“If you are selected, you will understand.” Seonagh said. “You will not learn the sacred rituals until you are inducted into the Coven properly, as a woman.”
Aoleyn was nodding before Seonagh finished the thought. She could be patient. She pictured herself, a grown woman, covered in beautiful, mesmerizing tattoos, dancing in the firelight with the other women of the tribe …
“Wait,” she said, a bit perplexed. “I’ve seen the women dance before, at the festivals and blessings. I’ve seen them barely dressed. I’ve seen you undressed! But no one has any of these markings?”
“Of course you haven’t, child! Tattoos are for the men.”
“But…” She could hardly find the words to express her disappointment. “They are so beautiful. If the Coven can make them, surely the witches could mark themselves?”
Seonagh’s demeanor suddenly grew quite stern. “Aye,” she said. “We could, but we will not. Tattoos are for the men, not for the women. They are a mark of status among the warriors of the tribe. They are earned, not given. Most in battle, or in the success of a hunt. You should be glad that your man at the fire last night had so many. It means he is an accomplished warrior, and well regarded.”
“Brayth?” Aoleyn asked. “Who is he to me? Why should I—?”
“Your intended,” Seonagh interrupted.
“Intended?” she asked, perplexed. “What does that mean?”
“It means once you’re formally declared a woman, you will be his. His woman, his wife. And most of all, his problem, and no longer mine.” Seonagh sounded gruff and angry, like Aoleyn had done something wrong, had gotten into trouble yet again.
“His wife? Who is he? Why should I want to be his wife?” Aoleyn asked.
Seonagh scoffed at her. “Want? What you want does not matter, foolish girl. The tribal leaders have decided that you shall belong to that man, and it shall be so.”
“When?” she whispered.
“As soon as you are a woman.”
Aoleyn stared at her, not hiding her confusion.
“Yes, I know you have bled,” Seonagh said. “You are his now, and can be claimed by no others unless he dies. You will be wed to him as early as this coming winter solstice, though it’s more likely that you’ll have to wait some few years before assuming your duties to him, that you can be properly taught in the way of the crystals and Usgar—if you show that you are worthy of the training.”
She said it like a threat, like her words were tying an inescapable noose around Aoleyn’s neck. Seonagh already had all the power over her, and now she had just strengthened that position.
That pit in Aoleyn’s chest returned, filling her with hurt and anger. Again, she could not pinpoint the precise reason—but it was something about the way Seonagh had said “his.” She would be “his” woman, “his” wife, “his” property. Like the uamhas.
Like Bahdlahn’s mother.
Aoleyn stumbled toward the exit. She mumbled something about being hungry, needing food. But in truth she doubted she could eat right then. She simply needed some air, to be somewhere else, away from Seonagh and all this disturbing talk.
She broke into a run as soon as she cleared the doorway. She didn’t have a destination in mind; she merely wanted to be not here. But her feet carried her somewhere unexpected, and she didn’t realize she was heading there until she arrived.
Outside the grove of thick pines that housed the slaves, Bahdlahn sat on the ground, playing with a stick.
“You will come with me,” she commanded. Bahdlahn jumped up at the sudden sound of her voice, leaping about to look at her. He appeared wholly confused, but this time he didn’t hesitate for long. He gazed at the ground as he walked, but he rushed to follow her without complaint.
Aoleyn led the boy a short way from the slave grove. She was feeling defiant, feeling like she had to strike back against the terrible reality that seemed to be closing in all around her. Seonagh’s warning followed her, though, and so she certainly didn’t want to get into too much trouble right now, so she decided against heading for the woods. Instead, she found a little nook on the cliff face, took a seat, and beckoned Bahdlahn to do the same. The boy obeyed without complaint.
“Your mother isn’t from the mountain,” she stated. Bahdlahn grunted, indicating that he understood.
“Is she from the lake towns?” Aoleyn pressed him. The boy grunted again, this time a noncommittal sound that seemed to Aoleyn to mean, I don’t know.
Aoleyn nodded and answered her own question. “She is. She’s from one of the lake towns. I know it. I remember the raid when the warriors took her and brought her here.”
Bahdlahn averted his gaze, and Aoleyn got the distinct impression he was hiding something.
“That’s why her head is … is so long,” Aoleyn pressed.
Bahdlahn inhaled deeply, clearly disturbed.
“Has she told you anything about that place?” she asked.
The boy ignored her. She repeated her question, but he still did not respond and Aoleyn, who thought this terribly important, felt her frustration growing.
“No, you cannot pretend!” she said with a growl. “Listen to me! I know you understand my words, even if you pretend not to speak. You take commands. You know what the words mean. I know your mother speaks to you of the lake towns, so you know about them?”
Bahdlahn looked up. His eyes were wide, his face ashen. He seemed terrified. He did not grunt or nod, but Aoleyn knew she had sorted it out.
“Now, listen,” she said, softening her voice, trying to sound nonthreatening. “I don’t care that you know about them. I don’t care that you cannot speak, or choose to say nothing, or whatever it is that makes you grunt all the time. I’m not trying to trick you, or catch you doing something wrong or anything like that.”
The boy looked doubtful, and seemed very small to Aoleyn in that moment. She reminded herself that he was really a child, not like her. He was nearing fourteen, but was much simpler than that, more like a boy of ten, it seemed to Aoleyn.
“Besides,” she said, “if I wanted to get you in trouble, I could just tell the warriors whatever I wanted. Those fools would believe me over anything you might, or might not, say.” Aoleyn was trying to make it lighthearted, a tease, but as she heard her own words, she realized that what she was saying here was clearly a threat, and one that no slave would take lightly.
Truly, the boy looked petrified. He started to rise, though his legs seemed as if they hadn’t the strength to support him, but before he got up, as if he remembered that he had been commanded to sit, he let go and plopped back down, looking miserable and afraid.
Aoleyn glanced all around and patted her hands in the air. She moved very close to Bahdlahn, that he could look into her black eyes. “I’m not trying to get you into trouble,” she said quietly. “Not at all. I just want to know some things.” She kept her voice soft, and was surprised by how much she cared about making this pitiful little slave boy so uneasy. She thought back to that long-ago day when she had defended him against two boys of her own tribe. Bahdlahn seemed like he needed that same kind of protection right now.
“I’ll ask questions, and you just nod yes or shake your head no, all right?”
The boy did not move a muscle. Aoleyn rolled her eyes at him. “That was a question, Bahdlahn,” she said sarcastically.
The boy looked confused for a moment, then nodded, somewhat emphatically.
“Your mother,” she said. “She came from one of the villages on the lake?”
Bahdlahn nodded.
“There are many villages there?”
The boy nodded again, glanced around, and held up all the fingers on one hand and two on the other. Aoleyn was surprised at how quickly Bahdlahn volunteered that information, and was surprised indeed that this supposedly feebleminded boy could even count to seven.
“Is it true that the lake is the end of the world? No one lives past it?” she asked. She already knew the answer—despite the tribe??
?s legends, the mountain and the lake were not the only inhabited lands around. She was more curious whether Bahdlahn knew that than anything.
Bahdlahn nodded emphatically. He opened his mouth, as if to speak, but no words came forth. Aoleyn wasn’t sure if he was considering what to say, or struggling to say anything at all. In either case, he closed his mouth again and kept nodding.
Aoleyn didn’t believe him. There were people beyond the lake, and Bahdlahn knew it.
Aoleyn pondered where she wanted this conversation to go. She wanted—she needed—to know something, but she wasn’t sure what to ask. Asking about the wider world would be useless; the child probably knew very little of the world beyond the mountain and the lake, and what he did know would be nothing more than stories his mother had whispered into his ear. The young woman had to remind herself that this boy who was not Usgar was even less worldly than she!
In her desperation, though, she had to believe that he knew something, but of course he had no way to communicate that little information without her directly asking, and she had no idea what to even ask!
But Aoleyn’s troubles were closer to home, anyway. She felt that pit in her chest again, that painful lump of emptiness and rage.
“In the lake village, did your mother have a husband?” Aoleyn asked.
Bahdlahn looked at her curiously.
“Your father?” she asked.
Bahdlahn nodded again and grunted a little.
“Where is he? Still in the village?”
Bahdlahn cast his gaze down and shook his head, and Aoleyn got the message.
She had suspected as much. When Tay Aillig had become Usgar-laoch, the tribe had held a great celebration to recount his greatest victories. One of those spoken of was the raid that had captured the pregnant woman. In verse and in toast, the tribe had celebrated that victory. No Usgar warriors had been slain in that raid, but some of the lakemen had.
Aoleyn gave him a sympathetic look. Her own father was dead, as well. Perhaps from a raid battle, perhaps from a hunt, perhaps from the winter wind. No one would tell her about him or the circumstances. Her mother, too, was gone, soon after her birth, or perhaps during it. Again, none would recount the details to her.
Perhaps because of that, Aoleyn suddenly wanted to know more from Bahdlahn. “Your father,” she asked. “Did he own your mother?”
Bahdlahn’s face screwed up in apparent horror.
“Was your mother his to command?” Aoleyn pressed. “Was she his uamhas, his slave?”
The Usgar had an expression, “nyonach’ard,” which they used to mock someone who seemed truly dumbfounded by an insult or an accusation. Not until this moment, with the purely nonplussed expression on Bahdlahn’s face, did Aoleyn begin to comprehend the depth of that remark.
Bahdlahn’s jaw was still hanging open when he had recovered enough to shake his head even more emphatically, as if the entire notion was absurd, and revolting.
Aoleyn was aware of the disdain the warriors held for the men who lived by the lake. Was this, perhaps, one of the differences that drew such sneers?
“Your mother speaks to you about him,” Aoleyn reasoned.
Bahdlahn didn’t answer, but Aoleyn didn’t need him to answer. He looked down at the ground.
“Fondly?”
Bahdlahn glanced up again, and Aoleyn caught the sparkle in his blue eyes, and she understood, for she recognized that look in her own eyes. Feeling the magic of Usgar had given her that inner sparkle. Aoleyn had felt the same as she saw in Bahdlahn now, the rush of a rapid heartbeat, the lightheadedness that followed. She had felt it that night in the tree near the great crystal protrusion in the sacred grove. She had felt it on the winter plateau. She knew how wonderful that feeling was.
Bahdlahn felt it when thinking of his father, and he could only know his father through the words of his mother.
The weight lifted from Aoleyn’s chest, as if the dark pit beside her line of life energy was filling, buoying her. That was what she had needed to hear, some confirmation that her mounting revulsion as Seonagh had told her of the world she would soon know was not her perspective alone.
From the reaction of Bahdlahn, from that look in his eye, Aoleyn got the distinct feeling that things were very different in the lake villages below Fireach Speuer.
Aoleyn and Bahdlahn sat in their little nook for a long while, Aoleyn talking, Bahdlahn nodding or grunting or miming. It was nearly sunset when Aoleyn left Bahdlahn in the pine grove and returned to the encampment. Over the coming days, she would gather the boy and retreat to this sheltered spot whenever she could, for the pit in Aoleyn’s chest always felt less substantial after those conversations with the little slave boy, who was not feebleminded, as he pretended and as the others believed.
* * *
From behind a rock not far away, Aghmor watched the young woman and the slave boy leave the sheltered nook. They weren’t carrying anything, he noted, so why might they have been out here?
Had the child tried to escape, and this woman, Aoleyn by name, given chase and captured? Aghmor knew quite a bit about Aoleyn, and her spirited and headstrong reputation, to believe that a possibility.
He smiled as he watched her walking back toward the encampment, admiring the play of her muscles in her short and curvy figure. She wasn’t the prettiest woman in the tribe, certainly was neither tall nor fair. Still, his best friend Brayth was a fortunate one, Aghmor thought, for the fire of Aoleyn was hard to deny.
Or perhaps Brayth would be monumentally unlucky, Aghmor considered, and his smile grew wider. He loved Brayth like a brother, even though Brayth had nearly killed him on that raid those years before.
Still, the young man couldn’t help but grin at the trouble he pictured this young Aoleyn would give to his friend. Her spirit was the stuff of legend among the young warriors. It was said that the only time she cast her eyes down was to find a stone to throw into someone’s face!
Brayth was in for a wild ride indeed.
Aghmor stopped nodding, and his smile disappeared a moment later when Aoleyn turned to say something to the young slave.
They were holding hands.
And the boy looked back at her and grinned and nodded.
16
CONFESSION
The deciduous trees swayed in a mesmerizing, multicolored dance, the autumn wind of late Parvespers blowing strong across Loch Beag. Borne by those gusts, small waves accompanied Talmadge’s canoe to the lakeshore, beaching in the pebbly shallows right at water’s edge.
Khotai hopped out and grabbed the front of the boat, dragging it up securely onto the land before Talmadge had even secured his paddle.
“Car Seileach?” the woman asked when he joined her on the beach.
“Another day’s journey yet.”
“We could get more hours this day. The sun has not touched the western rim.”
Talmadge tried to verbally respond, but only sighed and shook his head. He had known that he would have to return to this ghost-filled spot from the moment he had agreed to let Khotai accompany him to Loch Beag.
“We go the rest of the way on foot, then?” Khotai asked.
“We’ll be back on the waters at sunrise,” Talmadge explained. “You’ll meet the tribe before tomorrow’s twilight.”
Khotai shrugged curiously. “Why here, then? Why this place?”
Talmadge didn’t answer.
“Is there something here?”
Talmadge nodded.
“Supplies? A safe haven for the night? Do you fear those three rogues are following us? I’ve seen no sign of them since we left them more than a month ago.”
“This is the least safe place I know,” he admitted, though he was thinking more of his emotions than his physical well-being.
“Then why?”
Talmadge looked back to the boat, then closed his eyes, trying to find the courage to continue. “You have to do this,” he told himself under his breath.
“Talmadge?” she asked, he
r voice changing in timbre, becoming sympathetic, concerned even. “Talmadge, why have you stopped here?”
There was also a bit of trepidation in her voice, Talmadge realized, and he noted concern on her face, and that she had shifted one leg back defensively. Only then did he realize that he had reflexively put his hand on the hilt of his short sword.
He let go of the weapon immediately. “I’ve been here but once,” he explained. “Since that time, I paddle farther out into the lake to loop about far from this place, though ’tis more dangerous out on the deeper stretches by far.”
“When was that one time?”
“Thirteen years ago.”
Khotai nodded and narrowed her eyes as if trying to do some calculations to sort this riddle.
Talmadge turned away, motioned for her to follow, and determinedly put one foot in front of the other, propelling him toward a nearby stand of trees, and one in particular.
He stopped before the thick branch, crossing horizontally some eight feet from the ground, and he licked his lips, trying to steady himself, when he discovered a rope still tied about a low and thick branch! Over the years, that thick cord had dug deeply into the wood, and seemed somehow a permanent fixture of this place now. It was knotted underneath, with a short and frayed length hanging down a foot or so.
Talmadge remembered tying that knot.
“Thirteen years ago,” he heard Khotai say behind him. “Would that be the last time you brought one with you here? The year the man named…” Her face screwed up as she tried to remember.
Talmadge fought the words, but only for a moment, before blurting, “Seconk,” he answered. “They called him Badger. I hung him up by the ankles right here, with that rope, so the lizards would eat him and not chase me back onto the lake waters.”
There came no reply.
“I heard them eating him,” he said, pushing as hard as he could. “I heard the flesh ripping and the crunching bones.”
“And the screams?”
“He was already dead,” Talmadge replied. He didn’t turn about to face the woman, and could well imagine her standing behind him with her whip and dagger drawn, ready to stab him in the back.