It was Daylily, her red hair flattened across her blood-streaked face like a veil, her undergown clinging to her limbs. She held the child in her arms.
She must be dead. But this was not the Netherworld, where the dead wander, this place of swirling darkness and pain. Or perhaps it was. After all, the last time she stepped through Death’s gateway and descended the long road into his world, she had been one of the living. Perhaps the pain and darkness were saved only for the truly dead.
Then her body convulsed.
Daylily coughed up a flood of dark water. Her ears swam with wet and distant sounds, but they were living sounds. And the thud of her heart, painful against her breastbone, told her she was not yet passed to the Realm Unseen.
The women of the village held back from the well even after the burst of water left the two sodden figures lying like drowned corpses upon the edge. Then the skinny young girl gave a cry and sprang forward, reaching for the child and for the strange ghostly maid who was his rescuer.
But Sun Eagle was there first. He took Daylily in his arms and held her upright in time for more water to cascade from her lips in a sickening gush as her stomach heaved and lungs burned. She pushed her heavy hair back from her face and, though she did not yet remember what she sought, instinctively looked for the child. She found him mewling in his sister’s clinging arms. He was alive.
“I saved him.”
The worlds crashed and danced in Daylily’s mind as she clutched Sun Eagle and lay upon the bank. Her body, relearning to breathe, shuddered and shivered even in the heat. But her thudding heart soared to the heavens. “I saved him!”
“You did, Crescent Woman,” Sun Eagle replied, and she blinked without recognition up into his triumphant face. “You have proven yourself. You are a warrior.”
The men from the village, tools brandished like weapons, swarmed down the incline, joining the women and children. They hesitated at what they saw. Should they attack these strangers, this otherworldly girl with her bright hair, this savage youth with blood on his hands and face? But the skinny girl, her sibling held close as though she would never let go, caught Daylily’s hand in her own and kissed it again and again. Then she began to speak, garbled and quick. Daylily wondered if it was the sobs that made her words incomprehensible, or if she spoke another language entirely, an older, wilder language.
Sun Eagle, still crouched with his hands supporting Daylily’s shoulders, said, “She wants to know how she may repay you.”
“Repay me?” Daylily ineffectually wiped water from her eyes. “No,” she said, her voice a whimper. “No, no payment.”
A woman and a man reached them now, the parents of the two children. They put their arms around the girl, helping her to her feet. The mother grabbed the little one and held him, weeping, to her shoulder. But the skinny girl would not release her hold on Daylily’s hands. She continued speaking earnestly, tears flowing down her cheeks.
“No, please!” Daylily said, frightened somehow by the intensity in those words she could not understand. She turned to Sun Eagle. “Please, tell her I want no payment!”
But Sun Eagle shook his head solemnly. “You cannot deprive her of that right,” he said.
Then he addressed the parents, speaking with swift assurance in their language, or a language very like it that they understood but Daylily did not. But Daylily watched the expression on the mother’s face change, so full of relief one moment, so full of devastation the next. She reached out and put her arm around the skinny girl, drawing her to her side.
On the girl’s face, all expression vanished.
The father stood by, unmoving save to adjust his grip upon the weapon in his hand, a wooden club set with a sharp stone at one end, a crude hammer. Sun Eagle, his voice low, even gentle, said his piece, then stood looking from father to mother.
The man stepped forward, his hammer upraised, and would have brained Daylily on the spot.
It was over before Daylily could react. By then, the man lay in screaming agony, his arm twisted too far behind him, so far it must be broken, and Sun Eagle’s foot upon his neck, pressing his head into the ground. The mother screamed and dragged her children back, and the villagers all exploded in shouts and screams as well. Only then did Daylily find her voice.
“What are you doing? Let him go!” she cried. Though weak from her ordeal, she flung herself at Sun Eagle as though to drag him off. But she found the gathered crowd of villagers closing in, and she saw from their faces that she and Sun Eagle both would be torn apart in a moment.
Sun Eagle dropped his hold on the man, stepped away, and then took hold of the bronze stone about his neck and lifted it high. It flashed in reflective fire from the sun, so blinding that even Daylily shielded her eyes.