Black Sun (Between Earth and Sky, #1)(42)

Okoa felt relief, but it was short-lived. Benundah was well, but if not his crow, then what? Something had upset his normally unflappable cousin. “What then?”

Chaiya took another deep breath and seemed to settle himself. “Can I leave Kutssah here? We should talk inside.”

“Of course. I have forgotten my manners. There should be food in the mess.”

“And something to drink to take the chill off.”

“Tea, but nothing stronger. At least not officially. But I am sure I can find us a bottle of xtabentún somewhere.”

Chaiya smiled as he secured Kutssah to a hitching post in the pen. “I’m not a student anymore. I’m not worried about getting caught with forbidden drink.”

Okoa flushed, feeling like a teenager again. “Of course not.”

“Never mind,” Chaiya said, waving a hand. “I’ve brought my own.” He gestured with the rug saddle that he’d lifted off Kutssah’s back. Attached was a leather sack, and after he’d laid the saddle across a nearby bench, he reached into the bag and extracted a pile of fabric. He unfolded it to reveal a clay flask.

“Ten years since I’ve walked these grounds,” the older man said, his voice wistful with melancholy. He unstopped the flask and took a long drink. “I didn’t think I’d ever come back. But Kutssah is swift, and I volunteered to bring you the news.” He proffered the flask toward Okoa.

“What news?” Okoa asked, taking a deep drink. At first, the alcohol was sweet on his tongue like summer fruit, but it had a long tail that burned down his throat like chipped glass. He coughed and handed the flask back.

Chaiya slipped the flask into a holster on his belt. He took off his gloves and slid them in beside the flask. “Inside,” he said, motioning Okoa forward through the cedar gate. “I’ll explain it all once we’re good and drunk.”



* * *



“Dead?” Okoa repeated. He wasn’t sure how many times he had said the word, wasn’t even sure he knew what the word meant anymore. But every time he said it, Chaiya, who was sitting across from him, big hands wrapped around a cup, nodded and said nothing.

“Are you sure?” Okoa asked.

They had found an unoccupied table and two stools in the far corner of the common eating room; two bowls of berry-sweetened toasted knotweed and accompanying marshelder bread sat before them, Chaiya’s empty. Around them swirled the noise and energy of the hundred cadets and officers whom the war college fed and housed, but Okoa felt like he and Chaiya were utterly alone, tucked in some bubble of space and time that existed outside of Hokaia and the reality he had always known.

“Are you sure?” he asked again.

And once again, his cousin nodded.

“How?”

“Suicide, Cousin,” Chaiya said gently. “But we’ve told the Sky Made Council and the priests that she died in her sleep.”

“Why?”

“Your sister thought it best. She worried there would be a scandal.”

“But…”

“She jumped off the terrace of her private rooms in the Great House. I guarded her door that night myself and no one entered. There’s no other way she could have ended up in the Tovasheh. Her body washed down the river, and the monks who live below found her body.”

“The monks.” Okoa knew of them. A sacred order that lived far east on the banks of the Tovasheh and subsisted off whatever they pulled from the river. Sometimes that was a body, which they carefully cleaned and wrapped and reported upriver for payment. Most bodies that ended up in the Tovasheh were from accidents. The cliffs of Tova were known to claim their share of victims. Drunkards who went over the edge after a night of carousing in the Maw, foolish teenagers who dared each other to climb impossible rock faces, and, occasionally, a suicide. There was no shame in it, particularly among the elderly or the very ill. Only grief, potential lost, and those left behind.

“But my mother was none of those things,” Okoa said.

“None of what things?”

Okoa looked up from the mug he had filled with whatever was in the flask. It was now empty, but Okoa clung to it anyway, like an anchor. His cousin was weeping again, silent tears running down his cheeks, but his own face was dry. He wasn’t sure why.

“My mother wasn’t ill or old. She was in her prime. Why? Why would she jump?”

“I don’t know. These last years have been hard on her, Okoa. With you gone and the cultists gaining power. She confided in me many times that she was tired.”

Okoa flinched. “Was this my fault?”

“I didn’t mean to suggest that.”

“No, I should have been there,” Okoa said, voice barely above a whisper. “I should have helped her. Instead I lingered here too long, playing war games.”

“No, Okoa.” Chaiya’s voice was firm. “You are a man. Your place, your honor, was here. Yatliza had me as her Shield, so what could you have done? It was your sister’s duty to ease your mother’s burdens, not yours. She is the one who will rule after your mother, so she is the one whose responsibility it was to care for her.”

“Esa is not me,” he said flatly, citing the obvious but meaning much more. He remembered his sister as striving, obsessed with Sky Made politics and prone to gossip and fretting about fashion. It did not surprise him that her first concern upon learning about their mother’s death was to cover up her suicide to avoid scandal.