Shadowed By Wings
Page 35
I’d argued with Gen over his choice of my disguise, disliking even the idea of playing the part of the dragonmaster’s mistreated woman. But a disguise was necessary, and given the dragonmaster’s temperament and my own battered state, the pretence of being a beaten woman would be readily believed.
That didn’t stop my pride from chaffing as the bold, sensuous woman with the peculiar name of Tansan examined me.
I defiantly stared back at her as the warmth of her chest invaded my breasts and surged to my throat. The dragonmaster followed a group of men to one of the arbiyesku huts.
“You’ve had a debu life,” Tansan pronounced, and those about her accepted the observation with calm nods.
Debu. A derogatory word that Djimbi use for cursed. I’d heard my mother use it, in my youth.
I was gripped with the urge to wipe the certainty from Tansan’s face. Who was she—indecently dressed, in clothes so worn they were all but threadbare—to pronounce my life cursed? How dare she—surrounded by kin and kith, safe from the insanity of Arena on this far-flung impoverished Clutch—declare my life damned?
That she was right only inflamed me further.
She turned on her heel, arms balanced at her side, not a tense line in her body, and walked away. An old woman carrying a baby in a sling upon her back touched my wrist. The whorls on the old woman’s loam-brown skin were the color of damp hay, her eyes the color of snails. Her lips and tongue were black from slii stone.
“Come, yes, we’ll give you food, water.”
Walking proved difficult after days of travelling in the back of the cart, drunk on milky maska wine for the pain in my ribs. The women surrounding me showed the good grace not to notice or remark upon my shambling gait. Ahead of us, Tansan walked erect and loose-hipped toward the wooden stairs of a long bamboo-beam and woven-jute structure on stilts: the women’s barracks. She walked with the same sultry fluidity as my sister, Waivia.
Waivia.
After a decade of believing her to be dead, I’d seen her while I fought for my life in Arena. She’d been in the crowd, upon the balcony adorned with Clutch Re’s pennants and standards. One of her arms had been linked intimately, territorially, through the arm of Waikar Re Kratt. That had always been her ambition, to be Wai ebani bayen, Foremost First pleasurer, to Kratt.
I couldn’t rejoice that she was alive, though, for I was too unnerved that she was with Kratt. With her by his side, Kratt now had access to my mother’s haunt, that powerful, insane creature that could so facilely disguise itself as a Skykeeper. But surely Waivia wouldn’t command the Skykeeper to do Kratt’s bidding. She had no reason to.
But what if she did?
Then I’d have to kill him.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Janine Cross has published short fiction in various Canadian magazines and was nominated for an Aurora Award in 2002. Her nonspeculative fiction has appeared in newspapers and a local anthology, Shorelines. She has also published a literary novel.