The Cedna (Tales of Blood & Light Book 2) (5 page)

The Elders each had their own shape here, cast from bloodlight, shimmering, colored forms that constantly changed between their human shapes and that of their tormaqs, their animal spirit guides, their totems.

I had no tormaq, and I had no body in Yaqi, either. Where my body should have been, only black bloodlight flowed, shapeless and dark.

Skeleton Woman’s voice penetrated my haze.
Death can be traded for life. Sickness traded for health. Coldness transformed to warmth. Every change has its own cost, and one joy brings one sorrow, one life, one death. This is the natural order, and it must not be disturbed. The balance cannot be tipped. For any pure light in the world, there exists a black shadow. Within love, hatred already exists, incubating like a child before its birth. This is tunixajiq, the balance. The more you ask of the Hinge, the more you must give it.

When Ikselian dropped my arm I crumpled forward from my kneeling position, too dizzy to remain upright. No one offered to help me to my feet or even to a comfortable seat.

The Elders bowed and clasped hands in their circle as I lolled in the center, alone. I closed my eyes, held my aching forearm against my body, and let waves of black roll over me.

“It didn’t work.” Ikselian’s voice broke through the thick, woolly buffer of my trance. She tugged me to my feet in the ritual chamber.

“W—what?” I said in confusion. “Why didn’t it work?”

“We sought to strengthen the Hinge, but the magic faltered. Perhaps your blood is weak, as your mother’s was. We will have to try later. Come. We must attend the burial of those who fell.” Though my head spun, I followed Ikselian on the long walk to the tundra where the Kaluqs interred their dead.

A
gain and again
, we made the ritual to strengthen the Hinge, the basic purpose of the Cedna’s existence. The rite was a simple one, giving my blood to the ritual chamber’s crystal channels that led to the Hinge. My blood could be offered anywhere, but the Hinge received more power if it was offered in this way, directly to a crystal vein. If the ritual had worked, the channels would have lit and glowed. They never did.

After every attempt, Ikselian would shake her head, saying, “It is strange. Your bloodlight has no light in it. What does it mean?”

Though the channels would not light, I still sensed power leaving me and seeping into the walls around me. Energy and vitality surged in my blood, pulsing into the crystal channels, straight to the Hinge.

Even so, we all felt the waning of the Hinge’s power. We strove in vain—not because my blood would not suffice, though Ikselian preferred this explanation—but rather because we fought something beyond our power to cure. The tides of magic that moved deep beneath Gante, the surges that fed the Hinge, had a natural cycle like the sea, an ebb and flow connected to forces that we mere humans could not command. We sought to govern the pulse of the earth. We may as well have tried to halt the stars in their passage across the night sky.

I
still believed
we should send a Gantean delegation to the Lethemian capital to plead our case to stop the raids. If King Mydon Galatien demanded that Malvyna Entila cease her attacks, she would have no choice but to obey. I suggested this plan more than once, but Ikselian always shot me down with scoffs and derision. She treated me as though I were a child, incapable of strategy.

She would listen to no one’s counsel, and yet her plan to strengthen the Hinge through my bloodletting accomplished nothing. Throwing my blood at the waning Hinge was like pouring water into a vessel that had no bottom. It certainly did nothing to prevent future raids.

“Enough!” I finally croaked when I arrived in the ritual chamber for the fifth bloodletting in a sennight. I had eaten seal heart the night before—a disgusting meal, but necessary given how much blood they had taken. “No more.”

Ikselian scowled. “There is no alternative unless you will ask Skeleton Woman to name a successor.” Ikselian had taken up this idea as a new plan for the Hinge’s salvation. She claimed a new Cedna would solve all our problems. But if I named a successor, I’d seal my own death warrant. They’d do to me what they had done to my mother.

A shiver rippled my spine.

To my surprise, Drasuq stepped from the circle. “Let us rest, Ikselian,” he said in a heavy voice. “We must meditate on other possibilities. We have done too many rituals, and we all are taxed.”

I exhaled in a deep sigh. Finally, someone could see that Ikselian pushed too hard.

Ikselian glared at him. “There are no other options.”

Drasuq went to the woman and rested his wrinkled hand on her shoulder. “Come now,” he murmured. “Even you, Ikselian, require rest now and again. We will think on these grave matters.”

S
ince the Elders
had begun the frenzied, repetitive rituals, I had been trapped again in a cave—the same one I had spent so much time in with my mother. It galled me to be cooped up while spring blossomed outdoors. The days were lengthening, and purple saxifrage flowers would be opening out on the tundra. I longed for sunlight.

While the Elders rested and debated what to do, they sent Atanurat to look after me. He came bearing a skin of water and a meal of venison and saranaki roots.

“I want to go outside,” I told him. “I’m sun-starved. I need the light to restore myself.”

Atanurat unfolded from his cross-legged seat to stretch his legs in front of him. “They forbade me to let you out.”

“What? Why?” Even when they had put my mother and me in here, we’d been allowed to go out, supervised.

Atanurat flushed. “They believe you will try to flee.”

“Flee? Where?” I threw up my hands. My heart raced in my chest. Were they trying to drive me mad, as they had my mother?

“You must let me out.” I stood and threw aside the tray of food he had brought. “Atanurat, you must! I am the Cedna!” Fury surged in my chest, and I had to forcibly still my hand to avoid slapping him. “Can’t a Gantean man make a choice of his own without consulting the Elders?” I raged, pacing the cavern. I took two broad steps and hauled Atanurat to his feet by his skin tunic. “I am your Cedna. Do you wish to profane me? Why does no one treat me with any respect?”

Atanurat shook himself. “I don’t know.” Color rose in his cheeks. We stood frozen, face-to-face.

“I am your Cedna,” I repeated. “I tell you, Iksraqtaq are forgetting the ways. The Elders do not treat me as Cedna; they give me no heed! We would not only be watching these sayantaq
raiders if I had my way. These shores belong to us, and we should do more to defend them. We should protect them with my magic, but Ikselian is too frightened to try. We are stymied because of one woman’s fear!”

Atanurat shifted his weight from his toes to his heels, deliberating. “If I let you out, what will you do?”

The idea bubbled up from nowhere. “I’ll return to the Ikniq clan,” I said. “That is where the Cedna belongs.” The Cedna had always lived with the Ikniqs until the Kaluqs took my mother away for her disobedience; the Fire People would be glad to have me back.

“But how will you get there?”

“I’ll walk. It’s spring and the weather grows fine.”

Atanurat frowned. “Alone? It’s not safe.”

“Of course not alone. You’ll come with me.”

“What if they pursue you?”

I contemplated the idea as I threw my sealskin cloak over my head. “They will know where I’ve gone. If I can get to the Ikniq settlement before they do, at least the Kaluqs will have to face the Ikniqs and explain themselves. It is not right that the Cedna lives here in Kaluq. I belong there, with the Fire People.”

W
e made
good time across the tundra. The flat landscape stretched west past the Kaluq camp, dotted with clumps of green tuttu moss and lavender saranaki blooms. Rare patches of purple saxifrage gave Atanurat and me a treat to eat when we found them. Sunspots emerged on my cheeks, though Atanurat’s darker skin remained unblemished—to my envy.

Atanurat had more experience than I did with travel, and he made me drink too much water when we came to a stream, “to stay hydrated.” He never fatigued, always keeping a steady pace. When we reached the river where we would cross to turn north, Atanurat carefully assessed the remaining ice cover.

“It’s solid,” he said when he returned from his scouting mission. “Or solid enough. We’ll run fast. You first.”

The race across the waning ice terrified me. As Atanurat urged me forward, an ominous cracking rang out—the spring-thin ice suffered beneath our weight. I winced as I ran, trying to quell the distressing airlessness that rose in my chest.

“Don’t think of it, don’t think of it,” I whispered as I ran, but I could not push down the memory of my mother’s helpless panic beneath the cold water. I could not die breathless in frigid water. Any way but that.

Atanurat’s soft footfalls echoed in my skull. The ice groaned.

When Atanurat called, “There! We’re across!” I exhaled and collapsed against the snowy bank, gasping as my vision blackened.

Atanurat did not even pause—he simply gathered me onto my feet and pushed onto the white plain above the river. “We must not stop.”

Nitaaraq, the largest Ikniq community, rested at the base of Gante’s fire mountain on the northwest coast, thinly veiled from the shore by birches and low willow shrubs. An ice sheet wound five fingers down through the community. I only vaguely recalled the layout of the camp from my childhood.

Atanurat and I went down to the gathering house and huddled together while we waited for someone to see us. Custom dictated that we wait there.

Eventually three children spotted us and dashed away.

By the time we had risen, brushed down our clothes, and exited the gathering house, a woman approached. She stood as tall as I did, and her hair had been dyed yellow by birch juice. A single braid made a dry stalk running down her back. She was familiar to me, a figure from both my early childhood and my mother’s memories.

“Who are you?” She folded her hands into the crooks of her elbows as she stood before us.

“I am the Cedna of the People. I am returned to live with you again. This is Atanurat of the Kaluq Clan. He is my escort.”

The woman drew her brows together. “Who are you?” she asked again, her words a cold gust in the crisp morning.

Atanurat gave me a reproachful look and made the proper formal greeting. “I am the unmoving stone that is Her blood,” he intoned.

“I burn with the heat of the world, fed by Her fire,” the woman said, bowing. “I am Esteriaq Ikniq Iksraqtaq. Come with me.”

Deep down I feared that the Ikniqs would reject me, but Esteriaq welcomed us and said she would gather the clan to listen to me speak.

The Ikniqs harbored their own grudges against the Kaluq Elders. The Kaluqs had robbed the Ikniq clan of their power when they dragged my mother and me off to the Kaluq caverns. Without the Cedna the Ikniqs were forgotten in their northern fastness.

That evening a fire blazed, huge and furious, in the camp center. The crackling wood punctuated the low voices of the people Esteriaq had collected to hear me. My head spun with the memory of my mother’s inebriated storytellings that I had dreamed of so often. I had to pull myself together.

“Why have you have come here?” Esteriaq faced me.

“The Cedna is selected from the Ikniqs; traditionally she lives amongst you. That was the way of it for generation upon generation. I shall live again with you. I have decided.”

The sea of Ikniq gazes flashed with wariness or disbelief.

“The Kaluqs would not have sent you to us,” Esteriaq said flatly.

“It is not for them to decide. I am the Cedna. They killed my mother.” This final sentence slipped out of my mouth inadvertently.

A startled hiss ran through the audience.

“What do you mean?” Esteriaq’s eyes were like blackstone shards.

“I saw,” I whispered. “They drowned her.”

A dead silence followed. The Ikniqs understood the significance of what I said. If the killing had been a proper ritual, if it had been tunixajiq, a Cedna would be killed via bloodletting. Drowning my mother was a profane act.

“They drowned her,” Esteriaq said.

I met her gaze, and a flash of memory, not my own, rippled through my mind. Esteriaq had been my mother’s friend. They had stood together to watch Ronin Entila step down from his metal-hulled ship and take his first step onto Gantean ice.

Esteriaq’s youthful voice whispered through my mind:
You must not go, Miseliq. Wait for the others.

And my mother’s stubborn reply:
I will go to him now. Look, he does not know how to cross the ice safely. He needs help.

My mother had raced across the floe to take Ronin Entila’s hand, to guide him to land, sealing her own fate when his warm hand enclosed hers. Ganteans viewed matters of the heart differently than sayantaq southerners. We were not a passionate people; we were raised to make choices reasoned through the logic of need and practicality. The Elders selected the Cedna’s mate, and she mated for life like all Ganteans. We permitted none of the emotional turmoil the southerners courted with their many lovers, their divorces, their flirtations. Only sayantaq believed that love could fall out of the sky like rain.

The unexpected rain of love had fallen on my mother when she had laughed at Ronin Entila as he scrambled across the treacherous ice.

“I do not understand.” Esteriaq brought me back to the present.

“My mother’s death was not tunixajiq,” I bit out. “It was murder.”

I
wanted
the Ikniq people to rally around me; I had returned to win their support. In the end, they gave it to me not because of my mother’s murder, but because they feared sayantaq raiders. News about the deadly raid on the Kaluq camp had spread, and it left the Ikniqs worried.

The Entilan raids hit hard on the west side of the island in spring and summer when the Gantean sea was passable. Though the Kaluqs had seen only the one raid whose aftermath I had witnessed, the other clans lived in constant fear of Entilan raiders during the warm season.

At Ikniq nightfires, the fear spread. As summer lengthened the days, news of more raids in the Shringar and Tuq territories traveled to us.

“News from Umaq,” Atanurat whispered to me as we lounged after a nightfire. Some of the Ikniq fisher-fathers had journeyed south in pursuit of a pod of whales, and they had just returned.

“What news?” I did not bother to quiet my voice.

“Another raid on the Shringars. Seven children taken. Five men killed. The Shringars might move their entire clan north and inland.”

“But those are Tuq lands.” Clans did not encroach on each other’s territory. Those boundaries were as fixed as the paths of the stars.

“They are desperate; they have nowhere else to go. Shringars live on the shore, exposed everywhere to the raiders,” Atanurat said.

I shook my head. “We must do more to protect the shores, no matter what Ikselian thinks. This is not sustainable. I must try to use the Cedna’s magic.”

An older hunt-father who sat across from us joined in. “The last time a Cedna used her magic, she did more damage than good.” He spoke, of course, of the one time my mother had attempted to use her magic to protect our shores. “That magic weakened the Hinge too much. It is not stable. We must endure these dangers without the assistance of magic and conserve whatever power the Hinge holds for winter. The signs say it will be a hard one, and if it is, we will need magic to see us through it.”

I knew the conservative arguments as well as anyone, but it discouraged me to hear them from an Ikniq. What use was there in protecting the Hinge if we could not protect the people? Just because my mother had lacked the strength to wield the Cedna’s magic safely did not mean I could not. They did not have much faith in me or my magic.

I lifted my arms above the fire’s embers. It was too early to push the Ikniqs if they did not trust me. “As I told the Kaluq Elders, if I cannot use magic, then we must try a different route. We must go to the Lethemian king and make the Entilans culpable for these wrongs. Malvyna Entila plants her flag on our lands without any right.”

People in the circle nodded. A thrill of excitement coursed through me. They were on my side!

A
s the moon
of saranaki flowers waned, we organized a trip to the south. An Ikniq woman, Inarian, who knew the southern tongue well and had been to Queenstown once to trade, was elected to be my guide. I wanted Atanurat, but the Ikniqs voted against it. As we were gathered around a nightfire making our final plans, five figures clad in sealskins emerged from the shadows.

One of them was Ikselian. She threw her hood back with a grim glare as she stepped into the fire’s light. The Ikniqs shrank from her. Though small, Ikselian commanded a powerful presence.

“I am the unmoving stone that is Her blood, Ikselian Kaluq Iksraqtaq,” she announced, looking over our circle and the two packed sealskin rucksacks we had supplied for the journey south. “We Kaluqs have heard that the Ikniqs hold a council that touches upon the fate of our island.” Four Kaluq hunt-fathers shifted around Ikselian. “We object to these matters being settled without Kaluq input. I am here to be the voice of the Kaluqs.”