Black Skull’s muscles bunched like serpents under his scarred hide. Then he jerked a curt nod at the Clan Elders and pushed through the crowd.
“Should be a fascinating trip,” Otter muttered from the side of his mouth.
Four Kills placed a restraining hand on Otter’s shoulder.
“Brother, I don’t care what’s at stake. That Dream last night … Listen, don’t do this. You didn’t feel the terror that I did. I mean, I … I don’t want you to die. I need you too much.”
Otter patted his brother’s hand. He could sense Four Kills’ fear—like a dark wind within the soul. “I think it’s meant to be, brother. You have a new life to live now. Our paths split that night on the river. And, brother, search your feelings.
There, in your soul, that part of you that is me. I was leaving for the north anyway. I want to do this. I need to do this.”
Otter bit back a cry at the expression of loss in his brother’s eyes. “You’re already mourning me.”
“Who will bury your body?” Four Kills bowed his head.
“And care for your soul so it doesn’t become a homeless ghost?”
Water patted and slapped off the bow as the sleek canoe continued to shoot forward into the twilight. The land had changed, growing colder and familiar plants were becoming rare along the banks of the Father Water.
For Pearl, the endless monotony of the river had become a sort of torture. She’d picked a handful of winter-dry dogtail grass. To keep herself from madness, she worked the leaves into a series of complicated knots, creating an Anhinga prayer mat. She’d never made one before, although she’d been taught the difficult knots as a child. Prayer mats were made only in the direst of situations, and then laid on the burial mounds of the ancestors in a desperate quest for aid.
Pearl had no mound now, no ancestral ghosts around to hear her pleas.
When would this misery end? Her body ached from constantly sitting on her sack of maize seeds, and to make matters worse, she had started her Bleeding Time. When she squirmed from the discomfort, the men behind her made hissing sounds.
She’d come to hate them. They never left her alone. When she went into the forest to strip the soft inner bark of trees to use as an absorbent, they followed and jeered.
Somewhere, the roles had changed between them. From escorts, they’d grown into captors, and she’d found herself a virtual prisoner instead of an exalted and precious bride.
“Woman, you spend all day riding in the canoe. After that, we wait on you all night. From now on, you will cook for us,” Grizzly Tooth had ordered. Then, last night, he’d forced her to carry all the bedrolls up to camp.
“To teach you to serve men,” he’d added.
And what can I do about it? The thought had been nagging at her for days. She’d become nothing more than their slave.
Somehow, there had to be a way to escape, or to fight back.
But how?
- They made sure that someone always stayed close to her— even on the occasions when she retreated to the bushes to relieve
herself. Granted, Pearl had never been shy. People who travel on small boats can’t afford that luxury. Nevertheless, she’d never been the subject of intense observation when she attended to the by-processes of digestion.
Where once the Khota warriors had stared at her with something of a reverence, she could now detect open desire among the majority of them—and outright lust in the eyes of a certain few.
The warrior called Eats Dogs would fix his gaze on her full chest and rub his jaw as his eyes went glassy. Round Scar, on the other hand, was the worst violator of her privacy, always stalking her, grinning at the swing of her hips, seeking to touch her muscular thighs when he helped her into the boat.
Today had been particularly trying. One Arm had slowed whenever he passed her, lifting his nose, sniffing like a male dog around a receptive bitch.
Grizzly Tooth noticed the shift in behavior and sensed the increasing tension. Despite his role as nominal leader and best friend to her future husband, he’d taken to giving her guarded glances, his thoughts veiled.
And perhaps he’d been right to do so. More than once he’d caught her staring back down river, the longing for home welling in her eyes while the empty ache of loneliness grew in her gut.
As the canoe lanced the waves and turned toward a long sandbar that jutted from the shore, she pondered her options.
There were only two: run away, or surrender meekly to whatever fate her clan had sold her into. Glancing at the warriors in the canoes beside her, that latter option seemed less and less desirable.
She’d grown sick of everything Khota. The chore of learning Khota language exhausted her very soul. The endless repetition of words tangled her tongue and frustrated her.