Saomeji held her gaze. He had strange, golden eyes, though his skin was as white as that of any pureblood. “Traitor’s eyes” they were called back in Nakkiga, because the eyes of the Sithi, the Norns’ kinfolk, were that same color, though the two tribes had been gone their separate ways for a very long time. Such ancient features were scorned among the Hikeda’ya, even though they predominantly occurred in the oldest clans. As another halfblood, Nezeru wondered how much Saomeji had suffered for having a mortal parent. Even to ask him, though, would be to create a kind of intimacy in which she had no interest.
As she and Saomeji joined the others, Makho stared at her so hard it made her uneasy, his eyes as unfeeling as a hunting eagle’s. Nezeru had admired him since she had first joined the Order, and had always done her best to emulate his pure-mindedness and his mask of stony indifference, but she feared that no matter how hard she tried, the human side of her heritage would keep her from being accepted by him or the others as true Hikeda’ya. Halfbloods were plentiful now in Nakkiga, and they always matured far more swiftly than their pureblood counterparts, though they seemed to live nearly as long. Nezeru had become a death-sung Sacrifice at an age when her untainted peers were scarcely ready to join an Order, let alone be granted its highest honors, but the confidence of the insider could never be hers. She was half-mortal, and her father, though important, was not even of the Order of Sacrifice; only deeds could overcome such a heritage and lift her out of the crime of her diluted blood.
The rowers pulled their longboat up onto the strand. Like most mortals who lived near the ocean here in the north, they looked to be of Rimmersgard blood, but unlike their kinfolk farther south who had long ago given up the seafaring life, these so-called Black Rimmersmen still made their living upon the water, trading along the coast and even harrying and robbing any ships of other nations that strayed too far out of safe southern waters. But that was not the only reason these people were scorned by their Rimmersgard kinsmen. The Black Rimmersmen had been bound up with the Hikeda’ya for centuries, many of them captured and kept like animals, forced to labor for their Hikeda’ya masters. Slave or free, though, they were usually hated as turncoats by their own mortal kind.
At a sign from Makho, the Queen’s Talons climbed silently into the boat and the staring, clearly frightened mortals rowed them out to the waiting ship.
? ? ?
The captain of the Hringleit, a gray-bearded mortal with a face browned and cracked by the elements, tried his best to act as though these passengers were nothing unusual. But Nezeru knew that there had been little direct contact between the coastal lands and Nakkiga since the end of the Storm King’s War decades ago. These mortals might even have convinced themselves they were no longer the queen’s slaves—until Makho and the rest of the Talons appeared in the coastal village and demanded passage to the outer northern islands. The thought filled Nezeru with sour amusement.
The captain certainly seemed to know these waters well, because they sailed through the night. As the dark hours passed and Nezeru watched, the stars wheeled across the sky overhead in their familiar constellations, the Gate, the Serpent, the Lantern and the Owl, as if they had come to remind her that no matter where she voyaged, she was still beneath the protection of the Garden.
When morning came, the land had utterly disappeared and everything beneath the gray sky was water. Nezeru slept for a while without closing her eyes, letting her thoughts drift.
She rose back to awareness to find the sun higher in the sky but still far from its noon prominence. A short distance away her chieftain Makho was sharpening his witchwood sword Cold Root against a polishing stone. She had watched him do it a hundred times since they had left Nakkiga in the previous moon, and still it fascinated her, the rigor of his attention, the unshakable sameness of his actions. The sword was well worth the care, of course, a blade of impeccable lineage: fellow Sacrifice Kemme had once told her, in tones of veneration, that it had belonged to a brother of Ekimeniso himself, the queen’s revered but long-dead husband. More recently it had been wielded by one of Makho’s nearer kin, General Suno’ku, the beloved hero who had died in the Nakkiga Siege.
Nezeru did her best to watch without too much obvious staring—it was a very bad time to break their leader’s attention; Makho had slapped Ibi-Khai’s face once for coughing when Cold Root was unsheathed. As she watched the chieftain’s long, pale fingers moving across the blade, she found herself almost falling into the pattern of the witchwood, its gray lines like whorls on a fingertip, so delicate as to be almost invisible. Each witchwood sword was as individual as its wielder: the pattern of the grain differed with each tree. Even discounting ornament, no witchwood sword would ever be the same as another.
They were rarer than ever now, since witchwood itself was ever more scarce. Nezeru had heard whispers that the groves were lifeless places now, that only a few of the trees still grew, and that these had been moved for safety’s sake to a garden inside the royal palace. Some of the whispers even said that these last trees were dying, too. Nezeru thought that such a loss would be almost a greater tragedy than the ancient dispossession of her race from the Garden or the evils that mortals had done to them in these new lands. The People still survived, and if they were strong, the Hikeda’ya might last until the world itself was unmade, but with the witchwood gone there would never be another sacred blade smithied; the great, damaged gates of Nakkiga would never be properly rebuilt. Old witchwood could not be forged anew. When it was broken the spells were unbound and it became no different than any other object of the weary, mortal earth.
? ? ?
By the second day on the mortals’ ship, Nezeru began to see islands, some little more than clumps of rock that barely pierced the sea swells, others large enough to have vegetation of their own. One cold, windswept atoll was even decorated with wooded hills and a settlement of thatched houses near the shore.
“What people live here, in such a place?” she asked Makho as they passed it, but the chieftain ignored her.
“Qosei, we call them.” The Singer Saomeji was very close to her, almost beside her ear, and this time she had not heard him approach. “They are much like the trolls in the eastern mountains or the mortals of the south, the swamp dwellers.”
She wondered why the Singer seemed so eager to speak to her. Did he have some interest in her beyond their comradeship—beyond the Queen’s sacred mission? She was grateful that he was another halfblood and thus had no right to force her to couple with him as Makho and the others did.
“Yes, they are like the trolls and the savages of the Wran,” said Kemme, a scarred, hard-eyed veteran of the battles for Asu’a and the Nakkiga Gate. “They bleed, they die. And someday they and all the rest of the mortals will be scraped from the Queen’s lands.” He turned and strode away up the deck. The mortal crew hurried to get out of his way. Nezeru made to follow him, but Saomeji moved with graceful precision to block her path. “We have some time still before we reach the Island of the Bones.”
“The sooner we can perform our task for the Mother of All, the happier I will be,” she said, but for once she was interested in what he said. This was the first time she had heard anything of the nature of their mission, and the name of the island was unfamiliar to her.
Saomeji still had not moved. “If you would learn more of the Qosei or anything else of this place in the world, I would be pleased to share my knowledge with you.”
“You are kind,” she replied, “but I am sure such learning would be beyond me.” Her father had always told her that the followers of Akhenabi, Lord of Song, were as deadly and secret as adders, subtle beyond the understanding of the other orders. Everyone in Nakkiga knew that the Order of Song was the Queen’s favorite, its spellwielders and loremasters more valued even than the ancient Order of Celebrants or Nezeru’s own huge and powerful Order of Sacrifice, but Nezeru could not imagine exchanging the warrior’s way just for power. She had fought too hard in the first place to become, not just a Sacrifice but also the first of her kind to be named a Queen’s Talon. Who would exchange such honor for a life of shadows, and ugly secrets? “I am trained only for a single task,” she told him, making her voice firm, “—to kill the queen’s enemies.”
Saomeji may have guessed at her thoughts. “Do not scorn my knowledge, Sacrifice. A sword is no use without a hand to hold it, and a hand no use without the thoughts that guide it. My blood is no more pure than yours, and yet I have risen high already.”
“My presence here shows that I am not scorned by my own order, either. Still, I thank you, Singer, for enlightening me about the natives.” She inclined her head in the smallest acceptable acknowledgment, then slipped past him.