Page 128 of The Boy Bride

“I should think so.”

Otoni set her daughter down on the path. “Nomi, you walk for a bit—you’re getting too heavy for me.”

“My legs are tired,” the little girl complained, holding up her arms. “I wanna be carried.”

“Let me carry her for a bit,” Lill suggested. He’d never picked up a child before, but the girl was really very small. And this seemed to be a day when he was doing a lot of things for the first time.

* * *

Vanu stood a moment on the trail watching Lill walk away with Otoni, carrying her daughter piggyback. He’d forgotten the instructions he’d just given out. He felt off-balance again, as if Lill had taken some piece of his self that he needed to stay upright.

Tirtu would be alarmed if he knew. He’d thought Vanu needed drink and swordplay to be himself, but Vanu had just killed three men in the forest, and it had made him feel sicker than the bottle of wine he’d drunk last night.

Tirtu was looking a little unwell himself, Vanu noticed. They went back among the trees and found the bodies of the men who had set fire to Otoni’s house. They began dragging them back out to the trail.

“Been a while since we’ve done anything like this, hey, my lord?” Tirtu remarked. He didn’t sound as though he’d missed it.

“Lord Vanu!” Halza hissed suddenly.

He was deep in the undergrowth, tugging half-heartedly at one of the bodies, and Vanu had been just about to go back to take over. He heaved the man he’d been dragging out onto the trail and strode angrily back into the forest.

Halza was pointing toward the clearing, where the roof of Otoni’s house had collapsed, as she’d predicted, inside the stone circle of the house walls. In the light of the fire, Vanu saw several new figures, men and women, entering the clearing from another path through the trees. Padunu, busy pulling an arrow out of a tree, didn’t see them until they had seen him.

“Who are you?” one of the newcomers demanded.

“What happened here?” asked another, pointing at the burning house.

“Should we go to his aid?” Halza whispered.

Vanu shook his head. “They know him here.”

They did know him, and that was the problem.

“That’s Shaman Padunu!” one of the women said before Padunu could identify himself.

“You are correct,” said Padunu, as if they were meeting on the village square in broad daylight instead of in the dark after a raid, in front of a burning house.

“Where is Otoni, Shaman? We heard someone say her house was on fire. Is she safe?”

“I have not seen her. I could not say, unfortunately.”

“What are you doing with those arrows?” a man asked suspiciously.

“Weren’t you Arakhu Vinu’s hearthman at one time, Shaman?”

“Yes, he was, wasn’t he!” a woman cried shrilly. “He’s with the raiders!”

“I assure you I was never the hearthman of Arakhu Vinu!” Padunu pitched his voice to carry above all the others, the way he did. “On the contrary⁠—”

“No, I remember it clearly!” The woman with the shrill voice was more than a match for him. “He was Vinu’s household shaman on Korokhura Peak!”

“I most assuredly was, but if you think that means⁠—”

“Did you hear that? He said he was—he admitted it!”

Vanu buried his face in his hands. The crowd forgot all about looking for Otoni and seized Padunu—gingerly, because they were afraid to hurt a shaman—to haul him back to the village. He protested but did not struggle, and since he had already admitted that he had been Arakhu’s man, nobody was listening to the rest of it. Any minute he would begin explaining how he had accidentally fucked Arakhu’s wife, as if that was proof of his innocence.

“We have to go after him!” Halza hissed.