“Before?” Cuirin’nên’a asked, still watching the majay-hì.
“When your son, Léshil, and his friends came to us,” Leanâlhâm explained, “and Sgäilsheilleache took us all toward the Hâjh on the way to Most Aged Father. The strange majay-hì with Léshil sometimes went off with this one’s pack.”
“My son?” Cuirin’nên’a whispered. “You are speaking of the majay-hì they call ‘Chap’?”
Leanâlhâm flushed at the thought of anyone putting a name upon a sacred one. Wynn Hygeorht, the funny little human called a “sage,” had also done that to this white female. Leanâlhâm would not repeat such an offense.
“It is a rare thing,” Cuirin’nên’a whispered, continuing to watch the majay-hì. “Rarely ... if ever ... is someone singled out by one of them.”
Leanâlhâm did not think so, not after what the others had done to her. She looked to the white majay-hì watching Cuirin’nên’a, but she could not understand what Léshil’s mother meant.
Cuirin’nên’a glanced away. “Very well,” she whispered.
The white female wheeled and vanished into the forest.
Leanâlhâm clawed up the cedar, scraping her hands on the bark as she pulled herself up to stand, and lunged after the majay-hì in a panic. She was snatched by the back of her tunic and pulled short. All hope vanished, and she did not struggle this time. She stood weeping yet again at another loss.
“I will take you to the ancestors.”
Leanâlhâm spun around, numb with shock, and then relief overwhelmed her.
“Do not thank me,” Cuirin’nên’a warned. “There are other things that need my attention, which are now dangerously delayed by my choice. And when we have reached the burial grounds, you will have never run so long and hard in your life.”
And so, although Leanâlhâm had never expected help from Léshil’s mother, the two of them traveled together. In some ways Cuirin’nên’a’s presence made the journey easier than it would have been in following the white majay-hì.
The people of the Hâjh knew her as the daughter of great Eillean—another greimasg’äh. Comfortable transportation and good meals on a barge were provided without barter. Due to spring swells, the current was faster than at any other time of the year. The barge swam with great speed, as a “living” vessel of the people, and carried them swiftly down the river for days. But they did not go all the way to Crijheäiche, Origin-Heart.
Much to the confusion of the barge master and his awestruck attendants, Cuirin’nên’a requested a stop where there was no known settlement for leagues. After disembarking, she led the way through the wild with the confidence of someone who knew exactly where she was going.
Leanâlhâm followed without question, and the running soon began.
Her only relief came when the thickening woods slowed them enough that they had to find a way through. Wherever Cuirin’nên’a was taking her, it was on a direct course rather than an easier path.
In daylight, Leanâlhâm harbored little doubt the ancestors would accept her, for they had accepted Léshil. But that night in the dark, as she lay weary and aching upon the ground, questions and fear crept in.
What if the ancestors rejected her?
At dawn she pressed onward, following Cuirin’nên’a, who never appeared to tire. The next afternoon the forest around them began to change.
There were no flowers here, only an overabundance of wet moss that clung to tree trunks and dangled from branches overhead in dark, wet curtains. The trees were older and gnarled, their bark darkened by moisture that was thick in the air. On that bark were growths of fungus in earthy, sallow colors. A rain began, its drizzle pattering against the leaves.
The farther they went, the less Leanâlhâm could see the way out when she looked back. Until it was completely dark, she could not even tell when night drew close. The sky had long past been blocked out, and it seemed they walked for so long in a perpetual dusk.
Leanâlhâm felt as if the trees, so old and tangled with each other, were aware and did not want her here. She had always felt like an outsider among her people, but now the an’Cróan forest itself closed in on her as though she was a trespasser.
“Keep up,” Cuirin’nên’a commanded.
It was long past dark with they stopped. Leanâlhâm waited, but Cuirin’nên’a did not crouch to prepare a fire this time and simply stood there with her back turned. Finally Leanâlhâm stepped closer.
The forest ahead thinned, its branches screening an open space. It was so dark that the masses of leaves and trailing moss were little more than shapes of pure black. Yet beyond and through the spaces between them was a soft light, perhaps a little brighter than a full moon might provide.
Leanâlhâm tried to make out what was hidden beyond in the clearing, but she caught only a hint of glistening yellowish brown limbs beyond shapes that might be more moss-draped oaks.
“Enter there,” Cuirin’nên’a whispered. “Do not move. Do not look for it. It will come to you.”
Leanâlhâm glanced up, but Cuirin’nên’a did not look at her. Then she heard something sliding heavily up the wet forest mulch.
The faint, soft sound carried from directly ahead. For the first time since this journey began, Leanâlhâm’s fear grew beyond that of being rejected.
Was there danger in what she did now?
The sound grew louder, as if something circled around the far clearing instead of passing through it. Wet dragging came between rhythmic pauses.
“You will say these words exactly as I speak them,” Cuirin’nên’a whispered.
But Leanâlhâm was frozen with fear.
“Father of Poison,” Cuirin’nên’a began.
Leanâlhâm tried to choke out the words, but nothing came from her mouth. The dark base of one oak bulged near the ground. The swelling rolled and flowed on the forest floor, and came toward her across the nearer clearing. It turned in to the path between her and that farther half-hidden clearing. The soft glow from that place caught on a piece of slithering darkness.
Its surface glinted to iridescent green.
A long body, thicker than her own, was covered in tight-fit scales. Their deep green shimmered to opalescence as it came closer. The yellow glint of two eyes marked its approaching head, like gems bigger than her fists in an oblong boulder pushed along a hand’s breadth above the ground.
“Repeat my words!” Cuirin’nên’a hissed.
Leanâlhâm shook so hard that her teeth clicked. She fumbled in the tunic’s front to pull out the bottle of her uncle’s ashes for something to hang on to.
“Father of Poison,” she uttered in a shaky croak.
The slithering mass upon the ground began to twist and roil no more than four strides ahead.
Cuirin’nên’a took a quick breath. “Who washes away our enemies with Death.”
Leanâlhâm struggled to get out those words. The mass in the dark began to rise ... like a snake too huge to be real.
“Let me pass by to my ancestors, first of my blood,” Cuirin’nên’a whispered. “Give me leave to touch the Seed of Sanctuary.”
But then Leanâlhâm lost her voice.
The serpent’s body knotted and coiled, gathering into a mass beneath the last of it, which raised a scaled and plated head to hover in the dark and sway gently. Slit-irised eyes like spiral-cracked crystals fixed on Leanâlhâm.
“Say the words!” Cuirin’nên’a ordered.
“Let me pass by ... to ... my ...”
The serpent’s jaw dropped open.
She saw in that night-shadowed mouth the shapes of glistening fangs longer than an anmaglâhk’s blades. The widening maw could swallow half of her before she screamed.