When Kora sat up with a gasp, Natalya nearly leapt to her feet. “I knew everything,” Kora said, and Natalya knew that look in her eyes. She’d seen the universe.
“What did you do?” Natalya asked softly, but Kora didn’t look at her. That didn’t matter. She wasn’t talking to Kora anyway.
“She told me what I needed to know,” Kora said. “How to exist in this body, to exist with her.” She smoothed her long, tangled brown hair over her shoulders. “I lived all those years with her. I grew up with her, with you.” Her aged eyes pinned Natalya to the spot. “We used to go on picnics.”
“Did we?” A hollow pit opened in Natalya’s stomach. Maybe it would have been kinder to let her starve. “Was I your mother?”
“You worshipped my mother. Everyone did.”
In Natalya’s mind, Naos cackled before she said, “We’re not far from the clan you sensed earlier, but they’ll move at first light. We should go now.”
“In the dark?” Natalya said.
At the same time, both Naos and Kora said, “I don’t need light to see.”
Natalya shepherded the hypnotized children to their feet and bade them walk again. If left on her own, Kora directed them around ditches and holes. When the power and presence of Naos filled her, she danced naked over the grass, luxuriating in the moonlight, a beautiful puppet.
“What will we tell them?” Natalya said as she helped the children down a steep rise. “These people we’re going to meet? Won’t they wonder about the naked girl, her handmaiden, and her retinue of small children?” When neither Kora nor Naos answered, she sighed. “I guess they’ll think whatever you want them to think.”
“Exactly!” Naos called with Kora’s mouth. “You’ll tell them I’m your daughter, and we rescued these children after we were attacked by the Svenal.”
“And if they want the name of our clan?”
“Make something up! Do I have to do everything?”
“I can’t just—”
Kora spun, and her eyes glowed electric blue in the dark. “You’ll do as I say, or I might start to wonder what to do with you now that I have my perfect vessel.”
Natalya shut her mouth until they were nearing the next camp. Though it was late, a few fires still burned in the dark. Natalya staggered forward, trying to put on a show while Kora leaned on her arm as if wounded, Naos chuckling through her mouth the entire time.
“Help!” Natalya called. “We’ve been attacked!”
Chapter Two
The drums kept time with Cordelia’s heartbeat. A loose circle of humans and drushka cheered her on as she faced her opponent, a man maybe two or three years her junior. His skin was duskier than hers, like many of the plains dwellers who spent so much of their life outside, but he still wasn’t as brown as a drushka. Cordelia suspected they’d all be darker before their time on the plains was done, if the Storm Lord ever lifted their exile.
As she and her opponent circled each other, she tried to put the past out of her mind. Beside her, Nettle sized up her own opponent, an older woman who’d grinned when Nettle offered to be a quarter of the night’s entertainment. Even after the eight months they’d known each other, some of the Uri still looked at the lean drushka and saw people who’d break easily.
The older woman leaned back as if she would step away but instead spun and aimed a kick at Nettle’s head. Nettle bent, her torso kinking like a snake’s. She caught the leg and shoved, sending the woman off balance. The older woman stumbled but recovered. She eyed Nettle with new appreciation, and Nettle darted forward and slashed with the poisonous claw on her middle finger.
The older woman scrambled back, but Cordelia saw the ruse for what it was. A drushka wouldn’t risk paralyzing a human. Most humans could survive the poison, but there was always a risk. As Nettle darted again, launching a punch, Cordelia’s foe finally attacked.
A clumsy rush. Cordelia almost pitied him as she grabbed his arm and planted her feet. After a wink at his startled face, she fell backward, letting his weight slow her. As she connected with the ground, she pulled her feet up and planted them in his chest, still holding his arm. She rocked his body onto her feet and threw him up and over to slam back first into the ground.
Still keeping hold of his arm, she twisted and rolled to her knees. While he tried to catch his breath, she kicked to the side, thumping his ribs and driving a harsh wheeze from his mouth. She flipped him onto his belly and folded his arm up behind his back until he squealed.
Beside her, Nettle had a foot in her opponent’s back and an arm in each hand. “Enah!” the woman said, the plains word for stop.
Cordelia’s foe couldn’t seem to say anything, so she took the call of uncle to count for both of them. She and Nettle released their opponents at the same time, and the circle of watchers pounded their feet or clapped. The drums banged out a fast rhythm as the Uri chafa, Wuran, pronounced Cordelia and Nettle the victors.
After a slap on the back, he led them to sit. “I like it when you fight,” he said. “I always leave a richer man.”
Nettle sucked her sharp teeth, the sign of drushkan confusion. The firelight glinted off her dark brown skin, picking out the darker whorls and patterns that ran across her flesh like lines in tree bark. “I do not fully understand this wagering. You do so against your own people?”
“With you two? How could I not?”
He waved for them to make themselves comfortable on a pile of leather cushions. Cordelia took a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped her sweaty face. Wuran took off his large brimmed leather hat and fanned himself. He’d already taken off the long, sleeveless leather coat many plains dwellers wore, revealing a blousy white shirt and leather trousers. He grinned when he caught her studying him, showing the gaps in his teeth and adding many more wrinkles to his lined face. “Soon, no one will want to fight you,” he said.
Cordelia chuckled. They’d been on the plains nearly a month before they’d met Wuran and his clan. Her uncle Paul had been communicating and exchanging emissaries with the plains dwellers for some time, and she’d been thrilled to find that some of her renegades spoke the language of the plains, and some Uri spoke Galean. Luckily, the languages were similar enough that everyone soon picked up a bit, though Cordelia had to admit she was particularly bad at it. The words didn’t want to stick in her head, so even now, eight months after coming to the plains, she mostly spoke to Wuran; his Galean was perfect.
Another drushka threaded through the crowd to sit at their side and speak with Nettle. Reach, the former drushkan ambassador to Gale, had taken to new languages far easier than Cordelia. She supposed that was one reason Reach had been chosen as ambassador and probably one of the reasons Paul found her so fascinating, enough to pursue her as a lover. Even Cordelia had found her attractive, once upon a time.
And now that she’d found Nettle, Cordelia would have given plenty for the chance to take back all the shit she’d given her uncle about having a drushkan lover. But she’d given him shit about everything else, so why not that, too? If he’d lived, that’s probably what he’d have said.
She sighed and tried to think of something else, an exercise that came easier the more time that passed. She’d missed him keenly when they’d first arrived in their new home among the long grass and tumbled boulders of the plains. He would have been able to coax the drushka out of their tree much sooner. Even now Pool hesitated to bring her tree close to any other humans. She left it to Cordelia and a few others to journey to the plains dwellers’ Meeting Rock, a spear of stone that stabbed into the sky, the largest object around save for Pool’s tree. Wuran and his people had seen the tree from a distance and asked about it, but Cordelia had let Reach answer, letting the drushka keep their secrets however they wanted.
She took a leather cup as it was handed around and gulped down some scuppi, a plains dweller brew that a person had to fight through drinking in order to get drunk. Liam had said it tasted like fire, and as she winced, she thought he wasn’t far wrong
.
“Careful, my friend,” Wuran said. “It snuck up on you last time.”
Cordelia chuckled. “Scuppi doesn’t sneak. It strides right up and knocks you over the head.”
He slapped his knee and smiled. “Truth! Are you frowning in anticipation of that?”
She shrugged. “I feel as if…something should be happening. Or maybe that something will happen soon. I don’t know.” There was a prophet among her renegades. Maybe she should just ask, but the prophet claimed that seeing the future changed nothing, and it did no one any good to see it coming.
“I know what you mean,” Wuran said. “Like the air before a storm.”
“Or maybe that’s bullshit.” She already felt a little dizzy. Adrenaline, even when fading, plus scuppi equaled…a bad equation. “If we’re already anxious, we might make things happen.”
He shrugged and looked to the night’s next fight. “I’ve heard rumors from the other clans.”
When he didn’t say more, she prodded his knee. “And?”
“The Svenal, a clan to the southeast. Sickness walks among them, and some of their neighbors claim they have attacked, but I haven’t heard from anyone who’s actually fought them.”
“They won’t be hard to beat if they’re sick,” she said. He shrugged again, but maybe their illness only affected their brains, not their bodies. “Are you going to send someone to check?”
He shrugged yet again, and after a moment, Cordelia wandered away from the fire, staring up at the stars that stretched from one horizon to the other. She put the Svenal and any rumors out of her mind and focused on what was around her, searching for the peace she’d felt when she’d decided to leave Gale.
Geavers, large pack animals for the Uri, milled around the outskirts of the camp. Bigger than the beetle-like hoshpis of Gale, the geavers stood nearly twelve feet tall and twenty feet long. Their rough, scaly hides provided the plains dwellers with all the leather they’d ever need, but the creatures didn’t seem to resent their fate as transportation and then clothing. They trundled through the landscape on four stumpy legs, with long necks and flat heads bearing scraggly manes that shaded their huge, dull eyes. Cordelia stepped around them carefully. They could kill her by accident with a badly placed foot, and Cordelia had no intention of dying such a shitty death.
She found a boulder and climbed it. The Uri gatherings were a welcome break from digging latrines or wells, settling petty disputes or explaining to Liam once again why they couldn’t go attacking the Storm Lord. The Uri liked a good fight, and Cordelia had never been so glad to meet someone who enjoyed it as she did. Liam, her frequent partner in extracurricular fighting, didn’t join in anymore. The only fight he still craved was the only one he couldn’t have.
Cordelia breathed deeply of the night air and wasn’t surprised at the hint of greenery coming closer. She never heard Nettle walking, but the woodsy scent gave her away.
“Do you wish to be alone?” Nettle’s voice asked from the near darkness.
“Only if I’m alone with you.”
Nettle chuckled and climbed up on the rock. It was a corny line but true. Spending time with other people and spending time with the woman she’d fallen for were two different things. She’d never meant to fall in love, hadn’t wanted to, but it had sneaked up on her. She’d been afraid of a sharp, sudden change, but as time passed and she never wanted to be without Nettle, she knew she’d eased into love rather than fallen.
“Are you thinking on the past again?” Nettle asked.
“I’m trying not to, but you know how it goes.”
“Drushkan lives are long. We must look at now or forward, not behind.” She shivered. “But I admit, I do not know if I will ever get used to the feeling of so much space. It makes the swamp large in my memory.”
Cordelia chuckled. The plains were as different from the former drushkan home as it was possible to be. Though the swamp was large, its trees enormous, the ropy branches that crisscrossed it and the murky water threading through it made it seem suffocating when compared to the endless rolling hills of the plains. “Just how old are you, anyway?”
“Did I not just say we do not count the past?”
“Roughly, then. Approximately,” she added when Nettle sucked her teeth.
“Perhaps seventy summers. Perhaps more.”
Cordelia grunted as if she’d been punched. “Seventy!”
“I knew it would upset you.”
“I’m almost thirty. I thought you had to be the same, but… You look so young!”
“Your people may take that as a compliment, but it means nothing to a drushka. To some, it might even mean you think them inexperienced. You know the age of the queen?”
“Yes.” Pool was over two hundred, but she looked the same as the rest of the drushka, with their skin whorled like tree bark. And now it hit her that she didn’t know how long Nettle would live, how long any of them lived, and she didn’t want to ask. She fumbled for Nettle’s hand and gripped it. Nettle rolled her middle finger into her own palm, tucking away her poisonous claw.
The long line of Nettle’s body bent close, molding itself to Cordelia. She nibbled up Cordelia’s neck with her sharp teeth and whispered, “Do not fear, Sa. I will be by your side for many years to come.”
Cordelia sighed at the touches and the sentiment and the drushkan name. It seemed at times as if Nettle could read her mind or at least share her feelings as drushka could among one another. Cordelia had once done the same, right before the exile, when the Storm Lord had hit her with his lightning just as the healer Simon Lazlo had saved her. Her spirit had been propelled from her body, and she had sensed the drushka as they sensed one another. Even now, with Nettle so close, Cordelia could feel the love between them; her own feelings and Nettle’s feelings returned, along with a vague awareness of the drushka who’d come to Wuran’s encampment.
Before she could sink too far into the feeling and freak herself out, she sat up. “How old is Shiv? Sixty? Sixty-five?”
Nettle sighed, and Cordelia sensed her irritation, though she told herself it was from months of getting to know each other well.
“Perhaps…fourteen summers?”
With a groan, Cordelia put her head in her hands. “And now I have to tell Liam he’s a pervert.”
Nettle grabbed her before she could slide from the rock. “He and the queen’s daughter are enjoying themselves. Leave them!”
“You’re the one who didn’t want them together in the first place.”
“I thought two fools together would birth a thousand mistakes, but they have matured, and she is not a child. She has not been a child for some years.”
“So you mature faster and live longer than we do! Fantastic. We can’t know if we’re coming or going.”
“That makes no sense, Sa. Stay. Liam has the same number of summers as you, ahya?”
“Yes.”
“But his mind is younger than yours, especially when we first met, ahya? As Shiv’s mind is younger than most drushka you have met.”
Cordelia sighed and relaxed into Nettle’s embrace, seeing where this was going. “I suppose they are a good fit together, brain-wise.”
“At last.” She wrapped her long arms around Cordelia and nuzzled her neck again.
Cordelia fought the images of screwing teenagers or the elderly and tried to relax, but she knew it wasn’t going to be easy.
*
Bathed in the first rays of dawn coming through his windows in the Yafanai Temple, Dillon grunted his way through a second set of pushups. He’d gotten soft on the space station. Everyone had, but with Lazlo’s boosts of immortality, no one had noticed. Now, after eight months without Lazlo, Dillon had to keep on top of his fucking exercises.
Luckily, his muscles still remembered his old workout routine. Well, mostly. He’d floundered at first, unable to remember where the pushups went in relation to the sit-ups. Did he jog before or after? He’d been hesitant to join the paladins’ routine, scared
he would fuck up worse than the new recruits, but now he ran with them regularly, getting a kick out of the way they picked up their feet when God ran by.
And with Captain Jen Brown around, he didn’t have to worry about handing any new recruits their asses if they fell. She was more than happy to yell for him, so much easier to get along with than old Captain Carmichael. It had been a mistake to let anyone on this rock know he was human, but she was too dead to tell anyone now. And with luck, no one would even suspect he wasn’t immortal.
With a final grunt, he finished the pushups and stood, draping a towel around his shoulders as he breathed. He opened the window wider and looked at the courtyard below.
A tree blocked most of his view, but that was by design. He wanted to look upon the yafanai, his favorite children, unobserved. So many round bellies among them made him smile. He tried to have a kind word for all the women who were bearing his children. The visibly pregnant ones were easy, but he sometimes forgot those who weren’t showing. Even then, if they were disappointed, all he had to do was turn on the charm, and they forgave him. Perks of being God again. A nursery full of superpowered offspring was a good idea all on its own. Odds were, one of them would be as good as Lazlo, and then immortality would be in the bag again.
“Wow, how many have you screwed?” a voice behind him asked.
Dillon turned, knowing that voice but not believing it, not until he saw Lazlo standing there, arms behind his back, neck craned to look out the window.
“Looks like most of them if that’s all your handiwork,” Lazlo said.
“Laz, what…” But what and why and how didn’t fucking matter. Lazlo was back! Dillon reached out even as he knew he shouldn’t, even before Lazlo popped like an overinflated balloon, covering Dillon with red tendrils of gore.
“What the fuck!” Dillon scrubbed at his clothes but felt nothing. The fluid rolled away from his hands and coalesced into a willowy female form.
Widows of the Sun-Moon Page 3