Within minutes, it was over.
This time.
She couldn’t afford to let her people stop to catch their breath. “Mandy,” she grabbed the nearest crew chief she could find, “pull together a crew and get to work on these ruined forms. Tear this section down and rebuild it, stat. I want every able-bodied adult we’ve got left pouring this section within the hour.”
“But—” Mandy sputtered, face grey with exhaustion. “That won’t leave anyone to man the guns!”
“Get the kids out here,” Ginger said grimly. “Any child big enough to lift a rifle. Put ’em on top of the poured sections to either side of this gap, but get ’em armed and get ’em in position.” She picked up a rifle from Jeremy Wilson’s bloodied fingers, trying desperately not to look at the ghastly red ruin where the top of his head had been, and thrust the weapon into Tommy’s hands—then turned a glare on Mandy’s shocked expression. “You don’t like it? Got any better ideas? I didn’t think so. Move, dammit!”
It was only in her heart—cold as the howling sleet beating against her face—that Ginger wept.
Chapter Three
The wind was a wild and howling moan above the crackle of the Council fire. The bone-shivering sound of the storm, one of the murderous, early-season blizzards that roared up from the distant oceans and took two hands of days to blow themselves out again, matched the howl in Chilaili’s soul. The storm raging through Chilaili was born of anger and frustration, a visible cloud as violent as the blizzard outside. The focus of Chilaili’s rage stood glowering on the far side of the Council fire, a tall and gracile male whose stubbornness and refusal to see reason formed a deadly omen of things to come, of disasters the ruling Grandmothers must be made to recognize.
“We cannot make war against the humans,” Chilaili said again, forcefully. “We have been more fortunate than you can possibly understand that this storm,” she gestured toward the entrance to the Council cavern, blocked by thick, woven mats that kept the heat inside, but did very little to keep out the shriek of the wind, “has kept us locked in our winter nest. Let the other clans rush to destruction, if they so choose, but do not send our mates and our sons to battle against the humans. War against them will bring nothing but the death of Icewing Clan. It is stupid to fight them—stupid and unnecessary.”
Across the Council fire, the clan’s akule met Chilaili’s gaze with a blaze of anger. Kestejoo was an outsider, even after twenty winters in Icewing Clan. He had come to them from Snowclaw Clan, so smitten by the gloriously sensual Zaltana, he had forsaken his own birth clan for love of her. Their meeting was still the stuff of legend, told to hatchlings around the winter hearth fires.
At his shoulder stood another male, Yiska, the clan’s war leader. Taller by a full head than Kestejoo, Yiska was nearly two heads taller than Chilaili, and she was not the smallest of the huntresses. Yiska’s eyes, unlike Kestejoo’s, did not hold a glint of anger. They reflected instead the same deep thoughtfulness that had marked his many years as viho, leading them again and again to successful battle.
Kestejoo lifted his hands in a frustrated gesture, bringing Chilaili’s attention back to the akule. “How can you say this war is not necessary? The Ones Above demand it. Therefore it is utterly necessary. I have deep respect for your knowledge, your insights as clan katori, but in this matter, there is no room for theorizing. No place for a healer’s guesswork. Our creators have ordered it, so it must be done.”
Chilaili, whose mothers before her had all been katori, healing the sick and dancing the sacred rites to heal the wounded soul—and whose only daughter, Sooleawa, would be katori after her, if they survived so long—reached desperately for her patience. “There is wisdom in your words, but we have far more to consider than orders from the Oracle. Perhaps He-Who-Looks-Up has been staring at the stars so long, he has forgotten to look at the faces of those to whom he speaks the Oracle’s words? Look at our people, akule,” she gestured around the Council cavern, “look at the tiny handful of us, barely three hundred in all, and tell me again how necessary it is to send our sons and our mates into battle with creatures who have never meant us any harm.”
A stir ran through the assembled clan, born of surprise and uncertainty that flew like wind-driven snow. The ancient Anevay, ten times a Great-Grandmother and the eldest member of the ruling Council, spoke from her seat near Chilaili’s right hand. “How can you say this with such certainty, katori, when none of us has ever spoken with one of these newcomers, to judge such matters?”
Chilaili drew breath to speak—and the words stuck in her craw like a long and pointed urka thorn, tearing at her constricted throat. She glanced into her daughter’s eyes, caught Sooleawa’s wide and frightened gaze . . . and time spun crazily, tilting and plunging her into a night that had changed them both, forever, a night that had challenged things they had long believed. Things they could not yet bring themselves to say aloud, except to one another, in the strictest privacy—and always carefully away from the nest.
On that fateful night, she and her daughter had left the clan’s migrational summer nest for a night-hunt, Sooleawa’s first, the Blooding Hunt every young female was required to make under the supervision of her Mother—or guardian, if a girl’s Mother had died. The multiple moons soared across the sky like a scattered and distant flock of birds, casting crazy, crisscrossed shadows that tricked the eye, but Chilaili and Sooleawa had little trouble seeing the undergrowth beyond their carefully concealed summer nest. Chilaili always hunted by night—and so would Sooleawa, once Blooded. Most of the clan’s huntresses preferred the day-stalk, but night was the time, the realm in which Chilaili’s bloodline excelled. The Ones Above had made them that way, an experiment, so her Grandmothers had said, to see if a fiercesome dayhunter could be made to rule the night, as well.
The Ones Above had wrought well in that much, at least, creating Chilaili’s foremothers. When the daystar vanished beneath the rim of the world, only Chilaili’s bloodline—able to see far better in the darkness than any other bloodline—dared hunt the broken, fissured terrain of their clan’s home range. Now it was her only daughter’s turn to learn the night-stalk—and Chilaili tasted worry the moment they left the nest, armed with nothing but their own claws, as custom demanded. The empty sheath at her belt, its beautiful knife left in the hut she and her daughter shared, left Chilaili feeling naked, vulnerable, afraid. The omens had been poor all day, yet the Blooding Hunt was always performed—by clan law—on the fifteenth anniversary of a young girl’s hatching, never sooner and never later.
To fail to make at least an attempt to hunt, regardless of how ill or injured a girl might be, was to be shunned, to become One Who Never Hunted, with no say in the clan’s Councils and no hope of breeding, ever. Chilaili had seen Mothers carry daughters dying of fever into the deep forests of their clan’s home range to give their daughters the honored status of Huntress, without which even a dying girl’s sisters would be sullied and overlooked when the time for breeding came.
“What’s wrong, Honored Mother?” Sooleawa asked, when Chilaili jumped at shadows for perhaps the hundredth time since leaving the nest.
“I cannot say for sure,” Chilaili muttered, staring narrow-eyed into the moonlit shadows. “But I am uneasy, daughter, and mistrust the omens. Keep your wits sharp and your eyesight keen, precious one, for there is something wrong about this night.”
Not the best words to give a nervous young candidate, yet Chilaili could not lie to the aspiring huntress she had so lovingly raised. Better to be blunt and ensure her child would be doubly vigilant, than to remain silent and court utter disaster. Sooleawa considered the warning for a long moment, then crouched down and broke off a young tree with a wrenching snap and stripped away long, thin needles and branches. Sticky, resinous sap smeared her claws, prompting a grimace that left Chilaili hiding a smile. Sooleawa used the sharp edges of her beak to scrape one end to a point, spitting and wiping her beak with one arm as the pungent taste of the sap drew another grimace. Her efforts left Sooleawa with a sturdy pole as thick as a foot-talon at its base. The crude spear was not the best weapon, true, but serviceable for the task.
Chilaili hummed approval at her daughter’s decision to arm herself immediately upon hearing her mother’s concerns. If the ancestors looked favorably upon her, Sooleawa would become a fine huntress. They traveled east, Sooleawa casting ahead for signs of prey, trying to find the spoor of some unlucky creature she could kill and carry home. They were perhaps six hours’ distance from the nest when her daughter found the faint trail left by a wurpa stag—good eating, with a prized pelt, a high-status kill. They set out on the wurpa’s trail, Sooleawa leading.