The Thunderbeing fell silent.
Good Plume frowned. “What’s the matter? Are you afraid of something?” She shook her head, slightly disgusted. “Well, when you’re ready to tell me, I’ll be eager to hear. Now go to sleep. All of you. We’ll have a lot of work to do tomorrow, Healing, and Singing for the sick and the dying.”
She pulled her hides up over her cold ears and closed her eyes. The Steals Light People started talking again, muttering amongst themselves. She fell asleep to the sound of their soft murmurs drifting in and out of the storm’s roar.
“The woman’s coming… almost on her way…”
“Whatif…”
“Will she catch his soul?”
“Pray…”
Two
Rain fell, misty and cold, from the sodden gray sky. The chilling drops had soaked through Kestrel’s antelope-hide dress as she scrambled up the steep slope through the turquoise sage. Heavy steps pounded behind her. She glanced over her shoulder. In the soft, pearlescent gleam of twilight, she could see the two men, coming fast—both of them tall and muscular, with damp black hair that whipped around their expressionless faces. They ascended the slope in quick, measured steps, as though loping on dry ground rather than climbing through clay-slick mud. The warriors of her clan the Bear-Looks-Back Clan—had legendary abilities as runners. From time beyond memory, they had spent half of every day racing the trails to build their endurance.
Kestrel hugged the bulk of her pregnant belly and desperately ran toward the red caprock ahead. The hoarse hunting cries of saber-toothed cats echoed through the rocky hills as she crawled on hands and knees to clear the gritty lip of stone—hurrying, driven by her pursuers.
In the distance, silver light penetrated the clouds, shot leaden streaks off the wind-painted lakes and coated the gray hills that rumpled the vista. Camp fires gleamed here and there among the villages of mound-shaped lodges. More fires flickered to life as the darkness increased, their twinkles twining through the hills like a necklace of amber beads. Around the villages, hundreds of ponds reflected the orange firelight.
Kestrel could smell the damp reeds and grasses of the marshy lowlands as she staggered along the ridge top. Juniper
and pinyon pine speckled the rocky hilltops and slopes in dark green clusters.
“Come on, run!” Tannin, her brother-in-law, shouted as he cleared the caprock behind her. His black eyes, unblinking but wild, were fixed on her like the eyes of a cougar stalking a rabbit. The tension in his thin face had incised deep lines across his forehead and drawn a web around his wide mouth. Soot and grease spotted the chest of his buckskin shirt, and mud matted the fringes on his pant legs. In the dim half-light, the smears looked like clots of dried blood. Tannin sprinted up behind Kestrel and used the stone point on his dart to prod her in the shoulder. “Run!”
“Please!” she shouted. “Please, Tannin—”
“If you don’t move faster, I’ll kill you here and now!”
Kestrel dashed between two junipers, heedless of the limbs that scratched her face and arms. Locks of long black hair netted her oval face and tangled in her eyelashes. She hadn’t the strength to brush them away. Small, frailly built, Kestrel knew that her strength had vanished long ago. Her chest burned as though a fire raged in her lungs. Tannin had kept her running for two days, so long that her feet had swollen hideously.
Cottontail, the young warrior, trotted silently behind Tannin, his sixteen-summers-old body bare to the waist and painted with blue, red and white colors. In the rain, the designs had dissolved into a great purple smear.
“Tannin,” Kestrel panted, “please, let me rest. Just for a moment. I can’t keep this up.”
“Do you think I could show you mercy after the way you’ve shamed my brother?” Tannin’s deep voice wavered in a gust of sage-scented wind that swept the land. “Hurry!” He jabbed her shoulder harder, and the sharp point of his dart bit into her flesh.
Kestrel cried out and turned pleadingly, walking backward. Her moccasins slipped perilously on the mud. “Tannin, listen to me. If you let me go, you know I—”
“Let you go?” He threw back his head and laughed. Rain beaded on his cheeks.
“Tannin, I beg you! Don’t make me go back to him.” She extended her hands. Tannin had been her friend in the past. When her husband, Lambkill, beat her particularly badly, Tannin always sheltered her in his own lodge. His wife, Calling Crane, tended Kestrel’s wounds, speaking gently to her as she washed the bloody fist cuts that covered Kestrel’s face and chest.