Eyes of Crow (4 page)

She turned back to the table, where her brothers and father sat in silence. It would have been generous to call the meal in front of them half-eaten; the food on the plates was rearranged rather than consumed.

Silina sat with Mayra and monitored her breathing. She had offered to attend to Mayra’s bodily needs, so the family could attend to their own grief.

Rhia wondered if Silina’s assistance only made it harder for them; they were left with nothing to do but look at one another. They had intended to take turns sitting with Mayra while the others slept, but Rhia suspected only her mother would sleep tonight.

“She’s awake.” Silina’s soft voice cut through the silence as if it were a shouted proclamation rather than a whispered notice.

The three men stood. Lycas and Nilo sat again, a grudging deference to their stepfather’s place. Tereus moved to Mayra’s side.

Silina approached Rhia at the window. “Tell me how I can help. I could feed the hounds or the horses, fetch some water.”

“It’s been done,” Rhia said. “We’ve checked the animals several times. There’s nothing to do but wait.”

Silina glanced over her shoulder at Lycas and Nilo brooding at the table. “I think a family could do other things besides wait.” She picked up a lantern and slipped outside.

Rhia considered the advice. Over a year had passed since she had spent an evening with her brothers. She sat at the table next to Nilo.

“Tell me a story,” she asked them.

They looked at each other, eyebrows pinched. Lycas said, “We don’t know any stories that would be, er—”

“Appropriate,” Nilo finished.

“I don’t care about appropriate. Tell me one of your stories about hunting with Rhaskos.”

Nilo’s lips threatened to curve into a grin. “Now?”

“They make you giggle,” Lycas said to Rhia.

“I know.”

He glanced in their mother’s direction. “Do you really think—?”

“I think she’d love to hear her children laughing together again.”

“If we must.” Nilo leaned forward, then took a dramatic pause. “As you may remember, Rhaskos the Goat has slightly less intelligence than the average hound.”

“Slightly?” Lycas said. “You insult our hounds.”

“Shame on you.” Rhia faked a stern look. “For such an affront you must clean their pens twice tomorrow.”

Nilo held up his hands. “Slightly less intelligence than the average hound’s left dewclaw. Better?”

“You are forgiven.” Rhia glanced at her mother. The candlelight played distorting effects about her face, but she thought she saw Mayra smile.

“In any case,” Nilo continued, “one morning we went hunting after Rhaskos had a bit too much ale the night before.”

“It wasn’t that he was hung over,” Lycas added. “He was still drunk. See, he had the impression that no matter how much you drink, as long as you sleep, even for an hour, you should wake up sober.”

Nilo chuckled. “He thought if it’s a new day, you’re a new person. His body had different ideas, though.”

As they continued the story, with Rhia prompting them as they forgot details, the three of them picked at the cold bread in front of them, then the meat, until most of the food was consumed.

Finally Tereus rose and approached the table. He looked at the twins. “She wants to speak with you, Lycas first.”

It made sense; Lycas was older by a few hours and had always been treated as the elder twin. It meant Rhia would be last. She stared hard at the floor and prayed to Crow to let her mother remain awake long enough to speak with her.

Tereus’s body dropped heavily into the chair next to Rhia.

“Papa, why don’t you sleep?” she said. “We can wake you if—when she’s—”

He touched his daughter’s cheek. “No. I’ll stay up. I can’t imagine losing any of these moments to sleep.”

“But it could be days.”

“Soon enough I’ll wake up without her. I don’t want to start quite yet.”

A choked sob came from Mayra’s corner. They looked over to see Lycas bent over their mother’s frame. Tereus dropped Rhia’s hand and scrambled over to them.

“It’s all right.” Lycas stood and wiped his face with a stroke of his arm. “Your turn, Nilo.”

Nilo took his brother’s place at Mayra’s side. Lycas returned to the table and sat, his elbows on the table, face in his hands. Rhia felt the barely controlled fury pour off him, and understood for the first time how dangerous he could be. Even with his first-phase powers, he could kill a man in little more than an instant with no weapon at all. The veins on the back of his hands bulged as he clenched his fists in his long black hair. She shifted away from him a few inches.

When he surfaced from his well of rage, Lycas gave Rhia a glare that withered her soul. In that moment, she knew, her brother hated her. The meal in her stomach soured.

“I’ll see if Silina needs help with—whatever she’s doing.” Her chair nearly crashed to the floor when she stood.

She had to smack the latch several times before it gave way and the door opened. Once it closed behind her, she leaned against the house and gulped the stagnant, humid air that had slunk in a few hours ago. Crickets and katydids sang in an uneasy chorus, so the night had not progressed far. No glow lingered near the western horizon, however. The haze of late summer hid all but the brightest of stars, and the setting half-moon gave off a muted glow behind the trees to her west.

A lantern bobbed into view near the barn. Silina called her name, and Rhia gave a weak wave in response.

The Turtle woman held a basket against her ample hips as she approached. “I found some dried chamomile in your mother’s herb shed. It will help her relax.” The lantern light glowed against the gray hairs that had overwhelmed the brown on her head. “I wish I could do more.”

“So do I. Me, that is. I wish I could do more.”

Silina put her basket down and hugged her. Between the healer’s warmth and the scent of the chamomile, Rhia felt momentarily soothed.

The door opened, and Nilo’s impenetrable face looked past her. “It’s your turn.”

She withdrew from Silina’s embrace. “Thank you,” she told him as they passed in the doorway. He did not respond.

Sitting next to Mayra, Rhia felt Crow’s weight upon her again, but she shoved the awareness to the back of her mind.

“Were you with Arcas today?” her mother asked in a rasping voice.

“Yes.”

“And?” The corners of her mother’s lips twitched upward.

Rhia’s face warmed. It felt like weeks, not hours, since she had made love to Arcas in the sunny meadow. With a sickening feeling, she realized they had probably been intimate at the instant her mother had fallen from the attack.

Mayra squeezed Rhia’s hand. “Don’t have that look. It’s not your fault this happened.”

“I should have been here.”

“It wouldn’t have made a difference. I can’t be saved. It’s my time. So was it how you thought it would be, with Arcas?”

Rhia looked at the wall above Mayra’s head. “It was better. And worse.” To change the subject slightly, she added, “I’ll miss him when I go away.”

Mayra frowned. “I’m sorry, Rhia. I should have made you go into the forest when Galen first asked. I was afraid.”

“It was my choice. I was afraid, too.”

“I should have pushed you out of the nest, baby bird. If I had—”

“I could help you now. As I am, I can’t. I’ll never forgive myself.”

“I forgive you,” Mayra said.

The tears that had swollen Rhia’s eyes spilled out onto her cheeks. She wiped them away with the back of her hand.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should be strong for you.”

“You have no idea how strong you are. Someday you’ll know. Someday soon, I think.” With a great effort, Mayra reached forward and touched the end of one of Rhia’s auburn curls. “I hate to think of all this hair gone.”

“Mother, don’t—”

“I must speak of my death, and all it means.” She let her hand fall and gazed at Rhia’s hair. “It’ll be curlier, like when you were a little girl. Your brothers will look strange to you.”

Rhia wanted to ask what Mayra had told the twins, why their anger had suddenly resurged, but she didn’t want to distress her mother. No doubt they would soon tell her themselves.

“When you go to Kalindos…” Her mother’s voice trailed off as her breath ran out sooner than expected. She drew another shallow inhale. “When you go to—oh!”

A gasp burst from Mayra’s throat, and she began to pant. Her eyes rolled white with pain and fear.

“Mama?” Rhia heard her voice turn into a child’s. “Mama, no—not now! Mama!”

Mayra’s hands flailed over the blanket covering her, as if reaching for the breath that wouldn’t come. An inarticulate plea bubbled from her throat.

Tereus lunged to his wife’s side. Rhia drew back, stepping away from the body before her, a body that was fighting the journey from life with every shred of energy.

She shut her eyes but still heard her mother’s desperate struggle for the air her lungs refused to grant. A sound like a great wind arose then, swirling past Rhia, moving up, up, and she looked to see if the door had opened to a storm.

She wished she had kept her eyes closed. Though no wind blew through the room, it was anything but calm. Tereus was trying to hold Mayra in his arms, but she pushed him away.

“It’s all right, it’s all right,” he murmured. “Let go. Just let go.” His voice, which had started in a whisper, grew louder. He seemed to bite back the words even as he uttered them. As Mayra’s struggles became more feeble, he was able to embrace her. He held her trembling body in his arms and rocked her, while Rhia and the twins stared in horror at their mother’s futile battle.

At last Mayra fell silent and still. Tereus eased her onto the bed and closed her eyes, praying to himself as he did so. Whispers to Rhia’s left and right told her that Silina and Nilo were beseeching Crow to guide Mayra’s spirit home.

She looked at Lycas. He stared straight ahead, his face frozen in grief. After a long moment, his gaze shifted to pierce Rhia, though his head did not move. This is what it would feel like to meet him in battle, she thought.

When the others had finished praying, Lycas hissed, “You said she would live the night.”

Tereus turned from Mayra. “Leave her alone.”

“He’s right, Papa.” Rhia’s lip trembled. “I was wrong. I’m sorry.”

“She wasn’t ready.” Lycas spit his words like venom. “Galen wasn’t coming back until morning to prepare her. Because of you.” He pointed to Mayra’s corner. “She shouldn’t have had to die like that!”

“That’s enough.” Tereus’s voice resounded like a thunder clap. “I said leave her alone.”

Lycas ignored him and focused his wrath on Rhia. “You couldn’t get the time right, you couldn’t even comfort her, all because you wouldn’t go for your Bestowing.”

Nilo put a restraining hand on his brother’s arm. “Maybe we should—”

“So now your own mother dies in agony and fear.” Lycas tore out of Nilo’s grip and advanced on Rhia. “Are you happy now, you little coward?”

Rhia’s sorrow turned to rage. She shrieked and flew at her brother.

Tereus stepped between them, moving faster than she’d ever seen him. His arms stretched out to hold Rhia and Lycas at the tips of his fingers.

“Not one more word.”

His voice was quiet, little more than a whisper, but it held more strength than Rhia’s scream or Lycas’s shouts of recrimination.

Silina moved toward Mayra, heaving the sigh of the habitually practical. “Preparations must be done. Rhia, help me, please.”

Rhia turned and took several halting steps toward what had once been her mother. Her feet felt shackled. Behind her, Lycas wept great, racking sobs. The sound muffled, and Rhia guessed that Nilo had drawn his brother close against his shoulder.

Her imagination of the scene would have to suffice, for she would not look at her brothers again tonight.

Her scalp smarted from the leather band that pulled her hair into one long mass at the back of her head. Beside her, Lycas, Nilo and Tereus waited their turns.

What seemed like half the village stood outside for their most beloved healer’s funeral to begin. Mayra would be buried here on the farm where she had raised her family for over twenty years, nestled in a bower of oak trees. Rhia tried to envision the place of peace that her mother’s soul would know forever. But all she saw and heard was the knife, its blade glinting in the light that trickled in from the window, its
shing-shing-shing
against the sharpening stone.

The house was silent. This private part of the ceremony involved no chants, no songs, no celebration of Mayra’s life. The Shearing was somber, matter-of-fact.

In theory, Rhia appreciated the custom of cutting one’s hair after the loss of a close relative—a parent, sibling, child or spouse. Not only did it provide an outward expression of grief, it allowed others to treat the mourners with the proper deference and sympathy. Such a wound should not be concealed.

But as Galen came toward her with the knife, she had to fight to keep from lurching away, from leaping to her feet and shrinking into the corner. She told herself it wasn’t vanity, that it was the pain of carrying a constant reminder of loss. But she thought of Arcas and wondered how he would view her without her long chestnut tresses, which she knew held most of her beauty.

Galen twisted his hand into the rope of hair to maintain a better hold. She leaned forward to pull the hair taut and tried not to wince. Only children needed Galen’s apprentice to hold their heads. She would be brave. She would—

The blade sliced the air with a
whoosh
. There was a slight tug at the back of her head, then the remains of her hair swung forward to caress her ears. She resisted the urge to touch it.

Galen’s hand appeared before her, holding a lock of her hair in his palm. It looked longer and redder than she had expected. She took it from him reluctantly, as if it belonged to an unsavory stranger.

From the corner of her left eye, she saw Lycas kneel straight as a fence post, gaze sharp and focused straight ahead, neck muscles tight. The blade sang, and Lycas’s body tilted forward from the release of tension. Black hair swept his chin.

Rhia rolled the lock of hair between her thumb and first two fingers. Numbness was setting in at last.

Later that morning, Rhia and her family gathered at the edge of the bower near the foot of Mayra’s grave. The other villagers, numbering in the hundreds, stood around the perimeter of the shady burial area. The sun, only halfway up the sky, filtered through the leaves to dapple the gravesite and promise an unusually warm day.

Galen stepped forward through the crowd, followed by his apprentice, the young Hawk woman Berilla. They both wore ceremonial white robes with hawk feathers sewn into them, but while Berilla’s garment bore only a few small brown and black wing feathers, Galen’s held glorious red-tipped tail feathers that covered half his body. When he reached the head of the grave, he raised his arms to the side to signal silence. The feathers gave him the splendor of a hawk with wings outstretched.

Rhia knelt with her father and brothers on the green woolen blanket laid out for them. The rest of the villagers remained standing and would continue to do so throughout the ceremony, even if it reached past sunset.

When all was quiet, Galen began a low, mournful chant, a simple tune to calm and focus the minds of those gathered. The crow feather hung heavy around Rhia’s neck, and she longed to conceal it. Everyone knew that if she had gone for her Bestowing years ago, she might be taking part in the ceremony right now. She might have helped her mother.

The chant finished, and Mayra was brought forth. Eight of the village’s older males carried her body, which was wrapped in a white shroud from head to feet. Rhia had spent hours the night before helping Silina apply thyme and bergamot oils to her mother’s skin and wrapping her body in strips of scented cloth.

On top of Mayra’s chest and stomach lay dozens of blossoms—blue coneflower and chicory, lacy white wild carrot—and over her throat, the otter fetish that Arcas had carved for her years before. Many of the flowers fell as the men moved her, leaving a colorful trail. The otter remained in place. The men laid Mayra’s body next to the grave and stepped back into the crowd.

Galen began to sing her spirit home. Berilla drummed the rhythm while an elderly man played the haunting melody on a wooden flute. The voices of the villagers—everyone but Rhia, Tereus and the twins—rose together to lift Mayra’s spirit into the winds, high enough that Crow would find it and carry it home. They would sing until a crow came into sight nearby, called, then flew away.

Without one of its People to do the beckoning, however, the bird’s appearance could take hours. Crows could not be summoned and directed like sheepdogs. Rhia hoped the Spirit would have mercy on them all and send one of His minions quickly.

The drummer thumped and the voices sang, never flagging. The sun rose in the sky until its rays angled through the opening in the trees, tingling Rhia’s newly exposed neck, which would no doubt be red by the ceremony’s end. A drop of sweat trickled from her temple past her ear, and her knees throbbed beneath her. She chided herself for noticing physical complaints when her mother was forever beyond the pains and pleasures of the body. But it was easier to concentrate on the ache in her legs than the hurt in her heart and the stinging behind her eyes that made them full and hot.

No one met her gaze except Arcas. His face held a mixture of sadness and shame. He must have figured out, as she had, what the two of them had been doing when Mayra began to die. She wanted to dash across the funeral ground into his arms. It would ease his pain, if not hers, and she needed to make someone feel better rather than worse. Such would be her role—turning death, the most inescapable reality, into an acceptable part of life.

But how could she move people to accept death when she herself wanted to rail and rave against it, to beat her fists and forehead against the earth in futile defense of the person it had just consumed?

Though she was not supposed to join in, Rhia closed her eyes and sang the chant in her mind, reaching out to the Crow Spirit and begging Him to send one of His kind to end this torture of her neighbors and friends.

A half minute later, a crow called overhead, from the topmost branch of a hickory tree. The chant faded, and the relief, while not expressed aloud, was palpable as everyone looked up to confirm the source of the sound.

The bird cawed a few more times, its head and chest bobbing with each throaty utterance. An unseen crow, probably its mate, returned the call from down the hill. As the crow took off, the branch shook, and a single dead leaf floated to the ground. Autumn was on its way.

The bird passed the bower, wings thumping the air, at once the softest and harshest sound Rhia had ever heard.

A choked cry from her left signaled Tereus’s final surrender to grief. She wrapped her arms around her father’s neck, and they sobbed into each other’s shoulders as Mayra’s body was gently lowered into the grave.

Her father’s pain rolled off him in waves. Tereus had claimed many times that he would never remarry if he outlived Mayra. Rhia believed it now, and wept for his emptiness.

A feast was held on the hillside after the ceremony. Villagers made a long line for the water and ale, their throats no doubt raw from singing.

Tereus and Rhia sat on their front step, on display—or so it felt to her. The funeral attendees filed past to greet them, but as soon as her father took one of them to the paddock to see the new yearling, the parade dwindled. Her brothers had retreated to a far corner of the farmyard, clearly preferring solitude.

Arcas soon joined Rhia.

“Are you sure you want to be seen with me?” she asked.

“I’m sure I want to be with you.”

She gestured to the villagers, who had banded together in groups of eight or twelve to eat. “No one will even look at me, much less share my company. My own brothers haven’t spoken to me since she died.”

Arcas studied the frayed hem of his sleeve. “They’re grieving. Don’t expect them to make sense.”

“But something doesn’t fit. We were getting along last night. I thought they’d forgiven me for not having the power to help her. Then she told them something that set them off.”

“Why don’t you ask them?”

Rhia looked across the field at the twins. They sat alone, with no food or drink, Lycas scowling and Nilo directing his stony gaze at the ground in front of him. The village tailor and her husband the horse healer approached the twins to offer condolences. The villagers received polite nods but no words, so they hurried back to the feast as soon as courtesy would allow.

Rhia turned back to Arcas, who made a conciliatory gesture. “They do seem less than receptive right now,” he said.

“Arcas, may I speak with Rhia alone?”

She looked up to see Galen, still in his ceremonial white robe. Arcas slid away after giving Rhia’s hand a surreptitious squeeze.

The older man eased himself to sit beside her. “I’m sorry. I should have stayed last night. I wanted to give your family some time alone, but—”

“But you shouldn’t have trusted my judgment.”

His voice held a heavy weight. “Our powers can become cloudy when we turn them on those we love.”

“Must I never love anyone, then, so that I won’t fail them when they die?”

Galen shook his head. “You can learn to separate your feelings from your magic. But it will always be harder with some. Not impossible, just hard.”

Rhia looked to the east, where the pale green valley met the GreatForest. “I wanted Mother to see another sunrise. It was her favorite time of day.”

“They say that the Other Side is more beautiful than a thousand sunrises, though that’s no consolation.” When she didn’t reply, he asked quietly, “Are you ready, then? To travel to Kalindos and train with Coranna?”

Ready?
She would never feel ready to live among the wild Kalindons, to learn to wield her powers by watching people die.

Nonetheless…

“When do I leave?”

“At spring thaw. By the time your mourning period is over, it will be well into winter, when it’s best not to travel. I’ll take you into the forest myself.”

Rhia knew she should be grateful that the Council Leader had taken a special interest in her, though she suspected it was more for her value as a Crow than for any belief in her ability.

“But first,” he said, “I must train you in ways of the Spirits. How to journey within, visit their dwelling places in the Spirit World.”

Rhia touched the ends of her shorn hair for the first time. The training would let her escape, give her somewhere to put the pain where it couldn’t prick her heart.

Now she was truly ready.