The Unfinished Song (Book 5): Wing (7 page)

Starting at age four, pa had taken me into the woods
and left me alone there, always a little farther away from home,
and let me find my own way home. I knew how to track. I hunted
small things, to eat and to make myself a few scraps of
clothes.

But I knew what my pa expected.

I tracked the wolf for many days. The moon was
waxing. I despaired I would find it in time to still make the three
day walk home by the full moon.

When I found week-old wolf scat, I realized with
dread the wolfling had been sniffing around for quite some time.
The whole time I had been hunting it,
it
had been hunting
me
. More cunning than any animal, it had been brushing the
ground free of prints, which is why I had not found any. After
that, I knew to look for a trail of brushed earth.

Even that trail ended, at a stream. Flummoxed, I had
to admit I had been outwitted. I had to give up and make it home
before the full moon or fail my Initiation completely.

Then I saw it. The stream was just another false
lead. It was still on my side of the bank, staring at me from
behind a bush: Grey and huge and malevolent, with glowing yellow
eyes. It leaped out and I let my arrow fly. My aim was erratic. I
had no control. The arrow was wild and should have overshot the
wolf.

It didn’t.

That was the first time I heard the song. Every
thing around me burst into music, the trees, the stream, the air
itself, hummed, all part of an immense, ancient harmony as vast as
Faearth itself. I knew that it was not the song which had just
started, but my own ears which had opened for the first time. A
green glow flared around the shaft and guided it down a perfect
emerald arc, straight into the wolfling’s heart. Silence returned.
Again, I knew it was not the song which had ended, but my own
ability to hear it. I knew I would hear it again only in those
moments of my life when I was most true, and pure and in love with
life, and my greatest fear is that I would never again prove worthy
of it.

The wolf changed at death into a hairy, bestial man.
I scalped him and took home his hair. I arrived barely in time, on
the night of the full moon, to find my whole clan anxiously waiting
for me. I tossed the scalp at the feet of my father, Clan Patriarch
Obran.

“Welcome home, Finnadro Wolf Hunter,” he said
gravely. I knew I had made him proud. I vowed I would not rest
there, but would win a Singing Bow, as had my father before me. I
knew had heard a tiny piece of song of the bow, and would do
anything to deserve that song again. I vowed I would hunt not just
the devourers of man-meat, but the tyrants and war mongers who
created their hunger.

Other men hunt prey. I hunt predators.

The trees that had once grown in a circle around the
tribehold were gone, but roots remained sticking up like twisted
bones from a shallow grave.

Finnadro and Nann and five other Tavaedi warriors,
gathered in the sweat lodge, faceless behind wooden animal heads
painted green and white and brown, in fearsome expressions. They
fed herbs to the embers in the pit. The smoke curled up around the
rafters, releasing a pungent odor that made one dizzy if inhaled
too deeply.

A wooden frame stood at one end of the fire pit.
Warriors brought enemy prisoners, one after another, stripped each
down to his loincloth, and lashed him to this, spread eagle. Then
the interrogation began.

Nann led the questioning, but Finnadro pulled
threads of Vision from the prisoners as they babbled. The herbal
smoke loosened most tongues. Those who were still reluctant to
speak received blows, or the threat of being laid prone over the
hot embers. Fear and pain loosened the tongues of the stubborn
ones.

Finnadro could not hear the thoughts of the
captives, but he could sense their emotions, catch images from the
Green threads in their aura. He could tell who told the truth and
who lied.

Most of the prisoners were ignorant. They had been
told that the Green Woods tribe was planning a sneak attack, so
Orange Canyon must attack first. None of them knew their leaders
future plans.

The last captive to be lashed to the frame over the
fire was Hawk. His shoulder wound stood out, raw, enflamed, against
his pale naked skin.

“Where will Amdra and Vumo take the White Lady?”
demanded Nann.

Hawk did not reply.

One of the masked Tavaedies pressed his hand into
Hawk’s wounded shoulder, hard enough to make him cry out and try to
buck free. The lashings to the wood frame held him firm.

“Enough.” Finnadro removed his mask. He put his head
close to Hawk’s like a confidante. “Hawk, she enslaved you. You owe
her nothing.”

“I’m already dead,” said Hawk.

“Just tell us where she will take the White Lady.
That’s all we want to know.”

He shook his head.

Finnadro leaned closer and whispered, “Anayo.”

Finnadro could taste Hawk’s fear, almost panic. At
times, emotion could be as clear as thought:
How has the enemy
learned my true name?
For a wildling a name was a secret
thing.

“Anayo, I see your true self,” said Finnadro. “The
man you were meant to be. You don’t have to go back to them. You
could fly free, as you once did. As you were born to do.”

“I’m already dead,” Hawk said thickly. “I failed my
task.”

“What task?”

“His duty to serve his mistress,” guessed Nann.

“No, I sense something deeper and stronger than an
outside Compulsion. This is something he took on himself…”

Finnadro pulled harder on the threads of Hawk’s
aura. A Vision:
a stone room, high in the mountains. A woman on
the bed, bleeding terribly. Another woman, a healer wearing yellow
and gold, knelt beside her, holding something. A cry, a wail, as of
a tiny animal
…

No, not an animal.

Finnadro’s eyes widened. He darted a shocked glance
at Hawk, who only curled his lip in response.

“Let me help you, Hawk,” Finnadro urged. “The enemy
of your enemy is your friend. Let us help each other.”

“You cannot even help yourself. You cannot help me.
It was my burden, and I failed.” Hawk laughed unsteadily. “The
Black Well will soon swallow all of us anyway, what does it
matter?”

“Lower him over the fire,” ordered War Chief Nann.
“The pain will loosen the strands of his aura, and make it easier
for you to pick out truths.”

“No.” Finnadro straightened. “It’s useless. He will
never betray her. Take him back to the other prisoners to await the
Chase.”

Umbral cleaned his hands in the snow. The snow
turned pink, but his flesh and gloves retained the stain. He would
have to bathe. But not here, not near the menhirs.

Relatives of the dead outfitted the corpses for
burial with the finest clothes and weapons they could spare.
Wealthy corpses might have a whole extra jar of clothing, pottery,
weaponry and food packed with them. The Deathsworn took for
themselves what treasures they wished, as their due. Umbral chose a
few items himself, which he added to his packs.

He whistled for Shadow. The dark creature trotted up
in the shape of a horse. Umbral itched to fly again, but it would
not be prudent while still so close to the Green Woods tribehold,
where so many archers still had arrows to spare and a loathing for
winged things against their skyline.

He lifted the girl onto the horse in front of
him.

“Umbral!” Ash stomped over to him. “Where are you
going?”

“I have important business elsewhere. Camp here with
the others for a few more days. There will be more dead as the
disease fae gnaw down the wounded. Once you are done, if you can
catch up with me, do so, otherwise meet me back at Obsidian
Mountain.”

“What are you talking about? What about the White
Lady? Didn’t you hear anything I told you? Orange Canyon has taken
her!”

“I’m well aware of that, Ash. Do as you are
told.”

He tapped hoop and heel to spur his horse. Tree and
hill and snow-topped rock whizzed past. He did not hoop in his
horse until they came to a dell walled in by thicket. A brook ran
through the dell over tumbled boulders, forming picturesque little
cataracts and pools. In the spring it would have been a feathery
bower of ferns and flowers and moss covered rocks, but in winter it
was rather icy and grim.

“We will not be disturbed here,” he said,
dismounting with the girl still in his arms. He set her on the
ground and released her. She stumbled back a few steps. She glanced
down at her clothes, caught sight of the blood smeared all over
them, and began to hyperventilate. He stepped up to her and
caressed her aura to soothe her.

“Breathe slowly,” he urged.

She flinched away. “Don’t do that.”

Umbral built a fire from driftwood on the bank with
an ember saved from his last fire in a bone box. He peeled off his
blood-soaked gloves and rinsed them in the stream. Then he unlaced
his legwals.

“Take off your clothes,” he ordered the girl.

He heard her sharp intake of breath.

“Is that why you spared my life?”

He paused. It was an understandable fear, closer to
his impossible fantasies than he liked. He wrung out his gloves and
scarlet water dribbled onto the snow. He felt unclean in more ways
than one.

“You saw what I do. You know what I am.”

“Yes.” She tucked contempt and terror into one
word.

His nostrils flared. He slapped his gloves onto the
rocks on the bank, leaped to his feet and advanced on her. For the
past year, he had lived among the old, the diseased, the scarred,
the withered and decayed. The only non-Deathsworn women he had seen
had been from afar, held apart by an impossible gulf of physical
and social distance. And now here was this exquisite swan, fresh
and young, with pearl skin and eyes tumultuous like the sea. Her
hair had been dyed like flame, bright enough to lure moths to their
deaths. Even the bloody, ragged cape couldn’t hide her slender
waist and long legs. He wanted her and hated her for it.

“I look like your man, don’t I? The one you loved. I
look like the man they all loved. I look like a living man; I have
the desires of a living man. All illusion, delusion and deception.
I am already dead. I will never find a pretty girl, move onto her
farm, tend rows of corn and kraals of aurochsen. It is taboo for me
to marry, or sire heirs. It is taboo for me to take a woman.”

“But that won’t stop you,” she whispered, for he was
close to her, towering over her. “No one will disturb us here.”

She was right. It would have been easy.

“And afterward, you will kill me.” A tear glittered
on her cheek. “Once again I beg you. Don’t wear
his
face.”

“I told you, I don’t control how you see me.”

He untied the gut-string of her cape. It billowed
onto the snow.

“You must bathe.” He pointed to the pools. “I must
cleanse myself, as must you. Though you have not killed someone
yourself, you’ve been close to the dead, and been touched by
blooded hands. You will bear the stain of murder until you purify
yourself.”

She just stared at him. “How can that possibly
matter now?”

“It matters.”

“I don’t know the right dance.”

“You cannot purify yourself in any case. Someone
must do it for you.”

“You?” she said in horror. “Can you even…?”

“I have magic,” he said, though he suspected that
was not what she meant. “But, no. Not me. Summon the fae. They will
know what to do.”

“Oh.”

“Do I need to take off the rest of your clothes, or
can you do it yourself?”

She blushed like a little cranberry.

“
I will leave the glen to spare
your modesty,” he said with a sardonic twist to his lips. “But,
remember, you still wear my leash. I will be nearby. Also keep in
mind the enemy may still be about in this wood. Call to me if
anything goes wrong.” From his pack he took out the set of clothes
he had taken from the pelf, and left the pile by the fire. “Oh, and
don’t put those dirty rags back on. I’ve brought you something else
to wear.”

Umbral withdrew. As he had promised, he did not go
far, just beyond the thicket. He let his eyes stray through the
tangle of saplings and thorn bushes. When he caught a glimpse of
rounded buttocks as Dindi undressed, he quickly looked away, but
not soon enough to prevent a shot of arousal from rushing through
him.

“What are you doing?” hissed a voice by Umbral’s
side. “Why do you have a girl? Why haven’t you killed her? Are you
planning to keep a pet?”

Ash. He sighed.

Umbral trusted Ash with his life, as far as that
went, but he also knew that she was a spy appointed by Obsidian
Mountain to keep an eye on him. As a child, enemy warriors had
attacked her clan. They had raped her. They then had taken the more
valuable women, those older, and more likely to survive, with them,
and had left her with the corpses of her brothers and uncles while
they set fire to her clanhold. When a friendly clan had found her,
still alive, but hideously burned, they had sent her to Obsidian
Mountain to complete her dying. There, instead of death, she had
found new life with the Deathsworn. To this day, much of her face,
indeed, of her body, warped into shiny crusts of red and white
skin, the inerasable memory of burns.

She had once confessed to Umbral that unlike the
rest of the Deathsworn, she remembered everything about her first
life.

“I told you, I have a use for her,” Umbral said.

Ash snorted.

“Then use her, and get it over with!”

“No, I must let her rest first. She’s exhausted from
the War Dance and the battle and…” And the Vision she’d caused
before, fighting him when he tried to kill her. “I will wait.”

From the dell, gentle blue light gleamed. Umbral
glanced that way reflexively, and caught a glimpse of Dindi
standing naked behind the silvery veil of a melted waterfall, while
Blue water and air fae danced all around her in a whirlpool of
purifying energy. He looked away again quickly, but the image was
incised on his memory. Nor was he subtle enough that Ash hadn’t
caught the direction of his attention.