Faery Worlds - Six Complete Novels (2 page)

The two sides began to mock-fight. They punched and kicked and crossed spears, they threw one another and made dramatic vaults over one another’s heads to attack from the rear. The humans began to slaughter the Aelfae. Maybe the dance exaggerated the humans’ prowess, but the Aelfae fled, wailing, across the stage. None escaped the humans.

While they danced, Dindi reproduced tiny imitation movements with her hands and feet—nothing noticeable to anyone watching her—to help her commit the steps to memory so she could practice them on her own later. At first, when Dindi had started observing the dances with the object of learning them, she had missed most of the steps. Every moon, she noticed more.

Lately, as the Tavaedies danced, she had begun to see the most amazing thing. The interactions between the dancers were not random. They formed rows and columns, circles and chevrons, shaped arrangements of dancers. And these patterns glowed. It was as if the dancers created ribbons of living light by their movements, tracing out incandescent symbols with their bodies. The dancers themselves glowed too, in the same color as whichever costume they wore. Even now that Dindi knew what to look for, she couldn’t see it all the time, only if she concentrated.

The human dancers encircled the last of the Aelfae dancers, who fell into an artful pile of corpses.

“The Aelfae are no more, the Aelfae are no more,” victors and corpses droned in a mournful dirge.

The chant hit her with a wave of melancholy. The interlocking patterns of light the dancers had created rippled outward like disturbed water, and when the light hit her, vertigo robbed Dindi of her balance. She stumbled, nearly fell.

For a moment, instead of the Aelfae dancers, she saw beautiful beings with wings like swans, and instead of stylized flips and leaps, she witnessed atrocities she could barely comprehend. Aelfae men forced to eat their own intestines, Aelfae women with bloody thighs pinned down under grunting human males, Aelfae babes clutched by their tiny wings and smashed face-first into walls…. Underlying it all, she sensed not one battle, but decades of skirmish and ambush, truce and betrayal, wearing the Aelfae down, driving them to their final extinction, not just in the Corn Hills, but across all of Faearth.

She blinked, and the double vision cleared. Tears streaked her cheeks. It was not just a dance. Though the events reenacted had happened long ago, they were real. Her people had done this, wiped out the most beautiful and powerful faeries in the world, pushed them all to extinction save one. In all the world, except for the White Lady, who was the last of her kind, the Aelfae were no more.

On stage, the triumphant humans split into three groups. One carried a full basket, another a basket split into two halves, and a third a swan feather. They represented the three clans who now lived in the Corn Hills—the victors in the war with the Aelfae. That was the end of the dance. The Tavaedies formed a line and snaked back down into their hole, to their kiva beneath the square.

“Ooooh, look, it’s the goose from Lost Swan,” said a catty voice. Dindi whirled around.

Kemla and a few of her cousins stood there, young women from Full Basket clan who were always harassing Dindi.

“Crying because when Initiation comes, you won’t be invited to become a Tavaedi like me?” Kemla taunted. She always wore as much scarlet as a non-Tavaedi could get away with, and had arranged cardinal feathers in her breast bands to show off her cleavage.

Hastily, Dindi wiped her face. “You don’t know that.”

“It’ll never happen, goat-legs,” snickered Kemla. “No one in your scraggly clan has ever been chosen as a Tavaedi. The closest Lost Swan clanholders come to dancing magic is to go mad and run off with the fae.”

The Full Basket girls laughed. Dindi flushed.

“Goat-legs! Goat-legs!” The girls formed a circle and shoved Dindi back and forth, finally pushing her into the dust. They laughed and flounced away.

The dust tasted like dung. They were right. No one from Lost Swan Clan had ever passed the test given during the year children disappeared for Initiation rites. She could be taken for Initiation any day now, Dindi thought. And all omens indicated she’d fail miserably. Like her mother. And her grandmother. And every single person in her whole clan since the days of the Lost Swan Clan’s great-mother.

Her basket had fallen. A tiny meow and skritching came from inside. She pulled her kitten out of the basket. His fur stood on end and he looked outraged. She’d rescued the kitten from a grolwuf, a cat-eating goblin, who had already devoured mama cat and the other kits. The little thing had been snow white, eyes sticky shut, but since then his ears, nose, paws and tail had darkened to black, as if he’d pranced in mud, so she’d named him Puddlepaws. She petted and kissed him until his fur settled and he purred to let her know the upset basket was forgiven.

The purring kitten on her shoulder and the beauty of the day rinsed away her gloom on the walk home. Rolling green hills stretched out in every direction under a perfect blue sky marked only with the V of migrating swans. Everything smelled fresh. The corn was shoulder high, while inside the pale green husks, the kernels flushed deeper gold with each passing day. Innumerable clouds of tiny willawisps hazed the fields like sparkling mists. Maize sprites clambered nimbly to the tips of the straight-backed stalks to wave at Dindi when she brushed by them. Pixies of every color fluttered on luminous wings around her head, making her dizzy. Puddlepaws batted at them.

“Wait up, Dindi,” called her cousin, Hadi, puffing behind her. “Aunt Sullana asked me to find you.” He posed with his spear, in an attempt to look stern. Unseen by Hadi, a pixie banged the butt of Hadi’s dangling spear on his knee.

“Ow.” He dropped the spear and hopped about on one foot. He glowered suspiciously at his spear when he picked it up, and then at Dindi. “There aren’t any fae around, are there?”

“Hardly any,” Dindi assured him.

The pixies laughed as he plowed right past them without seeing them. Most people could not see the fae. Kittens could. Puddlepaws leaped from her shoulder, trying to catch a pixie, missed, of course, and flipped in the air before landing in the dirt.

“I’m not a wayward goat,” said Dindi. “I don’t need herding.”

“I’m older than you and I’m the closest you have to a brother, so yes, I am your keeper,” he said, brandishing his spear. “Once I pass Initiation, and I am a Man, my duty will be to protect your honor from all who threaten it—”

The mischievous purple pixie crouched at his feet, fiddling with the laces to his legwals. While Dindi tried to guess what the fae was up to, the pixie untied two pairs of laces on either of Hadi’s legs, then retied the wrong strings together. Meanwhile, another pixie buzzed around his ear to distract him. Though Hadi couldn’t see the fae, and couldn’t make out the words, he could hear the hum of pixie voices.

“You little fiends!” Hadi waved his spear. “I know you’re here somewhere! I’ll get you!”

“Hadi, don’t…!”

When Hadi tried to lunge, he tripped because his calves were tied together. He fell face first into the moist soil.

“You mucky faeries!” He pounded the mud where he’d fallen. The pixies cheered and jumped up and down on his back while congratulating each other on their victory over the foe. Puddlepaws pounced on the pixie. Very proud of himself, he held the pixie by the back of its little tunic and brought it to Dindi.

“Bad kitty! Bad kitty!” cried the pixie.

Dindi scooped up the kitten, freed the pixie, and shouted back over her shoulder, as she took off down the row of maize, “I’ll just go on ahead.”

“Dindi! You are not to leave my sight!” He squirmed in the mud but only managed to dig himself into a shallow trench. “Dindi! Dindi, get back here this instant! I’m in charge of you!”

She just laughed. The empty basket bounced on her back as she ran. The fae followed Dindi in a cloud.

“Come dance with us! Come dance with us!” they urged in a babble of flute voices.

“I can’t this afternoon, friends,” Dindi apologized. “I have to gather soap roots, tallow and ash to make soap and pick and juice blueberries, all by middle meal.”

A purple pixie fragile as a butterfly, landed on Dindi’s shoulder. She twined her tiny lavender hands in Dindi’s black hair.

“Chores are boring, Dindi,” she said.

“That’s why they call them chores.”

“Don’t let those humans tire you out, Dindi,” chided a green pixie. He landed on Dindi’s other shoulder. A red shoved him off and claimed the shoulder for his own. That enraged the purple, who raced over Dindi’s nose to attack the red pixie. All this activity excited Puddlepaws, who squirmed in Dindi’s arms. She kept her grip firm on the furry pixie-hunting predator.

“Do you mind?” Dindi said. “It’s very difficult to walk when you’re using me as a battleground.”

“Then come dance with us!”

“Yes, yes!” agreed a yellow dandelion sprite. He parted the corn stalks to skip at Dindi’s feet. “You dance with us and in exchange, we’ll do your chores for you.”

“Mm. Just like you milked the bull for me and winnowed the sugar out of the gravel for me, and wove a sitting mat I was to give to Uncle Lubo out of prickly pear thorns?”

“Friends,” the green pixie said to the others, “anyone would think she wasn’t grateful for all our help.”

“Impossible.” The purple one giggled. “She just can can’t express herself because she’s so overwhelmed with joy that with her chores out of the way she is now free to dance with us.”

Dindi frowned.

“Are you sick, Dindi?” asked the orange.

“We won’t do your chores for you anymore if you stop dancing with us,” blustered the yellow sprite.

That would be a big loss. “Soon, I might not be dancing with you anymore at all. If I fail the test to become a Tavaedi, I must stop dancing.”

The fae were stunned silent for a moment. Then they all began to shout at Dindi at once.

“Enough!” cried Dindi, making the Dispel hand-sign in earnest this time. The clouds of willawisps scattered, the pixies were flung away as if by gusts of heavy wind, and the sprites all went rolling like tumbling stones. Corn stalks were flattened around Dindi in a perfect circle three yards out.

From the perimeter of the circle of dispellation, the fae peered at her with hurt expressions.

“I’m sorry,” Dindi said. “You know I don’t want to abandon you.”

The fae crept back towards her until at last they huddled as close as before, murmuring her name.

“Uhm.” She was abashed. “Could you help me fix the corn?”

“Hurrah! She will dance with us!” squealed the purple pixie.

What harm would it do to share one more teensy weensy dance with her friends? After all, who knew when Initiation might come? She might never have another chance. She would sip one last taste of wild faerie magic. She shrugged away the basket and let Puddlepaws down in the grass. Dindi let the fae lead her into their circle.

The pixies began to fly in circles over the ruined crops. The cob-sized corn sprites whose stalks she’d knocked over joined in next. Willawisps were drawn to all the activity. They all began to twirl and shuffle and skip and jump in a ring around and around, Dindi dancing right along with them. As the corn stalks began to right themselves, the dancers changed the pattern and started to weave in and out of the stalks. Wild swirls of color trailed in the wake of all the fae dancers, strange and marvelous.

Dindi laughed with exhilaration despite herself, abandoning herself to whatever moves her body wanted to make. The corn was upright again. If anything, it was greener and more fragrant than before. Dindi slowed down, signaling the fae to stop too. They refused to take the hint. They kept whirling.

She danced alongside them, but she knew it was their magic at work. If she didn’t stop them from getting carried away, they would continue dancing and possibly start to do more damage than good. She had seen them summon storms, uproot trees, start geysers from bare rocks. It was one reason she normally only danced with them out on the heath, far past the cultivated fields. Mama had warned her never to let other humans see her play with the fae.

The swarm of whirling faery dancers moved up the mountain, without ever missing a step. Dindi moved with them, keeping up easily with their improvised patterns of skips, turns, kicks and leaps. Soon they emerged onto a patch of flat heath with a view of the whole valley below. The sky seemed to pull back to give them more room.

She spread her arms and drew in a drought of the fresh air. Then she closed her eyes and envisioned again the shinning swirls of light patterns created by the Taevaedis on Barter Day. In her mind, she recreated the role of every single dancer. What steps had each player in the pattern made? One by one, she danced each person’s role as best she could remember it. First, she played the ‘human’ parts. Then, saving and savoring them for the end, she played the Aelfae parts. But when she came to the finale, when the last Aelfae in the dance was to fall and die, she decided to change the ending. Instead, she leaped up again, spread her imaginary wings behind her and vaulted across the field in a full twisting double back leap.

The fae laughed in glee. They much preferred her new dance to the dance of the Tavaedies. Satisfied now that she had run through all the steps of all the dancers in yesterday’s dance, Dindi finally abandoned herself to free-form dancing. That delighted the fae even more.

The low hum of faerie voices, the sparkle of pixie wings and her own pounding blood wrapped Dindi in a trance of pure feeling. Movement inside her itched to spill out.

A pixie curled a small hand around Dindi’s ear, whispering, “You never have to go back, Dindi. You could dance with us forever and ever…”

Their voices hummed hypnotically, enticing her forward step by step. The lullaby lure of the faery ring shimmered all around her, a mixture of light and song. The fae clasped hands together, closing the circle about her. A chain of pixies undulated in the air, the sprites linked up, and then, in the last gap in the circle, a heron-winged kinnara soared toward the dancers to close the circle. “Come dance with us, Dindi. Come dance with us forever…”