It Wakes in Me (9 page)

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Authors: Kathleen O'Neal Gear

BOOK: It Wakes in Me
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“What is it?”
Flint slipped his hands beneath her hips and held her in place while he forced himself deeper. Snail and Black Turtle edged closer to watch. Snail had started to breathe hard.
Flint whispered, “Do they hate me?”
“Who?” She frowned up at him.
His dark eyes glistened. “My relatives.”
The fear in his voice astounded her. “No. Didn’t you hear them when you entered the Captives’ House? They don’t believe the stories that you betrayed me. The fools think you are as much a hero as the Loon People do. I’m sure they believe you are here to save them.”
He squeezed his eyes closed for an instant, but in gratitude or pleasure, she couldn’t tell. “Have they asked you any questions?”
“Many. Cold Spring wants to know what happened to his injured wife. Apparently she was taken—”
“She’s dead. Her injuries were too severe. Strongheart couldn’t Heal her. What else?”
She tried to remember all the questions that were thrust upon her when she’d first entered the Captives’ House. “One woman, I don’t know her name, said her five-winters-old son wasn’t captured in the attack. She—”
“She’s wrong. He was captured. The warrior who took the boy adopted him into his family. He’s unhappy, but alive and well-fed.” Flint began thrusting again, driving himself into her.
Sora watched the agony on his handsome face draining away, turning to rapture.
“Jawbone is worried about her daughter. She said she saw her run away from the—”
“Yes.” His voice had constricted, and she could tell he was close. “She did run away. But they tracked her down and killed her.”
Flint’s back arched and he cried out, stilling the conversation between Black Turtle and Snail. Snail took an eager step forward, waiting to be summoned.
Flint glanced at the youth, then collapsed on top of Sora and murmured, “Tomorrow, during the trial, they may torture you, Sora. For the sake of the gods, do not try to be brave.
Be weak.
Make them pity you.”
“But Flint …”
He roughly rolled away from her and got to his feet. “Snail?” he called. “Come over here.”
“No, Flint, please. Don’t let him—”
“I’m going to use every tool I have to accomplish my goals, Sora,” he hissed. “Including you.”
As Snail trotted up and tugged off his breechclout, he said, “My turn?”
In a nasty voice, Flint answered, “No. It is not your turn. I told you that you have to prove yourself before I let you taste her sweet flesh. The next time someone is trying to kill me, I expect you to help me. And give that message to your friends. If they help me, I’ll let them take a turn, too.”
SORA WALKED SHAKILY BACK TO THE VILLAGE. SHE FELT like her heart had been cut out and left bleeding on the forest floor; but if it took all of her strength, they would never know it.
Behind her, Flint and Black Turtle laughed at something lewd Snail had said.
She kept her eyes on the ground. As the cool evening breeze blew through the palms, their shadows danced over the forest floor like gray silken veils. She concentrated on them to keep her mind off the fact that she longed to lie down in the grass and weep.
Through the trees, she saw Eagle Flute Village. The light of the rising moon gleamed from the faces of enemy warriors, crude thatched houses, and hungry people: things she had feared her entire life.
How was she going to get out of this?
Feather Dancer, if he was alive, would be nursing his wounded body. The other captives were old, or injured, or quivering with fear. They could not help her. In fact, they were
looking to her with childlike faith, praying she would get them home safe.
She glanced over her shoulder at the three men following her. They smiled and continued to joke. There had to be a way … something she could do. But what?
Without the authority of her former position, she couldn’t offer them corn to feed their hungry, or exotic Trade goods to buy them off. Only Wink, Long Fin, and the Council of Elders could make those decisions.
Just as Flint had said, she was nothing.
Her exhausted souls worked the problem, going round and round, coming back to the same dead end.
I am nothing. Flint is right.
She had never felt so powerless.
A palmetto partially blocked the trail. Her numb legs barely felt the brush of the sharp fronds as they scratched her shins.
Blessed gods, this
had
to be a dream. Her shadow-soul must be walking in the dark underworlds where the monsters lived. Surely she would soon wake to the smells of roasting venison and frying corncakes, the high-pitched squeals of children running in the plaza, and Rockfish’s soft voice telling her it was very late, that she needed to rise and resume her duties as chieftess of the Black Falcon Nation.
As she stepped out of the forest, soft murmurs filled the air. Every eye seemed to be upon her.
Sora marched toward the guards who ringed the Captives’ House, and the two men who blocked the doorway leered at her.
She stopped in front of them and said, “Get out of my way.”
The bigger of the two men folded his arms, tipped his chin to something behind her, and said, “I have orders to hold you for him.”
Sora turned.
Strongheart flowed through the darkness as though part of
it. His cape billowed around his long legs. When he got closer, he glanced at Flint, and said, “I’m sure you won’t object if I, too, take a turn with her.”
Her heart went cold and dead in her chest.
Flint shifted uncertainly. “Of course not, Priest.”
Strongheart took Sora by the arm and guided her away from the Captives’ House. As they walked, he said, “You’re shaking. Did they hurt you?”
She glanced sidelong at him. Anger had strained his voice.
“No. Given more time, they might have, but Flint was in a hurry.”
He led her to his house and held aside the door curtain. “Go in. There are warm blankets by the fire. You must be cold.”
Sora ducked into his house and looked around. The firelight silhouetted the baskets and pots that sat beneath the bench encircling the walls. Blankets had been laid out by the fire, as though prepared for her. She walked to them and eased down. Warmth seeped from the cloth and penetrated her damp dress.
Strongheart knelt to her right and studied her for a long time, his gaze taking in the old leaves tangled in her hair and the blood that oozed from her split lip. He was a homely man, his round face too wide, his bulging eyes too big, but he had a powerful presence.
He gestured to her mouth. “Which one did that?”
“Flint.” She touched her lip and winced. “He was a little too ‘eager.’”
Strongheart didn’t say a word. He just rose to his feet, and walked around the fire to the pot that sat in the coals. As he picked it up by the handle, he checked another small pot that perched on the hearthstones and said, “Are you hungry?”
She shook her head. “No. I was, but … not now.”
“A cup of tea, perhaps?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
He dipped a cup into the pot hanging from the tripod at the edge of the flames and handed it to her.
“Won’t your chief be angry that I’m here, rather than in the Captives’ House?”
“I’ll risk it.”
Sora drank slowly, savoring the sweet flavors of maple sap and dried cactus fruit. “Why did you help me?”
“You needed my help, didn’t you?”
She didn’t answer.
He dipped up a cup of tea for himself and sank to the floor a short distance away. After drinking and swallowing, he said, “My spies didn’t inform me that you’d been taken until too late.”
Clutching her cup in both hands, she rested it upon her drawn-up knees and stared at him. “I would find new spies if I were you.”
His brows lifted. “Yes, that’s good advice.”
She took a long drink of tea and let the warmth filter through her cold muscles. A creeping sensation of helplessness vied inside her with the certain knowledge that she
would
figure a way out of this. She always had. No matter what boulders life had rolled into her path, she had always found a way around them. When her father died and her mother blamed her, she had sent her reflection-soul flying with the Cloud People, where no one could find it. After her sister drowned, she had fought ferocious waves to get to shore and then wandered alone in the freezing forest until she’d gotten close enough to home that her people had found her. When Flint divorced her …
Her belly twisted as though a stiletto were being slowly turned in her intestines.
“Are you all right?” Strongheart asked in concern.
She squeezed her eyes closed. “No. But I will be. I just need some time.”
Strongheart didn’t speak for a time; then he said, “Do you know why he hurt you?”
“We hurt each other for fourteen winters. Nothing has changed.”
She let out a long breath, opened her eyes, and found Strongheart watching her intently.
“You are the accused murderer of Chief Blue Bow. Every action Flint takes to demean you raises his status among my people.”
When he divorced me I splintered like a wooden doll hit with a war club, but I mended myself. I can fix this, too. If only I had Wink to talk to, I
—
“There is only one person you can rely upon now. You know that, don’t you?” he softly asked.
“Who?”
He leaned forward. “Sora, a disgraced chieftess, thirty-two winters old, alone and frightened. Everyone else you think you need, you do not.”
“Really, Priest?” she scoffed. “Do you know me so well?”
His expression slackened as he looked at her. “I know you are alone.”
He was, of course, right; it was a strange, hollow sensation. As the daughter of the chieftess, she had rarely been alone. There had always been someone close by who would answer if she called out.
He leaned forward and tossed another branch onto the fire. Sparks flitted upward toward the smokehole in the roof. “Don’t fight it. Your loneliness may help me to Heal you.”
“How?”
“It is only when we are lonely that our afterlife soul can
seek us. If your reflection-soul truly is lost in the forest, it may find its way home by itself.”
“You mean loneliness draws the reflection-soul back to the body?”
He lifted a shoulder. “Loneliness is more like a signal fire lit in the darkness. The reflection-soul walks toward it out of curiosity, sees its own body, and rushes home.” Pausing, he rearranged his dark cape around his feet, keeping them warm, and said, “Did you want your father to die?”
The question startled her. “No, of course not. I loved him very much.”
“As much as you loved your mother?”
“More. Mother was not particularly kind to me. She preferred my older sister. I was my father’s pet.”
On the hearthstones, the small pot began to bubble. Suds boiled up and spilled over the lip into the fire, scenting the house with the fragrance of soap. He must have been preparing his nightly bath when his spies brought him the news that Flint had taken her to the forest.
Strongheart wrapped his cape over his hand, grabbed the pot, and set it on the floor between them.
“I’ve been told your father was a traveler.”
Her father’s face formed behind her eyes, as eerie and dreamlike as it had been when she’d been a small child. In most ways, he was very ordinary; he had a plain round face with a broad nose and ears that stuck out through his black hair. Ordinary in every way except his eyes. Those eyes might be looking straight at you, but he wouldn’t be seeing you. He would be seeing faraway places. Even now, twenty-five winters later, she didn’t need to remember the tale he’d told her of the far western ocean. All she had to do was remember his eyes. He could look that vast blueness right into your heart until you felt you were drowning. Her tongue still tasted the salt in the air.
“Your father visited the islands far to the south, I’m told.”
“Yes, he—he was a great Trader before he met my mother. He traveled far and wide. It was his reputation that gave him the right to marry into my family. But I think it was a bad choice for him. Marrying a chieftess meant he had to stay in Blackbird Town and help my mother. It withered his souls. His greatest pleasure came from seeing distant horizons.”
Absently, as though thinking about other things, Strongheart brushed at the suds on the pot rim. “Did he tell you stories about those places? About the islands to the south?”
“Often.”
She opened her left palm and stared at her hand. The beautiful flowers of those islands scented her fingertips—though she had never seen them. Never touched them. Her father had been there long before she’d been born. “He was a very good storyteller,” she said softly.
Strongheart reached into the sudsy pot and squeezed out a cloth, then rubbed it over his own arm as though testing the temperature. “I want you to tell me more, much more, but for now, I imagine you are feeling dirty.”
After what she’d been through tonight, she felt filthy, but it surprised her that he was concerned about it. She finished her tea and set the cup on the floor.
“Is that for me?” She gestured to the soapy water.
“Yes. Please,” he said, and held out his hand as though he wanted her to take it.
Reluctantly, she gripped his fingers. To her surprise, rather than putting the cloth in her hand, he used it to wash her arm.
Sora let herself float in the sensations.
Strongheart kept soaking the cloth, squeezing it out, and washing her body. When he reached her face, his touch became feather-light. He washed her forehead and around her eyes like a mother cleaning a frightened child. The cloth moved
over her mouth and throat, then slipped lower, cleaning her chest above her dress.
Just when she thought he might slip the cloth into her dress to wash her breasts, he stopped and patiently unlaced her sandals. After he’d set them aside, he started washing her feet. The water felt almost too hot on her cold bare toes.
“Our peoples have different beliefs about illness,” he said. “To understand what I must do to Heal you, you must grasp what my people believe.”
The cloth moved up her calves, and she longed to lie back and fall asleep while he worked.
“The Loon Nation believes that illness comes from three sources. The first is very similar to your beliefs: illness is caused when a person’s soul wanders away from the body and can’t find its way home again. Second, illness may be caused when the saliva spoils. Saliva is as important to life as blood or gall. If it spoils, a person begins to live a nightmare of despair.”

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