Fevered Star (Between Earth and Sky, #2)(52)

“Not hurting anyone?” Ziha leaned in, face flushed and nostrils flaring. “My cousin Abah was only nineteen. She was a beautiful woman, a healer. She brought good into the world. The Shield found her on Sun Rock with her throat slashed and her head bashed in. And for what? What had she ever done to hurt anyone?” She ended in a shout, rage cording her neck.

“She bit a boy’s tongue off once,” Iktan offered.

Both women turned to stare.

“She was twelve, I think, a new dedicant, and the boy the same. They sent the boy to the healers but brought her to me. They thought perhaps her show of violence meant she had a propensity for becoming a tsiyo. People think it takes a certain kind of moral flexibility to be an assassin, but it’s really quite the opposite. Our values must be absolute. So I questioned the girl. Asked her why she had done it. Said that if she liked the boy, there were better ways to show her affection. She solemnly informed me that no, she did not like the boy. She had only wanted to taste his blood. She was curious, she told me, to see if it was salty or sweet.”

“Seven hells,” Xiala whispered, fighting the urge to touch a finger to her own tongue to make sure it was intact.

“They were not able to heal his tongue, so he never fully recovered his ability to speak. I don’t know what happened to him, if he left the priesthood or stayed on as a dedicant. But your cousin was a viper, Ziha. Let us not pretend otherwise.”

“A child’s misunderstanding. You would damn her for that?”

“I would damn her for many a thing, but one thing in particular.”

Ziha shifted, uncomfortable. “Naranpa should have never—”

“No,” Iktan said, voice suddenly lethal.

Xiala’s instincts made her still like a rabbit sensing the presence of a wolf. Ziha’s eyes shifted toward the door and the guards just outside. But she must have realized that Iktan was much too close, and much too fast, and if xe wished it, she would be dead before help could find her.

“Keep her name from your mouth, Golden Eagle,” xe whispered. “Your clan made promises to me and then broke them. You do not get to blame the dead with your excuses now.”

Ziha swallowed. “There are complications to what happened,” she said, voice as careful as footfalls on a frozen lake, “and I should not speak of them. Perhaps we have strayed too far from why we are here together, traveling treacherous roads with our careless thoughts. Golden Eagle is not your enemy, tsiyo. Or yours,” she said to Xiala.

Iktan’s eyes were hooded, glazed with a deceptive calmness. Xiala remembered xir earlier quip about them all being prisoners. She had thought the comment mocking, but now she wondered if Iktan had in mind a particular bitch when xe had spoken of fate.

Ziha stood. Xiala could see the sweat on the back of her neck, the slight tremor in her hands. “I’ll let you finish your meal. I have things to see to in camp. We will talk again tonight and plan to be moving toward the Puumun River before dawn. Xiala of the Teek, I would very much like to hear what you know of the Odo Sedoh when I return this evening. And perhaps then Iktan can share what xe learned from xir man in Carrion Crow Shield. But for now…”

She bowed slightly at the neck and was out, the tent flap blowing behind her. Words were exchanged with the guards, and they stayed where they were instead of following their commander.

“Looks like we’re under guard now,” Xiala said.

“It’s theater,” Iktan said confidently. “If I wanted them dead, they’d be dead in seconds. Assassin, remember?” Xe had risen and was searching through the trunks and pots in the back of the tent. Xiala heard the clatter of things being pushed aside.

“What are you looking for?”

“I’ll know it when I find… ah.” Xe came back bearing a bottle of xtabentún. “I knew she had to be keeping a bottle somewhere.”

Xiala had not touched drink since the Convergence and was not sure now that she should. But she did not protest when Iktan uncorked the bottle, took the two clay cups left from their meal, and filled them with alcohol. And she said nothing when xe set one in front of her and took the other.

Iktan drank, long and deep, before topping the cup off and settling back in the furs, back propped against a pile of cushions.

“Tell me about the Odo Sedoh.”

She folded her hands in her lap, trying to ignore the cup that seemed to beckon. “Tell me of the Watchers first,” she countered.

“What do you want to know?”

“You’re a priest?”

“Was a priest,” xe corrected, tapping xir cup. “Drink is forbidden in the priesthood. I was a priest until Ziha’s mother and her murderous cousin killed a friend I cared very much about. And then your friend killed all but a few children and graybeards left in the tower, which means there’s not much of the Watchers left.” Xe drank more. “Clearly, people having murderers for friends is the problem here.”

“If there are some Watchers left, couldn’t you rebuild?”

She couldn’t believe she was even asking. Serapio had explained how corrupt they were, the transgressions they had committed. But this person before her seemed lost, and she knew what being lost felt like, so her instinct was to offer some comfort.

“There is nothing to rebuild,” Iktan said with a note of finality. “The Watchers served for more than three hundred years. They did what they could to keep the Meridian at peace, and now war comes, and they are done.” Xe glanced at her. “I think you mistake ‘priest’ for ‘martyr.’?”