| Ruhiger does not feel Baneslayer’s touch; and yet she does. There is another hand on her shoulder. She turns, laughing aloud, says his name and shrugs off his hand. A quarter of which she is a member approaches the open waters in the center of the lands; she remembers the woman’s face from the first night she was introduced to the society of their kind, in the back of a church the white men built, living to the livid drone of the words of an alien god.
They haven’t even changed, yet.
We have no choice. What choice do we have?
– and more, but no, here and now, it is twilight. The sun has disappeared; she can still smell his smoke on her sky and her hair. A long run across country brought them there, and exhaustion leadens her limbs. The ash is still in her mouth, the lick of unburning flames seems to have tattooed itself on her skin; not pain, precisely, but awareness of the translucence of the world. Now: twilight, and the moon is rising over the open waters. She holds in her hands a cage of willow, a half dozen live songbirds she captured herself, she can hear their hearts beating furiously, alive to the rage that still lies quiescent beneath her breast.
You must honor both; the elder says, her brother stands ahead of her, the land here treacherous, sinking beneath his feet, but he walks with such careful reverence and the – our twin hearts. Can you feel it beating?
The birds coo and sing; their wings beat against the bars of their cages. Her feet are sinking in the mud; she is careful now to step just in the footsteps of the tall, darkskinned elder woman who leads the way, thin and tough as old leather. The hand on her shoulder. She turns to look at her brother, and looks beyond him, then. “No,” she says, her voice out loud – “No no no. I can feel it again, every step closer. I – ” she shakes the cage of birds, holds it out, laughing – over the water.
“HEY!” Her brother says; leaping for the cage. “Those are mine, too!”
– he stumbles through the water, she splashes and falls. The cage hits the water and the birds take wing, alarmed, a thousand wings beating against the bars it seems. She sputters, breathing water in a terrible, flailing effort to remain upright, alert – to keep them above water until she can truly make her offering but then –
– no, what – turn The old man staggers forward, blood bright around his mouth, changing in a wild rage as the point of a spear explodes through his eye. She stumbles and falls into the waters, turns, stuckin the mud, sinking, the birds – she has to – another step and the waters open up beneath her.
The waters swallow her; sputtering, drowning.
Ruhiger is staring directly into the face of a woman; she can see and sense the clearing around her, the rock, Tamarack. She is aware of Kathrine’s hand on her shoulder, is alive to it, but is arrested by the face – translucent, transparent – painted in the air before her.
You – she does not speak; there is simply an awareness of meaning that shivers through the silent modi. – are not one of my children. |
