Black Sun (Between Earth and Sky, #1)(90)

“Xiala…” He didn’t know what to say. She made it sound so normal.

She waved a hand. “Never mind. It was only a thought. I’m sure you’ll be busy doing whatever the vessels of gods do. I’ll just…” She sighed, long and heavy. “I’ll find something. A job. But what kind of work do you think there is in a place like that for a Teek? The sea is distant, even now. I was in the river, and it didn’t know me, Serapio. It didn’t recognize me as its child.”

He pressed a soothing hand to her head, ran a palm down the long plane of her hair. He could hear her soft sobs.

“Ah, shit,” she said, her breath a soft hiccup. “Maybe I am drunk. And I think I left that bottle of xtabentún down by the river.”

“Leave it,” he told her. “Stay with me instead.”

And she did, her breath steadying in slumber and her body limp against him. Only when he was sure she was dreaming did he begin to drift off, destiny untold, deciding that tomorrow was soon enough.





CHAPTER 31




THE OBREGI MOUNTAINS

YEAR 325 OF THE SUN

(5 MONTHS BEFORE CONVERGENCE)

And one day Crow came upon Eagle, who said, “Lo, Lord Crow. What fine feathers you have. I would like to admire them up close. Will you let me?” But Crow knew that she and Eagle were natural enemies and said, “You may admire me from where you stand, but come no closer. I do not trust you. It is in your nature to eat my kind.” And Eagle, who had indeed intended to eat Crow, was chastened.

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



“Did you kill the other tutors?” Powageh asked.

They were sitting under the giant pine outside Serapio’s old rooms. He had been practicing calling the shadow. Shortly after they had met four years ago, Serapio had told his tutor about the trick with the mirror he had used to defeat Eedi. Powageh had listened and then scoffed.

“Only priests and magic users need objects to channel the god’s powers, Serapio. You are something else.”

“Explain.”

“You are an avatar of the crow god. Your power does not come from somewhere other. You do not need to draw it from the sky or the fireplace or even your blood, although I imagine your blood would be quite potent.” Xir mind seemed to drift off for a moment, lost in the possibility of Serapio’s blood sacrifice. It should have been unsettling, but he was used to it.

“Anyway,” xe said, concentration coming back, “Saaya already did that for you. It is inside you, now, all that power. Can’t you feel it?”

He could. The shadow seemed closer to the surface of his skin every day, a living, rippling presence. When he let it come, he could draw it to his fingertips, feel its icy fingers dance around his own, hear the muffled roar of its arrival like the rush of beating wings.

“Is that what I will do when I confront the Sun Priest?” he asked. “Bring forth the crow’s shadow to smother his light?”

“Her light. The new Sun Priest is a woman. But the body doesn’t matter. It’s the institution we’re after.”

Serapio said nothing. He was used to Powageh’s rants against the celestial tower, the evils of the Watchers, the wrongs they had done to xir and countless others. He also remembered Paadeh’s grievances of abuse as a child in a district of Tova called the Maw and how the woodworker had blamed his impoverished beginnings on the tower and the Sky Made clans. Serapio often wondered if his condemnation of the clans included Carrion Crow, but since he had already marked Paadeh for death after their first meeting, he did not bother to inquire. Eedi’s complaint had been a strategic one. She wanted a weakened Tova so that her own people, a people who seemed to have soundly rejected her for a transgression she never made clear, could sweep in and conquer the Holy City. Serapio was happy to learn all he could from her, but he was not keen on her plan of conquest. When the crows forced her to fly, he did not mourn her.

“I said, did you kill them?” Powageh said, xir question cutting into Serapio’s reverie and bringing him back to the present.

He thought carefully on how to answer. He decided that Powageh must already realize that he did if he was asking.

“How did you know?”

“That staff, for one. That was Eedi’s. She would have to be dead for it to be in your hands. I knew it from the first time I met you under the tree, when you took me down with it.”

Serapio ran a hand over his staff. “I made it my own.” And he had, adapting the skills he had learned to carve wood to the more challenging bone. He had marked hand placements at both center and top with elegant and detailed designs that resembled the interlocking wings of crows.

“It is a spearmaiden’s armament,” Powageh said. “No one else carries a bone staff, and they are almost no more. It is the weapon of a different era, before the Hokaia Treaty.”

“And now I carry one and have no interest in their Treaty.”

Powageh sighed, and Serapio was not sure what xe was thinking.

“They were not good people, Powageh.”

His only remaining tutor chuckled. “No, they were not. Are any of us? Am I? Are you?”

Serapio mulled the question over. It was a strange thing to ask. He had spent the better part of his adolescence being molded into what he was by these people: his mother and her co-conspirators. His father had all but abdicated responsibility for him from the day of his transformation, but in earnest after his seventeenth birthday, when Serapio had moved to a caretaker’s cottage far from the main house. He did not know what Powageh had told Marcal to convince him to let Serapio go so easily. Perhaps not much at all except “burden” and “free of,” but he had not seen his father since.