Clan Ground (The Second Book of the Named) by Clare Bell Read Free Book Online Page B

her and the night’s chill on the other or whether Thakur’s words angered and frightened her.
    “How? Are you afraid he would seize my creature and use it against me?”
    “No. I’m not saying he would do that, or even want to. I am only saying that my belly tells me there is risk in making him a Firekeeper. What the risk is, I don’t know.”
    “That’s all you can tell me?” Ratha stared at him in dismay.
    “Yes.”
    “And what if I choose to take the dangerous trail?”  
    He looked at her for a long time. “Then nothing I can do or say can help you bear the load you may carry along that trail. I do not envy you the journey.”
    “You can’t even offer a little comfort?” she said as he turned away.
    “No. I don’t seem to be able to do the things I used to,” he said bitterly. “The coming of the Red Tongue has changed all of us, even me.”
    She was silent until he had gone a few paces away from the fire. Swallowing hard, she said, “You still may eat after me at the kill tomorrow.”
    “If you wish me to,” he answered and was gone.
    It wasn’t just the night’s cold that made Ratha creep closer to the fire.
     
     

 
    Chapter Five
     
     
    At the clan gathering, Ratha looked down from her place atop the sunning rock to the Named settling themselves below. Again they had fed and again they had come together, but this time there would be talk rather than celebration.
    She smelled the rich odor of three-horn flesh. It lingered on the twilight breeze even though the herdbeast was now bones and rags of hide. She had eaten half the liver and left the rest to the others. Usually she gorged herself, but too much meat made her sleepy and muddled her thoughts. She went away from the carcass with her belly half-filled; she knew she needed to think clearly tonight.
    She watched Fessran lead in the torchbearers. They looked black against the setting sun. The flame that leaped and danced on their brands seemed born of the sky’s red and orange light. The Firekeepers who bore no torches carried wood in their mouths. Under Fessran’s direction, they arranged the kindling to the side of the sunning rock and lit the meeting fire.
    The firelight grew as the sun’s glow faded. Wavering shadows stretched out behind the clanfolk. The eyes that turned up to Ratha held their own fires of green and amber. One color was missing among them; the hue closest to that of the flame itself.
    The Firekeepers lay together near the blaze. Fessran remained on her feet, searching the gathering. Ratha saw the Firekeeper leader sit down again with a puzzled expression in her eyes. From Fessran, Ratha looked across to Thakur, who was sitting on the opposite side with the herders. The closed, remote look on his face told her why the Un-Named One wasn’t there.
    The group quieted, leaving the evening to the snap and hiss of the Red Tongue. Ratha stood up, waving her tail to indicate the meeting was to begin. She sat and curled her tail about her feet.
    “We of the Named,” she said, “have seen many changes. Once we were ruled by the Law of the Named and the power of teeth and claws. Now we follow a new law and a new way.” She turned her head toward the meeting fire and the Firekeepers beside it. “Change begets change as do cubs that grow up and have their own young. Now another change has come upon us, and again we must choose whether to accept it or turn it back.
    “We have always grown from within,” she continued. “In Baire’s day and Meoran’s too, that was the law. There was no mingling with the clanless ones. But we were different then. We are fewer now. The number of cubs born each season is less. We never dared to seek outside the clan for others, but now one of them has come seeking us. He is Un-Named, but he has the same light in his eyes that we do. The question I must decide is this: shall the Un-Named One be taken among us?”
    Fessran raised her soot-stained muzzle. “Tamer of the Red Tongue, I would