Powageh’s voice was apologetic. “Marcal was just the first acceptable Obregi to impregnate her. Wealthy enough to keep her in comfort, kind enough to protect her son once he was born. Your father was a means to an end.”
Serapio pressed his lips together in displeasure. He had no love for his father, hated him and his condescension most days, but to hear him talked about like a fool, and his mother as a heartless temptress, bothered him. He wondered how much was Powageh’s fabrication and how much the truth.
“Your mother was very beautiful,” Powageh said, voice dreamy with remembrance. “Powerful. She burned with such a fierceness, Serapio. She swept people up in her presence. It was impossible to deny her what she wanted, and what she wanted was you.”
“Not me,” he countered. He remembered Powageh’s words: a vessel.
His new tutor was silent for a moment. “You want me to reassure you that she loved you,” xe said, voice low and not unkind, “but I cannot. The Saaya I knew was practical, set on vengeance and vengeance alone.”
“I know she loved me,” Serapio challenged, remembering the way his mother had touched his cheek, his hair. The love in her eyes as she had painted his teeth that first time, marked him with the knife. “No matter what her purpose was to begin with, I know she loved me in the end.”
He could feel the weight of Powageh’s gaze. It felt like pity. He didn’t like it.
“Her death says otherwise. She was the human sacrifice, after all. The last link in the spell. Although…” Powageh’s voice was thoughtful. “Perhaps it was her love for you that made her sorcery so effective in the end, Odo Sedoh.”
“Odo Sedoh.” He repeated the unfamiliar words. The wind caught them, tossed them through the branches of the trees, the crows cried out, seeming to speak the words back to him, and his whole body burst wide open.
As the words passed his lips, his limbs convulsed, power juddering through his bones. Cold flared inside him, freezing his blood. His skin tried to stretch, break and release the shadow that squatted inside him. He opened his mouth to scream, but no words came out. He fell over, heaving, tears of ice leaking from his eyes.
He could hear Powageh’s distress faintly, indistinct noises in his ears, a hand reaching for him that he pushed aside.
“Don’t. Touch,” he managed. “Cold. And…” He panted, reaching, trying to understand. “W-w-wings?”
That was the feeling. Like wings were threatening to burst from his body, his human form ready to shatter to make way for something else entirely.
“Drink this,” Powageh said, xir voice distant but urgent. Panicked. Xe held something, a clay vial, to Serapio’s lips. “Drink it, Serapio. Now!”
He pried protesting lips open and let the old priest pour the liquid down his throat. He recognized the taste, even after all this time. The same drink his mother had given him on the night of the eclipse. Pale, milky poison. He swallowed, convulsing, and Powageh forced more in.
Slowly the tremors faded, his skin and muscles settled, his blood warmed to normal. He lay on his side in the winter grass, panting, shock rolling through his body like the rumble of snow loosed from the mountainside.
“What do they mean?” he finally said, gasping. “Those words. What do they mean?”
Powageh’s voice was awestruck, wary. “It is the old name for the crow god, in the language of the people who became Carrion Crow. It is your true name and, obviously, not to be said lightly. At least by you.”
Serapio nodded, knowing it was true. Knowing his name was power, and not the kind he could control. Knowing that uttering it was enough to unleash what was inside him.
“It is just as Saaya predicted,” Powageh said. Xe chuckled softly, incredulously. “She did it. I cannot believe she did it.”
What did she do?
Powageh grasped Serapio’s arm and shook him hard. His teeth rattled in his head, his stomach protested around the unfamiliar foods he had consumed. He lay in the brittle grass, wrung out and helpless, shivering as the coming winter descended upon him and the old priest laughed.
“My boy,” xe said, awe in xir voice, “you are more than simply a vessel. You are the weapon that will bring the Sun Priest and the Watchers to their knees.”
CHAPTER 26
THE CRESCENT SEA
YEAR 325 OF THE SUN
(9 DAYS BEFORE CONVERGENCE)
There are only two kinds of men: ones who betray you sooner and ones who betray you later.
—Teek saying
Xiala wasn’t sure how long she slept, but when she woke up, it was night. She was back in Serapio’s room, back on the bedding on the floor, and she thought perhaps she had dreamed it all. Baat’s knife in her throat as she choked on her own blood, Callo’s gruesome end as his flesh was torn apart, Serapio standing there in an unnatural wind like some dark god made of feathers and blood and vengeance.
The wound on her throat throbbed. She pressed a hand to the place where it burned and found a bandage, freshly changed. She wasn’t bleeding, but the wound still felt raw, certainly real enough to prove that the slaughter of her crew and all the rest of it was no dream.
She gingerly turned her head, hoping to find Serapio sitting on his bench like she had become so accustomed to, but she was alone.
She closed her eyes and let her mind drift. To golden sand beaches and children’s unrestrained laughter. To women cleaning nets and mending thatch houses. To the smell of salt and sun and no man for a hundred miles.
Home.
Homesickness so profound it scared her, seized her heart. She wanted to go home.
But that wasn’t an option.
Another vision filled her mind. Her mother, face dark as a thundercloud. Xiala, kneeling in a pool of blood not her own. The village elder, lips moving in a prayer turned curse as Xiala ran, tripping and stumbling, into the dark ocean, her tears mixing with the salt of the sea, as she swam for her life.
She drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around her legs and let tears silently flow from her eyes. After a while she fell back to sleep, but all that awaited her there were nightmares. Of blood not hers, and curses to flee, and, this time, black-winged birds.
* * *
Next time she woke, she was glad for it. She forced herself up immediately, washed her face with a moistened cloth, and drank a few gulps of precious water. Then she remembered that her crew was dead and there was plenty of water for only two people, and she upended the clay flask, swallowing until it was empty.
She found him sitting on her captain’s bench at stern, wrapped in his black robe, head down, forearms resting on bent knees, looking very human and very tired. She started to walk over and paused. Just to her right was the barrel of balché left over from the feast on Lost Moth. It had been shoved under a cloth tarp that had been blown ragged by the storm. She dragged off the remains of the tarp, grabbed the barrel, and walked over to sit across from the captain’s bench.
Serapio didn’t raise his head to acknowledge her, but he had to know she was there.
She thumbed the lid off the balché and tipped it back, letting some of the sour alcohol run down her throat. It hurt to swallow as the far-from-healed wound stretched, but the balché tasted so good that she didn’t mind. After another swallow, she held the barrel out to Serapio, tapping it against his knee.
“The drink from before on the sand,” he said quietly. “I recognize it. It smells terrible.”
“The smell doesn’t matter,” she said patiently. “It’s how it makes you feel afterward.”
“It’s alcoholic?”
“I hope so.”
He shook his head. “I don’t drink alcohol.”
She sighed, the only icebreaker she knew thwarted. “Well, more for me, then.” She tilted it back for another mouthful before setting the barrel on the bench beside her. She waited for him to say something, but he had fallen into silence again, a quiet that felt large, like he wished not to speak for a long time. Perhaps forever.
Bu
t already she was anxious. She had never been the one to let a conversational pause linger, always preferring to fill it when she could. But what should she say? Ask him if he spoke to birds and if he had meant for them to kill her crew? Inquire about his strange relationship with sudden eerie winds and disappearing suns? It all seemed preposterous and as unlikely as… well, as a woman who turned into a sea creature of legend. If she was honest, his apparent powers were no stranger than what had happened to her when she’d dived too deep to save Loob and the sea had transformed her. There was magic in the world, pure and simple, things she didn’t understand. Best get used to it.
She chuckled under her breath.
He lifted his head now, a clear question on his face.
She grinned, remembered he couldn’t see her, and said, “Here I was wondering what kind of unnatural creature you are, crow man, when I was abruptly reminded of my own peculiar nature.” She shrugged and rolled a finger around the edge of the balché barrel. “I think they call that pot and fry pan alike or something.”
His brow furrowed.
“Never mind,” she said. “A Cuecolan saying. Something about how you and I are more the same than different.”
Something in his shoulders relaxed, and a faint smile, just a lifting of lips, creased the corner of his mouth. “We are nothing alike, Xiala,” he said, and there was enough regret in it, enough longing, that it didn’t feel like an insult.
“You’re not so special, Obregi,” she said, but there was no heat to it.
Her gaze traveled around the ship, and she shivered. “All dead,” she said, her voice soft with something between disbelief and regret. She took in the bloodstained canoe, the decimated cargo, the ominous creak of the ship on waves, flat and unkind. Where have the bodies gone? she thought to herself. Did he remove them while I was unconscious? Throw them overboard? Or did the birds eat them all? Tendon and fat and muscle, picked down to bones. She shook the macabre image from her head. Surely he had simply thrown them overboard.
When he spoke, his voice was a rumble, a dark beating of wings. “Men die.”
She shivered and reached for the balché. “Yes, and thank you for assuring that it was not me. But…” Images came back unbidden. Callo’s eyeless sockets, Baat’s beak-shredded face. She shuddered and drank more, not caring that she was consuming too much too fast. “Perhaps next time you use a knife, yeah?”
Suddenly Serapio’s hands were holding hers, warm and firm. She blinked. He had moved so fast. Had he always moved that fast, or was she already drunker than she realized? And then Serapio’s face was inches from hers, so close his breath shivered across her lashes, making her blink. She thought passingly of how unerring his direction was even without seeing where she sat.
“I am sorry for your crew. They were never truly cruel to me, but they were going to kill you, and I could not let that happen.”
Her heart fluttered, and heat kindled in her belly. Was he saying he cared for her? That her life mattered to him? So few people had ever cared whether she lived or died, only about what she could provide to them through her Teek talents. And a goodly half of those ended up actively wanting her dead by the time they parted ways. Was he different?
“They were indwelling bastards, all of them,” she said with a shrug. “Even that fucking Callo.” Her breath caught a little, and she quickly took another drink. “You did what you had to do.”
They sat together for a while, neither speaking, but with Xiala steadily drinking. They were still in the doldrums—for how many days? she wondered. How long had she slept while he sat here on this flat, windless sea, waiting for her to wake up? Well, he had come to clean her wounds and give her water. She tried to remember how many times but couldn’t. In fact, remembering anything at all was getting harder and harder the more balché made it down her throat. Just the way she liked it.
“Now what?” she asked, her voice slurring slightly.
He looked surprised at her question. “Tova by the Convergence,” he said. “My plans have not altered.”
“Sure, but…” She gestured expansively. “Look around, Ser. Even if I wanted to get you to Tova, I don’t know where the hell it is.”
His lips quirked up at the nickname, but he didn’t correct her.
“There is the mouth of a great river that way,” he said, lifting a hand to point slightly behind him and to the west.
“And how do you know that?”
He cocked his head. As if in response, a crow cawed out. She turned to look behind her, too quickly, and it pulled at her wound. But there it was, a huge black body, perched on top of the shack she had been sleeping in. It spread its wings and yelled at her again, flapping for emphasis.
“Where did they all come from?” she asked, although there was only one bird on the roof.
“Land. I’d been talking to them since we left shore, but only began to rally them to us when they locked you in with me.”
She imagined what that must have looked like. Hundreds of crows rising up and flying unerringly out to sea.
“Got it,” she said, turning back to Serapio. “So they are like your eyes?”
“When they wish it.”
“And your weapons?”
“Not my only one, but yes.”
Not his only one? What other power was he hiding? She thought back to Lord Balam. Clearly she had not asked enough questions before taking on this commission.
“Okay, so your crow friends say the Tovasheh is that way. How many days?”
He pressed his lips together, thinking. “They are not always clear on the passage of time. But it should not matter. We go as quickly as we can and arrive in time for the Convergence.”
“And how do we get there? I seem to have lost my crew. I don’t suppose your birds can work a paddle?”
His brow creased. “No. But they have offered to make a wind…”
She had a vision of them arriving at port, a flock of black birds gallantly pushing them to dock with their tiny beaks and flapping wings.
“Mother waters, no. Let me try with my Song first.”
“Of course.”
“But…” She lifted a finger. It swayed slightly before her. “I want to know why.”
“Why what?”
“What’s so special about Tova for you? And why must you be there by the Convergence? What is the Convergence, anyway? You keep saying that like I’m supposed to know what you’re talking about.” She sighed, big and gusty. “I’m done not asking questions. I want to know everything.”
He was silent. Skies, the man could go silent with the best of them. She was about to concede that they were at a standstill, when he said, “A Convergence is a celestial alignment. A day when the sun, moon, and earth align, and the moon’s shadow devours the sun.”
“A black sun,” she said, nodding. “That’s what the Teek call it. They are rare.”
“Rare, yes, but this one is the rarest of all. This Convergence will happen over Tova on the winter solstice when the sun is already vulnerable. A Convergence has not been seen in Tova in almost four hundred years, and never on the winter solstice. Truly, the sun’s power will be at its weakest in a millennium.”
“And why must you be there?” Even as she asked, she thought of the way the sun seemed to shudder when it first saw him, hide from him when he was in his power. Which sounded ridiculous, as she was deeply aware. But she had felt it; the sun feared him.
“I have a meeting I must keep on that day.”
“With the sun?”
“With the sun’s priest.”
“Why?”
He didn’t answer. Just pulled her hands to his mouth and pressed them against his warm lips. Her heartbeat quickened, and a mild tingle raced across the back of her neck, as if he had whispered something against her skin. She shivered, more pleasure than fear.
“Can you get us to Tova, Xiala?” he asked, voice low and fervent. “Can you call the sea with your Song and get us to the Tovasheh?”
; “I…” She suddenly felt very drunk, as if the balché hit her all at once. And with the feeling of Serapio’s lips lingering against her knuckles and his words still in her ears, she knew she was about to do something foolish. A small voice in her head reminded her that he was dangerous, and she knew little about him. But that wasn’t true. She knew he had a sense of humor, although he hid it well, that he had never seen a naked woman, that he had nursed her wound back to health, and that, most of all, he had saved her life.
“I’ll get us to the Tovasheh,” she agreed.
And then, because of the balché and because of the shock and because she was grieving the loss of her crew—even superstitious Callo and murderous Baat and Patu’s eggs and fruit—and because she’d been very much wanting to for almost a week, she leaned in, a matter of only a few feet, and kissed him.
He resisted at first, as if confused, and she wondered if he’d ever been kissed. But then his mouth softened and returned her interest. She climbed onto his lap, straddling his thighs, and kissed him some more. It felt good. His skin was cool, like a welcomed drink of cold water after a day’s work in the summer sun. And he was clumsy, not fatally so but clearly inexperienced, and she liked that, liked that she had the upper hand, that his reaction was so very human. And he felt good and solid and real, his chest against hers, her arms around him, and as long as she was kissing him, she didn’t have to think of impossible sea voyages and dead crewmen and swarms of black birds, just her and this man who she wasn’t sure was a hero or a villain, but maybe she didn’t have to know if only she could get his robe off and—
He stood abruptly, and she rose with him, legs wrapping around his waist.
“Xiala,” he murmured, “I can’t.” He drew his mouth away. She leaned in, aching, not wanting this feeling to end, wanting just a little oblivion between the balché and two bodies, but he pulled back and turned his head.
“Fuck,” she said, dropping her feet to the deck and her arms to her side.
“I can’t.”
She laughed, pretty sure he had taken her expletive literally. Her laugh turned into a hiccup and then a sigh. “Religious affliction?” she asked.
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