Crow Jane - D. J. Butler Page 0,11

seem, would tie her and a mate together for their own protection, and the protection of their children.

What children? Qayna asked. What mate?

It was time, Mother explained, and there was a companion.

There was Abil.

Qayna fled. She didn’t want Abil, not as anything other than her brother. She wasn’t sure about the First Precept and the Bond generally, but she knew that she wasn’t ready yet, and maybe never would be. Horrified and sickened at the thought of what was proposed, angry at the base treachery of her mother, she began from that day to carry a knife.

Abil returned with the warmer weather, as green tendrils started cautiously to poke their heads out of Qayna’s furrows. He was tall and worn by the weather, his jaw becoming straighter and his arms and legs longer and more muscular, like Father’s. Qayna couldn’t look at him directly, and neither could she avoid looking at him when she was in his presence. Mostly she tried to avoid him, dunging and pruning the orchard and the field and searching his face, when she could do so without being noticed, for any sign that he, too, had spoken with the Messenger this winter.

She wondered if he knew.

Shet and the others, meanwhile, seemed to follow her even more closely than they always had, giggling and pointing at her whenever she caught them peeking around a corner or peeping up from behind a rock. The little children pointed and giggled, anyway. Shet just stared.

Until the day when she came back from watering her farthest field and found the family gathered in front of their dwelling.

* * *

Abil stood in front of Mother and Father, perfumed and oiled. He was dressed in a fine white kilt Mother must have woven and sewn for him, and tooled sandals that had obviously been cut, stitched and dyed by Father. Her parents held up more clothing, she guessed for her, and they smiled.

Behind them rose the Messenger. He was tall, far taller than Abil or even Father, and his skin, his robe, and his six wings all glowed crackling white. His hair danced and snapped like flames in the spring breeze, and there was a smell about him that was unnatural and unearthly. He had a strong, imperious brow and piercing eyes that seemed perfectly clear and bottomless. Qayna had never felt totally at ease around this Messenger or any others of his kind, but she was especially uncomfortable now.

“Come,” Mother said.

“Come,” Father repeated.

Abil smiled. It was an ugly smile, a smile Qayna had never seen before on a human face, a smile that looked like it belonged on the bristling muzzle of a wolf.

“It is time,” the Messenger boomed. His voice was like lightning in the far hills in Autumn, a thundered utterance that was impossible to misunderstand and that brooked no dissent.

“No!” Qayna cried, and she fled.

Qayna bathed in a spring beyond her orchard, in private and in secret. The spring was her own special place, a canyon of young stone and crystal water she had discovered while chasing fluttering spores in a dry summer storm the year before. She ran to the spring now, not directly because she feared pursuit, but by a circuitous route. She dropped below the fields into a gully, crossed a river, climbed a hill, and then finally came to her spring by traveling downstream from its sources.

She undressed, trembling from shock and rage, laying her tunic and sandals on a large rock beside the stream and setting her small knife carefully on top of them. She threw herself into the water, gasping from the sudden cold shock.

The spring was deep, and with the chill of the water prickling her skin, Qayna sank to the bottom. The solid reality of the rock beneath her bare feet and hands reassured her that the earth and its limits were unchanged, and when the pressure on her lungs became so real that it began to pain her, she surfaced.

Abil stood above her at the water’s edge, and behind him waited the Messenger.

“Am I so bad then, Qayna?” Abil asked. The look on his face was petulant and wounded, a look such as Shet might wear if a prized toy had been taken away from him. Something else lurked in the expression, too, a note of violence that Abil could not entirely hide. “Am I so bad that you will not have me?”

Once Qayna and Abil would have played together freely, naked and thoughtless. Now she stayed in the