The Unfinished Song (Book 5): Wing (39 page)

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then an immense groan echoed through the canyon. A
single, huge crack, right down the center of the river, started
high in the mountain and traveled like a lightning bolt down the
ice.

The Vyfae raised more winds. A gust rose from
nothing and grabbed her as if in an invisible hand. She had no time
for fear. Everything moved too fast. Pain exploded in her head when
she hit rock. Then again when she hit ice.

Liquid cold engulfed her and with it the strange
warmth that uttermost cold brought as a strange balm. She could no
longer care that she was about to die. Her hands closed around
something, seeking something. Hadn’t she once had a doll that might
have slowed time down, saved her?

But why should she care? At last she felt warm. At
last she could sleep.

There was nothing left to hold onto except one
hope.

Kavio, our tie was never broken. I’m following
the thread back to you
…

The ice cracked right down the middle. The blizzard
sheared the river in half. Snow, trees even boulders torn from
their moorings in the clutch of that insane rage…and a human body,
looking tiny and frail as a doll.

“No!”

The wind drowned out his cry.

He was too far away to do anything but watch,
helplessly, as the wind smashed Dindi against the rock wall and
then threw her under the broken ice.

Then the blizzard hit him as well, and he tumbled
head over heels in the fury of punching ice and unfrozen water.

“That did it!” shouted Amdra. “We got him!”

“The girl is trapped in that!” Finnadro cried. “We
must go back for her!”

She might still be alive. Fox might still be
alive too
. He clung to that.

“There’s no chance. They’re both dead.”

“You
can go back, but I’m going down there.
We don’t even know for certain the Deathsworn is dead.”

“He’s dead. They’re all dead. I’m sorry, but there
was no other way.”

“Let me down!”

“No! We must report to the Great One.”

Finnadro’s knuckles whitened on his bow. Short of
jumping from the Raptor’s back, he had no choice but to agree as
Amdra turned Hawk around to head up to the mountain summit, the
tribehold of his enemies, and the master Amdra served—now
Finnadro’s ally.

It is summer and she and Kavio stand in a field,
alive with poppies and monarch butterflies. The rest of Faearth
might as well not exist. They are dancing together.

He shows her a tricky lift and toss. She lands in
his arms, her hair spilling across her face, wisps of midnight
mess. The sight makes him laugh. He purses his lips, puffs. The
wisps billow up and re-settle back over her eyes.

She puffs back. His bangs flap on the little
breeze.

He retaliates with another puff, and she
re-retaliates, and then they are both blowing into each others’
faces, cheeks round, lips comically pursed, bangs flapping like
wings, until the absurdity is too much.

She collapses onto his chest, shaking so hard she
can’t stand, helpless with laughter. Her knees buckle but he
catches her in his arms. His strength supports her like a promise.
She basks in the heat of him, the musky male scent, with the same
delight a cat would purr and roll in a sunbeam. He pets her hair. A
patter of heartbeats, hers, his, together, indistinguishable,
sounds in her ears. She could no more peel herself off his chest
than she could step out of her own skin. They are one cloth.

Dindi didn’t want to let go of the dream. It was a
memory, though she could no longer remember the exact day it had
occurred—just that it had been during her journey with Kavio to
Sharkshead. A lifetime ago. That was all she remembered of it.
Someone must have pulled away first, let the embrace loosen, tamped
down the last embers of laughter. Probably it had been Kavio. He
was always quicker to sober up than she. But maybe, to please him,
she had steadied her balance and straightened her face, and said,
demurely, “I am ready for my next set, Zavaedi.”

She couldn’t remember. The laughing moment stood
alone in her memory, perfect by itself. She had returned to the
sequence again and again, rehearsed it in her mind, as if it were a
tama, a secret History about only two, known only by two.

And now only by one.

Someone was rubbing heat back into her frozen limbs.
Why? She did not want to wake up. She wanted that memory to be her
last thought.

“Dindi, come back to me,” Kavio said softly. “Don’t
leave me.”

Her eyes flew open.

She was on a black fur cape—Umbral’s raven and bear
cape—naked. Another fur covered her, but that wasn’t what had
warmed her up. Kavio knelt beside her, stripped down to his
legwals, rubbing life back into her arms and legs. She had grown
used to Umbral wearing Kavio’s face, but this was different. It
wasn’t his handsome face, or perfect body that reminded her of
Kavio. Umbral might have looked like Kavio, but there was something
in his dark and guarded posture that was all his own. She’d learned
to see him as himself.

This was different. This man moved like the Kavio
she remembered. Younger. More innocent. More pure.

Still, she had learned not to trust appearances.

“You’re not really Kavio,” Dindi accused.

“I am. He’s given me this. As a kind of thank-you, I
think.” Pain flashed on Kavio’s face. “But only for a single, brief
turn. We don’t have long, Dindi, before Umbral will be back.”

“Back? But I don’t understand. I thought you were
dead, how…”

Kavio tapped his heart.

“The same way you let Spider Woman live again. I’m
not really here, Dindi. I’m just a memory. The last thread of a
lost pattern. But I can still love you. I can still do this.”

He pulled her into his arms and kissed her.

Only Kavio could kiss her and make creation explode
into a million unnamable, unimaginable colors. She didn’t need to
know anything else. They shared one transcendent kiss. It lasted
forever. And it was over instantly.

As soon as the change came, she felt it. One moment
she was kissing Kavio. The next, though she was still kissing a man
who looked just like Kavio, she knew it wasn’t.

Kavio was gone.

Umbral was back.

For a single, sweet flicker of a moment, Dindi was
in his arms, kissing him fiercely. Then she stiffened and pulled
away. Firelight illuminated her bare skin, eager nipples. She had
been naked in his arms. Self-consciously, she pulled the fur over
her breasts.

She glanced around the white limestone cave. It was
a large, if uneven space, like a mouth with a thousand teeth,
stalactites and a stalagmites gnashing toward each other with only
a handbreadth between many of them. They were camped in the center
of this forest of limestone on a spot where previous denizens of
the cave had hewed some flat ground from the jagged jaws of rock,
close to the small cave where they had entered the mountain. Umbral
had found many dozen unused torches, and lit half of them.

“Spider Woman’s prison,” said Dindi.

So Kavio had told him. How Kavio knew, Umbral did
not know. Apparently Kavio knew of it as a secret passage to the
Orange Canyon tribehold on the summit of the mountain. The rock
passages riddled the mountain all the way through.

Umbral stood up. He could not bear to look at Dindi,
disheveled and naked on the fur in the firelight, with her lips
still moist from Kavio’s kisses. Kavio had kept his word and
departed when Umbral asserted himself, but what good was it?

Kissing Dindi, Umbral had realized that he could not
blame Kavio for his emotions any longer. Umbral was the one who had
chosen to drag Dindi from the ice. Umbral was the one who had found
the entrance to the cave—though Kavio had showed him where—and lit
the fires. Umbral was the one who had stripped the wet clothes from
her body, sucked the water from her mouth and warmed her limbs with
his own. Umbral was the one who had knelt by her side until she
woke up, only to step aside and yield his body to Kavio for one
agonizing moment.

All he’d had to do was let her die. Umbral could
have done that and Kavio would have been helpless to stop him. That
had been true all along. Umbral just had not wanted to admit it to
himself.

Because he had fallen in love with her, as stupidly
and overwhelmingly as Kavio had.

Umbral tossed the corncob doll on the limestone
floor next to her fur. It clattered and rolled to a stop.

“I believe that’s yours.”

Dindi picked up the doll. She turned it around in
her hands, looking down at her lap. Her hair fell over her face.
When he had captured her from the Winter Warrens of the Green Woods
tribe, her hair had been dyed flame red. The henna had grown out
and faded by now, leaving her locks the dark color he remembered
from the first time he’d seen her.

“Now you know,” she said dully. “I’m useless to you,
and have been this whole time. I don’t care anymore. Go ahead and
kill me.”

“I can’t.”

She glanced sharply up at him.

He would never, never tell her the true reason he
had changed his mind. Even if she could learn to open her love to
someone a second time, the one man in Faearth she could never
choose would be the murderer of her first love.

Besides, nothing had changed. He still had only one
purpose: duty. To fight the Aelfae, to protect humanity. He was
still a blade. Just aimed at a new throat.

“There’s a greater threat to Faearth than you,
Vaedi,” he said. He smiled mirthlessly. Cool and sardonic, with no
hint of what he felt. His pain was no one’s business. “There’s
something else in this cave that you should see.”

He turned his back and walked to the edge of the
firelight so she could put on her clothes. All he had for her was
the translucent Aelfae gown, but the caves were unnaturally, almost
uncomfortably, warm. He had taken off everything but his legwals,
and he still felt sweat sheen the muscles across his back.

“I’m ready,” she said.

He held out his hand. She hesitated.

“The path between the stone teeth is precarious,” he
said.

She put her hand in his and he led her through the
maze of stalagmites.

Much deeper into the immense limestone cave, there
was another, larger area where the stones had been pulled away and
the floor chiseled into something flat and polished. But fourteen
immense stalactites dangled like stone icicles from the ceiling in
almost a perfect circle around the space. From seven of these
stalactites dangled cocoons the size of death jars, bulged as if
they held something heavy.

“What is this?” Umbral asked tightly. “The larder of
an immense spider? Did Spider Woman or her Aelfae kin have any
inhuman
descendants we should be wary of?”

“I don’t know,” Dindi said. The horror on her face
mirrored his own.

“How do I know you aren’t lying to me again?” Umbral
asked. It came out more harshly than he’d planned.

“How do I know you won’t change your mind again
about killing me?” she shot back.

“So that’s it? Nothing’s changed between us? I still
can’t trust you?”

“What
has
changed between us? You still
haven’t told me!”

“The Bone Whistler is alive.”

He watched her face carefully.

“You knew,” he said.

“From the Visions,” she admitted. “Yes. At least, he
was twenty-some years ago. So what?”

“So what?” he exploded. “Can’t you see how this
changes everything? He’s Aelfae and he’s trying to bring his people
back. Everything he’s ever done, every murder, every atrocity,
every lie, every scheme, has been toward that one end. And the
White Lady is his lover. She’s been helping him from the
start!”

“That’s not true!”

“I saw it for myself. She led some fool named Vio
into an ambush. The Bone Whistler killed him, and the White Lady
helped.”

“You saw Vio murdered in the Vision? Actually
killed
?”

“The Vision cut off before he was actually killed,
but the intention was clear.”

“Visions are tricky things,” Dindi said slowly.
“What they seem to show is not always…” She broke off and put her
hand over her mouth. She stared at him with the oddest
expression.

“What?” demanded Umbral.

She shook herself out of some distraction. “Nothing.
I was just saying that it would be strange if the Vision had showed
Vio being murdered by the Bone Whistler and the White Lady more
than twenty years ago, because Vio is still alive. He is the Maze
Zavaedi, War Chief of the Rainbow Labyrinth tribe. And the White
Lady is still his wife.”

In the back of his mind, Umbral could hear Kavio
snickering. So Kavio had known and said nothing.
Shut up,
Kavio
.

Umbral paced across the polished circle. “Then I
don’t understand what I saw. Or why I saw it. Or why
you
saw
it. Visions aren’t random. They are supposed to have
meaning
.”

“Usually discovered too late.” Dindi sighed.

“We can’t afford to be too late,” Umbral said
sharply. “We must know the Bone Whistler’s plan. Even
you
cannot want him to eradicate humanity.”

“Of course not. Despite what you seem to think, I’m
not a monster. You think that humans and Aelfae could never have
learned to live together in peace. I think they could have. But I
don’t want humans wiped off Faearth any more than you do,
Umbral.”

Umbral stopped pacing.

“What if what happened in the past
is
relevant to what’s happening now? If the Bone Whistler had a plan
to destroy humanity twenty years ago, why hasn’t he done it
already? What stopped him? Dindi! We must invoke the corncob doll
again. Together. Share the Vision. If we can combine our powers,
maybe we can force the Vision to show us what we are missing!”