Takoda Thunderborn's Arc

Chapter 9 of 2

The fire rolled back down the valley, but the damage was done. Takoda sat his great antlered mount on the slope and watched the red glow shrink toward its sender. Below, the lower lands still burned. Smoke climbed from the valley floor where people lived. He had turned the fire. He had not turned it fast enough. By morning they came up the slope on foot. Valley people, soot-black and shaking. A woman led them, her arms wrapped around a child who no longer moved. She stopped at the edge of the Elder Moot Hall and looked at Takoda on his mount, at the swords still in his hands. "Your gods did this," she said. Her voice did not rise. That made it worse. "Fire from the sky. They fight over a stone and we burn for it. Build your council. We will not bow to any peace made in their names." The crowd behind her murmured. They had carried their dead up the hill to say it to his face. Takoda's battlehound pressed against his leg and whined. He slid down from the mount. Whatever council he built, it meant nothing if these people spat on it. Pyros stood in the hall doorway, scarred chest bare, watching the crowd with flat eyes. "They are right," he said. "The fire was divine. No word will unburn their children." "Then I don't give them a word," Takoda said. He turned to the valley woman. "Come with me." He did not take her to the hall. He walked her down the slope toward the smoking fields. He sheathed the eagle-sun blade and kept the serpent-lightning one. Then he knelt, drove his free hand into the scorched earth, and called both bloodlines through his open palm. His mother's green magic rose through the soil. His father's storm cooled the air above. Together they drew water from the deep ground and pulled new shoots through the ash. Grass came first. Then saplings, uncurling where the fire had killed everything. He did not stop at a patch. He worked down the field, crawling, hands black to the wrist, until a long stretch of dead valley wore green again. He stood, shaking, and faced the woman. "The gods took this from you," he said. "I am half theirs. I will give it back with my own hands. That is the council I offer. Not their names. Mine." The woman looked at the new grass. She looked at her dead child. For a long moment she said nothing. Then she knelt and pressed her palm to the living shoots. "We will stand with you," she said. "Not the gods. You." The valley people knelt behind her. Pyros watched from the hall and said nothing. Takoda had won their faith. But he had won it in his own name, against his parents' gods. Now the council he was building belonged to no pantheon at all, and both his bloodlines would soon ask why.