In the Ruins

The girl considered her uncle with an eagle’s brooding gaze. She bit her lip. She grasped Anna’s wrist and tugged her closer to the gate. He scared Anna. He was fierce and he looked unkind, but Blessing walked right up to him and spoke in the language of the Ashioi. He laughed, and it was obvious even to Anna that these fluent words did not surprise him; he had guessed all along. When he spoke, replying, Blessing gasped out loud. She yelped with joy. She released Anna’s arm and hopped in a circle.

“He says he’ll take me, he’ll train me in arms to be a mask warrior, like the others. Right now! So I can kill bad people. He won’t make me wait, not like my daddy did.”

“You can’t go with them, Your Highness!”

“Why not? I can go! I hate it here. He’s given me a new name, and I like it better!”

“What name?” she asked, as her voice was throttled by fear. The uncle did not even look at her, because she didn’t matter to him. He only looked at Blessing, with a cruel smile.

“He calls me ‘Little Beast.’ I like that name!” She danced over to his side, and he was so delighted that he tousled her dark hair as if with affection.

“You’re too young!” cried Anna.

The girl took her uncle’s hand and, without a backward glance, walked through the gate.

“Then let me come with you!”

But Blessing was already gone, and the masked warriors pushed Anna back into her prison and shut the gate.

8

“WE have waited long enough,” said the blood knives. “We marched out here into the wilderness, Feather Cloak. We are exposed, we might be attacked, we risked contagion through contact with the corpses of the Pale Dogs. Now we have waited six nights and a day. Those who crossed through the loom have not returned.”

Feather Cloak was drawing with a stick in the dirt, as she had been for the last six days, trying to understand the threads and angles by which the Pale Sun Dog had woven a gateway through the standing stones. The blood knives drew off to one side and began muttering together.

Secha dropped into a crouch beside Feather Cloak. “The sky counters are displeased with you, Feather Cloak.”

“What do you think?” The other woman paused with the stick hovering above the earth. “Is the angle there sharp enough?”

Secha had already drawn the pattern; she had seen its measure at once, watching the sorcerer draw the bright threads down off the stars. It amused her that Feather Cloak struggled even though she had proved herself strong in the deep magic known to those who walked the spheres. Feather Cloak could reach into a thing and draw its qualities out of it, twist them and turn them. She could cause fog to rise out of the ground, or earth to crack, or vines to curl around the limbs of her enemy. When they had lived in exile, she had called the burning stone out of the aether and walked through it onto Earth. But angles and numbers defeated her. She looked very annoyed.

“What are you come here for?” she demanded, when Secha made no answer.

“To tell you that the work crew has cleared the bodies out of the village and cleansed them. The pit where the dead flesh is buried is ringed with death stones. Their spirits can’t walk, to haunt us.”

They had set up camp on level ground outside the ditch that ringed the deserted human village. It was a bare landscape that reminded her of exile, pale grass, brittle shrubs, and the long sweep of hills. On the seven days’ march here they had seen no sign of human life, but birds flocked in great numbers out of the south where they had taken refuge in the Ashioi country. Small animals abounded, and they feasted on the little spitted creatures every night.

She rose. The grave site lay almost out of the site to the west, just off the trail that led onward into the enemy’s lands. A few mask warriors were still piling stones on the mound, but it was well sealed according to the old custom.

“I think the stones are unnecessary,” Secha commented.

Feather Cloak stood. She was not, in fact, wearing the feathered cloak; on the march out here she had set it aside as too cumbersome, despite the sky counters’ protest. “Let them have their ceremonies,” she said dismissively.

“If you do not show them respect, they will come to hate you.”

Feather Cloak looked sidelong at her, and that intense gaze sharpened. She had a way of tightening her jaw that made her look very threatening. “Why this concern, Secha? You’ve never liked me. Not even when we were children together.”

“You do not know me very well.”

“That is your answer, then. The blood knives do not know me very well.” She ran a dusty foot over the dirt to erase the crooked hatch work she had drawn.