They dismounted. Marghe felt as though she had swallowed something so cold it was turning her stomach to ice. She put her hands on Thenike’s shoulders; the bone and muscle felt warm and strong. They pulled each other close, and Marghe buried her face in Thenike’s hair.
When they remounted, the rim of the sun was just touching the eastern hills with orange. The horses’ legs were covered with pinkish yellow pollen. Thenike’s saddle leather creaked as she turned this way and that, sniffing the air. “The storm will come today.”
Marghe knew Thenike could not be smelling anything through the thick scent of olla; it was another sense she used. Marghe herself could feel that crawling under her skin, that ripe sensation she had felt before the last storm. “The sky’s clear.”
“I don’t think it’ll bring rain. Just hot wind and lightning.”
“How soon?”
“Afternoon, maybe. We’ll need to find shelter before then, some rock. The grass is dry enough to burn, without rain.”
They were silent a moment, Marghe’s mount facing back the way they had come, Thenike’s facing Marghe. Their horses whuffled at each other’s necks. Marghe pointed to a clump of trees. “If Danner doesn’t come, wait for me down there. I’ll be back.”
“I’ll wait,” Thenike agreed. “But before the storm, Danner or no Danner, I’ll come looking.”
Marghe knew it would be pointless to argue. She gathered the reins awkwardly in her maimed left hand, preparing to wheel and head north. She wanted to tell Thenike to be careful, tell her how much she loved her. She could not find the words. “If she comes, make her wait. Make Danner wait.”
“Your wait, at least, is over.” Thenike nodded ahead, and Marghe twisted in her saddle to look. The western horizon was hazy with dust, dust kicked up by a hundred horses.
Thenike turned her horse. “Speak well, Marghe Amun. And remember, I’ll come looking, before the storm.”
Then she was gone.
Marghe turned her own horse to face the dust.
She was waiting, reins tucked under her thighs, hands free, and the sun almost fully risen behind her, when the riders came over the horizon. Dawn underlit their faces, orange and alien; their sweat‑sheened mounts gleamed like creatures of molten metal.
The massed tribes were in a long, straight line–a skirmish line, Danner would call it. Slowly, the line wheeled about its center, where the sun picked fire from Uaithne’s braids, and continued to advance, facing Marghe head‑on. Next to Uaithne, tied to the saddle and slumping like a gray sack of grain, was a Mirror. Her armor had been ripped off to reveal fatigues, and there was dried blood on one cheek. Captain White Moon. She did not seem more than half conscious.
Marghe breathed slow and deep, keeping a steady rhythm, hands relaxed on her thighs. They would not capture her again. She would make them listen. A slight breeze lifted the mane of her horse and blew it across the backs of her hands, tickling. Her mounted shadow stretched long and umber across the grass between her and the Echraidhe and Briogannon. The tribes would see her as a huge, dark silhouette, backlit by the rising sun.
They halted a hundred and fifty yards away in a whispering of grass and chinking of bits.
Now.
Everything Marghe had learned, from the death of her mother, from the biting cold of Tehuantepec, and at the hands of Thenike–everything that made her who she was–came together in one hot focused point in her center, flooding her with adrenaline, tightening her skin, raising goosebumps. Her hands felt heavy; she remembered the ammonites. She was Marghe Amun, the complete one.
She held out one hand, palm out, as she had in the storytelling tent of the Echraidhe. Her voice cracked across the grass.
“You have amongst you a liar and a deceiver, one whose heart is twisted and empty, who leads you to a destiny that is false. Uaithne, murderer and betrayer, claims to speak for the Death Spirit. She lies. She claims to know my will, mywill, and lies.”
They were listening. Or at least they were not charging at her. Her blood surged powerfully. She nudged her horse to a slow walk, along the line, timed her words to fit her mount’s steady hoofbeats, sent them rolling away from her, unstoppable.
“Listen to me now. Iam the one who has traveled the black void between the stars to come to you; Iam the one who has wandered the white void, the plain that stretches its hand between the worlds of the living and the dead; Iam the one who has spoken with the spirits of the ancestors in the sacred stones. Iam the one who came amongst you and learned, like a child, the ways of my tribe; Iam the one who left, like a ghost, when I had learned all I needed; and Iam the one who survived winter alone on Tehuantepec, and who returns to you now.”
Her words were steady and hypnotic, falling in a strong cadence, up and down with her breath and the beat of her heart until she found strength building behind those words like a living thing: powerful, straining to be unleashed, to bound away to the tribeswomen astride their horses and tear away their masks.
“Uaithne laid the path. Uaithne brought you together before me. Before me, I say. For Uaithne is my tool, no more. A flawed tool. One that would twist in the hand of any who lean upon her promises, and break.”
She did not look at Uaithne, but caught the eye of Aelle, of Marac and Scatha sitting together, of Borri. She had their attention. There was no sign of the Levarch. Dead? Then Aoife would be leader, Aoife who was staring at the grass between her mount’s legs.
Lift that head, Aoife, look at me.
“You seek death, and I say to you: it comes. I am its herald and its shepherd. But you are my tribe, you will die as and when I decree, in the way I shall set down. And I tell you now: this is not the way. For this throwing of yourselves upon strangers is merely seeking death of the flesh.” She waved her hand dismissively. “A small thing, an easy thing.”
The energy that had been building inside her climbed to the back of her throat, so that she could barely contain it. She rose in the saddle and lifted both hands, palms out. A peremptory gesture demanding attention. “It is notthe death I have traveled the void to witness!” She slammed the sentence home with a double palm strike to the air. The Echraidhe jerked.
“My journey was hard beyond belief!” All the rage she felt at having been held captive and treated as something inhuman came pouring forth, making her words twist and roar. “The death I demand of you will be harder still! It means nothing to me that you prepare to die one by one in blood and heat. Nothing. I demand of you something more, much, much more. I demand of you the Great Death. The death of change.“
She saw a small movement, so tiny she almost missed it: Aoife, lifting her head. Yes, Aoife. Look at me, listen to what you would not hear before, The sun was warm on her back now, and the smell of olla overpowering, but she did not care, she was carried away on a tide of her own power and her words were hammer blows.
“The death of change,” she said again, “the death of your way of life, the death that is not just an ending but a great and terrible new beginning. Thisis what I ask of you!”
Oh, she had them now. They breathed with her, blinked with her, sat their horses as still as rocks.
“This, then, is my demand.” And now her words were implacable. “That you lay aside this crusade, that you move your grazing grounds south and west, that you leave Tehuantepec to the snow scuttlers and creeping plants.” She softened slightly. “You are not stones to endure the wind and the ice, you are people. You need light, warmth, food for your children. You need others of your own kind from whom to choose lovers and friends. Ah, but the finding of them will change you.”