by Jane Kindred
“What do you mean, for hers?” Jak set the last box of supplies on the floor by the steps. There was a defensive note of warning in Jak’s tone that Ahr failed to heed.
“Meerhunters, Jak. She’d be a fugitive. The Meer are illegal. Harboring one is illegal.” He glanced up to find Jak giving him a look of disgust.
“Meerhunters. You mean those filth who pursue people for sport.”
Ahr wasn’t in the mood to be lectured about Deltan politics by a falender. “We’re not talking about people here. We’re talking about Meer.”
Jak’s jaw tightened in the angular face. “I find it distasteful enough having to argue against the subtle racism that persists among the clans. I never expected to hear it from you.”
“Racism?” Ahr tried to keep his temper in check. “They’re not even human!”
The gray eyes regarded him with mistrust. “Sooth, Ahr. Are you a Meerhunter?”
Ahr nearly laughed out loud at the absurdity. “No, I’m not a damned Meerhunter. I’m a Deltan. Which means I happen to know what I’m talking about.”
“So you get to decide who’s a person and who isn’t.”
“I’m not deciding anything. Deltan law decided.”
“I see. And what does your Deltan law say about me, Ahr? Am I a person?”
The unspoken accusation stung. He thought Jak knew him better than that. But he wasn’t going to be sucked into a game of words. “This has nothing to do with you. Why do you have to make everything about you?” They stared at each other wordlessly, and Ahr knew he should take back that last bit, but his nerves were still raw from the encounter with Cree.
After a moment, Jak nodded. “Let’s simplify things, then, shall we? Let’s just make nothing about me. Then you won’t have to worry about breaking Deltan law.” Jak turned and mounted the stairs, leaving Ahr’s door open to the elements.
Ahr opened his mouth to call Jak back, but nothing came out. Shaking with a rush of adrenaline, he sank into his chair as the haywain trundled away over the hard ground above. He’d never fought with Jak before, not like this. Where had any of that even come from? Jak was his friend—his only friend. And now a mysterious Deltan stranger had sidled in between them, and the infamous Maiden Sky of Soth In’La was just hours away in a pub at Mole Downs, reading palms and talking of magic. What in the name of dead gods was going on?
Four: Renaissance
After the mention of ancestral spirits, Jak stopped at the burial cairn and left a little offering of bitterwort for Fyn. If she was watching over Jak in some way, perhaps she’d appreciate the remembrance. Not that she’d done much watching over Jak while she was alive.
Someone had left a sprig of dried foxglove on Pim’s vault. Peta probably. Her firstborn had been gone longer than Jak’s mother had, but Rem and Peta memorialized Pim as if the loss were ever-present.
Stomach tight with anxiety and guilt, Jak led the qirhu back to the paddock after unharnessing them from the wain. Accusing Ahr of racism and bigotry hadn’t exactly been fair. But Ahr had been acting peculiar since bailing on the pub in the Downs, so it wasn’t entirely down to Jak. Had he seen Jak with the fortune-teller? Was that what had spooked him?
Even if it was, it didn’t explain why he’d responded with such hostility to Jak’s questions about the Meer. Except that Ahr was from the Delta and he kept his secrets close. What did Jak really know about him anyway?
The slaughter of the Meer during the violent movement to overthrow the divine rulers of the eastern city-states was legendary. Magic or not, the Meer had been hated and feared for their power, and to overthrow them had required a treachery and brutality Jak wouldn’t have believed possible of Ahr. The Meer might conjure any imaginable horror against their enemies if given even a moment’s forewarning, so the insurgents had drugged the reigning Meer and taken them by surprise in their beds, beating them to death where they lay. At least, that was how the stories went.
Traders had brought the gruesome tales to the settlements in the west in the months following the Deltan Expurgation. The conjured images were indelibly etched in Jak’s mind, perhaps more vividly than for anyone else in Haethfalt—it was the same year Jak’s mother had died. The year Geffn and Jak had become lovers. Jak had been unable to weep for Fyn, too numb to feel anything. But Jak had wept for the Meer. It was easier to grieve for strangers.
Meerhunters had appeared in the highlands now and then in the years since. Supposedly, they used the magic of the Meer against them in some way, but Jak had never heard of a successful hunt, or even a confirmed Meer sighting. Deltans were prone to tall tales.
It seemed a stretch to imagine Ahr as a Meerhunter, though he’d obviously been an Expurgist. Then again, why admit to being a Meerhunter if it meant losing his quarry? His warning about harboring fugitives took on an ominous significance. Jak was an idiot to have told him anything about Ra.
Of course, Ra was a stranger. Jak didn’t owe her anything, even if she was some preposterous magical fugitive. Maybe Ra had gone on her way while Jak was out and returned to wherever she’d come from, and none of this would matter anyway. It was what Jak had been hoping would happen in spending the day away.
But back at the mound, Ra perched once more in a chair by the fire, bare feet tucked beneath her, and a look of childish wonder on her face as she listened to Rem play the fiddle while Keiren and Mell were curled up together in the opposite chair acting as if nothing were amiss.
Peta emerged from the kitchen with a tray of mulled wine kettles, and Jak turned her about, hustling her back in, and closed the kitchen door behind them. “Jak, what on earth? These are heavy—”
Jak took the tray from her. “What is she still doing here? I thought we were going to help her get home.”
Peta rubbed the back of her hand against her temple, where the steam from the simmering wine infusing the kitchen had made her sweat. “Yes, we were, dear, and you disappeared. Besides, I spent some time with her—she doesn’t seem to know anything about housework, but I got her to help with the canning—and I don’t think we’re likely to get any more out of her. If she knows what happened to her or how she got here, she’s not going to tell us.”
“Did she do anything weird?”
Peta wrinkled her nose. “Weird? What do you mean, ‘weird’?”
“I don’t know—did she say anything strange? Or…” Jak sighed. This was ridiculous. “Never mind. So what are we going to do with her?”
“What are we supposed to do? Toss her out in the snow?”
“That was what everyone seemed to want to do when I offered her a place to sleep for the night. Now she’s ensconced in the gathering room, and you’re mulling her wine.”
“I am not mulling her wine. I just happen to be mulling wine for the moundhold.” Peta took back the tray with an irritated huff. “Honestly, Jak. I think you’ve gotten too used to the moundhold revolving around you and your whims.”
Jak scowled at Peta’s back as the older woman returned to the gathering room with the drinks. Whims. As if the handfasting with Geffn had been a whim, or as if a desire for self-identity were some kind of rebellious phase.
As before, Ra seemed entranced by the mulled wine as if it were a novelty to her, just as the ket’ was a novelty. Everything, in fact, seemed new to her. Jak was beginning to wonder if she’d done anything before. At least there were no more mysteriously appearing garments. Maybe Jak had imagined the whole thing—a naked-woman mirage. The back of Jak’s throat tickled with the threat of hysterical laughter. It was probably wiser not to mention the strange occurrence to anyone else—or to laugh like a loon. The rest of the moundhold already thought Jak was a bit touched.
Magic or not, Ra’s enthusiasm was infectious. Before long, even Geffn had come out of his room for a ket’ and seemed to have forgotten his rancor. Not that he was speaking to Jak, exactly, but he wasn’t glaring wounded, angry
darts in Jak’s direction either, or storming off when Jak spoke a word to anyone.
In fact, he seemed to be quite taken with their guest. Jak felt a little prickle of irritation—not jealousy, irritation—at the obvious way Geffn kept refilling her wine and hanging on her every word. Not that she said much. But whenever the ruby lips opened, everyone in the room seemed rapt.
After a late dinner of qirhu pie and lingonberry relish, Jak volunteered to clean up when the moundhold began to turn in. Sleeping by the fireside, it made sense for Jak to be the last to bed, and it would provide some welcome quiet to think about the problem of Ahr. And the problem of Ra.
But as Jak tidied up, Ra herself wandered into the kitchen, eyes sparkling with the wine, and sat somewhat unsteadily at the small table.
Jak paused, licking a sticky thumb. “If you’re still hungry, there’s plenty left. I can fix you a plate.”
Ra propped her elbow on the table and rested her chin in her hand, sliding into it a bit. “No, not hungry. I don’t think.” She let out a dreamy sigh. “I like it here. I like mulled wine.”
Jak laughed. “I can see that.”
“I think I’ve had wine before, in the other life, but not warm. Not with spices.”
“The other life? You mean where you lived before you came here?”
Ra nodded clumsily against her hand. “Before I died.”
Jak paused in stacking the plates. “Before you what?”
The ruby lips curved into a frown. “I don’t remember that. I can’t. I just remember the renaissance. And you, and the moon, and the snow.”
“Renaissance?” Ra wasn’t making any sense. How much had she drunk?
Unnervingly, she took Jak’s palm in hers as Ume had done, tracing her finger over the lines in a way that made Jak acutely aware of the heat of her skin. “Renaissance. It’s when we come again after we die.”
“You mean reincarnation?” Jak was transfixed by the little circular motions Ra was making with her finger. “I suppose our elements, at least, become something new after we’re gone. I’m not sure I believe we come back, though.”
“But I did. Just yesterday.” The wine had obviously gone to her head. Ra lifted her rather perfect behind from the bench and stretched across the table, planting both elbows before Jak and leaning on her crossed arms. “How would you come back? Would you choose to be the sex you wish you’d been born to in this life?”
Despite their proximity, Jak tried not to stare at the swell of Ra’s breasts in the tight, blood-red sweater, but it was virtually unavoidable. “That isn’t how it is for me. It’s not that I wish to be something else. I just don’t see the need to choose to be labeled one or the other. The binary concept—” Jak made a squeak of surprise as Ra’s lips interrupted the dull philosophical statement, planted on Jak’s and tasting of spice and grapes and an indefinable sweet flavor like maple or molasses.
Whatever else Jak had wanted to say drowned in the soft touch of those lips, as though they were charmed with a spell for forgetting. Ra’s dark, deep eyes remained open, studying Jak, her tongue tracing the inner rim of Jak’s lips, seeking entrance. Jak let out an involuntary gasp, and Ra took it for admission. The warm, wine-soaked dampness of her tongue moved against Jak’s, exploring, a soft sigh issuing from Ra’s mouth and meeting the helpless moan Jak gave her in return.
She perched on all fours on the table as though prowling toward Jak, then sat back and lifted her arms from the wood to cross them over her front, tugging up on the hem of her sweater as if she’d pull it off right here in the kitchen.
Jak drew away from her, head shaking, trying to be rational. “We can’t…not here…”
Clearly discerning this last as an invitation, Ra took Jak’s hand and slipped from the table, bare feet whispering over the floor as she tugged Jak with her and hurried through the doorway. Jak went without protest, forgetting any flimsy arguments that might have been offered, pattering down the hall with her to the bedroom and tumbling over Ra onto the bed. Ra worked the sweater above her head and rolled Jak over, pressed down beneath a pair of breasts like succulent fruit that Jak would happily have smothered in.
Mouth parted, Jak grasped for the tip of one, taking it in with a moan, softer and sweeter than the ruby lips, hands running over Ra’s smooth skin while her hair rippled down over them both in a silky curtain. She was warm and sweet and intoxicating, as if she exuded the essence of the wine itself, and the eager shimmying motions of her body, combined with her soft, desperate moans as Jak’s tongue slaked over her taut nipple, were almost enough to make Jak come.
And then Ra’s fingers were at Jak’s shirt, working through the buttons, and a semblance of sentience returned. Jak let go of the mouthful of breast with a breathy yelp and flipped Ra onto her back, knees against the curve of her thighs, holding her down.
“Stop,” Jak insisted, breathing in raggedly. “We can’t do this. I can’t. Stop.”
Ra went slack in Jak’s grip, a look of dismay on her face. “Did you not want to? I didn’t mean to—I just wanted—I thought—I’m sorry, Jak. Please forgive me.”
“No, it’s all right. We got carried away. You didn’t do anything wrong. I just don’t—” The words of reassurance froze in Jak’s throat. Tears were streaming from Ra’s eyes toward her temples—tears of a dark substance thicker than water, and red as the garment she’d discarded.
The child stroked downward over the parchment, the dark smudge beneath its finger on the face of the beautiful woman bringing with it an inexplicable melancholy. It was a face that should never be marred. The child touched the blackened finger to its own cheek, feeling a kinship with what the dark marks depicted. It was sadness. These were tears.
Looking into the darkness of the glass, the child pressed a hand to the surface as if the woman might be just beyond and it might touch her, but she was only a dream, only a thought within the flow of knowledge that filled the child’s veins. The child could no more affect the truth of the vision than it could touch. It only drew.
Ume kissed her way down Cree’s belly to the place she liked best, pausing to touch her lips to the jagged scar, using less pressure than a breath. Cree didn’t want to acknowledge it, and Ume had no desire to stir the painful memories, especially not at a moment like this, but she had to acknowledge it for herself. She had to pay homage to Cree’s body in its every part, every perfection and every imperfection, every powerful ridge of muscle, every soft curve of flesh, every strength and every weakness. It was the ritual of the temple courtesan, the sacred honoring of the god’s sacrament. There was no longer a god to whom these sacred acts could be offered up, but sex was still holy, the body still a temple to be worshipped.
She also loved to see Cree displayed for her like this in all her glory. The dainty breasts just the size of Ume’s mouth were her secret pleasure. No one else got to see this. No one else got to touch.
Cree moaned as Ume’s tongue dipped into the sacred heart of her sex, her back arching as Ume cupped the boyish ass and brought the delicious treat closer to bury her face in it. In all the years she’d practiced her art in the Garden of the temple of In’La—and the years before, spent honing her craft on her knees in In’La’s alleys—Ume had never had a female patron. Though there were women—very rich and very few—who had the luxury of sampling the gifts of the god, Ume’s specialty was elsewhere. Until Cree, Ume had never tasted this delicacy.
Cree’s breath was coming in sharp gasps punctuated by moans of a steadily increasing pitch. She squirmed in Ume’s hands, her fingers digging into Ume’s shoulders. Ume held tight to her ass and rolled over, pulling Cree on top of her, and Cree arched back, balanced for the crucial moment on the deeply buried tip of Ume’s tongue as she let out a loud cry and rocked into Ume in rippling waves of delight. Ume tormented her, making her climax again, again, and once more until Cree’s legs were limp and she was literally weeping wit
h exhaustion.
Only then did Ume slide up beneath her on the bed to kiss her lips and let her taste the fruit of her own pleasure and desire, arms wrapped tightly around her in a silent promise that she would never let her go.
Cree groaned, sliding her own arms around Ume’s neck and twining their legs together. “You’re simply evil,” she moaned against Ume’s cheek. “You’re trying to kill me.”
“Death by cunnilingus.” Ume laughed. “At least you’ll die with a smile on your face.” She kissed the blushing cheek as Cree turned her head aside to try to hide that very smile. “I love to see it,” said Ume. “You looked troubled earlier.”
Cree sighed and rolled onto her side as Ume loosened her grip. “I didn’t know if I should tell you.”
Ume’s heart skipped with a stutter of fear. “Tell me what?”
“I saw Azhra today.” Cree propped her head on her hand as Ume sat up. She hadn’t heard that name in years. “The same Azhra we saw on the dock at In’La. He came into the bar, and then he turned tail and dashed out as soon as he saw me. But it was him. It was Azhra. I went after him and tried to talk to him, but I don’t think he wanted the reminder. He seemed…broken.”
Ume remembered seeing him after the Expurgation. There’d been a sense of deep sorrow about his intense blue eyes, and yet they’d had a hopefulness to them too. “You know there’s been talk of Meerhunters in the bar. Do you think he—?”
“I hope not.” Though it was treasonous for a Deltan to swear upon the name of a Meer, the whispered imprecation escaped Cree’s lips as if she couldn’t keep it in: “Meeralyá.”
Five: Necromancy
The obscenities that had been the Meer were no more. Nesre prided himself on having been instrumental in their undoing. Once a temple priest of the highest order in service to the Meer of In’La, he’d seen the excesses of divine monarchy firsthand, and when the people had become restless and dissatisfied under Meeric rule, he’d been smart enough to sense the turning tide. Better to be part of a revolution than its target.