People of the Raven(25)

Whisker sobbed suddenly and looked at Pitch over her shoulder. Her wide eyes were startlingly black in the firelight. “My mother gone, too.”

“Your mother?”

“Yes, I go to cave to talk. She gone.”

A chill settled on Pitch’s heart. In a gentle voice, he asked, “Did your mother’s soul fly, Whisker?”

“Don’t know.”

Whisker broke into a run, heading away from the caves and out into the forest.

Pitch stopped. “Whisker? Where are we going?” He could see that other feet had beaten a path into the snow.

“This way. You come this way.” She waved him forward. “Elder Ragged Wing needs show you something.”

“Show me what?”

The shake of her head looked more like desperation than a refusal to answer.

As they entered the forest, Pitch heard voices and caught the glimmer of a shredded-bark torch. A group of six or seven people stood near a large boulder. They had their backs to him and, for the most part, resembled dark, amorphous figures floating in the halo of torchlight.

“What are they looking at, Whisker?”

“Skinned … wings,” she said, and hesitated as if she wasn’t certain that was the right word. “Bloody feathers. You must see. Come. The elders wait for you.”

“The elders want me to see skinned wings?”

“Not all. Broken Sun not here.”

“Maybe he and Dzoo are together.”

Maybe your mother died and the carried her body out into the forest to be ritually prepared for the journey to the Underwater House.

People cleared a path for them. Two of the elders stood speaking softly. Behind them, a shape lay on the forest floor. A body, human from the looks of it. His heartbeat quickened.

“Who is it?” He stepped forward. “What happened?”

Chief Antler Spoon glanced at him, then walked a few paces to one side. Thin white hair matted his head, as though he’d just risen from his bedding. A pale caribouhide cloak hung down almost to the high wolverine leggings that covered his moccasins.

Elder Ragged Wing stood in front of the body. He had a sunken, withered face that reflected horror and disbelief. The elder put a gnarled hand on Pitch’s arm as he came forward, and said, “Whisker thinks this her mother, but I am not so sure. You know Dzoo better than any of us … .”

Pitch bent over the corpse where it lay in the track-pocked snow.

At first he could make no sense of what he saw. She lay on her side with a bloody white cape covering her torso, but nothing was in the right place. She looked deformed or … contorted.

“Skinned wings,” he murmured.

The murderer had wrenched the victim’s arms and legs from their sockets and twisted them behind her back at unnatural angles; then he’d peeled the skin from her arms and smoothed it out flat on the snow. Pitch swallowed hard. They did resemble wings.

In the past twelve moons of raiding, the North Wind warriors had committed a great many atrocities, but nothing like this. Hate-filled warriors often mutilated their victims, but they did it in haste, hacking and slashing. This had been performed with grisly patience. “Bring me a torch.”

Elder Ragged Wing took a torch from someone and held it over the body.

The killer had cut out her eyes, leaving bloody gaping caverns, and her cheeks bulged hideously from the fatty flesh stuffed inside her mouth.

Pitch’s hand hesitated over the cape before he nerved himself to pull it back. She was naked. Her breasts had been cut off—not with the quick hacking of a warrior, but with the surgical slicing of a practiced Healer with a freshly struck obsidian blade. He glanced at the flesh in the woman’s mouth and realized what it must be: breast tissue.

Pitch wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Weakly, he asked, “Did you find any clothing or jewelry? Anything that might identify her?”

“No, just this beautiful cape.”

The longer Pitch stared at her bloody face, the more his fear grew. He turned to the milling crowd. “Did anyone see Dzoo leave the village?”

Heads shook, and murmuring broke out. People huddled against each other as if in protection from some misty vapor that hung on the night.

“Someone must have seen Dzoo leave. Or seen Whisker’s mother leave. They cannot both have just vanished without someone noticing!”

“He did it for us,” Antler Spoon whispered fiercely. “For all of us!”

Pitch twisted around to look at the elder. Wind Woman blew wisps of Antler Spoon’s white hair. He was fingering a caribou-bone fetish carved in the shape of a great northern owl.

“What are you talking about?”

“He Traded her.”

“Traded who?”