Brena

Brena bowed her head over the fallen body of her enemy. Though he hadn’t driven a spear through her heart, he’d killed her all the same. She wasn’t sure why she had saved him from Kavio’s blow. To spare his life, or to keep him alive until she could drive the bear’s black arrow through his heart? Would she do that, take the life of an enemy in cold blood, a human sacrifice? With Gwena and Gwenika dead…

The young man who had fought with such supremacy touched her on the shoulder. She supposed she should apologize to him for misjudging his honor, but she didn’t have the strength. In any case, he seemed preoccupied with another matter, asking, “Would rain cleanse the hill?”

“I suppose,” she said. She rolled her eyes to the cloudless, moonless sky. “Do you know how often it rains in Yellow Bear?”

“No less than it does in the desert canyons of my home, I imagine,” he said, and she remembered he had originally been from the Rainbow Labyrinth. “But I am a Rain Dancer.”