Tara Runeweaver's Arc

Chapter 20 of 29

The morning after the carving, Tara walked past the antler-crowned arch where laboring women were brought to the midwives. Two old women stood beneath it, arms folded. One met her eyes and shook her head. "You do not know the songs," she said. "We cannot stand at a birth bed silent." Tara felt the cold bite deeper than the wind. She had won his name on the child. She had not won this. She went to the medicine tent where the clan women kept the old rites. She did not push the flap. She knelt outside it and waited. After a long while, Bjorn's mother came out and looked down at her. Tara kept her hands open on her knees. "I was never taught," she said. "Teach me, or tell me where to learn." The old woman studied her for a long breath. Then she went back inside and returned with a bone flute marked in ice-blue. She placed it in Tara's palm. "The songs live in this," she said. "Sit by the fire each night. Play what the holes give you. The women will hear and come sing the words over your playing. By your time, you will know them." She closed Tara's fingers around the flute. "This is how we let you in." Tara carried the flute to the hearth that night and set it to her lips. The first note came thin and wrong. The second came truer. One by one, three women slipped into the tent and sat down around her, and their low voices found her notes and held them. Tara did not look up. She played until her mouth ached. The midwives would come to her bed when the time came. The songs were no longer closed to her — though every note she learned was one more thing the doubting hearths could call sorcery.