The Unfinished Song (Book 5): Wing (28 page)

“You should not have mocked Kavio.”

“That
I will
not
apologize for.”

Umbral packed up the camp and put out the fire.
Dindi helped him in silence. It was only mid-day, for all the good
that did. The sun refused to shine on him. It sulked behind gray
rain clouds. Umbral was sick of sloshing through swamp and tired of
trudging through mud. It had taken them too long to get this far,
and would take too long to reach the mountains, if they kept
knocking their boots on dirt the whole way.

By then Finnadro and his hounds might overtake them.
Umbral had no wish for the confrontation.

“No more Boglands,” he said, standing up. “Put on
your warmer garments. We are going to travel to Orange Canyon the
way the Raptor Riders do. By wing.”

“Uh…really?” Dindi bundled into her feather parka.
“Which wing, exactly?”

Umbral unleashed the Shadow pent up in his Penumbra.
The dark energy crackled and billowed. Shapes extended from the
sides and turned into feathery wings. A bulb in front became a
head, a fan in back turned into a tail. The empty rift in space
took on the illusion of solidity as a huge, black raven, with blood
bright eyes.

“Our ride, my Vaedi.”

“But…”

“Don’t be afraid. It’s perfectly safe. Unless the
dark energy disintegrates unexpectedly while we are in the air. In
that case, we would both plunge to our deaths.”

“Nice to know. But that wasn’t my concern.”

“Well?”

“Aren’t you going to…purify yourself? You…killed the
Aelfae.”

“I know,” he said. “No, I won’t be purifying
myself.”

She didn’t ask, but he knew she wanted a fuller
explanation.

“For some deeds,” he said tonelessly, “There can be
no expurgation.”

Dindi wondered what other excuse she could use to
distract and delay Umbral. If he would not dance purification, she
needed some other pretext to keep them both grounded.

She had picked up the first hint that someone was
following them back at the hobgoblin clanhold, but she had not
recognized it for what it was. Here, for some reason, the tail of
magic wagged clearly, unobscured by the usual thickets of other
Patterns. She could not be sure, but it seemed familiar. She picked
up a misty image from the thread, of a man with a bow, with wolves
trotting at his heels like dogs. It could only be Finnadro.

Could it be that he knew of her capture? Was it
possible he was trying to rescue her? Much more likely, he sought
to free the White Lady. Nonetheless, if he crossed paths with
Umbral, perhaps he could help Dindi escape. Finnadro was the only
one other than the White Lady herself who might be strong enough to
defeat Umbral, or cunning enough to outwit him. If only there were
some way to leave spoken words behind like footprints. She could
leave him a warning.

If they rode on the shadow raven, however, Finnadro
would have no way of following them. She had to hinder their
departure as long as possible.

“Get on the bird,” Umbral ordered impatiently.

“Wait!” she said. “Shouldn’t I try to dance up a
Vision of the White Lady before we go? We need to know which
direction to go.”

“We know where they are taking her. To Cliffedge,
the Orange Canyon tribehold.”

“I’m not sure they are. Last time I had a sense
of…of some place else.”

He didn’t look convinced.

“The Kiva Beneath the World,” she blurted.

His expression changed.

“Orange Canyon must be behind the dark magic that
resurrected the Aelfae,” he muttered, more to himself than to her.
“But what is the White Lady’s role in all this?” He frowned. “I’d
rather not delay. We’ll approach the tribehold first, then try
another Vision. The Kiva Beneath the World is north of
Cliffedge.”

Dindi felt another brush of Finnadro’s magic, but
she tried not to draw attention to it. Instead, she nodded solemnly
and plucked the air, as if feeling for the White Lady’s memory. She
wasn’t sure if she would experience any real Vision at all, since
the air felt uncomfortably stretched and stale.

Umbral picked up the packed bags, and, with streams
of dark ropes from his Penumbra, strapped them to the raven. While
he was busy with that, Dindi bent down in the dirt and scratched
her clan symbol, a swan, in the mud behind some a thicket of weeds.
Next to that, she sketched a skull: Deathsworn. But how could she
indicate flight? She thought of the movement that a dancer made in
a
tama
to indicate that he was flying, a V with the arms and
one leg extended. She drew a stick person in that position. She
bent the weeds down to hide the drawings and went to mount the
giant black bird.

Umbral did not show any sign he had noticed her
treason. He lifted her onto the raven and climbed on behind
her.

Air rushed though her hair when the raven flapped
its wings. Umbral tightened his arm around her waist, and she felt
nausea rise in her gorge, made worse when the bird lifted into the
air and her stomach turned into a falling rock. She shut her eyes
to stop the world from spinning.

Behind her, Umbral’s deep chuckle rumbled against
her back.

“Open your eyes, Dindi,” he urged. “Look at the
world with the eye of a bird.”

The sky reappeared. Surprisingly, the clouds didn’t
look any closer from here than before.

The ground, however, looked much, much farther away.
Once, back in Yellow Bear during her year of Initiation, she had
climbed a sequoia all the way to the top, just to see if she could.
When she had looked down, the ground had spread out under her in
all directions. The wind had whipped by her so fiercely that she
feared she might be blown off to plummet endlessly. It looked like
that now, and the wind was even fiercer, as abrasive as scaly
serpents gliding over her skin
.
Serpentine
gusts of wind glided over her skin, rough as scales. She gulped at
the ether vigorously, but she couldn’t quite swallow enough of it.
The air tasted dilute. If it had been mutton stew, she’d have
complained it had more water than mutton.

She could see their last campsite, the lake where
the Aelfae mummy had attacked them, snaggles of thickets and
rolling hills, and the sparkle of more remote lakes. She imagined
she could even recognize the hobgoblin clanhold in the far
distance.

She had to admit the earth looked beautiful from the
vantage of the sky.

Then the bird plunged into a fog so heavy that the
air around them turned white. She could no longer see the ground.
When the raven flew out of the fog, she saw they had passed through
the heart of a cloud, which now floated beneath them. A gaggle of
shocked sylphs, who had been reclining on the cloud, hopped and
pointed at them, keening unhappily about the dark creature that had
disrupted their cloud home. Several white, winged sheep took off
from the cloud and darted away. The sylphs flew after them.

“Did you ever think you would see the top of a
cloud?” Umbral asked. “Or glimpse the winged sheep once herded by
Cero Skylord and Gaya Earthdancer?”

He spoke close to her ear, so she could hear him
over the wind.

“They must be dead now,” Dindi said sadly. “Like all
the other Aelfae.”

“It is not that they died, but
how
they died,
and who killed them, that matters. It is a History danced often in
Orange Canyon.”

“Tell me.”

He began the story, in a lilting cadence. His deep,
pleasant voice, Kavio’s voice, sent shivers down her spine.

“Ninhago was a hunter, who could follow any track.
His brother loved a faery, but she did not love him back. ‘Lead me,
brother, lead me,’ his brother would plead. ‘Just this once, hunt
for me, this is all from you I need.’ So Ninhago tracked the faery
and led his brother to her lair. But when his brother tried to kiss
her, both brothers were attacked.”

As Umbral murmured the tale, the ground sailed by
below them, hidden by cloud, suddenly revealed, then hidden again,
a motley quilt of sepia and olive and white.

“At Ninhago’s home, his wife and daughter waited.
But instead of the return they anticipated, their home was visited
by the Lady in Black. ‘Cero Skylord killed them and they’ll never
come back,’ said the Lady with ravens in her long, dark hair. But
she swore they could avenge him the way that she related.

“Ninhaga was his daughter and even then she knew
that she must avenge her father. Every day she grew, she blazed and
burned with hate that could never be sated. No revenge torments one
more than revenge belated. Cero Skylord lived out of reach, high in
the air. But she had magic of her own. As an eagle, she flew, yes,
she flew, on eagle wings, until she reached the sky.

“There she found the home of Cero and Gaya, so high
above the human world that she knew. The Black Lady had warned her,
‘Hide what’s true. Give a lie as your name, or else they will know
where you have come from, as well as who you hunt and why.’

“So Ninhaga pretended that she too was fae.
Deceived, her foes welcomed her and bid her to stay. She met their
son, Ovin, whose charming smile made her shy. When he made her
laugh, she began to hate her lie. For a moment, she questioned her
whole purpose there. She almost abandoned her revenge to sneak
away.

“But then she was reminded of why she came. They
boasted of killing her father, without any shame. Cero and Gaya
laughed as they recalled that cruel day. That’s when Ninhaga stood
up to draw her bow and say, ‘Murdering fae! Bid your son farewell
and prepare! Ninhaga daughter of Ninhago is my name!’

“Before they could attack her, she shot them both
dead. Two black arrows plucked two wide eyes from two fae heads.
Ovin shook them and said, ‘Awake! What is this game?’ ‘They will
not awake,’ she said. ‘They are to blame for my father’s death.
Therefore it is only fair to pay death for death, to spill new
blood for old blood shed!’”

Umbral paused dramatically.

“Where do you learn all these Histories?” Dindi
asked. “How does a Deathsworn know the secret
tama
from so
many different tribes?”

Umbral pulled back a finger width from her, as far
as he could without letting go of her waist, but even that crack
allowed the wind to sweep between them. Dindi rocked in her seat.
Instinctively, she clenched her knees more tightly around the
bird’s neck. The immense feathers rustled under her legs. The
Deathsworn raven did not smell like bird. The musk was heavier,
like smoke. Or blood.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said at length, and after
that he was stiff and silent.

Below, the landscape frowned, bulbous and
melancholy. Flattish boglands gave way to a rumpled blanket of
foothills, followed by peaks of jagged magnificence. These giant
old men had white heads and white beards that tumbled down their
sienna robes.

The Shadow raven had borne them steadily east for
most of the flight, but when they came to the peaks, the raven
turned, and followed the wall of rock and ice northeast. The wind
grew noticeably colder. The weedy air strained her lungs. To their
left, the sun sank into crevice between the stacked bowls of sky
and earth, herding a flock of pink sheep clouds.

“We’ll keep flying,” Umbral said. “We can make it
all the way to the base of the Orangehorn Mountain.”

“Was that the end of the story?” Dindi asked. “What
did Ovin do after Ninhaga killed his parents?”

“There is more, if you wish to hear it.”

“Please go on.”

“Very well.” Umbral’s deep voice rumbled against her
neck again. “Ovin pulled the arrows from his father and mother. He
saw the shafts were black, both one and the other, black as Lady
Death, except where stained blood red. Only then did he grasp that
they were
truly
dead.

“He leapt at Ninhaga. She hit him back with flare.
Furiously, they fought and bit one another. She grabbed one black
arrow, while he held onto its twin.

“As they circled warily, bows drawn, she had to
grin. ‘I would have preferred to take you as a lover, you handsome
fae, but if we must kill each other, instead of kisses, black
hisses of death we’ll share. As for me, my task is done and I
welcome my end.’

“‘
Listen, Human huntress!’ Ovin
said. ‘We don’t need to bring each other grief, to make each other
bleed. There is another way…’”

Umbral broke off in midsentence; his body shook
uncontrollably. His arms fell limply to his side, and a blink
later, his whole weight shifted, slid and plummeted off the
raven.

The raven itself disintegrated into black wisps.
Dindi plunged through open air. Nothing remained of the bird.

Dindi and
Umbral fell from the sky into immeasurable emptiness, toward the
jagged rocks of a mountain, as the ground rushed up to meet
them.

I am a cloud, suspended between sky and ground,
empyrean and abyss

…falling,

…falling,

…falling,

and I feel nothing, no pain, no roiling stomach,
only a strange bliss, inseparable from pain and

…falling,

…falling,

…falling,

as if it
had
to come to this, as if there
were no other way it could end other than half-way between darkness
and light, truth and lies, Kavio and the man who killed him….

For he is falling with me. The man in black. The man
in Kavio’s flesh. Kavio’s killer, Kavio’s shadow.

Umbral.

Ever since Umbral abducted me, I have been falling.
I see that now. So how could it end any other way than with me
crashing to the earth? How could it end other than this, with my
death, and his?

It’s fitting too, that I tumble slowly, upside down
and backwards to myself, so the sky is a blanket around my knees
and the mountains are waiting to pillow my head. All the things
once kin to my heart have become as outtribers to me. My loves have
become my foes. My dancing—turned upside down during this journey
with Umbral. Once, I danced for joy. As a game. At play. During the
year of my Initiation, I danced out of defiance. As a dare. Despite
the danger. And once I won the right to dance as part of the
troop—I danced because I could, and if I am honest, because after
giving up everything for the right to dance, I couldn’t give up
dancing too. It had cost me too dear to trade back.