Black Sun (Between Earth and Sky, #1)(103)

Her feet hit the thick heavy fiber of one of the sky bridges that ran between Otsa and the other districts. Rough filament cut her feet, but they were so numb with cold the pain only dully registered. The bridge swayed beneath them as they crossed, and she imagined the great Tovasheh river below them.

“Stop!”

They stopped, and the hands that held her gripped her hard enough to make her cry out around her gag.

“What is it?”

The second voice was Abah’s, and she was irrationally grateful to hear a familiar voice, even if it was her enemy’s.

“We have to go back. There’s someone at the Odo landing.”

Odo. They were taking her to Carrion Crow. She had assumed Golden Eagle. She forced herself to concentrate and listen.

“We can’t go back. We barely got her out undetected as it is. That damn tsiyo has razed the tower.”

She smiled through shivering teeth. Iktan wasn’t dead. But if xe was causing chaos in the tower, then xe wasn’t the one waiting for her on the Odo landing, either.

“There’s at least a dozen people, maybe more,” the first voice said, obviously one of Abah’s men.

Abah cursed, something Naranpa had never heard her do. “What are they doing there?” she whined. “It’s not even dawn. We need to dump her body in Odo, or this won’t work.”

Ah, so that was her plan. Frame Carrion Crow for her murder to justify crushing them. Not because of the cultists; Abah never cared about that. They were only a means to an end. An end that involved Golden Eagle, no doubt, and resembled Denaochi’s suspicions about influences outside Tova more and more.

“They’re just standing there, but they’re blocking the way. We’ve got to go back.”

“What do you mean, go back? I just said we can’t.”

“It’s dark now, but they’ll see us when the sun rises if we stay here.”

Nara laughed behind her gag. They were caught in the middle of the bridge.

Someone ripped the cloth from her face. “Why are you laughing?” Abah asked, some of her customary sweetness leached away by stress and the morning cold. “You’ll be dead either way, Nara.”

“Oh, Abah,” she said, still laughing. “You always were too clever for your own good. Whose scheme was this? Eche’s? No, he’s too simple. I smell Golden Eagle’s hand in this. What did they promise you? What did they promise him?”

Abah had narrowed her eyes and looked like she might answer when a shout rose from the Odo side.

“They’ve seen us!” a guard said.

Abah looked around wildly. “Cut her throat and throw her into the river,” she finally said. “I’ll find a way to salvage this.”

The guards grabbed her, and she struggled, screaming.

“Wait! Take off the robe.” Nara was still wearing the brown servant’s robe they had disguised her in to move her out of her rooms. “If her body washes up in that, someone will suspect the tower.”

Hands seized the neck of her robe and tore it from her body. The blindfold and gag came off, and her hands were untied. She stood naked in the middle of the bridge, Odo distant in the icy winter morning before her and Otsa behind her, no longer in her vision.

“The necklace?” someone asked.

“Leave it. It doesn’t matter.”

Naranpa blinked. Zataya’s necklace, the small bison anointed in her blood. How had she forgotten?

“Zataya,” she whispered. And then louder, “Zataya, help me.”

“Nara, please,” Abah chided. “Begging won’t save you.”

Nara smiled. Abah had not understood that she was calling for help. Now she only needed to give Zataya time to find her. And she saw only one option.

She used all her weight to throw herself against the guard on her left. He fell against the fiber railing, causing the bridge to tilt. Abah cried out, and the guards grasped for whatever they could reach, momentarily worried more about their own lives than Naranpa’s.

She took the moment to launch herself at the railing, grasp the top, and haul herself over into nothing.

It was the fall she had always dreaded when she was a child in the Maw, her body plummeting to the rushing river below, the descent she was sure ended in death.

But to Nara, it felt like flying.





CHAPTER 37




CITY OF TOVA

YEAR 325 OF THE SUN

(1 DAY BEFORE CONVERGENCE)

And Grandfather Crow said to First Woman, tell me your stories so that I might know who you are and what you value. If your stories are of the glory of war, I will know you value power. If your stories are of kinship, I know you value relationship. If your stories are of many children, I know you value legacy. But if your stories are of adaptation and survival, of long memory and revenge, then I will know you are a Crow like me.

—From the Crow Cycle, an oral history of the Crow clan



When he left Xiala, he had planned to make his way to Sun Rock. The solstice festivities still filled the streets, and he passed through the people no more than a shadow. The world had been a wonder with her by his side, guiding him through the celebration. The sights and sounds and colors had come alive, superior in her telling to how they could have ever been through his own eyes. Those few hours had been the best he could remember, and for a moment, when she had shivered beneath his fingers in the bath, back arching and breath soft with pleasure, he had wondered what it would be like to be only a man.