teeth and a laugh that seemed bottomless. The room about them quieted as attention fixed on Ki and Nils. Ki’s ears burned.
‘I feared an adversary here,’ Nils said loudly to Cora. ‘You warned me of a spirit that had wrested control from you during a Rite. I thought to find bitterness, anger, and a sly mind. Instead, I have this puppy telling me to do my best to put things to rights; she will be grateful. Ki, you make an old man young again.’
The room had begun to buzz about them. Ki wondered at Nils’s motives. His little blue eyes gleamed bright as a ferret’s. They seized Ki in their gaze, and he gave a barely perceptible nod.
‘I claim your daughter’s arm to help me to the table, Cora,’ Nils announced. Ki stepped to his side uneasily. Never had she seen an old man in less need of physical assistance. Yet he gripped her arm hard above the elbow, and put enough weight on it that her body was forced to sway close, her head above his. He took small, slow steps, as if he found walking a labor.
‘You’re a bright one,’ he whispered as Ki helped him to the table. ‘Hiding from you would do my purpose more harm than good. Cora is right. I must tell you. You’ll be in for a rough time of it tonight. You’ve scared these people half to death. To rejoin them to their Harpies, I must unscare them. I must make you appear less formidable, more of an incompetent child and less of a strong counter-spirit. You could resist me in this. You could stand firm and young and strong, making a mockery of their beliefs, forcing us to see the uglier side of that race that has befriended us. Or you can let me make a mockery of you, belittle you, turn you from the specter in the corner to the shadow under the bed. Which will you?’
Ki thought rapidly as she drew out the old man’s chair for him. ‘And if I choose to withdraw completely? I have already told Cora that I will not join you in this rite. What if I should seek the privacy of my room?’
‘The fears these people have built up will stay with them, daunting them until the end of their days. My rite will be powerless against it. No one will again see their dead. There will be no more Rites of Loosening. One more rhythm will pass out of their lives, and they will be the poorer.’
Ki gently pushed the chair toward the table. She curbed the pride that rose in her. She had said she wished to make amends. So this is what it would take. ‘Do your worst, old man,’ she replied. Nils chuckled and sent her a bright glance.
‘Remember your resolve, girl. You’ll need it.’
Ki stepped back from the table, uncertain of where to place herself. She looked to Cora. The glance Cora shot her pleaded. For what? Then, as Lars moved to silently escort Ki to a seat far down the table, away from the adults and people of import, Ki understood. Nils had primed Cora to what must be done. Cora, ruthless as a wolf when her family was threatened, had taken the necessary action.
Others were moving into their places about the table. Kurt, Rufus’s eldest son, took a seat beside Ki. He glanced at her, abashed to find her seated so closely, and then looked away. Edward took the chair on the other side of her, and other children filed from across the room to fill in the empty places. Ki sat gravely, her dark head raised above theirs, looking up the table to where Haftor, Lars, Lydia, and the others were being seated. Haftor stared down the table to where Ki sat. The muscles of his jaw clenched, and he spoke some short, angry words to his sister seated beside him. Embarrassed, Marna hushed him. Haftor’s dark blue eyes met Ki’s in a pledge of loyalty. Ever so slightly, Ki shook her head. She hoped he understood the message. Lars, Rufus, and Cora did not even look her way. Their attention was fastened on Nils, as was everyone’s. The little girl across the table from Ki giggled nervously. Her seating was so inappropriate that even the youngest child was aware of it. Ki took a slow, deep breath and turned her eyes to Nils.
Nils did not need to make any gesture to gain the full attention of the table. He simply began to speak.
‘I have come to you here, at Cora’s request, to repair a rift between you and the Harpies of Harper’s Ford. We shall not speak tonight of ignorance or pettiness.’ Ki’s face reddened. Haftor’s knuckles showed white on the edge of the table. ‘I am not here to instruct you in what you already know. You have been raised to certain ideals. You have enjoyed the companionship of beings better than ourselves, creatures closer to the Ultimate. But your regard for them has been soiled, your image of them spattered with the mud-throwing of a hurt and angry mind. You were wise. You did not go to the Harpies and defile their gifts to you by exposing them to these unfitting sentiments pressed upon your unwilling minds. You have chosen to wait, for atonement and reconciliation. You will return to the Harpies as unsoiled as when, in childhood, you made your first encounters. Tonight we begin.’
Nils paused. It seemed to Ki that he paused so that every person at the table could shoot her at least one look. She read every conceivable emotion in them. From Cora, a plea for understanding. Rufus was cold, Nils knowing. From Holland came enmity and a thirst for revenge. Marna’s was wonder, Haftor’s a grim sympathy and an unreadable promise. Lars’s eyes were hooded, careful blanks. But his mouth was small as a stricken child’s.
‘Tonight we eat together,’ Nils reclaimed their attention. ‘We talk, we drink, we speak no words of sadness or misfortune. By each plate Cora has placed a bit of dried kisha fruit wrapped in toi leaves. Take it with you tonight. Chew it slowly before you sleep, and think as you chew it of pleasant memories of happy intercourse with the Harpies. It will help you to recall those meetings in detail, and the feelings of peace and wholeness they gave you. Now, let us eat and speak to one another as if this misfortune had never befallen you.’
Nils fell silent. Basins and platters began to be passed at the higher part of the table, and the murmur of polite voices rose. Around Ki the children were silent, waiting anxiously for the dishes to work down the table to them. Ki ate, as the children did, whatever the adults had left to be passed. The children, warned, no doubt, to be on their best manners, spoke little. Ki was at a loss. She could not pretend to be interested in their short comments on the food, and she would not supervise their feeding. Young Edward dropped a piece of meat, retrieved it calmly from the floor, and ate it. Ki pursed her mouth and glanced up-table. Hastily she returned her eyes to her plate.
Nils had effectively drawn out her claws. For the first time since the Rite of Loosening, people were looking at her openly. Nils, by placing her far down the table, had made her an appropriate topic for conversation. He had told them all not to dwell on that mangled Rite of Loosening. Ki guessed that they had found other topics. She ate slowly, in small bites, keeping her head bowed and her eyes on her food. She tried not to care that it made her look like a guilty child to sit so while her ‘elders’ discussed her. She marked the absence of Haftor’s deep voice in the conversation. She could hear other voices, but not enough of the softly spoken words to make sense. Only enough to sting. ‘Romni’ she picked out several times, and the phrase ‘Sven too young’ once.
Ki’s mind cast about, traveled back through the years. Rufus knelt in the yard, blood streaming from his nose, with Sven towering above him, outraged and weeping in frustration. Lars was a white-faced little boy peering from the door. Ki had been sixteen then, and Aethan a year dead. She had wanted to flee back to the shelter of her wagon, to whip up the tired old team and disappear from Harper’s Ford forever. But Cora had been standing in the bright sunlight, wiping earth from her hands, demanding to know what went on. And Sven, a fool in his righteousness, told her.
‘I said to him that Ki may stay her wagon in our fields, in the fields that will come to me when I am a full man. I say she may, for I am decided that we will be joined together. He says I let her stay because she pays me in the coin that Romni girls love best to give away. So I struck him. I will strike him again if he tries to rise before he apologizes to her.’
Cora had not only made Rufus apologize, but she had forced Ki to eat inside, at the table beside them. Ki had hated her for it at that moment, not understanding why she did it, and not wanting to. This meal was like to that one, with emotions simmering but not voiced to Ki. But here was no Sven to press her hand under the table, to put the choicest bits before her. Seven months later Sven had attained his manhood, claimed his lands, and taken Ki to his bed. He had been young for it, and Ki scandalously so. All talked of the