Voice of Crow (3 page)

“They came at midnight,” she said matter-of-factly. “Our scouts sent out the alarm. Cougars and Bobcats shot a few, but there were too many. We surrendered. They gathered us all in the big clearing, where we have our celebration bonfires. They brought out the elders and slit their throats. The ones who struggled were stabbed in the gut instead. They died a lot slower.” She rattled off the details as if recounting the weather. “The ones who healed up right away, like Orias the Butterfly, they had their heads bashed in. We tried to stop them, but they restrained us.”

Thera paused with her mouth open, as if waiting for her memory to catch up. “They brought the bodies here and tied them up. They asked for a Hawk to give their message, said everyone else would be taken away, so I volunteered. They tested my memory to see if I was lying, then they tied me up. They took everyone else—the children, the young people, the fathers and mothers—and they marched them to the river. They said they were taking them back to Leukos as prisoners.”

“The WhiteCity,” Rhia whispered. Next to her, Alanka shuddered.

“They said it was in revenge for helping Asermos,” Thera continued. “They would have left us alone if we hadn’t sent soldiers and archers to defeat them there.”

Rhia’s stomach went cold. Her worst fears had come to pass. This death and destruction, this decimation of Kalindos, had happened because of her.

“It’s not true,” Alanka whispered, bending her head close to Rhia’s shoulder. “They would have come here if they’d won or lost. Nothing would have stopped them.”

But Rhia could feel the others’ judgment, as heavy as a stone.

“Maybe some escaped.” Adrek picked up his bow and quiver of arrows. “Maybe the Descendants couldn’t keep track of all the prisoners. Or—or maybe they left behind the ones who couldn’t keep up. Some of the children…” His fierce gaze darted among them. “We have to search.”

Alanka was the first to shake the shock of Thera’s story. “I’ll go.” She left the paddock and sprinted into the forest with Adrek.

Rhia turned to Marek and motioned to the corpses that surrounded them. They had to remove the gruesome spectacle before the others arrived. Marek pulled out his knife and reached for the rope binding the closest one. She glanced down to see a splotch of blood soaking through Marek’s trouser leg.

Rhia looked at Elora, whose eyes were also focused on the reopened wound. The healer stood and approached Marek, mumbling, “At least there’s one person I can help.”

On her way out of the paddock, Rhia gave a last glance at the baby Etarek, quiet in his mother’s arms. He had been named in memory of his grandfather, the first casualty of a war that had only just begun.

Alanka echoed Adrek’s call for his two-year old daughter as they ran through the dim forest. She added the names of other Kalindon children, the memory of each face stabbing her with regret. Her father had started it all, collaborating with the Descendants in their attack on Asermos. How could he have known it would bring so much pain to the village he loved?

No. How could he
not
have known?

Her ears strained for signs of others, but heard nothing over the sounds of their feet and the blood pumping through her head.

She grabbed Adrek’s arm and pulled him to a halt. “Let me listen.”

He obeyed, panting hard. Cats were sprinters, she reminded herself, and placed her palm over his mouth. “Shh.”

Alanka closed her eyes to listen. Her pulse, accustomed to long runs, slowed and quieted. In a few moments, the world of scent and sound opened up to her.

She filtered out the background hum of the distant river and whispering pine branches. A squirrel shook the branches of a tree, claws scrabbling over bark in its haste to hide. From its scent she knew it was a female who had recently given birth.

She knelt on the forest floor and put her face near the ground. The damp dirt held the scent of people—so many, she couldn’t pick out any individual. Many wore deerskin shoes, but some had been taken barefoot.

“They came this way.” She sat back on her haunches and drew a deep breath. “But the scent is hours old.”

“We already know they came this way. We need to know if they’re here now.”

“Not in that direction.” She pointed to their right, off the path, toward the south, from which the wind blew.

“I’ll climb.” Adrek removed his moccasins and took off, racing for a pine tree whose lowest branch hung more than three times his own height.

She watched his lithe form speed up, long legs devouring the distance in less time than she could blink. With a graceful leap, he launched himself at the branch. Alanka gasped, certain he would miss and crash to the ground, but his hands seized the branch as deftly if he had been standing next to it. Adrek arced his body to align his hips with the branch. He planted a foot on the limb, then stood up straight, with only a finger on the trunk to steady himself.

He surveyed the area, then shouted, “Nothing yet. I’ll go higher.”

He leaped to grasp the stub of a branch Alanka couldn’t see, then used his bare feet to push himself farther up the trunk where he could get his arm around a longer limb. She watched him repeat the process until her neck ached.

She picked up Adrek’s shoes and moved closer to the tree, hoping to glimpse his diminishing figure in the forest canopy. The breeze shifted to blow from the east, from the river itself.

A human scent struck her, too strong to be a lingering footstep. She closed her eyes again to isolate it. It was a child. Female?

As she turned to tell Adrek, he shouted, “I see something!”

He ran out on a branch too small for his weight, and Alanka tensed. Just before it snapped, he leaped to the limb of an adjoining fir. He slid down the smooth trunk, then hung from the lowest branch. Adrek let go and slammed to the ground beside Alanka. “I saw pink.” He pointed toward the river, then grabbed his moccasins from her and shoved them on his feet. “The mountain laurel’s stopped blooming, so it must be someone’s clothes.” His own face was pink from the exertion.

“I smelled a person in that direction,” she said, “maybe a girl.”

“Daria!” Adrek took off.

When Alanka caught up to him at the side of the path, he was kneeling over a small patch of pink. Her sweat turned cold.

She ran to join him and realized he was holding only a nightshirt. Its front was smeared brown in the center.

“It’s hers. The stain is just mud.” He heaved a wheezing breath and stood. “She could be anywhere.”

“Give it to me.” Alanka held the shirt to her face and inhaled the same scent as before. She shoved the shirt back into Adrek’s hands and trotted off the left side of the path, to the north. As he followed, she said, “This is the one direction I couldn’t smell before, because of the wind. Stay off to the side so I don’t pick up the scent of the shirt.”

But after a hundred or so paces, she knew it was futile. “Not this way. And not south.” She looked at Adrek’s face, taut with desperate hope. “We’ll keep moving toward the river, and I’ll track back and forth to see if she left the path, but—”

“She must have. She’s always running off.” His words tumbled over one another. “Turn your head for two blinks and she’s gone. That’s how they are at that age, right?” He twisted the pink cloth between his fingers. “She probably got hot and cranky in her shirt and made her mother take it off, then saw a rabbit or—or a flower or—”

Alanka put a hand on Adrek’s arm. “We’ll find her.”

They ran. Alanka veered to both sides of the path, staying within the cone of scent the girl had created. Now that she had smelled the shirt, it was easy to pick out one person’s trail among the others.

But the center of the cone never left the path. Alanka knew Adrek’s labored breathing wasn’t only due to the strain of the cross-country run. His anguish held an acrid scent of its own.

The light ahead brightened as the trees thinned. Her legs pumped harder, and in a few moments she burst from the trees into the blinding sunshine. She trotted up and down the riverbank, searching for a scent leading off to the side, some sign of a last-minute escape.

Nothing.

Adrek stumbled out of the woods and sank to his hands and knees in the mud. He coughed several times, then raised his head to look at Alanka.

She went to him. “I’m sorry.”

“No…” His muddy hands grasped his hair as if to tear it from its roots. Alanka slipped her arm around his shoulders, slick with sweat and tree mist. He called his daughter’s name again and again as if his voice could reach down the river and yank the child back to him.

“We’ll get her back,” Alanka murmured. “We beat them before—we can do it again.”

“Not on their land. We don’t even know if they’ll keep her in the city. She could be—” He spit out the words. “She could be sold.”

Alanka’s grip on him tightened at the thought. “I swear on my Spirit, Adrek, someday we’ll make them sorry they ever met us.”

Rhia laid a blanket over the body of the last Kalindon elder they had removed from the paddock posts. Her chest ached at the sight of the woman’s pale, wrinkled face. Though Rhia had seen people she’d known since childhood fall on the Asermon battlefield, these deaths somehow cut her more. So much wisdom and power, gone forever.

The voices of the dead still whispered. Now she knew they belonged to those who had perished here. She was almost glad she couldn’t hear their words—surely they were accusing her.

Marek brought her a skin of water and placed a hand on her back. “How are you?”

She wiped the sweat from under her eyes with a clean cloth. “I feel responsible.”

“You were protecting your home. It was the Descendants’ choice to kill. You didn’t put the swords in their hands.”

“I put the targets in front of them.”

Marek’s gaze shot to the right, and his nostrils flared. “They’re coming!”

Panic streamed down her spine. “The Descendants? Again?”

“No.” His face broke into a near smile.

With a rustle of undergrowth, the forest gave birth to Wolves, stumbling under the weight of weariness and small children.

Rhia ran with the others to embrace the men and women—all second-phase Wolves like Marek, able to cloak another person with their nighttime invisibility. Ten had escaped, as Kerza had, when the Descendants invaded. Each had carried off a child to shield.

Rhia helped Elora deliver food and water to the returning Wolves and the children. The adults tried to muffle their mourning for the sake of the young ones, who seemed more dazed than frightened. Most were too small to grasp what had happened. Rhia almost envied them.

Not long after the Wolves’ return, her mentor, Coranna, and the other nonwounded Kalindons arrived on foot. Coranna approached Rhia at the paddock gate, her pale blue eyes blank with shock. Most of her long silver hair had come loose from its braid, and her graceful gait had turned into a near stagger.

Rhia embraced her. Coranna’s thin arms trembled against Rhia’s back, then she drew away and blinked hard. “Have you done the prayers of passage?”

Rhia nodded.

Coranna stumbled past her to sink onto a nearby log. After a moment, she sat up straighter and drew the heels of her hands over her temples. “I’ll just rest a moment, then we’ll get help moving the bodies to the pyre.”

Good, Rhia thought. Keep moving, be useful. “How will we burn so many?” she asked Coranna. “There isn’t enough dry wood for twelve funerals.”

“We’ll burn several at a time and have separate ceremonies away from the pyre. Each person should have their own tribute, especially since they—” Her voice caught, and Rhia waited to see if her composure would crack. These people were Coranna’s closest friends. She and Kerza were the only remaining elders.

Coranna drew in a breath and pressed her lips together, as if trapping the onrush of emotion inside. “We’ll hold the rituals as soon as the rest have arrived from Asermos.”

Rhia had almost forgotten about the wounded and their caretakers. The scene of sorrow and discovery would repeat. The thought made the skin around her eyes feel tight and heavy.

“Why do they hate us so much?” she heard herself say. When Coranna didn’t answer, she continued. “I can almost understand their invasion of Asermos. The lands there are rich. But here—” She lifted a shaky hand toward the line of shrouded bodies. “What they did to these men and women, it’s—” She fell silent. Any attempt to describe the atrocity sounded feeble.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Coranna said. “Never imagined.”

“Where were the Spirits? Why didn’t They protect Kalindos?”

“I understand your bitterness,” Coranna said, “but it’s not up to the Spirits to solve human problems. You’re old enough to know that.”

“I don’t want Them to solve our problems. But a little help would be nice.”

“Perhaps it’s all part of a plan.”

“Then it’s a bad plan.”

Coranna sighed. “Tell that to Crow.”

“I will.” She wished she could communicate with Him right here, right now, without waiting for a vision or dream. But the Spirits couldn’t be beckoned like dogs.

A low croak came from the tree overhead. Rhia looked up to see a raven gazing down at them. She stood, ready to shoo the bird away from the bodies if it came any closer.

Coranna touched her elbow. “It has something.”

The raven cocked its head, revealing a shiny silver object in its beak. It stretched its neck and opened its mouth. The thing fell to the ground in front of Rhia.

She picked up the object, which appeared to be a large flat button. It held an insignia in the shape of the sun, with tiny marks on either side.

“Must have come from one of the soldiers,” Coranna said.

An idea dawned in Rhia’s mind. She clutched the button in her fist and looked up at the raven. “Thank you.”

Someone called her name. Alanka walked toward her, skirting the rows of bodies. The bitter set of her jaw told Rhia the unwelcome news: no Kalindons had been found on the way to the river.

She approached Alanka quickly. “I have an idea.”

“Our boats are gone, even the canoes, so we can’t follow them. Adrek and I are going to Asermos to gather a rescue party.”

“You’re a step ahead of me already.” Rhia showed Alanka the button. “Use this. It belongs to the invaders, so maybe it can be traced to a certain part of Leukos. Maybe that’s where the prisoners will go first. It’s not much, but it’s a start.”

Alanka examined the button. “Better than going in blind.”

Rhia thought of the dead Descendant in the woods whose soul she had delivered to Crow. “Let’s have everyone scour the village for pieces of the invaders’ uniforms. The more clues, the better.”

“And it’ll give us something to do besides cry.” Alanka put the button in her pocket. “We’ll leave as soon as the horses are ready, before nightfall at the latest. Drenis and Ladek want to come. Maybe Morran, too.”

The
shing-shing
of a sharpening knife drew their attention to Morran and Adrek, who knelt side-by-side at the feet of their fathers’ corpses. The Cats stared straight ahead, fists clenched, as Endrus prepared to shear their hair in mourning.

“Now we’re all orphans.” Alanka fingered the ends of her own short black locks. “Time to grow up.”

Whether we’re ready or not, Rhia thought.