“Go on,” I murmured to her. “Go on.”
I expected her to skitter away when she was finished laying. She did not. Instead, she withdrew her body from the rent she’d made in Chua’s flesh, took a handful of staggering, unsteady steps, then collapsed onto the dirt. I had forgotten that part. Laying eggs was the last act of the puppeteer. She would never see her brood emerge into the sunlight, never see them grow.
I stretched out a hand to her, cupped her body in the moonlight as she twitched herself still, as Ananshael came with his own deft, gentle hands to unmake her. I was still holding the corpse when blackness closed over me once more.
*
I woke the second time to Ruc’s hand on my shoulders, shaking me awake. Over his head, the morning sun blazed, blinding me, casting his face into shadow.
The movement hurt, but not nearly as much as it had the first time, during the night.
The night.
I turned to find the carcass of the spider an arm’s length away. Already it was buzzing with flies, crawling with ants. A few steps farther, Chua was still passed out, the wound in her side scabbed over. Ela and Kossal were gone. The space where they’d been sprawled when I first awoke was empty, the only sign that they’d been there at all some matting of the grasses. Before I could worry about their absence, however, Ruc was dragging me onto my feet.
“What’s happening?” I managed, raising a hand to shield my eyes.
“Jaguars are happening,” he growled. Even as he spoke, he threw something with his left hand, a stick or stone—my vision was still too blurry to make it out. “Two of them. They were wary of me at first, but I think they’ve figured out my secret.”
“What’s your secret?” I asked, blinking my eyes, scanning the tangled brush around us. My mouth tasted like ash and my head throbbed, but after a moment my vision began to steady. We were in a small clearing maybe a dozen paces across. A wide, muddy channel swept in a lazy arc behind us. Thorny shrub and reed ringed the rest.
“My secret,” Ruc murmured, “is that if I take more than two steps in any direction, I fall over.”
I tested a step myself, wobbled, almost toppled, then caught myself on Ruc’s shoulder.
He was holding a sword, I realized, a strange, gorgeous weapon of cast bronze.
“Where’d you get a sword?” I asked stupidly, forgetting for the moment about the cache I’d noticed earlier.
“They left us with weapons,” Ruc replied, pointing to the diminished pile.
“Thought they brought us out here to die.”
“I think we’re supposed to make the dying interesting. Here.” He pressed the shaft of a spear into my hands. It was about as long as I was high, the point also of bronze. I might have spent more time admiring it if the jaguars hadn’t chosen that moment to attack again, both of them flowing out of the brush from opposite sides, testing our flanks. Ruc lashed out, sunlight flashing off his blade, and I turned to face the other beast.
I hadn’t seen a jaguar since the last time someone decided to make a sacrifice out of me. The cat I remembered was huge; its jaws had seemed large enough to crush my skull. Of course, I had grown since then, and had shed my childhood terror. The creature facing me now didn’t weigh much more than I did. It moved with all the deadly grace that I remembered, but I had grown more graceful too. As long as I kept the spear’s point between us, I could hold it at bay.
The jaguar bared its fangs, hissed, stalked side to side, searching for an opening. Its green-gold eyes were almost human as they studied me.
“Come on,” I whispered to it. “Come on.”
The cat lashed its tail, circled wide, swatted at the spear’s point, then circled again, testing. Behind me, its companion howled in frustration.
“I can’t help but notice the lack of immortal women leaping from the water to our rescue,” Ruc said. “Or does that come later?”
His breathing was heavy, but even.
“I wouldn’t be too eager,” I said. “According to the Vuo Ton, she left me alive so I’d be more fun to kill the next time.”
“Yeah, well, she’d better hurry up if she doesn’t want these cats to do the job first.”
I’d been so disoriented when I woke, then so focused on the jaguar stalking me, that only then did I realize that Ruc’s fury from the day before, his disgust for me, his disdain—all of it seemed gone. I didn’t dare turn to see his face, but his voice was the voice I remembered: wry, focused, unflappable.
“Why didn’t you let them kill us?” I asked. “Kill me?”
“And fight my way out of the delta on my own?”
“You could have saved just Chua. She knows the delta better than any of us anyway.”
I turned side-on to the cat, as though I’d forgotten all about it, waited for the flicker of movement out of the corner of my eye, then whipped the spear back around, knocking it from the air mid-leap. It was a long time since I’d fought with a spear, and though I nicked a gash on the jaguar’s flank, most of the blow’s force connected through the shaft. The creature rolled to its feet, hissed, then backed away, those molten eyes never leaving me.
“I take it you missed,” Ruc said.
“It’s not dead.”
“Some fucking Skullsworn you are.”
“Why did you save us?” I asked again. “Why did you bother to wake me up?”
Instead of answering, Ruc let out a low curse. There was a quick scramble, the sound of a blade biting into flesh, then a high, furious scream, followed by Ruc’s panting.
“You still alive?” I asked.
“For now.”
“Then answer the question.”
Ruc spat. “I’m sure I’ll have a few agonizing moments to regret my decision, but for now I’m not finished with you.”
My own beast showed its teeth. I bared mine in return.
“What does that mean?”
“It means you still haven’t told me the truth.”
“Learning I’m a priestess of Ananshael isn’t enough truth for you?”
“No. It is not. You said you came back to Dombang, but you never said why.”
“To serve my god.”
“People die the same way everywhere. I watched them. I’ve killed them. No need for you to trudge all the way to Dombang.”