Pasko and Amalq arrived shortly after, and Naranpa, bathed and wearing a new dress from Sedaysa’s overflowing trunks, found herself around a table in the Agave’s decadent courtyard having tea with her new allies, the criminal bosses of Coyote’s Maw.
“I must admit that when Denaochi told us his sister was the Sun Priest, I did not at first believe it,” Amalq said, once they were settled with their cups.
Naranpa took a sip. The tea was bright and summery, a fit for the hothouse if not for the weather outside. “I left for the tower when I was a child, to work as a servant.”
“That does not explain things.” Pasko was a large man with a deep voice that Naranpa imagined was used to menace.
He seemed ill suited for the tea table, and she found herself reluctant to sit with him. She attributed it to her own biases and tried her best to set it aside, but it was there in the back of her mind. Something that told her Pasko was to be watched.
Naranpa set down her cup. “I became Sun Priest almost by accident. I was working in the kitchens, and one of the other girls had fallen sick. Her duty was to bring tea to the Sun Priest every evening, which for that night became my duty. The Sun Priest then was a man named Kiutue. He was striking. Tall, with a beard. Winged Serpent by birth, but he must have had Obregi heritage somewhere. I thought him a great bear when I met him first. But he was kind. Gentle. He became my mentor.”
“You seduced him.” That was Sedaysa, and Naranpa flushed.
“I did not. It doesn’t…” She caught the edge of a smile on Sedaysa’s perfect lips. Was she teasing her? Naranpa didn’t think it amusing and refused to rise to the bait.
“I took his tea up that evening,” she continued, “and he was working with one of his dedicants, an unpleasant man the kitchen girls knew to stay away from. Seeing him there made me nervous, and I ended up spilling the tea on one of their star charts.”
“And he beat you,” Pasko said knowingly.
“No!” Skies, did all these people expect the worst of their fellow humans? “But he did yell at me. The dedicant, not Kiutue. And as I was cleaning up the spill, I noticed an error in his chart. A star in a constellation he had drawn too far to the south. It was a small error, and no doubt that they would have caught the mistake eventually. But I was thirteen and humiliated, and I blurted it out.”
“Ho!” Pasko said, laughing. Too loudly, as if to make a show of it. “Just like a Maw brat to talk back to her betters!”
“But he was not my better. That was the point.”
“And what happened?” Amalq asked intently, her cup held in long-fingered hands that Naranpa could see were crisscrossed with white scars.
“He made me a dedicant.”
“You were ambitious,” Sedaysa murmured over her cup, her gray eyes knowing.
“I did not mean—”
“Don’t apologize for it. We are all ambitious.” Amalq gestured around the table. “Else we would not be in our positions.”
“From kitchen girl to Sun Priest is quite a tale, no matter how it happened.”
There was admiration in Pasko’s voice. Admiration she was not sure she deserved. She had been smart, yes, and worked hard. But part of her still felt she had been picked because she was not the right kind of ambitious. It had always been her suspicion that Kiutue had chosen her to succeed him precisely because he thought she would be content to bend the order of oracles away from the political and toward the more mystical, and he had mostly been right. But once she had become Sun Priest, something had changed for her. She could not pinpoint what it was, or even when the shift had occurred, but she had begun to care. About the future of Tova, about the legacy of the Watchers. Now it all seemed so pathetic. The fate of the city rested in the hands of a vengeful god, and the Watchers’ legacy had died in one fell swoop on a single day.
They were staring at her, waiting for her to speak, and she realized she had gotten lost in her thoughts. She sipped her tea, biding time, and finally asked, “And how did each of you become…?”
She trailed off. She knew Sedaysa’s story now, and it had involved murder. She could only imagine they all had similarly bloody ascensions.
“We know what we are,” Sedaysa said, her laugh as light as moth wings. “Thugs, criminals, bosses. I certainly have no shame in it. Although I might prefer the term independent merchants.”
They laughed at that, Pasko the loudest.
Amalq said, “If the families of the Sky Made were to run the workhouses or gambling dens, they would call it simply commerce. But when we do it, it is illicit, forbidden. So we operate here in the Maw or in the Eastern districts and pay a tithe to the Sky Made to turn an eye, and they let us live unbothered. Mostly.”
Pasko nodded his agreement. “We were born clanless, and in Tova, there is no greater transgression. No family, no clan, no life unless you make your own. So we made our own, each of us in their own way. Just as you did.”
Is that what she had done? She was not so sure, but she let it pass.
“I am a moneylender and the proprietor of the Blackfire.” Pasko leaned in. “If I were Sky Made, I would be admired, considered a generous man of the community. But since I am not…” He shrugged his large shoulders.
“I run a workhouse and club called the Wildrose,” Amalq said. “I was once indentured there for a debt my husband owed. But now I run the house.” She lifted a scarred hand. “We make textiles for export.”
“How did you come to be a boss?”
“A worker’s revolt. I killed the boss and took her place.” She tossed her head back, guiltless. “If not me, then another would have.”
“And I peddle pleasures of the flesh here at the Agave.” That was Sedaysa. “Not just sex, although very much sex. But also flowers, herbs, and other botanicals that relax the mind and body. Some of the very ones that you see here.”
Naranpa eyed the blossoms around her. They abruptly took on a more sinister cast. “Do you also sell god magics?”
The woman tilted her head. “Are you in the market?”
“No, I only wondered.”
She was thinking of Zataya and her rare items from the Graveyard of the Gods. She wondered if Sedaysa had been the one to sell them to her, but she dared not ask it now while their wary alliance was barely birthed. My allies are all criminals and murderers, she thought to herself. But how is that different from the Sky Made or even the Watchers themselves? Only that the law favors one form of corruption and frowns on the other. The principles are the same.
“You have earned the right to claim a name and a club,” Sedaysa said.
Naranpa flushed. “Me? I have no need for a club.”
Amalq’s smile was knowing. “Perhaps not now, but the vagaries of the future are uncertain. It is still a right you have earned should you need it.”
“It would honor us if you picked a name,” Sedaysa said.
“Something meaningful,” Amalq agreed.
Naranpa thought of Denaochi’s lupines and Sedaysa’s agave plant. Even the blackfire and the wildrose. “They’re all flowers.” It seemed obvious enough once she said it.
Sedaysa motioned a servant forward, and she handed her mistress a book. Sedaysa opened it and turned to a blank page. “Put your mark here, Naranpa, and those who rule the Maw shall know it is yours and can be claimed by no other from this day forward.”
It felt surprisingly formal, but Naranpa was a former priest who appreciated ceremony. She took the proffered stylus and drew her insignia. Her drawing was simple, a black-and-white replica and cruder than she would have liked, but it resembled well enough the blue flower with the three bladelike leaves that peeled back from the starburst center that was its inspiration.
Amalq nodded, looking pleased. “A handmaiden.”
“And now you have the right to call yourself the proprietor of the Handmaiden.” Sedaysa closed the book and handed it to the patiently waiting servant.
“But I don’t even have a building.”
“In time.”
Naranpa had not expected to come out of this evening as an actual Maw boss, and she understood it was only in name, but she found herself smiling anyway.