Feasting had lasted until well after midnight. And while most of the village still slept, the refugees were up and moving about through the forest.
“ … today you’ll speak … Thunderbird.” Rides-the-Wind’s scratchy old voice penetrated his lodge.
Rain Bear cocked his head to listen. Rides-the-Wind had been whispering to Tsauz since long before dawn, preparing him for some task. He’d caught only a few words of the conversation. Something about hunting and magical stones.
He clutched his hot cup and concentrated on the warmth that penetrated his fingers, trying to will it into the rest of his frozen body. Half of a cod was propped on sticks jammed into the charcoal-black earth and tilted so that the chevrons of meat slowly cooked over the fire’s low heat. The odor was sending Rain Bear’s stomach into fits.
Evening Star slipped out of her lodge, her face swollen with sleep, her eyes heavy. She glanced at him first thing, smiling as if just for him. She stood, reached for her cloak, and walked off into the forest to attend to her morning needs.
Rides-the-Wind’s garrulous voice rose and fell as he regaled Tsauz with some story about Thunderbirds.
Rain Bear was pondering that when Evening Star stepped out of the dew-beaded trees, deposited a scapula comb and something else in her doorway, and walked over to accept the cup of tea he had already brewed for her.
“They’re still in there?” She gave him that smile again, and glanced at Rides-the-Wind’s lodge.
Rain Bear yawned, watching his breath frost. “I think Tsauz has been adopted. He moved his bedding in with Rides-the-Wind. I heard last night after I returned from the island that the Soul Keeper had volunteered to train the boy.”
Evening Star studied the browning cod with hungry eyes. “I hope the boy knows just how lucky he is.”
“Lucky?” Rain Bear smiled at the thought. “Half the world wants to kill him as a means of getting back at his father.”
She considered. “This story about him going blind after his mother died … It seems to me the boy has already paid a terrible price for being Ecan’s son.”
“Do you believe he just went blind? Just like that? Without being hit in the head, or having his eyes injured?”
Her stare fixed on the distance inside her. “Oh, yes, Great Chief. I myself … I just wish I could have gone blind, and deaf, and perhaps mute as well. It’s punishment, you see. The desire to atone for failing my daughter, my husband and mother … my people.”
“Matron, you don’t—”
She held up a hand. “Oh, yes I do. And to make sure I punish myself, I will continue to live, see, remember, and hear their screams. Taking the other route and giving up would be too easy.”
He let her stew for a moment. “I never knew your husband, but I knew Naida. I wasn’t aware that either she or your husband had a reputation for cruelty.”
She glanced at him. “Cruelty?”
“Or that they were petty, or even mean for that matter.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Just this: If you had died, and your husband had lived, I am to understand you would want him to punish himself for the rest of his life for your death?”
“Absolutely not!”
“Ah,” Rain Bear added gently. “Then you would want your mother, had she lived, to blame herself for your death?”
She was giving him a suspicious look now. “If I were dead, and they alive, I would be furious with them for blaming themselves.”
“Then what would you want them to do?”
“I’d want them to …” It sank in on her then, her expression getting small, her eyes seeing inward.
“To go on with their lives,” Rain Bear added with assurance. “As the Naida I knew would want her daughter to do with hers. What about your husband? I’ve heard he was a good man, kind and thoughtful. Were he here, sitting in my spot, what would he tell you?”
She took a deep breath. “I need to think about this. I just …” She shook her head. “I don’t know. I’m angry with myself. Confused.”
“We’re all a little confused.”
Her blue eyes burned when she looked up at him. “I’m feeling doubly guilty. That’s all. They’re dead—their souls barely on the road to the House of Air … and all I can think about is you.” She gestured. “My husband was a good man. What happened to him was wrong. I just—”
“It was an arranged marriage,” Rain Bear pointed out.
She nodded. “We did our duty.”
He used a stick to prod the fire where blue smoke spiraled lazily from blackened branches and puffed around the sizzling cod. “If Tlikit had done her duty, she would have pined for the rest of her life, thinking of me. She never let on, never knew that I knew, but until the day she died she believed she had failed her people.”