Faery Worlds - Six Complete Novels (20 page)

Vio stretched and rubbed his eyes. He shook himself. “By the Seven Faeries! It’s dawn! We were watching you all night.”

She looked at him.

“You aren’t even sweating,” he marveled. “What are you?”

“I
must
have her,” said Vumo. “At any price. I must have her!”

“
You
must have her?” Vio asked coldly. “You forget yourself, little brother. We serve the Bone Whistler. But I agree with the basic idea.” He bowed to Hertio, who was also rubbing his eyes. “We will take your bargain, War Chief of Yellow Bear. We will take the Corn Maiden.”

“Then you must take me as well,” said Danumoro, rising to his feet.

“Don’t be a fool, Danu,” said Hertio. “It was out of friendship for you that I did this.”

“Then you never understood what it meant to be a friend,” said Danumoro.

Brena

Brena bowed her head over the fallen body of her enemy. Though he hadn’t driven a spear through her heart, he’d killed her all the same. She wasn’t sure why she had saved him from Kavio’s blow. To spare his life, or to keep him alive until she could drive the bear’s black arrow through his heart? Would she do that, take the life of an enemy in cold blood, a human sacrifice? With Gwena and Gwenika dead…

The young man who had fought with such supremacy touched her on the shoulder. She supposed she should apologize to him for misjudging his honor, but she didn’t have the strength. In any case, he seemed preoccupied with another matter, asking, “Would rain cleanse the hill?”

“I suppose,” she said. She rolled her eyes to the cloudless, moonless sky. “Do you know how often it rains in Yellow Bear?”

“No less than it does in the desert canyons of my home, I imagine,” he said, and she remembered he had originally been from the Rainbow Labyrinth. “But I am a Rain Dancer.”

Her jaw dropped. When he requested a clear space to dance, she nodded dumbly and staggered back to tell the other Yellow Bear warriors and Tavaedies to drag the bodies out of his way.

“He claims to be a Rain Dancer,” she told them, suddenly afraid to believe it. Many Tavaedies claimed such powers, but true Rain Dancers were more rare than rain itself.

Nonetheless, everyone worked to remove the bodies from the center of the Stone Hedge. Brena helped organize teams to help the wounded and carry away the dead. All the while, however, out of the corner of her eye, she watched the young man, and was aware when he began to dance.

As his fighting had been flawless, so was his dancing. Otherworldly grace whispered in his movements, sending chills down her spine. Something about him frightened as much as awed her. She was glad he was not her son, and wondered what his mother thought of having born such a fearfully powerful child.

Thunder clapped above, startling her. Hard torrents of rain out of nowhere pelted the hill. Gore and grime streamed away in the sudden flood. The water felt delicious against her bare back, washing away the ache of the lash marks along with the blood. Not just rain, she realized, a healing rain. Her amazement deepened. Those who danced the most powerful of Blue Chromas might dance rain, but who could dance healing and rain, Yellow and Blue, into the same spell?

Ten minutes of bucketing rain battered the hill, then ended as quickly as it had started.

“Who are you?” Brena asked him, but he didn’t hear her. His attention snapped to watch someone walking across the clearing.

Hertio, the War Chief of Yellow Bear tribehold, threaded the rings of stones, with his elite band of Bear Warriors in tow. He must have arrived some time during the Rain dance. He pointed to the young Rain Dancer.

“Seize him!” Hertio commanded. “He is an exile from the Rainbow Labyrinth tribe.”

“No!” cried Brena, daring to thrust herself forward. When Hertio turned to look her up and down, she blushed, but persisted. “He may be an outtriber, even an exile, but he fought on our side. He saved us!”

“Did he?” asked Hertio. “Or was he in league with the Blue Waters tribe all along? The Initiates are dead. Perhaps it was the plan all along to distract us with a fake battle while they suffocated.”

“No!”

“No, they didn’t suffocate? If they are still alive, then what are you waiting for? Perform the spell that will allow them to arise out of the earth. Finish the ceremony you came here to perform. My men and I will take care of the wounded, the dead and the prisoners of war—including this one,” he jerked his finger at the Rain Dancer, “until we can determine if he is friend or foe.”

Brena

The twenty-one Zavaedies and Tavaedies dressed in swift silence. The utter blackness of pre-dawn matched their spirits. Though the healing rain had soothed the physical wounds inflicted on them, nothing could heal the ache of what they had lost. They danced open the faery door to the underhill knowing they would find corpses.

At least they died innocent,
Brena told herself.
Better than to emerge into this world of torture and war and hate, where even good deeds were rewarded with betrayal.

The hole into the earth appeared at the center of the clearing. Normally, the magic of the exit would have allowed each Initiate to emerge from the ground one at a time, as the ceremony required.

Abiono descended into the hole. He leaped back out almost immediately, his whole face transformed.

“They live! They live!”

“But how is that possible?”

“The magic of the tor itself? It was built by fae…”

“Who cares? They live…”

Dizzy babble finally found focus in the agreement to carry on the ceremony as though the abomination had never interrupted it. The Tavaedies took their places around the circle, one before each of the stones, not bound this time, but bathed in halos of magic light.

Hadi

Hadi woke up with a biting headache. He’d had the strangest dream, of a beautiful woman dancing…

No light. No food. No water. No air. No wonder he felt like gunk under toenails. But a draft of air had revived him somewhat. He didn’t see anyone around him…

…
because it’s dark, you idiot,
he reminded himself.

But he couldn’t hear anyone around him either. Rejecting the possibility that he had gone deaf, and the even more unlikely scenario that the other Initiates around him had stopped whining, he crawled toward the fresh air.

He saw the faint outline of moonlight. He scrambled to his feet and raced outside.

Ugh, he was in the center of the creepy megalith circles they called the Stone Hedge.

“Follow the brightest light you see,” instructed a voice.

The Tavaedies, all dressed up in their finery, stood in a circle around him, in line with the stones of the inner circle of megaliths.

Hadi didn’t hesitate. The brightest light? Only one Tavaedi held a torch. The rest stood in the shadows. He walked toward the torchlight. How easy was that? Some Test.

The Tavaedi said, when he approached, “Present your totem.”

“Uhm, here.” Hadi fumbled with the corn doll he had on a string around his neck. He lay this at the feet of the Tavaedi.

“Congratulations, Hadi, son of the Lost Swan clan of the Rainbow Labyrinth tribe,” said the Tavaedi, handing him an ornate obsidian pestle. “You are now a man.”

Gwenika

Gwenika awakened to a golden light. The wisps of a beautiful dream, a dancing maiden more brilliant than the sun, tingled at the edges of her mind.

She was still in the cave, but she appeared to be alone except for a glowing ball of yellow light that hovered in front of her.

Come with me.

Gwenika couldn’t stand in the cave, so she crawled after the puff of light through the catacombs. At last, the unhewn rocks in the floor tilted up an incline. Gwenika crawled faster. Soon she realized the ceiling was tall enough that she could stand, so she did. The glow puff didn’t wait. She hurried after it.

Pale as it was, the moonlight stabbed her eyes when she first emerged from the cave. She recognized where she stood—the center of the Stone Hedge.

Tavaedies dressed in elaborate costumes stood in between the large monoliths. Most of them stood in shadow, except for one, who held a torch.

He called aloud to her in a sepulchral voice, “Follow the brightest light you see.”

The golden puff twinkled at Gwenika. It bobbed toward the shadows on the opposite side of the circle from the man with the torch. While Gwenika looked on, wide eyed, the golden ball of light grew into a blinding sun.

“It’s so bright,” Gwenika murmured, hiding her head with her arms.

Dance with me.

The miniature sun turned into a Vision of glowing men and women dancing. Nothing felt more natural than to copy their movements and join them.

That’s when she saw the yeech, flying toward her on the backs of leathery-winged bats. She wanted to duck and run, but she remembered what Dindi had told her, and indeed, when she forced herself to look up at the horrid things, she realized she was pulling them toward her on strings of light.
Let go! Let go!
she begged. The dance was becoming hopelessly tangled.

“Let. Me. Go!” she shouted. She slashed at the strings, not really expecting it would help, but to her surprise they were as frail as cobwebs and floated away. The yeech on their bats veered away into the night sky.

All that remained was the grace and golden light of the dance of the Ladder to the Sun, the oldest and most powerful
tama
of Yellow Bear.

At the end of the
tama
, the golden sun faded to a tiny puff of light cupped in the hand of a Tavaedi in a Yellow costume.

“Do you see any other lights?” asked the Yellow Tavaedi. “Look around the circle carefully. The torch is not important—look for other spheres like the golden one that led you here.”

Gwenika scanned the circle of Tavaedies and stones, but all she saw were men and women standing in the dark. She shook her head.

“You’ve done well,” the Yellow Tavaedi reassured her. “Present your totem.”

Gwenika unfastened her corn doll totem from the gold bead necklace about her neck, and deposited it with a bow to the Tavaedi.

The Tavaedi regarded her gravely. “You are invited to join the Yellow Dancers secret society, to learn its dances, its magics and its hidden Patterns. Do you accept the invitation and pledge to impart knowledge of the secrets to no one outside the society, upon pain of death?”

A Tavaedi? Me?
Gwenika’s heart began to pound very fast.
My sister, yes, we all knew she would be invited. But me?

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I pledge my word.”

“Congratulations, Gwenika, daughter of the Sycamore Stands clan of the Yellow Bear tribe,” he said, handing her a windwheel with painted yellow petals. “You are now a Tavaedi of the Golden Maize Society.”

Dindi

Dindi woke up alone, bathed in light.

All around her on the cave walls, she saw luminous glyphs. The symbols looked the same as the abstract designs painted upon houses or woven in to clothing. Chevrons, half moons, zigzags, arrows, squiggles. Things that looked like claw marks, and things that looked like bird wings. All glowing in every primordial color of the rainbow.

She traced the sigils with her fingers. Where did the light come from? She couldn’t tell. She followed the glowing glyphs up a slope, until she reached the exit from the subterranean vault.

Wind whipped her hair once she stepped into the cold night air. All around her, she saw huge stones inscribed with more glyphs. The symbols shone like brilliant flame against the basalt rock of the megaliths and the black night sky.

“The Tor of the Stone Hedge,” she whispered, spinning in a circle. She remembered the Vision clearly. Where were the other Initiates? Had they also seen the Corn Maiden’s breathtaking dance before her enemies upon this very tor?

Dimly, she could see the silhouettes of people, Tavaedies in costume, standing at the base of the megaliths with faint balls of light cupped in their hands, but it was impossible to see their faces because they were backlit by the overwhelming waterfalls of light streaming from every stone.

“Follow the brightest light you see,” a woman commanded her.

Is it a riddle?
she wondered.
Among lights all equally bright, can any be brightest?

She turned around again, in a slower circle this time, searching to see if any particular megalith glowed more strongly than the others.

“If you can follow the light, do it now,” said the woman. “The brightest light you see.”

“But all the stones are lit!”

“Don’t spin fancies to impress us. The stones are not lit. Dance, if you can see the
tama
to follow. Otherwise, walk to the torch.”

Which of you should I follow?
Dindi asked the stones of light silently.
Which of you can sing me the Unfinished Song?

As if in response to her thoughts, the three concentric circles of shining stones pulsed more brightly still. It was like trying to stare into the sun. The light stabbed her eyes. Music washed over her like a river that would drown her.

Luminous figures jumped out of the stones and swirled all around her, cavorting madly. It was the
tama
of the Unfinished Song, and it was as breathtaking as when the Corn Maiden had performed it. But she saw now that it was not simple at all. The dancers flipped and leaped and twirled in the air. They flew through the moves, they swayed, they swam, they fought, they flung themselves around the circle in steps so convoluted she couldn’t even catch the movement clearly, never mind copy it. The faster they twirled and whirled, the more cacophonous the song and the brighter the lights until she couldn’t see anything any more. The radiance from all sides battered her like a rain of fire. She screamed and hid her head.

“Go away, go away, I can’t take it!”

Darkness felt like a cool cloak when it settled back around her. She collapsed onto the grass. It felt cold and wet and prickly.