The Unfinished Song - Book 6: Blood (51 page)

Finnadro and Hawk both bowed their heads.

“Vessia spoke in my mind,” said Hawk. “She said you can dance the rainbow and can help restore magic in Faearth. I would be honored to serve you.”

“Thank you,” Dindi said gravely. “And if I have need of you, Hawk, I will hold you to that offer. But for now, you have a son who needs you more. Please, go to him and take him far from this place.”

He smiled. “Thank you, Vaedi.”

Changing to a bird again, Hawk flew away. Dindi did not watch his flight, only checked to see if the other man was returning. He was still at the cistern.

“Who is he?” Finnadro asked.

“He is Kavio, son of the White Lady and the Maze Zavaedi. He was captured by the Deathsworn, who stole his memory. Xerpen doesn’t know Kavio is still alive. If he were to learn that, just as if he were to learn that I am…who I am….”

“I understand, Dindi.”

“I can’t let Xerpen know our real identities until I win the Vaedi Vooma and Kavio claims his rightful place as War Chief of the Rainbow Labyrinth. But Kavio has lost his memory, and I don’t know the tribehold. I need a friend… a secret ally. Will you help me? Will you help Kavio?”

Finnadro tried to speak, but his mouth was dry. He cleared his throat, and rasped, “I am not who you think I am either, Dindi.”

“What do you mean?”

“You have no great name, Dindi, and most who see you scorn you, having no idea of your true worth. Had I not just watched you slay Zithra-Lume—whom I would have sworn none could slay, when even the White Lady was powerless before her—I, too, might have doubted you could be Vaedi.

“But I am in the opposite position than you are. I have a great name, and many men call me a hero. The truth is, I am dirt, I am filth, a failure, a coward, a monster. I have failed the tasks entrusted to me; I have broken a lifedebt; I have trusted the wrong man and let him make me his clown.

“I want to serve you, if only to redeem my honor, but I have no right to let you depend on me. I fear I would only let you down.”

“Finnadro.” She held out her hands, and her touch was gentle but firm. “There is no one else I dare ask.”

He bowed his head. “Then I will serve.”

He knelt and formally placed the Singing Bow at her feet. “I give you my oath, upon my blood, my bones and my bow, to serve you and protect you as my Vaedi.”

She returned his bow to him. “I accept your pledge as an honor. Uh… Had you met Kavio? Before he…disappeared?”

“No.”

“It’s just as well. You would find him…changed.” Finnadro wondered what she meant by that, but she added, “Here he comes.”

The man finished his ablutions and re-joined them, wiping his face with a cloth. He had an injury in his leg, but otherwise was healthy, except for scars that covered his body like a decorative mesh. He wore only a loincloth.

Finnadro noticed all that before the man tossed aside the cloth and held out his arm in greeting.

“Thank you for the flight. Your timing was exquisite.”

Instead of clasping arms, Finnadro stumbled backward several steps.

It was Umbral.

Finnadro pushed Dindi behind him, and, in a single swift motion, notched his bow and aimed it at Umbral.

A single, urgent thought rang in his mind:
I must protect the Vaedi
.

“Get back, Dindi!” Finnadro shouted. “This is not Kavio! He wants to kill you!”

“So you
have
met,” Dindi said drily.

Finnadro looked ready to shoot Kavio with an arrow, Kavio looked ready to murder Finnadro with his bare hands, and Dindi suddenly had a headache.

She touched the Singing Bow. “Please, Finnadro. You made an oath to me. Trust me on this.”

He lowered his bow but the flint stayed in his eye. “Let me have a word with you alone, then.”

Dindi glanced at Kavio. He scowled and walked away, disappearing from view. She worried about where he would go and what he would do, and had to quash the urge to run after him. She had to deal with Finnadro first.

“Vaedi, that man is Umbral. He has a hex, one of the original weapons created by Death, an Obsidian Mask, which allows him to appear as…”

“I know all that,” Dindi interrupted. “But I also carry a Death Hex, and so the Obsidian Mask has never been able to deceive me. Although it took me some time to realize that. I have always seen his true face. That is how I know he is actually Kavio. He is also Umbral, formally Henchman of Lady Death.”

“Formally?” Finnadro injected extreme skepticism into the word.

“The Deathsworn took away his memory as Kavio, and I wasn’t able to restore it. So I…took away his memory as Umbral.”

Finnadro chewed over that in silence. “He remembers
nothing
? Nothing of the last three days?”

“Nothing of the last year, or of his life before that. Although he obviously remembers general things, such as speech and the ability to fight.”

“Dindi… Vaedi.” Finnadro spoke slowly, “What is it you hope to accomplish? Just yesterday, this man was doing his best to kill you.”

“Today, too.”

“How can you allow him to live?”

“How could I kill Kavio, the son of the White Lady and the Maze Zavaedi? The Deathsworn tried to make him their blade; I will take him back from them. If he is to be a blade, let him be a weapon in his
own
cause.”

“Can you reweave his original memories?” Finnadro asked.

“I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “But I have to try.”

Finnadro fumed and paced in front of her. He shook his head.

“Do you wish to be released of your oath to me?” she asked, with a touch of flint in her voice. “I will release you, if you will not aide Kavio as you would aide me. This is not something I will compromise.”

Finnadro stopped pacing. “I never met Kavio, as I told you before. But I have met Umbral. It was…not on good terms.”

She nodded.

“If he regains his memory of being Umbral, he will slay us both without mercy.”

“I know.”

A stillness followed. Finnadro bent his head. “Vaedi, I will do my utmost to protect you both.”

She says my name is Kavio. The man with the bow cried out that Kavio was not my name. Whom am I to believe?

As I walk, I roll the name
Kavio
around on my tongue like a pebble. It has no taste and I don’t want to swallow it. It feels right to me—but also wrong. Like leather legwals that have been left in the sun, and shrunk so they no longer fit comfortably. Or like something incomplete… as if it were only half the name that I should claim. Which makes me wonder about the other half, and why she does not want to speak of it.

At least it’s a name. It’s something to hold onto, at a time when I feel like I’m still fighting for my life, teetering on a thin thread over a chasm. So I will be Kavio. For now.

Other than
her
name, Dindi, I don’t even know who she is. On the Bridge, as we fought the shadow spiders, I felt destined to fight by her side, to hold her tight and kiss her, but now I wonder if I was being naïve. She could be the innocent maiden she appears to be or she could, for all I know, be a monster. I must find out for myself who
I
am—who I
truly
am—why I have this terrible power—and who my real friends are.

And enemies. This one thing I’m sure of: I have enemies.

Someone
hurt me recently, very badly. All the power coursing through me can’t hide the wounds. As the power subsides, the ache increases.

Someone
stole my memory, but who and why? The answer is probably not something I’m going to like.

Someone
set me free in the middle of a war, hurt and unremembering, with no real idea whose side I’m was on. That means someone is trying to use me.

I don’t much care for that idea.

For now, there’s nothing I can do but be who these people want me to be until I know what’s true and whose side I should support. Right now,
they
have the power and
they
have the knowledge and so
they
have the control. But not for long, I promise myself. One day soon,
I
will find answers.

I walk until I reach the edge of summit. There’s no warning, just a sudden precipice at my feet, opening over a ravine a thousand spans below. The mountain looks as if it were sliced by an ax.

A strange tree grows out of the edge, leaning down so far, it has grown upside down. The tree is dead now. There’s something twisted and desolate about it that reminds me of the power of the shadow spiders.

To my surprise, I hear a tiny bleat. Something small, fluffy, and white lifts its head from behind a large, warped root. A newborn lamb. There’s no sign of its mother, or its flock.

Wobbling on unsteady feet, the lamb bleats again, for it is tangled in more roots next to a sapling.  Five or six pixies are trying to help free the lamb, but pixies being pixies, they are only making the jumble worse.

Cautiously, so as not to alarm the baby animal or the fae, I creep over the big root. The pixies screech and dart away as fast as their little wings will flap. Fa, so much for not scaring them. The screams of the pixies panic the lamb, which jumps and rears like a crazed stallion, though the result is cutely comic. It can’t go anywhere, for all its efforts, because it’s still trapped. The sapling, I notice, is an offshoot of the dead tree, but this young, new tree is growing up straight and tall. Or will, if the lamb doesn’t trample it in its efforts to escape the roots. It’s not hard to untangle. I lift the lamb into my arms.

“There you are!” a young woman cries. “You naughty son of a sheep!”

The young woman who has climbed the hill to reach the dead tree wears an odd mix of clothes, a few Orange Canyon skirts under a tunic and gold bangles that indicate Yellow Bear. She also has herb satchels tied to her belt and necklace, as a Healer Tavaedi might wear. She pauses and her jaw drops when she sees me. Stark terror is painted on her face.

I glance around, wondering what frightened her, before I realize
I
am what frightened her.

“Please don’t hurt the lamb,” she says. Her voice quavers.

I step over the dead tree and hand her the lamb without a word. She snatches the creature and stumbles backward, babbling, “Uh…thank you… all the ewes dropped their lambs all at once, you see, after that giant spider thing was destroyed…. Why am I telling you this? Scary black-clad warrior fellows like you don’t care about sheep, do you? I’m talking too much…. Please don’t kill me…. I’m leaving now!”

She runs away with the lamb in her arms.

I stare out over the horizon. The air is warm and humid, scented with earth and flowers. Spring has come to the mountains, not gently but precipitously. Clouds in the distance have unleashed spring rains. Snowmelt has turned quiet mountain streams into raging rivers and thundering waterfalls. On every slope, I can see blossoms and fresh grass, though the tones are anomalous. At a distance, I can see fae, but if I approach too close, they flee. There’s something wrong about my magic… something wrong about
me
.

I clench my fist, staring at the aura of darkness that pulses around me. I’ve seen magic like this before—around the spiders and the Spider Queen. Like them, I am a creature of eclipses. I realize what is wrong with the colors of the flowers; they all look gray. Spring has come to the mountains, but it has not come for me.

Dindi finds me after a while.

“Kavio,” she calls out. The name makes me shiver uncomfortably.

I search her face for any sign of fear, but, though I see worry there, I have a feeling I’m not the center of it.

“I’m sorry about that,” she says. “He thought you were someone else, impersonating Kavio.”

It takes me a moment to realize she means the man who drew a bow on me. I shrug. She talks for a while, filling me in on things I can’t remember for myself. On both summits, victorious armies negotiate treaties and tend to their wounded. The politics are complicated and beyond me, though I intend to remedy that as soon as possible. Somebody named the Maze Zavaedi is in charge, but Dindi advises me to avoid him for the moment, and I concur. I don’t want to meet anyone powerful until I can stand on both feet, secure in who I am and what I want. I say very little until she falls silent and looks at me uncertainly.

“Kavio?”

Is that really my only name?
  Instead, I ask, “What am I? I frighten fae, small fuzzy animals, and young girls—though not
you
, for some reason. I even frighten seasoned warriors enough to make them draw weapons when I come near.”

“I’ve told you, it will take a while to find yourself again.”

I am silent, waiting for her to add more, but she doesn’t. I am sure she
knows
more, but she doesn’t want to tell me. So…even
she
fears me.