Bound in Blood

XI Equinox

By now it was almost noon and the sun had risen over Old Tentir’s roof in a shimmer of heat. Most cadets had loitered back to the shade of their quarters for lunch and a nap afterward, leaving the practice square vacant and sun-cracked. It didn’t feel like the thirty-sixth of autumn. A haze was growing, and with it a kind of shudder in the still air. It was the equinox, Jame thought. Anything might happen. Her eyes turned instinctively northward and despite herself she shivered.

Gorbel limped beside her, holding the piece of quartz. “Nothing like a chair or a seat,” he was muttering. “Why do people play stupid word games? You, clear off. I have business that’s none of your affair.”

With that he lurched and almost fell, caught by Jame’s steadying hand.

“Why didn’t you bring Bark?”

“It’s none of his business either.”

Jame wondered if, like Burr in his early days with Tori, Bark was really at the college to spy on his master. True or not, Gorbel could easily believe so.

“You need help if you’re going to find this Wood Witch of yours.”

He snarled at her. “As if you knew. She’s wherever she’s needed.”

By now, Jame had a fair idea who Gorbel’s mysterious healer was. “It’s the equinox,” she said, helping him hobble out the northern postern. “She may be otherwise engaged.”

The training fields stretched out before them, beyond that the outer wall and then the apple orchard.

Farther up were the paddocks of the remount herd. Something seemed to be going on there. Instead of grazing, the horses were moving about uneasily, sometimes breaking into swooping flight like a flock of disturbed birds. Bel’s cream-white coat glimmered among the mares as she tried to calm them. The rathorn colt Death’s-head must be off hunting, unless it was his presence to which they were reacting, prey to predator.

Jame considered the colt wistfully. While he was no longer actively trying to kill her, she hadn’t yet ridden him without at least one bone-jarring fall that usually ended each lesson. His reflexes were too damn fast. Also, he hadn’t yet consented to wear any tack. Worst of all, her irrational fear of horses in general only grew the longer she failed. Graykin liked to say that nothing stopped her. Nothing had, until now.

Put it out of your mind, she told herself sternly. One problem at a time.

Crossing the fields cost Gorbel more than he was willing to admit. With every step, the rootlets tried to dig in, coming loose clotted with clay that added to the weight of his boot. This might have been a sodden garden, not a sun-baked field. Soon he was too breathless to argue. Here was the edge of the meadow beyond the orchard and forest trees leaning inward, jealous of the land that they had lost. Under their eaves, the animals waited. Jame saw squirrels and rabbits and badgers and deer, all unnaturally still, watching them stumble past. Beyond, the wood was darker, with yellow eyes among the leaves. Wolf. Boar. Elk. Bear.

Jorin pressed against her leg, bristling but too afraid to growl. Again, she had the sense of looming powers. Heat hazed the sky and the Snowthorn’s peaks high above seemed to waver as if about to fall. Forest loam exhaled mist to drift, wraithlike, between the trees. The wind had all but died.

This is the festival of harvest and hunt, the fruits of the earth, murmured the leaves. Child of another world, is our bounty also for you?

“Would you prefer that we starved?” Jame asked the watching eyes.

“Huh,” said Gorbel. “Want feeds as want needs, wolf on hind, hart and hare on winter bark, damn the tree, but never for mere sport. I know. I transgressed.”

Jame glanced at him, askance, surprised. Gorbel was the most avid hunter she had ever met.

Beyond Gorbel, a stag watched them pass with dull eyes from his bracket cover. Blood burbled in his throat around the snapped shaft of an arrow loosed by a careless hunter who couldn’t be bothered to track down his wounded prey. Further on, the buzz of many flies came from the bristling heart of a massive cloud-of-thorns bush. In among the spikes was a great mound of flesh—a huge wild sow surrounded by the smaller lumps that were her starved offspring.

“No more. Learned my lesson, or thought I did.” Gorbel’s muddy, brown eyes were as veined with green as his leg, the whites all but gone. “Look.”

Against a tree leaned a man, a Merikit judging by his braids, but that was no red cap that he wore.

“ ‘Prime pelts on some of them,’ ” Jame quoted, feeling her stomach contract.

“First time I saw Fash take a trophy. Last time I hunted with him.”

Stag, sow, and man dissolved into afternoon shadow. Gorbel blinked. The green clouding his eyes faded leaving only flecks. He stumbled and almost fell, swearing fretfully like a tired child.

Something dark flitted from behind one tree to another. It could be a trick of the eyes, but Jame still had the sense of being watched. Where in Perimal’s name was that lodge?

She fished the imu medallion out of her pocket and spoke to its blind face. “If you want us, Earth Wife, here we are. Enough games!”

With the next step, she pitched forward on her face, a three-foot drop into deep grass with barely time to break her fall. Behind her were the low eaves of a half-sunken house. Its upper walls were lined with gap-mouthed imus, its doorposts and lintel with serpentine forms carved in high relief. Worn steps led down to the door.

“I told you she was around,” said Gorbel, still snorting with laughter at her fall. He limped down the steps, forced open the rasping door and bellowed, “Wood Witch! Company, with a present.”

The next moment, as he stepped inside, there came the sound of another fall, followed by a spate of heartfelt curses.

Jame descended the stair and waited at the bottom for her eyes to adjust—not, surprisingly, to the lodge’s usual gloom but to a golden, melting light that cast no shadows and distorted all distances.

The map spread out before her, with Gorbel sprawling across its eastern margin. Earth and stone ridges indicated mountains; furrows, rivers. The hollow that had betrayed the Caineron must be the Eastern Sea. Strangely, there was nothing west of the Central Lands except for tentative scratches. Also, some areas were either blank or had small, leather sacks sitting on them. The Earth Wife seemed to be packing up her map—why, Jame had no idea. She winced as Gorbel scrabbled to his feet, defacing large tracts of the Ben-ar Confederation. At least he had fallen short of Tai-tastigon, or there might have been real trouble.

Then the emptiness of the room struck her. The last time she had been here, in the middle of a volcanic eruption, it had been packed wall to wall with creatures taking refuge from the hot ashfall without. This time there was only one, grazing by a side wall that wasn’t quite there. Chumley whisked his blond tail and cocked an ear at Jame. Then he smelled the apple still in her pocket and ambled over to investigate. While he munched it, she stood on tiptoe to pat his shoulder. Here at least was a horse that didn’t frighten her, despite his size. Already huge, the chestnut gelding seemed to have grown even larger since she had given him to the Earth Wife during the eruption. Presents of all sizes and shapes stimulated Mother Ragga—luckily since at the time she had been rendered to skin, bone, and a great deal of molten fat by her sudden descent from the eruption in a lava bomb.

But where was she now?

Feet padded rapidly on earth, growing nearer. So did the sound of wheezing breath.

The northern wall wasn’t there either, only hints of it melting back into shadows. Out of it trotted Mother Ragga.

Everything about her dumpy figure flopped or jiggled. As a hat, clamped in place with one pudgy hand, she wore the laterally split head of a doe. Its skin cape covered her shoulders and its hooves, still attached, clattered at her heels. Underneath, over massive swaying breasts, she wore an assortment of hides both rough and smooth, predator and prey. Withered vines wreathed her wattled throat and ample waist. Burrs and green berries tumbled in her wake. On she came, panting, a tattered harvest unto herself, somehow sere and lacking.

“Present,” she wheezed, thrusting out a dirty hand. “Gimme!”

When Gorbel gave her the twin-globed quartz, she crowed with delight. “The Commandant’s baubles! Taken or given?”

“He said that I could have them . . . it.”

“Any man who says that has at least a pair in reserve. A slippery bastard, that boy, but he never did lack balls.”

She stepped carefully onto the map, clucking with disapproval at the damage caused by Gorbel’s fall, “Bet they never had an earthquake there before,” and placed the quartz near the northern wall between two rock ridges, beside a twisting, deep furrow. Jame realized with a start that that was Tentir’s location.

“Mother Ragga, what are you up to?”

The Earth Wife chuckled. “Find out if you can, clever puss.” Amusement changed abruptly to a scowl. “What are you doing here anyway? You should be up in the hills.”

“You know I’m not welcome there. Your Favorite or not, Chingetai would probably kill me.”

“Chingely is a fool. Just the same . . . ”

“Will you two stop nattering?” Gorbel balanced on one foot, sounding like a petulant child but also sweating in genuine distress. “You’ve got your balls . . . er . . . baubles . . . er . . . ”

“Bottom?” suggested Jame.

“Seat! The Commandant’s Seat! Now help me, dammit!”

“You picked a fine time to barge in, as if I weren’t busy enough today. What’s more, the time when I could really have used this bauble has passed, although I still might find it useful. Oh yes.” She peered into the rock’s crystalline depths. “Such sights yet to see . . . but you’ve also lapsed, haven’t you? You got this infection trying to take a trophy, a young rathorn no less, just to prove that you could. What, did you want to impress Daddy?”

“He laughed at me for failing.”

“He would. And if you’d succeeded, he would have been angry because the kill wasn’t his.”

“D’you think I don’t know that?”

“Huh. A sweet family you’ve got, young Caineron, for all that you’re one of the better sort. Just the same, are you sure you wouldn’t rather be a tree? Nice, long, quiet lives they have, and with golden willow in your blood you could even go for the occasional stroll.”

“Get. It. Out!”

“Oh, all right, all right. Some people don’t know a blessing when it bites them in the baubles. Sit you down.”

Gorbel groped for the outline of a chair by the fireplace and gingerly sat in it. At his touch, after an alarming tendency to melt, it took on substance.

Jame knelt, gripped his bucket of a boot, and pulled. Part of it ripped away, then more, eaten by the acid-tipped rootlets within. Gorbel’s foot was scarcely recognizable, swathed as it was in a tangled mass of white threads. Freed, they unraveled into a thrashing, serpentine node, each thread like a blind mouth. One of them struck at Jame’s hand, causing her to draw it back with a sharp hiss. Acid had eaten a hole in her glove, and this had been her last intact pair, dammit.

Mother Ragga threw a rope over the rafters, then whipped its end around the flailing roots.

“Help me!” she said to Jame.

As both of their weights came to bear, Gorbel’s foot jerked up. Both he and the chair crashed over backward.

“Again,” said the Earth Wife.

They hauled, and the mass of fibers inched out of Gorbel’s flesh. He made a sound like a kettle coming to a boil and kicked the air with his other foot

“And again.”

Suddenly, it came free, dumping them both on the floor. Jame looked up at the extracted, writhing fibrous growth, red-tinged down most of its length with the Caineron’s blood. Mother Ragga seized and shook it. “Behave! Here’s a nice tub of earth. Make yourself at home.”

Jame circled the chair. Gorbel still lay on his back, foot absurdly in the air. Trinity, what if the rootlets had reached as high as his heart? No. He had only fainted from the pain.

“Mother Ragga . . . ”

“Enough distractions. I’m off.”

With that she trotted back into the dimness of the northern wall and beyond.

Jorin bounded after the Earth Wife and Jame followed him, scarcely knowing why. Utter darkness enfolded them, and the dank smell of earth. The unseen floor rose and fell underfoot, sometimes providing hard obstacles to stumble over or on which to whack one’s shins. A sideways lurch from one such collision briefly tangled Jame in roots reaching out from the walls—not those of a golden willow, luckily, but unnervingly limber, like scaly, bifurcating snakes.

Ahead, Jame saw a dim light, and made for it with relief.

. . . boom-wah, boom-wah . . .

The throb of drums, growing louder.

Boom-wah-wah. Ching. Boom-wah-wah. Ching, ching, ching . . .

Jame stumbled out of darkness, back into the Earth Wife’s lodge. Had she gone in a circle? But here the chair by the cold hearth stood upright and no Gorbel sprawled on the floor. Besides, the late afternoon light that spilled aslant down the stairs was not that of the noontide glare near the college.

Jame crept up the steps to ground level, Jorin slinking beside her. At the top, raising her head cautiously, she wasn’t entirely surprised to find herself in the circular courtyard of ruined Kithorn, Marc’s old home keep, now deep within Merikit territory. To the right was the smithy where she, Ashe, Kirien, and Kindrie had been held prisoner; to the left, the shell of barracks; ahead, across the covered well-mouth, the gutted tower keep. Worse, not only was she within Kithorn’s courtyard but inside the square that defined the Merikits’ sacred space, facing a setting sun. More time must have passed in the lodge and underground than she had realized. Then too, Kithorn was at least a hundred miles farther north than Tentir. Time and space could both be tricky on this world.

Apparently so could matter.

Jame realized with a start that part of the black tower’s base squatted close enough for her to touch, that in fact it was the Earth Wife’s broad back.

“Mother Ragga,” she whispered, “I’m here.”

“I know you are. Stay quiet.”

Boom-wah-wah-BOOM!

The great boulder that the volcano had dropped near the well at the summer solstice had been cleared away and the ash of that eruption swept back into the ruins in drifts. Only cracks remained lacing the flagstones as a reminder both of the solstice impact and of the earthquake the previous Summer’s Eve. Jame wondered what Rathillien had in store for them this time. A rain of frogs? No, that had already happened too.

The courtyard’s margin was filling with Merikit men. Most stayed outside the square. Into it, however, stepped a cocky figure in red britches and vest, Chingetai’s latest candidate for Favorite. Jame recognized him as Sonny’s younger half-brother, that charming lad who had vandalized Mount Alban’s storeroom and tried to put her eye out with a stick. He had grown, more in gangly height than width. He had also acquired a fine garnish of pimples.

The Earth Wife grunted. “Old Chingely must be running short of sons. As if I would ever favor a poor stick like that.”

The “poor stick,” already dubbed Sonny Boy in Jame’s mind, might also have considered the fates of the previous two substitute Favorites, the first—Sonny—bitten off at the ankles by the River Snake and the second smashed flat.

“Bloody stupid Merikit,” the Dark Judge had said, speaking for himself and for his native counterpart, the Burnt Man, referring to Chingetai’s stubborn efforts to pass off a false Favorite for the chosen one, Jame. “Think they can fool us, do they? Not again. Never again.”

A sudden, chill thought struck Jame. Burnt Man, Dark Judge, as That-Which-Destroys, am I the third of your dread trinity?

But Chingetai hadn’t believed the threat and neither, apparently, did his son.

Sonny Boy certainly appeared very pleased with himself, and courted nervous laughter from onlookers by fussing about the dour shaman in straw wig and skirt who had taken the Eaten One’s place on the western side of the square, a seething basin at his feet. When the false Favorite tried the same tricks with the Falling Man’s representative to the south, Index’s old friend Tungit, he got boxed on the ear. For a moment, it looked as if he would return the blow. However, at a sharp word from the chief in the northern corner, he made a face and went back to clowning for the crowd.

Three more Merikit entered the square, masked with fluttering black feathers sown to peaked leather hoods.

Ching, ching, ching.

The shamans stamped and the bells strapped to their ankles rang. With a sputtering whoosh, the standing torches surrounding the square burst into blue flame one after another, closing sacred space but not, as before, entirely transforming it. The outer courtyard remained fitfully visible between drifting clouds of smoke. Within, glimpses came and went of the Eaten One in her scaly glory and the Falling Man, hovering just above the ground. The Earth Wife also wavered between her familiar stout form and that of a thin, anxious shaman who seemed incapable of sitting still.

Errant breezes, blowing first hot, then cold, teased the flames, making them dance. The weather was changing, and clouds scudding high above caught the sunset’s ominous fire. A few fat raindrops fell in the courtyard if not—yet—in the square.

Chingetai rose.

“Hail, equinox!” he shouted, defiantly throwing wide his muscular arms.

Jame listened closely. One odd consequence of her choice as Favorite was that she could understand the Merikit tongue, but not yet speak it. Already, though, her trained memory was storing up words and noting grammatical constructions.

“Balance bright day with long night,” roared the Merikit chief. “Courage we crave to face the coming dark. Faith we have in the strength of our arms, in the favor of our gods. The harvest is done!”

“Such as it was,” muttered Ragga. “Poor gifts I got from it, too—a handful of bitter blackberries, some unripe hazelnuts, and a rotten potato. After that, he expects my help?”

Which, Jame supposed, was why the Earth Wife hadn’t yet betrayed the presence of her true Favorite in the square.

“Now the hunt begins!”

“What, without the yackcarn?” someone outside the square called from the safety of the crowd, to a general rumble of discontent.

No one seemed very happy about these rites, Jame thought, except for that preening, idiot boy. The rest sensed, as did she, how wrong this all was, what a farce, at the cost of powers too great to be trifled with. The result might not be Index’s promised “end of the world,” but a failed hunt would be almost as bad.

“What about the yackcarn?” she whispered. “And what are they, anyway, when they’re at home?”

“Big, bad-tempered brutes with more hair and horns than brains, also the Merikits’ chief source of meat. They summer and mate up in the mountains, then head south for the winter. Their migration should have started by now, but they’re bottled up above the volcano by a valley-deep ash drift. That’s Burny’s work too.”

“Can’t you or the Falling Man sweep it away?”

“Told you, didn’t I? We Four can only meddle so far in what the other three do. That ash belongs to the Burnt Man, and nasty stuff it is too. Breathe enough of it and it’ll shred your lungs like so many tiny knives. And while the yackcarn are milling around up there, fighting each other out of sheer frustration, the Noyat are getting their pick of winter meat.”

“You’ve lost me again. Who are the Noyat?”

“Told you there were tribes farther north, didn’t I? The Noyat are one of them. They’re pushing south into what was Merikit territory before that fool Chingetai forgot to close the back door. Sworn enemies, they are, with a touch of the shadows in their blood from living so close to the Barrier. The Merikit figure Chingetai is largely to blame for the whole mess. So he is, too, for trying to change the rules, just when that damned cat judge of yours shows up to make an issue of it.”

Jame wriggled unhappily. In turn, the blind Arrin-ken known as the Dark Judge wouldn’t have gotten involved if he hadn’t been so eager to judge her, an as-yet-unfallen darkling. That relative innocence in conjunction with her link to That-Which-Destroys must be driving him crazy, all the more so as he couldn’t get at the true source of evil across the Barrier in Perimal Darkling.

The chief waved his arms and bellowed, “I said, ‘Now the hunt begins!’ Days of daring deeds, nights of drunken song. Blood we crave, rich fat on the bone. Air, carry to us the black swans of winter. Water, bring us your teeming young. Earth, yield your bountiful beasts. All hail the Earth’s Favorite, the Lord of the Hunt!”

With that he paused, as if expecting a response. Everyone glared at him. Glaring back, he sat down. Jame noted for the first time that instead of the usual Burnt Man’s soot, he was wearing only his own wealth of dark tattoos under a mat of black hair.

“He didn’t mention fire.”

“Burny’s none too popular just now. Funny thing, but people didn’t take kindly to him trying to drop a mountain on them. Just the same, it’s a bad time of the year to quarrel with fire. He may not have a big role in these rites, but I don’t see them succeeding without him. Look how poorly the torches burn. No fire in the village has behaved properly since the solstice.” She settled herself, with cracking joints and a redolent fart. “Now for the mock hunt.”

Boom-wah went the drums.

Ching. Tungit freed a bell from his ankle and tossed it into the air. Ching-ring-ring.

One of the hooded men caught it. Sonny Boy dove for him, only to miss and fall sprawling, to laughter from the crowd. What followed was a spirited if lop-sided game of keep-away. The bell flew back and forth, always just out of the boy’s reach. The players became almost airborne in their sport, leaping and swooping, spinning on a toe with wide-flung arms. Higher they sprang, and higher. Who could catch them now? The black feathers of their hoods covered their faces, spread down their arms. Not hands but golden beaks caught the flashing bell, not arms but snakelike necks whipped it back into play.

In frustration, the boy tackled the last to throw it and knocked him out of the square.

Although the Merikit missed the torches, his sudden return to normal space caused his feathers to ignite, wreathing his head in flame. For a moment, he seemed to be struggling with a great, black swan with blazing wings. Then it rose, taking him with it. They heard his scream, high above, followed by the crunch of his fall.

Sonny Boy crowed in triumph However, he had lost the bell, which Tungit had risen to snag out of the air.

Ring-ching-ching. Back on his ankle it went and the crowd growled. So much for the black swans of winter. And the ducks, and the geese, and the plump plovers with their acidic spit.

Jame tugged the Earth Wife’s sleeve. For a moment, the startled face that turned toward her was that of the shaman who was playing Mother Ragga’s role in these ceremonies. His gaze swept fearfully over her, unseeing, then back to the square. As he settled, his narrow back swelled into the Earth Wife’s.

“Don’t do that,” she hissed. “You nearly gave this poor old lean-shanks a heart attack.”

“But did you see? Fire is here, outside the square, and he’s just claimed the Falling Man’s servant.”

“Oh yes,” said the Earth Wife grimly. “I saw.”

The two remaining men removed their peaked hoods. Under them they wore the scooped-out lower halves of fish with absurdly flopping tails.

Boom-wah-wah.

The straw-thatched shaman threw a handful of powder into the basin. When the thrashing had subsided, one by one he drew out six glittering, half-drugged fish and tossed them to the Merikit who were now the Eaten One’s servants. Jame had expected the usual catfish, but these looked more like trout, although with a strange swelling near the anus.

“Are those . . . ?”

“Oh, yes,” said the Earth Wife, a wicked grin in her voice. “The fisherman’s bane. Slimers.”

Gripping a fish-spear and a small net, the boy stepped onto the well cover. It rocked gently under his weight. He froze and so did Jame, remembering what lay beneath. On Summer’s Eve, Sonny had pitched her down that well in a last, desperate effort to save himself. Inside, it was the muscular, red throat of the River Snake, ringed with downward-turned teeth, ever hungry. Only her claws had allowed her to scramble out, and that barely in time.

The two Merikit began to toss the fish back and forth over the well-mouth, catching them skillfully by the gills. This at last won applause from the audience. It was certainly one of the best juggling acts Jame had ever seen, including one in Tai-tastigon done bare-handed and blindfolded with ball vipers.

Sonny Boy watched the fish fly overhead. Out of water, they must be dying, and with that stress their abdomens swelled even more. He speared one in mid-flight, and got a face full of the rancid oil that it had secreted in self-defense. Another one, netted, virtually exploded at his feet, spraying both him and the nearest Merikit. Abruptly the juggling turned into a fish fight. The two hurled their catch at the boy and he slung back any that failed to split open on impact. The wooden well cover and the flagstones around it became slippery with piscine discharge. One of the Merikit stumbled onto the edge of the cover. It tipped, then flipped over as the boy jumped off the far side. The Merikit fell down the well shaft in a silence worse than any scream. A massive belch followed, lifting the lid a foot into the air, then letting it drop.

Whump.

. . . wah-wah? murmured the drums tentatively.

“Now what?” Jame whispered to the Earth Wife.

“At least the fishing should be good this autumn, and water is a useful ally, in moderation. Next, my turn.”

As she spoke, the remaining Merikit brushed past her and rushed down the steps. Unfortunately, he didn’t see Jame and she didn’t have time to get out of his way. They collided and tumbled down onto the earthen floor, Jame contriving to land on top. However, her accidental adversary didn’t move.

“I think you’ve knocked him out cold,” said Gorbel, limping out of the shadows with a ruined boot in his hand.

“What are you doing here?”

He shrugged, as if to say, Where else? “I woke up, you were gone, and so was the wall. I followed.” He sat down with a grunt in the chair by the hearth. “You dragged me out here. You can drag me back.”

By the firelight cast down the stairs, Jame saw that the Caineron was dirty, disheveled, and panting. Moreover, his swollen bare foot left bloody prints on the floor from wounds still oozing after the brutal extraction of the willow roots.

Sonny Boy could be heard outside in the square, shouting shrill, incoherent defiance.

Jame checked the Merikit. Yes, he had brained himself on one of Mother Ragga’s miniature mountain ranges. “Why did he bolt down here? Was he running away?”

“Maybe. More likely he came to fetch his mumming gear. It should be around here someplace.”

After a brief search, Jame followed the glow of moon-opal eyes to a corner where Jorin cowered. Mislaid objects are always to be found under the cat. Shifting the ounce, who managed to make himself at least twice his normal weight, Jame found a pile of clothing topped by an enormous, outlandish mask.

“It’s supposed to be a bull yackcarn,” Gorbel said, “or rather someone’s best guess since nobody has ever seen one. Now, what a trophy . . . no.” He glanced at the Earth Wife’s back. “I didn’t mean that.”

“You obviously know more about these things than I do.”

“Fash and I used to sneak up here to spy on the Merikits’ rites. They were always good for a laugh, and in those days they didn’t mind the occasional innocent onlooker. Of course, that was before Fash started collecting their hides.”

Outside, Sonny Boy gave a yell of defiance. He was standing at the top of the lodge’s stairs, shouting down them.

“We’d better get out of here,” said Jame.

“How? The wall has turned solid again. We’re trapped.”

“Bugger that. Earth Wife!”

Instead, Sonny Boy plunged down the stair and stopped at their foot, staring. He pointed at Jame, garbled something, and laughed.

Jame felt a chill. “What’s wrong with him?” she asked Mother Ragga, who had turned to sit massively on the second step down, filling it from side to side and blocking out most of the firelight. “Can’t he talk?”

“Not clearly. When he was a child, his older half-brother Sonny dared him to put his tongue on a frozen axe head. When it stuck, he panicked. The weak aren’t dealt with kindly here. His mother shut her lodge door to him and never opened it again, though he sat crying on her threshold half that long winter. She froze to death out of shame. He survived. Since then, he’s found other ways to communicate.”

The boy clutched a fist full of his red vest and brandished it in Jame’s face. With his other hand, he grabbed her coat.

“Ahhh . . . !” He flapped his ruined tongue in her face.

Then, feeling the slight swell of young breasts under his grip, he thrust her back with a jeering laugh that sprayed spittle in her face.

“And he’s found little ways to get back at the world, as you see.”

Jame shot her a hard glance. Earth could be cruel, squatting there clad in the skins of slayer and slain. The wonder, perhaps, was that Mother Ragga brought any mercy to her role at all, if sometimes precious little.

“I understand,” she told the boy in careful Merikit, searching for words that she had heard. “You tell me that you are the Favorite now, not me.”

He nodded gleefully and made another grab for her. She knocked his hand away. “Much more of that,” she said in Kens, “and I’m going to get angry.”

Mother Ragga made a grating noise that might have been a laugh, “That, I would like to see.”

“No, you wouldn’t.”

“Hark ye, boy.” The massive head turned, like the earth rotating on its axis. “Favorites win in combat, before their gods. Red pants are nothing, nor what’s in ’em. You’re only a challenger at best; at worst, you’re a fraud.”

Sonny Boy shouted a mutilated word at her that could only be a curse.

“You,” said Gorbel in Merikit, standing up, swaying, “keep that obscene tongue behind your rotten teeth.”

For the first time, Sonny Boy saw him, and his jaw dropped. He pointed and jabbered. Swinging around, he bolted up the stairs, somehow straight through the Earth Wife. For a moment, a lean, bewildered shaman stood in her place, until she again enfolded him.

They could hear Sonny Boy up in the square, shouting.

“He’s challenging you,” said Mother Ragga to Jame, “and he’s telling them that I harbor a skin-thief in my lodge. I know, I know. That’s your friend, boy, not you, but you’re a Caineron, and that’s enough for them.”

“Then I should be the one to fight him.” Gorbel stepped forward, and fell over.

“I don’t think so,” said Jame. “Besides, he’s challenging the Earth Wife’s Favorite . . . or is that her champion? Either way, that’s me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Gorbel clawed his way upright with the help of the chair. “You know I handle weapons better than you do.”

“What weapons? I bet you don’t have more than a sheath knife on you. I know I don’t.”

He glowered at her, hanging onto the chair. “If it weren’t for you and your damned willow, I wouldn’t be in this fix.”

“What do you mean, my willow? You didn’t have to help me save the rathorn colt from drowning.”

“What good is a drowned trophy?”

“Children, children,” rumbled the Earth Wife. “The fight is outside. And you,” she indicated Jame, “are indeed my champion this time, as well as my Favorite. So put on the gear.”

The hairy shirt and britches were much too big for her. She put them aside.

The mask was built over a huge skull—a yackarn’s perhaps, or maybe some other giant forest dweller such as a cave bear or an antibison. It had, at any rate, horns with a good three-foot spread, two sets of tusks, and a shaggy hide that probably belonged to some other creature. It was also much too large.

“I can’t see!”

The weight of it pressed down on her shoulders. Inside, her eyes were about level with the thing’s domed forehead and her nose flattened against its browridge. It smelled terrible.

“Here.” Gorbel raised it and jammed his rolled up burgundy coat around her neck as both padding and support.

“Oh, splendid. Now I can see your feet.”

“Are you the Earth Wife’s Favorite or not?” Mother Ragga growled. “If you’re coming, come. Now.”

“It will be like a game of blind-bluff.” Gorbel turned her toward the stairs. “I’ll spot for you. At least you’re good at stumbling around in the dark.”

That was true, Jame thought as she climbed the steps on all fours, dragged forward by the weight of the skull mask. Even before she had been introduced to the sport of blind-bluff at Tentir, where blindfolded players tried to score hits on each other with chalk or knives, she had worn the eyeless seeker’s mask and before that, at Tai-tastigon, had trained to navigate in the dark as a master thief’s apprentice.

A muffled roar, which she belatedly recognized as the audience, greeted her appearance in the square. Trinity, not only was she three-quarters blind but also half deaf; and Jorin, as often in a crisis, had withdrawn into his furry self. This did not bode well.

Gorbel shouted something.

“What?”

“I said, he has a boar spear!”

The brief glimpse of a foot . . . she spun away, feeling the spearhead pluck at her coat, and heard again the muted yell of the crowd.

This is madness, she thought. Why did I let them hustle me into wearing this damned mask?

Why, for that matter, had they?

Gorbel had taken the Earth Wife’s word that it was necessary; and he was annoyed that Jame had claimed this fight in the first place. How deep did his resentment run, or his father’s mandate that she be destroyed?

As for Mother Ragga, did she fear that Chingetai would recognize Jame, the unwanted Favorite, and try to kill her? After all, someone had given Sonny Boy that spear. Perhaps the Earth Wife herself wanted Jame dead.

. . . hard earth, hostile to the foreign seed; cruel earth, that wears life and death as a mantle . . .

It must be raining harder. Icy drops pelted her shoulders and sank through to the skin. Sacred space was breaking apart.

A sudden blow to the head made her stagger and shifted the mask’s alignment. She could no longer see the ground nor draw a full breath of air.

She imagined how this rite would normally be conducted, the Favorite as Lord of the Hunt stalking his prey, the two of them miming combat back and forth across the square. It could be played for laughs with cowering beast or hunter; it could be deadly earnest. In a season of poor game, surely it would be the latter, the beast dying as a sacrifice for the good of the tribe. Sonny Boy seemed to be playing it both ways. As she quested for him, swinging her massive head, all but mute, deaf, and blind, he was apparently prancing around her, mugging for the spectators.

Dammit, she didn’t want to kill him; much less, however, did she want him to kill her.

Gorbel shouted something Jame couldn’t hear. Sonny Boy tripped her with a spear shaft between her legs.

Right, she thought, getting up, her knees stinging from the rough flagstones Let’s play.

Her sixth sense defined the space around her and what moved through it. Concentration blocked sight and sound. He was . . . behind her, about to stab her in the back. She spun, caught the spear under her arm, and broke his nose with a upthrust palm. The mask didn’t quite cover the scent of blood. The crowd jeered. He was lurching around her, trying to recover himself. She felt his growing rage.

“Finish it!” Chingetai shouted at him.

That, she could hear clearly, both through her senses and Jorin’s. The ounce must have recovered his nerve, or been roused by the insatiable curiosity of his kind.

The addition of his senses to hers nearly undid her. Sound and scent came roaring back. Blood and fish oil and sulfur-soaked torches sputtering in the rain. The shouts of the onlookers, Sonny Boy’s incoherent cursing, the sound of his rapid approach.

She pivoted and lashed out almost without thinking in a fire-leaping kick. It connected. The shock and the weight of the mask overbalanced her. For the second time she was on the ground—stumbling around like a fool, she thought crossly; but the jolt had dislodged the mask and she pried it off, never mind who saw her naked face.

Sonny Boy had fallen back into one of the torches and overset it. Burning fragments of cloth rained down on him, on his oil-soaked vest and pants. Suddenly both were on fire, as was his hair. He leaped up with a yell and beat at them, but the flames only seemed to spread. At their caress, his skin turned red, then black, and still he flailed, screaming, around the square. The stench of burning hair and flesh rolled off his body like smoke. Jame tried to catch him in Gorbel’s coat, but in his agony he knocked her away. She became aware that she was also slathered with oil from her falls. A thread of flame ran up her sleeve. She beat it out and retreated toward the lodge.

Those outside the square had stepped back in horror. There, it was raining hard and many had drawn up their hoods against the deluge. Ash dissolved into mud and trickled out of the shadows, as slippery underfoot as the rancid fish oil. Now that was burning too, until the mud flowed over it.

Mother Ragga’s bulk blocked the door, with Gorbel peering out aghast under her arm. She was staring not at the burning boy but at the muddy rivulets. A huge grin broke out across her face. “By stock and stone, transformation!” she breathed, and raised a clenched fist grown to the dimensions of a club. “Ash to mud, mud to earth. Got you, Burny!”

The blackening figure had stopped and stood swaying, still obscenely alive. Its head lifted as something of the boy surfaced.

“I . . . can talk,” he croaked, and even that terrible immolation couldn’t quite dim his startled delight. “Father, I can talk! It doesn’t hurt anymore. But . . . what’s happening to me? Father?”

Up until then, Chingetai hadn’t moved. Now he backed slowly away, out of disintegrating sacred space into the downpour.

“Father!”

The boy’s skin split over the tracery of molten veins and he stepped out of it, out of himself, forever.

“Transformation,” agreed a voice out of the blackened hulk like the crackle and hiss of banked flames. “Told you, can’t fool me. Not again. Not ever.” And it shambled toward Jame.

The Earth Wife grabbed her, shoved both Kencyr back into the lodge, and shut the door in the Burnt Man’s charred face.