The Roads of Taryn MacTavish, page 19
part #3 of Lords of Arcadia Series
“Her things! Her—” Dryleaf’s hands sketched half-remembered shapes in the air. “Her damned little things! Give them back!”
“I did. She thanked me,” Starfall added wryly. “And then she got back in her kennel.”
Dryleaf raised both hands and smacked them over his face with a rapport that actually echoed in the still air. Then he swung about and started marching.
Taryn lowered her hornless brow, threaded her arms through the bars of the back wall, and gripped on stubbornly. She had the spark to kick at him when he leaned in, but he got hold of her ankles anyway. “Let go!” she shouted.
“I have let you go! Now get out! Get! Out!” He heaved back and she held on. Her legs left the ground, then her hips. She screamed, hanging taut half-in and half-out of the cage, still struggling to break his grip. “Damned!
Stone-headed! Beast!”
He swung a hoof at her, unbalanced and lost his sweaty hold on her.
Both of them dropped with twin grunts and lay glaring at each other. He leapt up and she instantly locked in a new grip. Dryleaf paced back and forth before her kennel, his breath heaving in and out of him. He stopped. She tossed her hair at him. Dryleaf threw back his head and bellowed for a spear.
Through the haze of his anger, he noted that the satyrs gathered before him exchanged glances, but it was a faun who brought him the weapon. He showed her its edge and spat, “Out, damn you! Now! I want you gone!”
She laughed at him. “Déjà vu,” she said, and did not explain.
An insult, then. Dryleaf raised the spear overhead in both hands and swung.
Taryn shrieked, all her body curling around her belly in what would have been a futile effort to protect the life she carried if that had truly been his target.
The steel head of the spear cracked down on smoke-hardened wooden bars and resin-soaked cord. Again. Again. His body worked like a bellows, throwing off sweat and chips of wood in a choking cloud. The cage was no match for Dryleaf in a rage. It splintered, and what the spear did not crack, his hooves demolished. The next time he grabbed at her ankles, there was no kennel 145
left for her to hide within. She tried to hug on to Molly’s kennel, but her hands were as slippery as his and she lost her grip at his fourth heavy pull.
“Let go of me, you bastard!” she screamed, striking at him with pieces of her broken kennel.
Dryleaf started dragging her across the center to the borders of his village. Fauns scattered before him. Satyrs strolled after.
Taryn twisted and grappled at his leg, toppling them both into the bushes.
She tried to crawl back into the village while he was extracting himself from a thorny bush, but he waded out covered in spines to snatch her back again. “And stay out!” he thundered, flinging her violently into the trees.
“Make me!” she screamed.
“Go home!”
“So you can forget about me and go back to brutalizing your prisoners with a clear conscience? Not on your life!”
“It’s your life, demon, and I’ll have it, I swear by the bones of the Great God Pan, I will!” He gave her a final push and turned his back on her, knuckling sweat from his brow.
And that was when Taryn jumped on him. She wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist, bowing in his back with the solid curve of her belly. He fell to his knees with a strangled sputter to claw at her, succeeding in dislodging her only after knocking an elbow to her temple. She sprawled in the dirt and Dryleaf leapt away. He ran back across the village grounds, shoving those satyrs out of his path who did not already stand aside. He had lost his dignity, he knew, perhaps beyond any recovery, but he did not care. His sole objective lay now in ridding himself of this red-haired demon, her mouth, and her damned accusing eyes. Let Burntbrow be Speaker after this day, if no one could look on Dryleaf again save as a fool, but he would see Taryn gone.
He snatched up his spear, meaning to knock her unconscious and drag her all the way back to Outlook himself. The humans still in their cages screamed.
More than humans. A faun bounded out before him and threw himself over Taryn as she struggled to stand.
Dryleaf’s arm sank by slow degrees. Little Browse was sobbing hard, shivering, hardly able to touch his own flesh to the human’s, but he remained between her and Dryleaf’s spear. “It wasn’t her!” the faun cried. “It wasn’t!
She wasn’t there!” Everything else was a howl of hysterical fear, quickly taken up by all the fauns brave enough to stay in the clearing.
“Step away, little one,” Dryleaf said gruffly. His voice was still raw where Taryn had found her choking grip. His breath was a cutting edge and his heart, a furnace. He would not kill her, but the faun could not be made to understand that. In time, a month at most, Browse would forget Taryn had ever 146
existed. Dryleaf could suffer the faun’s tears now for that peace. “Someone get him away.”
Several satyrs stepped forward, but it was Taryn whose hands closed on Browse’s shaking shoulders, and Taryn who pushed him firmly back. She glared at Dryleaf through fear and anger in equal measure and waited.
Dryleaf raised his spear. Its shadow cut across her and the shadow shook.
She didn’t move.
Beyond her, thin arms hugging her own shoulders, Molly watched him.
Dryleaf threw. The spear’s head sank and held fast. The shaft quivered with the force of his throw. Taryn glanced around at the tree he’d impaled and her mouth twisted. “That’s the third time I’ve had someone chuck a spear at me,” she remarked. “I’m starting to take it personally.”
“What do you want?” he shouted.
“I want you to look at them,” Taryn said, pointing at the kennels. “I want you to see what you’re doing to those innocent people!”
“Innocent!” One of the satyrs bleated laughter.
One of the humans joined him in it. “I weren’t even born that, cully,”
she said, and the satyr frowned and backed away from her.
“Yeah!” another burst out. “Just leave us alone! You ain’t helping and now…now it’s raining!”
Dryleaf and Taryn both looked up. A drop of water struck him unerringly in the eye. Taryn stepped back under the canopy of the trees, wiping at her face. Had the storeroom roof ever been finished? Ah, gods and grief.
“Thanks to you, I gots to sleep here,” the human in the kennel said.
“Because you couldn’t quit on ‘em, and now none of ‘em will take us to a hut tonight. It were nothing but tupping! I’d rather do that than sit in pissy straw trying to sleep in the rain!”
Burntbrow took a step towards her and stopped, looking away. She reached to him through her bars. “Take me to bed, huh?” she said, almost singing it as she pleaded. “Ain’t I your tickle no more?”
“Nasty!” another human cried.
“Pits with you!” the other spat, and the rain poured down. “I been tied up on hooks when I was too sick to stand, had me teeth bashed in when a pricker said I scraped him, and seen me Ma choked to death cuz the pricker liked the way it made her wiggle! Worst thing they done to me here is make me sleep in the fuggering rain! So who’s nasty, huh? Who’s nasty?”
“They’re just as bad!” a human called, shouting to be heard over the roll of following thunder. “They’re every bit as bad! They done me in the mud!
They done me sick and bleeding! They done me six at a go when I were too sore even to breathe! The only difference ‘twixt here and Outlook is it hurts more when they kicks me!”
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Dryleaf backed away from that shrill, shaking challenge and caught a hard shove forward.
“You look at them!” Taryn hissed behind him. “You answer that! You own it!”
He swung and shoved her back. “I am not responsible for this!”
“You put them in cages, you son of a bitch!” Taryn shouted. The skies sparked, lighting her with white fire. “Don’t you dare tell me you’re not responsible for them now!”
Rain drummed on heat-hard ground, drowning out the sobs of fauns, human fighting, and the awful silence of the satyrs. Dryleaf stared at the one who had brought it all upon him as his soul bled.
“I hate you,” he said softly.
“I can live with that.”
Dryleaf raised his hand, forced it down, and walked away from her.
“Empty out the tanning shed!” he ordered. “Put everything… burning hell, I don’t care, just empty it! Strike the kennels. We’ll put them in a hut tonight.
Shut up,” he snarled as eyes flicked behind him, indicating Taryn about to speak.
“If you say one word, I swear I will sew your mouth shut.”
“It’s a start.”
Dryleaf threw his head back and roared into the rain. He swung around, spitting stormwater along with his rage. “Don’t you ever stop?!”
But she wasn’t fighting. There was even a kind of sympathy in her demon’s eyes. “The hardest thing I ever did was take that first step,” she said.
She went to the tree and pulled his spear free. “I wish I could tell you everything after that was easy. It wasn’t. But at least I could see the way to go.”
She put the spear in his hand.
“It’s a start,” she said again. And slightly smiled. “Want me to scare up a needle and some thread?”
Dryleaf swiped water from his face with a curse and pushed past her. He tossed his spear into the leaking storehouse and took his Molly’s arm. He had ordered her washed, he would see her washed. After that, gods, he truly did not care.
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30. The Choice
The prisoners each received two things that night: A chain connecting each shackled leg to the frame of the wall, and a soft-woven sack of straw to be a bedroll. Taryn, who was no longer a prisoner, had neither. Sometime after dark, one of the fauns—probably Browse—snuck in and tossed a pillow at her before running away again. It helped, but her sleep was still pretty thin and she was already awake when the satyrs’ Speaker threw open the door and stomped inside.
It didn’t look like he’d slept too well, either.
“Here it stands,” he said harshly, “and there shall be no negotiations. I choose to release you. You may stay or go as you decide.”
Another satyr entered with an armload of skirts and halters. He glanced once at Taryn and damned if he didn’t wink before he started passing them out.
“If you choose to leave, you will be masked after morning meal and led to your barricade. If you choose to stay, you must agree to the conditions of life in this village. This will be your hut until one more suitable can be built or until…you come to other arrangements. I am Dryleaf, your Speaker. You will obey me before all others. You will join the fauns at their labors and you will learn to hold a proper watch over them. You will mate with us and bear our young. And you will be named.” His gaze shifted to Molly and his jaw tightened. “You will be Wave,” he said roughly. “Waves…are always changing.”
Molly, or the girl formerly known as Molly, looked stunned.
The other satyr, now finished passing out garments, bent and started unlocking shackles.
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“And I want you gone,” the Speaker concluded, glaring at Taryn.
“I’ll think about it.”
Muttering, the Speaker turned and stomped out again.
No one said anything for a while. The satyr continued calmly removing shackles. Slowly, one of the women pulled her filthy shift over her head and stepped into her clean skirt. She fastened it around her bony hips, her expression nearly one of awe.
“Is he really letting us leave?” the thin-faced one asked suspiciously.
“Yes,” said the satyr.
“He’s not waiting to see who wants to and locking her up again?”
“No.”
“Or leading her off in the woods like to trick her and killing her when she’s out of sight?”
“No.”
“Hunh.” The molly rubbed at her ankle, baby-white and scarred by years of wear. “Well, I leaving,” she declared.
“So be it.” The satyr unlocked the last of them, removed his key from around his neck, and let it drop beside the open restraint. He looked intently at one of the others. “And you? What will you do?”
“I don’t know,” this one mumbled. “I guess…I guess I might as well stay.”
The satyr’s brows knit slowly. The girl continued to sit and stare at her feet and he finally dropped his eyes. Clearly, he had been expecting a more enthusiastic response.
“I mean, it’s mollying either way, ain’t it?” the girl asked, and shrugged.
“Just a question of where.”
“No, it’s a question of what!” The thin-faced one jumped up and edged along the perimeter of the hut, eyeing the satyr in their midst with fearful belligerence. “You stay and mark me, you’ll be back in the cage soon as that one’s away! Getting wooly-poked by any ‘n all! Clean and dry and fed, maybe, but you’ll be a molly still! Be a molly for a man!”
The satyr turned his head and stared at the wall. He said, “Stay. I will not have you save that you come to me.”
The girl laughed dully. “You don’t have to lie to me. Said I’d stay, didn’t I? Clean and dry and fed…I’d fuck a whole goat for that.”
She went out into the village and the other girls gradually followed, until Taryn was alone with the satyr. After a long, stifling silence, he looked at her.
“If I ask you a question,” he said, “will you swear to answer honestly?”
Surprised, she raised her hand in the boy-scout salute. “I promise.”
He came to her and hunkered down so that their eyes were on a level.
“Are you a god?” he asked quietly.
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She thought she was ready to hear anything, but that one left her absolutely stupefied. “Fella, do I look like a god?”
He contemplated her in silence, beginning at the crown of her head, slowly staring his way down to her feet, and back up again. “A god may look like anything,” was his final judgment.
“Do gods bleed?” she asked, pulling out folds of her stained bodice to show him.
“You are not answering my question.”
“Well, of course I’m not a god!”
“You are Quiabe in human form.”
She burst out laughing. “I am not!”
“Then you are his get.”
“My father is an optometrist in Shoestring, Oregon!”
He rubbed at his chin, regarding her with dubious eyes. At last, he shook his head. “Who else could do what you have done?” he demanded.
“Maybe anyone,” she said. “Who else has tried?” She stood up and so did he. As she stretched out her stiff body and practiced a few hobbling steps, the satyr stood motionless and thoughtful.
“Will you go now?” he asked.
“Not yet.”
“Because you believe our ways shall revert in your absence?”
She started to shake her head and then faced him fully to say, “Because the Pathfinder who brought me let me out in the middle of the woods and I have no idea how to get home.”
He looked about as convinced by this explanation as he’d been by her assertion that she was not a god. “How were you expecting to leave if you had been allowed to deliver your message and depart?”
“I’m expecting someone to come for me,” she said with a rueful smile.
She rubbed her belly. “Someone with as much to lose as I have.”
“Quiabe?”
She rolled her eyes and headed for the door.
“Who, then?” The satyr followed her. “What human is it that would know the location of this village when you do not?”
“No human, as far as I know.” She started to open the door.
He caught it, forced it shut, and leaned over her shoulder. He studied her unhurriedly before finally shaking his head. “If you expect us to heed your words in certain matters, you must stop lying in others.”
“If you really think I’m lying,” she said, “feel free to ignore me entirely.”
She pushed at his chest until he consented to back away, then opened up the door again. This time, he let her go.
Breakfast was fruit, shared out equally while unleavened bread cooked in covered pans over the morning fire. The bread was drizzled with honey and 151
served with a bowl of wine. Again, all portions were equal, even Taryn’s, although she was served with a hell of a glare from Dryleaf, and she traded her wine for plain water.
“It’s very good,” she ventured.
“I send no one away unfed,” he said crossly. “Eat it and go.”
“You’re not interested in hearing what I came to say anymore?”
He bleated under his breath and kicked at the ground, still dark from yesterday’s spat of rain. “Well, what is it, then?”
“You don’t sound very receptive.”
“Human, I’m not.”
“Then I’ll wait.”
“I’ll never be rid of you, demon,” he said, and sat beside the girl he’d named Wave. “You’re a curse, sent to harry me to death for the vengeance I have taken.”
“It’s nice to have one’s work appreciated,” Taryn remarked.
“Eat your food and shut up.” He glanced at Wave. His face did not soften exactly, but it did lose its scowl. He looked away at the next girl. “What is your decision, human?”
“I…I’d like to stay, me. If you meant it.”
“I did.”
“And a name for me?” she asked hopefully. “For only me?”
He considered her, his nostrils slowly flaring. “Argil,” he said at last.
“The clay we shape.”
She smiled, testing it. “Argil. Yeah, I could be clay, all right. Bet I could learn to do it even, if someone showed me how. I’m good with me hands, yeah?”
Seldom kind, Antilles had said, but they were all kind enough not to laugh at her.
All in all, only three women chose to return to the human camp they called Outlook. Although all three tried very hard to convince the rest to leave with them, there was not even a hint of vacillation in any of the others. The only decision that surprised Taryn was that of the arm-scratcher, the woman who had always seemed the most unbalanced, who chose to stay. Under the new name Umbra, she sat close to the fauns, rubbing her fresh bandages, and if she did not look entirely happy, at least she wasn’t hurting herself anymore.
“I did. She thanked me,” Starfall added wryly. “And then she got back in her kennel.”
Dryleaf raised both hands and smacked them over his face with a rapport that actually echoed in the still air. Then he swung about and started marching.
Taryn lowered her hornless brow, threaded her arms through the bars of the back wall, and gripped on stubbornly. She had the spark to kick at him when he leaned in, but he got hold of her ankles anyway. “Let go!” she shouted.
“I have let you go! Now get out! Get! Out!” He heaved back and she held on. Her legs left the ground, then her hips. She screamed, hanging taut half-in and half-out of the cage, still struggling to break his grip. “Damned!
Stone-headed! Beast!”
He swung a hoof at her, unbalanced and lost his sweaty hold on her.
Both of them dropped with twin grunts and lay glaring at each other. He leapt up and she instantly locked in a new grip. Dryleaf paced back and forth before her kennel, his breath heaving in and out of him. He stopped. She tossed her hair at him. Dryleaf threw back his head and bellowed for a spear.
Through the haze of his anger, he noted that the satyrs gathered before him exchanged glances, but it was a faun who brought him the weapon. He showed her its edge and spat, “Out, damn you! Now! I want you gone!”
She laughed at him. “Déjà vu,” she said, and did not explain.
An insult, then. Dryleaf raised the spear overhead in both hands and swung.
Taryn shrieked, all her body curling around her belly in what would have been a futile effort to protect the life she carried if that had truly been his target.
The steel head of the spear cracked down on smoke-hardened wooden bars and resin-soaked cord. Again. Again. His body worked like a bellows, throwing off sweat and chips of wood in a choking cloud. The cage was no match for Dryleaf in a rage. It splintered, and what the spear did not crack, his hooves demolished. The next time he grabbed at her ankles, there was no kennel 145
left for her to hide within. She tried to hug on to Molly’s kennel, but her hands were as slippery as his and she lost her grip at his fourth heavy pull.
“Let go of me, you bastard!” she screamed, striking at him with pieces of her broken kennel.
Dryleaf started dragging her across the center to the borders of his village. Fauns scattered before him. Satyrs strolled after.
Taryn twisted and grappled at his leg, toppling them both into the bushes.
She tried to crawl back into the village while he was extracting himself from a thorny bush, but he waded out covered in spines to snatch her back again. “And stay out!” he thundered, flinging her violently into the trees.
“Make me!” she screamed.
“Go home!”
“So you can forget about me and go back to brutalizing your prisoners with a clear conscience? Not on your life!”
“It’s your life, demon, and I’ll have it, I swear by the bones of the Great God Pan, I will!” He gave her a final push and turned his back on her, knuckling sweat from his brow.
And that was when Taryn jumped on him. She wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist, bowing in his back with the solid curve of her belly. He fell to his knees with a strangled sputter to claw at her, succeeding in dislodging her only after knocking an elbow to her temple. She sprawled in the dirt and Dryleaf leapt away. He ran back across the village grounds, shoving those satyrs out of his path who did not already stand aside. He had lost his dignity, he knew, perhaps beyond any recovery, but he did not care. His sole objective lay now in ridding himself of this red-haired demon, her mouth, and her damned accusing eyes. Let Burntbrow be Speaker after this day, if no one could look on Dryleaf again save as a fool, but he would see Taryn gone.
He snatched up his spear, meaning to knock her unconscious and drag her all the way back to Outlook himself. The humans still in their cages screamed.
More than humans. A faun bounded out before him and threw himself over Taryn as she struggled to stand.
Dryleaf’s arm sank by slow degrees. Little Browse was sobbing hard, shivering, hardly able to touch his own flesh to the human’s, but he remained between her and Dryleaf’s spear. “It wasn’t her!” the faun cried. “It wasn’t!
She wasn’t there!” Everything else was a howl of hysterical fear, quickly taken up by all the fauns brave enough to stay in the clearing.
“Step away, little one,” Dryleaf said gruffly. His voice was still raw where Taryn had found her choking grip. His breath was a cutting edge and his heart, a furnace. He would not kill her, but the faun could not be made to understand that. In time, a month at most, Browse would forget Taryn had ever 146
existed. Dryleaf could suffer the faun’s tears now for that peace. “Someone get him away.”
Several satyrs stepped forward, but it was Taryn whose hands closed on Browse’s shaking shoulders, and Taryn who pushed him firmly back. She glared at Dryleaf through fear and anger in equal measure and waited.
Dryleaf raised his spear. Its shadow cut across her and the shadow shook.
She didn’t move.
Beyond her, thin arms hugging her own shoulders, Molly watched him.
Dryleaf threw. The spear’s head sank and held fast. The shaft quivered with the force of his throw. Taryn glanced around at the tree he’d impaled and her mouth twisted. “That’s the third time I’ve had someone chuck a spear at me,” she remarked. “I’m starting to take it personally.”
“What do you want?” he shouted.
“I want you to look at them,” Taryn said, pointing at the kennels. “I want you to see what you’re doing to those innocent people!”
“Innocent!” One of the satyrs bleated laughter.
One of the humans joined him in it. “I weren’t even born that, cully,”
she said, and the satyr frowned and backed away from her.
“Yeah!” another burst out. “Just leave us alone! You ain’t helping and now…now it’s raining!”
Dryleaf and Taryn both looked up. A drop of water struck him unerringly in the eye. Taryn stepped back under the canopy of the trees, wiping at her face. Had the storeroom roof ever been finished? Ah, gods and grief.
“Thanks to you, I gots to sleep here,” the human in the kennel said.
“Because you couldn’t quit on ‘em, and now none of ‘em will take us to a hut tonight. It were nothing but tupping! I’d rather do that than sit in pissy straw trying to sleep in the rain!”
Burntbrow took a step towards her and stopped, looking away. She reached to him through her bars. “Take me to bed, huh?” she said, almost singing it as she pleaded. “Ain’t I your tickle no more?”
“Nasty!” another human cried.
“Pits with you!” the other spat, and the rain poured down. “I been tied up on hooks when I was too sick to stand, had me teeth bashed in when a pricker said I scraped him, and seen me Ma choked to death cuz the pricker liked the way it made her wiggle! Worst thing they done to me here is make me sleep in the fuggering rain! So who’s nasty, huh? Who’s nasty?”
“They’re just as bad!” a human called, shouting to be heard over the roll of following thunder. “They’re every bit as bad! They done me in the mud!
They done me sick and bleeding! They done me six at a go when I were too sore even to breathe! The only difference ‘twixt here and Outlook is it hurts more when they kicks me!”
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Dryleaf backed away from that shrill, shaking challenge and caught a hard shove forward.
“You look at them!” Taryn hissed behind him. “You answer that! You own it!”
He swung and shoved her back. “I am not responsible for this!”
“You put them in cages, you son of a bitch!” Taryn shouted. The skies sparked, lighting her with white fire. “Don’t you dare tell me you’re not responsible for them now!”
Rain drummed on heat-hard ground, drowning out the sobs of fauns, human fighting, and the awful silence of the satyrs. Dryleaf stared at the one who had brought it all upon him as his soul bled.
“I hate you,” he said softly.
“I can live with that.”
Dryleaf raised his hand, forced it down, and walked away from her.
“Empty out the tanning shed!” he ordered. “Put everything… burning hell, I don’t care, just empty it! Strike the kennels. We’ll put them in a hut tonight.
Shut up,” he snarled as eyes flicked behind him, indicating Taryn about to speak.
“If you say one word, I swear I will sew your mouth shut.”
“It’s a start.”
Dryleaf threw his head back and roared into the rain. He swung around, spitting stormwater along with his rage. “Don’t you ever stop?!”
But she wasn’t fighting. There was even a kind of sympathy in her demon’s eyes. “The hardest thing I ever did was take that first step,” she said.
She went to the tree and pulled his spear free. “I wish I could tell you everything after that was easy. It wasn’t. But at least I could see the way to go.”
She put the spear in his hand.
“It’s a start,” she said again. And slightly smiled. “Want me to scare up a needle and some thread?”
Dryleaf swiped water from his face with a curse and pushed past her. He tossed his spear into the leaking storehouse and took his Molly’s arm. He had ordered her washed, he would see her washed. After that, gods, he truly did not care.
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30. The Choice
The prisoners each received two things that night: A chain connecting each shackled leg to the frame of the wall, and a soft-woven sack of straw to be a bedroll. Taryn, who was no longer a prisoner, had neither. Sometime after dark, one of the fauns—probably Browse—snuck in and tossed a pillow at her before running away again. It helped, but her sleep was still pretty thin and she was already awake when the satyrs’ Speaker threw open the door and stomped inside.
It didn’t look like he’d slept too well, either.
“Here it stands,” he said harshly, “and there shall be no negotiations. I choose to release you. You may stay or go as you decide.”
Another satyr entered with an armload of skirts and halters. He glanced once at Taryn and damned if he didn’t wink before he started passing them out.
“If you choose to leave, you will be masked after morning meal and led to your barricade. If you choose to stay, you must agree to the conditions of life in this village. This will be your hut until one more suitable can be built or until…you come to other arrangements. I am Dryleaf, your Speaker. You will obey me before all others. You will join the fauns at their labors and you will learn to hold a proper watch over them. You will mate with us and bear our young. And you will be named.” His gaze shifted to Molly and his jaw tightened. “You will be Wave,” he said roughly. “Waves…are always changing.”
Molly, or the girl formerly known as Molly, looked stunned.
The other satyr, now finished passing out garments, bent and started unlocking shackles.
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“And I want you gone,” the Speaker concluded, glaring at Taryn.
“I’ll think about it.”
Muttering, the Speaker turned and stomped out again.
No one said anything for a while. The satyr continued calmly removing shackles. Slowly, one of the women pulled her filthy shift over her head and stepped into her clean skirt. She fastened it around her bony hips, her expression nearly one of awe.
“Is he really letting us leave?” the thin-faced one asked suspiciously.
“Yes,” said the satyr.
“He’s not waiting to see who wants to and locking her up again?”
“No.”
“Or leading her off in the woods like to trick her and killing her when she’s out of sight?”
“No.”
“Hunh.” The molly rubbed at her ankle, baby-white and scarred by years of wear. “Well, I leaving,” she declared.
“So be it.” The satyr unlocked the last of them, removed his key from around his neck, and let it drop beside the open restraint. He looked intently at one of the others. “And you? What will you do?”
“I don’t know,” this one mumbled. “I guess…I guess I might as well stay.”
The satyr’s brows knit slowly. The girl continued to sit and stare at her feet and he finally dropped his eyes. Clearly, he had been expecting a more enthusiastic response.
“I mean, it’s mollying either way, ain’t it?” the girl asked, and shrugged.
“Just a question of where.”
“No, it’s a question of what!” The thin-faced one jumped up and edged along the perimeter of the hut, eyeing the satyr in their midst with fearful belligerence. “You stay and mark me, you’ll be back in the cage soon as that one’s away! Getting wooly-poked by any ‘n all! Clean and dry and fed, maybe, but you’ll be a molly still! Be a molly for a man!”
The satyr turned his head and stared at the wall. He said, “Stay. I will not have you save that you come to me.”
The girl laughed dully. “You don’t have to lie to me. Said I’d stay, didn’t I? Clean and dry and fed…I’d fuck a whole goat for that.”
She went out into the village and the other girls gradually followed, until Taryn was alone with the satyr. After a long, stifling silence, he looked at her.
“If I ask you a question,” he said, “will you swear to answer honestly?”
Surprised, she raised her hand in the boy-scout salute. “I promise.”
He came to her and hunkered down so that their eyes were on a level.
“Are you a god?” he asked quietly.
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She thought she was ready to hear anything, but that one left her absolutely stupefied. “Fella, do I look like a god?”
He contemplated her in silence, beginning at the crown of her head, slowly staring his way down to her feet, and back up again. “A god may look like anything,” was his final judgment.
“Do gods bleed?” she asked, pulling out folds of her stained bodice to show him.
“You are not answering my question.”
“Well, of course I’m not a god!”
“You are Quiabe in human form.”
She burst out laughing. “I am not!”
“Then you are his get.”
“My father is an optometrist in Shoestring, Oregon!”
He rubbed at his chin, regarding her with dubious eyes. At last, he shook his head. “Who else could do what you have done?” he demanded.
“Maybe anyone,” she said. “Who else has tried?” She stood up and so did he. As she stretched out her stiff body and practiced a few hobbling steps, the satyr stood motionless and thoughtful.
“Will you go now?” he asked.
“Not yet.”
“Because you believe our ways shall revert in your absence?”
She started to shake her head and then faced him fully to say, “Because the Pathfinder who brought me let me out in the middle of the woods and I have no idea how to get home.”
He looked about as convinced by this explanation as he’d been by her assertion that she was not a god. “How were you expecting to leave if you had been allowed to deliver your message and depart?”
“I’m expecting someone to come for me,” she said with a rueful smile.
She rubbed her belly. “Someone with as much to lose as I have.”
“Quiabe?”
She rolled her eyes and headed for the door.
“Who, then?” The satyr followed her. “What human is it that would know the location of this village when you do not?”
“No human, as far as I know.” She started to open the door.
He caught it, forced it shut, and leaned over her shoulder. He studied her unhurriedly before finally shaking his head. “If you expect us to heed your words in certain matters, you must stop lying in others.”
“If you really think I’m lying,” she said, “feel free to ignore me entirely.”
She pushed at his chest until he consented to back away, then opened up the door again. This time, he let her go.
Breakfast was fruit, shared out equally while unleavened bread cooked in covered pans over the morning fire. The bread was drizzled with honey and 151
served with a bowl of wine. Again, all portions were equal, even Taryn’s, although she was served with a hell of a glare from Dryleaf, and she traded her wine for plain water.
“It’s very good,” she ventured.
“I send no one away unfed,” he said crossly. “Eat it and go.”
“You’re not interested in hearing what I came to say anymore?”
He bleated under his breath and kicked at the ground, still dark from yesterday’s spat of rain. “Well, what is it, then?”
“You don’t sound very receptive.”
“Human, I’m not.”
“Then I’ll wait.”
“I’ll never be rid of you, demon,” he said, and sat beside the girl he’d named Wave. “You’re a curse, sent to harry me to death for the vengeance I have taken.”
“It’s nice to have one’s work appreciated,” Taryn remarked.
“Eat your food and shut up.” He glanced at Wave. His face did not soften exactly, but it did lose its scowl. He looked away at the next girl. “What is your decision, human?”
“I…I’d like to stay, me. If you meant it.”
“I did.”
“And a name for me?” she asked hopefully. “For only me?”
He considered her, his nostrils slowly flaring. “Argil,” he said at last.
“The clay we shape.”
She smiled, testing it. “Argil. Yeah, I could be clay, all right. Bet I could learn to do it even, if someone showed me how. I’m good with me hands, yeah?”
Seldom kind, Antilles had said, but they were all kind enough not to laugh at her.
All in all, only three women chose to return to the human camp they called Outlook. Although all three tried very hard to convince the rest to leave with them, there was not even a hint of vacillation in any of the others. The only decision that surprised Taryn was that of the arm-scratcher, the woman who had always seemed the most unbalanced, who chose to stay. Under the new name Umbra, she sat close to the fauns, rubbing her fresh bandages, and if she did not look entirely happy, at least she wasn’t hurting herself anymore.
