Tokela turned way, started to descend. Inhya’s voice halted him midstep, soft and somehow wounded.
“Your dam was of thisLand, raised in the footsteps of her sire’s People. Before her heart… changed, she welcomed me here, too. She was daughter and sister to Beloved Ones.”
Tokela kept shaking his head. Madoc was unsure whether it denied Inhya, or the sudden glitter in his nigh-hidden eyes.
“This is your home. She would have wanted—”
“My dam is dead.”
The shock of hearing it—so blunt, so perilous—stilled Madoc's breath against his teeth.
“And she would have told me what that”—a gesture towards Inhya—“is. Told me why.”
“Tokela.” A warning. “There are things that should not soil our tongues. Your dam spoke of such things, heedless, and look where it got her.”
“It got her,” Tokela said, deathly quiet, “with me. And that’s what this is about, isn’t it?”
A small, choked sound came from Inhya.
No hesitation this time; merely heavy footfalls, stumbling then strengthening, gaining. Madoc shoved back hard into the shadows of his hiding place just as Tokela came hurtling downwards.
Madoc stayed pressed there, his heart nigh lifting the tunic from his breast, the rock cool against his back. On the terrace above, Inhya’s hands came to rest on the faded grey of the railing. Madoc knew those hands well, had known them since birth and even before, their slender, callused power smoothing over the belly that had sheltered him… for Madoc remembered, even though he’d been told it was impossible to know such things.
His dam held a thin-stretched and crumpled skin. It resembled the bits of hide Tokela scavenged for his sketches.
“It can’t be,” Inhya whispered. “I won’t let it be!” Her hands clenched, and she laid her head against them, started to sob.
Madoc slid down the stone and curled his knees tightly to his chest, burying his face in the thick weave of his leggings. He didn’t understand. He wasn’t sure he wanted to.
THE COMPOUND was crowded: people heading to the communal cooking hearths, children laughing and fretting, dogs barking, guests arriving and being settled. Then, voices, rising in surprise; hands making as if to grasp Tokela as he darted, twisted, and slipped through.
None of it mattered. By the time he gained the stair to Talking Bluff, Tokela was running.
He clambered up the drum heights three strides at a time, refusing to look back or so much as cast a glance at the shining, massive ribbon of water that fascinated… repelled… dominated him. From the moment She had taken his parents, River had been both succour and terror.
Now, it was the latter. He fled Her. Fled Naišwyrh’uq.
The drumKeeper, lounging by the great talking drums and smoking a pipe with an acquaintance, gave a small yip of query. Perhaps they wondered at his haste. Perhaps it had nothing to do with him.
No matter—he kept going.
Away. Outward. Over stony crags, through a clearing of scattered logs and stumps recently harvested for Fire’s feeding, into a meadow. Tall new grass bent in the wake of his passage, swaying with lastdark’s wet. A clump of grazingKin spooked in his wake.
Tokela wanted trees to take him in, bracken and moss to muffle and hide his passing, hidden pools still enough to be silent and clear enough to wash bone-deep apprehensions. His shadow flitted beside him in an unending race, then flickered and disappeared as he ran from field into Forest. The going slowed him, but only a little. Tokela’s feet had eyes; his body tensed keen with running-memory, his nostrils flared to scent his way, his eyes gleamed with the darksight gifted to all kin—footed, furred, feathered, and hoofed—by the Grandmother who bore them upon Her belly.
Over rotting stumps and under low-hanging, mossy branches of standingKin; here a twist, there a leap. One of hedgeKin puffed up to twice ša’s bulk and growled from a burrow entry as Tokela trod too close; a tree-lounging wildcat twitched ša’s tail, beryl eyes watching avidly for a half-breath then slitting, disinterested.
Finally, quivering limbs and burning lungs enforced a floundering halt. Tokela propped palms on thighs. His eyes stung, his tunic clung to the small of his back, the thin ahlóssa braid wrapped slick and serpentine about his throat.
Truth more and more seemed the ultimate pursuer, and him Dancing it from childish whisper to ripe reproach.
You are a’Naišwyrh!
Hard to believe, when she didn’t.
Wind had fallen. The only sound was Tokela’s lungs labouring against the cool, damp air. Forest lay sparser here, Sun loosing gilt arrows through the treetops, and…
Tokela stiffened.
He’d never seen such a thing before. Never wandered into this particular edge of wild. Yet he’d no doubt what it was: Šilombiš’okpulo. The forbidden place.
And an extraordinary, outLand thing guarded it.
Tokela crept closer, every sense twitching. The arch seemed of rare, long-polished stone; it reached into the ancient canopy and also tunneled deep. A guardian like—yet unlike—the tight-woven trees that led into the Great Mound. And tall, ai, it reached taller than five of Tokela standing atop himself, glowing ebon-smooth as the obsidian point to a MedicineKeeper’s knife. On either side as far as Tokela could see, the forbidden place lay choked by a tangle of brier. Coiled unnaturally tight, as if even a stray bough didn’t dare to grow sideways, and the scattered bits of sun that filtered through lent no light. The thing seemed to suck them up, swallow them. Nothing reflected.
As if from far away, a small Riverling could be heard, making Her way through the thicket, gleaming and glittering through briar. She was unafraid of this thing. So must he be.
Nevertheless, fear and fascination did battle within his breast. Fingers twitching with the urge to sketch it, capture it, Tokela drew closer, step by wary step.
Got a mere five paces away before he realised what he was doing. He halted. Crouched. Contemplated.
None here could say him nay. None would even know. It would be a challenge, to see if he could
