“You have told me this time and time again.”
“I will tell you yet again,” Jaguar Hide insisted. “Think, Anhinga! You are going to marry a man. You will live with him, day in and day out. You will look into his eyes, watch his smile. You will welcome his body into yours. His child will begin to grow within you. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes, Uncle. That by pretending to fall in love with him, I really will.” She shook her hair, flipping her raven locks in a dark swirl. “Looking at my back, what do you see?”
“Outside of a healthy and attractive woman?” He hesitated. “The scars are healed.”
“Yes, but you can still see them.” She drove her paddle vigorously into the water. “And so can I. I can run my fingers over them, feel the ridges, and remember the pain. Those are the things I do when I am awake. I remember what each wound felt like when they inflicted it. Over and over, I see the bodies of my companions. See what they did to them. It is better when I am awake, Uncle. I can shut most of the memories out of my head. When I am asleep, the terror comes. The Dreams wrap around my souls, and I relive every moment, watching them be cut apart, their hearts, livers, and intestines ripped from inside their bodies. I see those animals squatting over ruined faces, defecating into bloody eye sockets. Unlike being awake, I cannot stop the Dreams, Uncle.”
He paddled silently behind her for a moment. “The past cannot be killed, Anhinga, but it can be built anew. It is that which you must guard against. You will be tempted.”
“I will be strong!” she insisted. “I have no life left. At the Panther’s Bones, I had to look into eyes of Mist Finger’s relatives, see Cooter’s sister, wince as Right Talon’s mother’s eyes asked me, ‘Why?’ I had no answer for them, Uncle, only the ache in my heart that I was alive, and their sons and brothers were not.”
“No one holds it against you.”
“I do,” she snapped. “And I’m the only one who matters.”
After a long silence, he asked again, “Are you sure that you want to do this thing? It is fraught with danger.”
“It isn’t a matter of wanting, Uncle,” she told him hollowly. “I must.”
With a leaden heart, she continued to paddle doggedly toward her destiny. In her souls she was already delighting in the surprise as she drove a deer-bone stiletto into White Bird’s heart. But before that, yes, she could be patient. She could wait for years if she had to. It would make the act all the more terrible for the witnesses.
Twenty-seven
“I felt like such a fool!” Salamander cried as he reached out from the bobbing canoe and grabbed at the duck-shaped wooden float. He caught it, pulling it toward him. Straightening in the canoe, he reeled in the cord that hauled the wicker fish trap to the surface.
He sat in the stern, Water Petal in the bow. The center of the narrow hull was cluttered with pointed wicker fish traps. Each was the length of a man’s leg, two hands wide, cylindrical, with a funnelshaped opening that allowed a fish to swim in, but not out.
Water Petal remained silent as Salamander grasped the wet staves and pulled the trap from the opaque brown water. A single buffalo fish flopped inside. He placed the trap across his lap and untied the door that allowed him to reach in. He caught the fish behind its gills and pulled it from the trap. Using a round rock, he bashed it in the head and dropped it, quivering, into a basket.
“I’ve never felt so worthless in my whole life.” His thick fingers retied the cord after he closed the hinged trap door. “I couldn’t think of anything to say. I was so embarrassed and shamed.”
Water Petal picked up her paddle, propelling the canoe forward, steering with the blade. She glanced over her shoulder, checking to see that her son slept soundly in the moss-padded cradle. “Salamander, don’t blame yourself. No one expected the Elder to react that way. She was like a ball of soil in a rainstorm. She just melted away.”
“My brother wouldn’t have made a fool of himself.”
“Perhaps not, but he’s dead, and you are the Speaker.” She shook her head. “I’m not sure how this happened, but it has. Like it or not, you are the Speaker. Sick or not, your mother is the Elder. At least she is until Moccasin Leaf can marshal enough support from the clan to dismiss her.”
“She has started on that,” Salamander noted. “It will take her a while to get concurrence from the outlying camps. It’s the middle of summer. People are off everywhere, hunting, collecting, making a living.”
“I don’t have much hope,” Water Petal told him heavily. “As bad as it was on you, I watched any chance of succeeding Wing Heart vanish. Without her, our lineage is too weak.”