Chanting the slow deep lines, he told of how the tribes and clans grew, of the long lineages father to son, mother to daughter, through ages and ages to Khe'sha and Sha'khe and the nest mound in this swamp of exile. Of how the bloodlines would flow on and on until the end of time and the coming of Pan'gu yet again, to lay the final egg of the world and slip inside it for rebirth.
Beginning and end, and yet endless as the telling should be endless until the last egg lay as empty fragments of shell. Even the form of the telling was ancient, the Kunja form used only for the hatching song.
A white flash dazzled him for an instant, lightning against the darkness boiling over the crest of the hill. Rain hissed across the sky in dark slanting lines against the blazing outlines of the backlit thunderclouds. But their main fury missed the swamp. Witch winds battled overhead, holding the storm at bay and deflecting it into the forest to soak the moss and dry duff among the roots. The lightning and the driving rain set his nerves tingling, as if he felt the charge of those clouds gathering on his crest to draw fire from the sky. His kind feared lightning, one of the few things they did fear.
The shiver turned into that prickly feeling of hostile eyes. Someone watched, out there in the rain. Khe'sha squinted against the raindrops, looking up towards the keep and his enemy. Clouds shrouded the hilltop now, veiling everything in formless gray.
He lifted his head, nervous from the storm, and looked around. The edge of the marsh lay gray and faint under low clouds. The mists parted. A figure stood on a nearby point, untouched by the rain and wind, watching him, watching the nest, watching the hatching. Dark cloth covered the form's head and shadowed its face.
He couldn't see the color of its hair.
* * *
Cáitlin shivered. She hated being cold and wet. And she'd never had to put up with it before. Though her cottage stood exposed on a lonely tor surrounded by bog and rolling moorland, the breeze always caressed her cheek with a warm and gentle touch and the peat fire burned clean and clear. And anytime she wished, she could walk the warm coral sands of Bora Bora and listen to the gossip the trade winds whispered in her ears.
Spiteful downdrafts chasing smoke back into the kitchen to sting your eyes, bitter searching winter winds, the clammy creep of fog that chilled you to the bone and left you wandering lost through mires that spelled death to the unwary -- those had always been for others. Being an aer witch had its benefits.
Her nod of agreement and the blood gift had ended that. Fiona had swallowed Cáitlin's blood and swallowed Cáitlin's will with it in a rite as binding as Communion. Things once connected remained connected. Cáitlin could still command the winds, but only in Fiona's service.
Or when the dark witch focused her attention elsewhere. Even then, Cáitlin didn't try to work the winds in this forest. She wasn't sure she could. Few Old Ones cared to waste their power in extravagant displays like a thunderstorm. Dougal's killer wrote her rage across the sky and underlined it with a lightning bolt. If Cáitlin touched her fingers to the weaving of the aer, this forest would know it in an instant and pass word to its new mistress. So Cáitlin bit her tongue and lived with the cold.
Cold, and wet, and her bones ached. Walking hurt, jabbing knives into her joints and tendons. Even standing left her with a dull red throb like arthritis or fever where her hips and shoulders grew used to the changes Fiona had wrought in molding this body to a semblance of a man. Cáitlin felt awkward every time she moved, a stranger in her own skin. She could never forget.
I have made a mistake. That was supposed to be one of the deepest expressions of shame in the Japanese language. The phrase should be followed by a formal apology in exquisite calligraphy, and suicide. Well, the Old Blood often treated mistakes as ritual suicide.
Her mistake lay in thinking that Fiona wanted allies in her war, that the old custom of trading favor for favor still ruled the land. However, Fiona seemed to think her Power met her needs. She certainly hadn't needed any help to reduce that rebel keep to smoking rubble. Slaves and pawns had done the job quite thoroughly.
Pawns could wear many forms. Cáitlin turned and studied a black shadow sprawled along one limb of a massive oak, sheltering from the rain. The shadow blinked lazily back at her and then licked its paw, its pink tongue framed by white fangs longer than her fingers. The winds said that it was one of Dougal's pets, a mutated leopard trained to guard the keep and kill trespassers. It scrubbed behind one ear with the damp paw, a housecat magnified a hundredfold. But it watched her through the entire move. Apparently it wasn't hungry. Yet. Death walked this forest in a dozen different bodies.
Or none at all. Cáitlin's shiver turned into a shudder of distaste. She stared down at the moldering skeleton that now served as the center of her life. Brambles still bound the form like a Druid's sacrifice wrapped in wicker, and rootlets fuzzed across each bone and flowed acid into the porous calcium to etch it into dust. That had been a living man a few days past. Now it looked as if it had lain on the forest floor for centuries. No, she did not want to attract the redhead's attention.
Instead of talking to
