by Tara Maya, Elle Casey, J L Bryan, Anthea Sharp, Jenna Elizabeth Johnson, Alexia Purdy (epub)
The fae were stunned silent for a moment. Then they all began to shout at Dindi at once.
“Enough!” cried Dindi, making the Dispel hand-sign in earnest this time. The clouds of willawisps scattered, the pixies were flung away as if by gusts of heavy wind, and the sprites all went rolling like tumbling stones. Corn stalks were flattened around Dindi in a perfect circle three yards out.
From the perimeter of the circle of dispellation, the fae peered at her with hurt expressions.
“I’m sorry,” Dindi said. “You know I don’t want to abandon you.”
The fae crept back towards her until at last they huddled as close as before, murmuring her name.
“Uhm.” She was abashed. “Could you help me fix the corn?”
“Hurrah! She will dance with us!” squealed the purple pixie.
What harm would it do to share one more teensy weensy dance with her friends? After all, who knew when Initiation might come? She might never have another chance. She would sip one last taste of wild faerie magic. She shrugged away the basket and let Puddlepaws down in the grass. Dindi let the fae lead her into their circle.
The pixies began to fly in circles over the ruined crops. The cob-sized corn sprites whose stalks she’d knocked over joined in next. Willawisps were drawn to all the activity. They all began to twirl and shuffle and skip and jump in a ring around and around, Dindi dancing right along with them. As the corn stalks began to right themselves, the dancers changed the pattern and started to weave in and out of the stalks. Wild swirls of color trailed in the wake of all the fae dancers, strange and marvelous.
Dindi laughed with exhilaration despite herself, abandoning herself to whatever moves her body wanted to make. The corn was upright again. If anything, it was greener and more fragrant than before. Dindi slowed down, signaling the fae to stop too. They refused to take the hint. They kept whirling.
She danced alongside them, but she knew it was their magic at work. If she didn’t stop them from getting carried away, they would continue dancing and possibly start to do more damage than good. She had seen them summon storms, uproot trees, start geysers from bare rocks. It was one reason she normally only danced with them out on the heath, far past the cultivated fields. Mama had warned her never to let other humans see her play with the fae.
The swarm of whirling faery dancers moved up the mountain, without ever missing a step. Dindi moved with them, keeping up easily with their improvised patterns of skips, turns, kicks and leaps. Soon they emerged onto a patch of flat heath with a view of the whole valley below. The sky seemed to pull back to give them more room.
She spread her arms and drew in a drought of the fresh air. Then she closed her eyes and envisioned again the shinning swirls of light patterns created by the Taevaedis on Barter Day. In her mind, she recreated the role of every single dancer. What steps had each player in the pattern made? One by one, she danced each person’s role as best she could remember it. First, she played the ‘human’ parts. Then, saving and savoring them for the end, she played the Aelfae parts. But when she came to the finale, when the last Aelfae in the dance was to fall and die, she decided to change the ending. Instead, she leaped up again, spread her imaginary wings behind her and vaulted across the field in a full twisting double back leap.
The fae laughed in glee. They much preferred her new dance to the dance of the Tavaedies. Satisfied now that she had run through all the steps of all the dancers in yesterday’s dance, Dindi finally abandoned herself to free-form dancing. That delighted the fae even more.
The low hum of faerie voices, the sparkle of pixie wings and her own pounding blood wrapped Dindi in a trance of pure feeling. Movement inside her itched to spill out.
A pixie curled a small hand around Dindi’s ear, whispering, “You never have to go back, Dindi. You could dance with us forever and ever…”
Their voices hummed hypnotically, enticing her forward step by step. The lullaby lure of the faery ring shimmered all around her, a mixture of light and song. The fae clasped hands together, closing the circle about her. A chain of pixies undulated in the air, the sprites linked up, and then, in the last gap in the circle, a heron-winged kinnara soared toward the dancers to close the circle. “Come dance with us, Dindi. Come dance with us forever…”
“Nice try, but I’m not yours yet!” Regret tinged her amusement, but her resolve was firm, as it always was when the fae played this game with her. Dindi somersaulted through the air with an aerobic leap that catapulted her right out of the gap. She rolled away on the moss, laughing.
“You can’t catch me in a faery ring that easily,” she teased them. The fae responded in delight.
“Again, again!” they urged her.
“My family needs me. Oh, mercy!” She clapped her hands over her face. “Soaproot and blueberries! I haven’t had time…”
Boast waved his little scarlet arms in an expansive gesture. “Fear not, friend Dindi! We have taken care of all that silly human stuff for you!”
Oh.
Oh, no.
“How, um, exactly?” Dindi asked.
“How else? We juiced the blueberries and sudded the soaproot.”
“Here it is now,” said Kippy. A goat legged satyr with tawny fur and an Orange glow, skipped up to Dindi. He carried a covered basket in one hand—the soap—and a jug in the other hand—the blueberry juice. It was the same jar she had broken this morning. The fae had stuck the cracked shards back together. After Kippy placed these on the grass before her, he bowed solemnly and pranced away.
“We did it just like the humans do,” Giggles said.
Dindi had her doubts, but just at that moment she heard Hadi shouting. He appeared around a bend in the path and glared at her with exasperation.
“There you are! An important guest has arrived for middle-meal and Great Aunt Sullana will chop off your toes if you miss it. And on top of that, I’m starving. If you make me miss middle-meal, I’ll tell her you went off dancing with the fae again.”
An important guest?
“I have to go,” Dindi told the fae. She rescued another pixie from Puddlepaws, shouldered her basket, and followed Hadi back down the hillside.
Kavio
Kavio smelled the costumes of his accusers before he could see them—corn-husks, horse hair, quilt skirts and shoulder blankets soaked with years of dancers’ sweat. He heard the rustle of many bodies, the clicky-clack of shell and chalcedony bracelets jangling upon wrists and ankles. The susurration of disapproving voices rose in pitch as people noticed his entrance.
Stone spearheads pricked him in the shoulders. Tiny trickles of blood coursed down his back, mingling with his sweat as a testament to his guards’ enthusiasm to see him judged for his crimes. The warriors guarding him had told him nothing. He had been blindfolded, stripped to a loincloth, and bound with his hands behind his back. Still, Kavio didn’t need to see to know he had been brought to his trial.
The cool, musty air, crisscrossed by rays of warmth, told him this must be the kiva where the Society of Societies convened for the most serious of deliberations. The underground amphitheatre was one of the few kivas with windows in the upper reaches of the room. Otherwise, the texture of the walls and floor—volcanic rock daubed with adobe and dung whitewash—felt no different from the rest of the Labyrinth.
The guards shoved him to his knees before one them tore off his blindfold.
Three dyed reed mats had been placed at intervals down the center of the rectangular room, one white, one black, and one orange. A large polychrome pottery vase painted in patterns of those same three colors had been placed beside the middle, black mat. Kavio knelt in front of the white mat.
Tiered adobe steps around three sides of the rectangular room provided seating for the Tavaedies and Zavaedis, the men and women of the secret societies. From the squeeze of costumed bodies, it looked as though every dancer in the Labyrinth was in attendance. All were masked. Many of the masks sprouted huge fans of woven cane, feather tufts
, or carved wooden animal faces. Others sported horns, manes, or false beards. Still others displayed abstract shapes, ovals or diamonds, or a cascade of beaded fringes. It wasn’t easy for so many masked dancers to fit in the tiers. Feathered and beaded shoulder blankets, necklaces coiled as thick as snakes, and full corn-husk skirts took up space.
Only his mother, indifferent as ever to convention, wore no mask, just a simple white beaded dress. She sat stiffly on the lowest tier, face-to-face with Kavio. Even at her age, she was the most beautiful woman in the room. She was also the only one in the tiers who had no closely-pressed neighbors. No one quite dared sit next to her.
Opposite her, behind Kavio, rose an adobe platform taller than any of the tiered seats. He had to twist his head to look up the seven steps to the top of the platform to see the man who stood there in full regalia, holding a rain stick. Paint divided the man’s already severe features into an interlocked pattern of sharp edges and boxes. Colorful matching mazes were woven into his shoulder blanket and outlined in beads of obsidian and pearl. His massive headdress consisted of numerous coiled cords, horned and feathered and shelled. Beaded hoops rested around his neck, as did a gold coiled torque. The pin that held his shoulder blanket in place had also been beaten from gold, into the shape of a stylized wild horse.
The man pounded his rain stick on the platform. He had a voice of gravel and stone.
“Let it be remembered on the Memory Stick, that in This Year, yet to be named, I, the War Chief of the Rainbow Labyrinth and head of the Society of Societies in the absence of a Vaedi, have called all of the secret dancing societies together to sit in judgment at the trial of Kavio . . .”
He paused to make the ponderous trip down the seven steps to the floor of the assembly room. Even so, because Kavio had been forced to his knees, the other man had to look down to glower at him.
“. . . Kavio, my own son.”
Even though he’d expected it, his father’s contempt stung.
“Who will cast the first stone?” asked Father.
The men and women in the tiers shuffled, whispered. Most of them removed their masks from their sweat-drenched heads, and a few went so far as to fan themselves.
A woman in amber necklaces removed an orange eagle-feathered mask before she rose to her feet. She was an elder from Father’s generation, his brother’s wife and Father’s bitterest political rival. As a child, Kavio had nicknamed her “Auntie Ugly.”
“I will cast the first stone on behalf of the accusers,” Auntie Ugly said with ill-concealed relish. “Kavio committed the most serious crime of which a Zavaedi dancer is capable. He concocted his own Pattern, a dance unknown to our ancestors. He cannot name the teacher that taught it to him, nor the society who held its secret. That is hexcraft.
“That in itself would be reason to discipline him. But on top of that, he used this Pattern for the vilest of purposes, to harm the community that bore him and to deprive his neighbors of their very livelihood.”
Kavio glanced involuntarily at Mother. He had never seen her so ashen. Though a part of him wanted to spit in Father’s face, the knowledge that he had disappointed Mother burned like chili pepper in his mouth. But no matter what happened, he’d be cursed before he’d show how he felt in front of this assemblage of vultures and jackals. Or in front of his father.
He lifted his chin and faced his accuser with his most insolent smile.
As he’d known it would, his smile infuriated Auntie Ugly. She jabbed a bony finger at him.
“Three days ago, Kavio, you went into a room here in the Labyrinth and performed a hex that diverted a part of the river upstream from the Valley of the Aelfae. By doing so, you have lowered the water level in the fields, making it possible that not enough silt will be deposited by planting season.
“As witness, I call my own son, Zumo the Cloud Dancer.”
Kavio’s cousin, a young man of similar age, build, and height, stood. He removed his mask of blue shells. While Kavio seethed inside, Zumo repeated the lies that had led to this trial in the first place. Not that anything Zumo testified was false; his deception lay in what he didn’t say.
After Zumo, a second witness repeated the story of having found Kavio dancing alone in a kiva in the Labyrinth.
“Thank you both,” Auntie Ugly said smugly after the second witness sat down again. “Kavio, do you deny these charges?”
“I don’t deny what I did,” he said. “I deny that I invented the Pattern, I deny that it was hexcraft, and I deny that it was intended to harm our people.”
When Auntie Ugly sneered at him, the anger that had been pummeling his belly these last days bettered his sense, and he added sarcastically, “I do not deny that there are times I wish I had let you all drown.”
He knew it was a mistake as soon as he said it. The masked Tavaedies and Zavaedies hissed and shouted.
“Zavaedi Kavio’s guilt is plain,” said Auntie Ugly. “I cast my stone with justice. I call for Kavio’s death!”
She glided to the pottery jar and pulled out a smooth, gray stone, then tossed it on the black mat.
Big surprise there, thought Kavio. You’ve always hated me, you old toad. I never even understood why.
“Zumo?” Auntie Ugly asked her son.
More slowly than his mother, Zumo picked a stone. He threw it on the black mat. He had to walk by where Kavio knelt on the adobe floor to reach his seat again. Just as he passed, Kavio looked up and met his eyes.
“Is that what you really think I deserve, cousin?” Kavio asked in such a low voice that only Zumo heard him. “For what crime? The lies you told here or because I know the truth about you?”
Zumo flushed, whether with guilt or anger, it was impossible to tell.
“No one will listen to anything you have to say now, Kavio,” Zumo replied, also too quietly for anyone else to hear. “They’ll know you’re just clawing at worms to try to save your own hide.”
He stomped back to his seat, where he replaced his mask.
Auntie Ugly had sentenced the son of her rival to death; all eyes now fell upon Father to see if he would defend his son.
Father’s heavy shoulder blanket seemed to weigh him down as he walked to the jar to pick up a stone. He stood there a long while, turning the rock round and round in his hands.
“I would like to speak,” he said finally, looking straight at Kavio, “on behalf of the accusers.”
Surprise stirred the onlookers. Kavio just smiled grimly. He wasn’t surprised at all. He’d known from the day his father had called for the trial that Father would put political need above family sentiment. Sure enough, Father gave a pretty little speech, distancing himself from his son. He locked his jaw when he finished and clutched his fist around his stone. “I too must cast my stone with justice, even if it means the death of my own son, my only child.”
He threw his rock on the black mat. He met Kavio’s eyes without flinching, but when Mother gasped, Father would not look at her.
Mother stood up next and pleaded on Kavio’s behalf. Even she would not declare him innocent. Instead, she simply begged for mercy—exile instead of death. Mother picked a stone out of the jar and placed it on the orange mat.
Kavio felt his face burn with shame. He wouldn’t beg for his life himself, and he didn’t want her to crawl for him either. Besides, death would be easier than exile. He didn’t think he could bear the humiliation of wearing ash. Exile meant fleeing his home like a vole from a prairie fire. Exile meant scorn would meet him wherever he went. Exile meant he would not have the opportunity to finish unraveling the puzzle he had discovered in the heart of the Labyrinth, the only magic he still cared about.
Far, far better to die.
One by one the rest of the Zavaedis came to cast their stones for either exoneration, exile, or death. Some spoke to the assembly of their reasons why, others simply placed the stone according to their choice.
Unfortunately, his mother’s plea moved many people to pity him. When all the rock
s had piled up, the orange mat held the most stones.
Exile.
Kavio swallowed hard to conceal his reaction. You have murdered me all the same.
Father pounded the rain stick.
“Kavio, you have been found guilty of the most heinous of crimes—hexcraft. Though you remain a member of the secret societies that initiated you and are therefore spared death, nonetheless you are forbidden to enter the Labyrinth, to take with you anything from the Labyrinth, or to study with any dancing society of the Labyrinth. Do you understand and acknowledge your punishment?”
“I understand it all too well,” Kavio said through gritted teeth. “But I will never acknowledge it as just.”
“So be it,” Father said tonelessly. “Bring the pot of ashes.”
Two warriors hefted a ceramic pot from where it had rested in the shadow of the tall platform. They forced Kavio to lean back while still on his knees. They smeared him with a paste and rubbed in the gray-black powder. His bare chest and clean shaven face disappeared under a scum of grey crud. Humiliation itched, but like poison ivy, he knew it would be worse if he scratched it. He forced himself still as stone while the warriors slapped on more mud.
“You must wear mud and ash for the rest of your days,” the Maze Zavaedi concluded. His voice broke. “I am ashamed to call you my son.”
Kavio struggled to his feet. The warriors escorting him surrounded him with a hedge of spears. Did they fear him, even now?
“You never could just trust me, could you, Father?” Kavio asked.
Father’s jaw jutted forward. A muscle moved in his neck. Otherwise, he might have been rock. “Escort my son out of the Labyrinth.”
Dindi
Dindi and Hadi climbed down a ladder to the kitchen in the main house. Puddlepaws was not invited but the kitten scrambled down the ladder after them. Smoke dimmed the whitewashed walls to grey and hazed the air with spicy fumes. She searched the room for an important guest. In the corner opposite the ladder were three beehive-shaped ovens, each with its own adjacent ash pit. Mixed with lard and soaproot, the ashes would be used to wash clothes in the stream—which reminded Dindi of the chores she should not have let the fae do for her. Nearby were quern stones for milling corn.