“Grese, Ylem.” Way-Say’s voice was rough and raspy in the dark. The soft sounds underneath it had to be him scraping up dirt to bury the evidence. These Crow people did seem awfully particular about that.
Elim could not recollect the Marín word for you’re welcome. He certainly could not have translated you can have all the rest of it; just keep your nephew dead and put, and make sure he doesn’t bust out of his box to murder me in my sleep.
But he could catch the canteen, and despair at its depressingly light weight, and comfort himself with knowing that he’d done a good thing. Elim did not lie down again until he’d gotten himself absolutely sure about that. He was a good person who just-so-happened to have done one terrible thing, and he didn’t need to worry about Way-Say drinking after him, or wonder what had gotten him sick in the first place, or think any more about what Hawkeye had said to those road-agents.
We will take him to infect the children of Marhuk in their own home, and begin a new plague.
Because the only way Elim could have anything to do with that was if he had badness just oozing out of him – if he was bound to hurt these Sundowners no matter what he intended, and couldn’t help it no matter what he did. Elim couldn’t tell about Do-Lay or any of the rest of it, but he could still thank God that at least that wasn’t true.
CHAPTER TWELVE
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN
THEY’D LEFT HER.
Shea drifted motionless in the water, silent, camouflaged – but everything in her was screaming. You’re going to die, her oldest, most primitive instincts shouted at her. You’re alone and crippled and soon you’ll starve or freeze or be eaten. Hide – wait – be still.
So she did. She floated along like a river-colored corpse, seeping distress until no mereau even five miles downstream could have failed to smell it.
But her thinking mind knew that there were no mereaux downstream – that that was the direction she’d just come from – and that the cohort from the House of Losange had gone upriver without her. She had not gotten lost: she had been abandoned, and none of her kin knew where she was, and none of the strangers she’d taken up with were coming back for her. She was going to die.
That was a hard thing to accept. She had been so close! It might have been all right to fall out of a window or get run over by a clay-cart three days ago, when she’d spent twenty years looking for Yashu-Diiwa with nothing to show for it. But now, to have looked him in his ridiculous spotted eye, smelled his fetid sweaty hide, and to float along knowing that the bastard prince of the Ara-Naure was out there, ignorant and helpless and closer to death every minute... oh, it was beyond enduring.
Even if he was bigger than any Ara-Naure ought to be.
Even if he didn’t have their marks.
Even if she’d been wrong about those others.
No, this Elim was the right one; she was sure of it this time. Whether she would live long enough to prove it, on the other hand...
Not for the first time, Shea was consumed by a vicious wish to be anyone but herself – to have any body but hers. If she could go back two days, before her virgin lungs were so rudely deflowered by that bullet – ten years, before she’d scorched her eyes looking for that wretched boy – thirty years, before the hot knife had taken her tail and toes... if just one essential part of her would work the way it used to, she would gladly compensate for all the rest.
But no magical fire-spirit bubbled up to grant her any wishes, and Shea was trapped in the floating wreck of her own present self, drifting aimlessly toward an anonymous, dismal ending.
Maybe her next life would be better.
She was roused from her torpor by a sudden disturbance in the water. Her water-sense knew at once that it wasn’t the movement of fish: this was something big and splashy, coming from the edge of the western bank. Two somethings, actually – one smaller and relatively calm, the other broad and turbulent. When she did not dare come any closer, Shea finally risked surfacing. She emerged from the water slowly, and only far enough to expose her eyes and ear-holes.
A man and a horse were stooped at the shoreline – one taking a drink, the other washing his face. For two wild seconds, Shea’s heart soared at the sight of the man’s clothes: cotton-jeaning trousers, muddy gray work-shirt, and a hat just the right size!
Then he left off washing and looked up, and her hopes fell right along with the water streaming from his two-colored face. That was not U’ru’s boy. Of course it wasn’t.
No, this was somebody else’s bastard – or mestizo, or mule, or whatever they called him, wherever he came from. Like Yashu-Diiwa, he looked like he might have had a native parent, but the rest of this man’s heritage had to be Afriti. Even from this distance, Shea could make out the mix of black and brown over his face, and the halo of lightweight, tightly-curled black hair girdling his beaten white hat. Día’s had been just the same, before her father started her dreadlocks.
And maybe he’d been fostered by mereaux too, or at least knew how to spot one: he spied Shea almost immediately, and all but bolted to his feet. “Hey, now, patronne,” he said in Ardish. “Didn’t mean no trespass. We ain’t gonna have a problem, right?”
Shea consented to lift the rest of her head from the water, her nose wrinkling at his accent. A bayou boy, all the way out here?
Well, it sounded like he’d learned some manners, anyway – and she would not hesitate to take advantage of them. “Who are you calling patronne, bourick? And who gave you permission to blow your nose in Mother Opéra’s river?”
He almost certainly knew the name, but mentioning it might have been a mistake. He looked around, as if Opéra herself might rise out of the water to take him to task, and seemed to find other mereaux conspicuous by their absence. He hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his trousers, and Shea could hear his expression in his cloying, musing tone of voice. “Guess it musta been me,” he said. “Now what do I call a little guppy out here all by itself?”
Ugh. It had such a nasty, sterile sound in Ardish – so much uglier than the lyrical Fraichais lu.
“I am not a guppy or an ‘it’,” Shea declared, and remembered to pitch her voice convincingly. “I am a LADY. And you may address me as Miss, Lady, or Ma’am.”
On reflection, Her Ladyship would have done well to notice that pistol at his hip about thirty seconds earlier... but as Shea watched, it didn’t seem to tempt him at all. “All right, Miss Lady,” he said. “So what’s a lady do all the way out here?”
Shea did not fail to notice his casual disrespect, but his face was nothing but an earthy blur, and there was no telling about his intentions. What would he try to do if he realized that the two of them were really alone out here?
Well, she was far enough out in the current to escape just about anything but a bullet, and a dead mereau was hardly much of a prize. So the real question had less to do with her safety, and more with expediency: how could she make this fellow useful?
“Well, OBVIOUSLY I’m in distress,” she said, draping the back of one hand despairingly over her forehead. “Here my very-dear Mother sent me all the way up from Island Town to deliver a message to the new prince of the House of Losange, and now a wicked hunter has shot me,” and it was not difficult to pause for a suitably convincing cough, “and I’m sure I don’t know how I’ll ever get there now. I don’t suppose you’re a doctor?”
He snorted. “Not ’less you count the time I midwifed for a cow.”
How crass. Shea narrowed her eyes and opened her mouth, before remembering that the job was to make him want to help her. “Well, nevermind the cow – what about your horse?” The idea immediately caught fire in her mind. “You could take me upriver! Just a day – half a day – and I’d be ever so grateful...”
The stranger looked at his horse, a big brown thing still standing there by the stream, and then back at her. She could imagine the hard set of his face. “He ain’t no doctor neither,” he said, “and grateful don’t spend. I think you best keep
swimming, patronne.”
Fear jolted through Shea like a kick under the table. “No, wait –” she said, racking her mind for some fresh idea as the terror of being left again compelled her forward. But she had nothing, not one thing, not even a scrap of clothing – nothing but her own wretched, useless...
... well, there was an idea. “Did I say grateful?” she said, and tightened her throat just-so to use her voix-douce, her sweet voice, which so reliably softened the minds of earth-persons. “I meant VERY grateful... as only a lady can be.” And as she swam forward, she brightened to a warm, suggestive pink – pale and lovely over her front-parts, flushed almost scarlet over her back and sides.
This was the hardest part. She couldn’t see his face well enough to tell what he was thinking, and her own thoughts vacillated constantly between fear and brutal self-loathing. Easy enough to feel lovely – to BE lovely – when she had her beautiful clothes, her pretty shoes, her hair and jewelry and painted human face all just-so. Would he hear any of that in her voice, see anything at all desirable in what she was now? Or was he staring at her as if some giant reeking catfish had just flopped up on shore and offered its vent?
“Is that right,” he said. She dared to imagine some interest in his tone.
“It is,” she said, and stopped where the water got shallow enough that she could hold herself up by the elbows, showing off the supple curve of her back. “Why don’t you come down here and let me show you?”
He was a great shadow above her now, his boots so close that she could have lunged forward and touched them. “Mais, how do I know you ain’t going to drown me if I do?”
Oh, for pity’s sake – he was half again her size and twice her weight, and her thin limbs would be hard-pressed to murder anything more vigorous than a newborn puppy.
Shea did not say that.
Instead, she smiled around a set of beautifully sharp teeth, and batted her eyes. “Well, how do I know you won’t smother or shoot me, or ride off and leave me?”
That got a laugh. “Cuz if you’re a lady, then I must be one hell of a gentleman.” But the jingling sound he made as he unbuckled his holster assured her in spite of his teasing: for all present purposes, she was as lovely a lady as anyone could want.
FOR THE MOST part, mereaux had no idea what to think of human sex – which was understandable, given that humans themselves couldn’t seem to make up their minds about it. It was sinful, or beautiful, or a duty, or an expression of true love, or a means to an end, or a sacred ritual, or an itch to be scratched, or the most heinous kind of betrayal. Who could be expected to understand anything about it, when the answer seemed to change according to the day of the week and which side of the street you were standing on?
But Shea had long since decided that she simply adored sex. Not in the way they did, of course: her body was as deaf and insensible to those peculiar spasming pleasures of theirs as earth-persons were to shapes and smells in the water.
And therein lay all the joy of it. Biologically exempt from desire, from pregnancy, even from human disease, Shea was wholly free to give for the sheer pleasure of giving: to marvel at that all-consuming need that pulled them into each other’s arms – to pity the urges that so afflicted them – to feel herself moved to compassion at the sight of a man so desperate that he would lay down a day’s wages for twenty minutes of a stranger’s consent.
Shea rarely charged. Money was mere compensation for labor: a dreary, miserable commodity she wrung out of the laundry and scrubbed from cracks in the floorboards. More valuable by far was the power she wielded in choosing her partners, the pride she took in her ability to nurture and manipulate their feelings, and the love she felt – for them, poor lust-addled souls that they were, and through them, for herself. She had never managed to replicate that selfless, generous, all-giving love which Fours seemed to find in parenting. Still, she had never felt nearer to it than when she embraced a lonely stranger, and dedicated herself to his relief.
In that sense, this man here was nothing short of a delight. No, he didn’t smell particularly fine, and his teeth weren’t especially straight, and his manners were rougher than she would have liked. But right now, today, his presence was a vital comfort, and his arousal a compliment more precious than he would ever know.
So she lay in the shallows, her back and shoulders digging rhythmic furrows into the sand as he did his needful work, and loved him. Her bare, scarred backside was invisible as she nibbled his lip and licked his ear. Her mutilated feet, crossed at the ankles over the small of his back, were irrelevant as she ran her fingers through his coarse, kinky hair. Her foreshortened breaths were inaudible over the sound of his splashing, heaving exertions. And for a wonderful little while, every part of her worked exactly as it was supposed to.
He wasn’t doing half badly, either. He was black and tan, like a bloodhound or a Svaldic sheepdog, with the black around his eyes as lopsided as a half-melted bandit’s mask. But he was nearer to handsomeness than most, with high cheekbones, a broad nose, and creased dark eyes whose intensity surpassed every other part of him.
“Fill me up,” she whispered as she felt his pace quickening – though of course he already had. “Give me everything.”
He hardly needed urging. Shea’s hands tightened their grip on the roots of his hair; her vent grabbed and tensed around the base of his shaft. She remembered to breathe faster, to flush her cheeks and chest – to translate her joy for his every remaining sense, and as his gasping grunts reached a fever pitch, to assure him of her perfect, mutual enthusiasm. Then he was helpless, his face and body contorting out of his control. Shea savored all of it, committing every sound and sense to memory as she nursed him through his delightful crisis.
And when she felt him losing the last of his strength, Shea reached up, inviting herself to cling to him as he rolled over onto his back and lay panting in the sand. And this was the best pleasure of them all. It was the most wonderful thing in the world to drape herself over his chest and stomach, copying the marbled patterns of his skin, listening to his galloping heartbeat and the placid grass-ripping of his horse farther along the bank... to spend those brief, happy minutes declaring herself a living extension of him, as still and content as a turtle sunning itself on a log.
He must have liked it too. At any rate, he eventually found the energy to rest one hand on the back of her head, and caress her left gill-plume.
Then he drew in a huge breath, his chest lifting her like a raft on a rising tide, and blew out a gale-force sigh. “Coo,” he said, “you wasn’t kidding.”
Shea reluctantly returned to the world of spoken words. “Told you,” she mumbled.
She hoped that he would leave it at that... but of course she wasn’t that lucky. “So do y’all just got one –”
“You don’t want to know,” she said.
He paused, long enough for her to hear the wheels in his head clicking. “So how do you keep it greas –”
Shea sat up, and returned to her own blue-white skin. “You REALLY don’t want to know.” Why was he so hell-bent on ruining this?
He sighed again and pushed her off. Shea’s heart sank as he heaved himself backwards to sit on dry land and reached for his pile of clothes, but she hadn’t even finished getting her feelings hurt before he caught her curiosity again.
“All right. Here’s something I do wanna know.” He pulled his dirty trousers to his lap, drew a packet of folded papers from the back pocket, and spread them carefully out over the drier part of the sand. “You seen any of these coujons?”
Shea crawled forward and propped herself up on her hands, mindful not to drip on the papers.
They were warrants, public notices, pocket-sized Eadan wanted posters... which meant that this fellow was a bounty hunter. Shea glanced up at him, amazed at how completely she’d neglected to wonder about his business out here.
Then she returned her attention to the crumpled collection of names and hand-drawn faces. A white boy, wanted for
horse theft and murder. Two Pohapi, one marked, one blank, and a white man, all wanted for armed robbery. An altered mereau, wanted for larceny. A piebald mule, wanted for petty theft and arson. Shea scoured the text, comparing it to her mental map of streams and rivers, working to assemble a story that would convince him that one of his targets had gone west, and – here was the critical part – persuade him to take her along for the ride. That was what she’d bungled in speaking with Jeté: telling him everything he needed, leaving him no reason not to toss her aside. That was the mistake she wouldn’t make again.
But she’d been thinking too loudly, or else too long. “Don’t lie to me, Miss Lady,” he warned.
Shea sighed, and sat back. “That’s Al Starnes,” she said of the white man, though the paper named him as Elver Stiles. “He comes to Island Town every few weeks to drink and waste money. I’d expect him back in a week or two. I don’t know that one,” and she pointed at the mereau, “but if she was living in Concho, she probably belongs to the House of Colonne – or whatever it’s called now.” There was no telling whether that other mereau actually thought of herself as female, but Ardish was not like Fraichais: ‘it’ had an ugly sound that Shea avoided. “I would check with the stage line first: if she’s truly abandoned her House, she won’t be safe in any of the Concho River tributaries, and she’ll have to travel by land in order to keep passing for human. Look especially for anyone with hair of that color and style: she can easily change her face and clothes, but a good wig is hard to find.”
Shea stopped talking as she felt the weight of his gaze – fixed not on her face, but on the body she’d unwittingly dragged out of the water.
Maybe he was thinking that she had a little too much in common with that missing mereau.
Maybe he was thinking that there could be a paper with her face on it, too.
Or maybe he was just thinking that Concho was sixty miles east across the border, and Island Town was a good fifteen or twenty to the south, and there was no reason at all to waste time toting some soggy old shrew in exactly the opposite direction.
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