"I need to know," he said, speaking to her now not as his sister but as a shaman. "We all need to know.
And I could not protect you while you slept."
"Even so," she said, and sighed, knowing he spoke truth. "But if it is a demon in the camp that they have summoned..."
"Whatever is there, it is no demon." He gestured to the amulets, like unholy fruit glittering in the new light.
"And if there are wardspells in the camp, or some other form of spirit power that will tell them of my presence, the best time for me to enter is while they are breaking camp."
She spread her hands palm out in surrender. "So be it, then," she said. "Come."
"You go quick, now." Hethya unknotted the rope that pinched agonizingly around Tir's wrists. "He's looking into that crystal of his, so he'll be busy awhile. Don't go far."
"I won't." Tir was sufficiently grateful that this woman let him go into the woods alone to relieve himself, instead of taking him on a rope as Bektis did, that he wouldn't have gotten her into trouble by running away. Besides, he knew perfectly well there was nowhere to go. He might only be seven years old, but he knew he could not survive alone in the badlands. Whatever was happening, he was safer with Bektis-which, as Rudy would say, was a pretty scary mess to be in.
He could not rid his mind of the image of Rudy being struck by Bektis' lightning, buckling slowly forward over the cliff, falling into whirling darkness. Beside Hethya's soft-breathing warmth at night he saw it over and over again, as if it were caught like the images in Gil's record crystals, repeating itself exactly the way it had happened for all eternity. He wanted Rudy and he wanted his mother and he wanted his friends and his home, and he knew that he might never, ever see any of them again.
He knew not to go far into the woods. Hethya was watching him-turning around he could see her broad face, her rough rusty curls and the topaz-and-snuff patterns of her quilted jacket-but he knew, too, that if any trouble arose, like the White Raiders who'd attacked them the day before yesterday, that she was too far off to help.
From Tir's earliest memories there had been bandits, dire wolves, saber-teeth, and sometimes even White Raiders in the Vale of Renweth, in spite of all the patrols by Janus and the Guards. He had a healthy respect for the green-on-green isolation among the cottonwoods, boulders, and fern.
He was coming back toward camp when he found one of the Akulae dead.
The man lay on his side at the bottom of a little slope, in a nest of fern and wild grape. Tir could see no blood. It wasn't the man who'd been wounded in the fight, but Tir didn't know which of the other two it was.
His white-stubbled face, half turned up toward the dapple shade of elms and cottonwoods, was calm, stoic, and a little stupid, as it had been in life.
Tir looked around quickly. There was no danger in sight. ("It isn't the saber-tooth you see that kills you," the Icefalcon would have pointed out.) Taking a deep breath, the boy scrambled down the clayey slope.
Closer to, the body smelled of death, but not of blood. It smelled of something else, too, an ugly decay Tir couldn't recognize or define.
What if the Akula had died of the plague? Gil and Rudy and Ingold all said plague got spread by bugs too tiny to see. What if they were all over this body just waiting to jump off like fleas and onto him?
But at the same time he thought this, he was looking around, pulling a handful of big leaves off the wild-grape vine-from underneath where it wouldn't show-to shield his hands. He unbuckled the dead man's belt and pulled his dagger free, sheath and all. The leaves were awkward, and he threw them away-if he dropped dead of the plague, he thought, it couldn't be any worse than what might happen to him if he didn't have a weapon in an emergency.
He buckled the belt on the dead man again, and with some difficulty worked the dagger down into his own boot, on the inside of his leg, and pulled his trouser over to cover the hilt. There wasn't time for more. Hethya would be watching for him the moment his head disappeared from the bushes. He scrambled fast up the bank again, calling out, "Hethya! Hethya!"
He remembered to sound scared, so they wouldn't think he'd gone down to the body.
She appeared at the top of the bank and held out her hand for him, big and strong and warm. He pointed down the bank. It wasn't hard to fake fear; he was trembling all over and could hardly breathe, but he managed to say, "He's dead!"
Then Hethya did a strange thing.
She clicked her tongue-" Tsk!"-and shook her head a little and took his hand. "Let's get back to camp, sweetheart."
And that was all.
The Icefalcon crouched near the cave's entrance under the chokecherry bushes-it was too low to stand straight-while his sister marked out the four corners of the narrow place with guardian wards, then knelt to burn a pinch of the powder of dried olive leaves on which certain marks had been made to cleanse the air.
Ideally, when a scout undertook to shadow-walk-as scouts did occasionally in war, when the other family or band had a particularly powerful Wise One in their midst-he or she would lie on earth and under open sky, where neither the demons of the air nor the elementals that imbued the ground could dominate.
Given Cold Death's strength as a shaman the icefalcon did not doubt that he would be safe from elementals. Still, the damp place, closed in, green-dim, smelling of earth and foxes, made him uneasy.
The Icefalcon had never shadow-walked. It was not considered safe for boys to make the venture before they reached full manhood, and he had left the Talking Stars People in his seventeenth year. He had seen it done only twice before in his life, when the Talking Stars People had been at war with Black Pig's family of the Salt People.
On the first occasion, the shadow scout had returned safely, with information about the layout of Black Pig's summer hold in the Cruel River Country that could not be ascertained by ordinary observation.
The second time, six or seven years later during another war, the scout's friends-it was the same man who had gone before, who had experience-and Cold Death had waited by the body through three nights and two days, Cold Death weaving such spells as would draw back the scout's spirit to the empty and silent flesh.
After that the tribe had had to move on for fear of being raided by Black Pig. The next time the Talking Stars People had camped in that place Cold Death and the Icefalcon-who was sixteen then-and three or four of the scout's friends returned to the place where the body had lain and seen a few of the man's bones. What became of his spirit they never knew.
Thus it was with a certain degree of trepidation that the Icefalcon lay himself down between the four cold balls of spirit-fire that Cold Death summoned from the air and watched her drawing out Circles around him.
There was a Circle of Protection, to keep at bay the elementals and the demons that would have taken over his still living body once his spirit was no longer in residence.
"You have to watch out for them while you're walking," Cold Death said, once she had completed the marks and stood wiping ocher and blood from her fingertips. "They'll try to distract you, to get you lost once you're out there. They feed on fear and pain."
There was a Circle of Ancestors. "Do our Ancestors actually guard us when they are summoned to a Circle?" He was drowsy now with the growing effect of the spell and with the warmth of the heat spells she'd called to keep his body from dying in its sleep. He and Cold Death had watched by turns through the previous night, and neither had slept after midnight.
"I've never seen them." She leaned over him to paint the first lines of the Circle of Power across his face, his hands, his breast under the wolf-hide tunic, in a paste of mud and powdered wildcat blood.
She wove his name into them, and the image of the pilgrim-bird that dwells in the high cliffs near the glaciers, overlaid with sigils of protection.