While there wasn’t any true respite from the horde’s unending assault on the delta, everyone who could joined the procession to watch Juniper wake the Water Frond Snake. She led the crowd in the same ceremonial clothes she had worn when I saw her among her drawings, chin lifted high and shoulders thrown back with pure determined pride. Her mother, Tribe Master Toniva, walked a step behind her to her right. She presented a stoic face for her people but I could tell from the tension running from her shoulders to her hands that she wanted to drag her daughter back to Bramble Watch and insist that the coast get frozen over instead. The tribe leaders of the allegiant tribes followed a step behind her and from there the crowd flowed from their best warriors to the rest.
I could see how Juniper thought she had to contribute to the fight or be worth nothing, even if her circumstances were different now. If she let go of the past, she might even be able to flourish among the Hundred Eyes sect.
The whisper women and I kept ourselves separate from the main group as we traveled a route similar to the one I had taken with Kaylan to see the Water Frond Snake. This time, however, we went directly to the path leading up to the Snake’s mouth rather than tromping all over its back.
I had hardly seen Esie since coming to Bramble Watch. I wasn’t sure if she was simply content to leave in my official mentor’s care since Ingrasia had come to the delta or if she was busy with her own plots or if she wanted to see what I would do left to my own devices now that we were in the delta. Or some combination of all three, but as we walked I caught her watching me like she waiting for me to do something. Kaylan was also watching me from her other side.
Ziek was a bolstering presence at my back while Ingrasia walked on the walkway’s railing as if it was the normal path—even when she had to leap from side to side to avoid low branches blocking her way. She had come back specifically to see the ceremony. Ana flashed a bright smile and drew anyone who looked like they were about to question Ingrasia’s choices into conversation. Hattie was more than happy to chat away with her. Ambervale looked like she building up the worst headache of her life through impotent frustration, Nix was focused on seeing the upcoming ceremony, and Morwen seemed bored with the whole thing.
They had all been busy, presumably with preparations for the proxy war, while I had been busy with my own plans. What was interesting, was that they had allowed me to coordinate with Tribe Master Toniva through Ana without interfering about the current fighting. Which meant they either didn’t realize I was the one behind some of the recent strategic changes rather than Ana or Ingrasia, or they thought that it didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. I was just a brand new Sapling, after all.
“What?” I asked in response to Esie and Kaylan’s stares.
“You were pretty upset when you learned the truth about the Water Frond Snake…” Kaylan ventured, her tone somewhere between concerned and curious.
I set my shoulders. “She made her choice, so I made mine.”
“And that is?” Esie prompted.
“Wait and see.”
Ingrasia laughed. “You shouldn’t have pulled her around by the nose so much if you wanted her to be honest with you.”
Esie smiled. “I always look forward to Gimley’s surprises.”
I glowered at her but it wasn’t long after that we arrived at the Water Frond Snake and all conversation petered out. Juniper and her mother walked up the short pathway until they stood right outside the Water Frond Snake’s gaping mouth. When they turned to face the crowd I was once again hit with the understanding that no matter how much I wished it, I couldn’t have shifted Juniper from this course, not once she learned the delta was in danger. One way or another, she would have fought and bled until she was here, standing in those clothes, about to give her mind away to some constructed beast. This was where she thought she belonged—and with her blessing mark covered she looked it too, except for one single irrefutable bit of evidence.
Her black shadow stained lips. Even from the distance I stood at I could see that she had tried to cover them with something—some lip staining plant or paint, but the darkness bled through. It couldn’t be denied.
I smiled at the bittersweet thought. What pain my blessing brought me, the difficulties we faced on the path to becoming whisper women, those lips and the shadow touched lips of all the women around me, were a mark that we had taken a step forward. That no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t return to the past we had before drinking shadows.
Juniper included.
Well, she could wake the Water Frond Snake, and hopefully that would open her eyes to the fact that this whole thing was similar to the water bubble trap she used on the fish. Something that was supposed to fit, to be their preferred terrain, but the water was just wrong enough that it killed them instead.
Only I wouldn’t allow the trap to kill Juniper.
Tribe Master Toniva stepped forward and spoke, “We have fought, we have feasted, we have prayed, and now the Pearl Bearer stands before us all, cleansed and ready to uphold her sacred duty.”
Stolen novel; please report.
“May her mind stay clear! May the fish flee in fear!” The tribe called in unison.
I thought it was telling that the first thing they asked for, before Juniper had even given her mind to the Snake, was for them not to get attacked from the drive to fight overwhelming her.
“Indeed,” Tribe Master Toniva agreed. “The waterways will run yellow with the blood of our enemies. They will be slaughtered beneath the might of our great defender so that we might recover and sleep through a night without the sound of slings whistling through the air to accompany our dreams.”
“May her mind stay clear! May the fish flee in fear!”
“When all is said and done,” Tribe Master Toniva continued, “the great snake will curl back into slumber and the Pearl Bearer will return to us so that we may reward her for her great accomplishments.”
“May her mind stay clear! May the fish flee in fear!”
Tribe Master Toniva turned back to her daughter and gestured toward the Water Frond Snake. For barest fraction of a second I saw Juniper hesitate. From what I understood this was the first time she had actually gone through the ceremony to wake up the Water Frond Snake. Her first time, it had been a slap-dash affair where there hadn’t been a known Pearl Bearer but somehow Juniper had managed to get her hands on the pearl and then escape to where the Snake rested, despite her fear of heights, in order to wake it up. The tribe had found her body after noticing the rampaging Water Frond Snake and put two and two together, but it seemed there was more than a little uncertainty about whether or not she could pull herself out off the overwhelming instinct to fight a second time—unless the Swirling Waters tribe always used such poor encouraging statements in the ceremony.
Then Juniper reset her shoulders and strode into the Water Frond Snake’s mouth. She stepped the bone bowl and offerings so that she could press her forehead to the stone where the snake’s throat would be.
At first nothing happened and tension roiled through the crowd almost like a storm about to burst. Everyone strained to see some sign that the transfer was successful, that their brutal guardian would awaken to protect them like it was supposed to.
Juniper fell backward and her mother caught her, easily sweeping her up into her arms before she could fall onto the shrine. The pearl pulsed in a shining silver blaze and an echoing blaze of light burst from the Water Frond Snake’s head before racing away towards the tip of its tail, tracing an otherwise invisible pattern of scales. Another pulse of light from pearl and snake, only this one was accompanied by a shudder that also shook the walkway beneath our feet.
I heard someone mutter, “Will it hold?”
A third blaze of silver light followed by a larger shudder from the Snake and Juniper’s mother leapt from the beast’s mouth with her body moments before it snapped closed. I purposefully locked away any speculation about what might have happened if she hadn’t leapt free in time. Now wasn’t the time for it. Instead, I had to focus on keeping my feet as it felt like the walkway or the trees holding it up would fall.
I looked up just in time to see the silver blaze coalesce into the Water Frond Snake’s eye sockets. A rasping sound like a thousand needles being brushed over at once filled the air and then the Water Frond Snake was moving, shrinking, sliding through the branches holding it up and down into the waterway below.
Unable to help myself, I sent out a whisper on the wind to Juniper, hoping for any sort of response that showed she was okay. I didn’t hear anything back but Ana sucked in a breath and said, “She goes to fight.”
I sucked in a breath as well. I had used part of the boon I had gained from the Twin Founts and peeled back the layer of wind that normally blocked me from hearing other whisper women’s wind whispered conversations when they wanted to keep them private, so I could hear them if they tried anything while we traveled together. So I heard Juniper’s response to Ana’s inquiry if she was fine after the transition. I hadn’t even realized that we could send anything besides words on the wind until that moment.
All Juniper had projected was a a deep seated need to defend her home and an even stronger, desperate instinct to fight, to decimate any fish who dared cross her path.
I shifted to run after the Water Frond Snake but Ana caught my wrist and shook her head. “She was still able to respond. She isn’t lost. We need to do our part as well.”
I gritted my teeth before I managed to nod and she let go.
Then came the sound of ominous creaking before a wet, booming splash filled the air. It was followed one after another by similar creaks and groans and then loud splashes. Sometimes the thunk of wood on wood. The tribesfolk, those not in the know, fearfully asked what was going on while the rest of us looked up to see if a night sky raced in to overtake the current morning gloom.
But despite the increasing number of twisted pine trees falling to their doom, the goddess didn’t step through the shadows and condemn us to spending the cold season planting a forest’s worth of trees with only our fingers in the cold season.
We hadn’t wanted to brazenly bring down the trees ourselves, that still felt too sacrilegious, but dirt scooped out beneath roots to destabilize a tree, a few cuts made here and there, already fallen or dead wood used for leverage and such and it wouldn’t take much to send the trees falling.
The Water Frond Snake was a large, monstrous thing, no matter how Juniper could change its size to fit into different waterways and its fighting was never gentle or subtle. We knew that Juniper would like take the shortest route to the closest batch of fish once the Water Frond Snake was awakened, so we set up a test.
It took no little bit of convincing to overcome one of the most important rules that was ingrained in us since we were young: never damage a living pine tree. But there was evidence that trees had been damaged previously during fighting in the delta without repercussions and it was more than time to us that to our advantage. So, while doing enough that we could still have some plausible deniability, we had used a select group to prepare multiple trees on the Water Frond Snake’s predicted route.
Now that preparation was paying off. Tree after tree fell into the waterway after the Water Frond Snake passed through, blocking passage upriver so that the fish would be forced to cross overland or waste time trying to cut their way through. Other traps could be seeded among the fallen trees to make the cost of trying to continue to use the waterway even higher.
The fish had two main advantages: their ability to fight and breathe in the water, and their numbers. With this, I had taken my first step at removing one of the two.