People of the Raven(24)

Broken Sun turned the small bag to the moonlight and stared at the tiny red coyote paw prints painted on the leather. He offered it back. “Take it. I don’t wish it.”

“That was our bargain. And you do wish it, my friend.” Coyote paused, and carefully pronounced the following words: “Betrayal is a costly business. Costly in every way. Remember that your own people might thank you for saving them, but the Raven People will kill you for what you have just done. You may need those fetishes to buy your life.”

Coyote knelt, and the large spear point pendant he wore on a necklace swung forward. As long as a man’s hand, and almost as wide, it had been carefully chipped from translucent brown chert with two deep channel flakes driven out of each side like flutes.

He tucked it back before reaching out to stroke her hair with a shaking hand, then quickly wrapped her in the blanket, slipped his arms beneath her body, and lifted. She felt as light as a sparrow’s feather.

Dear gods, I’m holding her.

His arms started to tremble, and he could feel the first ecstatic prickling at the root of his hardening penis.

Broken Sun’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve kept my part of the bargain. Do not forget what you promised. My village is safe, yes? The sickness will leave us, and no warriors will come here.”

Coyote clutched the slender body against his chest, and a fiery wave flooded through his pelvis and along his veins. In a soft voice, he answered, “It will be just as I promised.”

Broken Sun scurried away like a rabbit freed from a snare, tripping, falling, running again.

Coyote waited—listening to the darkness, feeling the need throbbing through each fiber of his soul—until he knew he was alone with her.

Then he tenderly kissed her silken cheek and carried her away into the forest.





Nine

“Pitch?” A voice pierced the Dream like a sharpened stick. In it, Pitch had been conversing with Rides-the-Wind on a windblown shore. Strong white waves had battered the rocks below them while dark Power slipped and dove, flitting about them like a falcon on the stiff wind. In the Dream, the old man had been tossing a soul, like a glowing orb, from hand to hand.

Pitch blinked, shoved the tanned elkhides down around his waist, and raised himself on one elbow. His red war shirt was rumpled, and his skin itched where the thick fabric had eaten into his flesh. How long had he slept? The heaviness in his limbs told him it couldn’t have been too long. “Who is it?”

“It be me, Whisker.”

He blinked in the faint glow of the fire and saw the young woman standing in the cave’s rounded entry. She must have run to get here. Sweat glistened on her catlike nose, and black strands had torn loose from her bun and straggled around her oval face.

“Please, come, Pitch. Elder Ragged Wing say for you to come. Now.”

The Cougar People, distant relatives of the North Wind People, had a strange accent that had always been difficult for him to understand. They were hunters who lived for the most part east of the mountains at the edge of the plains, rarely fished, and insisted that fish did not feed the blood.

Pitch clambered unsteadily to his feet. “What’s happened?”

She wrung her hands. “Dzoo gone.”

“What do you mean? Where did she go?”

“Don’t know. Men hunt for her.”

Pitch pulled his cape from the floor and swung it around his shoulders. When he’d arrived at dusk, Dzoo had ordered him to get some sleep before they began their journey back to Sandy Point Village.

“She must be somewhere close by, Whisker. She wouldn’t have left the people in the sick cave for long.”

“Hope so.”

Whisker’s right hand rose, to clutch the little fetish tied around her throat, and revulsion ran through Pitch like a cold wave.

Witches’ fetishes had become so valuable that even ordinary people had begun to prowl the burned villages, collecting ears, toes, sexual organs, or a lump of human liver from the dead to make fetishes to sell. Those who bought them believed that the gods could not protect them from the North Wind People, so they had to protect themselves. Only that morning, a passing Trader had shown Pitch a hideous doll made from dried seaweed mixed with human fat and baked hard. He’d said the maker was a Powerful witch called Coyote. The Trader promised that if Pitch carried the doll, no spear would be able to penetrate his body.

“Dzoo probably just needed a moment alone to gather her thoughts, Whisker.”

“Yes. Please, hurry.” She grabbed his wrist and dragged him out into the cold wind, then rushed ahead.

Pitch tied the laces of his cape as he walked.

The night smelled pungent—a mixture of wood smoke and boiling willow bark tea they had Traded for from the far south. Big bags bubbled near the fires in the sick cave ten and five paces ahead.