The Unfinished Song: Taboo (39 page)

No wonder Svego was ordered to lead us to the tribehold by the back route. Nargano did not want me to see how many war canoes they ha
d
prepared
. Because of Kavio’s failure to secure the peace, there was nothing to stop Blue Waters from using their fleet to row upriver and attack Yellow Bear. Failure felt like a knife to his gut, worse than the cold, worse than the pain.

All at once, light blasted everywhere. Kavio felt the explosion of power rock him like a physical blow. His jaw dropped.

From the post where Gremo and Svego had been bound, a huge white osprey, as large as a forty-man war canoe, rose into the air.

He heard the Blue Waters tribesfolk shout and scream in alarm.

The osprey lifted Svego into the air in its talons and set him down again, near Kavio.  There was no sign of Gremo. While the osprey lifted crabs into the air and dropped them back on the rocks, shells shattered, Svego tugged at the cords that bound Kavio’s hands behind his back, but he couldn’t budge them. The osprey returned. With a shrewd tilt of its head, it reached a talon forward and sliced the cords neatly.

“G…Gremo?” Kavio stammered.

The osprey nodded, once, definitively, then pecked at a crab that tried to rush them. Kavio lifted the sharp pike that had recently held him captive and turned it as a weapon on his immediate tormenters, the crabs. He darted from one to another of the men and women tied to stakes on the beach to release them. The osprey beat him two times out of three, but what mattered was that between them, they freed the rest of the captives and killed or frightened away all of the crabs.

Unfortunately, the Blue Waters warriors did not intend to let their carefully planned execution be disrupted. They had organized an offensive. Volleys of arrows arched toward the bird.

“Foul Aelfae magic!” bellowed Nargano. “Take the others hostage!”

Kavio looked up in time to see Dindi and the other Yellow Bear folk surrounded by warriors armed with spears.

“Gremo!” he cried. “Lend me your wings!”

Warriors closed in on Dindi and Gwenika.

“We would have let the rest of your party return home unharmed,” Nargano said furiously, “But this magic will not be tolerated. Your lives will be forfeit if Kavio does not…”

The giant
white sea
bird flew through the hole in the ground over Nargano’s head. Kavio rode on the bird’s back.

“Jump!” Kavio commanded.

“Are you crazy?” shouted Gwenika.

“No!” Dindi pointed. “Look down!”

The Shunned, once free of their bonds, had raced over the rocky tide pools to the deeper water of the lagoon. They swam as surely as seals to the big forty-person canoes moored in the bay. Several of them used their magic to reverse the tide long enough to cover the rocks with enough water to support the keel of the boat.

Brena took charge of the other Yellow Bear Tavaedies and warriors, ordering those who had not jumped yet into the water. Their hesitation cost them dearly, for it gave the Blue Waters Tavaedies time to draw their clubs and knives. A full melee erupted. The Blue Waters strove to drive the Yellow Bear warriors away from the hole, and the Yellow Bear warriors bashed and slashed their way to the ledge to jump.

“Jump!” Brena shouted at Gwenika and Dindi.

The two girls held hands and jumped together, but Gwenika’s hand was ripped out of Dindi’s when someone yanked Dindi from behind. Gwenika sailed over the edge of the hole, after her mother, and landed in the water. Dindi heard the double splash, and Gwenika’s outraged shriek, “It’s
freezing
!” Arms reached for them. The men and women already in the boat helped them clamber up.

A man flung Dindi over his shoulder and ran with her toward the houses. She screamed and pounded his back with her fists, which was about as effective as punching stone. So instead she reached down, gripped his waist, and flipped her legs into the air, completely turning herself upside down and backwards, as if it were a dance move. He wasn’t expecting that and lost his grip. She landed on her feet already running.

He caught her again in two strides. This time he swung her around and tossed her into a pile of reed mats.

It was Zumo. “I’m trying to save your life, you little fool! If you go with Kavio, you will be killed with the rest of them!”

She did not reply because she saw something Zumo did not: the white bird, behind his back, flying toward them. She held up one arm as if mutely asking Zumo to help her up. When he reached to assist her, she used another dance move to haul him down, off balance, step up onto his shoulders and leap into the air.

Kavio caught her and slung her behind him onto the back of the bird.

Flight elated him.

Dindi slipped her arms around his chest. She snuggled tight against his body as
if  she’d
been made to fit there. The wind rushed through their hair. Every time the bird dipped and curved, Kavio’s stomach dropped and Dindi squeezed him just a little harder.

It didn’t get better than this.

“Duck!” Kavio ordered Dindi. They both bent forward and a volley of arrows passed overhead. The osprey soared higher above the tribehold, out of the archers’ range.

“We’re not out of here yet!” he called back to Dindi.

The osprey swooped toward the canoe with the Yellow Bear tribesfolk and the Shunned. They’d taken up oars. The magic users had allowed the tide to follow its natural course again, which pulled them toward the open sea, and everyone aboard rowed hard. Kavio counted them twice from his perch until he was satisfied they’d left no one behind. They’d saved everyone.

Nargano had no intention of allowing them to escape, in a stolen boat no less. Blue Waters warriors poured into their war canoes. Dozens of one-man kayaks, plus three big boats, pursued them. The enemy had more boats, and faster, and they launched arrows, spears and grappling hooks at the fleeing boat.

He leaned forward to speak to the bird. He had no way of knowing if Gremo could understand speech in this form, or if he could catch Kavio’s words against the wind.

“Fly over the canoes still on the beach!” Kavio cried. Apparently Gremo, even as an osprey, heard, remembered and comprehended. He flew over the beach where the Blue Waters warriors were scrambling into their war canoes.

Kavio did not often call on the fae, but today he was out of other options. The Blue Lady’s smothering grip had drained so much of his magic he would not have even had the energy to summon fae, except that Gremo’s burst of power seemed to have reawakened an echo of his old power.

“Malfae, to me!” he shouted, lifting up his hand.

Lightning cracked from the sky and touched his palm. Without hesitation, he pointed down at the row of ships, and a blast of fire shot out from his fingers. Where the jet of fire touched the boats, red hot Malfae sprang up, beings of pure rage and fire. They danced from boat to boat, devouring the wooden vessels with teeth of flame. Blue skinned Merfae rushed out of the sea to fight them, infuriated by the invasion of their territory. The Malfae fell one by one under the counter-assault. As they died, their bodies turned to ash. But the wooden war canoes gnawed down to black crisps were useless.

Unfortunately, the Blue Waters tribesmen had already pushed many canoes into the sea, to chase the escaping prisoners.

“We will only escape the pursuers if we use magic to go faster than they can!” Kavio said. “Fly over the boat, I have an idea. Do you remember how you once pulled the huge boulder about your mother’s house?”

He swooped low over the boat, streaming ropes of magic behind him. Glowing hooks latched onto the prow of the boat. Gremo flew forward, hauling the boat behind him faster than either current or rowers could have accomplished. The rowers had to pull their oars back into the boat, in fact, as the boat cut a lane through the water so fast that wind and foam whipped up around and behind them in a frenzy.

They left the pursuing boats behind. When even Sharkshead Island was lost behind them in the fog, Kavio sagged in his seat. The excitement that had sustained him through the escape crashed, leaving exhaustion so deep even his bones felt tired. He teetered and would have fallen off the osprey if Dindi had not steadied him.

“Please!” she shouted to the bird. “He needs to rest!”

“No!” he protested. His hand throbbed. His whole palm and fingers were singed from calling the Malfae. Blisters bubbled up in the seething flesh as he examined it, reminding him of the pus-filled pustules that afflicted the Shunned.

Gremo ignored his objections. The osprey circled around and landed inside the canoe. As soon as Dindi and Kavio slid off the bird’s back, Gremo transmogrified into his human self, though huge white wings still extended from his back. He crouched on the prow of the boat, looking like one of the decorative fae carved into the wood come to life.

Svego approached him shyly. “Gremo, is it really you?”

“This is who I really am,” Gremo said simply. “Can you still love me?”

“I would love you no matter what shape you were, you big lug.”

Kavio knelt in the canoe. Bilge water stung his knees. He had spent most of the night suspended from his wrists, battered by icy waves, but what had truly drained him was whatever the Merfae had done to him. He could not seem to warm up, except for his hand, which still pulsed from heat. Though he wanted to collapse, he couldn’t allow himself the rest his body begged for. Dindi ignored his feeble attempts to ward her off, and wrapped his hand in wet strips of cloth she ripped from the hem of her dress.

“We need to get as far away as we can,” he wheezed. “They will chase us all the way back to our territory. We have to get back upriver before every clan between here and Yellow Bear prepares canoes and arrows to greet us.”

“I can keep flying with the boat in tow,” Gremo said. “I can turn a month journey into a week.”

“Upriver…”

“Even upriver. I can do this, Kavio. I was born to do this. I understand that now. All my life, I’ve done nothing but fight my own nature. You don’t know what it’s like to be free to be myself at last. I could fly to the ends of the world and back.”

Just discussing travel upriver exhausted Kavio, but he did not want to discourage Gremo. Everything looked hazy…

“Svego, catch him!” he heard Gremo cry.

Everything faded to fog.

Dindi cradled Kavio’s head in her lap. Nightmares tormented his sleep. To sooth him, she hummed softly, which seemed to work. The song folded itself into variations that swallowed the hours of monotonous travel. He stopped thrashing and slept peacefully. The blisters on his hand and the welts around his wrists also smoothed over, fading to mottled bluish and yellowish bruises. As a half-fae, he seemed to heal faster than other people.

She was still humming, unconsciously, when his eyes finally fluttered open.

“Mmm,” he murmured. “I like it. What is it?”

It was the Unfinished Song, though she hadn’t realized it until he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“I think my mother used to sing it to me.” He smiled dreamily.

She brushed his hair from his forehead, admiring his perfect face. Awareness of where he was crept over him, and his smile changed into a frown. Abruptly, he sat up. The white bird pulled their boat swiftly on ribbons of light.

“How long have we been traveling?”

“Hours.”

“We should have entered the river by now. Why are we still on the ocean?”

“Svego told Gremo he should follow the coast farther south and enter a different river to reach Yellow Bear. They thought we would be more likely to travel past clans who do not know the peace treaty failed. Gremo swears also that he will get us home in seven days.”

He grunted, unconvinced.

“I’d be happier if we were not still in the palm of the Blue Lady.” He shuddered. “Her coldness is not something I will soon forget.”

“No boats have caught up with us yet, at least.”