‘Sleep well.’ His voice startled her, coming from so close beside her and so unexpectedly. She jumped, and then tried to pretend that she had been settling herself.
‘We’ll make an early start.’ She was unwilling to let his remark hang in the silence.
‘Yes.’ Ki lay staring up in the darkness as Vandien watched the wall of the cuddy. Each was unwilling to be the first one to sleep. Ki could hear faintly the crackling of the fire outside the wagon. One of the horses stamped and shifted. The bed began to warm her. Almost warm enough to sleep comfortably. She let her legs stretch and relax. The dark pressed on her eyes. She closed them to shut it out.
She only realized she had slept when she opened her eyes sometime later to darkness. She was not certain what had awakened her. She remained motionless, listening to the stillness, searching for some sound that might have disturbed her. As long as she lay still, she was warm. She knew that to shift might open some small crack in her covering, let the cold air seep in to touch her.
Gradually, Vandien came into her awareness. In sleep they had shifted, gravitating toward each other’s warmth. Vandien had rolled over to face her, his body curling toward her. His head had lolled forward, to rest heavily against her shoulder. It was the tickling of his dark, dense curls against her face that had brought her to wakefulness. She smelled his smells, the acridness of his sweat and the fern-sweetness of his hair, like crushed herbs – so different from her own man’s soft blondness and smell of leather and oil. But the leaning weight of Vandien against her brought him into reality for her, made Vandien a whole person, not one of those shadows with which she had consorted for so long. He pressed against her solidly, breaking into the sealed world she had defended. The world twisted about her, and Vandien, sleeping here beside her, breathing so slowly, was the reality – and Sven became the shadowy being beckoning to her from some other world. Her mind struggled with the tangling images.
In rebellion, she shut her eyes, closed out Vandien’s nearness. Sven was hers. She would not forget Sven and her children. She would never let them go. She groped for their images in her mind, but it was Lars she summoned up. Lars, brother to Sven, looking up at Ki where she perched in the limbs of the twisted old apple tree …
‘I thought I might find you here,’ Lars said.
‘Please go away,’ Ki pleaded softly.
Last night’s ritual had drained her. When she had awakened at last, it had been late in the day. She had dressed in her own dusty garments, feeling angry and displaced. Here was no quiet privacy of washing herself in a stream, of making her solitary cup of tea and facing the day. Here she must dress in dirty clothing and face a room full of people before she could even cleanse herself. Her head ached abominably and her ears still hummed.
Armed with her anger, she had entered the common room. It was empty. Cora’s wooden table, cleared of all traces of last night’s appalling feast, was in its usual place against the wall. The fireplace stood cold and empty. Last night might never have happened.
Ki had been free to go to her wagon and change into her clean brown shift. She had checked her team only to find them grazing contentedly in the pasture. She had crossed the pasture and walked through a narrow belt of trees, to the apple trees and meadow that fronted on the road. She had been sitting in the tree, careful to keep her mind as empty as the road she watched. Now here was Lars, to bring it all up again.
‘I can’t just go away, Ki. I wish I could. It’s time some of it was said, anyway.’
‘Some of what?’ Ki asked angrily. ‘I don’t even understand what happened last night, but somehow everyone holds me responsible for it. Maybe you should start there, by explaining that to me.’
‘Maybe I should,’ Lars conceded wearily. He stood, arms folded, as Ki dropped down from the tree. A little self-consciously, he seated himself on the grass. Ki reluctantly joined him.
‘Last night was not your fault. In a sense, none of it was your fault. You are not one of us – I do not mean that unkindly. But you were not raised in our ways, and you have never chosen to learn them. The Rite of Loosening – did Sven never speak of it to you?’
Ki shook her head. ‘We had our minds upon living, not dying. It was obscene for Sven to die. Obscene!’
Lars nodded. ‘It was. And you showed that obscenity to us, in every detail.’
‘And what should I have showed you?’ Ki asked bitterly. ‘You harped on me about sharing my sorrow. Having tasted the cup, do you turn your face from it?’
‘You do not understand.’ Lars pressed the heels of his hands to his temples, then forced his hands to fold themselves and rest quietly in his lap. ‘A woman raised in our ways would have shown us her man and her children racing away on the horse. She would have shown us, as you did, their wild beauty as they went, hair streaming, voices trailing laughter behind them as they galloped up the hill. Then she would have told us that they never came back from their ride. This is our custom in the case of a violent death; not to reveal it in all its hideousness. And she would have saved for us a cup to end on – a healing, loosening cup. With the last cup she would have given us, as a gift, a memory of them she cherished. A moment, perhaps, of a child seen sleeping by firelight. When my father died, the gift my mother gave us was an image of him as a young man, muscles bared as he raised the first roof beams of our home. It is a gift I cherish still, the glimpse of my father as I would otherwise never have seen him. Thus, it is called the Rite of Loosening, Ki. We let them go. We set our dead free, and in place of mourning we offer to our friends a quiet moment of our happiness with the one who is gone.’
Lars fell silent. Ki cast her eyes about, abashed. She spoke huskily. ‘I suppose that could make it a very beautiful thing, this Rite of yours. But it was never explained to me. All you told me was that I must share his death with you. Do you wonder that I waited so long before I came to you? I will be honest. But for my oath to Sven at our agreement, I would have let my road take me past here.’
‘I know,’ Lars replied gently. ‘If that was all there was to it, Ki, we could all forgive.’
He pulled a long stem of grass up and rolled it thoughtfully between his fingers. The wind touched his hair with gentle fingers, pressed his shirt softly against his chest.
‘Mother feels it most. She is the most devout in the family, the one closest to the old rituals. The ablutions and prayers the rest of us omit or forget, she still observes. The doctrines we have set aside as superstition, she clings to. That is why it was worst for her. You held a cruel mirror to her faith, Ki. You were strong of spirit, stronger than she. When she tried to turn you gently away, to bring your mind back from that long hill, you fought her and kept us there. Some felt last night that it was deliberate; that you wanted to force us to see Harpies as you see them. With hatred, disgust, fear. When we share the liquor of the Rite, we must feel what you feel. You showed it to us, hideously scrambled, now revealed, now hidden, all flavored with your emotions. It took all Cora’s strength to drag us back. You drained her. She keeps her bed still, from weakness. And Rufus,’ he went on, his eyes fixed on the ground. ‘Rufus feels it, not as blasphemy, but as shame, a blot upon the family honor. Those two take it hardest. But none of us will ever recover fully from it.’
Lars shifted uneasily and began to rise. Ki put out a hand to detain him. He looked at her, puzzled.
‘I did not mean for you to see it at all. I let you think the horse had killed them last night when we talked on the wagon. I knew nothing of this drink of yours, this bizarre sharing, as you call it. I never meant for any of you to know the Harpies had done it.’
‘We, who know Harpies, could have faced that if you had told us of it. We would not have demanded to see, to poke our fingers in your sores. You walk too lightly among us, Ki, never leaning, never trusting us to understand. One would almost believe that you doubted our love for you.’
Ki bowed her head to his rebuke. Should she deny the truth of his words? She had wanted