“Yes, Elder.”
“Go. Find your friends and take this vision to the Mountain Witch. When Ripple has spoken to her, send Bad Cast back to me. No one will suspect him, and unlike you or your peculiarly colored companion, no one will notice him.”
“Yes, Elder.”
That horrible white eye seemed to burn into his very souls. “If there is a way … I want to thrust a burning branch right through the heart of the First People. Do you understand?”
Wrapped Wrist nodded as he scrambled up the ladder, missed a rung, and almost fell. He caught himself before leaping the last bit out onto the roof. Heedless of the outside ladder, he jumped to the dark ground and sprinted headlong into the darkness.
It was half a hand of time later that he remembered his buffalohide—but didn’t have the courage to go back and retrieve it.
Matron Larkspur understood the effect her body had on men. In the case of the Trader called Takes Falls, it worked to her absolute advantage. He was a member of the Made People’s Coyote Clan and had married a local First Moon woman who lived in a village on the west side of the mountain. He imported enough exotic items for the woman’s kinsmen that they accepted him for the most part, and he shared many of their confidences, and all of their gossip.
Takes Falls was no one’s fool. As one of the more influential men in the community, he had come to pay his respects just after Larkspur had taken over administration of Pinnacle Great House. A Trader who stood in the Matron’s good graces had an advantage over his peers—and Takes Falls, being ambitious, was willing to take whatever advantage he could get.
She had seen the effect her beauty had on him during that first meeting, and had made a point of encouraging his attraction over the passing moons.
She was stringing beads when he arrived in the plaza, asking to see her. She let him wait.
The beads she worked with were a present from her cousin, Desert Willow. They had come in a striking black-on-white jar capped with a stone lid that had been sealed to the rim with pine pitch. Inside had been a wealth of tiny stone and shell beads.
The value of a bead was directly tied to its size; the ones Desert Willow had sent were among the smallest Larkspur had ever seen. To craft them had taken a master beadsmith. First the raw shell—Traded from the distant western ocean, carried across the deserts to the Hohokam, thence to the Fire Dogs, and finally to the Straight Path Nation—had been ground into thin sections. The artisan then sifted clean sand through fabric to obtain the finest of grit. A thorn was fitted to the shank of a small bow drill, wetted, and dipped in the grit. Then, with the greatest of care, the hole was drilled. Using that as a center, the next step employed a hollow tube of bird or rodent bone. This, too, was fitted to the bow drill, dampened, and dipped in the fine grit. Consummate skill was required to cut an even circle around the hole.
Mixed among the white shell, a smaller number of beads had been cut out of thin sections of bloodred slate, while others were from black jet. The challenge for Larkspur was to manufacture a single necklace from the thousands of tiny beads in the jar. To augment the value of the beads themselves, it would have to be a single strand that could be looped time and again to hang from her neck. Her contribution included not only the pattern but spinning a single cotton-and-buffalo-wool thread to go the length. That thread had to be small enough to pass through the tiny hole but still strong enough to bear the weight of stone and shell. If it broke at the wrong moment—say, perhaps in a ceremony—the tiny beads would cascade to the ground and be forever lost.
Stringing the beads wasn’t a task for the farsighted. She used a flat section of river cobble polished smooth by eons of water. The gray schist contrasted to the white, red, and black beads. She used a cactus thorn to pick the beads off the rock. A tiny dab of pine pitch attached her thread to the base of the thorn and pulled it through the bead.
She finished another repetition of the pattern: ten white, one red, five white, one black, five white, one red, and so on. As she had laid it out, the colors would align when she settled the fifty or so loops of beads around her throat. She had measured the length so that they would hang just below the notch of her sternum and contour to the swell of her breasts.
Laying the needle down, she took a sip of peppergrass and blazing-star seed tea. She used a bone spoon made from a mountain sheep humerus to dip more of the tiny seeds from the jar.
“I will see Takes Falls now,” she called as she picked up her needle and bent to the task of spearing the beads one by one from the smooth stone work surface.
She heard his steps on the clay outside before he entered her room. His glance went surreptitiously to her, and then to her belongings where they lined the walls. He was seeing colorful blankets dyed all the colors of a desert rainbow, beautiful dresses adorned with beadwork, feathers, and gleaming shell. A collection of turquoise pendants sat on a polished split-cedar box in the back. Lines of delicate white jars decorated in the fine-lined black patterns of the Blue Dragonfly Clan lined the north wall. The ladder tips extending through the floor opening in the rear of the room marked the way down to her bedchamber. His gaze seemed to stop there, a longing in his dark brown eyes.