“Now that you are here, he no longer needs to suffer.” Sedaysa stepped to the side. “Go free your brother.”
Naranpa stepped forward tentatively. At first, she only saw the people, small groups of men and women in fine clothes drinking from long, delicate cups, and she knew these must be the bosses of the Maw. She spied a tall woman in a wrap dress of deepest blue, heavy jade beads around her neck, leaning close to talk to a man in a billowing red cloak, a crown of speckled feathers on his head. There was a feast laid out on a low table, and another handful of people lingered there, eating with their hands and laughing. They stopped to watch as Naranpa passed, their eyes like pinpricks against her skin.
And then she saw him.
Denaochi knelt naked upon a dais strapped to a wooden rack. His head lolled on his neck, and his hair which had been so neatly coiffed hung loose and tangled around his face. His arms were splayed wide and tied at the wrists and shoulders with heavy rope, and familiar white stingray spines pierced his body. One through his tongue, more through each ear, and one through his genitals. Where there were not spines, there were knives. At his shoulders and elbows and hands, through his hips and thighs, inner and outer, but none through his torso. He was meant to bleed to death, very slowly.
Naranpa shuddered.
She was dimly aware that around her the sound had stilled, and she knew they watched—the woman in blue, the man in red, and all the rest. She felt someone beside her, but she could not tear her eyes away from her brother.
“It is the old way,” Sedaysa said beside her, her voice so calm Naranpa wanted nothing more than to scream.
“The Watchers ended this practice,” she said through gritted teeth. “It is forbidden.”
“Do not judge us, Sun Priest,” the woman said. “Denaochi consented, and it is his atonement.”
“Release him,” Naranpa growled, the sound of her voice so filled with anger that she did not recognize it.
“No,” the woman said simply. “That is your atonement.”
Naranpa wanted to shout that she owed these people nothing, but it was too late for argument. And the longer she delayed, the more he suffered.
She forced herself forward, the hem of her fine dress dragging through blood. Once she stood directly before him, she paused, hands raised, not knowing what to do first. Untie him? Remove the spines?
“The spines first.” It was Sedaysa again, behind her, voice gentle.
Naranpa pulled the one from his tongue first, and then the others, her hands steady for Denaochi’s sake. And then, one by one, she removed the knives, counting a dozen as they clattered to the floor. The ropes were last, and once released, he tumbled into her arms. She caught him and pulled him into her lap. Blood soaked through her dress, but she did not care.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, pushing his hair from his face. He had not opened his eyes, and she didn’t know if he heard her.
If he was still alive to hear her.
Grief bubbled up, dense and drowning. Her tears wetted his hair as she held him close.
“Which one of you did this?”
They had assembled before her. Sedaysa, the man in red, the woman in blue, and nine others who made up the company of the Maw known as the bosses.
“We all did.” It was the red-robed man who spoke. “I am Pasko of the Blackfire, and my blade is there.” He stepped forward to retrieve one of the discarded knives.
“I am Amalq of the Wildrose,” the woman in blue said, stepping forward, “and my blade is there.” She took another knife.
And so on they went, until Sedaysa took the last blade and they stood before her, waiting. For what she didn’t know. It all stank of ritual, not malice, but she had no use for any of it.
“And who pierced him through with those?” Her eyes touched on the stingray spines, the desire to catalog her enemies strong.
“Those he did to himself,” Pasko said. “He was not craven.”
She had not expected that, and it tore at her heart. She imagined him there, kneeling, knowing their knives would come next, as he drove the needles through his flesh.
What if I was too late? She pressed her hand to his chest. She felt a heartbeat and the slow rise and fall of his breath. He still lived, but barely. “He needs a healer.”
“No.” Sedaysa’s denial was flat and did not brook argument. “If the gods will it, he survives. If they do not…”
I must save him. But how? She thought of Zataya’s manual and its decree that the power of the sun was life itself. But what use was that here when death loomed so near?
“Life,” she whispered. “I have the power of life. I am a survivor.” She pressed her lips to her brother’s head. “And so are you.”
She closed her eyes and concentrated. She thought of the shock of hitting the icy river from a great height, the terror of waking up in her own tomb, the exhilaration of escaping the Crow God Reborn’s attack. She drew from those moments, those memories, and let them build within her. She fed them to the place in her heart, the place where the sun god dwelled within, and she willed it to spark. She knew when her hand began to glow from the low gasps of the watching crowd, and she pressed her palm to Denaochi’s chest, willing his breath to strengthen, his heart to answer the beat of her own.
And it did.
Slowly, he came back to her.
She felt a mirroring strength leave her body for his. She let it happen, let her vitality flow to him. Her head began to pound, and the room around her swayed, the heady perfume of flowers making her dizzy. Only when Denaochi coughed and began to stir did she cut the connection between them.
They gasped at the same time, and then they were both laughing, and the bosses were murmuring in shock and approval, but in this moment, she cared nothing for what they thought, only that Denaochi was alive. She turned his arms, then his hands. The wounds were pale and raised, halfway to healed.
“Ah, Sister.” His voice was weak and strained, but it was enough. “I knew you’d come. You were always so ambitious.”
She hiccupped around her tears, smiling. “Another test, Ochi?”
“The last one, I swear it.” His eyes flicked to their audience. “Are they with us?”
She looked up.
At her attention, Pasko went down to one knee, murmuring, “Sun Priest.”
Amalq followed. “Sun Priest.”
And the others likewise.
Sedaysa was the last, “Sun Priest” triumphant on her lips, and Naranpa caught the shadow of a smile.
She brushed his hair from Denaochi’s face and whispered, “They are with us.”
A deep calm settled over her, a purpose she had not known before. Even when she had sung the stories and performed the rituals of the Sun Priest, she had never felt as much at her purpose as this. Was this what the signers of the Treaty had wanted when they established the Watchers? A Sun Priest not only to lead the Meridian but to heal a war-ravaged land? A Sun Priest to find order in the chaos, to know the future so that the past was not repeated?
She did not quite understand what she was meant to do with healing powers or if they offered her anything that she might use to fight against the darkness that the Crow God Reborn brought, but she was closer than she had been only hours ago to finding an answer. Her brother was alive, and as she looked out over the lowered heads and bent knees of the bosses before her, she knew they would face what came next together.
CHAPTER 21
CITY OF TOVA (DISTRICT OF ODO)
YEAR 1 OF THE CROW
Beware the faithless for whom duty is but an inconvenience. Better a single zealot than a thousand pragmatists who believe in nothing.
—On the Philosophy of War, taught at the Hokaia War College
“Wake up, Okoa.” Persistent hands shook his shoulder, and he came to all at once.