“But it’s true,” Melio said, forcing his voice to steady. “This is her doing. This is a message to-”

Tanin answered. “You are not a prophet of Maeben! You’ve no right to speak for the priestess. Nor for the goddess. First Priest, I charge that this man is defiling Maeben through some trickery. He has killed…one of Maeben’s warriors.”

The expression on Vaminee’s face never wavered. His features were rigid, anger trapped in stone. He said, “Find the priestess. Bring her to me. The rest of you, crawl from here on your knees. Pray forgiveness for having witnessed this vileness.” The peasants began to drop into the mud as instructed. Vaminee turned and locked eyes with one of the temple guards.

Melio understood enough what message passed between them. He would be seized and bound in a few moments, perhaps beaten or ceremonially killed. He knew that it would look criminal to the villagers around him, but he could not let himself be captured. These priests would twist everything. Even Mena would not be able to stop them.

Just to his left stood another guard, a young man who had forgotten the sternness of his office on seeing the dangling raptor. Melio rounded on him with an open expression on his face, as if he were about to offer a word of apology or explanation. He drove the flat of his left hand up into his nose with force enough to shatter it. His other hand found the man’s stick hilt and drew the weapon as the youth fell, howling and spraying blood.

“Kill him!” Tanin said.

His words carried enough authority that the rest of the guards swarmed. They drew their weapons and created a circle around Melio and steadily closed the perimeter. By design their weapons were meant to inflict punishment and demand obedience, but they had been trained to use them to lethal effect also. Melio kept up a constant motion, spinning this way and that on sure feet. He tried to recall his lessons on fighting multiple opponents, but nothing in his recollection addressed fighting out of a circle of fourteen foes.

“You’re making a mistake!” he cried, both for the guards to hear and for the priests and the crowd. “Harm me and the priestess will rage at you. Don’t you see what’s happened here?”

The guards faltered, slowed.

“I said kill him,” Tanin repeated.

Melio took one hand from the stick hilt long enough to point at the corpse. “This Maeben is no more. This Maeben will never take your children again. The priestess did this for you.”

“Kill him this instant!”

One of the guards leaped forward behind a downward strike. Melio twisted his torso to avoid the blow. He snapped his stick hard and fast, hitting the man with the blade flat across his cheek. The force of it spun the man into the air-head first and body following-and dropped him limply to the ground.

The others had not moved. “I don’t wish to fight with you,” Melio said, addressing them. “I don’t even wish to fight with the priests. If Maeben was a goddess, then the priestess is a god slayer. It’s the truth. The priestess will tell you so herself.”

Tanin had had enough. He pushed through the crowd to the space left open by the fallen guard. He snatched up the man’s stick, holding it in a manner that showed he knew how to use it. With him inspiring them, the circle began to close again.

Talking was over. Melio picked out one stick at random and smacked it so hard he almost knocked it from the hand that grasped it. He felt another attack coming from behind and he spun to face it. He took one man out at the knee and hit another with a downward strike that audibly snapped his collarbone. Tanin yelled for his death over and over. Melio tried to find him in the seething crowd of bodies and weapons, but it was too much of a blur. He ceased to think of his actions. He just let his body whirl and leap, duck and thrust and slash. His movements arose directly from a quick place in his instinctual mind, faster than the plodding engine of his consciousness. He heard the crack of wood on wood. He knew that his stick often touched flesh, snapped bone, but the attackers came on and he could see no end to it.

This may have gone on for many minutes, or may have been no more than a few seconds. He lost track of time until the barrage of weapons began to fall off one by one. Soon he was spinning and slashing, spinning and blocking in a dance with no actual attackers.

He stopped moving. He stood panting, drenched in sweat, eyes darting, stick held in a ready position. The guards had drawn back. Most of them weren’t even looking at him anymore. They gazed at something beyond him. Only Tanin stared fixedly at him, his face twisted with rage and disbelief, his mouth an oval hungry for oxygen. Melio understood the look. They had not touched him. Not one of them had gotten through his defenses and touched wood to flesh. He had left men on the ground all around him without ever suffering a single injury. This obviously mystified Tanin. But it was not the reason they’d stopped.

A Vumuan woman pressed forward through the crowd, a shock wave of confusion preceding her. People shouted as she passed, grabbed at her, questioned her. She ranted as she pushed through them. Whatever she said whipped the frenzy higher, but she did not stop until she reached Vaminee.

She knelt before the priest and began an impassioned speech. Melio had to concentrate hard to understand her. There were others behind her, running from the same direction she’d come, likely bearing the same news.

Just an hour ago, the woman reported, Maeben on earth had arrived at the magistrate’s home. She’d walked through the gates in all her finery. She’d strode past the stunned guards and demanded to see the foreigners who were staying there as his guests. They’d spoken to her in their strange tongue for a few minutes, and then the foreigners seized her. One of them, the tall one with hair like gold thread, actually placed his hand on her divine person. They left immediately for their vessel and were already sailing away on the receding tide.

Melio heard the whole of this in one inhalation and did not understand it until the woman finished. Then it hit him in the chest, the first blow to land on him that morning.

“They have the priestess?” Tanin asked, still breathing heavily.

“Yes,” a man, a new arrival, said. “She tried to speak. I heard her. I was closer than this one.” He motioned toward the woman dismissively. Then, remembering himself, he dropped to his knees facing Vaminee. “Honorable Priest, she turned her eyes to me and she said, ‘People of Vumu…’” He stopped without finishing the sentence.

“People of Vumu?” the first priest demanded. He finally lost his menacing calm. “What more did she say?”

“That’s all. They pulled her away. They did not let her speak any more.”

Melio only half listened to the chaotic discourse that followed, but he knew they were tossing about a version of events that escalated minute by minute. The foreigners had grabbed her, abducted her, dragged her away to their strange nation. Somebody began a moan that spread from person to person. Another shrieked that the foreigners had killed Maeben. The goddess was dead to them and the priestess was a prisoner of evildoers.

Melio sensed dawning possibility. There was something in this. Something he could do with these events, perhaps something Mena had only half envisioned when she’d set out on it. He steered away from the sorrow he knew hovered just behind his shoulder. He could give in to that later. But now-right here-he had to seize the moment before it was gone forever.

He pushed between two of the guards who had just been out to kill him and closed on the eagle’s corpse. He smacked it with his palm, clenched, and tore away a handful of feathers. He tossed them in the air above the crowd. Eyes turned toward him. Voices died down. Even the two priests fixed on him, waiting for what he might say. He was not sure himself until he opened his mouth.