Bones of the Past (Arhel) by Holly Lisle

immediately, and the three keyunu laughed, but in that split second when the poles were in the air and she thought she was going to die, Choufa, the sharsha, tried anything she could think of to get her traitorous body to respond—and failed. She was awake, she knew and understood everything that was happening, but she realized that she was completely helpless—completely at the mercy of the keyunu. And as she had already seen, the keyunu had no mercy.
    She was afraid—as afraid as she had been when she knelt in front of the Great Keyi, as afraid as she had been when the Keyi had pulled her into its slimy embrace and claimed her as its own.
    The keyunu took her to the tree-circle. The sun glared through the opening in the canopy of leaves; down at drummers who talked anger and righteousness on their drums; down at priests who chanted and danced and burned their incense; down at men and women who crouched around the bodies of small naked children, jabbing needles into them. The Keyu squatted in all their ugliness, muttering along with the drums. The very air in the circle was skin-prickling, charged with wrath and driven energy.
    The sharsha saw all of that for an instant and heard the hungry thoughts of the Keyu as she was brought into their presence again. Then the green-and-gold men dumped her into a vat of liquid, and someone else pulled her out by her hair. She gasped and choked on the bitter stuff, which burned her eyes and her tongue and filled her nose with its pungent scent. No one seemed to care whether she could breathe or not. The stranger who pulled her out of the fluid laid her on a table, took a brush and scrubbed the last remnants of itchy green paint from her hide—scrubbed so hard Choufa was sure her skin was peeling off. Then another stranger took a long blade and shaved away her long, soft hair. He cut her several times with his shaving blade, so that she would have screamed if she could. He didn’t even seem to notice. When he finished with her and her hair and eyebrows were gone, he passed her to yet another stranger.
    Tears ran from the corners of the child’s eyes, but she could not cry.
I must really be bad
, she thought.
I must. No one would do these things to a good child.
    A burly, ruined-faced nightmare of a woman slung her over one shoulder and trotted to a bare patch of earth. The woman flopped Choufa on a coarse, reed-woven mat that covered the dirt and squatted beside her. A priest joined them.
    The woman asked him, “What do you want the legend on this one to be?”
    The priest thought a moment, templing his fingers in front of him and staring off into the distance above them.
    “Yes…” he said at last, and a cold smile crossed his face. “This one was one of the temple children. She was destined to be a Song of Keyu before she desecrated the sacred places. On her, put, ‘This is excrement not worthy to feed the least tree. This is the broken song, and the spirit that covets corruption.’”
    The ugly woman nodded. “Partial mashoru? Or more?”
    “Dear artist, please!” The priest looked scandalized. “Full mashoru. Even the eyelids and the soles of the feet. Those who are raised in the heart of Keyu and who still choose the ways of malignancy must suffer most of all.”
    The woman nodded. “As you will.”
    The woman picked up a fine brush, cocked her head to one side and studied the sharsha for a moment, then began painting lines on the child’s body. She chewed on her lower lip as she worked, hummed absently and far off-key, and occasionally stepped back and squinted at her results. Choufa felt the damp lines the woman’s brush left on every finger’s breadth of her body.
    The longer the artist worked, the more the child began to fear. They’d cut her hair off, and the woman was decorating her like the saggy bald girl who’d been sacrificed to the trees. They were going to feed her to the trees as soon as the painter was done—Choufa knew it. Tears streamed down her