Chapter Twenty-nine

FIRST JUDGMENT

“Kill him!” wheedles a high, tinny voice. “Now, while you have the chance!”

“But it won’t be any fun,” comes the petulant reply. “He’s not even wearing his hook.”

I cannot say I am roused from sleep, although I have not been conscious until this moment. Not the kind of friendly oblivion found in the black drops, but simply the absence of everything—thought, feeling, senses. Even now, my senses are swaddled in wool; I see only shadows, can scarcely feel the weight of my body, yet these urgent words filter into my ears.

“Give him a sword, then,” says the higher voice.

“You don’t understand, Kes,” Pan rebukes his fairy. “It still wouldn’t be fair. Anyway, I want them both. And now I’ll get them both!”

A third voice intrudes, small and boyish. My senses dull again to their mumbled exchange, until I hear Pan cry, “The chief? Bring him to me!”

Some little commotion follows this command, and I make an effort to see. A narrow slit of light appears before me; I can open my eyes a little, yet every other part of me remains immobile. I see Pan’s bed in his underground chamber, his lantern, his carpet of leaves, all viewed from the same perspective I recall from when I stood beside Stella and broke her enchantment. That must be where I am now.

Pan perches cross-legged on the edge of his bed, a tiny light at his shoulder. Before him, Eagle Heart is lowering himself to the surface of multi-colored leaves, crossing his legs beneath him. They have scarcely exchanged pleasantries before the boy exults, “Look what I’ve got!” and gestures toward me.

The chief spares me the smallest glance, nods his head at Pan. “That is well, Little Brother. You are a fine warrior. My people will sing another song of praise for you.”

Pan preens like a little gamecock, glad to take credit for a capture in which he played no part at all.

“I come to you as a brother warrior, to claim the right of First Judgment over this prisoner,” Eagle Heart goes on smoothly.

Pan frowns. “What do you mean?”

“The clothing he wears belongs to another brave. And he broke an oath he swore to me in parley.”

Does the chief insinuate that I stole these tribal clothes? Although I suppose what he says is the literal truth. As to the crime of breaking my oath, that is true in every sense. I did exactly what I swore I would not, raise an arm against a boy, and I can only imagine what punishment the chief will exact. Yet I can’t be sorry for what I did, if it freed Stella from the boy.

“Didn’t you capture her?” Pan is interrogating his visitor, breaking into my thoughts.

“No, Little Brother,” says the chief. “But if it were possible for the woman, or the Captain, to leave the Dreaming Place, would they not have done so by now?”

The fairy light at Pan’s shoulder seems to pulse more brightly at this observation, even as Pan himself relaxes back into smug omnipotence. Stella has eluded them all; might she not yet discover the way out? Maybe Piper will help her. If Stella’s escape is still possible, I will gladly face any consequences.

“I claim the right of First Judgment,” Eagle Heart is explaining to the boy. “The prisoner must answer for the wrongs done to my people before he came here. He must be brought before the tribal elders, who will render their judgment.”

Pan is not so sure, frowning at the chief, and at me.

“Night is coming,” says Eagle Heart. “You and your warriors will soon be asleep. You have my word the sentence will be passed and carried out by the morning.”

The boy perks up at this. “What sort of sentence?” he asks eagerly. I hear the piping staccato of his imp at his ear. “The anthill torture? The sweat box? What about hanging by his heels,” Pan goes on, in a rapture of anticipation.

“Our elders will decide what is just,” the chief replies.

“You promise I’ll get him back in the morning?”

“Our council will be concluded by then,” Eagle Heart agrees.

I am bound like a monstrous papoose, arms roped to my sides, but at least I am free of fairy magic. We sit together in prickly silence, Eagle Heart and myself, in the middle of a long canoe paddled by a robust complement of braves fore and aft. The stream we navigate is in the wood; the density of forest creates premature dark, but the sky is still faintly blue beyond the trees. An icy moon is already on the rise, winking at us now and then through the tree trunks. Disoriented still from my enchantment, it’s not until I sense the urgency in the current, hear the rushing of rapids and a pattering of falls up ahead, that I realize we are not going back to the tribal village.

We debark at the brink of a ravine, where the stream plunges over into falls. We’ve not gone north to Indian Territory, but south to where the wood gives way to the Terraces. Two braves and Eagle Heart shepherd me down a well-worn trail to the bottom of the ravine, while the others heft the canoe upside down on their shoulders and follow us down. Below the falls, the stream widens into a swift, deep channel that speeds along like a snake between high rockface on either side, now cloaked in purple shadows. The inland waterway, hidden from me for two hundred years.

If they reveal it to me now, they must expect to have little to fear from me in the future. I try not to dwell on what sorts of disabling punishments they might have in mind, as we resume our canoe expedition through the heart of the Terraces.

“You must learn what they mean to each other, Captain, swearing an oath and keeping it,” Eagle Heart speaks to me at last.

Now we come to the meat of the matter. I grit my teeth and nod.

“Every action has a result, each small thing you do ripples out like water in a lake to touch the entire circle of life,” the chief goes on, his narrow eyes shadowed, his expression severe. “If your hook had been in place when you lashed out at that boy, the Dreaming Place would no longer be. One innocent life lost and all is lost. All who live here would be dead or displaced, the world’s children robbed of their refuge, all for one instant of rage. I thought you understood that.”

I don’t ask how he knows what went on in Pan’s lair. My captivity alone is testament to my broken oath, or else Kes could never have wielded her magic against me. Nor do I whine that I acted in defense of Stella. There were no conditions on my oath when I swore it.

“It was wrong of me to forswear my oath,” I agree, my voice rusty from disuse. “I betrayed the trust you placed in me, and put your alliance with the boy at risk, for which I am sorry.” Here, I take a leaf from the chief’s own book; my apology is literally true, and sincere, yet I do not lie and claim to regret the action that spared Stella’s life.

Eagle Heart continues to peer at me for a while, perhaps calculating the degree of my guilt. The dipping paddles scarcely splash in the water, and there’s naught to hear but the calling and rustling of distant birds as we speed along. Then the chief nods one time, whether in acceptance of my apology or in satisfaction that I’ve sealed my doom, I know not.

The transparent moon rises high above the ravine as we come at last to a tunnel of brush, ferns and dense, wild shrubbery. The braves paddle through it in darkness for a while, then our canoe emerges into a placid channel between wide banks of tropical foliage. Green jungle screens our progress now; the high cliffs of the Terraces are behind us. We warp round a bend and I sense the movement of deep water up ahead, by which I know the Mysterious River is nearby. But we glide into a sheltered little cove of steaming jungle at the base of some small land mass. I can’t make out much in the shadows, but I hear more water, burbling to a different rhythm, out beyond this jungle.

“The Fork of Three Rivers,” says Eagle Heart. And the braves make fast the canoe and herd me out upon the bank.

A banana leaf the size of a flying jib near smacks me in the face as we pick our way through verdurous jungle, the chief in the lead before me, a brave or two bringing up the rear. We proceed along a mossy track so narrow and hidden amid the riotous vegetation, it would try the ingenuity of the hardiest snake to follow it. An inconvenient place to hold a trial, it occurs to me. Unless the elders have already rendered their judgment, and the chief means to proceed directly to the punishment phase. Insects whirr, distant animals rumble and squawk. Up ahead, the chief sweeps aside a long, arching palm frond, agitating a covey of blue dragonflies, before we emerge into a little clearing encircled by jungle plants, giant green leaves, towers of pink and purple orchids, under a canopy of lacy ferns. In its center stands a great mound covered in buckskin hides, taller than a man. Aboriginal designs are burned into the hides, moons and stars and others too arcane to decipher.

So it’s to be the sweat torture. Or perhaps they mean to hang me up like a side of beef in a smokehouse. Whatever they do, there will still be enough of me left for the boy to abuse in the morning. Such is the price of rashness, and I will pay it, so long as Stella is free.

Eagle Heart draws aside the tent flap and nods at me to join him. “Consider what you have done,” he tells me. “Consider what you must do.”

He motions me inside, but instead of following me into the dim interior, he secures the flap closed again behind me. By nothing so obvious as sound, but rather a deepening of the silence outside, I know that he and his men have melted away.

In the dusky gloom inside, I spy a shallow kind of pit in the center of a circular dirt floor. Rounded shapes that might be baskets or gourds line the perimeter, I can smell their spicy contents. And something moves in the shadows at the far side of the pit, a pale figure, not the buffalo-horned shaman nor any of the martial braves. It’s a woman, working sticks together at the edge of the cold pit.

“A girl of five can do this in the tribes,” Stella murmurs.