenad, a killer, wants more than the feelings of our own people?”
Philos spoke across him, interrupting, angry suddenly that no matter how much he explained, they’d never understand. “She prayed. In the desert, after I’d taken her prisoner. She didn’t know I could hear. S
he prayed to the god to give her the madness back. She told him—” the memory came back to him, of her body, braced against tears, of the half-choked words: have him kill me, let me die, “—she didn’t care if she died afterwards, if the change itself killed her, or if I did. She offered it all, as a sacrifice, if he would only not let her die like a human, powerless. She—she sees it as something to be ashamed of, as something lesser, worthless. And I could not bear to let her be shamed again, in public.”
He heard the rawness of his voice, heard himself betraying far more than he’d ever wanted to, and stopped, swallowing, trying for distance. “It was wrong, I know it. I’m sorry for whatever panic I caused, whatever you, as leaders, are now going to have to deal with. But…”
“But you’re not sorry you saved her from humiliation,” said Aera.
“No. No, I’m not.”
She looked at him, her face steady. She’d learned to control herself in a harder school than the refugee camp, long ago. He’d never even seen her cry. Maybe she let her guard slip when she was with Coram. They’d come here, new lovers, five years ago, but even then it had been as though their bonds had been forged by something stronger than fire, made of a substance more lasting than the coldsteel, the one thing Aera could not destroy. But with everyone else, although she wasn’t cold, or—despite her legendary status—unapproachable, she never betrayed weakness.
“I understand that,” she said. “And she—the maenad—I cannot insist she must always be our enemy. Five years ago, I was the god’s weapon too. And the shock of stepping out of what you were always taught was his will…” She stopped. “Well, we all know what that’s like. But Philos, you’ve known her two days, she tried to kill you, and she’s your prisoner. And yet you feel like this, you act to protect her feelings before anyone else’s.” She took a breath, as if to brace herself for an unwelcome task. “Philos—”
He flung up a hand. “I know. I know what you’re going to say—”
“You have to let me ask. Philos, is it happening again?”
Blood of the Volcano: Sequal to Heart of the Volcano Page 10