Page 36 of Wind Rider

“I am sorry. I did not mean to—”

Dove raised her slender hand to silence Lily. “Purposefully being quiet about details of our lives before we joined these good people is the same as a lie, Lily. I will not do that.” Dove turned her face toward Mari. “Lily calls me mistress because she served me as my Attendant in the Temple of the Reaper God. I was the God’s oracle.”

“Which god is the Reaper? That creature with the antlers you call Death?” Nik asked.

“No and yes. Before the God of Death manifested within our Champion, Dead Eye, our god was silent.” Dove’s sightless face turned toward Lily. “Forgive me for what I must say now, but I am sworn to truthfulness, and even were I not it is past time that I was honest with you.”

Lily blinked several times, looking shocked. “Forgive you? I do not understand.”

“You will, my friend. I just hope you will allow me to call you friend after this.” Dove drew a deep breath and bowed her head, as if speaking a prayer to a fallen god. “Until Lily and I escaped I had never been outside the Temple of our God. I was brought there as a newborn to sacrifice to the Reaper God, but the Watchers—the old women who were believed to hear our God’s words and speak for Her—decided that I had been touched by the Reaper. They spared me. I learned quickly that I had to be of value to the Watchers or they would change their minds and sacrifice me—or worse: banish me from the Temple alone to starve to death. So, from the time I was a child I pretended to hear the voice of our God.”

Lily gasped, but covered her mouth quickly. Dove nodded, acknowledging her friend’s shock. She wiped a trembling hand across her face, and then continued.

“But the truth our People do not know is that all of the Watchers pretended. They were all false oracles. The God spoke to no one. And then my Dead Eye strode into the Temple, cleansing it of the vile old Watchers and sparing me. Like me, he knew the Reaper God was mute—a fabrication of old women to maintain power over the People. He also knew the source of the sickness that was infecting and killing more and more of our people.”

“Tainted meat,” Nik said.

Dove didn’t lift her head, but she nodded in agreement. “Yes, that and more. He believed the animals in our city had become tainted by our People because they had been eating the flesh of the Others and then merging it with their flesh as they attempted to cure the skin-sloughing disease.”

“Which seems to be very like a disease called the Blight that the Tribe suffers from,” Mari said.

“So the old rhyme is true,” Sora said, looking pale. “‘Of cities beware—Skin Stealers are there.’”

“I do not know of other cities. Only my own.”

“Why are you and Lily not sick?” Sora asked.

“I never ate meat, especially not the meat of the Others,” said Dove. “At first it was because I wasn’t allowed to, and then it was because I chose not to. The thought of it has always disgusted me.”

“And I was beginning to sicken before I entered Dove’s service, but I am small and only a girl, so I had to wait with the old people to get my portion of meat and often that meant there was no meat left for me. I was never allowed to eat from flesh taken from the Others.” Lily extended her arm and pushed up the sleeve of her tunic to reveal a few small blisters in the crease of her elbow. “These have not spread.”

“And once she entered my service I made sure she ate the same food my Dead Eye did—and he only ate from the beasts he found deep in the forest. Hunting for untainted food was how he became obsessed with the Tribe of the Trees,” Dove said.

“Lily, I will give you a salve that will soothe those blisters. Third Night, when we draw down the power of the moon to cleanse the Pack, is tomorrow. Then you will be healed completely of that disease.”

Lily bowed her head respectfully. “Thank you, Moon Woman Sora.”

“What Dove says does make sense,” Mari reasoned. “The eating of human flesh is one of our basic taboos—something passed from generation to generation. There had to be a reason for it, and not just because it’s disgusting. It causes sickness. So, this Dead Eye is the same person as the Death God?”

“No! He was my love—my Champion. He was kind to me and cared for me, but somehow he awakened the Reaper God—the God of Death. My Dead Eye was ambitious, but his ambition was only for what was best for our People. Forgive me for saying this, but his intention was to defeat the Tribe of the Trees and move our People to the untainted forest.”

“Only now it is tainted because of him,” Nik said, his voice heavy with anger.

“His original intention was not to poison the forest,” Dove said. “But he changed when Death awoke within him. At first I didn’t understand what was happening. I believed he was simply doing what he must to help our People leave the city. I was wrong. Death had marked Dead Eye as His and, finally, the God of Death absorbed everything that ever was my love until he was no more. Then Death began changing the People as well—flaying the living flesh of animals to their skin so that they absorbed the characteristics of the creatures, though I do not believe any so fully became beasts as did Death.”

“He did that to Thaddeus when He captured him, didn’t He?” Nik said. “He flayed the flesh of his Terrier to him.”

Head still bowed, Dove nodded. “He did.”

“And He poisoned the animals of the forest to weaken the Tribe,” Nik said.

“Yes.”

Nik threw his bowl aside in anger and began to stand, but Mari’s gentle touch on his arm stayed him.

“So much misery!” Nik said, shaking his head. “Her people have caused so much misery.”

“I never meant to harm others. Dead Eye and I only wanted a way out of our own misery.”