She sets off up the road to the stone circle, which seems to be both dining hall and meeting place. The cabins she passes stand empty, neatly made-up cots visible through the screen mesh, clothes poles hung meagerly with jeans and shirts and jackets. Several bear the crudely drawn images of large black birds, apparently intended to be ravens. Ravens on some, she corrects herself as she passes one with a saucer-faced raptor with eyes almost as big, owls on others. Both are sacred to warrior-goddesses, ravens to the Morrigan of Celtic legend, owls to Athena. There are no doves, which does not surprise her.
It doesn’t disappoint her, either. She and Kirsten and Morgan had sat up until well past midnight attempting to riddle out the puzzle of the murders. Item: droids kidnap women. Item: droids breed women, presumably with the purpose of producing babies. So far, understandable to a point. Dakota has lived in ranch country almost all her life. Most livestock eventually find their way into one of those fleshpots, even the breeders when their reproductive value is exhausted. Even horses, on many operations, ultimately wind up in an ALPO can. No puzzle there. It’s what comes next that is the problem.
Item: the droids kill and discard infants and toddlers. They are not, clearly, consuming long pig. Just as clearly they are not supplying anyone else’s depraved taste for the same.
Which leaves the burning question why.
A medical expert, a cyber expert, a legal expert should have been able to put together some hypothesis, but nothing they could postulate held water. The only thing that made sense was sheer terror. More than one human conqueror had pursued a strategy of killing enemy men, raping enemy women, slaughtering enemy children. But that doesn’t work, either. They’ve made no effort to set up a government. In fact, they seem content to let the rest of us be, at least for the time being.
Most of the rest of us, she amends. They still want Kirsten.
Bad.
Koda shakes her head to clear it. Cold shower or not, she still craves caffeine. Onward. Strategizing can wait another half hour.
On her left, she passes the deserted stables and the picket line. Only half the horses range along it this morning, including the two left on the hillside with the patrol a day and a half ago. Some of the Amazai, then must be out beating the bounds, guarding their borders, replacing sisters who have returned. But patrols would not account for the near-emptiness of the camp.
As she tops the rise that leads to the circle, which, goddess willing, will lead to coffee, a wolf-whistle rings out, clear and loud. “Yo, babe!”
Ripe as the back bayous of Louisiana, the voice and the whistle belong to the unseen Amazai from the mountain patrol. She crouches now beside the firepit, carefully setting a spit onto a pair of freshly-cut greenwood uprights. Even in that position, it is clear that woman is taller than Koda by an inch or so, and wider, as Themunga would say, by half an axe-handle. Her tank top shows off biceps and deltoids bulging like melons under her deeply tanned skin, a fair proportion of which sports tattoos in blue and green and red. Peacock feathers, beautifully drawn, cover her upper arms, and her pale hair, worn in a straggling braid, does nothing to conceal their counterparts that sweep up the sides of her neck. Kirsten, seated on the stone Morgan had occupied the night of their arrival, quietly sips coffee, hiding a three-cornered smile behind her mug. At her feet, Asimov grins up at Koda. No help there.
“Good morning,” Koda says equably. “I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced.”
The woman gives a bark of laughter and straightens from her work. She extends a hand easily as big as Tacoma’s. “Dale. Dale fia d’LouAnn. Pleased t’meetcha.”
“Dakota Rivers. Likewise. Is there any breakfast left?”
“There’s coffee and some fruit and bread back at the old main office. Nobody cooked this morning. Too much to do to get ready for tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“Lughnasa.”
“Loo—?”
“Lugnasa,” Dale repeats. “Lammas. Harvest.”
“Oh,” says Koda, and to Kirsten, “Can I have some of your coffee? Please?”
Kirsten hands the cup to her, and she subsides onto the rock beside the smaller woman. The coffee is still hot, and she swallows gratefully. “Gods,” she says. “It’ll be a terrible day when we finally run out of this stuff.”
Dale only shrugs. “There’s still coffee trees in South America—droids’d have no reason to destroy ‘em. Whoever manages to go after it and bring some back’ll make a fortune in trade, eventually.”
“Is that an Amazai project?” Kirsten asks quietly.
The big woman narrows her eyes. “Maybe. Eventually.”
Which means that this band has allies, is territorially ambitious, or both. Koda lets the thought wash about in her brain for a moment, along with the caffeine. It also means that survivors are beginning to live with the idea that “normal” is irreparably different than the “normal” of nine months ago. She hands the mug back to Kirsten. “So where is everybody?”
“Some’s out hunting. Some’s down at the farm. Some’s over at the Lake.”
“We’re invited,” Kirsten says, draining the coffee.
They need to move on. They also need to make the beginning of an alliance with these women, just in case they survive. Koda nods. ” Okay. Anything we can do to help?”
Dale grins at them sardonically. “Just about everything’s covered. If you want to do something, though, you can go pick some flowers.”
“Pick—”
“Unless you want a harder job?”
“That’s okay,” Kirsten says, standing up abruptly. “Flowers it is.”
Koda gives her an outraged glance. But the pleading look in the green eyes forestalls speech. “Flowers it is,” she repeats. “But coffee first.”
Two hours later, Koda wades through Indian paintbrush grown knee-high, carefully cutting the blossoms and setting them into a bucket partly filled with water. Kirsten, invisible over a fold of the mountainside, is working a high meadow carpeted in purple gentians and deep-blue iris. Koda’s own pail is near full now, overflowing with blossoms in autumn colors: red, vermilion, orange-and-yellow, gold. In among them she has placed tall spikes of blue and pink lupine, the wolf-flower. The Lammas feast marks the changing of the year. With the harvest, the year turns from summer to autumn, even though the days remain hot and long. It is a time of partings, looking toward the fallow season of winter before rebirth in spring. So: wolf flower, in honor of Wa Uspewikakiyape; in honor of the goddess in her form of hunter and defender. In the clear blue above, a hawk circles, rust glinting off her tail where the sun strikes it. Wiyo has kept her distance from the human camp, but has not strayed far. As Koda watches, she seems to pause in mid-flight, her wings backing air. Then she folds them and plunges like a meteor, her feathers gleaming copper as she streaks toward earth and her prey.
Koda watches for a moment, then hefts the bucket, testing its weight. That ought to be enough for one bucketful. They need enough for altar, “the quarters,” whatever those are, and the feast table. Four pails should do it. Time to take this one back to where the horses are tethered and get the second.
Koda finds their mounts ground-tied under a stand of balsam pine, happily browsing the undergrowth. Kirsten’s full pail sits on a stone not far away, overflowing with rich purples and blues. She sets her own beside it and runs her gaze over the high meadow that occupies a shelf of the mountainside here. Nothing. Nothing but the flowers, a pair of swallowtails sipping at the deep cups of the gentians, bees gathering pollen against the winter. No Kirsten.