Cradle of Sea and Soil Page 7

  There was already a crowd here, most of them standing around the limestone crags or up on the platforms, but out in the center of the arena there were other youths dressed in light war garb.

  Ixchel squeezed out from the pack of youths and ran toward them. He waved to her, readying to salute in the way of warriors and give her the proper words of greeting, but when she neared she hopped and gave Narune an embarrassedly intimate embrace.

  He frowned in confusion and wondered what she was doing.

  “Ixchel...” Kisari warned from behind them. He could sense Kisari already stepping away.

  “Don’t worry, I didn’t forget about you. Here—” she spun from Narune toward Kisari and dragged her into just as fierce and intimate an embrace.

  Kisari eventually rolled her eyes and swatted at her, but Ixchel danced away, laughing.

  Narune sighed. “What game are you playing now, Ixchel?”

  “No games,” Ixchel said, indignant. “Games are for sproutlings.”

  Kisari crossed her arms. “Oh? So I suppose none of that was a spectacle meant for those youths over there? The ones glaring at us?”

  Ixchel tried to feign disinterest as she turned to peer across the field. “Who? Oh, those fools. Eh, some of them might have voiced an interest in me. I'm very desirable, you know.”

  Narune exchanged a look with Kisari and they both shook their heads even though they knew Ixchel wasn’t completely wrong—she had many handsome scars with equally wonderful stories, and a body lined with bundled muscle. Ixchel practically emanated predator and survivor, and those unspoken boasts were backed by skills she was all too eager to show off at every turn.

  Ixchel wrapped her arms around the waists of both of her friends and smiled. “Come, let’s spend the last notch together, eh?”

  She guided them toward the center—where, of course, all the gathered spectators could plainly see her with them.

  There would be a lot of fresh gossip going around after today. That was probably also what Ixchel hoped for. He sighed, but let it pass. Ixchel was all about spectacle and loved doing exactly what no one wanted her to do, to the utter dismay of her fathers, as she loved to tell Narune and Kisari.

  Even so, Ixchel had always been more than happy to drown Kisari in trinkets, and she saw Narune as her equal in the warrior craft and treated him seriously during their sparring, which was also when he saw a glimpse of the mature warrior she would someday become.

  That was enough for him. So he smiled and laughed and let her have her little game, and they spent the notch together, just the three of them. Every so often a group would come to try and peel Ixchel away, or to come and nip at Narune and Kisari, but only found bared teeth in return.

  Then, the spiritseers arrived, each of them in their beautiful ponchos that were covered in war-marks and dyed the color of the Flow each wielded. Kisari wished Ixchel and him the Guardian’s favor, squeezing each of their hands in turn, and then left to join the spectators. A hush fell not long after.

  At the head of the spiritseers stood a man in a deep blue poncho. He wore a very long warrior braid and was covered in crisscrossing scars. The man bowed, graceful as any stormdancer, and then gestured with a sweeping hand.

  His tone was even, and his voice soft, yet his words had a weight to them that seemed to pull the spectators forward, their ears straining to catch his every word.

  “We, the elders of the Spiritseer Circle, welcome you,” the man began. He spread his arms and passed a glance across his peers. “I am Tessouat, and it is my pleasure to sound the Call that begins anew the Ritual of Fang and Feather. The Ritual, named in honor of the Guardian herself, first among all warriors, will push you beyond your limits, but then this is also true of our eternal war against the halja and Stillness. Some of you will turn away, heads bowed. A few of you may give your final heartbeats. The rest of you, however, will crawl through on trembling limbs and prove yourselves worthy of becoming spiritseers. But be warned, for ours is a path without an end, one that cannot be halted upon until you are sea and soil once more.

  “Knowing this, we ask who among you would still challenge the Ritual of Fang and Feather?”

  Narune’s ears flattened as the youths around him returned a thundering cry, Ixchel loudest among them, and felt out of place. After a moment, Ixchel grabbed his arm and, with a wink at him, forced Narune to leap with her. He found her excitement an easy spark for his own, and his nervous worries washed away before long.

  Eventually, Narune was screaming and jumping as loudly as the other youths.

  That was how he made the mistake of forgetting he was anything but one of them.

  Chapter 7

  The sentinels escorted Colibrí through the sleeping village, their faces grim and solemn masks. It annoyed her to be treated like this, but she kept her peace. Partly because she was already disobeying her exile for this meeting, and partly because she didn't trust herself to speak without making things worse. Her tail moved in a slow but forceful pattern behind her, and her jaw ached from grinding her teeth together.

  The sentinels noticed it all of course, and they also saw her ears standing and the hair on her neck rising, so they were tense the entire way to Yabisi’s caney.

  More of Yabisi’s personal sentinels were waiting at the large building. They eyed her as if she were a halja loosed into the middle of Kayuya Village, but Colibrí refused to be cowed and stepped through the curtain beaded with nuts and seashells. She moved past the wide audience chamber toward the cacica’s personal rooms. The sentinels followed close behind, their spears held in both hands.

  She found Yabisi sitting on a rug, bleary-eyed, an elaborate pipe in her hand. She looked up at Colibrí with amusement and spread her arms. “Oi, welcome!” The woman giggled as her protectors moved around her, all save one who remained at Colibrí’s side.

  Colibrí frowned. The cacica’s room was as messy as when they had been sproutlings, but rather than a collection of carvings, shells, and patterned bits of cloth, Yabisi’s room was now filled with the trappings of her station. A map of the archipelago gifted to them by foreigners spanned one wall—useless because the tangled forest covered every island, but it was pretty—while foreign books and papers lay in stacks. They didn't last long in the humid breezes of the islands, she remembered—it had been a common complaint of a much younger Yabisi—but it looked like the cacica was already copying them to the same cord-bound stacks of leaves sages used to store their knowledge for others. The leaves were oval-shaped and uneven, but, if prepared correctly, were capable of outlasting many generations.

  “Excuse the mess,” Yabisi said cheerfully when she noticed Colibrí’s wandering gaze. “Your request caught me by surprise, so I didn’t have time to tidy up.” She lifted her pipe. “Would you like to smoke with me?”

  The pungent scent prickled her nose; it was warding powder. She recognized mixture as a ward for the mind, one capable of soothing nerves and numbing aches. Colibrí wrinkled her nose. “Warding powder doesn’t work on us.”

  “Oh,” Yabisi said, frowning. “Yes. I knew that. You told me, once, after pretending for so long. Well, why not pretend again, eh? Come!”

  “I didn't come here to share your pipe, Yabisi. I came here to—oi, are you also water-minded?” Her frown narrowed on the empty gourd behind Yabisi’s back.

  Their cacica giggled again, like a sproutling. “Tasted very good. Strong, too.” The woman paused for a moment as she squinted up at Colibrí. “Oh, I know that face. You're upset with me. Fine, come and let us get this over with.” She rose unsteadily to her feet.

  Colibrí hesitated. “I can't speak with you like this. And if you think it’ll earn you pity…”

  “Oh, of course not. I know that too few have ever offered you pity for you to have any to spare. This is about your son, isn’t it? Well, go ahead and be upset. I don't care. He should never have been born and you should have given him back to the forest like you promised.”

  Something j
olted through Colibrí and in a flash her hand moved, palm striking across Yabisi’s cheek. The sound of flesh meeting flesh cut through the air like thunder.

  The sentinels were caught by surprise—and, honestly, it caught Colibrí by surprise too—but they moved a heartbeat later, their spears poised to kill, their arms trembling with shame and anger at the stain against their oaths.

  It was their deep, masterful training that saved her in the end.

  Yabisi laughed and gave them the holding sign of warriors, fist up in the air. The sentinels froze.

  Cacica Yabisi rubbed her cheek for a moment, then bent to collect her dropped pipe and took a deep pull. She puffed out a series of smoke rings, then laughed again.

  “What are you going to do to Narune?” Colibrí asked in a soft voice.

  “Teach him the lesson you’re too much of a coward to pass on, of course. Him, and anyone else who has forgotten what lurks inside you—waiting for the chance to be freed and hoping for the day you can no longer wrest it back under control.” Yabisi eyed her, smoldering pipe in her hand, her hair loose and messy. She wasn’t wearing her regal headdress or sarong, only a simple skirt. “I shouldn’t have fought to have your life spared. It's a mistake I regret, even now among so many others.” Colibrí tensed, her tail halting, and Yabisi nodded before taking another pull from her pipe. “Oh. I forgot you hated that word.”

  “But why make Narune suffer? Why not me?”

  “Because,” Yabisi began loudly, “Halfborn or not, there are still many feats in your story. I also already declared a sentence on you. So you’re beyond the reach of my honor now, and, as cacica, I can’t leave it behind just to prove a point.” She took another few puffs and exhaled slowly. “And Warmaster Jhul refuses to throw his daughter away, no matter how often I demand it. Since Kisari aims to become a warden, I might have looked the other way, but Narune? He wants to be a spiritseer! A spiritseer!”

  “It surprised me too,” Colibrí admitted. She sighed and ran a hand through her unbraided hair. “I thought he wanted to be a warrior, like me.”

  “Well, Mother Colibrí, my problem is what comes next. We both know that, because Narune is Halfborn, his seed won't be sown so easily, but if it is, then his sproutling will also be Halfborn. Same with the girl. How long, then, before my little acts of mercy spiral out of control? How long until some Halfborn demands the right to become a pathfinder? Warmaster? Fucking cacica?” She shrugged. “We’re already shunning morbid oaths just by tolerating the three of you, and it would only take one echo of the past—”

  “I’ve never turned against our kin,” Colibrí snapped through clenched teeth. “I even used to sleep against your nape, yet notice how your neck is still there.”

  “The Halfborn of old walked around cheerfully, loving and beloved, too—until they almost ended the tribes.”

  “Then why did you allow me to live, Yabisi? Why didn’t you listen to the voices demanding that you restore the oath Cacica Anacaona left broken?”

  Yabisi, whose first parents had been taken by war and storm, leaving her to be cared for by the village, had been raised to follow after Anacaona. As for Colibrí herself… well, her parents had supposedly been eager to give her back to the forest, but for a reason Colibrí still didn’t quite understand, Cacica Anacaona had instead taken her in at the last moment. Colibrí’s first parents, outraged and shamed by the knowledge that they were the reason a Halfborn would again exist, had formally refused to share any bonds with Colibrí before leaving for one of the villages on the outer islands.

  At least, that was the story Cacica Anacaona had told her—and that was all the former cacica had told her.

  “Well, I was young, foolish, and curious.” Yabisi moved close and hooked an arm around Colibrí’s shoulders. She grinned and waggled her eyebrows. “Curious about many things, like if you also had a coyote’s tongue.”

  “You’re jesting now? Truly?”

  “Eh.” The cacica waved dismissively. “Did you know we’re losing? The war against the halja and Stillness, I mean.”

  Losing the war? Colibrí didn't know what to say, didn’t know if Yabisi was playing some kind of game or if she could even trust anything the woman said in this state. Yet Colibrí suddenly thought back to what she had seen in the forest. It seemed like forever ago now, but the dread was fresh.

  Yabisi released her and spun a slow circle. She took a deep breath. “Did you hear? I said we’re losing the war. Oh, we were always losing, because the war has always been hopeless. The Primordial Wound festers with Stillness and every pinch of soil we lose to it we lose for-ev-er, and oh, how we’ve been losing. Nothing we’ve done has ever remained enough for long.

  “Islandborn shamans were enough of an answer at first, so very long ago, then we adopted the handful of surviving Vanadylans that drifted onto our shores and together we turned our shamans into spiritseers. That balanced the war against the Stillness for another long while, but things worsened yet again, and we were eventually forced to depend on Halfborn—” She paused to smile pointedly at Colibrí. “—until we couldn’t. Now, we find ourselves being pushed back yet again and I’m the cacica stuck with finding an answer—but I don’t know what to do.”

  Colibrí blinked and glanced at the sentinels around Yabisi, hoping they would stop her. But they had only moved closer to the cacica, seemingly unmoved by what the leader of all their people was saying.

  “Surely—” Colibrí paused to lick her lips, her tail curled around a leg, then tried again. “The halja prey on all of Creation, so surely we can find allies against them somewhere? Wasn’t that the task you gave to the seamaster?”

  “Yes, Colibrí.” Yabisi whirled and pointed at the map on the wall. “And I learned only that foreigners look at us and laugh. They see our practical clothing and focused way of life, see that we don’t even have a name for our islands, and then they call us simple-minded savages.

  “And yet their greatest warriors, like those who some of them call ‘knights,’ spend a lifetime chasing after a single fucking halja, and that alone is worthy of a lifetime of praise, honor, and reward!” She made a disgusted sound. “But, idiot that I am, I still worked hard to impress them. I dressed the archipelago in words from the oldest stormdancer tales: the Cradle of Sea and Soil. I told them of our many feats and our noble spiritseers. I told them of our superior wealth in flesh, spirit, and mind. Of our mender-lore, which has been honed by endless war, and of all the many gifts of the forest that lead me to giggle at the armor and weapons they are just so proud of.

  “None of it has made them respect the Islandborn, but what do I care? Our talks tell me they will be useless at the best and possibly yet another concern at the worst.” Yabisi paused to catch her frantic breath, giggled, and then sucked on her pipe. Afterward, she breathed out a slow stream of smoke, then turned to Colibrí. “So. Come here.”

  Colibrí didn’t move.

  “I said fucking come here!” Yabisi shouted, and when Colibrí at last moved before her, Yabisi snarled and clutched her chin and locked gazes with her. She drew close, their noses pressing together, and said, “Now, look at me and tell me you or your son are more important than all the Islandborn; than all the world, if we fail to hold back the Stillness.”

  Silence was the only thing Colibrí could offer.

  “Ah, see? So go and hate me all you want. I don’t care.” Yabisi tilted her head for a moment, as if some thought had struck her, and then she released Colibrí with something like a hiss. “Oh. The story you told to the night sentinels. You weren’t lying about the corruption you found?”

  “No…” Colibrí replied. “I swear it.”

  Yabisi waved a hand. “No one else has found halja or corruption, but I believe you because, other than Narune, your warrior oaths are all I left you and all you have. That’s why your story frightens me down to my blood and bones, and why it should frighten you. Maybe you should worry about why this is so—or who this hunter of yours is—instead of
worrying about your foolish child, eh? He was a mistake too, but I promise he won’t become mine.”

  “Yabisi—” Colibrí began.

  “Go,” the cacica commanded. “I don’t care if you hate that word.”

  Colibrí frowned and began to reach out an arm to touch the cacica. No, not the cacica, but Yabisi, the woman who had once been her only friend, and more. Oh, seas and skies aflame, Yabisi. I became a warrior for you. You told me I would become your champion, greatest among the honored, fierce like the coyote I wear, and quickly at the side of those in need like the bird I'm named after. I believed you, and for so long I had nothing else… Is this what remains of those days? She paused and her tongue struggled to form the right words.

  But hadn’t she just thought them? Surely Yabisi would understand? She licked her lips, tail still curled around her thigh. “Why must it be like this between us? I still feel the way I’ve always felt about you, Yabisi, and after all we’ve been through together—”

  “I commanded you to go!” Yabisi screamed the words and flung her elaborate pipe at Colibrí, scattering warding powder everywhere. “GO!“

  Colibrí fled. Two sentinels flanked her as she hurried through the caney, leaving behind a fuming Yabisi, curses spilling from her tongue. She didn't know what to do, now. She had come empowered by her anger to demand that Yabisi reveal her game with Narune, but what she had instead learned unnerved her.

  She stepped outside, the night air warm and filled with the chorus of the coquí, and then let herself be escorted to the edge of the village.

  Colibrí doubted Yabisi would outright murder her son, but… what did that leave? Shaming him and then shattering his heart?

  And what was she going to do about whoever was hunting her? About what she had seen? Could she truly be the only warrior finding the vile gardens of Stillness? But why?

  What was happening?

  Colibrí didn’t know, and the warrior in her trembled at that. An unknowable foe couldn’t be tracked or fought, and that left them as good as immortal, free to wait for the ripest moment in which to become real, like the unseen predator or the undiscovered trap.