The Unfinished Song: Taboo (30 page)

“Something about the sea makes me sad,” he said softly. “It’s so immense, so eternal. It makes me feel close to death.”

“Yes,” she said. “I feel the immensity too. It fills me with joy.”

He squeezed her hand, chuckling. “Typical. You always stand on the opposite side of whatever I say.”

“If by
opposite
you mean the one which conquers the other, then the victor over sadness is not joy,” she answered seriously, “but compassion.”

“Then what defeats joy?”

She remembered the man in black, and the utter cold. “Fear.”

“Tomorrow we reach the Blue Waters tribehold, Sharkshead. Are you afraid?”

The wind curled her hair around her neck. He reached out and untangled it, brushing against her cheek with the back of his hand. A delicious shiver that owed nothing to the wind made her tremble. In his presence, she was too happy to be afraid.

“You should be,” he said. “It will be dangerous. Nargano is not to be trusted. This tribe has many strange taboos, and troubling ways, but if we are to win peace from them, we must allow them to harvest the seeds they choose to sow. Promise me you will do nothing forbidden.”

“Dancing with you? Is that forbidden?”

He looked troubled. “We won’t take the chance. I will not dance with you in Sharkshead.”

Or ever again?
He did not say it and she did not ask, but the thought seeped into her bones like a chill that leeched away her joy. She did not fear the Blue Waters tribesfolk. After meeting so many of them, she’d come to the conclusion they were people just like Rainbow Labyrinth tribesfolk and Yellow Bear tribesfolk. She suspected that wherever you went, however far you traveled, folk were just folk. The thought that perfect strangers might hate her enough to hurt her seemed ludicrous, and she found it hard to imagine all out tribal war. She found it easy to imagine Kavio coming to his senses, however, and telling her they could no longer dance together. Perhaps he would just stop teaching her, or perhaps he would extract a promise that she would never dance again.

Was it time to tell him that she wanted to take the Test again? He had seemed dubious about the idea the first time she’d mentioned it. She still didn’t even know if it was possible, or if anyone else had ever been allowed to try. Kavio would know if she was ready, if anyone did, but she had never worked up the courage to ask him. She wanted to perfect her dancing first. If she were a good enough dancer, if she could finally master the
tama
of the Unfinished Song, she would have a better chance of convincing him there was a good reason to try the Test again.

She felt the heft of the corncob doll against her chest, where she hid it under her clothes. That too must remain secret if she was not to betray Gwenika.

“Sometimes we have to keep secrets,” Kavio said aloud. “In this world, not everyone is a friend, and silence needs be a shield.”

He stared away at the ocean
horizon
as he spoke, following his own thoughts, not hers, yet mirroring hers so closely she found it uncanny.

They had a secret they shared against the world. She had additional secrets she kept from him. Now for the first time she wondered what secrets he kept from her.

They had reached the sea after traveling the full cycle of the moon.
Their
last night on the mainland, Rthan made love to Brena with special care. She curled in his arms after they finished and closed her eyes, but he could not sleep.

The Blue Lady had not come to him since they’d entered Blue Waters territory. Rthan assumed she knew Kavio would see her and she chose not to display herself to the unworthy. She did not fear the White Lady’s son, did she? She was an immortal faery, the most powerful of the Merfae. Was it possible she might fear a mutt of mixed human and fae blood? The thought disturbed him.

Or…what if he, Rthan, was the one who had proven
himself
unworthy of her?

That thought disturbed him more.

What if Kavio was right? What if peace
were
possible between Blue Waters and Yellow Bear? The peace staff had swayed numerous clans to let them pass unmolested, so Nargano must have sent messengers out to allow their passage. Maybe Rthan’s suspicions were wrong.
Kavio might prove sincere. Nargano might forgive the Yellow Bear atrocities.
It could happen
. And
I might fart pearls
, too
.

When they arrived in Sharkshead, he would have to choose whether he wanted to stay home or return with his “wife” to Yellow Bear. It was obvious what his choice must be, so why did he keep chewing around the question like a man with a sore tooth? His jaw physically ached; he caught himself clenching it.

“Rthan?” Brena asked softly.

“I thought you were asleep.”

“Have you made up your mind?”

“About what?”

She sat up on her elbow and tugged his chin to look at her. “Don’t play games with me. We are returning to your lands, and Kavio is seeking Nargano’s good graces. He will not have brought you all this way just to dangle you as a slave in front of Nargano. That would humiliate both you and your chief, and it is not Kavio’s way.”

“No,” agreed Rthan.

“So he must mean to free you.”

He shifted uneasily.

“He has spoken to you of it already!” she exclaimed. “When?”

“Before we set out.”

Brena slapped his face. “You bastard! You knew all this time and said nothing?” She hit him again. “You slept with me, knowing all along you would leave me?”

She would have hit him a third time, but Rthan caught her wrist. “Enough, woman!”

“Don’t quiet me!” she shouted. She tried to pull away her hand, but he would not release her. “I could be bellyful with your child! And you, about to leave me to raise it alone, as I had to raise my two girls!”

Startled, he sat up and put his other hand on her taunt, flat stomach. “Could you really be with child already?”

“It only takes once, you dunce!”

They had enjoyed each other much more than once.

“Brena, I admit, I never considered the possibility.”

“Men never do,” she said bitterly. She wrenched free her hand, and took the blanket too, for good measure, as she rose from the mat. “I hope you do go back to your own people. I never wanted another husband. You’ve been nothing but trouble to me, and I should never have forgotten that your were just a prisoner and a slave!”

She fled the tent.

Sharkshead.

They reached the launching point near sunset
the next day
. The sun cast a bloody arrow across the sea pointing to the island hold. It looked tiny in the distance, but Kavio knew that only indicated how far across the waters they would have to row to reach it.

Svego and Rthan insisted they still had time to row to the island before dark, and though Kavio had his doubts, now that the enemy’s hold was in sight, he itched to reach it. Blue Waters warriors waited on the beach with huge, elaborately carved boats, hollowed out from redwood trunks, each large enough to hold forty men. The entire peace party could fit in one, even with a dozen rowers. Kavio wanted an oar, but Svego smoothly insisted it wouldn’t be necessary.

“I thought your people deemed it a sign of brotherhood to row together,” Kavio said. Rthan had told him that.

“You are our guests,” Svego assured him. “We wish to honor you by sparing you any undue sweat.”

Rthan shifted on the balls of his feet. Rthan didn’t buy it, but he wasn’t contradicting Svego openly, and Kavio wasn’t sure which disturbed him more, Svego’s lie or Rthan’s silence. Kavio agreed to let
himself
be rowed. A knot of unease sat in his gut, but he had come too far to turn back over a slight insult.

The second problem was Gremo. The man had carried his rock on his back
without  slowing
them down and without complaint ever since Svego had helped him change. The Blue Waters warriors objected to allowing him on their boat with the rock, however. It didn’t matter that they explained Gremo had been in boats all the way down the river, they claimed the ocean was more dangerous, and did not want to take him. Kavio had to sympathize. Rocks were good for almost everything—digging, building,
fighting
—except floating. No one had ever built a boat from a rock.

Wouldn’t that be interesting if one
could
build a boat from rock?
he
wondered.
Maybe a light rock, like volcanic rock, or a soft rock, a metal like gold, which you could beat into a shape….

“Maybe your henchman could stay here,” suggested Brena.

Kavio snapped out of his reverie about rock-boats and focused on Gremo. The man looked much better since Svego had cut his hair and scrubbed him, but he still tended to hunker in on himself and glower in unhelpful silence at those around him.

Gremo made no attempt right now to suggest any solution, only growled, “I’m
not
staying here.”

Svego said, “I will vouch for this man. The rock he carries weighs no more than the body of another man, and if it were a man he carried on his back, would any ask him to put the body down? No, so why make trouble over a little rubble?”

One of the warriors pointed out that since Gremo was tied to the rock, if he fell overboard, it would sink him to the bottom of the sea.

“Don’t tip the boat,” suggested Svego.

Plowing oars in the sea proved much harder than rowing the river. The waves, which had shimmered so alluringly from shore, like ripples in a woman’s hair, turned out to be more like huge hills of water, which lifted and cast down the boats at whim. Gwenika threw up in the boat, and even Brena clutched the sides of the boat in terror. Dindi, seated up front, leaned over the prow, and at first Kavio thought she might be sick too, but she was just trying to touch the water. Tiny winged seahorses bubbled up from the depths to touch her fingertips, and Kavio, struck by sudden fear they might pull her down to them, yanked her back into her seat and glared at her.

“Sorry,” she said. As usual, she didn’t look the least bit sorry and she leaned over the side of the boat again, though at least she kept her hands inside. The sea was rich with fae, overwhelmingly Blue, though sprinkled among them were occasional Orange, Purple and Green, even Yellow. No Red that he saw. No fire faeries would abide the open sea.

As the sky darkened, fog rolled in, hiding everything except the waves directly in front of them. From time to time, the fog thinned enough to see the island, which now looked as if it were floating on the mist.

Behind him, he heard Brena gasp. A huge face leered at them out of the fog.

Kavio grabbed his dagger, but realized a fraction of a second later that the snarl was set in stone. Pillars of rock towered above the water. They had been graven with totem markings and each was topped with a scowling stone face twice the size of a man.

They passed a dozen stone guardians before the island loomed into view again. Kavio was surprised how large it seemed up close. It was as foreboding as ever, however. From afar, the base of the isle had looked greenish, and he’d thought it might have trees, but now he saw the island was a dominated by craggy rocks. Nothing wholesome grew there. Strange seaweeds and oddly luminous growths covered the rocks—that was the green he’d seen. Serpentine Blue fae slithered in and out of the rocks. The susurration of their hissing and slithering formed a constant, grating buzz that scratched the edge of Kavio’s hearing and made his whole body tense.

The rowers grounded the boat in the coarse, dark sand of a gray beach squeezed between clusters of tide pools. Kavio helped Dindi from the boat. She grinned at him as if this was a fine adventure, and despite himself, the tightness in his chest eased a fraction. He helped Gwenika out next. Gremo had taken care of himself and his rock, and Rthan would have assisted Brena, except she leapt lightly to the sand before he could.