The Unfinished Song (Book 5): Wing (34 page)

“You’re a coward as well as a liar and a
traitor?”

Vumo picked up the black arrow. “You think I’ll be
easy pickings because I’m just a drunk old man, and you’re a young
ram impressed by the size of your own horns? You’ve made a mistake,
fool. You have no mucking idea who I am, or what I’m capable of.
Your mistake will cost you your life.”

The rumor of Tamio’s challenge to Vumo travelled so
swiftly through the sheepmeet that Kemla heard before Tamio found
his way back to his tent. She asked Hadi if he knew what Tamio had
been thinking—or drinking—but Hadi was as bewildered as she.

“He loved that old goat,” said Hadi. “They fit like
two halves of a clam. I can’t imagine what they could have fought
about.”

Still, Tamio did not return. Kemla went looking.

She found Tamio staggering about the camp, dazed
more with fury than drink, but just as unable as any drunk to make
sense of the maze of tents well enough to find his own. He was
still shouting random insults at the night, which earned him a few
shoves and cusses from those whose tents he nearly tripped
over.

Kemla guided him back to his tent. He sank onto his
blankets. Horror slowly replaced the rage in his expression. The
magnitude of what he had done seemed to hit him only now.

“What’s wrong with you, Tamio?” Kemla asked. She put
her hand on his forehead. “Were you bitten by a rabid dog?”

“I did a stupid thing.” He buried his face in his
hands.

“Behold: The Obvious.”

“What was I thinking? Why did I challenge him? I
can’t kill him!”

“You think it won’t pay the deathdebt because he
belongs to our tribe?”

“I have no idea. Who cares?”

“Surely you’re not worried that he’s too strong for
you. He’s old enough to be your father.”

“I
know
it.” Tamio looked at her bleakly.
“But he doesn’t.”

She paused, finally hearing him. Opened her mouth.
Closed it again, speechless.

“You
can’t
mean…”

“I was happier thinking he was dead,” Tamio said
bitterly. “But I can’t kill him.”

To her dismay, he began to weep.

“Stop that at once!” she ordered. “I can’t stand
blubbering. Especially in warriors! Abiono was the man who raised
you;
he’s
your father. Whoever this fellow is, he’s not your
kin. Just…just some crazy old goat. You will meet this man in
combat, and you will kill him. That will be the end of it. Do you
understand me?”

Tamio nodded. He wiped the wetness off his cheek.
There was nothing behind his eyes except blank despair.

She drew him to her, and this time when he sobbed
against her shoulder like a child, she didn’t chide him. She kissed
him instead. He stilled in her arms, then fiercely, desperately,
kissed her and pushed her back onto the furs.

A crowd gathered in the center lodge. The lofty
wooden masks of several Tavaedies towered over the heads of the
tallest men. Everyone wore festival finery. The lips of the women
glistened from a thick application of lamb fat.

Making the changes to the Loom and placing it in the
center of the stage had been easy enough. It was convincing the
elders to let him do it that took some wrangling, especially since
Dindi would not tell anyone, even Umbral himself, what the Loom was
for or why she wanted it on stage while she danced.

Umbral had done no more than pass on Dindi’s
message, that she had some revelation of importance to share. The
elders of the Spider Loom clan asked Umbral what a slave could have
to say that was important.

“She is a powerful Tavaedi,” he’d told them. “One
who is helping me in a quest with her Visions.”

This was quite true, which was no help. It is always
harder to convince people of a truth they scorn than a lie they
crave. However, once he swayed them, they grew excited and treated
the occasion like an impromptu carnival. Their lodge was arranged
much as the Aelfae lodge in the hobgoblin hold had been, a big
wooden rectangle with a raised wood stage at one end. Beneath the
lodge were many storerooms, including a large potato pit beneath
the stage itself. A ladder through a small hole in the stage was
the only access point from the pit.

Dindi had dressed for the occasion as well. Despite
the cold, she wore her shimmery Aelfae gown of white and gold,
which left her graceful arms and feet bare. Her face, however, was
as pale as her dress.

“I’m so sorry I dragged you into this,” she said.
“But I can’t. I can’t do it. I can’t go up there.”

She clutched Umbral’s tunic. Given how she loathed
touching him, he was too surprised to chide her. He just stared at
her while she babbled.

“What if I mess it up? What if I do it wrong and hex
everyone? You know, Kavio told me that a girl messed up a dance
once and caused a famine that killed half the Rainbow Labyrinth
tribe.”

“Dindi.” Umbral folded his hand over hers, against
his chest. “You saw an Aelfae mummy reanimated by the foulest magic
in Faearth and you rushed forward to hit it with an ax. But now
you’re going to back down because of a little stage fright?”

She caught her breath at his touch, but she didn’t
pull away as he’d expected.

“You don’t understand. I’ve never danced for anyone
before.”

“You’ve danced for me.”

And for me
, whispered Kavio from some
unwanted corner of his mind.

Umbral squelched the voice.

“You were a Tavaedi in your troop,” he said out loud
to Dindi.

“But all I did was put out the drums or ribbons,”
she said. “Or help the dancers change their masks. I’ve never
actually
danced
in public.”

Come to think of it, that was true. It was one of
the reasons she had been so hard to find when he was hunting
her.

“You can do this.”

“I can’t.”

“You can.”

“But…”

“You’re the Vaedi. You were born to do this.”

She blinked at him. “You really believe that.”

If only he did not.

“Just do what you did for me,” he coaxed her,
“except don’t summon a Vision. To be safe, why don’t you give me
the corncob.”

For a heartbeat, she stood so still, with her hair
hiding her eyes, that he wondered if his arrow had fallen wide of
the mark; or if she would realize her danger and fight him here and
now, for her life. That’s what she should have done if she had
known what he intended. But she brushed the veil of dark hair back
over one ear, and looked up at him with eyes that shone with
trust.

“You’re right,” she said.

From around her neck she tugged a cord and pulled
out an amulet that he had seen every day for two moons and yet
somehow overlooked. It was a little doll, not much bigger than a
finger, carved from a corncob. A corncob doll—that was what Kavio
had meant. This was the fetish Dindi had been channeling all along
to focus her power. Except for Kavio’s slip, he might never have
noticed it at all. The doll worked very hard not to be noticed.

And she handed it to him, innocent as a child.

“Crush a snail,” he said.

“What?” She looked startled.

Umbral allowed himself a tiny grin. “It’s what they
say in the Labyrinth to wish you good fortune before a ritual. It
would be dangerous to say ‘good luck’ and attract the attention of
envious fae. So they say, ‘crush a snail.’ But it means the same
thing.”

“I…knew that,” she said.

Then he knew that Kavio had told her the phrase.
Perhaps in the exact same words Umbral had just used. For once,
though, Umbral refused to be jealous. He would not let anything
ruin this moment for her. Let her shine. Just one time, let her
shine as she would have if she had never met him.

“If he were here,” Umbral said, “it’s what he would
have wished you.”

“Thank you. For…for letting that part of him still
live.”

“Go on, they’re waiting.”

She turned to the ladder, but tossed one last glance
over her shoulder. “You’ll be in the audience too, won’t you,
Umbral? Watching me?”

“Of course,” he said.

But he lied.

Dindi climbed the ladder onto the stage at the end
of the lodge. By mistake, she must have eaten rocks for morning
meal, because they were knocking around inside her belly right now.
It was all well and good for Umbral to tell her she was born to do
this, but she was the one who had to decide what to dance. On the
one hand, she could not dance like a pixie, unplanned and
spontaneous, in front of a human gathering. On the other, none of
the
tama
she had learned with her troop had any relevance to
the Spider Weaver clan, or what Dindi wanted to prove to them.

Horrible memories paralyzed her. She stood in the
circle of megaliths on the Stone Hedge, an Initiate all over
again.

I will fail now, as I did then
.

No!

She wasn’t a supplicant this time. She was the one
in charge. She was the Tavaedi. Most importantly, she wasn’t here
just for herself. She did no more than glance at Farla, who sat
beside her mother close to the stage, knowing both of them would be
scowling. Instead, Dindi focused on the Loom which stood upright
and tall in the center of the stage. Umbral had made a few changes
to the structure, and also, at her request, strung Farla’s weaving
onto the frame. The top of the wood frame was as high as Dindi’s
shoulder. If she had been born in Farla’s place she would have been
allowed to be a Tavaedi just because of her height. The entire year
of her Initiation would have woven a different pattern.

The crowd shifted. Dindi stood posed, but frozen,
and they were growing restless. They began to heckle her.

“I thought you were going to dance!”

“She’s from Green Woods—maybe that’s her imitation
of a tree!”

“Cut her down!”

“And burn her as kindling!”

Nasty laughter spread through the crowd.

“She’s wasting our time!” shouted a woman whose
unpleasant voice Dindi recognized. Farla.

I need a
tama
. I need a Pattern. Something
old, but something new. Something of mine, something of theirs.
Something they will recognize, but something that will change their
minds
.

Who knew dances as old as time and new as rain?

The Aelfae.

There it was, right there on the Loom in front of
her. Farla’s pattern of spiders and webs and faery dancers. The
Spider Clan was descended from Spider Woman, as Dindi’s own Lost
Swan clan was descended from Mayara. And Spider Woman, like Mayara,
had been Aelfae. Her pattern was still there, in the weave passed
down from mother to daughter, children who had become blind to the
meaning in the stiches, to the truth of their own history. Spider
Woman had not completely died as long as her children kept the
pattern of her life intact in their weavings. All Dindi needed to
do was turn that pattern of physical threads back into threads of
light one more time.

Dindi lifted her arms and spun into a pirouette. She
had never danced this
tama
before, but she did not need to
make it up. It was emblazoned on every rug and blanket in Spider
Weaver clanhold. Even on Essi’s rugs, though the colors were as
muddied as the clan’s collective memory.

The throng fell silent, mesmerized.

She felt the colors of the loom flow into her aura.
Umbral had taken the corncob doll, but she did not need to hold it
to use it. She had channeled Vessia many times. She had channeled
Mayara too. Now she opened herself to a new Vision, a dancer more
ancient than either of them, and another mind joined hers to guide
her steps.

A doll.

A mucking doll.

Umbral stared at the object in the palm of his hand.
A child’s totem. Ugly, tattered, forgettable. Was this truly the
object of power that enabled Dindi to peer into the life of the
White Lady, the Last Aelfae?

It made no sense.

Who made it? Where did it come from? How had it come
to Dindi, given no one knew she was the Vaedi? He knew objects of
power. The Obsidian Mask he wore, which to his ongoing annoyance
gave him Kavio’s face in Dindi’s eyes, was such an object. He knew
who had made it. Lady Death. She had made three objects of power,
and the Aelfae had made three, all during the War. There was
rumored to be a seventh, the Windwheel, but that had been lost.
Umbral knew of no corncob doll made by either side. Nor could he
sniff the magic of either side on it. Deathsworn? Aelfae? Rainbow?
Shadow? As far as he could tell it was just a…
doll
.

But if Dindi had used it to see the White Lady,
Umbral was damned if he couldn’t do the same. He had six Penumbras.
He would bend this toy to his will.

With Dindi and the whole clanhold occupied, he had
the yard behind Farla’s hut all to himself. He began to dance.

He punched the air, he kicked, he assaulted the
insult of existence with his furious revolutions.

He expected the corncob doll to fight back.

Instead, the Vision leapt up joyfully around him, as
if it had been waiting all along, like a child who has to bite her
fingers not to laugh and run out during a game of hide and seek. He
had the strangest feeling the doll knew him, perhaps better than he
knew himself.

He saw the White Lady, twenty years younger, more
beautiful and cruel than he could have imagined. But it was not her
eyes he saw through, or her thoughts that wove into his. It was
someone with her.

Vio grabbed his spear, already aware from the
footsteps that there were too many ambushers. He and Vessia were
trapped.

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.