Free The Unfinished Song: Taboo by Tara Maya Page A

glory and honor, you don’t care who gets hurt or abandoned while you rush off to prove your manhood by goring out some other man’s belly. I’m sure you will try to escape, maybe take a hostage, maybe kill a few people before you’re killed in turn. Well, you can have your wish and your glorious death, but I’m not going to let you near my daughters on your way to Obsidian Mountain. I’ll give you back to Hertio first thing in the morning.”
    She threw herself on her bed, back to him. “By the sun, I hate men.”
    The domestic vignette had killed his desire, but awakened in him a longing subtler and more painful. He cursed her silently for making him hear his daughter’s voice again, in the echoes of Gwenika’s innocent babble. Meira would be Gwenika’s age, if she had lived . Encouraged by the faery who had taken Meira’s place in his life, he had unthinkingly accepted his daughter as eternally eight. But mortals grew and changed. His fae doppelganger of a daughter could never grow into an Initiate, a bride or the mother of his grandchildren. In Gwenika, he had a glimpse of what might have been, and the knife wound of grief twisted afresh.
    The fire popped and grumbled. The roasting tubers were beginning to smell delicious, tormenting his empty stomach. Neither of them spoke. Rthan twisted against the ropes to watch Brena’s back. Her tunic fell loosely, revealing the raw scars where he had whipped her.
    “Brena.” He had never called her by name before. She didn’t turn around, but he knew from the tension in her back she heard him. “I would never hurt you or your children. Not even to escape.”
    “Ha,” she said dully, not moving. “Once you tried to escape, your good intentions would wash away downstream.”
    “I can promise not to attempt escape when you or your daughters are around,” he said. “Then you could not be in danger of being hostages or mortalities.”
    She snorted.
    The crackling fire filled another pause. “But I can’t give my allegiance to your people or your fae. I can’t.”
    Brena sat up. She met his eyes with a question and he nodded.
    “Then I will hold you to that,” she said. She rose from the bed and untied him, shoving the legwals at him. “For mercy’s sake, dress yourself.”
    She pointed to the tubers she’d placed in the fire earlier. Their skins now crackled toasty and crisp. “Your dinner.” She pointed to a reed mat on the floor on the far side of the hut from her bed. “Your bed.”
    Rthan picked the tubers out of the fire, tossed them from palm to palm until they cooled, then crunched into his meal with the gusto of a starved man. He didn’t thank her for her decency, which he hardly deserved. She went back to bed without wishing him good night.
    Despite his exhaustion, he lay awake on his mat, watching the shadows cast on the domed ceiling by the dying embers. His people would attack again.
    And when Yellow Bear fell, what would happen to Brena and her daughters?
Kavio
     
    Gold clinked on Kavio’s costume for the ritual.
    The day a man rema de himself deserved this perfect sky, bluer than a faery’s eye, scented with cut grass and loam. The song of women past the rise, winnowing the riverbed for gold, gave melody and harmony to match the song he kept inside. Stamping feet of lithe young men, bent each beneath his pack of dirt and rock, drummed the hill, up and down, as far as the quarry and back.
    Kavio knelt, drank air like wine, and said his oath before Hertio, his new War Chief. That was all; when done, Kavio rose again. He stood side by side with the older man and watched men work, hundreds of ants on the Unfinished Tor.
    Hertio clapped him on the back. “Each clan pledged to me sends me ten men but no more, sometimes two but not less , for one moon only, once a year. With these paltry few I must make do. Imagine if I had twice as many for twice as long, or every man in every clan for every moon, every season. What mountains could I not raise