“He’s allied himself with the Bluebird Witch?”
“I promise I’ll answer that question when I’m sure.”
He leaned forward, kissed her lightly on the forehead, and left the longhouse as silently as he’d come.
Ten
Sky Messenger
South of Yellowtail Village the predawn forest rests as though under some terrible enchantment. I stop on the crest of the trail to survey the rolling hills. Sunrise is at least one hand of time away. The sky is so blue it’s almost black.
My people rarely make war at night, but the scent of burning bark rides the breeze, and ash continually sifts down from the high branches, turning my black hair and cape a powdery gray. Gitchi shakes often to rid himself of the annoyance.
In the distance, I see Sedge Marsh Village, though I can’t make out what happened to it. This is a Hills People village.
“Tell me it’s still there,” I murmur to myself, and Gitchi looks up. “They were our friends when I left.”
For seven days now, I’ve been marching through burned villages and empty country. Trees have often been felled to block the trails into the village, or perhaps to close the trails behind those who fled. It’s clear that someone wanted these paths closed.
My progress down the hill becomes a torment. The larger rock slides force me to scramble over them on my hands and knees, and the trip is agonizing for Gitchi’s aching joints. He groans behind me. When at last we make it down to the trail again, the sky is a little brighter. Pale blue lights the forest floor and streams through the branches. Where it strikes the ground, steam rises into the air. The lack of people frightens me. I have seen no dead bodies. No injured. No orphaned children hiding in the trees. Yet every village I know is gone.
I stop just outside Sedge Marsh Village and study the charred palisade. This has been a wet autumn. Nothing burns easily, but the upright logs here have burned through at regular intervals, indicating that someone had the time to set fires purposefully, turning the palisade into a sieve impossible to defend.
“Easy now,” I whisper to Gitchi, who’s started to growl every time Elder Sister Gaha—the soft wind—whistles through the blackened husks of longhouses. It unnerves me, too, sounding so much like weeping that I keep spinning around, expecting to see someone following us.
My searching gaze finds only heaps of smoldering bark that, not so long ago, were walls and roofs.
For days I’ve deliberately avoided entering such villages, fearing lurking enemy warriors, but not today. Cautiously, I duck through one of the holes in the palisade and proceed across the ash-coated plaza. All that remains of the eight longhouses are blackened pole skeletons.
The air is smoky, difficult to breathe. I look around the destroyed village for any living creature—even the dogs have vanished—then I step inside a house that once stretched over six hundred hands in length. The gleam of dawn falling through the burned frame scatters the ground with rectangular squares of pale lavender. As I search, Gitchi’s paws shish in the ash behind me. Pots, baskets, and weapons are missing. No shreds of burned bedding hides cling to the sleeping benches.
This is not war. Warriors ransack longhouses. They throw things around and take only what they most value. This house is empty. That can only mean that people packed up and walked away. Then the men must have set fire to the village to deny the enemy a refuge. Or perhaps the enemy burned it to prevent the villagers from returning to their homes.
I slip out through the palisade and head north again. I keep anticipating warriors. Either Hills warriors or Standing Stone. If the Standing Stone People attacked this village, someone should have been left to watch the trails. On the other hand, there may be Hills warriors hidden in the shadows, waiting for the enemy to return.
I do not see a single sentry.
There are, however, people. At every high point on the trail, I see fires winking across the forest, and sounds carry in the stillness: the ringing of an ax chopping wood, children crying, pots clacking, dogs barking. Ordinarily people leave their villages in the summertime to go hunting and fishing in distant parts of the country. Only a handful remain to tend the fields until their relatives return for harvest in the autumn. But this is something far more sinister.
The trail enters a dark section of the forest, and I slow my pace. Footprints mark the mud. I silently kneel to touch them. The edges of the tracks are not hard. Fresh. Two people. Probably a man and a woman.
I give Gitchi the hand sign to be quiet and creep forward with ghostly skill until I see them sitting on a log to the right of the trail. They sit alone in a pile of human bones, strips of jerky in their hands. Every now and then they rip off a hunk and chew it, but it is a curiously leisurely activity, as though they have not a care in the world, as though the sun-bleached skulls, shoulder blades, and skeletal hands that surround their moccasins are a mirage.