Chapter 31: Outcast

Tarek led the other two boys to the stone bier as Seppa watched them, thankful that they both had enough sense to keep any confusion to themselves. He knelt, motioning for them to do the same. “Bachi,” he whispered, “tell me when she leaves. No, don’t look! Use the Song.”

Bachi looked at him like he was crazy but did as he asked, humming quietly in the Song as they knelt in the dawn coolness with their heads bowed. The heartbeats stretched on, and Tarek wondered if the old woman meant to watch them until they left. We may just have to take it and run after all.

Head still bowed, Tavi said, “All the tribes in one spot.”

“I know,” Tarek whispered. “It’s the best stroke of luck we’ve had since we left home. Maybe we can get this done by the equinox after all.”

“Won’t be easy. Lots of people all crammed together.”

“We’ll figure it out.”

“The Catori will be there.”

Tarek’s heart clenched. Yaretzi. The thought that he might see her again was dizzying. “We’ll figure it out,” he repeated.

Finally Bachi stopped humming and said, “She’s gone.”

Tarek bounded to his feet. “Tavi, open the bag.” He reached across the bier and swiped the bread from the dead man’s chest, trying not to touch the reddened part. The dead blood held no power over him, but a lifetime of habit was not easily discarded. He held the ruined bit of food between two fingers by the crust.

“That’s mine,” someone said.

Looking up, he saw a tall, hooded, black-cloaked figure emerge from the trees on the far side of the stone bier. His heart clenched in fear. The sin-eater. What kind of foul creature was this?

The cloak was darker than anything he’d ever seen, and it billowed as the sin-eater moved closer. Tarek knew he should run, but he was transfixed by the unearthly apparition before him. Fingers as pale as a flood-bloated corpse and as slender as twigs emerged from the depths of the robe, reaching for the hood to pull it back. Tarek quailed.

The hood fell back, exposing a shock of curly hair as bright as flame and a face as ghastly pale as the hand had been.

It was a woman. Her skin was freakishly white, and angry eyes blazed green in the rising light.

“That’s mine,” she said again. “Give it to me.”

Tarek gaped at her. Looking at his friends, he saw them to be just as dumbstruck as he was.

“What are you?” he said.

The woman, all cheekbones and hunger, gave him a skeletal grin. “Didn’t they tell you? I’m the death eater.”

“What’s wrong with your head?” Tavi asked, pointing at her shock of orange hair.

“It’s cursed,” she said. “Stay back or it will touch you.”

“A-are you going to eat the dead man?” Bachi said, quaking.

“I might,” she hissed. “Or maybe I’ll eat you instead. You look like a good meal.”

Bachi squeaked and hunkered down behind the bier.

“You,” she said imperiously, pointing to Tarek. “Give me that.”

Tarek hesitated. She’s just a person. Seppa said so. An outcast. She can’t hurt us. She’s hardly more than skin and bones under that robe. “We need it,” he said.

The woman blinked at him. She seemed confused. He couldn’t tell if it was because he was the first person to defy her or if she just wasn’t used to having people talk to her. “You’re getting his sins all over you,” she said roughly. “Don’t you care?”

“His sins are less than my own,” Tarek said. “It doesn’t matter.”

His words seemed to baffle her. “But you can’t. Give it to me.”

“I have to take it.”

She peered at him as if really seeing him for the first time. Her eyes were the clear, deep green of sunlight through the canopy. “Are you a death eater, too?”

Tarek opened his mouth to reply and stopped, thinking about it. “Of a sort, I suppose. But I don’t want to be. I need this so I can stop.”

She gaped at him. “You can stop?”

“It takes strong magic, but yes. That’s why I’m taking the bread.”

She came around to their side of the rock, walking purposefully. Tarek was not a short man, but she topped him by several fingers. Tavi and Bachi backed up, still cautious, but Tarek didn’t move. He had the measure of this woman now. She was hardly more than a girl, in truth. Her emaciation and startling paleness had fooled him at first, but this was just a lonely, hungry woman living on the fringes of her tribe. And if I, of all people, can’t have sympathy with that, I might as well throw myself in the river and drown like the old chief.

“How is it done?” she demanded. “I don’t want to be the death eater.”

He immediately regretted how he’d said it. “I’m a different kind. I don’t think the magic would work for you.”

She peered at him suspiciously. “It might.”

“I’m sorry,” he told her. “We have to go, and I have to take this. I’m sorry we interfered.”

            He backed away, meaning to edge his way past her and continue northward. Tavi and Bachi stayed close behind him, neither of them taking their eyes from the orange-haired apparition before them.

            With a feral growl, the woman launched herself at him, scrabbling for the bread. “Give it!” Surprised, Tarek went down in a heap, trying to protect his face from her dirty, cracked fingernails. Bachi and Tavi were still frozen in place.

            She grappled with him. Her frame was big and she was obviously strong, but she was shaking with hunger, and her muscles kept giving out on her. Holding the bread away from her, Tarek pushed her off his chest and into the dirt, scrambling to his feet and backing away. She made fists in the dirt and glared up at him.

            “Let’s get out of here,” he said to the others.

She reached up, anger evaporated, suddenly pathetic. “Please. Don’t take it.” She got to her knees, black robe dusty. “I haven’t eaten in two days.”

            Tarek stopped. “What? Why not?”

            She gritted her teeth, tears in her eyes. “Give me the bread. I won’t beg. It’s mine.”

            Tarek fumbled with his journey bag, drawing out a few bits of cooked fowl. “Here. Have this.”

She snatched the food from his hands so fast he nearly dropped the bread in the dirt. She stuffed the meat into her mouth, grunting and chewing like an animal.

“Are you only allowed to eat the sin bread?” Tavi asked.

Green eyes glowered at him. “How often do you think people die here, little boy?”

“Cliffs like that?” Bachi muttered. “All the time.”

“There hasn’t been a dancing in the last four moons,” the woman informed them as she swallowed the last of the meat. “Do you have more?”

Tavi took the remainder of his own meat from his bag and handed it to her. “What do you usually eat?”

“Whatever I can find,” she said, clambering to her feet as she ate. She seemed more animated, more real with a little food in her. “Berries, roots, fruit. But with the long flood, many of the village’s gardens were wiped bare, and the others have picked my area clean. If I find anything good, the men take it when they come.” She grimaced around her food. “They always take.”

“It’s easy to take from someone the tribe doesn’t care about,” Tarek said softly. She glared at him but gave a grudging nod. He thought of Kanga and wondered what else the men here took from their death eater.

“I wish we had more for you,” he told her, “but we must go before the others come back to burn the body. They would be angry if they knew we took the bread. Please don’t tell.”

Her green eyes narrowed. “I want to see this magic that makes you not a death eater.”

Tarek squinted at the rising sun and tugged at his braid. “It’s complicated.”

She snorted. “If I let one of the Shinsok see me during daylight hours, they beat me ‘til I bleed and I have to wash in the river six times before the dark of the big moon. Without anyone seeing me. Or else they beat me again until I can’t walk. Is it more complicated than that?”

“They seemed so nice,” Bachi whispered.

She gave him a pitying look with eyes twice as old as the rest of her. “No one is nice.”

“How did you end up being the death eater?” Tarek asked.

“Look at me,” she said, wrapping a dirty fist around a hand of fire-and-sunlight curls and pulling on it hard. “I’m a monster.”

“A ghost,” Tavi murmured.

“They call me that sometimes. They always say I’m lucky they didn’t throw me in the river on first sight as a child. I wish they had.”

Tarek bit the inside of his cheek and looked back to where Seppa had left them. “If your lot is so hard, why don’t you leave?”

“Where would I go?” she asked. “I’ve never gone more than two handspan’s walk into the forest, and you’re the first person I’ve ever talked to outside of the tribe. Everyone is frightened of my hair and runs. I think about falling into the river, but…” She shrugged. “It’s not so bad as that, usually.”

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“Our tribe tried to kill us, so we ran away,” Tavi said.

“No one will teach me to hunt, and I have no bow,” the woman said. “It would be a short run for me.”

Tarek pinched the bridge of his nose, feeling a headache born of exhaustion pulsing behind his eyes. “I’m sorry for you, truly I am, but the magic I seek won’t help you. I know it. We have to go.” He gestured to his brother and Bachi. The latter came willingly, giving the girl a wide berth, but Tavi stayed still, his brow knitted. “Tavi, come on.”

That was when Pahtl chose to waddle into the clearing, half a roasted groundfowl in his jaws. The pale woman caught sight of him and gasped, her eyes going wide.

“A water dog!” she whispered, awed. She fell to her knees and inched toward him, her hands outstretched as if to touch him.

Pahtl paused, regarding the stranger with caution. He looked at Tarek and said something, but the meat in his jaws garbled his words so much it sounded like nonsense.

“I’ve never seen one of you up close, beautiful one,” she crooned softly, still advancing on him.

Bemused, the otter sat back on his haunches and put his meat on the ground, covering it with both front paws to keep it safe. He cocked his blunt head and watched the woman approach with black eyes glistening.

“You’re so big,” she continued, her tone a sing-song like Tarek often heard parents use with their babies. “Look at your lovely colors!” She reached a hand out to touch Pahtl’s head.

“Don’t –” Tarek blurted, worried he might bite.

He did not. He accepted her stroking touch, leaning into it as she ran a hand across his head and down under his chin. “Amazing,” she whispered. “You must be one of the grand ones.”

“I am,” he agreed.

She squealed with delight, bouncing on her knees. “You talk! Oh, lovely one, how? Are you the god of your kind?”

Pahtl thought about this. “I might be.”

“He’s not,” Tarek said. “He’s just an otter. A big one.”

“Are you sure?” Pahtl said archly.

The woman turned to Tarek. “Do you know him?”

“He travels with us. He’s our friend.”

“Friends do not get left behind for thousands of handspans while other friends eat their fill,” Pahtl grumbled. “I had to steal whatever the crazy cliff-people dropped as they went home.”

The woman prostrated herself before the otter. “I have three dreamberries hidden under the straw in my cave. You can have them.”

The otter looked from her to Tarek. “I like this one.”

She bounded to her feet. “Let me go get them, great one!”

“Berries are terrible,” Pahtl said. “Do you have fish?”

“Don’t feed him, please,” Tarek sighed. “Pahtl, we have to go.”

“Are you helping him find his magic?” she asked Pahtl, awed.

“I have to. They are stupid without me.”

The woman stood, looking from Pahtl to Tarek with eyes shining. Her lips drew taut in her emaciated face and she nodded once, decisively. “Keep the bread. I will come.”

“What?” Tavi said.

“No,” Tarek told her.

She ignored them, pulling her shapeless black robe over her head. She cast it to the ground and spat on it. Underneath she had only a loincloth and a binding around her chest. She was even thinner than Tarek had imagined. He could see every bone jutting against her pale skin. Bachi made a strangled sound, his eyes bulging, and he whirled his back toward her.

“I will find your magic too and be a death eater no more,” she declared.

“I told you –”

“Bread tastes terrible with blood in it.”

“I’m sure it does, but –”

“Did your people beat you because you were the death eater? Take your food? Make you live in a cave?”

“No, it wasn’t like that.”

“So you would escape your fate but leave me to a worse one?”

“I can’t help you,” he said desperately. “Even with me hunting and Bachi foraging, we go hungry all the time.”

“I will find my own food,” she declared. “I already do.”

“But I don’t think I can protect you,” Tarek protested.

She gave him a look like the one she’d given Bachi earlier: old, sad, worn. “No one ever has.”

Tarek looked to the others for support. Bachi still had his eyes on the trees, his cheeks red with blushing. Tavi merely shook his head and shrugged.

“She says nice things. She should come,” Pahtl said.

“No,” Tarek said decisively. “We can’t just pick up every outcast on our way. We have to get to the Heart of the Song as fast as we can. How long do we have left until the equinox?” He picked up the woman’s discarded robe. “Put it back on. I know your life is hard here, but it can only get worse if you leave. Please.”

She raised her chin, ignoring the proffered clothing. “If I am willing to disobey the tribe who has punished me all my life, why do you think I would listen to you?”

“Because I’m speaking sense,” he said harshly. “We don’t always get what we want.”

She took the robe from him and cast it on the ground again. “The water dog was right. You are stupid.”

Pahtl nudged his leg. “See?”

She slapped away Tarek’s still-outstretched hands. “I don’t need your help. Go your way and I will go mine.”

Tarek gritted his teeth and nodded. It galled him to be insulted and walk away, but there was nothing for it. “Come on, Tav. Bachi. Pahtl, we’re leaving.”

“But she is nice,” the otter protested.

Tarek turned his back on the stubborn, pale waif and walked eastward, putting her from his mind. They would follow the Tamarok to where it gushed forth from underneath the Heart of the Song, and he would figure out how to get blood from all the other chiefs. He would be rid of the blood magic, and then he could go back to Yaretzi and ask her to come with him. “Let’s talk about it later, Pahtl. I’ll catch you a fish when we stop.”

“So stupid,” he grumbled, but he fell into step alongside him as the others did the same.

As they left the clearing, Tarek glanced back, expecting to see the woman donning her robes.

She had not. She was following them.

He halted. “What are you doing?”

She glared at him with those bright green eyes. “I am walking. Even a sin-eater can do that much.”

Tarek looked to the morning sky, wanting to shout in frustration. “You can’t follow us.”

She crossed her arms. “I go where I wish. If you are walking in the same direction, what can I do about it?”

He thought about trying to scare her off with an arrow, but he knew they needed to be gone from here, and quickly. “Do what you want,” he said shortly.

“Not because you say it,” she shot back.

He resolved to ignore her. He lengthened his steps, looking to the mountains in the far north.

“Do you think we could get her to put some clothes on?” Bachi whispered.

“No!” she shouted.

Tarek decided to ignore them all. It will be a fortnight of walking before we reach the Heart of the Song. She can’t follow us that far. She won’t.

But the patter of footfalls behind him seemed to say, Yes I will.

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