The Unfinished Song (Book 5): Wing (24 page)

“No thank you.” Her teeth chattered.

“I’ll turn my back.” Umbral walked to the other end
of the lodge. He lifted the top plank of another rickety bench.

“My clothes will dry soon enough,” she insisted.

“And you could shiver while you wait for that to
happen. Or…” He pulled a flowing garment from inside the bench,
“You could wear this while your clothes dry over the fire.”

He placed the dress on the dais behind the
hearth.

“I’m going to bring the rest of our things in out of
the rain,” he said.

After he disappeared outside, Dindi tried not to
look at the dress. It was no use. It drew her as a slope draws down
water. She simply had to hold it, feel the amazing texture.

It was a sheer, silken sheath of extremely fine,
extraordinarily white material, beaded with running animals at the
hem and hip. The skirt fell in divided petals, edged with designs.
Spangles of gold and pearl made the whole gown shimmer. The gown
had no back, only crisscrossed straps, as if to allow room for
wings.

By the time Umbral returned, she had it on.

“I found some other items of interest…” he was
saying as he entered the room.

He stopped in mid-sentence when he saw her.

“Do I look ridiculous?”

He cleared his throat before he found his voice.

“You look like a faery.”

“Is that a good thing?”

His lips quirked. “Not for me, I suspect.”

“You don’t like it?”

“That’s not what I said.” He held up something. “I
imagine this goes with it.”

It was the green-beaded necklace that Turtleback had
tried to give her. “That’s hexed.”

“I know. But the hex is feeble. I can remove
it.”

He shed his outer garments by the fire and set them
out to dry alongside hers. His tunic was soaked, so he unlaced that
as well, though he left on his legwals.

Dindi gasped.

Umbral stood up, dagger in hand. “What’s wrong? More
hobgoblins? Where?”

Welts and burns crisscrossed his magnificent chest.
Horrified and guilty, she put out her hand to trace around the
wounds.

“Did the hobgoblins do that?”

“Oh, that. It’s nothing. Those scars are
yesterday’s.” He stood very still while she touched him. He was
right. The welts had scarred over. The raised ridges of flesh felt
hard, almost like antler.

He closed his hand around her wrists. “It’s not safe
for you to touch me.”

She pulled back at once.

“The necklace.” He held it in one palm, green beads
on sinew strings in a crafty pattern. “Hexed, as you see. But
now…”

He passed his other hand over the necklace, pressed
his palms together and then began to dance. He danced as he fought,
swift and relentless, with hard kicks to the air and aerial flips
right across the fire pit. He ended his routine on one knee in
front of her, holding up the necklace.

“My Lady. Your necklace is restored.”

It was beautiful. It looked nothing like before. The
beads shone like gold, but the color was darker, almost orange, and
the metal was harder.

“What are these beads made from?” she asked
wonderingly.

“Bloodgold,” said Umbral. “Fashioned by the Aelfae.
Some call it copper; it is valued greatly. No human kiln can melt
it; no human smith can shape it. The metal can only be smelted by
the breath of a feathered serpent from the heart of a volcano.
According to legends, even among the Aelfae, only one man knew the
secrets of bloodgold: Lothlo the Golden. He perished in the War
against humankind generations ago.”

Umbral stood up and rustled behind her. He smelled
of heather and rainwater and other primal, musky things she dared
not name. He stroked her hair, then she felt him gather her
tresses, still somewhat damp, and twist them into a gentle coil
which he placed over her shoulder, baring her neck. He slipped the
necklace around her throat. The beads felt cool against her
collarbone. The soft skin at the back of her neck tingled at the
brush of his knuckles as he fastened the sinew string.

“Turn around,” he commanded.

She turned slowly and looked up at him. He drew in a
sharp breath.

“Yes,” he said.

That was all. But his eyes devoured her so
powerfully that she blushed and turned her head.

“I should dance,” she said.

“What?”

“Don’t you want me to have another Vision of the
White Lady?”

“Oh. Yes. That.”

“It’s the only reason you are keeping me alive, is
it not?”

“You don’t have to dance tonight, if you are too
tired.”

“I don’t believe I could sleep.”

“Very well.” He gestured to the dais. “Dance.”

She stepped up lightly to the dais, struck an
arabesque and held it. The Aelfae dress feathered her skin softly
as a baby gosling. Incrementally, she shifted from stillness to
movement. The petals of the dress slid over her limbs as she lifted
her legs and stretched out her arms. She was aware of Umbral
watching her, the delicious taste of his focused attention; and
then the Vision blossomed like a flower of light.

Vessia tore the belly of the deer with her knife and
exhumed the innards. She set aside the pluck (heart, liver and
lungs) for Vio, since she knew he loved the bits most people
rejected. He examined her work, and she hoped he would notice her
thoughtfulness.

“You ruined the pelt,” he said. “Next time, let me
skin it first.”

“We’re in the middle of the wilderness, thousands of
footsteps from the nearest clanhold,” said Vessia. “We don’t have
time to cure a pelt.”

“The deer gave you its life. The least you could do
is not waste its body.”

“Quite a few humans gave you their lives recently,
but you didn’t hang about to cure their hides.”

“The Deathsworn will find the human corpses.”

“The wild animals will find the deer carcass.”

Vio blew out an exasperated sound. A cloud of white
mist accompanied his breath. They were above the snow line. It had
not snowed recently, but dirty slush from a previous storm nestled
in the lee of the rocks.

“You butcher it then,” she told him. She tossed the
bloody knife in the red slush.

“I have no wish to wear a tanned human skin, like a
Red Spears cannibal,” he said as he picked up the flint. “But
another deer fur would have been welcome to fight this cold.”

Vessia stood in just her tunic and legwals, but she
shrugged off the chill.

“It would take fourteen days to salt and oil the fur
properly. We don’t have time.”

“I
am needed back at the tribehold as soon as
possible. Why are
you
so worried we finish quickly?”

Hadn’t she made it clear yet that they had to hurry?
She was tired of repeating herself.

Vio saved what he could of the doe’s pelt and sliced
off head, haunches, ribs, flanks, shoulders and rump.

“The offal will spoil quickest,” he said. “We’ll eat
that first. We don’t have time to properly smoke the meat. We take
what we can, bury the rest. The ice fae will guard it for us until
we can retrieve it on the return trip.”

Vessia set up their camp for the night while Vio
minced the pluck on a flat rock. From his rucksack, he drew on his
store of packed foods: onion powder, leeks, a rock of salt, a clay
jar of tiny black balls—mustard seeds—and a bag of dried corn meal.
He ground the spices, diced leeks and corn meal into the meat. He
sewed the whole mess into the deer’s stomach.

Vessia built the campfire between an icy brook and a
fallen tree. She fed the flames with whole branches—cones, needles
and all. She liked the smell of the roasting sap. The percussive
music of the pinecones, as they popped and crackled in the heat,
relaxed her. But she was still hungry. It dismayed her to see Vio
unpack his clay stewing pot.

“Why not just throw the venison on the fire?” she
asked. “Boiling it will take longer and taste worse.”

“We have time. Sun sets early in the mountains, so
it’s not as late as you think. As for taste, nothing beats a good
haggis!”

“At least it’s not corn mush,” she muttered.

“I’ve slit a man’s throat for corn mush.”

“I’m sure you have.”

“Why do you hate corn so much?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“I hope I’m not stupid enough that I have to ask
after the obvious.”

“You’re not stupid.”

She closed her eyes. A pinecone snapped in the fire,
and for a moment, she imagined her old friends gathered around the
flames, with her, as they had been on so many evenings. Instead of
Vio, it would be Hest who chased her away from the evening’s kill,
to roast it over the fire, to braise in his latest experimental mix
of spices. Gwidan would be stringing his bow. Yastara and Lothlo
would exchange mooneyes, thinking no one else noticed. Mrigana
would be knapping flint, or perhaps preparing poison flowers to tip
Gwidan’s arrows. Kia would be trying hard to manifest her wings for
the first time. And Xerpen… Xerpen would be telling a wry joke,
with his smile curled sardonically at the edges. Or Xerpen would be
singing a song that had them all laughing and clapping along. Or
Xerpen would be playing a heartbreaking tune on his reed flute that
brought tears to their eyes.

No matter what else he was doing, though, Xerpen
would be by her side.

“Vessia?” asked Vio. “What’s wrong?”

“You asked me why I did not like corn. It was a cob
of corn that Lady Death first hexed with the Curse, to trick the
first Aelfae to take a bite and die forever. Since then none of my
people eat that grain. Our caution was more symbolic than useful, I
suppose. The Deathsworn soon found many other ways to sneak the hex
in to our homes and holds.”

Vio was silent a long time. “I lost my whole family
too, save for my brother.”

“Yes, I know. In the famine.”

The famine caused by Xerpen…by one of us
. It
had never hit her before. Even Vio himself did not know Xerpen had
been an Aelfae.

“Vessia.” His face twisted like a blanket being
wrung out by the river. “You know, don’t you?”

“Know what?”

“What grows in my heart for you.”

That wasn’t the direction she had expected him to
go.

“I could not lose you.”

“I love you too, Vio,” she said, but the words
sounded awkward to her own ears, too cold, too brittle, like
icicles, when she had wanted the words to bloom tender and
fragrant, like calla lilies.

“Do you? Can you?”

“Of course.”

“You told me once you did not know how to love. I
thought you had just not met the right man, and in my vanity, I was
sure I could be that man. Now I am not sure.”

Her heart thundered. “Why now?”

“Because you are Aelfae.”

“So?”

“Do the Aelfae love, as we do? Can faeries truly
understand love?”

The wind in the woods made a hollow, mournful howl.
Her stomach felt as if she were falling from the sky with no wings.
She didn’t know how to hold on.

“This marriage thing isn’t working, is it? It’s my
fault. I do things wrong; I embarrass you in front of the other
humans. I’m not a
good wife
.” She touched a bit of emptiness
like a sore tooth. “Do you want me to leave?”

“I could not lose you.”

“So you want me to stay.”

“Yes, I want you to stay.”

“Then I’ll stay.”

“You make it sound…so…” He shook his head. “As if at
any moment, you might change your mind and fly away. But I could
not lose you.”

She did not know what to say to that. She
could
fly away at any minute—well, not
fly
, without
her wings, but leave—but so could he. If he wanted to stay and she
wanted to stay, then everything should be fine. So why was it all
falling apart?

They sat in tense silence after that, Vio hovering
over his haggis, prodding it along like an anxious hen with one
egg, and Vessia listening to the fire burn. She found no comfort in
it, only memories she did not want. She wished sometimes she could
be as she was before, when her true name had been lost in mist.

They both heard the snap in the woods outside their
camp at the same time. Their eyes met and shared the same thought:
Someone is here
.

Vio grabbed his spear and Vessia picked up her
bow.

More than a dozen armed men and women jogged into
view from behind a spread of boulders. Archers popped up on top of
the rocks, bows drawn.

“Drop your weapons!” an older, ax-faced woman
commanded them. She wore the ochre face paint and feathered bonnet
of a Raptor Rider. A Morvae Tavaedi from the Labyrinth, who had
once served under Vio, stood beside her, holding a spear.

Vio snarled at the man. “You traitor.”

“Fa,” said a new voice, “I think that feather
belongs in your headdress, Vio.”

Xerpen the Bone Whistler strolled out from behind
the boulder. The other warriors parted to let him through.

All the blood drained from Vio’s face.

As before, Umbral could only glimpse the edges of
the Vision Dindi danced. He saw the White Lady, and something
about…
sheep
?

“What did you see?” he asked when her dance and
Vision ended.

“She is heading toward Orange Canyon,” Dindi said.
“Then there was some bit about sheep.”

He nodded. “I sensed that too. Well, there are a lot
of sheep in Orange Canyon. We’re on the right path. We should get
some sleep—we’ll have to wake before dawn, unless we want to fight
hobgoblins again. I think if we take down one of these wall
hangings, it would soften the sleep platform. We could take it with
us when we cross the mountains too—it’s warmer down here, but once
we start climbing again, the snow will take another bite. Help me
with that corner.”

Umbral reached for the top left corner of one of the
tapestries, but Dindi lingered in front, studying it.