Unbinding

by Eileen Wilks

  And there was a depressing notion. Tired of sitting in the dirt, Kai stood and brushed herself off. “How long was I out? Special Agent Ackleford is expecting me.”

  “Us,” Arjenie said. “I’m going with you, remember?”

  EIGHTEEN

  BENEDICT wasn’t there to insist that Arjenie take guards along, so Isen did the insisting, sending a full squad with them. He wanted them to take his car, too—an armored Lincoln Town Car slightly smaller than a tank. Kai didn’t argue. She couldn’t help wondering how much the guards were there for protection and how much they were supposed to keep an eye on her. Just in case.

  “How’s your stomach?” Arjenie asked as they buckled up.

  “I’ll let you know if it starts acting up.” She looked at the backs of the heads of the two lupi in the front seat. Four more would follow them in another car. “You and everyone else.”

  “Kai.” Arjenie patted her hand. “I think you’re doing what they call projecting. You don’t trust you, so you think everyone else doesn’t, either.”

  “Why would you?” she said bitterly. “I let that parasite in. I let him listen in as we made plans. I—”

  “Didn’t let him do anything. Really.” Arjenie shook her head disapprovingly. “Is this what you’d tell a patient? ‘Yes, it’s all your fault. Shame on you for letting yourself be traumatized.’”

  “When you put it that way . . . okay, you’re right. It isn’t my fault he got a hook in me. It’s a lot harder to fix my own thoughts than someone else’s, though.”

  “Other people’s problems always seem so fixable compared to our own.”

  Reluctantly Kai’s mouth turned up. “True. Isen agrees with my mistrust of me, though. That’s not projecting. He’s genuinely angry.”

  “Of course he is. He thinks it’s his fault.”

  She stared. “How in the world could he?”

  “Oh, lots of ways. I bet he thinks he shouldn’t have urged Nettie to go rest and heal as soon as she got there. If he’d had her tell him what happened right away, she would have remembered that you needed to be cleansed. So if Dyffaya learned too much from our discussion, Isen figures that’s on him.”

  “He had no way of knowing he needed her to remember something.”

  Arjenie shrugged. “That’s how they think. All of them, really, or at least all the dominants. Isen, Benedict, Rule—they always think things are up to them. Isen’s the worst because he’s Rho and a lot really is up to him, but all the dominants have that ‘the buck stops here’ attitude. It’s one reason they need a clearly defined hierarchy. They need to know where their responsibilities end.” She raised her voice slightly. “Am I right, José?”

  “Damn straight,” their driver said.

  José was a wiry fellow about an inch shorter than Kai. He was in charge of the squad, although some of the others looked like they could toss him around like an oversize football. Kai liked the look of his thoughts—crisp, yet flowing, the greens girded by on-alert pewter, with reassuring flickers of confident orange. “What does dominant mean to a lupus?”

  Arjenie answered. “A dominant wants to be in charge, but he wants that so he can take care of things. Of people. He’s especially protective of those under him. And by that I don’t mean tucking them in at night, but making sure they have what they need to succeed—food, training, responsibilities that fit their skills. But deep down, a dominant would really like to be able to take care of everyone.”

  The man in the passenger seat chuckled. “She’s got you pegged, José.”

  “She lives with Benedict,” José said dryly.

  “Point.” That man grinned. “Benedict took great care of Sammy last week.”

  “Yeah. Smacked him halfway across the room.”

  That put both men in a good mood. As the Lincoln turned off onto the highway, leaving Clanhome, they continued to swap examples of how Benedict took care of them. It was, she realized, their way of reassuring themselves that they’d get him back. He was tough, strong, and wily, and he’d survive, and they’d get him back.

  Benedict had a lot of people who’d move heaven and earth to reclaim him. A whole clan. Nathan and Dell only had her.

  What was happening to them right now? What . . . no, don’t go there. Nathan wasn’t the god’s victim, whatever Dyffaya might believe. He was there on purpose. He was on a Hunt, which meant he had a chance of killing the god, even if Kai didn’t see how that was possible. He just had to stay alive and, sooner or later, he’d get that chance. And he was hard to kill.

  Which made him a perfect subject for torture, because he’d live through just about anything the god did to him.

  “You’re fingering that big knife of yours,” Arjenie observed. “I’m not going to take that personally, but it does look menacing.”

  Kai pulled her hand away. “Sorry. It makes a gruesome sort of security blanket, doesn’t it?”

  “Benedict gets all Zen when he’s cleaning his weapons, so I do understand. Sort of. But the authorities aren’t going to. You are going to leave it in the car, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not going anywhere without Teacher. Not now.” She’d worn her vest for the same reason, knowing she’d stand out like a sore thumb on a warm, sunny day like this. And her amulet. And the necklace that held a number of charms she hadn’t bothered with lately. Not that she expected to need to start a fire or detect poison, but better to have them and not need them than the other way around.

  Arjenie’s eyebrows shot up. “Your knife has a name?”

  “It’s more of a use-name. It’s a teaching blade.”

  “Meaning—?”

  “I thought you might have heard of them. Pretty much everyone in the Queens’ realms knows about teaching blades.”

  “My father’s idea of an education was pretty threadbare,” Arjenie said dryly.

  “Well, they’re not commonplace. They’re expensive, and there’s a high demand, so it can be hard to get hold of one.” Nathan never would tell her what he’d paid for this one, or even where he got it. One day he’d said he had something to check out and might be “gone a bit.” When he showed up five days later, he had Teacher. “A good teaching blade speeds up how fast you learn bladework. You get the right moves into muscle memory quickly because it assumes control of your body to show them to you. The best ones give that memory a little magical push to make it stick better.”

  “Wait a minute. It takes over your body? And you’re okay with that?”

  “I can resume control at any time. And by taking over, Teacher’s saved my life more than once. Like today. I couldn’t have fought off a chameleon on my own. They’re way faster than humans.”

  “So you’ve got a named blade that’s good enough to take on a chameleon.” Arjenie sighed. “That is so cool.”

  Kai’s grin flickered. “It is, isn’t it?”

  “Why learn to use a knife? Couldn’t you have taken a gun along if you needed a weapon?”

  “Guns are an iffy proposition in Faerie.”

  “You’ll have to explain that later. Your stomach still okay?”

  “Fine. Are you going to ask that often?”

  “No, but there’s something I want to tell you, and it really needs to be just between us.”

  “Um.” Kai glanced at the two men in the front seat.

  Arjenie grinned. “Oh, they already know.”

  “Is this the thing you wanted to tell me earlier? When Cynna said she couldn’t stop you? Because I can’t guarantee that we aren’t eavesdropped on. It’s really hard to listen magically to someone who’s moving as fast as we are, so we’re probably okay. But I can’t set a ward to make sure the way Nathan can.”

  “It’s a risk, I guess, but a tiny one, and you really need to know this. You said that your bond with Dell would’ve snapped if she’d been taken to another realm.”


  Kai nodded.

  “The mate bond doesn’t work that way.”

  The passenger-seat guard made a strangled noise. José said, “Uh, Arjenie? Did Isen know you were going to say that?”

  Arjenie leaned forward to pat him on the shoulder. “I’m sure he does. He was in the room when I said that I’d tell her. I didn’t say it to him, but he was in the room.”

  José did not look reassured.

  Arjenie looked at her. “You need to know about the mate bond because you need to know what I learn from it, and why would you believe me if you didn’t know where the information came from?”

  “I take it this mate bond is between you and Benedict?”

  “I should’ve said that right off. Yes. Mate bonds are very rare, they’re unbreakable, and they come from the Lady. They’ve got a lot of upsides, but the downside is that the bonded pair can’t be too far apart physically or they pass out. Unfortunately, ‘too far’ can vary. Right now it’s at least thirty miles for me and Benedict. I know that because he’s a little over thirty miles that way.” She pointed in the general direction they were going.

  “Uh . . . but he isn’t. He’s in the godhead.”

  “Well, yes, but—wait. You don’t get a sense of where Dell is?”

  Kai shook her head. “A little if she’s close, but distance thins it, just like it makes it harder to pick up detailed information, much less actual words. Right now it’s as if she were a hundred miles away. I don’t see how you can feel Benedict’s direction when he’s in the godhead.”

  “Apparently the godhead is sufficiently congruent with Earth to have a physical referent here.”

  Something clicked when Arjenie said that. “The godhead is physically congruent with Earth . . . and it’s a spiritual place, not physical, yet it can support physical life. Arjenie, it sounds like the Upper World.”

  Arjenie cocked her head curiously. “That’s from your people’s origin story, right? The Holy People led your people up from the Lower Realms to the Glittering World—also called the Surface World—but they themselves went on to the Upper Worlds.”

  “You’ve heard the story?”

  “My cousin is apprenticing as a shaman. Not that he talks about it much, but I did some research. Do you think the Upper Worlds are real places, then?”

  She snorted. “I asked Grandfather that once. He said I sounded like a bilagáana, and that when I could tell him what reality was I should ask again.”

  Arjenie grinned. “Bilagáana meaning white person?”

  “You speak Diné Bizaad?” The language of the People, that meant. Navajo to the rest of the world.

  Arjenie waved one hand dismissively. “I’ve picked up a few words, no more. Tell me about the Upper Worlds.”

  “Sometimes they’re referred to as plural, sometimes in the singular—the Upper World. Grandfather says they’re both singular and plural, and if that makes sense to you, please explain it to me.”

  “Buddhists might say that everything’s both singular and plural, and yet neither.”

  “And that means—?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Kai grinned. “Anyway, the Upper World or Worlds—never mind. I’m going use the singular, but keep in mind that may not be accurate. The Upper World is tied to our world, but there’s a barrier between them. In holy places, like the mountain where Grandfather lives, the barrier is thin, but the two worlds are linked everywhere. In other words, the Upper World and Earth are physically congruent. And according to the stories, a lot of the early heroes traveled to see one or another of the Powers and came back to share what they’d been taught. That suggests that the Upper World is capable of supporting life—and that it’s possible to travel there and return.”

  “I like the part about returning,” Arjenie said.

  So did Kai.

  “You think Dyffaya somehow parked his godhead in the world or worlds where the Native Powers live?”

  “When you put it that way,” Kai said, reaching for her phone, “I think I’d better call Nettie.”

  * * *

  THE food had been both hot and plentiful when Nathan crawled up to the table. His host had neglected to provide a chair, so Nathan was sitting on the ground, finishing his second helping of everything except the carrots and potatoes, which look good but lacked scent, when a chameleon slunk up to the edge of the clearing. It stopped and looked at him out of unblinking yellow eyes.

  Not Dell. This one was smaller, much less muscular. A male?

  It had come from the direction Nathan had decided to call west. With no sun, moon, or stars, directions were difficult to fix here, but like migratory birds, Nathan had a directional sense. It seemed to work here.

  When the second chameleon appeared beside the first, he put his fork on his plate and set the plate aside. He might have to draw Claw. “Hello to you both. I wonder if you understand me. I’d rather not fight you, so I hope—oh, Dell. Benedict. Good to see you.”

  Dell loped into the clearing. She was back in her original form, which worried him a bit. He’d thought she understood why he wanted her in human shape. Benedict strode along behind her. He scowled at Nathan. “You’re pretty damn cheerful for a man I thought was being tortured.”

  “Nothing like having the torture stop to cheer a man up.” The two smaller chameleons hadn’t budged, still hanging back at the edge of the clearing. When Dell reached him she sat and looked at his feet. Then she looked at his face, her head cocked in question. “It will be another four or five hours before they’re healed enough to walk on,” he told her. “I’d rather not accelerate the healing. I had to do that with the chest wound, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to eat again. Which is why I’ve been stuffing myself. Why are you back in your original form?”

  She looked over her shoulder at Benedict.

  He recognized his cue. “When the other two chameleons showed up, she said she needed to take care of the stupid males and Changed. They obey her. Seem to understand what she wants pretty well, too, which helps. I don’t know if I could have found you on my own. This place is seriously weird. You sure that food is safe?”

  “I doubt anything here is truly safe, but aside from the carrots and potatoes, everything smells okay. Where’s Cullen?”

  “Back in the grotto. That’s where we ended up, in this grotto where Dyffaya stashed Britta. She’s a mess. Won’t leave the grotto, but she got real scared when she understood we were going, so Cullen offered to stay with her.” He glanced down at Nathan’s feet. “What did he do to you?”

  “His version of a crucifixion. Impaled my feet and hung me upside down while we chatted. He left about an hour ago. It took me a while to get myself down, then get the vines off my arms.”

  Benedict looked at Nathan’s feet another moment, then grunted and pulled his knife from its sheath. He cut off a hunk of venison. “Seabourne says the god can hear us. He may or may not be paying attention at any given moment, but if he is, he’ll hear us.”

  “Cullen’s right. Everything here is Dyffaya, in a sense. It’s all the godhead, and he’s spread throughout it.”

  Benedict looked at the meat in his hand. “Everything?”

  “Including the food, yes. It’s godhead stuff that’s been magically transformed. Even the air we breathe is godhead stuff. But the venison, the bread, and the apples smell right, so they should be okay.”

  Benedict still didn’t eat. “You warned me about the smell thing, but you didn’t get to explain. Why does the smell make it okay?”

  “Food that lacks scent probably has some of Dyffaya in it. He doesn’t have a scent—I imagine you noticed that? I think it’s because he’s dead. The godhead itself is alive, though, so food that’s made purely from godhead stuff without any of the god mixed in smells like it ought to.” He paused. “Or so I think.”

  Benedict sighed. “Be ni
ce if you were sure.” But he took a bite of the venison. “Damn, that’s good. He gave us salad.”

  Nathan’s eyebrows lifted. “Salad?”

  “His idea of a joke. Feed the carnivores green stuff. We get plenty of water—there’s a spring—and we’ve been making the bar of soap last. Twice a day a roll of toilet paper and a huge bowl of salad shows up. After a couple days of that—”

  “Wait. Wait a minute. A couple days?”

  “Guess you lost track of time. Easy to do here. After we got to the grotto, Cullen cast a timekeeping spell. Don’t ask me how it works, but it does. When I left to hunt for you, we’d been in the grotto for thirty hours. Add two hours to that to allow for the period before he got his spell going, and another ten hours that I spent looking for you. That’s forty-two. Not quite two days, but close enough.”

  Oh, hell. “I have not been here a couple of days. Not even close to that. I’d estimate that, for me, slightly over three hours have passed.”

  “You must’ve passed out for longer than you realized.”

  Nathan shook his head. “I didn’t pass out. I can’t. I can be knocked out, either physically or magically, but not for that long. And I wasn’t knocked out. Dyffaya enjoyed having me conscious and hurting.”

  “That does not make sense.”

  “Time must fluctuate here, with different parts of the godhead experiencing different time flows.”

  “Shit. We need to go. Now. For me it’s been five hours since I left Cullen. God only knows how long it’s been for him.” He pulled off his shirt and began loading the remains of the meal onto it. Fortunately, Dyffaya had been generous. There was a lot left, enough for four or five humans or a couple lupi.

  “Not the potatoes and carrots,” Nathan reminded him, and gripped the edge of the table to help himself stand.

  “Sit down, dammit. You’ll ride on my back. Shouldn’t take us as long to get to him as it did to find you, since we won’t be casting around, so less than five hours. A lot less, I hope.” He looked at Dell. “Got an estimate?”