The Unfinished Song - Book 6: Blood (8 page)

Harcho the Bone Breaker smirked at Hawk and claimed the infant. A slave carried the baby away.

“Are you going to allow that?” Finnadro asked.

“There’s nothing I can do,” Amdra said flatly.

Hawk, however, stood up.

“I claim Ram’s Right to fight for my blood!” he shouted. His voice carried clearly.

“Hawk, you damn fool,” muttered Amdra. Her fists balled at her sides. “You’re just playing into his hands.”

Finnadro half expected the Eagle Lords to strike Hawk down for his audacity; instead slaves scurried forward with a bowl that had been filled with blood from the slaughtered lambs and painted his forehead with it.

“What’s Ram’s Right?” Finnadro asked.

“Sometime between now and the third day, Hawk must fight a duel to the death. The
hour of the duel and the opponent will be named by the Great One. Usually the duels are all held on the third day, after the Offering of Rams at sunset, but this year… I don’t know. The Offering of Rams will not be held at sunset this year, but will coincide with the eclipse. And I think the Great One has something special planned, so probably the lesser duels will be held tomorrow, after the Offering of Ewes.”

“Your people are truly noble, Orange Canyon.” Finnadro did all but spit. “To force fathers to orphan their babes to save them.”

Amdra glared at him. “Don’t act so superior, Green Woods. Do you not know the origins of this ritual? Your people initiated this custom, generations ago, when the wolf clans were much stronger than the sheep clans. Wolves used to prey upon us constantly, demanding human flesh to devour. We were weak then and could do no better than beg you to limit your predations to three days of the year, to sometimes take lambs instead of human children.”

“I see no wolves here now.”

“The Eagle Lords demand their own price for protecting us.”

“Open your eyes! Your protectors are your predators.”

Amdra bristled. “I remind you that you are only here on the forbearance of the Great One.”

Finnadro growled deep in his throat. The closer his view of Orange Canyon, the greater his loathing of his people’s traditional enemies. For their so-called Great One, he felt nothing but contempt.

The ugly ritual of the infants continued to the end of the line before it ended at last. Drumming and song started up.

“Come,” said Amdra. “It is time for you to honor the Great One.”

That will be difficult
. For the sake of the Green Lady, he reigned in his disgust.

He walked at Amdra’s side across the clearing. From this vantage, Finnadro had a clear view of the mountains, which formed a complete circle around the tribehold. Vast mists rolled like a silver sea between the tribehold and the ring of peaks. A strange sensation took wing in his heart. The Song was so strong here. He felt dizzy with the majesty of the place. How could such evil exist in the midst of such beauty?

Finnadro felt disoriented by the time he passed the altar, up the steps of the feathered tabernacle, to stand before the War Chief in his tall, wooden eagle mask. Next to the Great One, unmistakable with her dragonfly wings folded neatly behind her, was the White Lady.

The pair thanked Amdra for her service,
then turned, together, very much the couple, to Finnadro.

Finnadro held his hand over his chest and bowed his head to the White Lady. Her behavior confused him. The first time Finnadro had ever met the White Lady, he had come to save her from imprisonment by her nephew, and she attacked him. He had expected to taste some of that pepper in her yet.

She did not look rebellious. A little uncomfortable, perhaps, but she touched the arm of the Great One for reassurance.

Most disconcertingly of all, she looked Finnadro right in the face without a drop of recognition.

“This is the hero from the Green Woods?” she asked, dubious. “Skinny fellow, isn’t he?”

“We’ve met before, Lady,” he said.

He didn’t know why he said it. She must know she had met him before, and furthermore, everyone in Orange Canyon knew it too, so it would make no sense to pretend not to know him as a ploy.

She shrugged, utterly indifferent.

“Apparently, I’ve met many humans,” she said.

She put a slight emphasis on the word
humans
that made his heart sink. He had heard that tone before, from the High Fae. To most High Fae, humans were interchangeable. Even his own Green Lady, he knew, did not love him as desperately as he loved her. When Finnadro was gone, she would take a new lover, hardly noticing the change. He had not thought the White Lady saw humans in quite this way. There was a new coldness in her, an unconcern with all mortal, fallible things.

The Great One seemed to sense Finnadro’s dismay. He stepped forward and clasped Finnadro’s arm, friend to friend.

“Finnadro, Henchman of the Green Lady, I owe you personally, and all your people the greatest apology,” said the Great One. “It is with deepest sorrow that I think on the injury we did to you and yours, driven as we were by the vile deception of Umbral, that snake, that viper in the service of Death. Our common enemy.”

“You made the right decision to ally yourself with us,” the Great One said. “We deserve revenge against the one who has wronged us both.”

Finnadro nodded, taken aback by this heartfelt apology. It was so unexpected that he had no answer prepared.

He bowed, murmuring, “I am honored to be here for your festival, Great One.”

“Fa, it’s a barbaric custom!” spat the Great One. He glanced to the right and left at the stiff-backed Tavaedies flanking him and leaned forward to impart a confidence which they could not overhear. “One I intend to do away with very soon. Meanwhile, you, nephew, must not stand on ceremony with me. Be as kin; call me brother; name me Xerpen.”

Xerpen lifted his mask. Again, Finnadro was surprised. He’d heard the Great One was an old man, but this was a youth, square-jawed, flint-eyed, handsome and proud. Perhaps the mistake about his age was due to the color of his hair, which was so pale it looked bone white.

“You impress me, Finnadro,” said Xerpen. He looked Finnadro in the eye. “You are not made of the same crude clay as other men, are you? You hear it. You hear the Unfinished Song.”

“Yes.”

“So do I. So few do.”

“Yes,” said Finnadro, amazed.

As he said it, the Song sounded more loudly in his ears, insanely beautiful. The mountain summit no longer felt cold, and these people no longer felt like his enemies. The Green Lady had been right, as always, but Finnadro had not been able to come here with a forgiving heart as she’d asked. He’d come full of distrust, derision, and hate, and his first impression—his people caged, the babies offered up as sacrifices—had seemed to confirm his ugliest prejudices.

Why had he been so quick to judge? Had it never occurred to him that maybe the Orange Canyon tribesfolk, at least the most enlightened of them, like Xerpen, might yearn to break out of the cruelties of the past? Start afresh?

Xerpen clasped his hand, held his gaze frankly, and Finnadro connected with the man’s immense compassion, wisdom, and sadness. This man was no enemy. He hated the same injustices Finnadro did, yearned for the same beauty, and listened to the world’s secret music. Finnadro understood why Xerpen, the Great One, was so revered despite his youth. The warmth in him was as irresistible as the Song itself. It was especially welcome after the White Lady’s unexpected frostiness. Finnadro felt, inexplicably, that he had known and trusted Xerpen for years.

“We will be friends,” said Xerpen.

He shed a war and a thousand years of enmity as simply as that.

Truly Xerpen was a great soul.

“Yes,” Finnadro said stupidly. He felt himself too audacious. He ought to humble himself in the presence of a man like this. “Thank you, uncle.”

“Good. Now. Tell me what you know of your evil counterpart.”

“The Henchman of Lady Death.”

“Umbral. You’ve met before?”

“Yes.” Finnadro touched his thigh where the skin had been flayed.

“Tell me.”

Finnadro meant to describe the meeting tersely, but the whole memory enveloped him. He relived the entire horror.

I knelt on the path for a long time. Rock dust and crab weed did not sculpt deep prints, and a lazy eye would have missed the significance of the faint scuff, but to a careful man, the clue was as clear as a footprint in mud that the man in black had come this way.

In the years since I’d acquired the Singing Bow, I had hunted many a man-turned-wolf. Some still had the hearts of men, even if they chose the bodies of wolves. Those, I counted as friends, none better. Some had the hearts of animals as well as paws, and those, reluctantly, I slew.

Then there were…
things
…like the man in black. The man I hunted now wore the skin of a man to conceal the appetite of a beast.

I’d found the first body ten days ago, after a tip from one of my wolfling friends. My friend had worried that another wolfing had done the terrible deed, but I sensed that a deeper evil was at play. When ordinary men left their clan and tribe to wander Faearth, living by hex and fang, they were called Rovers. Infinitely more dangerous, however, was a Deathsworn who struck out on his own: a Rogue.

A wolfling’s victim would have had gnawed bones and ripped muscles, broken bones and devoured flesh. But the body I examined had been bound between two trees and tortured with sharp stones and firebrands… for
hours
.  Someone had taken time, and pleasure, in the slow debasement of the victim. The man’s tongue and genitals had been switched and his eyeballs and entrails had been removed. Throughout the torture, magic had kept him alive. After he had finally expired, his face and skin had been further abused past recognition, presumably so that none of his kin could recognize and reclaim him, nor stake a deathdebt on the culprit.

Days later, I found a second mutilated corpse and then a third.

I vowed there would not be a fourth.

Near a grotto hidden by pines and scraggly brush, sounds of a scuffle alerted me: A woman’s choking sob, a man’s guttural command. I crouched low and slithered forward.

The Rogue Deathsworn had his back to me. He had his victim before him, tied to a tree.

She still lived.

Barely.

From the ghastly injuries disfiguring her body, the way she clenched her legs and the infinity of pain and shame suffusing her face, it was obvious that the Deathsworn had spent long hours using and abusing her. Even more grotesquely, the Deathsworn held a tiny bundle in his arms, which he held out to the woman as he taunted her. It was a child, still alive, probably the woman’s own babe. I wondered how the Deathsworn had first appeared to her, what guise of illusion he had worn to capture her.
A slavering troll? A trusted friend? His head was bare. With his belongings, I saw a black skull mask, surmounted with an obsidian disk held by stag horns, which he had set aside. Now, perhaps because he had rendered his victim helpless, he revealed his real face, the face I saw.

The man was not as bulky as some fighters, but under his sleek black buckskin he had the lean and limber muscles of a master dancer and warrior. He was surely a Zavaedi. Like all Deathsworn, he dressed in midnight, severely so, without a feather or bead of ornamentation. His motions were as smooth and precise as a black cougar. Though I could not tell his tribe of origin, I suspected he had originally been Imorvae. His features were uncanny, flawless, more fae than human. Some shapeshifters possessed that same cruel splendor in human form.

Too much blood drenched the woman’s torn tunic for me to tell her tribe either. This territory belonged to the Rainbow Labyrinth tribe, but bordered on Red Spears.

I poised, hidden by birch trees and brush, with an arrow notched in my bow, waiting for my chance. I needed a clear shot that would not endanger the child. At last, the Deathsworn returned the unhappy tot to the papoose slung over his horse.

I stepped forward.

“Don’t move!” I ordered. “This arrow is aimed right for your heart.”

“You can see me as I am?” the Deathsworn asked. His eyes narrowed.

I laughed humorlessly. “I know what you are. I know what you’ve done. I came across your previous victims.” With a nod at the woman and her child, I snarled, “I see you don’t even spare women or children. Hold your hands away from your body and lie down on the ground, face down. If you make one wrong move, you die.”

I squeezed the arrow a fraction more against the string. The Deathsworn haughtily lowered himself to the ground, reeking of contempt as if outraged that anyone dare come between him and his prey, his toy. I had to unclench my trembling fingers from the bow to fight their itch to loose the arrow on the spot. It was not my place to collect the deathdebt on him. The kin of the men he had killed deserved that right, and I wanted to deliver the prisoner to them alive.

I kept the bow at ready in one hand while I drew a dagger to cut the frightened young woman free with the other. Up close, I could see that but for the mutilations and dirt and blood, she might have been pretty.