The Unfinished Song: Taboo (13 page)

The unheard lecture had dragged forever, but once the dancing lessons began, time passed quickly. The next thing Dindi knew, Zavaedi Brena dismissed the Initiates. Before they even finished their stampede from the kiva, Brena picked up the little wood cage she’d used at the beginning of the lecture and walked toward the storage room where Dindi hid. Her huge hulk of a slave, with the frightening tattoos, followed her like a puppy.

Oh, muck and mercy
. Dindi had prepared her escape; she just hadn’t planned on needing to exit in such haste.

For air and light, the kiva needed skylights. Once she’d found the first one, the others were easy to identify. They weren’t just holes in the ground, but stone cylinders, about waist high, easily mistaken for wells. She passed them by at first because she didn’t recognize what they were. Real wells held water, however, while the fake wells possessed only a square hole in the bottom of a dry stone cylinder. She’d tied rope to a rocky protrusion in the shaft to lower herself into the storeroom. She grabbed her rope now and climbed back up, pulling the end of the rope after her.

She wedged her knees into the airshaft just as Brena and her slave entered the storeroom below. Not daring the rest of the noisy climb, she froze half way up. She hoped they wouldn’t wonder why no light came through the hole. Fortunately, they seemed concerned with other matters.

“You can’t seriously think to keep me by your side day and night, all the time,” the slave, Rthan, said.

“Why not?” Brena opened the cage and released six pixies,
who
fluttered up to the ceiling and entered the airshaft. Seeing Dindi, they exclaimed in delight.
“Hello! Hello!”

“Shhhh!” Dindi nearly dislodged herself trying to signal the winged blabbermouths to shut up.

“Oh, don’t worry Dindi,” said a Purple pixie. “Those two can’t see
me
.”

“Me either,” laughed a Red, landing on Dindi’s thigh, which was beginning to cramp.

“Will you come dance tonight?” asked a Yellow pixie.

“Yes, come tonight and dance by moonlight!” said the Blue pixie.

“What?” Rthan, below, sounded shocked. Brena stiffened.

Dindi smacked her hand over her face.
Doomed by pixies. I might have known
.

Brena accused Rthan. “Did you just ask me to
dance
with you?”

He looked as suspicious as she incredulous. “
You
asked
me
to dance with you!”

“I certainly did not.”

“In the moonlight.” He grinned slyly, stepping close enough to trap her between himself and the wall. “You really do plan to stay by me day and night, hmm?”

“Just because I have to bring you with me while I instruct the Tavaedies doesn’t mean I intend to perform fertility dances with you.”

“That’s right. Blue and Yellow make Green, that’s how you dance fertility, is it? We do it differently.”

“How do you do it?” she asked, sounding almost more
Initiate
than widow.

Rthan leaned over her, now so close that all Dindi could see were the tops of two heads touching. “Give the word and I’ll show you.”

“Don’t forget you’re a slave,” she said. She shoved free of the wall and left the room, and he trailed after, with a deep, sexy chuckle.

With Zumo dogging his heels, Kavio met his new charges at dawn on an open plain by the river. The men had arrived before sunrise, to bath
e
in the river,
and
then paint themselves. He himself wore no paint, nor his Zavaedi costume, just simple legwals and
a
leather strap for his quiver, dagger and sling. His mind already tur
ned on the problem of how to re
organize Yellow Bear’s army, various schemes whirling like petals on a windwheel. For all of his life, he had watched his father, as War Chief of the Rainbow Labyrinth, train and lead an army. He couldn’t help feeling like a boy with a new toy. At the same time, something bothered him about the gathered men, though he couldn’t say what.

Kavio glanced at his cousin, who had shadowed his steps down to the kraal and now stood wi
th arms crossed, by his side.

Unlike Kavio, Zumo wore his full Zavaedi costume, even a headdress of feathers and otter-fur. He gestured with pleased contempt to the Yellow Bear men milling in clumps around the kraal. “Not much to fear from
that
lot.”

Kavio
had to agree
.
Except for the Bear Shields, most of the men were sloppy, fat and unalert. A few were drunk.
Yellow Bear warriors organized themselves
the usual way,
by clan and
age-group
. War paint on a man’s bare chest identified his clan and tribe, so it was obvious just from a glance that married men stood together with their brothers-in-law and cousins-in-law. Most of the men were at least seven years older than he. Their stares of sullen distain felt familiar to him. All his life, people had questioned his abilities. He flexed his shoulders back, perversely pleased with the challenge.

“Let’s get started,” Kavio said to the men before him. He walked down the center of the group, dragging the butt of his spear as he did. The line in the dirt divided the group in twain. “Two teams, one to either side of this line
. Let me see what you’ve got.
Fight.”

“Vulth
o invited me to a jug of corn beer and some fishing, a much better way to spend a sunny morning,” Zumo said.
Vulth
o was kin to Hertio, and the man was supposed to have been training with Kavio.
“Enjoy trying to make eagles out of your chickens, Kavio. You’ll never follow in your father’s footsteps.”

“Enjoy your beer, Zumo. You’re already following in
your
father’s footsteps.”

Zumo’s no
strils flared. He stomped away.

Kavio kept his eyes on the melee. He
noted which men attacked at once and which stood there blinking stupidly before they caught on. He noted who tried to help his teammates and who preferred to grab as much glory for himself as possible, without concern for the larger goal. He noted who glanced to him for approval and who glanced toward him in
contempt
. He let the fight continue long enough that he had time to watch and judge the performance of each individual warrior. Then he pounded his spear on the ground.

“Stop.” He pretended more displeasure with their performance than he felt, though he didn’t have to exaggerate his scorn. “You fight like
hens
.
Each one running around pecking the enemy.
No plan, no goal. That’s going to change.”

The men buzzed like a beehive hit with a stick.
Kavio gave new orders to each war group, arranging one side in the tapered rows of the Arrow Formation,
then
ordered them to begin again. This time the group in the Arrow Formation broke through the ranks of the unorganized group and routed them. The winning side cheered. The losers looked disgruntled but thoughtful.

The rest of the morning went well enough, except Kavio finally discovered what seemed wrong to him. Missing men. A few, l
ike Hertio’s lazy cousin Vulth
o, could probably be found emptying beer pots, but what of the rest?

He asked Hertio at middle meal. The reply did not set him at ease: No men of Rainbow Labyrinth maternal descent fought with the warriors of Yellow Bear, not even recognized Tavaedies.

“You’ve appointed a man of Rainbow Labyrinth
blood as
war leader, but won’t let men of his
kith
hold a spear in the same army?” asked Kavio.

Hertio didn’t answer until after he had licked the last drop of grease from a roasted pigeon’s wing. The fat glistened on his upper lip.

“They could go back to their own tribe lands. You can’t.”

The answer added a poor taste to
the
meal.

Dindi developed strategies for sneaking and spying. If the Tavaedies practiced in the kiva, she hid in the storeroom, which she reached by crawling through the air well. If the Tavaedies practiced outside in the sequoia forest, her job was trickier. First she had to evade Jensi and the other Initiate maidens. Fetching water, a daily task of all non-Tavaedi females, provided the best opportunity most days. The hardest part was still ahead, because she had to creep after the Tavaedies without anyone noticing they were being trailed. She chose her steps as stealthily as a huntress of nervous prey, and even painted her face with hunter’s colors to blend in the foliage.

At first, she never went a day without a pounding heart and sweaty palms, convinced it would be the day she would be caught and stoned as a hexer. Every day she survived, she relaxed a little more, until gradually she lowered her guard too far and made a mistake.

First, she tried to leave too soon, and Jensi demanded to know where she was going, and then, by the time she soothed Jensi’s suspicions and left, the Tavaedies had already been practicing most of the morning and Dindi was in a rush to find them. Then the fae began acting weird.

Fae never bothered her in the kiva, but the woods were another matter. She shooed them away, mostly, though some days they convinced her to go dance with them instead of following the humans. On this day, the fae showed no interest in playing. They hissed in terror and rage. A cloud of willawisps buzzed toward her like a disturbed hive of bees. She threw up her hands, afraid they might actually attack her, so wild were they, but they buzzed by without stopping. Pixies rushed by next, some flying, some riding birds, all with looks of terror on their tiny faces. Then sprites and even dryads ran past her.

She had only seen the lesser fae behave like that once before, when fleeing a forest fire. She smelled nothing burning, though, and saw no smoke. Instead of pausing, she ignored the worry at the back of her mind and hurried to catch up with the Tavaedies.

It was the cold that forced her to stop dead. It was winter, but the weather in Yellow Bear never turned cold enough to make snow, only occasional dreary rains. The water in the cisterns never even frosted over in the mornings. It was not
real
cold she felt now either, she realized, but something deeper, ethereal, which stung like stepping into snow with bare feet. The air itself hurt, and her throat felt raw, as if she couldn’t get enough of it, yet to breathe was like swallowing splinters.

She couldn’t ignore her fear anymore. Dread smothered her. She froze, unable to take another step, not even knowing what she feared.

That’s when she saw him.

A man all in black, with a mask of skulls, smeared black also, stood with arms crossed, watching her.

Deathsworn
.

Did the Deathsworn know what she had done? Did they know she had broken the taboo and decided to claim her for
themselves
?

All she could hear was her own heart pounding. The fae had fled and the forest was utterly silent. If he were to come for her, she knew she would not have the strength to fight or flee.

His head inclined ever so slightly. He knew she had seen him.

The Deathsworn turned around and disappeared beyond the trees.

Dindi’s legs buckled beneath her and she knelt in the pine needles littering the ground. She still felt weak with fear. Why was she doing this to herself? Why couldn’t she just be a good girl and follow the rules like everyone else? What would she do when they
did
come for her?