"I understand Petaga's reasons,** Aloda panted as he stopped behind them. "If we survive, one of us must go to Tharon. That's what he fears."
Streaks of fire sailed through the sky, landing on top of the thatched houses. The bone-dry structures burst into flame. People fled wildly through the village, half-dressed, dragging shrieking children. Behind them, pursuing warriors let out piercing war cries.
"Follow me. Hurry! Let's at least try to protect the children!" Black Birch shouted as he led his warriors forward.
Aloda braced his elderly legs. The fiill impact of the attack sank in. His seventy warriors could not even fight a delaying action against Petaga's nine hundred. This was pure butchery, merciless and brutal.
Petaga, you fool. You come spouting words of cooperation and unity, and then you attack us in the middle of the night. If our survivors go to Tharon begging protection, it will split our people down the middle. What a trap you've laid for us. You little fool.
A woman carrying an infant was cut down in her tracks by a flaming arrow. Aloda's old jaw quivered. She shrieked when her dress caught fire. The flames leaped into her long hair and turned her into a living torch. She threw her child from her and rolled frantically in the dew-soaked grass before her body went limp. The child toddled to its feet, crying in the glare of the blazing houses, reaching out blindly to every warrior who fled past. Aloda watched in anguish as a man bounded by, stopped, and slanmied his war club into the baby's head. The child fell, kicked, and went still.
Blessed Earthmaker. Does Petaga plan on killing us to the last child? What harm could a baby do him? When the other villages find out . . .
Aloda stumbled forward as Hailcloud sprinted over the crest of the mound, his bow raised.
Thirteen
Sunset lay like a golden mantle over the land. Mourning doves cooed from rock perches, their calls mixing oddly with the undulant buzzing of cicadas in the marshes below. Lichen trotted across the bluff behind Wanderer, trying to match his long strides. She could see clear to the edge of the world. Redweed Village lay in the distance. Smoke from its evening cook fires smudged the sky with a ripple of gray. She let herself drift for the briefest of instants, thinking about her mother, missing Flycatcher.
A hoUowness had grown inside Lichen's chest. She loved Wanderer, but she missed her family. And learning to Dream came so hard. Only a few days ago, she had felt that she knew herself and her place in the world. But now everything had changed. Her old Dreams had come effortlessly. This new Dreaming often terrified—or amused—her. She never knew for certain what madness Wanderer would suggest next.
Lichen smiled to herself as she glanced at the back of his long head with its spiky gray hair. He carried a thick coil of rope looped over his shoulders and a box trap in his hands. Unfamiliar emotions scurried through her chest, tingling like sticky ant feet. Things had changed between them. He no longer treated her like a child. He treated her like a Dreamer. She didn't know how to feel about that.
In past cycles, she had visited him for a few hours, but she had never spent the night before. Only since she'd left Redweed Village two days ago had she really come to know him in all of his amiable craziness. They talked constantly about Dreamers he had known and the trials they had faced, about the nature of Spirits and Spirit Power. He was always challenging her to go farther, to "step into the mouth of the Spirit that wants to chew you up," as he put it. She hadn't accepted that teaching yet. Who would want to?
Narrowing her eyes. Lichen grimaced at the slope they climbed. The limestone had been carved by the Ice Giants and smoothed into mounds like those on a buffalo's back. The need to Dream tormented her, calling out in unfamiliar voices, showing her flashes of places and things she had never seen before. She longed to give herself up to the ways of Power.
But it took so much courage.
"All right, here we are. This is it!" Wanderer cried in elation. "Sit down, Lichen."
She sat. The gray prominence of rock formed the highest point on the western bluff. Her blue dress and her braid had acquired a fuzzy patina of dust in the past hour of climbing. Wanderer knelt beside her. His buckskin shirt and pants looked just as dirty as her clothes did, but his gray hair appeared surprisingly clean.
"Are you ready. Lichen?"
"What can we catch up here. Wanderer?" Lichen scrutinized the place. Not a sprig of grass sprouted anywhere. "A hzard? A snake? This is barren rock."
His wide eyes flared, rearranging the wrinkles of his long face. "Oh, just wait. You'll see soon enough."
She watched him carefully as he took the box trap they had spent all morning making and prepared to set it up. Laying the lid flat on the ground, he tilted the box up so he could prop a flimsy stick beneath its lip. He laughed slyly as he got to his feet; then, his eyes still on the box, he pulled on the length of rope that hung over his bony shoulders. The action sent a mass of coils spiraling down around his tall body. "Oh, my," he said in distress.