Fevered Star (Between Earth and Sky, #2)(23)
“There is another element for which stone must be tested before it can be used to build a Great House.”
“And what is that?”
“Cost. Often even worthy stone is not worth the price it would require to obtain it. In that case, it is best to rid yourself of the burden early, lest the endeavor ask more of you than you are willing to give.”
She shut the door between them. He waited, listening to her steps retreat down the hall. Once she was gone, he tested the latch. It did not move. She had locked him in. He tried the door once more to confirm his imprisonment, with the same result. Amused to find himself yet again confined, he explored his new jail. It was as she had said. A bed, a washbasin, and nothing else. Yes, very much a prison cell.
At the far end of the room, he found another door. It was solid wood, and heavy. He felt for a lock, and, finding only a latch, he pulled it open. Winter wind rushed in, knocking him back a step. The eclipsed sun flared light and shadow in his vision. Somewhere nearby, crows cried out.
“A door that leads to nowhere,” he murmured, although he was sure that was not entirely true. He suspected that if he listened closely, he would hear the rush of the Tovasheh River a dozen stories below. “I believe she wants me to consider flying.”
He started to close the door and paused, thinking. Instead, he threw his mind out, searching. She had said he was not far from the aviary, and he hoped she had not lied. Crows answered immediately. He called to one. A moment later, the bird was at his hand. He ran a finger across the crow’s head, the touch of his friend a comfort in this unfamiliar place.
“Go find Okoa,” he told the corvid. “Bring him here.” He was about to release the crow when he had another thought. “Find this Maaka, the leader of the Odohaa. Bring him, too. Let us make this interesting.”
The corvid took flight.
Serapio closed the sky door. He made his way to the bed and stretched out, tucking his newly acquired knife under the reed-filled mattress. The wound in his side pulled as he stretched out, but he ignored it. Pain was something he could endure, and tolerance for discomfort he possessed in rare amounts. So he settled in to wait for what came next.
Patient as stone.
CHAPTER 8
CITY OF TOVA (COYOTE’S MAW)
YEAR 1 OF THE CROW
Magic is chaos. Seek it out at your peril.
—Exhortations for a Happy Life
Naranpa walked the network of underground tunnels below the Lupine, looking for Zataya. Denaochi had assigned her a servant who helped her bathe and find clean clothes, so now she wore a simple white dress and a red and yellow string belt instead of a bloody, dirt-stained blanket. It was progress, albeit small progress. The servant, whose name was Baaya, had even managed to find her a cloak and a pair of warm, fur-lined boots. Thus attired, she set out, without her brother, to find the witch.
Naranpa had tried to sleep, but it was impossible, despite her exhaustion. Her mind churned between horrors. First, the faces of her fellow priests in various poses of death—throats slit, heads bashed in, some details so gruesome she wondered at her own macabre imagination. And when she wasn’t imagining the violence of her former colleagues’ deaths, she dreamed of men in jaguar skins interrogating her, berating her for her failures, and then choking her until she couldn’t breathe. Feeling wrung out and unsafe even in her own head, she asked Baaya, who was dozing outside her door, to point her to Zataya’s room. She was hoping Zataya might be able to explain the dreams or, better yet, have a way to stop them. And maybe she could ask the witch more about what magic she had worked on the Convergence and if it could be the source of the continual burning in her chest or the strange glow that suffused her hands. Of course, now out of immediate danger and free of the suffocating earth, she doubted whether her hands had glowed at all. Perhaps they had only been a figment of her overactive imagination. She tried to remember if her lantern had truly been extinguished or if perhaps some small illumination had remained, but she couldn’t. Her travails in the tunnels were a blur. If only she had learned more about magic when she had access to the celestial tower’s library. A better grounding in history and southern sorcery would be welcome now.
“A head always in the stars,” Kiutue had scolded her when she was a dedicant newly promised to the oracles, but he had said it with such affection that she had not taken it poorly, even when he went on to chide her. “Look for the pleasure around you, too, Naranpa. You need not always focus on what lies in the heavens. There is beauty on earth, too.”
She had thought then of her childhood in the Maw and severely doubted Kiutue’s declaration, but love for her old mentor had quieted her tongue. The day-to-day world continued to disappoint, again and again, no matter what others believed.
She found Zataya’s room, knocked once, and immediately pushed open the door. She worried that if she waited, Zataya might not let her in.
A powerful perfume greeted her, filling her nose with rosemary, lavender, and mint. She swooned in pleasure. The scent emanated from the steam of small pots bubbling over a hearth fire in one corner of the room. Smoke rose up a long chimney to exit far above them, no doubt bathing the neighborhood above in fragrance.
“What are you making?” Naranpa exclaimed. “It smells wonderful!”
Zataya was hunched over a table in front of the hearth, her long back bent over a mortar and pestle and a mound of wild mint before her. Around her were clay jars of various sizes and piles of herbs and plants, many Naranpa didn’t recognize.