Kindra’s knuckles were white around her father’s spear as she watched Kaye disappear behind the tents. Fury burned in her core, tempered only by the despair that was swallowing every part of her whole. She had never imagined a life without Kaye.
Oak motioned her over. “We need to talk about your behavior.”
She stared at him, feet refusing to move, not comprehending what he meant. Before she could formulate a reply, Gar’s warm hands covered her shoulders.
“She just lost her family. Give her time to recover.”
Oak’s mouth pressed into a thin line. “Tomorrow morning then, and she is not to leave that tent. If she goes after her sister she’ll start a war.”
Kindra stared at him, mute, until Gar led her to her tent. She sank onto Kaye’s cot, bundled the blanket in her arms, and buried her face in it. The blanket smelled like the priestess herbs that constantly clung to Kaye’s clothes and hair. As Gar sat and put his arm around Kindra’s shoulders, the despair pushed up into her throat, a sob escaped, and she finally began to cry. She howled into the blanket, pouring everything of herself out, and when she was finished she was empty. No tears. No emotions. No soul. It was the same feeling she’d had after her father’s death, only then Kaye had been with her and Kindra still had a soul.
Gar handed her a cup of water and she stared into it’s depths as if she’d scry the secret to living without her soul in the bottom.
“Chin up,” Gar tapped it with a finger.
“I don’t need a buck-up speech,” she said. Her throat was rough from screaming.
“You’re bleeding.”
She raised a hand to her throat where Corbin’s knife had cut a shallow line. She wasn’t bleeding, but the sting came back with the memory. At least she felt something other than empty.
She held her hand out for the cloth and wiped the dried blood off. When she finished, she sat with the rag in one hand and the untouched cup in the other. There was still a full day ahead of them. A full day without Kaye. Then a night. Another day, and another. On and on until Kindra joined her father across the river. His spear lay on her bed and she stared at it for a long moment.
“Do you think they’ll let her come back to visit?”
Gar took the bloodied cloth from her hand. “Their chief’s an old man. Older than your father would be if he was alive. Kaye will outlive him.”
“What if he hurts her?”
Gar took her hand this time and held it in both of his. “He won’t. If he’s offering us hunting rights in the Valley, he’s desperate for a son. He’ll take every precaution to see that she’s safe and healthy, so she can bear a strong, healthy son.”
That eased Kindra’s heart some. Gar was right—the chief couldn’t hurt Kaye while she was carrying his son. She’d be safe until spring, at least.
The tent had been so full of life not long ago, and what had been a warm, cramped space was now cold and unbearably large. She always knew that eventually she’d live alone, but not with the smell of Kaye in the air. Not with the sight of her mother and sister’s unmade cots and unpacked things. Not with the sudden loss and fear for their safety.
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“What am I supposed to do now?” Kindra whispered.
Gar rubbed her cold hand between his warm ones. “The same things you were doing before. Protect the tribe. Work towards you name. Find what makes you happy.”
Her heart sank into the pit that had been growing inside her. “Kaye made me happy. And now that they have her, there’s no chance for war.” Kindra looked at him as panic squeezed her chest. “How do I finish my mark if there are no battles?”
He looked away. “There will be battles.” His voice was stern and unhappy. “Maybe not with the Obsidians, but what happened today…there are those of us who would see Oak step down.”
It took a moment for his words to slog through the despair inside her and hit their mark. When they did, she jerked away and spilled the water.
“You want to depose the chief?”
Gar looked her in the eyes again. “No. We want him to step down as chief. He doesn’t deserve the honor—he’s proven a poor chief, and now he’s refused to name you and let the Obsidians take your sister.”
“You said we had no choice but to give them Kaye.” If there was nothing else, there was the truth that the Obsidians would take Kaye, either way. “If you were chief you would have let them take her too.”
Gar didn’t deny it—couldn’t deny it. It was his sworn duty as one of Eoin’s chosen to protect the Seven Tribes at all costs. Even if it cost Kaye.
“That may be so,” he swallowed. “But I wouldn’t have promised her in the first place.”
Kindra threw the cup on the ground. “That was a vile lie. There isn’t a person in this tribe who would offer Kaye to our enemies.”
“Then how did they know she was Faye?”
The anger that had flared in Kindra guttered out. Kaye had always been careful to hide her wings, especially when she left the tribe. So how did they know? “But who would do such a thing?” Not even Oak was so terrible a chief as that.
The sadness in Gar’s eyes was too much for Kindra. She hid her face in the blanket and took a deep breath of Kaye. Gar put a warm hand over her healing, nameless mark. When he spoke, his voice was soft and kind, as if he was telling her of a death in the family.
“The Conals have been in control since your father died. Complete control—chief and High Priestess. The only ones who can knock them from power are you and Kaye. If Kaye stayed, she would be the next priestess of Fie Eoin, answerable only to the High Priestess—if she didn’t become High Priestess herself. And you…”
He removed the blanket so she had to look at him. “As a named warrior you are next in line to be chief, not Osprey.”
“But—"
“The Obsidian chief is desperate for an heir so his family stays in power. Who’s to say Oak isn’t desperate for his family to stay in power too? If Oak never names you, Osprey becomes chief. And if Kaye never becomes a priestess, she cannot challenge that. The Conals stay in power and the Odion name dies away into legend and lesser bloodlines.”
Kindra looked at her nails, still broken from the whipping rock. She wanted to believe Gar—wanted to believe the conspiracies that placed her father’s death on Oak’s hands—but she’d watched Fennec die and knew they weren’t true.
“Oak’s a coward who listens to his sister above all else, but he’s no conspirator.” Kindra squeezed the edges of the blanket. “Today the Obsidian’s bullied us, no more.”
“If they really have that much power, they have no need to bully us.”
Kindra looked at him. “You think without Oak we’d go to war?”
“We did.”
“And we lost.”
“We need more men,” Gar said. “The Dacians would join us. Perhaps the men over the mountain.”
Kindra thought on that a moment. They knew little about the men across the mountain, other than they lived on a giant river—perhaps the river that separated this life from the next. The Aledans knew the Dacians, however, and they weren’t fighters. They’d depended on the Aledans for generations to keep the Obsidians at bay. That was no guarantee of victory.
“We need something more than men.” Kindra frowned and studied the stitching on the blanket as if it was a battlefield. “They have more men; we have better warriors. But we need something other than fodder. Something to strike fear into their numbers before we attack. A monster.”
She wished she knew more of Obsidian culture. Their fears, their legends, their monsters. There were only two people who knew that much about them, and they were both in the chief’s tent.
Kindra stood and dropped the blanket on the cot, the white hot fury finally winning out over the despair.
Gar blocked her path. “Where are you going?”
“Oak wanted to speak to me. I need to speak to him”
“He said tomorrow.”
“Today.” She wasn’t going to sit around all day feeling betrayed and desperate. If there was some way to defeat the Obsidians she would find it and she would destroy them.