by Maya, Tara
Tamio
When he heard the scream, Tamio signaled the other quail hunters.
“My drum to dance.” Tamio leaped through the woods to flank the boar, bow already in hand.
He passed the rock where Dindi usually sat darning costumes. All that remained of her were a few widely paced footprints; she had been running.
The boar had already come through. But he should hear it crashing through the underbrush. Instead, he only heard birdsong and a few nattering squirrels. Where was the pig? Where was Dindi?
Muck and mercy, he cursed. If his stupid plan had gotten an innocent girl killed…
The camouflage over the pit trap had been disturbed. Tamio peered over the edge and felt a slap of surprise. The boar had already been impaled and a portion of leg had been neatly cut away. The clan sigil left no doubt who had taken the meat.
The other young men joined him. When they saw the pig and the clan sign, they laughed.
“Looks like the mouse escaped the trap with the cheese!”
“Aw, shut up,” said Tamio, laughing as well. “And help me carry this pig to the hunter’s shed.”
Vessia
All humans, like wolves in a pack, had a clear place in the tribal hierarchy based on their age cohort, clan connections and personal charisma. Try as she might, however, Vessia could not easily guess the status of the young girl who led them through the woods. The girl’s deft courage in the face of the boar attack suggested a warrior, and her grace hinted at a dancer. A Tavaedi then: Except she dressed simply and carried a huge rucksack like a serving maiden.
The wind picked up, wet with snow, chilling Vessia to the bone. Soon they had to crunch through a rapidly growing blanket of white. She had always scoffed at human luxuries, but as her toes froze in her sandals, she began to dream about a big, warm farmer’s kitchen, a hot oven and a meal of roast pork and warm milk.
The girl led them a fair distance through the woodsy hills to the outskirts of a clanhold. Tucked behind a hill, so it wasn’t visible from the rest of the clanhold, as if someone wanted to keep a stinky spot out of sight, was a clay shed in bare dirt yard. Instead of taking them any further, their guide stopped here.
Though it had four adobe walls and a solid thatch ceiling, the shed was just large enough for one mat and a miniscule fire pit in the corner. The hut wasn’t painted white, like human domiciles. No one had spared so much as the traditional coat of whitewash, never mind fancy colored designs. The clay walls were plain reddish brown.
It was clearly an animal shed, probably built to house goats. Yet the girl had brought them here to spend the night. Vessia’s suspicion it was a deliberate slight increased when the girl asked them to wait a moment. She disappeared with the ham hock, and returned with a few scraggly pieces of bread and just a thin slice of pork fat.
The sun had set and the wind grown cruel, so Vessia was in no position to complain, but a part of her felt that the outright unfriendliness of the first young woman they’d met was preferable to being shunted into an icy shack like animals.
The girl struck rocks together to light the fire. She sliced the lard on a stone in the fire until the pieces curled up crispy brown, black at the tips, and hot grease oozed from the fat. She rolled the bread around the greasy mess and offered the pishas to them.
“Thank you,” said Finnadro, as politely as if it were a whole roast shank.
Vessia snorted, but she nibbled the meager meal. Her stomach growled. Teasing it like this only made her hunger worse.
“Did you tell your clan we were here?” asked Finnadro.
The girl’s cheeks turned pink. “Um, nobody asked.” As if aware this did not reflect well on her people, she said, “Here in the Corn Hills, we keep mostly to ourselves. It’s not that people don’t welcome strangers, they just welcome them more if they know them already.”
“Then they wouldn’t be strangers, would they?”
The girl’s blush deepened. “There’s room for one on the mat, and if you don’t mind, the loft above.”
Vessia looked up. The “loft” consisted of a few slats of wood just under the roof, stuffed with straw.
“I will sleep in the loft,” said Finnadro. “Lady, you take the mat.”
Vessia nodded.
The girl left them alone in the goat shack…probably to go spend the night somewhere with a decent fire.
“If they knew who I was, they would not treat us like this,” Vessia grumbled.
“They might also turn you over to your enemies.”
She grumbled inaudibly. Her arthritis ached. Her back hurt from too many nights sleeping on rocks instead of a soft fur sleeping mat. The day before she had strained her knee, and the fatty meal she’d had for dinner threatened to make her incontinent again. This journey was brutal for her. How spoiled she had become, living in the human tribehold.
I’m getting old. She massaged her hands. What if I die before I find the girl? What if I die before I see my son again?
She closed her eyes in pain for a moment. She heard again her own voice, croaking like a frog, exasperated and angry, shouting at her son, You will be the death of me yet!
Those had been her last words to him before his exile. How many times had she wished to pick those words out of the ground and replant sweeter ones?
There had been a day when she had needed no tent to shelter her from the elements, when no aches had made it hard to stretch out her graceful fingers, no tiredness drained her even after dancing all day and all night. Ah, there had been a time when her youth had stretched before her into an eternally fresh afternoon. There had been nights when she slept only from boredom, never exhaustion, and even then untroubled by any dreams.
She had dreams now. This night, she had dreamed of That Day again, the day she first heard the cruel demand: Choose the Windwheel or the Maize.
Dindi
The crystal glitter of blue and purple willawisps danced in the wind. Gorgeous as they were, Dindi did not look forward to spending the night with them. She brushed away the snow next to the shed and pulled the blankets up over her. Even with two heavy wool blankets, she shivered.
With no dreamcatcher to ward them off, nightmares found Dindi as she slept. In the first dream, it was time for the Midwinter Rite. In reality, this was Kemla's biggest moment, when she performed both a duet with Tamio, and then a solo, the most demanding and breathtaking dance she would do all year. In the dream, when the circle of dancers peeled away to reveal the solo dancer in the center, it wasn't Kemla. It was Dindi.
Suddenly, in the jumpy, senseless way of dreams, there were riders in black flying on black ravens charging across a field full of clashing warriors. Flashes of color leapt everywhere, only to disappear, as if swallowed by shadow. A dark rider galloped straight towards Dindi, swallowing all the color in his wake. His face was impossibly fair, yet cold as snow. He grabbed her onto his horse.
Before she could scream, the second dream melted into a third.
She heard the riddle, almost a curse, repeating in a dizzy whirl. “Chose the Windwheel or the Maize!” Six lights, too bright, were spinning six colors, and six voices chanted the riddle. No, it was a Curse. Dindi was dancing, desperate; trying to keep someone she loved from dying. “Choose the Windwheel or the Maize!” She had no choice except to choose, and either way she chose, she’d lose someone she loved to the riddle’s curse. I do not want to send to death either one of these I love. “Choose the Windwheel or the Maize!”
She saw a dark clad lady, who, with a smiling kiss, would kill her. And again the curse, the riddle: “Choose the Windwheel or the Maize!”
Vessia
Snow fell throughout the night. The insufficient fire died and there was no more fuel to re-ignite it. Vessia woke up shivering. The flimsy reed door flap would not stay shut because a wedge of snow, growing like a tumor, nudged it aside. Wind whistled into the open crack. Though the desert valley of the Rainbow Labyrinth tribehold could get quite cold at night, it had been a long while since Vessia had
slept above the snow level. Once neither cold nor heat would have bothered her, but these days, the chill seemed to seep right through her skin like ice through cheesecloth.
Enough. She rose from her mat and stepped outside. She was not sure if she would stomp down to the biggest farmhouse and demand decent hospitality, hex the whole clanklatch in a fit of pique, or simply look for more firewood. Surely there must be some stacked beside the shack.
She saw a dark pile and bent down to feel for wood…but her questing palm touched something soft.
It was the little serving maiden.
She huddled in a ball, shivering in her sleep. Ugly nightmare fae clung to her hair, whispering poison into her ears. Vessia chased the nightmares off, but the serving maiden still looked miserable. Her only protection against the wind and snow was the eave of the roof and a few thin blankets. Vessia felt guilty about her earlier assumption the girl had gone to another building with a warm fire. On the contrary, the poor wretch had given up her shack, which was hardly fit for goats to begin with, to total strangers, while she herself slept outside during a snowstorm. Silly little human.
Every time Vessia was tempted to think all humans would be better wiped clean from the land, one of them would go and do something like this.
Vessia knelt and touched the girl again, this time with a warm orange glow to still her mind and deepen her sleep. Then Vessia picked her up and brought her into the shack. Vessia placed the sleeping girl on the mat next to her, and spread her wing like a blanket over them both.
Umbral
They stopped to camp in the Corn Hills, at the edge of Rainbow Labyrinth territory. A Deathsworn megalith, in this case two large black rocks with a third rock lying across them, with a row of skulls driven into the top, marked this path as belonging only to the Deathsworn. Ordinary travelers used another route, which also passed through the mountains a few miles to the south. Umbral had seen a pack of hairy Green Woods nomads wandering along that way, but he didn’t fear they would come here. Ordinary people feared the Deathsworn, with good reason, and knew the terrible price to be paid if they trespassed roads marked with black rocks.
Umbral stood on an outcrop that overlooked a wide vista of misty hills. Something in the air, a taste, a smell, a sound, a flash of color as if of light flashing on distant water, something tantalized him, promised him, called to him.
He teased a strand of magic from the air. It was so potent, he could taste the memory of the one who had danced it. A girl. He shivered with a strange hunger as he reeled in the strand.
He caught a memory of the wind blowing tangles through her hair, slender limbs, laughter. She must now be in the first flush of womanhood, ripe yet unplucked, nearly fae in her wildness.
The more of her he tasted, the more his hunger grew. Some Tavaedies left prickly strands in their wake, dense and thorny, but not this dancer, whoever she was. The loops of her magic bubbled everywhere.
Yet some power veiled her from him.
He could only catch glimpses of her. Her magic flirted with his fondling probes, eluding his ravishment. Her most intimate feelings and sensations were imprinted in her magic, which he absorbed with sensual abandon, only to have the wisps of magic dart away, slip through his clutching fists. When the first strand broke off, he sought out another and then another, and then another, but Umbral could not find her name or her clan or unclothe the privacy of her past.
He had never been so frustrated in the hunt.
It only increased his determination to quench his thirst for her.
He had to linger. He had to find more, taste more, devour more of her, all of her.
Chapter Three
Attack
Dindi
So deep and pleasant was her sleep that Dindi resisted waking even after she heard the howl.
Then something rustled, which sounded like feathers. The cozy warmth disappeared. Instead, freezing wind rushed over her. She squealed and sat up.
Though she had gone to sleep outside, Dindi found herself inside her hut. The beggar woman was there too, but already she had risen to her feet. She wore some kind of feather cape, which swept behind her as she left the hut.
The warrior who had slept in the loft dropped to the ground and hurried after the old woman. Dindi followed him. As soon as she stepped outside, she wished she hadn’t. Pubescent dawn was completely blocked out by the storm. Everything was undifferentiated white. Snow pounded her, and bitter cold. Her teeth started to chatter.
“What’s going on?” she asked. Her words puffed clouds.
He spared her a glance full of worry and pity. “An attack, I fear. Ready what weapons you have, and rouse your kin to the danger.”
He jogged off, and the swirls of snow swallowed him.
Dindi floundered for a heart stop. She knew war, but it was something that happened in someone else’s tribe, far away. It couldn’t happen here, at home. Not in her home.
A dark winged shape descended out of the sky, glowering and grey, like a living storm cloud.
Dindi yelled, “Attack! Attack! Outtribers!”
She ran toward the hearth house, at the center of Lost Swan clanhold. Their tiny hold, with only a dozen or so houses and an equal number of animal sheds, had no defensive wall, not even a row of sharp sticks. Not that it would have helped, she saw. The attack came from…unbelievably…
…above.
Warriors on giant predator birds, huge hawks and eagles, swept over the houses. They shot down flaming arrows, which alighted on the pointed thatched roofs and exploded into flame. Fire hissed in the snowy wind.
Dindi’s kinfolk rushed out of the huts. The storm muffled their screams and yells, but one of them blew on the conch shell. The trumpet pierced the howls of fire, wind and human dismay. It sounded loud over the hills. The clarion warned of danger and begged aide. If their allies heard it, they would reply with conch cries of their own.
No answer came.
Shadow blotted out the sun. One of the riders flew over Dindi. He aimed a long wooden lance at her. She threw herself into the snow to avoid the weapon, but he expected that. The bird snatched her up off the ground.
Vertigo twisted her. Her heart flipped upside down. Her stomach leaped to her throat. Her breath rushed out her ears. Sky and earth cavorted, topsy-turvy. The talons that held her scratched her flesh like tree-trunks. She fought, futilely.
She caught sight of Finnadro through a flurry of snow. He leaned back into the wind, aiming his bow high. Arrow after arrow he launched at the attacking raptors. His speed and strength amazed her. He never hesitated between shots, his flexing arms never wavered in their rhythm, and he never missed. More than one huge bird shrieked and fell from the sky with his arrow in its eye.
But he was one man. Dindi’s own kin were farmers and goat keepers. They tossed spears more like fishermen seeking trout than like warriors, and netted little.
The bird riders concentrated on Finnadro. Several of the riders whose birds had fallen rushed him at the same time. They knocked the bow from his hands. He kicked in the face of one man, and punched another, but two more landed blows on him.
Just as their numbers would have overwhelmed him, dark shapes growled out of the ground and leaped up on his attackers.
Wolves!
The beasts tore the attackers off Finnadro. The raptor riders struggled to fight off these new opponents, which gave Finnadro time to draw his club and bash heads. Fallen foes bloodied the snow around him. His wolves yapped and bayed.
His courage gave her hope. She renewed her own fight. The enemy raptor circled above her clanhold. Its talons pinched the breath from her lungs, but her arms were free. Hitting the talons only bruised her fists, however. She needed a better plan.
She found her chance when the raptor flew low over a burning roof. She grabbed a handful of burning straw and thrust the burning faggot into the tender spot between the bird’s foot and feathers. An inhuman keen rewarded her. The talons flexed open and spilled Dindi into the o
pen air.
Her stomach and heart switched places during the terrifying free fall.
Then she landed on the thatch of the house. Smoke billowed all around her. Fire spit onto her clothes, but she rolled down the slanted roof, landed, rolled again and snuffed the fire in slush. Her clothes were tattered and sodden when she rose, but she stood on her own two feet, unharmed and still free.
Everywhere else, the bird men triumphed. They herded Lost Swan clanfolk into the center of the clanhold at lance point. Other raptors had captured those who tried to flee in their talons and dropped them, mostly women clutching babes, in the center with the other captives.
Then at last, an answering conch trumpeted. A moment later, from another direction, another conch answered. Lost Swan’s allies had heard her plea, and answered with their pledge. Gratitude flared inside Dindi’s breast. Full Basket and Broken Basket had sent warriors to their aide, but would they be in time to save her kin—or only to avenge them?
Over the hills, warriors poured. Dindi recognized Tamio on his horse in the lead of the Broken Basket warriors. On the Full Basket side, Kemla had come too, with her face and taunt bare belly painted red and white, and with red streamers tied to the tip of her bow. The pride of the Corn Hills had come to defend their own. They shouted bold war cries. However, when they saw the outtriber warriors mounted on giant raptors, the Corn Hills warriors faltered. Dindi tasted their pungent dismay even at a distance. They had no idea how to fight such foes.
To their credit, they kept coming. Their war cries were not as confident as before.
A beam of dawn light split the clouds. The ray illuminated the old woman. Dindi had forgotten her. She lifted her arms and spread her feather cape.
No…not her cape.
Her wings.
She danced into the air. Her two white wings became six, shooting rays of the rainbow all around her. Dindi could no longer be sure if the sunlight illuminated her, or if she illuminated the sun. Her long white hair fluttered behind her as a pennant, and her face shone with a beauty stronger than time.