The Dawn Country Read Free Page A

friends, Wrass and Zateri, are still the old woman’s slaves. Somehow, I think it’s my fault. We were separated when the rescue happened. I should have called out to them, or gone to find them. Instead, I just ran away with Mother and Father. I ran as hard as I could.
    “It’s not your fault,” Baji says, as though reading the tracks of my soul. Is she feeling the same guilt I am? After the horrors of the past moon, we are closer than friends, closer than family. “It’s a miracle that we escaped with our own lives.”
    “I know, I just—”
    “And we’re going back for them. Tomorrow morning. Your parents promised. They wouldn’t lie to us, would they? We are going back to rescue Wrass and Zateri, and the other children, aren’t we?”
    I have to think about this before I answer. “ … My parents wouldn’t lie to us.”
    But I’m not sure that’s true.
    My gaze drifts to where Mother stands. Most people know her as War Chief Koracoo from Yellowtail Village of the Standing Stone People. My Father, Gonda, is her deputy. Women war chiefs are rare, and being honored with the title requires unusual courage, intelligence, and skill. Mother is a powerful and respected leader. She’s a tall woman, muscular and long-legged. Her war club—the legendary weapon known as CorpseEye—is propped on her shoulder.
    Just seeing her calms my fears. But I miss her long black hair. After the attack that destroyed our village, she cropped it short with a chert knife. Among our people it is a sign of mourning. The short jagged locks fall around her ears as though sculpted. Her gaze is fixed on the darkness just beyond the circle of firelight, as though she hears something, or someone, on the starlit mountain pass above us. We came over that pass two hands of time ago, and are now on the western slope.
    I breathe in the icy air and say, “We should try to sleep, Baji. We’re going to need our strength. Tomorrow is going to be a hard day.”
    “I’ll try if you will.” She tugs her blanket up around her chin and snuggles against me. The feel of her body against mine sends a warm sense of security through me. In less than sixty heartbeats, she is sound asleep.
    But my eyes will not close. I stare up at the dark winter sky. The flickering campfires of the dead look oddly hazy. I realize it’s because even here, across the mountain, smoke from the burned village still streaks the sky. I try not to think of the people who lived there, of the dead and dying, of the shrieking children who were taken captive. The destruction of their village allowed us to escape.
    Will the war and suffering ever end?
    Behind the lies of safety that I tell myself, I feel the presence of Gannajero watching me across the dark distances.
    Her warriors are coming.
    I feel their footsteps pounding in my chest.

Three
    W ar Chief Cord’s breath frosted before his face and hung there like a small starlit cloud, ghostlike in the frigid air. He continued struggling up the slope. Above him, through the frost-coated trees, the trail was nothing more than a black gash.
    The night had frozen the jagged terrain, turning it into a still and sparkling wasteland so bone-cold that nothing stirred. Even the Forest Spirits and lost souls who usually roamed the trails had fled to their hiding places beneath rocks and in secret holes in the ground. The vast silence was eerie, as though an otherworldly blanket had descended to compensate for the echoed screams, the ululating cries of victory, and the terrified shrieks of the dying that had washed the slopes last night.
    Behind him, he heard the rasping moccasins of the handful of his warriors who’d lived through the battle, but he didn’t turn to look. Instead, he focused on the trail ahead. Their lives rested upon making it to the pass that was hidden high above them.
    Cord pulled his wolf-fur hood closed beneath his chin. He stood twelve hands tall. Snake tattoos covered his cheeks and ropy arms. He wore his hair