The Killing Moon (Dreamblood #1)(85)

Ehiru laid a hand on the man’s chest and pushed him firmly back. “Peace,” he said—and even if Nijiri had not sensed the quicksilver flow of dreamblood between them, he would have known it by what happened next. The man caught his breath and stumbled backward, clutching his son to himself in reflex. He blinked at them with no hint of his former rage, focusing on Ehiru in stunned wonder.

“Take your son to the Hetawa in Gujaareh,” Ehiru told him. Then he turned to Sunandi and the guards, his eyes cold with suppressed anger. “That much is permitted, is it not? Or is even a Gatherer’s advice illegal here?”

She watched him for a long moment, and with a chill Nijiri saw that she knew what Ehiru had done to the angry man. How she knew he could not guess; perhaps it was only that she was skilled at observing others. Regardless, on her word the guards could kill Ehiru for using narcomancy—and in the process free her from the threat of the abeyance, at least until matters could be settled in Gujaareh and another Gatherer dispatched to collect her tithe. Bile rose in Nijiri’s mouth; he clenched his fists. Wicked, filthy-souled woman! he thought at her, willing her to sense his rage. If he dies, another Gatherer is right here to take your worthless life!

But Sunandi raised a hand, gesturing for the guards to be at ease. “Advice is permissible,” she said, “though I must add that anyone who goes to Gujaareh to be healed with magic will never be permitted to return to Kisua. This has always been our law.”

“I care nothing for your laws,” Ehiru snapped. Then he turned and started forward into the crowd again. They parted down the middle, making a path.

Sunandi sighed, no doubt reading Ehiru’s anger in the stiff set of his broad shoulders. Nijiri threw her a glare of his own and then started after Ehiru; after a moment and one last signal to the guards, she joined him.

“Whatever you might think,” she said in a low voice, “I stopped him to save his life.”

Nijiri snorted. “He allowed you to stop him, to save yours.”

“What?”

He gestured around at the crowd, which had begun to murmur and shift, anguish and anger on many faces. “Look at these people, Speaker. They are Hananja’s faithful and they came to see Her highest Servant. If those guards had attacked him, do you think any force short of the gods themselves could have stopped their wrath?”

She stumbled to a halt. He kept walking, too angry to care whether the crowd closed in and tore her apart in that moment. But he heard her sandals clap on the stones behind him as she jogged to catch up, and reluctantly he forced himself to think of his mother, as Ehiru had taught him. That cooled his anger, and he slowed down for her.

“It would seem I’ve spent too many years studying foreigners and not enough with my own people,” she said, sounding chagrined. He took it for her version of an apology. “You see them more clearly than I.”

“People everywhere are the same.”

“All people except him.” From the corner of his eye he saw her nod toward Ehiru’s back.

Nijiri smiled, lifting his head proudly. “True. All people except him.”

Following along in Ehiru’s wake, they passed through the last of the crowd and returned to Sunandi’s house.





32





It is the sound of screaming that wakes the child Ehiru.

For a moment he lies on his bed, listening to the chorus of his brothers’ breath and wondering if the sound is the remnant of some dream. But he dismisses that thought, for he never forgets his dreams, and just a moment before he was skimming above the greenlands near Kite-iyan. There were no screams then, just the hollow rush of the wind and the pennant-flap of his loindrapes. He remembers the tickling caress of barley hairs against his skin, the fermenting smell of hot mud in the irrigation canals, the sun on his back, the sere blue sky. In the past he has dived into the mud to see what it feels like. Once it tried to drown him, but he is a proper child of Gujaareh. He proclaimed his soulname—I AM NSHA—and took hold of the dream so that the mud became like the womb he remembers only when he is asleep, harmless and enveloping and profoundly comforting.

But now the dream is gone and he lies in the real world, where he is just a little boy and his heart is full of sudden fear.

He sits up; several of his brothers do the same. This is the chamber where the youngest of the Prince’s sons sleep. Tehemau has seen seven floods of the river and is oldest, but it is Ehiru to whom the other boys look. He is only five, and does not understand that they see a peculiar wisdom in him; he merely accepts it. “Goddess-touched,” their tutors call it. “Blessed with the gift,” said the priest who came to Kite-iyan a few days before to examine him. He gave Ehiru a necklace with an intriguing pendant: an ovoid of polished obsidian etched with a stylized moontear. “Before forty days have passed you shall join us,” the priest told him then. “You are a child of the Hetawa now.” Ehiru knows this is foolish. He is the child of his mother, and the father he rarely sees but loves anyhow, and perhaps this Hananja of whom he has heard so much. But he fingers the pendant now and shivers as a flicker of foreboding moves through him.

Getting out of bed, he whispers to his brothers that they should find someplace to hide. He will go to see what is happening. Tehemau insists on accompanying him, mostly to save face. Ehiru nods even though Tehemau wets the bed and sometimes, after a nightmare, weeps like an infant. Ehiru wishes one of their older brothers were here—Eninket, who is kind and knows the best stories, or perhaps the warrior Tiyesset. But Tehemau’s presence will be a comfort, at least.