The Unfinished Song (Book 5): Wing (6 page)

She tripped over a root she could not see. A strong
hand steadied her before she could fall on her face.

“Just a little further,” Kavio murmured
reassuringly. Except it was not him.

Damn him. Damn Umbral.

She wrenched her arm free. “Don’t touch me!”

Dindi pulled away, staggered over another root, and
ran smack into a tree.

Umbral picked her up and swung her over his
shoulder. He carried her that way the rest of the walk.

She heard a multitude of groans, as if arising from
a crowd. The air stank of blood and rotting flesh. The Deathsworn
barked orders and the groans swelled.

Umbral set her down on a log. He loosed the
blindfold. Light confused her eyes. Another sunrise had overtaken
them. The reflection off the snow hurt. Gradually she made out a
circle of black trees surrounding a square of four big black
stones. The clearing before the square of Deathsworn menhirs was
completely filled with rows of the dead and dying.

There were so many.

The dead were already in jars, and there were enough
of them. But the wounded. Oh, the wounded.

Green Woods warriors thrashed on the ground, some
with braided beards, some no more than pink-chinned boys. Orange
Canyon warriors clutched their ram’s horn helms and howled like
infants. A handful of Tavaedies had been grouped together, more or
less with their body parts. Missing legs, missing arms, missing
heads. Bodies torn to shreds by talons, bodies smashed to jelly by
being dropped by flying Raptors. There were Raptors there too, and
wolves, both groups human at last in death.

Umbral brushed the wet streak off her cheek.

“This is my work,” he said softly. “I will leave you
here, but you still wear my leash.”

A pulse of energy flowed through the black
shimmering cord, which caused exquisite pleasure to bolt through
her limbs. Dindi cried out in surprise, then clamped her jaws to
keep from moaning.

She glared at him. “Stop toying with me.”

“It’s a warning,” he said. “Through the leash, I can
make you feel bliss. I can make you feel pain just as easily. Don’t
make me show you the other side by doing something stupid.”

The Deathsworn “worked” all morning—which is to say,
they killed people. The Deathsworn began their ritual with a dance.
After that, one by one, they brought the injured to the four
stones, one of which was laid flat, like the altar where Umbral had
first tied Dindi. Then Umbral or one of the others butchered the
humans as a hunter would butcher a kill: slit the throat, drain the
blood, remove the head, quarter the limbs. The parts were placed in
empty jars, which waited beyond the tree circle.

Dindi forced herself to watch. This was what Umbral
would do to her.

If she let him.

The day never warmed, exactly, but the cold bit less
savagely. Umbral removed his headdress, cloak, and tunic. Though
his breath made misty swirls in front of him, he stripped to just
black leather pants and black leather gloves. His naked chest
gleamed with sweat.
Kavio’s glorious torso, Kavio’s gentle
hands, bent to a purpose Kavio would have abhorred
.
That
thief, that bastard
. One body after another he lifted to the
stone. One throat after another he slit.

Once, he looked up just as she was staring hard at
him. His muscular arms were stained crimson past the elbow. She
could no longer see the black gloves. He looked gloved in gore.
Flecks of brain and intestine splattered his bare chest.

He met her eyes. Something flickered in him, and she
had the oddest sense that he felt…humiliated…for her to see him
like this. Or ashamed?

Then his lips curled up in a sardonic smile.

She was sure she had imagined it. If anything, he
was proud of his “work.”

Yet, at times, he did not cut. “This one is not
ready for our Lady,” he said of a warrior who had lost a foot and
looked delirious with pain. Instead of killing the man, Umbral
waved his hands over the man’s aura. Dindi saw a flash of golden
light, and she realized with amazement that Umbral was healing him.
The stump bled less. The man fell asleep.

“Leave him past the trees with our marks,” Umbral
ordered the two other male Deathsworn.

He spared a few others as well. To Dindi, it was not
obvious why he spared some and killed the rest, any more than it
was obvious why he had changed his mind about killing her right
away.

The two male Deathsworn, who had been sent to place
a Green Woods woman outside the menhir clearing, returned on a path
that passed the log where Dindi sat. One of them, the ugly one who
had leered at her when she was still tied to the other altar,
lingered.

“What are you doing, Masher?” his companion, already
ahead, called back. “We have another two dozen or more left. Don’t
think I’ll do your share for you.”

“I have to yellow some snow. Go on, Owlhawker, I’ll
catch up.”

Owlhawker grumbled but returned to the rows of
injured. There were fewer bodies now, and more had stiffened before
they could be lifted to the menhir.

Masher did not duck behind a tree to attend private
business. Instead, he sauntered closer to Dindi.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “Your aura is skinnier
than an old woman in a drought, but when I am close to you, I feel
powerful. You taste real good…”

She would have moved away, but as soon as she stood
up, pain jolted through the leash. She crashed to her knees from
the electric agony. The flash of pain was brief, but delayed her
long enough that Masher reached her side and grabbed her hair.

He jerked her onto the log and forced her on her
back, with his own body splayed over her. He stank of offal.

“I could save your life,” he wheezed in her ear. One
of his clammy, soiled hands rummaged inside her fur cape, which,
since she’d had to remake it, was held together only by improvised
knots between the rabbit skins. Fingers pinched her nipple. “I’ll
let you run away, if you’re nice to me first.”

All at once, Masher flew off her into the air. He
smashed against a nearby tree.

Umbral, in a towering fury, stomped toward the man
he had just thrown like a ragdoll. He grabbed Masher by the front
of his jerkin and scraped him up against the tree.

“I’ve slit a lot of throats today, goat’s ass. It
makes no difference to me if I slice open one more. My gloves are
already dirty.”

“Forgive me, Umbral,” whimpered Masher. “It’s just,
you’ve never taken one before. Couldn’t see why you would now. I
didn’t know she was yours. I mean I knew she was yours, but I
didn’t know if she was
yours
yours.”

“She’s
mine
mine,” said Umbral through
gritted teeth. “And all mine. Touch her again, and I will give you
to Ash.”

Masher turned white.

“Let’s not be hasty. I said I was sorry. Didn’t I? I
am. Sorry. Ash still has it in for me, ever since that
plague-ridden clanhold. You know what Ash is capable of.”

“I do.” Umbral dropped Masher in the snow. “Better
than you. Get back to work.”

Masher scrambled away.

“Are you…unhurt?” Umbral asked Dindi.

“Unhurt,” she repeated flatly. “Asks the man who has
sworn to kill me.”

“Well enough, I take it.”

“I would have been able to defend myself if your
leash had not stopped me.”

“
That’s
its purpose,” he said, “To prevent you from defending yourself—from
me. But if anyone else tries to touch you, they will answer to
me.”

Other men hunt deer. I hunt wolves.

My father taught me the heart is a tree that will
grow as tall as we allow; but in the roots of every heart lives a
beast. The beast cannot be killed, but neither can it be freed. It
must live in the heart; and the heart must grow past it, to the
sky.

When I turned seven, my father told me to follow him
into the woods. For three days we walked without stopping except
for water and sleep. When all I could think of was my hunger, he
finally paused in a wild glen. He always wore a belt with a
satchel, made from deerskin dyed deep burgundy like a pomegranate.
An ancient, musty smell, which brought to mind old men smoking corn
pipes, imbued the leather. He never let me touch it, and never
opened it.

That day he opened it. A pile of scalps fell
out.

“Count them,” he told me.

Forty-seven. Almost higher than I could count at
that age.

“All for her,” he said. “All to protect your ma, and
you, for she already carried you. Forty-six men died so you could
live, Finnadro. Never forget that.”

“Were they bad men, pa?”

“Some were bad men. Some were good men who served a
bad man. You know that the Bone Whistler tried to conquer the
Hidden Forest. His War Leader, the Skull Stomper, led an army of
Rainbow Labyrinth warriors here, a thousand men, the largest army
in all of Faearth! But had they been but a quarter that number,
they would still have been unstoppable, for they were hungry,
hungrier than you are now, hungry for man-meat. Even the Blood
Spears warriors are not as crazed as the fanatic cannibals who
danced to the Bone Flute.

“We did not have the strength to fight them, and had
to agree to give tribute. They wanted furs, arrow shafts…and women.
Each clan had to give up a daughter, chosen by a drawing of tokens.
Your ma was one of the maidens whose token was drawn. But she was
my betrothed and I would not surrender her to the thugs of Rainbow
Labyrinth. We had not been able to marry yet, because we waited on
Midwinter, but I knew she already carried my seed. Your ma’s
brother, my best friend, Cullo, felt just as strong. He was a
wolfling. He’d always resisted his power before, but now he vowed
he’d take his wolf form and not change back until we rescued
her.

“With the Singing Bow to guide me and Cullo’s nose
to guide him, we hunted the men who took her halfway across
Faearth, and we killed them one by one.

“One man, though, we could not kill. The Skull
Stomper. He eluded every arrow of mine. He and the Blood Drinker
led the attack on Green Woods tribe, with the Skull Stomper
directing the battles and the Blood Drinker slaughtering the
prisoners.

“I was captured, caged and tortured. They tied me to
a spit over a fire, like roast pork. Ratho Blood Drinker himself
cut off slices of my flesh and ate it in front of me. I’m not
ashamed to say I wept. I expected to sing my last song over that
fire pit. But that night, a masked man released me from the spit.
It was the Maze Zavaedi. He was a Rainbow Labyrinth tribesman, but
he hated the Bone Whistler even more than I.”

I knew this part. “You helped him overthrow the Bone
Whistler!”

“Eventually. Yeah. None of us would have succeeded
without the help of the White Lady. You owe her your life. A
lifedebt is the most precious debt of all. You must never rest
until you have paid it.”

“Yes, pa!” I knew that too. Something bothered me,
though. “Pa, you said forty-six men died so I could be born, but
you’ve got forty-seven scalps.”

Pa nodded. I never saw my father cry, but that day
his eyes moistened when he held up one scalp marked with a leather
ribbon.

“The worst thing the Bone Whistler did to us was
unleash the beasts inside us. Not everyone in the Green Woods tribe
agreed we should have surrendered and paid tribute. The wolflings
and other wildlings, in particular, were furious with the decision.
They would not abide by it. They hunted the Rainbow Labyrinth
warriors on their own—and just as wolves will do with deer, ate
their kills. It was no worse than what the Rainbow Labyrinth
cannibals did to us. At the time, I thought the wolflings had the
right of it, and the tribe elders were cowards.”

Pa fell silent, and I had to prod him. “So what
about the forty-seventh scalp, pa?”

“Cullo was one who had eaten man-meat,” said Pa.
“Acquired a taste for it, I guess. He’d sworn he would stay wolf
until his sister was safe, but when we returned from the war, he
could not change back. We kept hoping he just needed more time.
Then one day, when you were still just a baby, Cullo attacked you,
got you in his jaws and tried to eat you. That scar on the back of
your neck?”

I felt it, a tiny ridge of raised flesh in a jagged
line between my neck and shoulder, reaching toward my collarbone.
I’d never thought much of it, but now a chill ran down my back.

“I had no choice,” Pa said softly. “I put an arrow
through him. I took his scalp to remind me that at the end, it
wasn’t really my best friend anymore, nor your ma’s kin. It was the
last revenge of the Bone Whistler.”

Pa handed me the scalp. The hair was like ma’s. Ma
sometimes spoke of her brother, fondly and sadly, but she had never
told me he was a wolfling, or how he died.

“Son, sometimes a man has no choice but to wade into
a river of blood, if he wants to protect the one he loves,” said
Pa. “But always remember, you do it for
her
sake. Never
cross to the far side of that river. You won’t come back.”

Then he told me it was time to prove myself a man,
which I had guessed by now. He took away my clothes and bow,
blindfolded me and tied my hands to a branch in a tree so my feet
dangled off the ground.

“Come home by the full moon with a kill, if you
can,” he said. “And you’ll have a Shining Name. If you can’t catch
a deer, catch a rabbit. If you can’t catch a rabbit, just come
home. Time enough to win a Shining Name later. But be careful. Your
uncle Cullo wasn’t the only wolfling who went bad during the war,
and many of them are still around, still after man-meat. There’s
said to be one in this area, that carried off a child not two moons
ago.”

Wiggling free of the binding wasn’t so hard. I
flipped my feet up onto the branch and gnawed the knots on the
leather straps free with my teeth. Chipped one tooth. Once free, I
made a bow and arrows before I made a fire. I’d held a bow in my
hand since before I could walk, and made my first kill when I was
three (though later I found out my pa had wounded the weasel for me
first). My arrows had no flint and no fletch, but they could still
take down a bird. After that, my arrows had fletch.