The Unfinished Song - Book 6: Blood (27 page)

“It’s the shape that matters. Kemla, you aren’t a virgin.”

“That’s a lie!” Kemla snapped. “I knew you couldn’t see any truth!”

“You’re with child,” Gwenika whispered.

“
Impossible!
We were only together once…and Tamio was drunk!”

Dindi and Gwenika both stared at her, open-mouthed.

Kemla sank to the mat, where she shook her head, twisted her hands in her lap and groaned. Her face was ashen with fear and dismay.

“It gets worse, I fear,” said Gwenika.

“Nothing could be worse than this.” Kemla pounded her belly. “Arggh! I will
kill
him!”

“I’m so sorry, but you must both be in the Parade of Maidens. I was told to see that Kemla joined the parade, regardless of what I found with my magic. And Dindi….well, it often happens that a maiden who is no maiden is included in the Parade, but the reverse is never allowed. I would gladly lie for you, Dindi, you must know I would, but I can’t, I can’t, it won’t work! Amdra can eat my thoughts. She doesn’t do it often—she says they are so scattered and jumpy it’s like trying to catch a hundred locusts—but she’ll do it for a day as important as this! There’s no way to keep you out of that parade!”

“You don’t have to lie for me, Gwenika. I’ll go, if I must.”

Gwenika nodded, her misery evident. “I must…must test the rest of the maidens.”

She squeezed Dindi’s hand and tried to put her hand on Kemla’s shoulder in a gesture of comfort, but Kemla growled so fiercely that Gwenika scurried away.

Dindi didn’t touch Kemla or offer any platitudes, but sat near her, protectively. They both watched Gwenika, who, they realized only now, was the most important person in the room.

Gwenika approached cluster after cluster of girls to dance and draw light from their auras. Wherever she went, she left girls weeping and worried in her wake, as if they only now awakened to the danger they would soon face. With new eyes, Dindi saw the girls not as wolves, ready to fight, but as lambs about to be fleeced. The girls were like the flori, on the cusp of blossoming from childhood to womanhood, instead closed back in on themselves, cocooned in fear. This equinox brought them no closer to spring.

Kemla sat up straight. “Dindi, that clown paint makes you look ridiculous.”

“That’s sort of the idea.”

“It won’t do at all. Fa! Very well, you don’t have to beg. I’ll take pity on you and help you fix yourself up.”

The room was filled with bowls of powder and paint. Kemla collected a dozen and began to re-paint her own visage and Dindi’s.

“Thank you, I think,” said Dindi, trying not to blink while Kemla blackened the rim of her eye with kohl. “But you realize we’re probably both going to be sacrificed to the Black Well by the end of the day.”

“If we are going to die young, we might as well die pretty.”

Vessia could hear the screams begin even before she reached the Bridge of One Thread, but she refused to look back at the tree where she had left the Green Lady. Mrigana stood at the Bridge, waiting for her.

“You travelled last night,” Vessia said.

“Nowhere useful.”

“To the Past?”

“I haven’t visited the Future for a long time.”

“Even here, where Xerpen has gathered such magic, Death can block you?”

“Death’s power is weak here, but apparently she can still deny us access to the Future.”

“It will change after the eclipse. We will have our full powers back.”

Mrigana gazed into the swirling black cloud. “I hope so, Vessia. I mistrust this darkness Xerpen has allowed to pool here. I wonder if he knows the true price of it.”

“I think he does,” said Vessia. “He is willing to pay any price to bring back our people. Aren’t you?”

Mrigana brushed dust off her purple dress. “That’s what I’ve been asking myself. How far will I go to win this War? How far
must
I go?”

In the distance, they heard screams. Perhaps it was only one of the humans being tortured in the Blood House. Perhaps it was the Green Lady.

“Do you think I am wrong to let this happen and do nothing?” Vessia asked. She gestured vaguely toward the screams.

“Does torture matter to our kind? She will survive it. A day or a year, what is that measured against immortality?”

“If it were you being tortured, Mri, I wouldn’t let you suffer one minute, never mind a day or a year.”

Mrigana looked startled. “Vessia…have you ever wondered…”

She fell silent, but Vessia sensed the question was vital, not idle banter.

“Wondered what?”

The horns sounded, and Mrigana shrugged aside her question. “It doesn’t matter. We’d better go attend the humans’ next soiree.”

They crossed the Bridge and joined the other Aelfae. The humans were arranged today much as they had been for the ceremony yesterday. Xerpen and the other notables stood on a step of raised turf behind the stone altar, under a feathered scaffold.

Xerpen smiled when he saw Vessia, though it didn’t crinkle his eyes. “I’ve found a solution for your problem. I’ve decided to do you a favor and take the annoying clown off your hands.”

Vessia should have been glad, or at least indifferent. She wondered why she felt uneasy. Mrigana also narrowed her eyes, which was strange, because Vessia could have sworn Mrigana didn’t like the human girl.

Xerpen just smiled. “You shall see.”

He turned to go. Vessia prepared to follow, but Mrigana spoke suddenly.

“What is
that
?”

Far down the mountainside, dark specks crept up the bottom of the canyon. They moved in formations, not like a herd, but like an army. The habits of human fighters were all too familiar to Vessia. Even at this distance, when they appeared as tiny insects, she knew better than to dismiss the danger.

A human army besieged them.

Vessia had been waiting for this to happen. The Traitor had let the humans know where the Aelfae were trying to hide every other time, why not now?

“Humans sniff out Aelfae as ants sniff crumbs,” Vessia said through gritted teeth as she watched the specks below. They looked harmless enough from this distance, those clever little ants, but there were many more septs of human warriors than Aelfae.

“It was no accident,” said Xerpen.

“The Traitor.”

“Of course.”

“We should have dropped everything else until we found the Traitor.”

“That’s exactly what I’ve done,” he said. “I know you feel I have acted mysteriously. It is not because I have neglected my duties, but because I am executing them.”

“I never doubted that.”

“But you
do
have doubts,” he said gently. “Tell me. Let me soothe them.”

Vessia hesitated. The half-human girl, Dindi, had raised some uncomfortable possibilities, but should Vessia heed the wiles of a known liar? Wasn’t that unfair to Xerpen?

“You unwove my memories of my life between the War and now…. Did I have a family?”

“Of course you have a family. The band of Uncursed is your family, as it is mine.”

“We have no other?”

“None.”

One of the Raptor Riders, a human girl on a giant hawk, landed near the promontory where they stood. It was Amdra. Her hawk, the human shapeshifter, became a man and knelt so Amdra could blindfold him. He remained there, on his knees, blindly waiting, while she approached Vessia and Xerpen.

Amdra bowed her head.

“Grandfather, the army belongs to Uncle Vio, as we thought. He wants to parley with you.”

“I have nothing to say to him,” said Xerpen.

“
’Grandfather
?’” Vessia raised her brows at Xerpen.

“I have a daughter named Nangi, and Amdra is
her
daughter.”

“You just told me you had no other family beside the Uncursed!”

“None who are important.”

“Not important? Who mothered this child?”

She remembered the half-human girl saying:
Your husband. Your son. Your husband’s brother. And his daughter
…. Who was also Xerpen’s granddaughter…

Her mind was spinning. It was too much. Xerpen was right, she had only
one
family. Her sept of Aelfae brothers and sisters. She glanced at Mrigana for support, but the dark-haired Aelfae studied the humans grimly and ignored Vessia’s discussion with Xerpen. With Mrigana, that might not mean she was not paying attention. She spoke little, but heard much. Either way, she didn’t have any advice to offer Vessia…and why should she? The idea of Xerpen having offspring was absurd. Almost as absurd as the idea of Vessia herself having offspring.

Aelfae did not marry. They had playmates. Marriage was a human invention, a form of mutual slavery. Play was never involved. Vessia could not match herself and marriage together in the same thought.
If I had a child, you would have told me, wouldn’t you? Did
we
have children together?
But she didn’t ask. She feared the answer.

“Don’t waste worry on this girl,” said Xerpen. “Look at her. Ugly as a Toad. Even the humans call her that: Toad Woman. She’s not one of us. Her mother and her mother’s mother were human. Her father too.”

Amdra the Toad Woman stood right there as he said this, with no expression on her face. There was something rather misshapen about the girl, Vessia admitted as she studied her. The only color in her aura appeared to be Orange. Yet, Vessia sensed that her power, if singular, still ran deep.

“She has Aelfae blood,” Vessia said. “Like the little clown you foisted on us.”

“Blood isn’t always enough,” said Xerpen. “Especially if it is diluted. Why are you still standing there, Amdra? You’re dismissed.”

“Yes, Grandfather. But.” She darted a tongue to her lips, then knelt and lowered her eyes. Like her shapeshifter slave. “I have a favor to ask.”

“Now what?”

“I need my slave fully compliant before the battle. Can you take away his memory of the last several moons? Let him remember only what he did shortly after I brought him here. I know you could use the Loom to unweave his recent days…”

“If your slave is disobedient, kill him and use another Raptor. You are dismissed. Go, before I start to get angry.”

“Yes, Grandfather.”

After she was gone, Vessia said, “You were telling me about how you unwove my memory. I want to know what was lost.”

“That’s your question? Really? Vessia you were Cursed. You should have seen your body…you were a hideous, decrepit hag. Your hair was scratchy and white, your skin nothing but folds and wrinkles. That’s what the Curse had done to you. I restored your immortality.
I freed you of the Curse
.”

The enormity of it awed her, as he’d intended, but he wasn’t finished.

“The others were in a much worse state,” he said. He glanced sidelong at Mrigana, who seemingly paid no heed. “They were Cursed too and had succumbed entirely. Death herself had touched them. Death intended they would never rise again, as faeries are meant to, but would lie forever cold in the earth’s gut, like human corpses. Food for worms. I freed them of the Curse too.”

They had told her about the cocoons.

“For so long, I’ve had to work alone.” He sighed and let her see the loneliness pooling in his eyes, the pain he usually hid with a mask of cheer and confidence. “It’s been hard, Vessia, without you by my side. Everything I’ve done has been for you and for our people. For the new day we will enjoy together. It’s close now. Just two more days. So close I can taste it, Vessia. What was lost will be regained.”

She touched Xerpen’s arm. “I have not meant to sound ungrateful. I know your path has not been easy, and you must have sacrificed much to bring us back. But I can’t stay in a basket like a trapped bird.” She gestured to the army in the distance. “Enemies surround us. I want to fight.”

An army could hike the Eastern Slope. That was the least precipitous of the cliffs surrounding the summit, the only one which was not straight down. On the far western side, the mountain leaned over an arroyo; good for hanging cages; bad for an attempted assault from below.

Not surprisingly, the humans in the tribehold had built a wall, and bumas—rickety wooden one-man watchtowers—only on the far eastern side. Archers manned the bumas, while Raptor Riders circled on their birds overhead.

“I don’t want you in harm’s way,” said Xerpen.

“Don’t patronize me. You know I won’t abide that.”

“I do not belittle your valor or your power. But it’s better to let the humans tire themselves out against each other. The Orange Canyon tribeholders are already bristling like porcupines at this intrusion from the Rainbow Labyrinth. They all hate each other, these humans. Nothing is easier than stirring them up against their brothers. By the time they realize they need to unite against us, we will be stronger. We’ll have plenty of fighting to do then.”