It wasn't long after that that Badgertail had gone raiding to collect tribute. Primrose had always secretly wondered if his own selfish pleas hadn't sparked it. He had felt too guilty to ask Locust whether she'd mentioned his desperation to Badgertail.
"Nothing's happening," Nit murmured as she sank back, so exhausted after the long hours of waiting that she couldn't do anything but stare blindly at the cattail mats covering the floor. Green Ash's cries started up again, pathetic whimpers like a fox trying to chew its way out of a trap. "Little Wild Rye, run to my house and get my bag of poisonous milk vetch."
Rye's face tensed. "Are you sure?"
"We've no choice. Go."
Rye scurried to her feet and ran out the door. For a brief moment, the tarnished rays of afternoon sunlight penetrated the gloom and lit the dust that curled up from the floor in her wake.
"Why?" Primrose dared to ask. "What will it do?"
Nit rubbed a hand over her ancient face. "Sometimes, when the poison enters the veins, it brings the child. We'll see.
"But what does it do to the mother?" Primrose questioned. "If it's Powerful enough to bring the baby, what . . . what happens to the mother?"
"It's a chance." Nit spoke very softly. "Don't question too deeply. We don't want to lose both of them."
'''Both!'' Primrose cried.
Nit glared at him. "Shut your mouth. If Green Ash knows what's coming . . . she's so weak . . . maybe too weak."
Nightshade floated in the glory of the Dream, her thoughts lilting as though borne on the wings of Hawk. Below her, Talon Town stood proudly like a jewel in the desert heat. Near the central plaza, a young woman sat surrounded by the tools of a potter. An eagle-bone whistle draped her neck, hanging down over the blue-and-yellow squares of her dress. The woman used a polishing stone to smooth a piece of coiled greenware before she picked up her bone-incising tool. Around the shoulder of her pot, she etched the delicate, abstract forms of thunderheads and falling rain. When a gaggle of laughing children raced by, the woman looked up and smiled.
Nightshade ached. Dimly, she realized that only her soul witnessed this scene, while her body lay elsewhere.
"But I want to go home," she pleaded of the Powers that she knew inhabited the towering red cliffs surrounding Talon Town. "Let me come home."
"Your life has been as a seed in water — sterile, waiting to strike earth so that it may bring forth fruit. Do not fear. The thlatsinas will lead you home. The moment of fruition is coming."
"When? My soul is dying. It's been dying for twenty cycles."
Nightshade shuddered with a bone-deep cold. Talon Town dissolved into a shimmering red haze, no more than a mirage spawned by the longings of her soul.
Brother Mudhead's twisted face, coated with sacred clay, solidified in the haze. "Mother Earth never rests." His familiar voice soothed her. "It is her destiny to give birth unceasingly, to bring life to whatever comes back to her lifeless and sterile."
"When can I go home?"
''When the waters wash you up onto shore. You were stolen to be delivered by the Father Water. He has done his job well. The seed of your soul has been nourished, strengthened, changed, by drowning in his chilling current. You are a child of the River — and a child of the Desert. Opposites crossed. Like Light and Dark. Good and Evil. Perfect and Imperfect. All things born of reconciliation atone."
"But what am I atoning for? I've done nothing."
Mudhead smiled sadly. The red haze deepened to a mortal shade of crimson, and voices whispered around them. They came from nowhere, from everywhere at once—soft, muted, ringing with desperate hope—and Nightshade knew that the Tortoise Bundle had penetrated the Dream to cry out to them. "Yes, the Bundle knows. It has seen it all before. Power has crafted you. Nightshade. Like a lance of sunlight through fog, your soul will clear the way and allow the arrow to pierce the layers of illusion spun by First Woman to prevent entry to the Well."
"The arrow? Is that a person? The woman whom Wanderer has been training?"
Mudhead laughed, raising his massive hands to sunder the image of his pink face from the backdrop of crimson. The thump-thump-thump of a pot drum echoed as he began to Dance—or perhaps it was his heart beating in Nightshade's veins. The crimson haze shattered, fragments whirling while Mudhead's sweeping arms reconfigured them into a land deluged by rain, where lightning leaped through moonlit clouds.
"What is this place?" Nightshade asked. She could discern people running, no more than dark shadows flitting through the body of the Dream.
"What might be — if you are willing."