“No, it’s quite all right. Come, Matron. After your day, you need the water more than I do.” He reached for his war shirt, used it to wipe his face dry, and stood. She watched him pull the damp hide over his head and down his muscular body. More than once that wide-shouldered frame had intruded into her imagination. It had Danced at the edge of her fantasies as she imagined what it would be like to be touched by him, to feel that warm strength pressed against her. In her Dreams she had allowed herself to run her fingers over his thick chest only once before she banished it as impossibility.
She turned, feeling oddly shy after witnessing his vulnerability. “Hornet? I would speak to the chief in private.”
“Yes, Matron,” Hornet called, and waved his opposite back.
She picked her way down to the slab of rock and studied Rain Bear. He sought to look everywhere but into her eyes.
“What is it?” she asked. “Can I help?”
He smiled wistfully. “Can you conjure the dead? Breathe them back to life?” He made an open gesture. “Can you fly back in time far enough to convince me to split Ecan’s skull before he reaches War Gods Village?”
At last she understood. The model of strength she had watched all day had been dying inside. “He did this. Not you. If you are guilty of anything it was acting with decency and honor.”
His voice took on a bitter twist. “A mistake I’ll never make again, Matron.”
She reached out, saw the blood and offal on her hand, and hesitated to touch him. “Don’t become like them.”
The pain behind his eyes stung her. “If I had listened to you, none of this would have happened. Those people would be alive today.”
“I was wrong, Rain Bear. There was more at stake than I understood,” she countered. “If you’d killed him, it would have given Cimmis a reason to hunt you down and kill you. With you dead, no one could stand against him.You are the one man alive who can rally the Raven People against the Council.”
“Those people died—”
“Yes, and in doing so they have become the binding that will tie the Raven clans together. But only if you are there to weave that knot.”
She couldn’t decipher the look he was giving her. Some mixture of hurt and hope, despair and rage. For long moments they stood thus, each searching the other for resolution.
In a low voice, he finally said, “But for the presence of his son, I would have killed him that day.”
“Then the boy was the key to the Raven People’s future. And it’s the future that you must face. Your people need to be shaped and molded. The story is told that when you came to this land, it was as a few scattered clans, loosely affiliated, and then only by your language. Canoe load by canoe load, you drifted down from the north, hunting, and moving on. Is that what you wish to be forever?”
“We can no longer be subject to the North Wind People’s caprice,” he countered.
“No, you cannot.” She turned away then, stung by her circumstances. “The North Wind People … Song Maker help us, what have we become? We’re like the great firs, so tall we scrape the clouds, ancient and towering; but cut into our thick trunk, and you’ll find a fungal rot. Massive as we might look from the outside, we cannot survive the coming wind.” She looked down at the dried blood that coated her fingers.
“Assuming I can create this new alliance of which you speak, what of you, Matron?”
“I believe I shall leave tomorrow night, Chief. Slip away with your help, and vanish. Perhaps somewhere to the south is a land where my daughter’s ghost doesn’t wail in my dreams. A place where I can forget Ecan and Kenada, and the way their bodies felt against mine.”
He stepped to her. An odd thrill leapt at his touch, at the strength in his hands as he rested them on her shoulders. “Stay,” he whispered.
“Stay?” she echoed, trying to understand the quiver that ran through her.
“I am going to need your counsel.”
“You will have plenty of counselors.”
He hesitated. “Why did you warn me you were close just now?”
She blinked, surprised. “I—I didn’t want your warriors to see you.”
“What difference did it make to you?
She considered and found no answer. “Everyone should be allowed a moment of privacy to weep for the dead.”
“And for themselves,” he added as he took a breath. “You have a sense about you, Matron. I would have done well to have listened more carefully to you. Stay. Help me. Not just for my people, but for yours.”
She swallowed against the sudden sense of falling she felt down in her gut. She gave him a quick nod. His hands tightened on her shoulders as he drew her to him, brushed his lips across her forehead, and stepped back. In the descending darkness, she couldn’t see his expression, but her forehead tingled as if afire.