The Unfinished Song (Book 5): Wing (31 page)

Xerpen, on the other hand, sounded grimly pleased.
“Very good, Amdra. Very good. Perhaps it won’t be necessary to take
either the boy or you. I might have another option. You had better
hope my tama goes well. If not…you
will
offer me your son’s
blood, and with a glad heart.

“Here is your chance to prove your life is worth
something. The Deathsworn who started Green Woods tribe will never
admit to truce now. The war came too soon. They’re like ants poked
with a stick, and won’t easily return to their dirt heap until we
kill enough of them. But Finnadro serves the Green Lady, who has
bowed to her Orange sister for the sake of the Aelfae. Cooperate
with Finnadro. Kill the Deathsworn. And there’s a girl with
him—kill her too. She seems important to Finnadro, so she may be
dangerous to us. Do not tell Finnadro your plan. Just see that she
dies. Do you understand? Don’t fail me again.”

“I understand, Great One.” Amdra touched her
forehead to the floor. Relief made her limp. New threats hardly
registered. She gibbered, “Thank you for your mercy, thank you
thank you thank you…”

Xerpen’s feathered eagle cape rippled behind him as
he strode away.

“He was testing you,” said Hawk.

“I know,” Amdra said. “I passed.”

He said nothing, but she heard that silence pound as
loud as drums.

“I didn’t mean it,” she said.

“He
didn’t mean it. You did.”

“It was just another of his stupid tests, and I
passed. That’s all. I passed.”

That was what she said, but inside she screamed:
Lies, lies, lies
. She had failed. She had crossed the line
no mother was meant to cross. Hawk knew it, and she knew he knew.
She hated him for seeing her as she truly was.

“I know how to deal with him,” she insisted. “I’ve
had to deal with him a lot longer than you. You have to trust
me.”

His rockslide of anger crushed the flower of his
inner cry:
I would trust you if you had ever, just once, trusted
me. I would have loved you if you ever, just once, not demanded it.
I would have died for you if you had not been willing to sacrifice
the only one who should matter to either of us
.

“And our son?” asked Hawk. “Should he trust you
too?”

“How dare you!”

Light flashed between them, a thread, orange like
rust, or desert dust, dry and cruel, and Hawk fell to the floor
writhing in pain. It wasn’t enough for Amdra to hurt him
physically, she knew he had made himself immune to his own body.
The agony of the flesh didn’t touch his inner core. She wanted to
lash out at him in a way he could never ignore.

“What do you care what happens to the baby?” she
sneered. “He’s not even your son, Anayo!”

Amdra achieved her goal. Hawk’s pain was
unimaginable.

His abyss was also Vessia’s opportunity.

She extended an image of light, of freedom, of two
birds in flight.

You know what you have to do, Anayo
, she said
directly into his mind.

Yes
, he replied, though she could tell he had
no idea who was speaking to him, nor did he care.

He snapped the leash that chained his soul to
Amdra.

He was free.

Careful
, warned Vessia.
Wait until the
right time. You will know it when it comes
.

Who are you?
he cried.

But Vessia felt Amdra stir in suspicion, and had to
withdraw from the link before Amdra traced the thread.

Maybe, Vessia hoped, she had taken the first step
toward her own freedom as well as Hawk’s.

That hope was crushed when Amdra appeared in person
at the courtyard. A dozen armed Tavaedies accompanied her.

“Xerpen has invited you to cross the Bridge of One
Thread to the East Peak,” Amdra intoned. No trace of anguish or
savagery showed on her ugly face. No emotion showed at all.

Vessia hoped Anayo would find his patch of sky and
take flight. It was too late for her.

The great raptors landed. Amdra slid to the ground.
She surely saw the wildlings who stood with bows half drawn in the
brush in a rough semi-circle around Finnadro, but she did not
acknowledge them. She addressed Finnadro alone.

“The Orange Lady has told me that Green Woods has
agreed to a truce,” she said.

“I never claimed the right to speak for my whole
tribe,” said Finnadro. “This is a duty of my own which I must
fulfill—even if it means accepting an alliance with an
oath-breaker.”

Amdra flushed. “I am no oath-breaker.”

“We had a truce once before. We invited your people
in good faith to our tribal lands. How did you repay us,
Amdra?”

“We were deceived, Finnadro.” She hissed. “
I
was deceived. The Deathsworn played us both for fools.”

“Explain.”

“He can change his appearance. He came to me in the
guise of…someone I obey, and told me that your people planned to
attack us first. We struck only in self-defense.”

“We would never have attacked guests!”

“Now, of course, I know it was all lies, meant to
divide us and set us against each other so that
he
could
steal the White Lady from us.”

“But
you
have the White Lady.”

“To protect her.”

Finnadro snorted.

“We have a common enemy in the Deathsworn. Do you
want our help or not?”

“What do you propose?”

“We will fly you over the mountains to the slopes
around Orangehorn. You and your …pets.”

Fox snarled. “We aren’t pets. We’re people.”

Amdra shrugged, elegant in her disdain. “We can get
you to the general region where we believe the Deathsworn is
lurking, but you can sniff him out on the ground better than our
raptors could. Once your side—or ours—flushes him from hiding, we
both close in and destroy him.”

“He has a captive. She must not be hurt during the
battle.”

“Of course not,” Amdra said smoothly.

“Look at her aura,” whispered Fox.

Jagged deception spiked in the Green around Amdra,
clear as footprints across a field of knee-deep mud.

“I see it,” he said softly.
But some compromises
are necessary
. Aloud, to Amdra, he said, “I accept.”

The roar of the crowd stoked heat in Tamio’s bones.
A big grin spread over his face as he and his enemy danced around
each other.

They each held two sticks: a wood cudgel – shorter,
knobbed at the top; and a staff, long and slender, for defense. The
opponent hammered at Tamio; he kept his staff steady to ward off
the blows, while hopping around, trying to wedge his cudgel past
the other fellow’s defense. His opponent whirled the cudgel in
snapping bites, and Tamio leaped and rolled out of the way. But as
he bounced to his feet, a blow caught him in the back. The pain
helped him focus. His own moves quickened. He feinted then twisted
his wrist and his cudgel slipped inside the other’s staff and boxed
his ear. He feinted again and hit his thigh and before he could
recover, darted in again and slammed his head so hard that the man
stumbled, leaving himself open. Tamio ruthlessly moved in to pound
and pound him, until his face was a bloody pulp, then Tamio jumped
on his chest, grabbed his head and twisted it until he heard the
vertebrae in the neck crack.

His own side cheered. The enemy horde was surly and
subdued but let him break his arrow. The man’s near kin broke his
too, promising that no one would take revenge for this kill.

Kemla gave him water and mopped his forehead. He
grinned at her, surprised. “Were you worried about me?”

“Of course not!”

“Good, because that means you know I’m
that
good.”

“If your head got any fatter, we’d have to skin and
cook it.”

Hadi stepped into the ring next. Tamio worried and
even Kemla shook her head, biting her lip. The big opponent,
Shegar, intimidated even Tamio.

Aw, muck. We’ll have to peel what’s left of Hadi
off the ground like a sheep patty
.

Nothing in the first unfolding of the fight changed
Tamio’s mind. Shegar roared and pounded Hadi with his short stick.
The most that could be said for Hadi was that he kept his defense
stick in place. A few blows got through. Shegar blackened his eye
and bruised his rib, but Hadi had already lasted longer than Tamio
would have guessed.

Then the real shocker came. Hadi started to fight
back. He roared too, even louder than Shegar. He shouted something
heroic like, “That’s for my family, you mucking sheep-kisser!” He
jumped at Shegar with teeth barred, like a crazed honey badger
attacking a cougar three times its size.

Shegar went down. Hadi hit his head. Shegar spewed a
geyser of blood and teeth. He hit dirt like felled timber.

The enemy crowd keened in agony and shock, but the
cheering amongst the Green Woods and Rainbow Labyrinth drowned out
their groans. Tamio screamed his approval loudest of all.

He ran into the ring to bear-hug Hadi. Pounded his
back, shouting, “You did it, you goat-headed mucker! By the Lost
Wheel of the Faeries, you mucking
thwacked
that
sheep-sleeper!”

“Yeah,” said Hadi. He didn’t look too happy about
it, but that was just Hadi being Hadi.

“Let’s go get drunk. Vumo has offered to provide the
beer. He’s from our clan, but related to one of their Eaglelords or
something, so they all defer to him…Hadi? Hello?”

“I should go help with Shegar’s body,” said
Hadi.

“What? Why?”

Shegar’s kin were gathering around the corpse to
pick it up and place it in the death jar, which they would roll to
a Deathsworn menhir outside the sheepmeet wall.

“He was a real honorable opponent,” Hadi said. “I
should, uh, honor him.”

Tamio rolled his eyes. “Fa! Get on with it, then, if
that’ll let you rest better. But don’t take too long. I’ll be with
the old man Vumo, getting tips on how to trap quail.”

The menhir was a lot farther away from the sheepmeet
than it had looked from the wall. Huffing the whole way, Hadi
rolled the jar to touch the upright black stone mounted with a
sheep skull and horns.

The sun set prettily over the mountains. Hadi could
still see and hear other duels going on in the sheepmeet. From a
distance, softened by the ambiance of dusk, the pageantry of ritual
death looked romantic: the dust, milling crowd, cheering and
mourning relatives, the drunken songs of memorial and celebration,
the flute and drum.

“Took you long enough,” said Shegar, unfolding
himself out of the jar. “And did you have to roll over
every
rock you found?”

“You aren’t exactly light as swan feathers.”

“Good job,” says Shegar. “You were pretty weak at
first, but you picked up at the end. I think the way I spit out the
blood really sold it. The teeth were an inspiration.”

“Where did you get them?”

“Sheep’s blood and sheep’s teeth too! Hope no one
looks. Ha! Now, that you’ve killed me, I can start a new life, with
a new name, someplace far, far from here. With a lot of frisky
ewes. Ha! Winking!”

“Winking,” Hadi agreed. His knees wobbled now that
the nervous energy which had sustained him poured away like milk
from a jug with a hole. His body deflated. He sank to the ground
and hugged his knees.

“You get the spoils of victory, of course,” said
Shegar. He had prepared his change of clothes in advance. He tossed
Hadi the garments he’d worn during the fight. The wool stank of man
sweat and sheep dung. Except for a little ram’s blood, and the fact
that the legwals would hang on Hadi like a tent, not a bad set.

“I guess I have to give up these too,” Shegar said
sadly. He handed over the last of his worldly possessions.

Hadi perked up. He finally had a pair of
sheep-fleece boots.

The snowstorm passed over the Spider Loom clanhold,
but the damage had been done. The trail leading out of the valley
was snowed over, and they would have to wait until it cleared
before they could continue. Umbral was not happy, because he
worried that his disguise would be questioned, especially since
Essi and Farla already knew he was not Rudgo. For Dindi, however,
the respite came as a welcome break. Not a
rest
—hard labor
was expected of her; Essi and Farla thought her a slave and treated
her as one; and she counted all of the Spider Loom clansfolk as
enemies, since their tribe had attacked her ancestral clanhold.
Indeed, she probably had deathdebts she ought, in all honor, to
redeem in blood. All of that was still preferable to spending time
alone in Umbral’s company, which had become too confusing.

Why had she saved his life when they were falling
from the sky? She kept asking herself that. She’d needed only to
let go of him. Let him drop, while she soared away on her Aelfae
wings.

Fortunately, she did not see much of him except at
meals and at night. He spent the day in the woods, hunting, cutting
firewood, or repairing the wooden slats on the roof. Dindi spent
her time obeying Farla, who delighted in having someone lower on
the totem pole to bully.

Farla decided to take advantage of the extra pair of
hands to make
chunyo
. Dindi had never heard of it, but she
dutifully followed Farla up a mountain trail to a high alpine field
dotted with stone hutches. Dindi and Farla were not the only women
working in the field, but the others did not greet Farla, nor she
them. Farla did not converse with Dindi either, except to cuss,
complain or call her names.

The hutches covered pits filled with potatoes.
Orange Canyon tribe grew over two hundred kinds of potatoes, but
the only ones available here, this late in the year, were small,
round, bitter and slightly poisonous. Much like Farla herself. The
first task was thus to leech them in a cold stream for a day. Dindi
was given the job of wading into the icy water to place the baskets
in the stream.