Faery Worlds - Six Complete Novels (6 page)

“This quest was supposedly so important you told me it was worth dishonoring myself to flee in secret rather than attend my trial. You don’t remember?”

“I thought they would execute you.” The scent of ripening corn wafted from the fields. Mother’s nose wrinkled slightly in distaste. She’d never liked corn, something she’d only eaten after she married Father. “I must have concocted wild things to save you.”

Why had he thought otherwise? She would never change.

“This is the last time I’ll see you, Mother.” He was proud of his straight back. He would not let himself scratch the dried mud that caked his body, though it itched like crawling flies.

She ruined the solemn moment by crying. He let her hug him and weep into his chest. He patted her shoulder. He realized he had been looking forward to her quest, to give him purpose in his exile. In his mind, he tore up the idea of finding the Vaedi, and all the other crazy things his mother had urged him, all lies, all spider-silk and parrot feathers.

As he walked away, the mud didn’t itch as badly. Her fierce hug had rubbed away most of the dust cake, leaving behind only a stain.

Rthan

Rthan surveyed the damage to his water spell. Weeks of fasting, planning, traveling and dancing, ruined. The careful crystalline lines he had built up around the mountain snows had been realigned, diverted. His original configuration would have unleashed a flood of snowmelt several months from now, with spring’s kiss. No longer. The new glowing blue lines of magic would sluice the melt water harmlessly down a dozen smaller arroyos, instead of toward the enemy settlement in the main valley below the mountain. Someone had protected the Rainbow Labyrinth tribehold.

“Who could have done this?” he asked aloud.

The other six men and women with him only mirrored back to him his own bafflement and bemusement. They shivered and wheezed in the snow, not used to either the temperature or the altitude. He knew they were wondering if he would order them to stay the long weeks required to dance the entire spell again.

He wasn’t really speaking to the little girl at his side. Nonetheless, she looked up at him with large, grave eyes.

“Kavio the Rain Dancer,” she said. She had joined him almost unnoticed.

Meira. His daughter, his only child, was only eight, but already she promised to be a classic beauty. Her long, straight black hair was knotted by strings of pearls in twists that reached her ankles. Her tiny face was a perfect moon, her mouth an adorable pink shell, and her eyes deep tide pools reflecting the shades of the ocean and the sky. People said she looked like him, but miniaturized and refined. He was a bulky, tattooed tower of muscle, with his long hair disciplined into a top tail of tiny braids to mark his kills. She was an adorable pixie doll.

Meira. His daughter, his only child, had died six years ago. He knew this, knew the person at his side wasn’t really Meira, and yet, he couldn’t stop the love and pain he felt every time he looked at her, glowing faintly blue by his side.

The six with him were all Blue Tavaedies, and they could see her, not as Meira, but as an azure radiance too brilliant to bear. They knew he sometimes called her by his dead daughter’s name, and because of that and because her power frightened them, her presence spooked them. They backed away now, shielding their eyes.

“Should we break camp?” asked Rthan’s second in command, Dorthamo. The man’s gaze slipped past the shimmering blue girl, back toward the lean-tos and campfire along the shore of the frozen tarn. “If we don’t leave now, we won’t have time to do the primary hex.”

“If we hex the Yellow Bear tribehold, but leave their allies unmolested, their allies will still be free to come to their aide during the attack,” Rthan said.

Dorthamo’s face sagged. “Yes…”

“But if we stay longer, the pass will freeze over and we won’t be able to return at all,” Rthan said. “We must break camp. We must cast the primary hex. Or call off the venture entirely.”

“I don’t think the War Chief would agree to canceling.”

“Neither do I,” said Rthan. He waved. “Go ahead. Break camp. I need a moment to speak to…”

“Her?” Dorthamo still wouldn’t look at Meira.

Rthan nodded.

Dorthamo swallowed hard. “Is she angry?”

Afraid to hear the answer, he scuttled away before Rthan could reply. The others hastened after him, and began to disassemble the hide tents.

The little blue girl slipped her hand into Rthan’s, just as his daughter had so many times.

“I’m not mad at you, Daddy,” she said.

“Don’t call me that. I can’t…” He pulled his hand away. “You said Kavio the Rain Dancer did this. Then the Rainbow Labyrinth must know of our spell. They will try to retaliate.”

“No.” A breeze lifted strands of her hair to play in a chilly wind. Dark, inhuman power shone from her eyes, belying the innocence of her child’s face. “They are fools. As for Kavio....”

She smiled at him, but it wasn’t the smile of a mortal child. The coldness of glaciers and the ruthlessness of typhoons glinted in that cruel smile. He shivered. He loved her. She was all he had, since the murder of his family. He had to admit, though, she terrified him even more than she frightened the others. He knew her better.

Kavio

Three days out from the tribehold, Kavio found his first fight. Rovers, men who had left their birth clan, but not yet married into a new allegiance, often traveled together in packs, like wild dogs, and like dogs, they hunted. Sometimes for need, sometimes for pleasure.

Three dropped onto the path in front of Kavio. One was missing his nose and ears, which meant he was probably a mariah, a captive destined for human sacrifice, who had escaped in the middle of his torture. The other two were undoubtedly exiles like Kavio, judging by the whip marks on their backs, though they did not wear their mud and ashes, and he assumed had no compunction against carrying out more of the crimes which had won them expulsion.

To his surprise, the rovers didn’t attack. They invited him back to their campfire. Shrugging, he accepted—was he any better than they? He found their lack of either resentment or awe oddly refreshing.

“Do you know who I am?” Kavio couldn’t help but ask them.

The noseless, earless one grinned. “I don’t care, Exile. Don’t you understand? This is your chance to escape who you are, become who you want.”

In their camp, they had a captive, some toothless old man, whom they’d tied to a tree. Taking turns, each rover sliced a piece of flesh off the old man’s thigh, ignoring his piteous howls, then tossed the meat on a rock in the fire and ate it.

“We eat first,” the leader, the earless one said, “Then we dance and invite the fae to eat the rest. Who says you have to be a Tavaedi to dance? The fae don’t care who serves them, or how well you dance, only that you do.”

None of the three had magic in their auras, save for a few wild, random glimmers born of strong hates and brooding envies, but—and this was kept secret for this very reason—fierce emotion alone could do damage if combined with dancing, especially if the fae were involved, never mind blood sacrifice and dark bargains.
When my Father looks at me, thought Kavio, is it these men he sees?

“So you’re hexers,” Kavio said, “as well as cannibals?”

The two exiles kept chewing. Their noseless, earless leader stopped.

“You’re not going to join us, are you?”

Kavio smiled apologetically. “No. I’m going to free the old man. You’re going to try to stop me. Then I’m going to kill you.”

The leader hefted his spear, which spurred his companions to do the same, but Kavio was already moving. Weaponless, it took him several minutes and cost him an ugly punch to the ear to kill all three rovers. He untied the old man and asked if his clanhold was far. The old man scrambled away, too terrified to answer. Pursuit seemed more likely to scare than help him.

He couldn’t desecrate the dead, even bandits, so he searched near the main path until he found a smaller path which paralleled it, a trail marked as Deathsworn by a black megalith capped by a skull.

To trod the path of the Deathsworn was to join them, or join the dead, and they in turn, were forbidden to taint the paths of ordinary men. The Deathsworn were neither fae nor exactly human, though they had once been human. The fae couldn’t see them. The Deathsworn recruited from all tribes and belonged to none. They were not allowed to involve themselves in tribal wars or clan politics. They performed a gruesome job, and most people loathed and shunned them, but everyone needed them.

He left the bodies beneath the skull stone. After a slight hesitation, he relieved one corpse of legwals and a spear.

The legwals stank of sour milk and blood, a stench that reminded him of the first time he’d killed a man. Though Kavio had only been ten, not yet past Initiation into manhood, he’d already been Tested and proved a Tavaedi. During the fight, he’d been so sacred he pissed himself, and because of that so embarrassed, he hadn’t told Father what happened. His stupid fear, his stupid pride, had almost started a war.

Was this the meaning of his journey omen? He’d spent his whole life trapped in the literal and political mazes of the Rainbow Labyrinth tribehold. This was his chance to shed those restrictions, grow himself anew. He didn’t want to be his father’s shadow, or his mother’s reflection, but neither did he care to be a rover. If he remade himself, he wanted to become more than he had been, not less.

Sheer cliffs lay directly west, so he took the gentler eastern path from the box canyon then circled back into the mountains. A generation ago, many thriving clanholds had nestled in the arroyos and cliffs of these mountains. Eagles nested in the thatch bomas where warriors had once stood guard. Whole clans had bequeathed nothing to the future but their bones. His father would not say how he had survived those years; that generation hoarded food and secrets, but Kavio knew more than his father suspected. It was in the West, in Yellow Bear, Kavio had learned his father was not the hero he’d always believed.

At times, he felt sure someone followed him. He went so far as to double back on his tracks, in case the rovers had friends. He saw no one.

At a major crossroads in the trail, however, a crowd of men and women waited. He growled to himself. He’d sharpened the stone point on the spear he’d won from the rovers, but if it came to real battle, he wasn’t properly armed.

This lot looked more deadly than the rovers. For one thing, he knew them and many of them were Tavaedies. It stung to realize that many of those standing there to confront him were young men and women of his own generation whom he had considered friends. Even Nilo, the son of Danumoru and Shula.

Kavio refused to show how they had hurt him. Weakness must be concealed; he’d learned that much from his father.

“Well?” he challenged.

“We want to come with you.”

This, he hadn’t expected. “Are you mad?”

“If the Morvae are going to start exiling Imorvae again, we want to be with you,” Nilo said. “If the blooded spear is to come, we’re going to be on your side.”

The others grunted agreement.

“Don’t be fools. There must be no blooded spear, no war. It would rip the tribe apart.”

“So you’re just going to accept being smoked out of the Labyrinth like a rat?” cried Nilo. “You’re just going to let Zumo win? You know that none of us will ever follow him as War Chief!”

“It’s too early to say it will come to that.”

“His blood flows from the Bone Whistler, and so do his ambitions. He’s already got you out of the way!” said Nilo. “With the White Lady under the Curse of Obsidian Mountain and your father growing older, and now you exiled—who else is there to stop him?”

“You going into exile with me won’t help,” said Kavio.

Nilo exchanged glances with some of the others. “It will—if we go to the Yellow Bear tribehold to raise an army against him. There are many of our people still living there who would follow us, who would follow you, Kavio. You could return in a year’s time with Tavaedies and warriors at your back! We could finally wipe out—”

“Enough!” said Kavio. He inhaled air past his clenched teeth to calm himself. “Enough, Nilo. You mustn’t talk like that. You mustn’t even think it. I will raise no army to march against my own tribehold. And I will take no one into an exile that I alone earned.”

“I guess we all knew you would say that.” Nilo shifted his feet. “That’s why we brought you journey gifts.” He held out his spear. “I want you to have this—no, don’t shake your head. You can’t refuse, it’s a journey gift. We took care to gather nothing from the Labyrinth itself, only outlying holds.”

One by one, each one of them pressed close to Kavio to give him gifts. Weapons, clothing, food, water, even jewelry. Overwhelmed, touched, Kavio could only murmur his thanks.

When his friends had dressed him and weighed him down with almost more than he could carry, they finally allowed him to say goodbye.

Nilo clasped his hand, then hugged him. He said in Kavio’s ear, “But you are going to the Yellow Bear tribehold, aren’t you, Kavio?”

“Perhaps.”

Nilo smiled, satisfied with that. “Whatever you do there, we will be waiting for you when you get back. We have no doubt you will be back. And then the blooded spear will be loosed, whether any of us like it or not.”

Kavio

Kavio camped alone, as before, in much greater comfort, but with even less peace of mind. Nilo and the others had meant to encourage him to come back to the Labyrinth. Instead, the disturbing conversation made Kavio wonder—if his return to the Labyrinth would ignite a civil war, maybe the best thing he could do would be to stay away. So much for the freedom of exile. His responsibilities trailed him like spies.

Perhaps actual spies trailed him as well. He again heard a rustle nearby, a subtle crackling in the leaves that made him tense. Maybe Nilo, or some other would-be ally, still wanted to follow him into exile. Or maybe some would-be enemy wanted to make certain he would never return.

Kavio climbed higher into the mountains. The peaks met like clapped hands to divide the rains of the world in half. All waters of the eastern fingers cascaded into a drought-dry landscape of sandstone phantasmagoria—stone rainbows, stone islands, stone waves, striated stone flavors of pepper and cayenne. All the waters to the other side flowed west, through terrain sweetened by late summer storms, down, gently down through valleys of oak and golden poppy, down, gently down to coastal forests and the sea.