Honor's Paradox-ARC (33 page)

It was also much like the previous Summer’s Eve when she had been tricked by Hatch into fighting to become the Earth Wife’s Favorite. There was the serpentine molding around the well mouth that led straight down the River Snake’s throat; there, the indentation where the Snake had claimed the previous Favorite, except for his sheared-off feet. The whole, now as then, was lit by a blazing sunset that tinged all beneath with crimson shadows.

The shaman wearing the Earth Wife’s skirts saw Jame and trotted out to greet her. Under a straw wig and rouged cheeks, she recognized Tungit’s wizened features.

“It’s about time,” he said, making a grab for Bel’s bridle as if to prevent her from escaping, but the Whinno-hir shied away from him. “Did you bring it?”

Jame handed him the knobby, blackened knuckle.

Tungit sighed with relief. “The last Burnt Man’s bone. It was only a guess that it had come to you, though the Earth Wife did say that she had done something to bring you running.” He called over a boy and gave it to him. “Quick, put this in the bonfire set beside the hanging man.”

“Where is Chingetai?” Jame asked as the boy ran off.

“Placing the other two hundred and five gathered bones to change the bonfires into bonefires.”

“What, all in one night?”

“Set the fires beforehand, didn’t he? A week’s work he made of it, all the time avoiding Noyat scouts. Well, tonight he has to run the whole circuit again, putting a bone in each fireplace, still dodging the Noyat. They’ll be out in force tonight, thick as jewel-jaws on a fresh kill.”

Jame remembered that once the fires were primed, each with its own cinder bone, Chingetai would play the Burnt Man and ignite them all simultaneously by jumping over the first—presumably hidden in that mound of kindling in the square’s northern corner. Still, that was a lot to do in one night. She said as much again to Tungit, hoping for more information.

“Ah.” He shoved back the straw wig and wiped a sweaty, wrinkled forehead with the back of his hand. “Take your questions to Gran Cyd’s lodge. Maybe she has time to explain.”

Jame rode on, thinking that this time both the village and Kithorn’s square seemed to have their roles in tonight’s ritual. Perhaps it had been the same last Summer’s Eve, but if so she had never heard of it. Generally speaking, Kithorn was men’s business and the village, women’s.

Here was the Merikit homestead on its palisaded hill under a smoldering sky. The gates opened before her and closed behind, manned by girls from the maidens’ lodge.

“Ride on, Favorite, ride on!” they called. “Gran expects you.”

The wooden walk echoed hollowly under Bel’s hooves. Lodge-wyves popped out of their sunken houses amid billows of savory smoke to wave as she rode by. If all went well tonight, the village would feast. If not, they might find themselves fighting for their lives.

The courtyard outside Gran Cyd’s lodge was crowded with armed men and women who cleared a path for Jame. Anku calling out a greeting, echoed by her war maids. Dismounting, Jame descended into the lodge. A fire burned on a raised hearth at its northern end, illuminating bright tapestries and a wealth of rich furs melting into the shadows. Otherwise, the lodge seemed to be empty. Muffled voices came from behind a hanging in back of the Cyd’s gilded judgment chair. Behind the tapestry was another short flight of stairs. Again Jame descended and ducked under a low lintel deeply carved with
imus
into the loamy shadows of the Earth Wife’s lodge.

“About time,” said Mother Ragga, sitting back on her haunches in a flounce of skirts. An irregular ring of small stones surrounded her in the middle of her lodge’s dirt floor. Outside it stood Gran Cyd in a green gown shot with gold thread, her dark red hair spilling over white shoulders. The gentle swell of her belly made her more statuesque than usual, her presence enhanced by imminent motherhood.

“You can’t go,” she was saying patiently to Prid, as if she had said it too often already. “This is work for your elders.”

The girl shook her tawny mane in frustration. “I’m old enough to be a war maid. Almost. Besides, Hatch is out with the men hunting the wood. Please, Gran!”

“Your cousin is older than you, however closely the two of you have been raised. Stand back, my love.”

Then they saw Jame. Prid rushed to her across the stone circle, drawing a growl of warning from the Earth Wife.

“My granddam won’t let me stand by my sisters. Will you?”

How like a child she was, refused by her mother, turning to her father. Jame touched the girl’s bare shoulder. It felt surprisingly thin and her face, upturned, was full of something close to desperation. Something had changed since the spring equinox, but what?

“It isn’t for me to say whether you go or stay,” she said gently. “Prid, what’s the matter?”

But the girl turned away, biting her lip, without answering. Meeting Jame’s eyes, Cyd make a slight, helpless gesture.

The ground shivered. Glowing cracks opened in the floor, spelling out the Four’s sigils. The square was probably similarly marked by now. Heat warped the air over each fissure. Jame slipped off the scythe-arms sheathed across her back, then her jacket, taking care where she dropped them.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

The Earth Wife indicated the circle with a sweep of her plump, grubby hand. “These stones come from each of the preset bonfires. When one flips over—see, like that one!—we know that Chingetai has placed a cinder bone there and turned over the stone’s mate in the firebed. Thus we track his progress.”

Jame observed that the Merikit chief had already completed a third of his circuit, fast work indeed.

“How far out are the fires placed?”

“About three miles, centered on the village. A closer circle would have been more secure, but our noble leader must needs use the folds in the land to grab all he can.”

“As when he tried to seize the entire Riverland.”

The Earth Wife snorted. “That would never have worked, not with the fires in a line like that. He got carried away by more than the weirdingstrom. As it is, this”—here she indicated the map—“may work, unless he gets caught. The set fires are hard to find, just a few dry twigs and a pinch of kindling. Unless the Noyat actually see him place one, they aren’t likely to stumble across it. And the Merikit are doing their best to harry them through the woods.” She shook her starling’s nest of a head, dislodging twigs and a confused caterpillar. “Still, they’re spread pretty damn thin.”

Another stone, the next in the progression, stirred, then tipped over.

“So the danger,” said Jame, working it out, “isn’t so much with the sites ahead as with the primed sites behind: the Noyat only have to snatch the bone out of one of them and run off with it.”

Much the way she had done, she reflected, before the previous Summer’s Eve, without being aware of the consequences.

“Snatch it and keep it,” Mother Ragga agreed. “If a stone turns out of sequence, chances are that the Noyat have disturbed the site. Then we send Merikit to check. Hence that mob at the door.”

It still sounded chancy to Jame. “Why aren’t they all out guarding the set bonefires?”

“Think. How better to say, ‘Here it is’? Besides, we haven’t enough warriors to guard each and every site properly.”

“Why aren’t the Noyat busy with their own bonefires?”

Ragga glowered at her. “Ask a lot of questions, don’t you, missy? I’ve noticed that before. It’s very annoying. In answer, the Noyat don’t set ’em. Put their trust in the Shadows, haven’t they? We Four are nothing to them unless the Burnt Man catches one of ’em over a border that he’s sealed. Even then, he doesn’t catch ’em all.”

Jame considered the Earth Wife’s stricture on her curiosity and dismissed it: how else was she to learn?

“You know, I’ve never really understood what it means to close the hills. I thought it just meant that you didn’t welcome intruders, and that the watch-weirdlings warned you if anyone crossed into Merikit territory with iron. To come without, presumably, would mean to come in peace, as my brother did last winter. But what if the Noyat were to arrive with bows and flint-tipped arrows?”

The Earth Wife gave a snort of laughter that made the rocks shiver. “So they did last Winter’s Eve. This entire past year, thanks to you and Chingetai, they could have marched across with an entire smithy strapped to their backs. When the hills are properly sealed, though, the folds in the land confuse intruders. They may cross into Merikit land, but their chances of finding its heart, the village, are slight. Meanwhile, we can hunt ’em down at our pleasure.”

Jame was a little disappointed at this. She had hoped that no one could enter Merikit territory at all and so by extension penetrate through it into the Riverland. Still, she could see how a proper sealing decreased the odds of the latter.

“Look!” said Gran Cyd, pointing. A stone, flipped over once, had turned again, then another and another.

Mother Ragga swore. “They’ve found three bonefires. Prid . . .”

But the girl was already on her way up the stairs.

Gran Cyd watched her go, and sighed. “Things have not been easy for my grandchild since the spring equinox, when she failed as the Ice Maid.”

“That was hardly her fault.”

“Perhaps not. To my mind, she did all that was asked of her, but the refusal of the Eaten One to accept her has raised questions, not least about her chastity. Why was she found unworthy? The other girls made her so miserable that she left their lodge—which was flooding at the time anyway—and the war maids are of two minds whether to accept her into theirs. Ever. Only Hatch and Anku have been unfailingly kind.”

Jame had wondered how the thwarted rite might affect her young friend. The war maids might take what lovers they pleased but apparently not so their younger sisters, if that was the problem. It would do no good to protest that the Eaten One had preferred a different Favorite, and that a Kencyr; the Merikit would still ask, “Why?” And they, like the Riverland, had suffered the consequences.

“Where has she been living?”

“With me. My daughter left her a lodge of her own, but she would be alone there and very unhappy. I don’t believe that she has been back to it since her mother died in childbirth.”

A moment later Prid returned with two Merikit men and Anku.

“Here, here, and here.” With a stubby finger, the Earth Wife indicated sites on the map. “Go.”

They left quickly. Prid looked after Anku longingly.

“Gran . . .”

“No.”

Meanwhile, Chingetai was halfway through his circuit, presumably unaware of the disturbance behind him.

“My housebond is clever at woodcraft,” said Gran Cyd, hugging herself. Jame had never before seen her show uncertainty, and found it alarming now. “Dressed in nothing but his tattoos and Burnt Man’s ash, he should be hard to catch.”

“Yet they must have at least seen him,” said the Earth Wife. “That’s three parties gone on the hunt, all of our reserve.”

They waited anxiously. The fissures on the floor widened and the air above them danced with heat. Runners returned to announce that they had retrieved two of the missing three bones.

“Actually,” one man admitted, “the Burning Ones got to them first. We only had to sort out the right bones.”

“Where’s Prid?” Jame asked suddenly.

As one, they realized that they hadn’t seen the girl since her great-aunt’s party had set out.

“Damnation,” said Jame, grabbing her jacket and weapons.

“Be careful!” the queen called after her.

She slung on clothes and arms as she rushed up the two short flights of stairs and out into the deepening night. The space before the lodge was empty except for the very young and the very old.

“Prid?” she asked them.

“Gone with the war maids,” came the answer, as if she had needed to hear it.

A child, perhaps four years old, held Bel with the mare’s patient consent. Jame seized the reins and mounted.

“Run,” she told the Whinno-hir, and turned her toward the outer gate. The girls there barely opened it in time to prevent horse and rider from piling into it nose first.

Outside, Bel stumbled on the steep descent, then gathered herself and leaped forward. They had only to follow the Silver, as Jame had done at the spring equinox. The Silver Steps were about a mile from the village. She hoped to catch up with Prid, but doubted that she would given the other’s head start. By now it was full dark, the red faded in livid gashes from the sky, the way lit by intermittent shafts of moonlight piercing a patchwork of clouds.

Bel emerged at the meadow where on the equinox the Merikit had feasted in honor of the Eaten One. Ahead, a circle of figures at the foot of the falls played a slight form back and forth between them to bursts of stiffled laughter. Cloth ripped. White skin shone.

Bel shied at a body half hidden in the deep grass. For a moment, Jame looked down into the still face of the war maid Anku, an arrow through her throat. Other bodies dimpled the meadow. They must have walked into an ambush.

By now the intruders had seen her and their circle split open. Some drew bows but their leader stopped them. Even from here, Jame could see the scar-twisted lip of the Noyat chief Nidling who had led the horse raid against Tentir and killed her cadet Anise. He held Prid with an arm twisted up behind her back, then thrust her contemptuously away to fall in a small heap at his feet.

“Well, well, well.” His voice carried clearly across the meadow. “Have you come to play, little girl?”

Jame swung down from Bel. As she walked toward him, she tugged free the scythe-arms at her back and slid her hands into their leather grips. Black rage built in her, giving a tiger’s lope to her stride. Here was her prey, too long denied, here her claws, two and three feet long respectively with deadly spurs behind. Cool night breathed in her face, spiked with the sharp scent of blood. Lithe and loose-limbed, she moved into her element.

The Noyat were spreading out, moving to encircle her with drawn knives. Good. She wanted them within reach. A flicker behind her. She spun and parried a thrust. Her blade slithered up her attacker’s arm, splitting cloth and skin. A backhanded slash opened a second mouth below his chin and he fell away in a spray of blood, suddenly speechless. Two came at her from either side. She slid out from between them with a wind-blowing move. As they crashed together, she swept in low, hamstringing them both.