So it was that Night Rain approached the Owl Clan ridges from the north, her ceramic pot bouncing just above her buttocks.
She kept her head down, trying for all the world to appear as just another young woman at her daily tasks. She watched the ground ahead of her and cast surreptitious glances from the corner of her eye. After climbing out of the deep drainage that bounded the northern side of the Owl Clan grounds, she threaded her way along the path past the ridges. To her left, under the embankment, Morning Lake looked silver in the afternoon light. To the right, the ridgelines of houses cast shadows in curving ranks. Smoke drifted skyward from tens of tens of fires as meals were being prepared in anticipation of the solstice.
People were everywhere, many having arrived from outlying camps and settlements for the solstice celebration. Most had moved in with relatives, bearing sacks full of dried, smoked, and cured fish, meat, and plant foods. Most of these would be succulent meals by the time the ceremonies started.
Night Rain passed the second ridge and turned onto the first. She walked right up to Salamander’s door and leaned her head in.
“Hello? Anhinga? Are you here?”
Silence.
Night Rain ducked inside and squatted by the smoking fire pit. She laid her ceramic bowl to one side and slipped it out of the netting. Only then did she take a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dim interior.
She rose and stepped to the wall where the tools lay. There, propped against the wall, were two stone-headed hoes, Salamander’s ax and adze, several hardened digging sticks, an assortment of bow drills for fire starting and drilling holes in stone, bone, and wood, and finally, yes, Anhinga’s ax.
Night Rain reached out, her fingers tracing the smooth wood of the handle. She grasped it, her gaze running the handle’s length with its carved panther design. She studied the sharp greenstone head set into a notch in the wood and wound tightly with deer sinew. The freshly ground edge was sharp where she pressed her finger against it. Sharp enough to cut. How well Night Rain remembered the blood streaming down Saw Back’s side in a slick sheet.
Could this be the weapon that knocked a hole into Eats Wood’s head? She tried to remember the wound in the top of that mudbrowned skull. Oblong, sinister. Just like this ax.
Night Rain made a face as she remembered this very handle slapping her cold buttocks as Anhinga drove her home under a load of firewood and humiliation.
What a child I was. The moons since that horrible event seemed to have run together, to have woven themselves into something else. Her life up to that day in the forest might have belonged to a different person—some child she no longer knew.
“But I still belong to my clan,” she whispered, grasping the ax. She turned and hesitated—Salamander’s face forming between her souls.
What if Anhinga had killed Eats Wood?
Night Rain reached out and encircled the ax head with her thumb and forefinger. Did the cool stone seem to vibrate? Was it alive, harboring some sort of soul?
Eats Wood was a maggot.
The often-uttered cautions slipped out of her memory: “I don’t want you girls alone with him! Do you understand?” She could imagine mother bending down, pointing a stern finger in her face. “That boy is not to be trusted! Not even with kin! Snakes, not even the horror of incest would worry his souls if it meant the opportunity to stick himself into pretty girls like you.”
Night Rain’s expression hardened as she remembered the way Eats Wood used to look at her. Something in those eager brown eyes had chilled her souls.
If Anhinga is proven to be the killer, she’ll be banished at best. At worst, Uncle would manage to have her killed.
And Salamander? What would that do to him? How many times had Night Rain wondered at the love in his eyes as he watched Anhinga? Snakes, it would wound his souls if anything happened to her.
Night Rain bit her lip, considered, and carefully replaced the ax. The reason why would plague her souls afterward, but at that moment of decision, she grabbed up Salamander’s ax instead. She slipped the handle into the kirtle’s belt and turned back to the fire.
With a stick she scraped some embers into the pot before she tucked it back into the net bag. “I just stopped for some hot coals to take back. It was just quicker than building a fire at home,” she would say if anyone asked.
With a final glance, she ducked out the door, and, casually as possible, started across the plaza for her uncle’s.
Mud Stalker smiled as he bent down in the dusk and lifted the skull from the mud-caked canoe. Behind him, beyond the screen of thick cane and willows, he could hear talking as people passed up the channel in a canoe. Still more arrivals headed for Sun Town and the solstice celebrations. Their voices carried anticipation as they neared their goal.