The Unfinished Song (Book 5): Wing

Wing

The Unfinished Song, Book
Five

Tara Maya

Copyright Misque Press on Smashwords
2012

Published by Misque
Press

Copyright © 2012 by Tara
Maya

Cover Design by Tara
Maya

Misque

Misque Press

First North American Edition:
September 2012.

This ebook is licensed for your
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If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not
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and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work
of this author.

The characters and events in this
book are fictitious. Any similarity to real

persons, living or dead, is
coincidental and not intended by the author.

Also by Tara Maya:

Conmergence

The Painted World, Stories, Vol. 1

Tomorrow We Dance

The Unfinished Song:

Initiate

Taboo

Sacrifice

Root

Wing

Blood 

Chapter One – Blade

Chapter Two – Tracks

Chapter Three – Crossing

Chapter Four – Trap

Chapter Five – Thread

Chapter Six – Knot

Chapter Seven – Loom

Contact Me

I don’t know who I was before.

It doesn’t matter.

I can’t live in the past. The past is dead. I know
my future. I know my purpose. I’m told I chose it, this path, this
shadow. Who knows. Do any of us really choose what we become? Does
the stone choose to become the blade? The chips fall away from
either side of the flint, and the edge is revealed by the
stone-knapper. The edge was always there, waiting to draw blood.
You can’t blame the stone-knapper for setting it free.

As a stone dies to be reborn as a blade, so a man
dies to be reborn as Deathsworn. So I died to be reborn as Umbral:
an edge sharpened to cut a single throat.

I have killed many. Men. Women. Children. Some in
battle. Some in their sleep. Some I looked in the eye as I drained
their lives. I felt their arms rub against mine, their palms press
my palms, as if we were friends. I shadowed their auras as an
eclipse blocks the sun, leeched their light and stole their power.
Their faces accuse me in the grey mist just before dawn, before I
chip free of them, each and every day. Those faces do not matter to
any but themselves and me, and not even to themselves any longer.
If I had not killed them, another Deathsworn would have.

There is one, however, that only I can kill.

Shadow, his unhorse, galloped across the field of
blood and snow, into the forest, where rain battled the fire that
wanted to devour the trees. Any colder and the rain would have
turned to sleet.

The girl trembled in Umbral’s arms. She felt good
there, soft and tiny and clinging to him like a child. Her hair,
brightly dyed red, held the fragrance of henna and dried flowers.
She clutched at his chest as if she trusted him to protect her;
though, more likely, she was just afraid that if she didn’t hang
on, he would let her drop and break her neck. He sheltered her from
the rain as best he could.

As if a few drops of water were the main danger to
her.

Deep in the forest, he reached the Deathsworn
menhir, large and looming, black and crowned with bones. Here he
tapped his horse with his obsidian-beaded hoop, and the shadow
beast halted. The forest fire had burnt out here, but it had done
its damage. The skeletons of trees around the megalith stuck up
from ash, raw black claws.

At the base of the menhir was another stone, gray
granite, broad like an elongated egg or gently convex table. Heavy
wooden stakes bit deep in the ground on either end of the stone
table. A quick glance confirmed that Ash had stored his extra
provisions under the lee of the stone, as he’d ordered.

When he slid from the horse with the girl in his
arms, she tried to pull away.

“What do you want with me?” she demanded.

“Shhhh.” He stroked her aura, absorbed and stole
wisps of her light into his own darkness. The power tasted even
sweeter than he had imagined. “Calmly. I promise I won’t hurt you.
This won’t take long. Come.”

Suspicious yet lulled, she let him draw her to the
stone.

Drawing on the void of his Penumbra, he spun ropes
of darkness. He pushed her back onto the rock.

At last her panic overcame her paralysis. He
expected this moment of resistance. His victims never gave up
easily; they always flailed for freedom at the end, always
futilely, like birds with broken wings trying to fly.

He sculpted her aura as smoothly as a potter worked
clay. She gasped as he fed pleasure into her aura, and while the
sensation incapacitated her, he molded her back to the rock and
bound her with the dark snakes of energy, wrists over her head,
legs stretched straight crossed at the ankles. The rain pelted her,
soaking her clothes, outlining every delicious dip and rise of her
body. The arc of the rock lifted her hips and breasts, as if in
offering. Her nipples pebbled from the cold. She shivered even as
her body buckled, shuddering in involuntary ecstasy.

“Shadow.” Umbral snapped his fingers at his
horse.

The dark bundle of equine-shaped energy unfolded and
refolded itself into its giant bat form. Shadow flew to the top of
the upright menhir and reached its wings forward, sheltering them
both from the rain.

He used her sweet power, transmuted, to light a ring
of fire around both the menhir and the sacrificial altar. Wet
leaves burned like incense. Even now, he could not
see
her
Chromas. But when he sipped her aura, the rush of power made him
giddy.

He was supposed to take her to Obsidian Mountain to
confirm who she was, but he had no doubt, and he dared not wait.
She was more powerful than they suspected. She was too dangerous.
She had to be eliminated
now
, before she realized her own
strength.

Umbral drew his obsidian blade.

She was helpless. With a single touch, the man in
black had reduced her to quivering flesh, yearning for more of
whatever he had done to her. Even after he released her, the
aftershock left her whole body tingling.

Dindi recognized the Deathsworn menhirs, but he had
no right to bring her here. She was not wounded, condemned or sick.
By the law of light and shadow, his kind had no claim to her. But
he had stalked her, deceived her and captured her. If he knew the
law of light and shadow, he obviously did not give a damn.

She still did not know why he wanted her.

His strange, dark beast crouched overhead, hiding
them from the rain under huge leathery wings. The man in black lit
a circle of flame around them with a single gesture.

His face. His lie of a face. Why did he have to have
that
face?

He loomed over her with a jet knife in his hand.
Despite the fire, her teeth chattered.

He brushed the wet hair from her face. The dagger
rose and fell, and a piece of her wet Tavaedi’s costume fell away.
Methodically, he cut away her clothes. When nothing remained but a
wet scrap over her most discreet elements, he draped a dark wool
wrap over her and toweled her wet skin. Where he had had the woolen
stored, she did not know. His strong hands brushed her flesh, but
he took no liberties. No pinching, no grabbing. He might have been
rubbing down his horse. Bat. Whatever it was. Yet that only made
the sensation more insidiously sensuous.

Once the wet clothes were gone, the warmth from the
fire stilled her shivering.

“Better?” he asked.

The voice. Even the voice was
his
.

“Untie me.”

He shook his head with a slight, sad quirk of a
smile.

That twist of his lips, so familiar, broke her
heart.

“I don’t belong to you,” she said.

“I know.”

“Set me free.”

“I will.” He held up the blade. “Though not in the
way you hope.”

Terror colder than the ice rain pelted her. “You
promised you would not hurt me.”

“And I will keep my promise. It won’t hurt. I will
deliver you to my Lady as gently as a mother wraps a babe in lamb
fleece. It will feel just like falling asleep. Warm and soft.
Painless. Except you will never wake up.”

Tears squeezed out the corners of her eyes. “Please
don’t kill me.”

“I take no pleasure in this.”

“Then don’t do it.”

“I have no choice. It is your destiny to die, and my
duty to be the one who takes your life.”

He wanted to justify himself? Good. Keep him
talking. She searched the ground where he had cast her cut up rags.
Among the debris was the corncob doll. She did not want to draw his
attention to it.

“Make up your mind,” she said. “Is it destiny or
duty? If it is a duty, then you have a choice. You can only blame
destiny if you are someone’s slave. Are you a slave, Umbral? Or are
you your own man?”

His lips twisted again. “You are tied to a rock,
helpless, about to feel my blade at your throat, but you won’t give
up, will you? I’m afraid I’m not easily goaded, sweet swan.”

“Don’t call me that.”

He stopped smiling. “You are correct. I haven’t the
right.”

Slowly, he circumambulated the stone where she was
bound. He scraped the tip of the obsidian blade against the granite
as he walked. Backlit by the circle of fire, he was an ominous
silhouette. The scratch-screech of stone rubbed on stone made her
fists clench.

“If I am to die, may I at least know what I have
done to deserve this so-called fate?”

“It won’t change what must be done. But if it
comforts you, I will tell you what I know. In all of Faearth, there
were only two strands left of Aelfae power which bred true. One
ended in Kavio, only son of the White Lady. The other was hidden
for generations, but at last we have found it. It ends with
you.”

“So you killed Kavio and you’ll kill me, all to
eradicate the last speck of the Aelfae?”

“The Lady of Mercy offered you a chance to join her.
You rejected her love. Instead, you aligned yourself with the fae,
and promised to undo the Gift of the Unfinished Song.”

“The Gift? You mean
the Curse
? You mean the
genocide
of the Aelfae
?”

“It may have been a Curse to the Aelfae, but it was
a Gift to humankind.
They
had to lose this world that
we
might gain it.”

Knife scrapped stone. A vulture circled helpless
prey the same way he circled her. When he reached her wrists or
ankles, he let the dagger very lightly trace a line over her limbs,
though without drawing blood. The blade did not yet cut, it
caressed.

“I know what you would argue,” he said. “Why could I
not simply accept your word that you would not help the Aelfae. You
could still learn to love Lady Death—”

“No.” Dindi found herself strangely calm. Angry yet
serene, afraid yet fierce. “I will never love or serve your Lady.
As long as I have breath, I will fight Death. If I could bring the
Aelfae back this minute, I would do it. Not because it’s my
destiny, but because it’s wrong to destroy a whole people, even in
a war. Humans crossed a river that should not be crossed.”