Black Sun (Between Earth and Sky, #1)(76)

Powageh’s voice was apologetic. “Marcal was just the first acceptable Obregi to impregnate her. Wealthy enough to keep her in comfort, kind enough to protect her son once he was born. Your father was a means to an end.”

Serapio pressed his lips together in displeasure. He had no love for his father, hated him and his condescension most days, but to hear him talked about like a fool, and his mother as a heartless temptress, bothered him. He wondered how much was Powageh’s fabrication and how much the truth.

“Your mother was very beautiful,” Powageh said, voice dreamy with remembrance. “Powerful. She burned with such a fierceness, Serapio. She swept people up in her presence. It was impossible to deny her what she wanted, and what she wanted was you.”

“Not me,” he countered. He remembered Powageh’s words: a vessel.

His new tutor was silent for a moment. “You want me to reassure you that she loved you,” xe said, voice low and not unkind, “but I cannot. The Saaya I knew was practical, set on vengeance and vengeance alone.”

“I know she loved me,” Serapio challenged, remembering the way his mother had touched his cheek, his hair. The love in her eyes as she had painted his teeth that first time, marked him with the knife. “No matter what her purpose was to begin with, I know she loved me in the end.”

He could feel the weight of Powageh’s gaze. It felt like pity. He didn’t like it.

“Her death says otherwise. She was the human sacrifice, after all. The last link in the spell. Although…” Powageh’s voice was thoughtful. “Perhaps it was her love for you that made her sorcery so effective in the end, Odo Sedoh.”

“Odo Sedoh.” He repeated the unfamiliar words. The wind caught them, tossed them through the branches of the trees, the crows cried out, seeming to speak the words back to him, and his whole body burst wide open.

As the words passed his lips, his limbs convulsed, power juddering through his bones. Cold flared inside him, freezing his blood. His skin tried to stretch, break and release the shadow that squatted inside him. He opened his mouth to scream, but no words came out. He fell over, heaving, tears of ice leaking from his eyes.

He could hear Powageh’s distress faintly, indistinct noises in his ears, a hand reaching for him that he pushed aside.

“Don’t. Touch,” he managed. “Cold. And…” He panted, reaching, trying to understand. “W-w-wings?”

That was the feeling. Like wings were threatening to burst from his body, his human form ready to shatter to make way for something else entirely.

“Drink this,” Powageh said, xir voice distant but urgent. Panicked. Xe held something, a clay vial, to Serapio’s lips. “Drink it, Serapio. Now!”

He pried protesting lips open and let the old priest pour the liquid down his throat. He recognized the taste, even after all this time. The same drink his mother had given him on the night of the eclipse. Pale, milky poison. He swallowed, convulsing, and Powageh forced more in.

Slowly the tremors faded, his skin and muscles settled, his blood warmed to normal. He lay on his side in the winter grass, panting, shock rolling through his body like the rumble of snow loosed from the mountainside.

“What do they mean?” he finally said, gasping. “Those words. What do they mean?”

Powageh’s voice was awestruck, wary. “It is the old name for the crow god, in the language of the people who became Carrion Crow. It is your true name and, obviously, not to be said lightly. At least by you.”

Serapio nodded, knowing it was true. Knowing his name was power, and not the kind he could control. Knowing that uttering it was enough to unleash what was inside him.

“It is just as Saaya predicted,” Powageh said. Xe chuckled softly, incredulously. “She did it. I cannot believe she did it.”

What did she do?

Powageh grasped Serapio’s arm and shook him hard. His teeth rattled in his head, his stomach protested around the unfamiliar foods he had consumed. He lay in the brittle grass, wrung out and helpless, shivering as the coming winter descended upon him and the old priest laughed.

“My boy,” xe said, awe in xir voice, “you are more than simply a vessel. You are the weapon that will bring the Sun Priest and the Watchers to their knees.”





CHAPTER 26




THE CRESCENT SEA

YEAR 325 OF THE SUN

(9 DAYS BEFORE CONVERGENCE)

There are only two kinds of men: ones who betray you sooner and ones who betray you later.

—Teek saying



Xiala wasn’t sure how long she slept, but when she woke up, it was night. She was back in Serapio’s room, back on the bedding on the floor, and she thought perhaps she had dreamed it all. Baat’s knife in her throat as she choked on her own blood, Callo’s gruesome end as his flesh was torn apart, Serapio standing there in an unnatural wind like some dark god made of feathers and blood and vengeance.

The wound on her throat throbbed. She pressed a hand to the place where it burned and found a bandage, freshly changed. She wasn’t bleeding, but the wound still felt raw, certainly real enough to prove that the slaughter of her crew and all the rest of it was no dream.

She gingerly turned her head, hoping to find Serapio sitting on his bench like she had become so accustomed to, but she was alone.

She closed her eyes and let her mind drift. To golden sand beaches and children’s unrestrained laughter. To women cleaning nets and mending thatch houses. To the smell of salt and sun and no man for a hundred miles.