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Rites of Passage is a work in progress.

PROLOGUE

It wasn’t wrong to want her, even though we were gold and she was flesh. She belonged to us, after all. When we were forged, the ancestors sprinkled their ashes into the molten metal. They opened their veins over the boiling cauldron to mix their sacred red ichor with ours.

Like the ancestors, she was blood of our blood. Bone of our bone.

In truth, Taria belonged to us from the moment she slipped from between her mother’s thighs and took her first ragged breath. The shaman laid the ruddy infant on the longhouse floor at the feet of the Oshta. Even then, from the chain around his neck, we swung above the baby girl like a sparkling pendulum, setting the rhythm of her life. We heard her first lusty cry and saw her open her bright blue eyes. Those little eyes fastened first–with all their intensity–on our glittering face.

She was only a squalling baby with a lock of red hair, miniature features screwed up in outrage at being so rudely thrust into a world of war and starvation.

The first time she reached for us, she was only a toddler, just a mop of red curls and milk-soft skin. She was sitting by the fire upon the Oshta’s lap and grasped hold with her fat little fingers. Her skin touched ours, so warm and alive against our gold, and we knew her at once. She was our child and our mother. She was our sister and our brother. She was our slave and our lover.

We didn’t give her a memory that first time; she wouldn’t have understood. Even so, she held us tight, shrieking as the Oshta pried us away from her. But he couldn’t keep us apart. She was ours. Ours.

As a girl, she came to us in the mornings, when the ashes in the fire were low and smoky and everyone else in the longhouse was still asleep. Sometimes we called to her, urging her to crawl out from beneath the furs to where we hung by the fire.

She never tried to put us around her neck, and we wouldn’t have allowed it if she had. She was too young for such intimacies. But we let her press her cheek to our stones. We let her stroke her fingers over our symbols, an erotic caress. And when she did, we whispered to her of all our faded glories.

We taught her about the plains we once ruled, though she’d never seen them for herself. We showed her the rustling grasses that spread out in a verdant expanse beyond the horizon. And we told her the Ticanee had once been as numerous as the stars.

Through our memories, we let her smell the perfume of the wildflowers that bloomed on the open prarie. We let her feel the prickle of electricity before lightning struck the land, and we let her smell the sweat on horses as they galloped wild and free. We could have shown her our fallen heroes; we could have shown her the horrors we’d seen too. But she was still so young. We didn’t want to break her.

But she isn’t a girl anymore. Soon she’ll burn with the fevered need to mate. As she sleeps fitfully in her bedroll, just a few feet from us, we sometimes catch glimpses of her slim legs, pale and creamy in the firelight. She’s grown into a lithe huntress, the embodiment of grace. Yet she isn’t dainty—her back is marked by the Oshta’s lash, scars of a childhood from which we couldn’t protect her.

You see, the Oshta wants to keep her small. He wants to keep her young. He wants to keep her from us. But he won’t succeed.

She wants us too, and soon we will take her. She’s our betrothed, and we’re her loving bridegroom. She must know it, the way she pulls her thick auburn braid over her shoulder and creeps to us. She presses us against her heart and our rune stones caress the silky skin of her breast.

It makes her sigh.

“There was another raid in the night,” she whispers, tears in her eyes. “The people were butchered in their tents.”

We aren’t surprised to see her tears, but beneath her tender nature, we know there is an older and wizened soul. She grieves not for the dead, but for her people as a whole, and we take her sorrow inside us and let it meld with the rest.

But this small comfort isn’t enough for Taria. She always wants more. “Take it all from me,” she whispers.

“But you need the pain,” we tell her. “Endure it. Learn to love sacrifice.”

“How can I learn to love it?”

“You will. Then you must take the Oshta’s place.”

In answer, she runs her fingers over our chain, tremulous fingers that betray her innocent maiden’s yearning. She thinks only of the pleasure of wearing us. Only of the release. She has ached for us as much as we ache for her, but she is still a budding flower, a beauty not quite fully bloomed.

We will have to wait, for in us, resides our people’s memories, but in her resides their hope.

CONTINUED

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