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Excerpt:
Rthan
Rthan surveyed the damage to his water spell. Weeks of fasting, planning, traveling and dancing, ruined. The careful crystalline lines he had built up around the mountain snows had been realigned, the original configuration would have unleashed a flood of snowmelt several months from now, with spring’s kiss. No longer. The new glowing blue lines of magic would sluice the melt water harmlessly down a dozen smaller arroyos, instead of toward the enemy settlement in the main valley below the mountain. Someone had protected the Rainbow Labyrinth tribehold.
"Who could have done this?" he asked aloud.
The other six men and women with him only mirrored back to him his own bafflement and bemusement. They shivered and wheezed in the snow, not used to either the temperature or the altitude. He knew they were wondering if he would order them to stay the long weeks required to dance the entire spell again.
He wasn’t really speaking to the little girl at his side. Nonetheless, she looked up at him with large, grave eyes.
“Kavio the Rain Dancer,” she said. She had joined him almost unnoticed.
Meira. His daughter, his only child, was only eight, but already she promised to be a classic beauty. Her long, straight black hair was knotted by strings of pearls in twists that reached her ankles. Her tiny face was a perfect moon, her mouth an adorable pink shell, and her eyes deep tide pools reflecting the shades of the ocean and the sky. People said she looked like him, but miniaturized and refined. He was a bulky, tattooed tower of muscle, with his long hair disciplined into a top tail of tiny braids to mark his kills. She was an adorable pixie doll.
Meira. His daughter, his only child, had died six years ago. He knew this, knew the person at his side wasn’t really Meira, and yet, he couldn’t stop the love and pain he felt every time he looked at her, glowing faintly blue by his side.
The six with him were all Blue Tavaedies, and they could see her, not as Meira, but as an azure radiance too brilliant to bear. They knew he sometimes called her by his dead daughter’s name, and because of that and because her power frightened them, her presence spooked them. They backed away now, shielding their eyes.
“Should we break camp?” asked Rthan’s second in command, Dorthamo. The man’s gaze slipped past the shimmering blue girl, back toward the lean-tos and campfire along the shore of the frozen tarn. “If we don’t leave now, we won’t have time to do the primary hex.”
“If we hex the Yellow Bear tribehold, but leave their allies unmolested, their allies will still be free to come to their aide during the attack,” Rthan said.
Dorthamo’s face sagged. “Yes…”
“But if we stay longer, the pass will freeze over and we won’t be able to return at all,” Rthan said. “We must break camp. We must cast the primary hex. Or call off the venture entirely.”
“I don’t think the War Chief would agree to canceling.”
“Neither do I,” said Rthan. He waved. “Go ahead. Break camp. I need a moment to speak to…”
“Her?” Dorthamo still wouldn’t look at Meira.
Rthan nodded.
Dorthamo swallowed hard. “Is she angry?”
Afraid to hear the answer, he scuttled away before Rthan could reply. The others hastened after him, and began to disassemble the hide tents.
The little blue girl slipped her hand into Rthan’s, just as his daughter had so many times.
“I’m not mad at you, Daddy,” she said.
“Don’t call me that. I can’t…” He pulled his hand away. “You said Kavio the Rain Dancer did this. Then the Rainbow Labyrinth must know of our spell. They will try to retaliate.”
“No.” A breeze lifted strands of her hair to play in a chilly wind. Dark, inhuman power shone from her eyes, belying the innocence of her child’s face. “They are fools. As for Kavio....”
She smiled at him, but it wasn’t the smile of a mortal child. The coldness of glaciers and the ruthlessness of typhoons glinted in that cruel smile. He shivered. He loved her. She was all he had, since the murder of his family. He had to admit, though, she terrified him even more than she frightened the others. He knew her better.
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