Free Heir of Scars I: Parts 1-8 by Jacob Falling Page A

dared. “And… what is it that I saw?”
    “Tainábe?” Shísha answered. “You saw what some of us see, when we are most deeply aware, but most do not believe. You saw what I see in almost every moment.”
    Adria stilled her impatience. She was meant to think upon this. And still… she was meant to ask. It was almost a game sometimes, with Shísha. But then Shíshawould probably say that games had a purpose as well. Adria could say it herself, for she had long played the game of kings.
    So Adria closed her eyes, and she breathed, and she welcomed the careless memory. She felt the cold, the moonlight, the time of waiting before the hesitation. The blur gray motion, and before, at the edge of her notice, a figure. A figure, faceless, hooded and robed. A man. Watching .
    Watching until watched. And then…
    “You see what I see,” Adria whispered. “You see one of… us, but not one of us.”
    “I see those who are meant to change this world, and those who are meant to watch. I see those who choose their path, and those who wait for the hunted to come to them. And I see and know that we are not the only ghosts who walk the Hei-land.”
    Shísha said the Aeman name with a strange emphasis on each syllable — the way it was once spoken, Adria realized, her history lessons from the Sisterhood returning — the way only those now dead had spoken it.
    This, as much as anything, sent a chill through Adria. Shíshawas no nursemaid, full of superstition. Her words did not need the frailty of a child’s fears to give them weight. And there was a weight in Adria’s stomach, then. The anxious uneasiness she felt when speaking of forbidden things, when frightened to turn a corner in a strange deep corridor of her childhood.
    “There is one thing more I would teach you,” Shísha said. “One think I have seen, but may not have the chance to tell you again.”
    Adria opened her eyes.
    “There are five great rites among our people, taught to us long ago by the White Wolf Woman,” Shíshacontinued. “These you know.”
    Adria nodded patiently, immediately feeling a little ridiculous for it.
    Shísha continued, “There was once a sixth.”
    “Yes,” Adria said. “The Sun Dance.”
    Shíshanodded, poking at the fire a little more. “We… are a traditional people. But traditions are not… laws, like the Aeman have. They are not written down, as the prayers of your Sisterhood. The Aesidhe traditions live as the People live, and as the People change, so must our traditions. We choose not to honor the Sun Dance any longer, because we remember the sacrifice of its last dance. But there is an emptiness where this dance once filled our people’s lives. Our Hunters feel it most, for it was their way to show their sacrifice to the People.”
    “ I do not understand , Lichushegi,” Adria shook her head. She understood the words, but not the deeper meaning, not the relevance.
    “Many were lost to us that day. It is what made us who we are now. And many have been lost since, no matter the strength and the speed of our Hunters, our Runners. And again we must change. We may retreat, but this does not mean we must be destroyed. And what we have lost must be returned.”
    “The Sun Dance,” Adria nodded, though still she did not understand. “The Fire Heart. The Black Tree.”
    “The Sun Dance is no more,” Shísha shook her head. “But soon we will make a new Ceremonial for the Hunters, a new dance. It will be a dance of the dead, a Ghost Dance, when those who have left us will return, and no King and no army can strike them down. When the ghosts dance, our fallen will walk again, and our enemy will fail against us.”
    Adria sat a moment in silence. She had never heard such a thing before… such an open prophecy from Shísha, or any other Mechushegiya. It sounded more akin to Taber’s mystic revelations than anything of the Aesidhe. In spite of this strangeness, or perhaps because of it, Adria said, simply and honestly,