The Unfinished Song: Taboo (21 page)

“Zavaedi, since we’re walking, mind if we start talking?” asked the Olani. He had a deep voice with the rolling, lilted accent of the far north coast.

Kavio inclined his head, while he searched for the man’s name. Svego.  

“Of course, Tavaedi Svego.”

The lithe man paused and flipped his hair back. He had the same flirtatious manner of many Olani that Kavio had known, but beneath the superficial mannerisms, there was a certain reserve about him.

“Oh, my no, sweetling, I’m not a Tavaedi.
I’m just a slave
.”

“I thought all Olani were Tavaedi.”

“Not in our tribe, sugarloaf.”

“Yet Nargano sent you as his envoy?” Kavio didn’t like the implications of that. Usually an envoy was a person of power, if not a Tavaedi, then kin or spouse of the one who dispatched him.

“Fa, don’t you worry,” said Svego. He pinched his fingers together. “I am
this
close to the War Chief, trust me. Close as a thong on a foot-long dong.”

Kavio grimaced. “Thank you for that Vision. But just to be clear, are you saying that you…and Nargano…. I thought he had a wife.”

“Oh, he does. Not to mention slave girls. And me. I’m just like one of his girls, but a lot prettier.”

“But…then…”

Svego laughed. “Sweetling, Nargano bumps his rump to anything that thumps.”

Kavio nodded. It still disturbed him that Nargano would have sent a slave as an envoy, it smacked of disrespect. He couldn’t understand how an Olani could not be a Tavaedi.

“Did you have something in particular you wanted to ask me about?” he asked Svego, who fidgeted like a man with something unpleasant he didn’t know how to say.

“Zavaedi, it is not my place to tell another man how to humiliate his slave, but if you wish him to accompany us, you might consider another punishment. His lagging is dragging us
all
down.”

It took a blink or two for Kavio to understand. “Ah.” He glanced backward at the last member of their party, now far behind the others, Gremo grunting to haul his boulder.

“Gremo is not my slave. He asked to come, as a favor, and I granted it.”

Svego looked skeptical. “He’s very handsome, under all that wild hair. Is he your lover? Is he trying to prove his worth to you by pulling the rock?”

“Handsome? Gremo?” Kavio laughed. “Maybe to an Olani. My tastes lie in a different direction.” He was careful not to let his eyes wander toward Dindi. He had a feeling Svego was shrewd about such things.

“Nonetheless,” pressed Svego. “The rock? A problem.”

“You have no idea,” Kavio said dryly. Still, Svego had a point. They couldn’t travel the whole way to the Blue Waters tribehold like this. “I’ll talk to Gremo after we make camp.”

“If you don’t mind, may I help him?”

Kavio raised his eyebrows at the slender Olani. “You want to help him pull the rock?”

“I want to help him fix his hair. And the stink! Fa! I like a big, sweaty man, but there’s good clean sweat and then there’s three-day stale stink.”

“If you can convince him, be my guest.”

The travelers hugged the edge of the river, despite the curves and feeding streams which occasionally deflected their course right or left, or forced them to brave spindly rope bridges over fat, gurgling creeks. Often, copses of birch and pine hid the water from view, but the whoosh and shush of the current could always be heard. Other times, the riverside was fringed with grassy meadows, and the broad sweep of water came into view, a mirror to the cold blue sky.

Since this was the first day of their journey, they did not stop for middle meal but ate dry cornbread as they walked, sipping a drink to wash it down briefly from the river, in order to press forward into the afternoon. Kavio had in mind to stop near a well-known landmark, called the Dam.

When they reached it, he almost did not recognize it, despite having seen it once before. As a child, he had expected something like a giant beaver dam, but, he remembered now, it was nothing of the sort. A
bridge of land
seemed to block
the river.
Kavio
knew it was
not
solid
land, but a floating island that had dammed the river
upstream from the Tors
. Centuries ago an enormous sequoia had fallen, forming the spine of the
Dam
. A number of lesser logs and branches had jammed up against the giant, followed by rocks and brambles, reeds and sod. This mass of mulch provided soggy but fertile ground for new growth. Weeds had colonized it first, followed by flowers and shrubs, culminating in whole trees
,
which anchored the silt. The immense tangled mass spanned the whole width of the river.
Although water flowed under the floating island, the main force of the river pooled on the
other side.

Just northeast of the Dam, the river forked. The branch they had followed, the southern branch, was called, sensibly enough, South Branch, and the other, which they would follow downriver, heading north and west, North Branch.

Kavio decided they dared not camp on the Dam. The ground there was too marshy; he did not want dampness seeping up through their mats at night, and in addition, a stench of dankness and rot permeated the tangled ground, which he did not relish. The land alongside the river was steeply sloped, but Kavio remembered it from his visit here as a child, and knew it would make a better camping ground.
Vultho
grumbled that it would be easier to pitch their tents on the soft, flat verge of the Dam, than on the rocky hill, but Kavio insisted, and so the group prepared their lean-tos on the slopes.

They had several hours of light left, so he suggested they hunt and search out any good fruit and berries. Brena also wanted to take Gwenika to look for healing herbs reputed to grow in the area. Brena clearly did not want Dindi to accompany them, which happened to suit Kavio’s plans.

In the same indifferent tone he used with others,
Kavio
told Dindi, “You will be stationed at the river itself, refilling the empty water skins for the camp.”

“Yes, Zavaedi,” Dindi said.

He said nothing more to her, so she
walked to a creek that fed the river to fill the skins. It did not take long.
Thereafter
, she had nothing to do. Under normal circumstances, she would have accepted the importunities of the pixies and nixies to dance with them. Instead, she waited with a thumping heart.

The rushes parted and Kavio finally appeared, on the far side of the
creek
.
She noticed he’d already acquired two birds and a rabbit, which he’d slung casually on a cord across his back.
He held out his hand to her.

“Follow me.”

She stepped across the rocks to cross the water and take his hand. Her fingers tingled cupped inside his. He took her up the mountain slope, where the trees knit closely together. They reached a veritable wall of firs, filled in below with thorny thickets. She thought such a thick part of the woods an odd place to practice, until he showed her how to thread her way through the snarl of needles and thorns. Inside, hidden from any idle wanderers in the woods, the trees guarded an open pasture of tramped down grass and
goldentuft blossoms.

“Look.” Pleasure shone in his face, making it difficult for Dindi to turn away from him to follow his gaze. A flock of butterflies, hundreds of them, all deep butter bronze and black, shimmied from branch to branch and flower to flower. “They pass through here every year around this season.”

Tiny
o
range faery lads and lasses clung to the back of each butterfly. They knew Kavio, and directed their winged mounts
to
flutter to him. A cloud of golden butterflies quivered about him. The fae butterfly-aback gloried,
“Kavio has brought Dindi to dance!”

Kavio must have heard them, but only the slightest flicker of his eyes to the side gave any hint he noticed the fae. He brushed the butterflies away casually. Since he seemed determined to ignore the fae, Dindi did too.

“I hope you didn’t think I forgot my promise to you.”
He smiled at her and she forgot to
breathe
.

Kavio cleared his throat. “We begin with the basics. We set up our practice area. We’ll need four sticks, or six, and we create the shape of a square or rectangle. Never a circle—that is a token of faery magic.”

“The dancing area in the Stone Hedge is a circle,” Dindi said.

“Exactly. The Stone Hedge was built by fae and humans together, before the war with the Aelfae.”

“But then humans must also be able to use a circle formation
sometimes
.”

“Are you going to argue with everything I tell you?”

“I wasn’t
arguing
.”

Kavio gave her a look. She grinned back.

With a flint ax, h
e
cut six
good sized
branches from a
tree. He took three, she took three and they drove the posts into the ground at parallel intervals, to form a rectangle.

“
A
privy cloth
would normally
c
onceal
our
movements from the uninitiated,”
he said. He shooed away another butterfly. “
We have none, but t
he rectangle will also discourage the fae.

“Next,” he said, “Unless we need to do aura work, or check the patterns directly, we sprinkle salt on the ground, to prevent our magic from working while we practice. For you it might not matter, but don’t grow careless. Even unmagic people have a tiny bit of magic in them, and if you are going through the motions of magic dances, you might still do something unexpected.

“For someone with magic—like me—it is absolutely imperative to toss down salt and suppress my magic while practicing. Otherwise, every dance I do would create spells that act with power on the world. If I do a fragment of a dance—to demonstrate a section of it for a student, for example—then that fragment will create a fragmented spell with unknown results.”

That made sense. He showed her how much salt was ideal
,
no more than a handful of crystals, dispersed across the whole area, but explained,
“I won’t throw down salt today. You said you wanted to learn the dances of all the Chromas. I’m going to show them all to you. I want you to watch carefully and say which, if any, of the Chromas stands out to you as more enthralling than the rest.”

“What do you mean by ‘enthralling’?” Dindi asked.

Kavio crossed his arms. “That’s what I want
you
to tell
me
.”

Bemused, Dindi just nodded.

He walked away from her to pick up a long staff on the far side of the clearing. He whirled around with the wooden staff and leaped back, spinning it in complicated loops and whirls. He tossed the staff in the air, spun in a circle under it, and caught it as it came down again. At the same moment, the ends of the spear burst into flame.

Dindi stumbled back in surprise.

He tossed the burning staff again, handstanded and caught it with his feet. He walked on his hands, rolling the staff on the soles of his feet as he moved. Another supple flip sent the staff flying again and twisted him back around to catch it, this time in his teeth.