The Unfinished Song - Book 6: Blood (3 page)

“That’s our priority, then,” she said, as she jumped off the stone table. “Find our friends. Then scout out this world…. Well, perhaps you’ve already done that.”

“I have. Vessia, I know you’re used to being the sept leader of the Eight Uncursed, but I think you’re going to have to let me take charge for a while. I know more about this time than you. Once you’re caught up, and we find the others, of course you’ll resume your role as sept leader. Until then, you need to listen to me.”

“Don’t I always listen to you?”

He smiled at her, but it didn’t reach his eyes.

Xerpen’s point was reasonable, so why did she feel a weird shiver run down her back? Surely she wasn’t so obsessed with her own self-importance that she couldn’t share command. Yes, she was used to leading their band of warriors, but she didn’t think she was dictatorial about it. Hadn’t she always accepted advice and input from the others?

“There’s one other thing you should know,” he said.

Vessia, already at the foot of the steps to the exit, paused.

“The humans think I am one of them. I am a leader among them…a War Chief of this tribe. For a time, I was War Chief of an even greater tribe, but our foes were too strong. Still, I will retake the Labyrinth. But to do that, I will need allies—we will need allies. We must use humans—

“No!”

“…pit one human tribe against another, until we are strong enough on our own. Do not be frightened that I control a human army. There is no one else.”

“Xerpen, have you gone mad?” she demanded. “How could you trust
any
of the humans? Those filthy animals! What about the other Aelfae?”

“All our people are dead.”

Vessia sank to the floor. A rumble built up in her belly, reverberating until she screamed and pounded the stone floor.

“DEAD! Then they have won! And my spell has failed, for if I sent only my aura’s pattern to overlay my future flesh, what way is there for us to go back to the past? Even if we learn how the humans defeated our people, what will it avail us? We can do nothing but gnash our teeth! We are dead, dead,
dead
, all of us dead!”

He tried to lift her from the floor, but she pounded his chest, then pounded the wall, then bashed her against the stone, until he pulled her to him and enclosed her in his arms until she stilled.

“There is a way, Vessia.” He kissed her forehead. “Look at us, we are alive, and we are young again! Once I despaired even that would be possible. But this is just the beginning. We can renew everything. Now that you are with me, we can do anything! We can
win
.”

The wind in the cave rounded the teeth of stalactites and stalagmites, creating bouncing echoes and uncanny whistles. Six Aelfae had ripped free of the cocoons hidden in the cave.

There was no mistaking the Aelfae for anything but Rainbow High Fae. They were too beautiful to be merely human. They had wings and other odd features.

They glowed. They
overflowed
.

It was as though they had too much power to be contained in mere bodies. They were greater than the sum of their limbs. The halo around each contained the whole rainbow spectrum, but the painfully brilliant light was only an outer manifestation of a deeper power.
Their luminosity, their intensity, their immensity hurt Dindi’s mind as much as her eyes. The Aelfae projected their thoughts and feelings with such abandon it made her appreciate for the first time how guarded most humans were. Visions flashed by her so fast she could only catch fragments.

The huge man had dark wings, wild hair like a mane, and purple tattoos, designs that looked like claws. He wore a lion fur diagonally across his chest and swathed about his hips. A lion’s tail lashed behind him once, twice, thrice,
then disappeared when he folded back his wings. His name was
Hest
. Dindi found herself in one of his memories, which flickered rapidly in and out of her mind:

Hest finds the dead mountain lioness around dawn. As he finishes curing the skin, he hears squeaks. He follows it until he lifts brush away from a shallow ditch under an overhanging rock. Three tiny kits paw the ground, mewling for food. Hest picks them up tenderly, one at a time. Their little claws and tiny, ineffective bites only tickle him. ‘Since I wear your mother’s fur, I suppose I must be the one to mother you, now,’ he tells them. They became his pets, until they’re old enough to hunt for themselves…He weeps when they finally leave him, running off into the hills without looking back. He finds ease for the strange pang when his friends Xerpen and Gwidan put his mix of joy and pain into a song that night around the campfire
….

Hest’s memory curled around another Aelfae standing near him; a slender, boyish man with ancient eyes.
Gwidan wore a complex camouflage of green muds and leaves, and held a bow. Dindi caught a brief flash from him:

Gwidan speaks little; there is too much to listen to, but it is not idle chatter that he seeks. Music fills his thoughts. One afternoon, he sits by a riverbank for a moment. He has picked some acorns for lunch, and eaten all but one, which falls to the ground. He crosses his feet over his knees, straightens his back,
quiets his mind. Everything has a song; every voice is precious to him. In the stillness and simplicity of this life song, he finds fulfillment. The song is all he needs, and he drinks in his fill of it. Though the song never ends, he hears his companions pleading for him to return to their company. To his surprise, when at last he rises and stretches his hands, he splinters mighty planks of wood. He has been sitting in perfect stillness next to the river for a hundred years. The acorn had grown around him into an oak tree, completely enclosing him. His friend Lothlo tells him, “We thought the humans had killed you.” “Not yet, friend,” says Gwidan. He looks at the tree with regret; he did not mean to kill it. He uses the wood of that tree to make his longbow
.

All the Aelfae’s thoughts are tangled together, tugging her from the memories of one after another. Now Gwidan’s thoughts have led her to Lothlo, a tanned and golden-haired stud with a smith’s muscles. Lothlo wore leather, set with bangles of gold:

He scrapes sparkling rocks from deep places in the earth and takes them back to his kiln, where he stokes fires to unbelievable temperatures, tempting the metal to slither liquidly away from the slag. He pays no heed to the kiln’s heat inflaming his skin with a rash until a soft hand cools his back with a damp cloth. He looks up; Yastara, with long black hair, gowned in fluid blue linen, stands behind him. She touches her lips to his shoulder then withdraws, asking nothing else but to plant a healing kiss. They say no words of love to one another. They don’t need to. A smile blooms on his face as he turns back to his work
.

Yastara, the beauty Lothlo loved so deeply, still wore a long blue gown made of the same translucent material as Dindi’s white dress, the one she and Umbral had found in the abandoned Aelfae stronghold. Yastara’s memory was the softest of all, but also touched by a current of fear:

Yastara swims in a lake by the shore where Lothlo bends over his kiln. She floats on her back in the water, at peace with the world. She touches her belly. The swell is so gentle. No one suspects her secret. Yet at night, nightmare fae find her, warning her of a black figure with a skull mask. If Death finds her child, the babe will be Cursed with mortality. That must never happen, vows Yastara. She and Lothlo have paid so high a price already to conceive this child. The baby must live
.

The baby
had
lived. Her name was Kia. But though she seemed to have escaped the Curse, a shadow touched her nonetheless:

Kia is crying. The other Aelfae children are so mean. They have the cruelest nickname for her, a taunt that always makes her ears burn and her heart clench. Kia knows she has six Chromas, but her magic is strangely stunted, twisted in on itself. Today the children of the Aelfae clanhold play a favorite game: Become An Animal. Each child takes a turn to choose an animal to be, and all the other children change into that animal too, until the next child’s turn. Kia tries so hard, but she can’t do it. She never can. She can’t make herself wings, either. She can’t fly. The others laugh so hard when she can’t become a deer or a dog or even a mouse. They call her that horrible, horrible slur again: “Human!” She hides her hurt, pretending to laugh too, as if the joke were not at her expense. Only as night falls, and she knows no one will hear, does she weep into her bedroll, wondering what is wrong with her. Her mother and father tell her she isn’t
Cursed. It sure feels like she is.
Somehow
, she thinks,
humans did this to me
. She hates humans more than anything
.

Kia’s concern touched back on her parents, Yastara and Lothlo, whose friendship with Gwidan and Hest brought their thoughts back in, until there were so many memories trying to enter Dindi’s mind at the same time, it choked her. The memory visions overlapped, too many and too rapid for her to understand them any more, but they hove heavier and heavier on her mind, like a blanket smothering her, stealing the air, closing her throat. She could not breathe, or she breathed too fast. She hyperventilated. Dindi collapsed on the floor, hands to her throat, gasping like a grounded fish.

Aelfae!

Umbral’s nerves hissed danger.  At the same time, so much power, so close, tempted him almost impossibly. Fighting the urge to rush forward and start drinking in all that power, was like trying to brace himself against an avalanche. He had to pull away and physically anchor himself on a stalagmite—literally wrap his hands around the cone of rock—to stop himself from revealing himself as Deathsworn by trying to steal the Aelfae’s light.

A groan rose deep in his chest and he muffled it against the rock. He let himself siphon just a little of the Aelfae’s power, just a trickle, just enough to dull his hunger and allow him to suppress his need for more. Even that tiny amount felt like a huge cascade of power. The Obsidian Mask felt heavier than it usually did, but his Penumbra throbbed with strength, and he bore the extra weight easily.

Would the Obsidian Mask deceive the Aelfae? If it did not, and he showed himself to them, they would fall upon him and slay him where he stood. He didn’t delude himself that he could defeat six Aelfae warriors at the height of their power, flush with new life from their resurrection.

Waiting for them to discover him was no better. He must know if he would need to fight, or flee, or if he could trick them. Only when he was sure he could control himself did he look again at the Aelfae. He stepped out from behind the stalagmite.

Dindi glowed just like one of them. Seemed to merge with them almost.

What had he expected? She
was
one of them—as close to Aelfae as still lived in Faearth.

What if she allied herself with them against him? What would it avail him for the Obsidian Mask to deceive the Aelfae if Dindi denounced him?

No one had noticed him. If he fled the cave now, though they would surely chase him, he might still have a chance of escaping. He would warn Obsidian Mountain. They would have time to prepare for this new threat. In the meantime, the Aelfae would meet up with their old comrade, the Bone Whistler, and their power would only grow. Umbral had no idea how the Bone Whistler planned to destroy humanity or how close he was to achieving his goal.

Dindi fell to the floor, gasping. She wasn’t melding with the Aelfae at all. They were smothering her.

Umbral stepped forward, prepared to fight all six immortals if he had to. If those fae muckers planned to hurt Dindi, they’d have to go through him first.

Abruptly, the blanket of visions pulled away. Air rushed back to her. Dindi drew a slow, deep breath. Air had never tasted so good, not even her first breath after she’d almost drowned in the river when Kavio had saved her.

A hand touched her forehead, soft, kind.

“Shield yourself like this, little one,” said the woman.

It was the final Aelfae. She had thick, dark hair braided with flowers and
deep set eyes, vivid with compassion. Dindi recognized her from the memories of the other five. Her name was Mrigana.

It occurred to Dindi that she had seen visions of all the Aelfae except one.
Nothing from Mrigana.

“Better?” Mrigana asked.

Dindi nodded.

Now that Dindi wasn’t submerged in the overwhelming auras of the Aelfae, she caught snatches of their voices embroiled in a worried, hurried debate.

“Did the spell work?

“The spell
must
have worked! We have awakened in the future.”

“How do we know this is the future?”

“Everything is different.”

“There are a thousand ways the spell could have gone wrong. We must be sure.”

“We need to find out where we are and what’s happened since our time.”

“But first,” – fast as lightning Kia streaked in front of Dindi, grabbed her by the neck and shoved her up against the wall. “Who ar
e
yo
u
? If you are
human
, I will snap your head off.”