People of the Masks(19)

Wren gasped. “His father was a Forest Spirit! Is that not right? That’s what Beavertail told me!”

“Hush, girl!” Frost-in-the-Willows shouted and Wren almost bit her tongue off closing her mouth. Frost-in-the-Willows turned back to Blue Raven. “For the sake of the ancestors, my son, the child went on its first vision quest at the age of five winters. You cannot treat it—”

“I know the stories, Mother,” Blue Raven replied shortly. He had met Silver Sparrow once, and liked the old man. But he hadn’t been a Dreamer then, just a Trader. “Your nephew, Jumping Badger, has made certain everyone knows them. I wish that you would trust me.”

Plume glanced back and forth between them. His broad face shone orange. “Elder, Starflower said for you to come now.”

“I’m almost ready.” Blue Raven picked up his mittens from where they warmed at the edge of the hearthstones. “Tell Jumping Badger—”

“He is not here, Elder,” Plume replied. “Jumping Badger sent two runners ahead with the boy. Mossybill and Skullcap said Jumping Badger should return tonight, then they turned the False Face Child over to the matrons, and fled for their longhouses. The runners were so ill they could scarcely walk!”

“Ill?” Wren asked, her interest piqued. “From what?”

“No one told me!” Plume bellowed. “I am just a boy!”

Blue Raven uneasily slipped on his mittens.

The men had been running and fighting for days, of course they would be exhausted, but … ill? “And why is Jumping Badger still out? Where is he?”

“He is hunting down the survivors of the Paint Rock Village battle.”

Heat flushed Blue Raven’s cheeks. The clan matrons had sent Jumping Badger to kidnap a child, and he had taken it upon himself to kill every last member of the child’s village. For many winters Blue Raven’s dislike for his arrogant cousin had been growing. Jumping Badger had been war leader for five winters. In that short span, he’d managed to antagonize nearly every village within a moon’s running distance. His words, it seemed, possessed more strength than Blue Raven’s. He waved a mittened hand at Plume. “Run and tell Matron Starflower I am on my way.”

“Yes, Elder.” Plume ducked under the curtain and dashed away.

Frost-in-the-Willows squinted at Blue Raven. “Listen, my son. Everyone knows you opposed this raid. I opposed it, too. None of that matters now. The deed is done. The False Face is here. Treat it as you would a wounded panther, a beast in pain who will do anything to escape.”

“A beast, Mother?” Blue Raven’s strained voice went low, and it seemed that the entire house swayed toward him to listen. “He is a little boy. A child who has just witnessed the destruction of his entire world. He—”

“I warn you.” She lifted a gnarled hand. “It is not human.”

Wren’s mouth gaped. “It isn’t? Then what is it?”

Blue Raven ignored Little Wren. He loved and respected his mother too much to challenge her words in front of others. She sat stiffly, her white hair glimmering with firelight. “I will be heedful, Mother. I give you my pledge.”

Lifting the door curtain, he quickly ducked outside.

The cold hit him like a fist, stinging his flesh and burning his lungs. He hurried forward.

Six longhouses encompassed the central plaza. Around the village they had constructed a palisade of upright logs that stood twenty hands tall—the result of Jumping Badger’s raiding. They no longer felt safe even in their own village.

People rushed to doorways to watch him pass, breaths puffing whitely as they whispered to each other. He could feel their excitement and fear; the emotions prickled at him like the first drops of a torrential rain that would flood the rivers and send them all scrambling for their lives. He could do nothing to stop it now.

The entry in the palisade consisted of the space between two overlapping walls. There were two entries, one on the north side of the village, and one on the south. He slipped through the southern entry and headed down the hill.

His cousin had been railing about the False Face Child from the night he’d become war leader, recounting horrifying events of murder and mutilation—describing in detail the times the boy had saved his people from destruction. The want had grown in Jumping Badger until it had seemed to consume him. “We must have the boy!” he’d said. “He is a False Face, a Spirit being! Paint Rock Village has not been attacked since the day of the child’s birth, while we have been raided once every two or three winters! Every battle that the Paint Rock war leader has waged he has won! Think. Think what would happen if we had the boy? We would be invincible! We could raid where we wished, take what we wanted. We must have that child!”