Foolish, of course, to think she could just go. A woman great with child, who had lived her life amongst the Eyriemen, a captive bride of one warrior or another, and then he had come to her and told her she was free. Free to do what, precisely?
Kailovela stared down at the child in her arms – sleeping, for now – and thought the world had expected her to die, but here she was.
Loud Thunder had expected her to live, but then she had been given ample opportunity to know he didn’t think ahead as much as he should, especially now he was Warbringer for the whole Crown of the World. Fly, he had said, and so she’d flown, while the Eyriemen stared after her with angry eyes, but dared not defy Thunder’s word.
But he had given her a place to fly to, at least. It was his place, a cabin near a lake. His directions had just been adequate enough for her to find it. There was food stored in the cold depths of the cave the cabin was built around, and there was firewood cut and ready, just as he had promised.
Still, left solely to her own devices, she would have been looking death in the eye. The child had been very close, when she had Stepped from her bird shape onto the ground, and Thunder’s cabin did not come with a midwife. But she had help. Help no others would have taken, but she was desperate.
The ground before the cabin had been cleared of trees a long time ago, and now she stared out at where the dense green of the pines took up again, that boundary beyond which lay all the threats in the world. Were there eyes out there, even now? What would they make of her, a Hawk woman living in a Bear’s cave. She had cut her dark hair short, so it could not be used as a halter about her neck. Childbirth and shifting for herself had surely added a crease or two to her face, and yet it had never been that which had drawn others to her. There was something in her soul evident to all. Beasts would not attack her, nor even run from her. Men wanted to own her.
There was a Deer village some distance south – her unlikely helper had found that much. Kailovela had forced herself to Step again, to haul her aching bird body into the air, feeling the child too close, as though she would be wrenched back to her human shape in mid-air. At least she could fly – she had been given very little chance to try out her bird shape before Thunder had freed her – only a few brief months of rebellious freedom before her first mate had claimed and shackled her. The skill had come swiftly to her, and her wings remembered it, no matter how many chained years she had languished through.
She had flown to the Deer and begged their hospitality: a pregnant Eyriewoman from nowhere. Still, if there was one gift she had, it was that people welcomed her. It had been a poisoned gift for most of her life but this once it saved her. The chief and the tall warriors of the Deer strutted around her, but she threw herself on the mercy of their hearth-keepers, and the women took her in and kept the men away.
She had the child, in blood and pain: a boy, the son of a Hawk warrior who had been killed by the Champion Yellow Claw before he even knew his seed had found a hold.
She had left the Deer as soon as she was strong enough, and before the men could bring themselves to pierce the wall of propriety the women had put up about her. They gave her gifts – of course they did; everyone liked Kailovela. She had a pack of food and clothes and wraps for the baby.
The path to Loud Thunder’s cabin had been a long one, on foot. She had stopped often. Again, had she been alone she would surely have died, or the child would have. But her help, the little monster, had stayed close. Kailovela tried to ask her why she did not go. The answers she got were fragmentary and unsatisfactory. She had to piece together her own narrative from them, and could not know if she was right.
But she was back here now, and the child was suckling well. She was eking out Loud Thunder’s supplies. And she was waiting.
He had done the best he could by her, in sending her here. He had taken her out of the hands of those who would claim her and he had fought down his own urge to take her. She had seen that hook in him, grimly familiar. She had felt the same in her: perhaps this time things would be different. Loud Thunder was a kind man and a strong one. In his shadow she would not fear any others’ hands.
She had her own struggle, to make herself see that she would still be in shadow. He had given her a choice, and she had chosen to be free, even if freedom and death came as one.
Looking down at her child, she weighed how she thought about gambling his life with her own. No regrets, she thought. Forgive me, but I needed to be free.
And still she was waiting. Many days had passed since her flight, since the birth. She had seen no humans aside from the Deer; when snow had fallen, none of the tracks the beasts left had suddenly become shod feet from one stride to the next. But one man knew exactly where she was; she knew Loud Thunder would come to visit soon enough. She hoped she was strong enough to survive it; she hoped he was. She had seen how hard it had been for him to simply free her and let her fly.
Now she stood before the heavy hide that closed up the warmth of the cabin, looking across Loud Thunder’s clearing. Her child slept in her arms. She should put him down and draw water or cut wood. Even though she was not quite alone out here, she must still work to live. Something had caught her mind’s notice, though. She could not quite tell what, but it held her out here in the chill morning air.
He’s here, then. She had not set eyes on him; the world had given her no proof of Loud Thunder’s return to his home, but somehow she knew. It was just one of those things about her. The gods had blessed her with gifts, the priests said. She felt so loaded with them she could barely stand.
But oracular visions would not cook a meal or make a fire, and so she went inside and set her son down, tucking him in as warm as she could. Then it was out with the hatchet she had found, to cut more of Thunder’s logs into billets. Luckily, though the Eyrie did not like its women to fly or talk or think, it had no problem with them working. Most Eyriemen hunters viewed taking a mate as the end of their ever having to make a fire or a meal again, and in making her tend to them, her mates had inadvertently taught her to look after herself.
He was there when she straightened up from the work to wipe her brow. He walked softly for such a big man.
Loud Thunder: strongest of the Cave Dwellers who were the sons of the Bear, a great awkward shambling man uncomfortable with the space he took in the world. Except some of that had sloughed off him since he had taken the battle to the Plague People and driven them from their nest amongst the devastated Seal tribes. When he had returned from that fight, she had seen a new power in him. He had become the war leader that the Bear tribe’s Mother had always seen in him.
There was enough left of that awkward, shy man in him, as he looked at her, to make her smile a little. His face lit up when he saw, then lost its expression when she flinched back as he approached. He halted, and she saw he was not alone. There was another Cave Dweller standing back by the trees: Lone Mountain, Thunder’s cousin. Mountain was almost as huge as Thunder, wearing a greatcoat of hide studded with bronze knuckles, a nine-foot spear sloped on his shoulder. At his side, virtually under his elbow, was a slight figure she didn’t know: a youth with short dark hair and something strange about him – her? An emptiness to the face that Kailovela thought she should recognize.
Thunder still stood there awkwardly, and she realized that he must be waiting for her to invite him in. He could just have strode into the cabin – it was his home, and she was surely his guest. But he waited, and wrung the edge of his sheepskin cloak a little in his hands, and did not speak to her.
Something gave inside her, and she said, ‘It’s your house. Come in if you will.’ Not exactly gracious, but the business of host and guest was strange with the Bear and she wanted to just sidestep it. He nodded, though, and there was relief in every movement when he headed inside. The short-haired youth bolted after him but Lone Mountain remained outside.
‘You’ll want fresh meat, I reckon,’ he rumbled, and Kailovela nodded cautiously.
‘Saw some hare spoor back there. Might go and dig them out.’
‘You do that,’ Loud Thunder agreed. He grimaced apologetically at Kailovela. ‘There will be others, probably. Soon, probably. If I were you I’d fly off or something.’
‘I can’t,’ she told him curtly, and saw understanding make its belated way onto his face.
‘Of course,’ he muttered, and ducked inside.
She found him there, looking down at her sleeping son. When he asked after a name, she just shook her head. Eyrie children had no names until they had seen a handful of winters. Hawk was a cruel god.
Thunder went to the fire and built it up a little, becoming the master of the place again without ever thinking about it. The skinny youth sat back on his haunches – no, her haunches. She was a girl, a Seal tribe girl. Kailovela regarded her quizzically and Thunder grunted.
‘Don’t know what to call her either,’ he admitted.
‘Empty Skin,’ the Seal girl said, her voice toneless.
‘No,’ Thunder said, obviously not the first airing of this argument.
‘I am Empty Skin.’ The Seal grinned horribly. Kailovela looked at her, and saw she was right. You could not give yourself a hunter’s name, but nonetheless that was surely the name she must have. That part of her which made her human was gone.
‘You were with the Plague People,’ she said, hushed, a hand before her child’s face so that the evil she named would not alight there.
Empty Skin nodded. ‘They took us, when they had killed or changed our parents. They like children. But I stopped being a child when I was with them, and the Seal could not find me to give me a soul.’
Kailovela digested that. What was there to say, to such a calm confession of ruin? Best change the subject to those matters that threatened her. ‘Loud Thunder, you have been kind to me,’ she observed. Will you take that kindness back?
He grunted. Plainly he was not just here to see how his cabin was holding up, but she had spoken with him enough to know how the words got choked inside him. So she must prod them loose herself.
‘I will take my child and leave. This is your house.’
‘No, no,’ he said, but then would not supply any alternative. At last it was Empty Skin who spoke for him. ‘The Bear wants you to go south where the Plague People are.’
‘What?’ Kailovela snapped. It was the one thing she had not considered.
‘It’s not like that,’ Thunder protested, but then he shrugged. ‘So it’s a little like that. We had some Horse come up the Sand Pearl on their boats, but not trading. They said their place down south is gone, that the Plague People ate it and put up their white walls about it. Sounds like those we didn’t kill up here have gone down there to join their kin. I’d hoped it would be over when we drove them into the sea and the sky.’
‘You thought that?’
‘I hoped it.’ He let out a long breath. ‘But no, I didn’t think it.’
‘So why would you think of me?’ She knew, even as she asked the question, but made sure nothing of the knowledge showed in her face. Please let me be wrong.
‘When I saw you, you were keeper of the little hollow monster,’ Loud Thunder said. ‘It was calm, with you. I know you spoke with it, a little, or it spoke with you. And it was one of them, one of the Plague People. Just a little one.’
She held herself very still.
‘We’re off to fight them,’Thunder went on, staring into the fire. ‘Us, the Wolf, the Tiger, your people, those two Coyote troublemakers, Boar, Deer, even those Bat Society magicians. Axes, we’ve got. Spears, bows and wisdom from the priests. But I said to Mother, when tribes fight there is a time when the fighting gets slow, and neither side wants to go on. And then we talk, and there’s peace.’
She glanced at Empty Skin, for surely the Seal girl had filled herself with revenge after the deaths of her parents and people. Skin’s face was solemn and calm, though; an expression far too old for her.
‘You could talk to them,’ Thunder prompted. ‘Even a little. I have heard them, the little chittery noises they make. To me it is no speech, but you . . .’
‘This is why you came? Because you think there will be peace with the Plague People?’ she asked sadly. ‘And the Wolf think this? And the Tiger?’
‘They are not Warbringer,’ Thunder pointed out, and then Empty Skin twitched round to stare towards the cave-dark that dominated the far end of the cabin, the stone hollow Loud Thunder had built around.
‘We’re not alone,’ the Seal girl said.
Thunder stood abruptly, his head brushing the beams. She saw his jaw work: who was it that had come before him to visit Kailovela? She watched the possessiveness and the embarrassment war in him.
‘Don’t,’ she whispered.
‘Who is there?’ he rumbled, and he couldn’t keep the threat out of his voice.
‘Please . . .’ But then her guest, her helper, stepped out into plain sight, perhaps cued by the sound of Thunder’s anger. The best she could say was that it wasn’t what the Bear had suspected. Instead his face froze – a little revulsion but mostly shock.
‘It’s still here?’ he demanded.
‘Where else would she go, after you drove her people away?’ Kailovela asked him.
Standing in the cave mouth was a figure whose head was at a level with Kailovela’s navel – meaning below Thunder’s waist. Its shape was that of a woman, but pale and strangely featured. Her hair was hacked short like Kailovela’s and she wore clothing of fleece and hide, just like a person. She was hollow as a pot where it mattered, though; not the physical flesh of her, but her soul. The lack of it shone out from within her, turned her pleasant features into a void, her body into a scar on the world. The little monster, as Kailovela thought of her. She had fallen from the sky one day, long before her kin came to slaughter the Seal tribes and take their children. The Eyriemen had bound her, and she had come into Kailovela’s hands because all living things loved Kailovela, even the empty horrors that were the Plague People. Only she could live with it and be its handler. And when Thunder had freed her, he had freed her fellow prisoner as well to go take word to its people. Yet the little monster had not left her.
There was a bronze knife in the creature’s hand, that looked about the size of one of Thunder’s thumb-nails. The creature was ready to defend the only human she knew.
‘She helps me,’ Kailovela said. ‘She finds food. She flies, and leads me to where I need to go. I would have died without her.’ Her words felt flimsy before Thunder’s wrath, but that last admission softened his look somewhat.
‘It will serve,’ Empty Skin said. Again, Kailovela looked for the vengeful anger that must be there and could not find it, as though the girl’s emotions had gone to find her soul.
‘What will you do, when you reach the Plague People?’ she asked.
The Seal girl’s hard, dark eyes flicked to her. ‘I will try to talk, as you will. When there is a moment for such talk. I will try to find the human in them. You speak to this one. I was their prisoner for many days and heard the sounds they made. And they cannot take from me what I have already lost.’ Her delivery was flat and dull, abrasive on the ear.
‘And you want me to come too?’
‘Yes,’ Thunder told her. ‘I want every voice we have that the Plague People might hear. We will fight them, because we will have to fight them. But I want there to come a time when even the Plague People send an emissary begging peace, and I want there to be you and the Girl,’ he would not call her Empty Skin, ‘so we can try and speak. But this one . . . will this one come too? Will it serve you?’
‘I can only ask,’ Kailovela said, thinking, I can hardly even ask. How little the monster and I can talk, even now. But that little was more than any other true human in the world. Perhaps that little might be the difference between survival and extinction. Because she did not share Thunder’s assessment. If one side was brought to bay and forced to beg for peace, she did not think it would be the Plague People.