“An enemy you know well, I think. Sit.”
Nezeru hesitated. She knew that the giant could not disobey the crystal goad that Makho held, and he would not let the giant harm her while he believed she carried a child. In any case, I am still a Talon of the Queen, she told herself. Even my failure has not robbed me of that. Not yet.
She found a fallen tree she judged to be just out of reach of the long arms, at least as long as the giant remained seated. The Hikeda’ya were camped beside the forest they had been skirting for several days, and trees were plentiful, but although he had permitted a cookfire, Makho had ordered her to build it small and to use only dry wood. She thought it was odd the chieftain showed so much caution here, in a place so empty of other living things.
The giant fixed her with a stare. His eyes were black, and should have been impossible to see beneath his bony brow-shelf, but a spark of pale green seemed to burn at the center of each. “You are female,” the giant said abruptly. “You look like all the others, but I can smell your womb.” He pinched one of the hares between thumb and forefingers as thick as Nezeru’s arms, then sucked it in half, fur and all, before popping the rest into its mouth. She could hear the bones crunching as it chewed. “I hear you are going to whelp, but I do not smell that. Gar wonders why.”
Nezeru felt a moment of trapped panic, but the creature had spoken almost conversationally; she decided to pretend she had not heard his last words. “Yes, I am female,” she said at last. “How is it that you speak our tongue?”
“What tongue should I speak?” Goh Gam Gar smiled—at least she thought it was a sort of smile—showing a mouth full of broad yellow fangs. For a moment the giant looked almost like a person. Almost. “My kind do not speak among ourselves. We live far apart, and when two males meet they do not talk like your kind, they fight for the hunting territory. Much we must eat. We need a wide land to keep us fed.” He bit the head off the second hare and sucked on it until the furry bag of skin had emptied, then rolled up the bloody hide and delicately consumed it.
“So how did you learn?”
“Many of us do, if we live long enough. Many of us have fought for your Queen Utuk’ku. We learn the words of command, of attack. But no one needs to teach us to kill.” The toothy yellow grin appeared again. “But I speak best because I am the oldest. I am the greatest. Three hundred turns of the world or more Goh Gam Gar has been alive, and I have been the queen’s captive for much of it. I fought for her in the southern lands, when the tower fell, and I alone of my people who went there came back to the mountains.” The eyes narrowed. “Oh, yes, Gar has learned many of your words. Whips. Chains. Fire.”
“Your loss in the south must have been great,” she said carefully. “I know many giants died there.”
“My mate. My whelps, some of them not full-grown.” He gave her a shrewd look that made her drop her gaze.
“I am sorry to hear it.” Nezeru was telling the truth, at least at that moment. Her own people had suffered so many losses over the years that no victory they might ever win would offset them all. Nezeru’s people understood loss.
The giant was still staring at her. At first she almost hoped, fearful as it would be, that he was looking at her merely as a potential meal. But the longer she sat across from the monster, the more she believed something else was at work, perhaps even that he had worked out her secret.
Watching her did not stop Goh Gam Gar from throwing the last two hares in his mouth and swallowing them without chewing. It came to her that he would not have much more trouble doing the same to her.
“Come here, Blackbird,” Makho called from the far side of the camp. The nickname came from the ancient story of a blackbird who had failed to deliver an important message because of cowardice. It was an old insult among the Hikeda’ya, and every time Makho used it, she felt it.
“Blackbird, is it?” A deep rumble came up through her feet and legs. The giant was laughing. “We have something in common, you and I. Your master Makho is also my master. He holds the queen’s little gift. Did I refuse him or do something he did not like, he could make me lie on the ground howling in pain until my heart burst in my breast.”
She got up and returned to the cookfire, which had been doused and was now only a thin trickle of smoke. The sun was vanishing behind the mountains to the west, and the whole valley was sunk in shadow. Soon night would come and they would be traveling again.
“See that the horses are saddled,” said Makho before she even reached him. “Kemme has returned from scouting the way ahead. We will leave when the stars kindle.”
? ? ?
The rocky valley narrowed into a defile. By the time the familiar stars had mounted into the sky above her head, Nezeru and the others were walking single file up a steep ridge, only the sureness of her footsteps preventing a tumble onto the jagged, snow-capped rocks below. Directly above the horizon the star called Mantis was following a dimmer light named Storm’s Eye, which meant they had turned farther south than she would have guessed. Nezeru wondered why Makho had brought them so far into the lands of men when their destination lay so far to the east.
A ghost owl slid past just above her head, so close she could have touched it, a flash of silent white that appeared and disappeared in the space between heartbeats. A moment later Nezeru heard its barking call in the treetops below the ridge and a sudden, almost overwhelming desire for freedom struck her. It was such an unusual sensation that she could barely give it a name—to go where she wanted, to live as she chose . . . But of course that would only come with a betrayal of everyone and everything she knew. Nezeru could no more be free of her ordinal vow than she could put on wings and feathers like a Tinukeda’ya shape-shifter out of old legend and become a real blackbird. And without that vow, what was she, anyway? A halfblood. A coward and a liar. Only the success of their mission might change that, might give her a chance to make good again.
“The Mantis is bright tonight,” said a voice just behind her. With the calm learned at the cost of countless beatings in her order-house days, Nezeru let the surprise wash over her without affecting her steps. White-robed Saomeji the Singer had come upon her, silent and unnoticed as an ermine, while she had been lost in thought. “That bodes well for our mission.”
“Our lives are the queen’s.” It was the blandest of responses she could make.
He followed behind her in silence for a score of paces before saying quietly, “I would not have punished you as Makho did.”
She thought that a very unusual remark. Makho and Kemme were far ahead of them both, and she could just see the top of Ibi-Khai’s head past the next bend of the ridge-trail, so it was relatively safe to speak; but the why of it made no sense. Did he hope to catch her speaking some treason against the queen’s chosen hand chieftain?
“I failed,” she said. “I was punished as I deserved.”
“Failure is usually as much a fault of the leader as of the follower who fails.”
Nezeru could not make out what Saomeji wanted from her, and that worried her badly. The Singer had avoided her the last several days, but in that he was no different from any of the others—the stink of her crimes was on her like the rotted meat between the giant’s teeth. Did he merely want to couple with her? That, at least, made some sense, but even if he had not been told about her being with child, she did not think the Singer would risk provoking their hand chieftain.
She took a breath. “Do you call Makho a failure, then?”
He laughed. She envied him the lightness she heard. “No, never. The queen and my master did well when they chose him. He is like a knife of finest blackstone, so sharp that he can cut the air itself and make it bleed.”
“When you say your master, you mean Akhenabi.” The Lord of Song’s bottomless black eyes and wrinkled mask now lurked at the edges of many of her dreams. “Are you saying that he chose this Queen’s Hand?”
He ignored her question. “The Lord of Song is more than my master. He will be the savior of our people.” Saomeji spoke so flatly it almost sounded as though he didn’t believe it, that he was speaking by rote, but there was a gleam in his alien golden eyes that she didn’t recognize. “You interested him, hand-sister. I could tell.”
His words touched something that had been disturbing her since Bitter Moon Castle. Emboldened by the distance between themselves and the rest of their comrades, she turned and asked him, “Why did your master let me go?”