Sonon wiped his soot-coated face with the back of his hand and looked out across the river to the opposite, willow-choked bank. Beyond it, towering black spruces caught the reflections in the water and seemed made of translucent amber wings. The river itself, coated with ash, had an opaque leaden sheen.
He stood up and turned back to the village. For ten heartbeats, he just breathed and studied the palisade. People from distant places did not understand that each log was a Standing Warrior. Among their peoples, the angry souls of dead warriors were excluded from the Land of the Dead, so they moved into trees. They remained in the wood for centuries, until the tree disintegrated and their souls were forced to seek new homes. It was these trees that the People cut down to make their palisades. That meant that every log was a warrior still keeping guard, still protecting his or her people.
He wondered what the Standing Warriors must be feeling. Not so long ago, they’d watched this little boy racing happily across the plaza, seen him playing ball and dish games with his friends, heard his laughter ringing through the village on quiet summer afternoons. Their grief must be unbearable.
Sonon whispered, “No one could have held off such an assault. It wasn’t your fault. You did the best you—”
Voices drifted from the river. He turned.
A birch-bark canoe quietly slipped through the smoke, parting the river like an arrow, heading south. An old woman rode in the bow. She was dressed like a man and wore a long black wig, but a few greasy twists of gray hair stuck out around the edges, framing her deeply wrinkled face. Even if she hadn’t been in disguise, he would have known her. A thousand summers from now, as he walked the earth alone, he would hear her footsteps in his nightmares.
Four children lay together in her canoe, crying. Three warriors with paddles swiftly drove them forward. Close on the heels of the first, another canoe pierced the darkness—with three more captive children.
As the canoes passed, waves rippled outward and washed up on the shore near the dead boy, leaving delicate ribbons of firelit foam at his feet.
Everything about tonight felt strange and surreal. As though Sonon was locked in a trance and could not wake, his heart thumped a dull staccato against his chest.
At least a few of the children had escaped. Earlier in the evening, he’d helped them … as much as he could.
When the canoes vanished into the darkness, he looked at the western mountains. He couldn’t see the pass through the smoke and falling ash. The trail the escaped children had taken was the fastest way back to the lands of the People of the Standing Stone. But there would be many others on that trail: survivors of the village slaughter, orphaned children, and a few wary men who’d left the victory camp early, trying to beat the onslaught of warriors who would crowd the trail just after dawn.
Very softly he called, “Stay strong, Odion, and you’ll be all right. You’ll—”
I’m here. Right here. Please find me?
Sonon squeezed his eyes closed for several long moments. It was a girl’s voice.
He clenched his fists again; then he tramped back up the hill, ducked through the gap in the palisade, and trotted into the roaring inferno to search for her.
Two
Odion
I’m alive … .
I pull my knees up beneath my woven moosehide blanket and gaze out at the night-dark forest, where frozen trees glitter in the starlight. An eerie elation washes through me. I have survived eleven summers and never felt this curious brew of terror and utter joy before—the odd euphoria of a captive suddenly freed from horror.
As I was just a few hands of time ago.
Hope vies with the flashes of hideous memory. I squeeze the terror into a black place hidden deep inside me and blink at the camp.
Our tiny fire glimmers in the depths of a narrow valley that cuts through a rocky mountain ridge. Clumps of trees surround the small meadow. The staghorn sumacs—scrub trees—grow four or five times the height of a man and have dark smooth bark that reflects the dancing shadows cast by the flames. Beyond the sumacs, a thicket of thorny plums spreads fifty paces in every direction. Frost covers the fallen fruit and makes the forest floor seem as though it’s paved with round white rocks.
Frigid silence reigns in the night, punctured only by my companions’ breathing and the occasional popping of the flames. Though I know Mother and Father guard me—and five other people sleep nearby—I jump every time Wind Mother rattles the trees, or flames leap as they chew through the sweet-smelling plum branches. My ears strain to hear enemy steps in the night.
I look first at Mother, then turn my eyes to Father. They guard opposite sides of the camp, and for a long time I’m not sure they’re real. So many times in the past moon, I imagined them standing just like this only to be shaken out of dreams and back to horror.