Ammonite

They were silent a moment, Marghe’s mount facing back the way they had come, Thenike’s facing Marghe. Their horses whuffled at each other’s necks. Marghe pointed to a clump of trees. “If Danner doesn’t come, wait for me down there. I’ll be back.”

“I’ll wait,” Thenike agreed. “But before the storm, Danner or no Danner, I’ll come looking.”

Marghe knew it would be pointless to argue. She gathered the reins awkwardly in her maimed left hand, preparing to wheel and head north. She wanted to tell Thenike to be careful, tell her how much she loved her. She could not find the words. “If she comes, make her wait. Make Danner wait.”

“Your wait, at least, is over.” Thenike nodded ahead, and Marghe twisted in her saddle to look. The western horizon was hazy with dust, dust kicked up by a hundred horses.

Thenike turned her horse. “Speak well, Marghe Amun. And remember, I’ll come looking, before the storm.”

Then she was gone.

Marghe turned her own horse to face the dust.

She was waiting, reins tucked under her thighs, hands free, and the sun almost fully risen behind her, when the riders came over the horizon. Dawn underlit their faces, orange and alien; their sweat-sheened mounts gleamed like creatures of molten metal.

The massed tribes were in a long, straight line—a skirmish line, Danner would call it. Slowly, the line wheeled about its center, where the sun picked fire from Uaithne’s braids, and continued to advance, facing Marghe head-on. Next to Uaithne, tied to the saddle and slumping like a gray sack of grain, was a Mirror. Her armor had been ripped off to reveal fatigues, and there was dried blood on one cheek. Captain White Moon. She did not seem more than half conscious.

Marghe breathed slow and deep, keeping a steady rhythm, hands relaxed on her thighs. They would not capture her again. She would make them listen. A slight breeze lifted the mane of her horse and blew it across the backs of her hands, tickling. Her mounted shadow stretched long and umber across the grass between her and the Echraidhe and Briogannon. The tribes would see her as a huge, dark silhouette, backlit by the rising sun.

They halted a hundred and fifty yards away in a whispering of grass and chinking of bits.

Now.

Everything Marghe had learned, from the death of her mother, from the biting cold of Tehuantepec, and at the hands of Thenike—everything that made her who she was—came together in one hot focused point in her center, flooding her with adrenaline, tightening her skin, raising goosebumps. Her hands felt heavy; she remembered the ammonites. She was Marghe Amun, the complete one.

She held out one hand, palm out, as she had in the storytelling tent of the Echraidhe. Her voice cracked across the grass.

“You have amongst you a liar and a deceiver, one whose heart is twisted and empty, who leads you to a destiny that is false. Uaithne, murderer and betrayer, claims to speak for the Death Spirit. She lies. She claims to know my will, mywill, and lies.”

They were listening. Or at least they were not charging at her. Her blood surged powerfully. She nudged her horse to a slow walk, along the line, timed her words to fit her mount’s steady hoofbeats, sent them rolling away from her, unstoppable.

“Listen to me now. Iam the one who has traveled the black void between the stars to come to you; Iam the one who has wandered the white void, the plain that stretches its hand between the worlds of the living and the dead; Iam the one who has spoken with the spirits of the ancestors in the sacred stones. Iam the one who came amongst you and learned, like a child, the ways of my tribe; Iam the one who left, like a ghost, when I had learned all I needed; and Iam the one who survived winter alone on Tehuantepec, and who returns to you now.”

Her words were steady and hypnotic, falling in a strong cadence, up and down with her breath and the beat of her heart until she found strength building behind those words like a living thing: powerful, straining to be unleashed, to bound away to the tribeswomen astride their horses and tear away their masks.

“Uaithne laid the path. Uaithne brought you together before me. Before me, I say. For Uaithne is my tool, no more. A flawed tool. One that would twist in the hand of any who lean upon her promises, and break.”

She did not look at Uaithne, but caught the eye of Aelle, of Marac and Scatha sitting together, of Borri. She had their attention. There was no sign of the Levarch. Dead? Then Aoife would be leader, Aoife who was staring at the grass between her mount’s legs.

Lift that head, Aoife, look at me.

“You seek death, and I say to you: it comes. I am its herald and its shepherd. But you are my tribe, you will die as and when I decree, in the way I shall set down. And I tell you now: this is not the way. For this throwing of yourselves upon strangers is merely seeking death of the flesh.” She waved her hand dismissively. “A small thing, an easy thing.”