Sunchaser… Kestrel exhaled a halting breath. How many nights had she lain awake listening to Iceplant repeat the stories he’d heard from the Traders who routinely stopped at Juniper Village? Sunchaser had barely passed twenty-five summers, yet people spoke his name with hushed awe, as though he were a legend, not a living, breathing man. Stories said he’d died and been carried to the Land of the Dead on the shining wings of the Thunderbeings. There, he’d met and talked to the Ancestor Spirits. They’d taught him a Dance that Sunchaser proclaimed would return the world to its former purity. He said that if people would follow his New Way, the mammoths would return—they’d come tramping back from the Land of the Dead with all of the ancestors who had gone before.
Wolfdreamer himself, the great hero who had led the first clans up from the underworld of Darkness to this world of Light, had promised to return to guide the people. But he would no longer be human. He would return as a dust spiral that bobbed and whirled around the mammoths. Sunchaser carried a square of deer hide with him, on which he had drawn a maze. It showed the Way, he said, to enter the Land of the Dead. He asserted that anyone could go and verify his
claims. His new teaching had spread like wildfire in parched prairie grass.
“It’s not nonsense,” Iceplant said in a shaking voice. He straightened .o his full height, eyes aflame. “Sunchaser has been to the Land of the Dead. He’s talked with the great leaders of our people. Wolfdreamer told him–”
“Shut up, filth! Do I have to kill you to silence you? Is that what you want?” Lambkill asked. “I could change my mind about your fate!”
Iceplant hesitated. His chin quivered before he clamped his jaw to steady it. “Don’t you understand? We have to change, have to return to the old ways of purity and truth.”
“You dare to talk to me-about purity!” Lambkill shrilled.
Kestrel’s baby shifted so suddenly that she grunted in pain. All eyes turned toward her expectantly, as though she might speak. She lowered a hand to rub her belly. “Shh,” she whispered in a choking voice. “Shh, my baby, don’t cry.”
“What did you say?” Lambkill demanded. When Kestrel didn’t repeat the words, he slammed a fist into her back and sent her toppling into the mud. “Stand up. Stand up! Do you hear me?”
“I hear you, husband.”
Kestrel got on her knees, then unsteadily rose to her feet. Mud coated her dress. She felt no indignation, no hatred, only a terror that gnawed at the pit of her stomach. Near the fire, Iceplant had folded his arms tightly across his chest, as if to ease a pain in his heart.
“I am a Trader!” Lambkill yelled to the crowd as he circled Kestrel. Those standing in the wet plaza watched him through frozen eyes, their faces rigid. The elders who had sheltered in the lodge doorways drew their painted hides up over their heads. “You all know that. As you know that I was gone… gone… from the Moon-of Turning-Leaves through the Moon-of Flying-Snow.”
The raindrops grew larger, splat ting on Lambkill’s hide shirt and sparkling in his gray braids. His voice had deepened as his movements became more precise. Kestrel’s stomach
knotted. She had seen him perform a thousand times. He boasted that he calculated each wave of his hand and tilt of his head to affect the crowd in just the way he wanted. His smug voice whispered from her memories: “That’s why I’m a great Trader, woman. No one can deny me what I want once they’ve heard me speak. It’s Trader Power.” To the outside world, he seemed strong and affable, always in control. Only she knew the real Lambkill, the monster who was born with the darkness.
He had such nightmares. Every night. And they had been getting worse over the past cycle: dreams that woke him from sound sleep and brought him awake gasping. That was usually when he beat her. She never knew why.
Lambkill worked the crowd, walking the circle, placing his clenched fists on the shoulders of the most powerful people while he stared into their eyes. Clan leaders nodded in agreement, and Kestrel’s great-aunt wept openly. When Lambkill whirled and strode back. Kestrel took a breath, watching numbly as he pulled a hafted obsidian knife from his belt and lunged at her. Twisting a handful of her waterlogged dress, he slit the soft leather from hide collar to fringed hem and jerked it wide, revealing her huge belly. She staggered to keep standing. Strands of waist-length black hair stuck wetly to her chest, partially covering her milk-heavy breasts; the rest of her seventeen-summers-old body lay bare to the gusting wind. Firelight coated her skin like a sheath of golden pine sap. Kestrel saw her mother close her eyes in shame.