“I see.”
Deer Killer gave Ecan a half-panicked glance, then fixed his gaze on the gate. He’d coiled his black braids over his ears and secured them with rabbit-bone pins. It made him look like a big-eared bat.
“How’s your stomach these days?” Ecan asked slyly.
Deer Killer swallowed hard, placing a hand to it as if it were tender.
The guards standing on either side of the entry shouted the arrival of the messenger.
Ecan said, “I want you to bring the messenger to me immediately after Matron Astcat is finished with him. Do you understand?”
“Of course, Starwatcher.”
They fled with unaccustomed swiftness.
As the litter was lowered to the ground, Pitch jumped off and clutched his slung arm, as though in pain. He looked like a skinny boy. Nothing more. His thin face and hooked nose glistened with sweat. He wore a tattered elkhide cape. Ecan’s eyes narrowed. So this was Pitch? Rain Bear’s son-in-law?
Pitch spoke quietly to the guards. Hunter and Deer Killer escorted him up the trail to the Council Lodge, where he ducked beneath the door flap and disappeared. Hunter and Deer Killer took up positions outside.
Ecan gruffly folded his arms. Odd, he didn’t even remember Pitch, though he must have seen him in Rain Bear’s camp, which proved how much of an impression the youth had made. He stared at the Council Lodge for a time, then turned.
Dzoo stood behind him—perfectly still, as though not quite real.
“Greetings, witch.” He instinctively clenched his fists. Wind Scorpion had a slight smile on his lips, as if expecting something.
Her deep voice had a velvet quality. “Where is the matron?”
Ecan looked up the trail to her lodge. No guards waited to take her to the meeting. “She must already be in the Council Lodge.”
Which meant Cimmis had received advance warning from a scout. He had had time to both rouse his wife and escort her to the Council Lodge long before he’d sent runners to notify Ecan.
“What are you doing out here?” he asked.
“Waiting,” she whispered, and tipped her chin toward the Council Lodge. “For that.”
Cimmis ducked under the door hanging and walked out into the plaza. He looked angry as he paced back and forth with his arms folded tightly across his broad chest. Finally, he stopped short, glancing this way and that until he picked out Wind Scorpion. He summoned the grizzled warrior with an angry gesture.
Ecan would have sworn that Wind Scorpion smiled ironically as he trotted toward the great chief. Smiled? When Cimmis looked as if all the fury on earth was building in that old battered body?
Ecan said, “Now, there’s a curious development.”
Dzoo’s voice was as musical as the wind. “The message Pitch carries is for Astcat alone, but I wasn’t sure if she would have the courage to dismiss her husband.”
He stared at her. “How do you know this?”
“Do you know what they’re discussing in there, Ecan?” Dzoo whispered, as though she didn’t wish anyone to overhear them. Her eyes seemed to have no pupils.
“No. Do you?”
She leaned forward to hiss, “They’re selling you. It’s like the summer solstice market. They’ll haggle over price for a short time, and then—”
He cut her off with a gesture and untied his cape laces, opening the front to the wind. He was sweating. “Do you really think I believe your threats?”
Her gaze drifted over Fire Village before she asked, “How is Mica?”
The change of subject left him floundering for an instant. “Dead. But he lasted a lot longer than I thought he would.”
Ecan boldly stepped to within a hand’s breadth of her, close enough to smell the earthy scent that clung to her hair. “What did you do to them, Dzoo? Some sort of poison? Some strange plant you brought from those buffalo hunters out on the plains?”
She softly laughed, “He’s taking them one by one—everyone who was near me. Hunter and Deer Killer will have to be next. Eventually he will have to eliminate White Stone and then … you.”
Matron Astcat was seated on a log before the fire, her long seashell-covered leather cape spreading around her feet in firelit folds. A walking stick leaned against the log beside her. She wore her gray hair twisted into a bun on top of her head, which accentuated the gaunt lines of her wrinkled face.
“Matron Astcat, I bring a message from Tsauz, son of Starwatcher Ecan,” Pitch called formally as he knelt before her.
“Before you deliver the message”—she put a bony hand on his shoulder—“I want you to verify a rumor.”
“If I can, Great Matron.”
“Two hands of time ago, a Trader passed through here. He said there was a great uproar in your village because Ecan’s son had had a Spirit Dream. Is it true?”