“Yes,” Adria said. “The Sun Dance.”
Shísha nodded, poking at the fire a little more. “We… are a traditional people. But traditions are not… laws, like the Aeman have. They are not written down, as the prayers of your Sisterhood. The Aesidhe traditions live as the People live, and as the People change, so must our traditions. We choose not to honor the Sun Dance any longer, because we remember the sacrifice of its last dance. But there is an emptiness where this dance once filled our people’s lives. Our Hunters feel it most, for it was their way to show their sacrifice to the People.”
“I do not understand, Lichushegi,” Adria shook her head. She understood the words, but not the deeper meaning, not the relevance.
“Many were lost to us that day. It is what made us who we are now. And many have been lost since, no matter the strength and the speed of our Hunters, our Runners. And again we must change. We may retreat, but this does not mean we must be destroyed. And what we have lost must be returned.”
“The Sun Dance,” Adria nodded, though still she did not understand. “The Fire Heart. The Black Tree.”
“The Sun Dance is no more,” Shísha shook her head. “But soon we will make a new Ceremonial for the Hunters, a new dance. It will be a dance of the dead, a Ghost Dance, when those who have left us will return, and no King and no army can strike them down. When the ghosts dance, our fallen will walk again, and our enemy will fail against us.”
Adria sat a moment in silence. She had never heard such a thing before… such an open prophecy from Shísha, or any other Mechushegiya. It sounded more akin to Taber’s mystic revelations than anything of the Aesidhe. In spite of this strangeness, or perhaps because of it, Adria said, simply and honestly, “I hope I will see this day.”
And Shísha turned her eyes upon Adria, and they stilled, and Adria knew that, somehow, she could be seen. “Then know this, Adria Idonea, Princess of Hei-Land and Hunter of the Aesidhe... You will see this day, for you will be among those who return.”
The Voice of One as Many.
Adria could not turn away, could not close her eyes, could not even breathe for a long moment. And when breath came, it felt as if she had risen from the water, drowning.
Despite the myths of her childhood, despite the years of Sisters and their tenets and their unknown god, and despite the servants and their superstitions, for the first time Adria believed something without having understood it.
Blind faith, Adria wondered… The faith of blindness. It is something she had once prayed for, when her vision of the world had grown too terrible, her place within it too difficult to understand. Knowing without seeing.
“You have taught me well,” Adria whispered. “And I have no gift for you, Chosen Mother.”
And she simply rose, leaned over, and kissed the women upon her forehead — more an Aeman parting than and Aesidhe one. Shísha raised her hand and touched Adria’s cheek gently, smiling. “Bring me something from across the sea…sneak it home in your pack.”
Adria laughed, cried. “Until that day, you have my thanks and my love.”
“You are welcome, Chosen Daughter. You always will be.”
And Shísha returned to the full consideration of her fire, without speaking again, and without even seeming to notice Adria’s parting.
Just outside of camp, Mateko dropped from a tree behind Adria in an attempted surprise, so she turned suddenly, clutched her blade hilt, and widened her eyes in pretend shock. He laughed, then held something out to her from behind his back.
“I… offering… you... carry.” He struggled with the Aeman words, then corrected himself somewhat, “I carry offering you.”
He means to give me a gift, she thought reflexively, but there was no reason to correct this particular. She was impressed he knew the word “offering” — he had not grown up with the Sisterhood, but among a People where an offering to the Spirit Helpers and a gift to a friend were not so different. Adria had taught him a little Aeman in her time among them, and he remained eager to learn more. They shared a fascination with language.
Mateko nodded and smiled, and urged the package into her hands. It was a bundle of cloth tied with twine. The cloth was thin, and a violet color that seemed strange in Aesidhe hands. It must have been salvaged from a raid. She thought.
But even as she opened it, even as she recognized it, her mind had trouble comprehending. It was a tabard of the House of Idonea — the silver hex star on a black and violet field. She blinked at it, then held it up to the firelight. Mateko had done his best to clean it, but the blood from an arrow had left a stain, just a little darker than the shade of the cloth.
This is from the first man I killed, Adria realized. He has kept this for more than two years.
“This… you… make remember…” he struggled to explain, smiling with the clumsiness of his own tongue around the words, particularly the r’s, which did not exist in Aesidhe. Adria had certainly never taught him everything he knew. He must have learned more from Preinon or Shísha. He was half-signing with his hands, reflexively trying to reinforce the words. “You… make sturong for… both your… people.”
“You once said that I tried to be too strong for a woman.” Adria teased. “Is it still true?”
Mateko bit his lip and shook his head slowly, abandoning the Aeman for the better poetry of his own tongue. “Lózha lozhani zhuhiwi tagli t’úmno. Zho chóli zazhuwe.” I believe that you are graceful and gentle. I will always love you...
He had such trouble finishing, and Adria had filled so quickly with equal measures of joy and sadness, that she leapt forward and embraced him, his hands caught between them, still in the sign for love.
“You are my true Brother…” she whispered, and he removed his arms from between them and embraced her in return. After a moment, they held each other’s shoulders at arms’ length, in the Aesidhe expression of family.
“Thank you,” she said slowly, enunciating clearly for him, while making the sign with her hand between them.
He nodded, excited. He knew this response rather well, and even in the right order. “You are welcome.”
As she turned away, she half undid the ties of her shoulder sack, and stuffed the tabard within, just in the space left from the toys she had carried there before. She smiled back over her shoulder as she straightened her pack again.
“These were never my favorite colors,” she said.
He shrugged. “I remember violets that grew in a clearing among the ruins of trees.”
Adria smiled, nodding. “And now trees grow there once more. They are only saplings, but one day some among them will be tall and strong and proud.”
“...and gentle and graceful.” Mateko added, smiling, then raised his hand between them in a curious half-Aeman, half-Aesidhe manner.
“Goodbye,” he said, and signed, You do not walk alone.
This time he waited as she turned away, blinking her tears down her cheeks. When she looked back a few moments later, he was gone, but she knew he would watch her from above, until she had left his sight entirely, fading like a cloud into smoke.
Adria followed nearly the same path she had come three years before.
A circle was complete. It had all been decided.
Part Two
Ghosts of Heiland
Borders of Ash
She no longer knew how she found her way. Her legs sought the swiftest paths, skirting the foothills that ran almost the breadth of Heiland, avoiding both the brambles of undergrowth and the shiftiness of loose footing. Her hands turned limbs subtly aside, restored her balance with slight and careful motions. Her mind remained still, her senses sifted the world around her for any sign of danger. And the whole of her body maintained its pace, sure to sustain with little need of rest, and still ready for any possibility of violence.
Even with all her training, she still recognized t
he strangeness of her navigation. There were small cues to direction, she supposed… something somewhere in her senses which noted moss on trees and direction of prevailing winds, small changes in scent, the occasional pattern of stars through branches above, some small measure of descent — but all were interwoven in ways she could not have described accurately if compelled to try. And when she thought of a word for her direction, it came first in Aesidhe.
Hashewatesuba. Adria thought. Downward, toward the water that wind follows. Closer to the sea, warmer, less wild — the swiftest way, but the way far more populated with Aeman villages.
Gradually, as the foothills to her left fell to rolling woodland, she turned to align herself more with her destination and took more care to be aware of danger. She knew well enough to avoid any forest settlements — small watch posts of Knights, foresters, and those few settlers who braved a little of the wilderness.
The winter’s raids had made this area familiar to all the Runners. Though neither too hungry nor too tired, she sought out one of the hidden caches they had left for later use. She did not like taking the time, but it would save her the effort of stealing once she reached the open Aeman lands.
Once she had dug up some food and a small bag of coins, she whispered a prayer of thanks and rested. She did not dare sleep, for she was not certain she could afford the time. Tainábe must suffice, she decided.
She found a dry place and sat upon her half-unrolled bedding furs, her back against a tree. She unfocused her vision again and closed her eyes, breathing deeply, filtering out the sounds and smells of the cold world, letting her thoughts gradually fade and subside.
When she neared the deeps of sleep, she let the wind of her awareness carry her just a little above the dark waters of dreams. She floated there for a time, and just when she began to feel the sensation of falling, her eyelids fluttered open. In that moment, she sensed something off to her side, distant, but when she turned her head it was already gone.
A figure in gray.
Again… Adria wondered. Another of the many ghosts of Heiland. Still watching… still following… still fleeting.
Adria’s father seemed a little like a ghost sometimes — too often gone, and often for overlong, in all her younger memories. When he came and went, it was with clamor and motion, with fanfare and great ceremony. Surrounded by his Knights, his Sisters, and the lesser attendants.
But it was when he was gone that the stranger ghosts arrived.
“I dreamed I fell into water, Nana,” Adria whispered upon awakening. Rain pounded the shutters, and wind. “I couldn’t breathe... I reached for a hand, but, apples...”
“Hush, my Lady,” Kaye soothed. “You are safe. It is only the storms. I will sing you back to sleep.”
“You sing songs, Nana? I should like that very much.”
“Of course, child.” Kaye smoothed Adria’s locks beneath her bonnet. “I sing to my daughter on nights when I am home.”
“You have a daughter, Nana?”
Without answer, Kaye began her song.
“Oh, hush little girl, thy sire was a knight,
Thy mother a lady, both lovely and bright;
The woods and the glens, from the tower we see,
They all are belonging, dear child, to thee.
Oh, hush little girl, thy sire was a knight,
Hush little one, so bonnie and so bright.
Your mother will watch o’er you as you sleep,
Among all the stars ‘bove the spires of the keep.
Oh, fear not the trumpet, though loudly it blows,
It calls but the warders that guard thy repose;
Their bows shall be bended, their blades sure and bright,
So hush thee, my Lady, thy sire was a knight.”
Adria slept, her dream forgotten again by morning.
Adria only once saw her father’s sword drawn, and like so many dreams, it would remain only half-remembered. Awakened by a servant she did not know, she looked for Kaye, but saw only men at arms, and turned her head at every motion of torchlight and hurried voices.
And from among them and through her doorway he emerged, blade in hand. He wore his nightclothes, and his long hair was askew and darkened with sweat. He looked her over without expression, with heavy breaths, though he might have nodded.
“See to the prince,” her father ordered as he turned a little, motioning men to the doorway.
The profile of his face flickered in the torchlight which remained. A plumed Knight entered just then.
“Your Royal Majesty,” he said. “Your keep is secured.”
“Very good,” her father nodded. “Are there ransoms?”
“You... dispatched the last of them, My Lord.”
Her father nodded slowly, his breath now slowed, his sword loose in his hand. “It cannot be helped. Thank you, Sir Knight.”
Awash among her bedclothes and the rush of emotions around her, Adria did not know what she should feel. She might have asked, but of course there were no words just then — not for her father.
And then he turned to her, and he took a step or two forward, and he smiled.
“You may sleep now, bright one,” he nodded. “There are days we are meant to forget, and others to remember.”
As she neared the ash line carved into the wilderness, Adria stopped for a second short rest and a moment of consideration. Her breath birthed clouds, and her skin broke into a quick sweat which cooled her quickly in the still night air.
It would be dawn soon. Once free of the forest cover, she would likely be seen by someone, and she did not want to seem an enemy. She removed some food from her pack — cured meat, a few shelled walnuts. As quietly as possible, she cracked them open with the pommel of her blade, then washed the nutmeat and salted venison down with a little water from her water skin.
I will seem an outsider, Adria realized.
She briefly examined herself as an Aeman might — warily, suspicious of anything even mildly different. She would certainly seem wild. Her clothing and hair were far too Aesidhe to be mistaken. These might be disguised, of course. Her blade could cut her clothes to a more Aeman fashion, remove the feathers and beads… and of course her hair could be loosed from its braids, and pulled up or back, or even left down to show its unmistakably Aeman color, though this would prove impractical for swift travel.
Were she male, she might seem simply a hunter, returned from a long trek. If she wore the tabard, its violet would dissuade a bowman from shooting, at least at first. But then it might be assumed she had simply stolen it. She would obviously seem disguised without any other trappings of soldiery — and still, of course, rather female. The Aeman soldiery, unlike the Aesidhe, did not allow females among their rank and file, even less than they would allow one as a hunter.
She did not wish to take the time to seek out another cache. It would mean backtracking, further avoidance of Knight outposts and more strenuous digging, and even then it might prove fruitless — only food and coin, like the last, or even something of no use at all. The odds of finding reasonable clothing were slim, to say the least. These were almost always taken back to camps and adapted for refugees.
If she skirted the forest, she might go unnoticed entirely, or at least be able to evade anyone who took notice. Even where the forest was thinned, she was confident she could move more swiftly than anyone without a horse, and could see and hear anyone with a horse approaching long before they could discern her.
But how long will this take me, to walk all this way… a fortnight? Two?
She could not even remember how long it had taken her to make the journey the first time. She had walked much of it, stealing or begging food, pretending to be the daughter of some smith from the last village on an errand. An occasional friendly farmer with a wagon had saved her legs a little.
Looking back now, Adria was sur
prised she had made it all. Many had been amazed or skeptical that a young woman had been sent alone from one town to the next. Most had probably not believed her story at all. But there had been kindnesses, nonetheless. She had not gone hungry, and had even received a few coins here and there. But sometimes, she had not felt comfortable approaching a settlement, and had merely taken what she could from the back of a cart or an unwatched cellar.
She had both food and coin now, though not enough of the first to get her all the way to Windberth if she walked, and not enough of the last to purchase a horse or ship passage. She could at least buy some clothing, if not from a border village, then at least from a town a little further north, well across the border.
In the end, she decided time was more valuable. She changed nothing of her appearance.
If someone is foolish enough to shoot me on sight, before they hear my voice, then it is a good day to die.
Adria smiled, relishing in this small defiance, even knowing it a little foolish.
Just give me a little while longer to feel Aesidhe, she thought. Before the airs and graces return, and the scars they would hide.
She stamped her feet and swung her arms to keep the blood flowing through her limbs and ready for the next run. Before her, a little to the right, she could see a graying of the sky through poorly-thinned trees.
Some of the Aeman were wise enough to pick the right trees to use for their homes and their walls, their tools and their hearths. Some, but not the foresters of this nearest village. In a generation, they would have to walk twice as far to find wood worth use, or else settle for houses that would mold and decay, fires that would sizzle and smoke. Maybe one among them would think to begin some replanting, but maybe not.
Careless, she mourned. Is it so difficult to live without needlessly and foolishly destroying?
This was one lesson she would gladly teach any Aeman she encountered. Even the birds were saying it — even they knew their home was being changed too quickly, the balance of predators and prey shifting dangerously.
Heir of Scars I: Parts 1-8 Page 7