“Make me wealth, of course, but it is the Obregi that concerns me most.”
“Why?” she asked, but Balam was already striding away, going forward to meet Pech before he made it onto the pier.
She would not have felt the bird watching her if she hadn’t been holding her Song low in her throat. The creature was too prescient, too focused. It was unnatural. She whistled sharply, her Song threaded through her breath to create a pitch too high for humans to hear, to send it on its way.
Instead, a vision flashed in front of her. A face. That of a young man, smiling. Teeth stained red and something like a bird skull carved into his skin at the base of his throat. His hair as black as a crow’s wings, curling back from a handsome face. He wore a cloth tied around his eyes, but he raised his head as if he had seen her, too. And then he was gone.
Strange. Visions were not one of her gifts, and she knew no men who looked like that. But she would think about that later. She had more pressing worries on her mind.
Callo had whipped the men into movement, and already they were falling into place, ten on each side picking up their paddles, Callo at the bow as watch to guide them out. She strode down the middle of the ship past the reed-covered cabin in the center and between the rows of men with paddles raised. She silenced conversation as she passed. She could feel the eyes on her, the murmurs of “captain,” and she realized she had a reputation among the sailors and not all of it was bad. By the time she took her place at the stern of the ship, hands on the tiller, she was smiling.
She spared one last glance at the shore and caught sight of Pech. He looked livid, stomping his feet and shouting something she couldn’t hear. But Balam had his arms spread and was blocking Pech and his men from the pier, and that’s all she needed to know.
“All drop!” she shouted, and as one, the crew dipped their paddles into the water. “Count two… and away!”
“Lead out!” cried Callo from his place, and the canoe moved. “One. Two. One. Two.”
The men echoed him with precision. “One. Two.” And again.
“Good and steady,” she said.
There was outraged clamor from land, but she ignored it. Already they were moving, sleek and easy through the water on the strength of the paddlers, and as Cuecola became smaller and smaller behind them, so did her cares. She’d have to properly introduce herself to the crew later, once they were well gone, and share the news that they would break for open water once she’d mapped their course. But all in all, it was not a bad end to a morning that had started in jail.
She laughed, loud and brash, as saltwater sprayed from the paddles and wet her face. Maybe being Teek was lucky after all.
CHAPTER 7
CITY OF CUECOLA
YEAR 325 OF THE SUN
(20 DAYS BEFORE CONVERGENCE)
The crows that flock around the Great House have a sense of cooperation and fair play. I have noticed that they will work together both with their own and even with a creature unlike themselves to achieve an end. But beware, the crow is also a trickster and will take the greater share of the reward, too, if he thinks he is able.
—From Observations on Crows, by Saaya, age thirteen
Serapio had arrived at the Cuecola harbor before sunrise. Lord Balam had insisted on bringing him early to the ship, so they had woken well before dawn, breakfasted on unfamiliar foods, and come to the harbor.
Serapio did not mind it. He had been in Cuecola for two days, newly arrived from Obregi, but he had waited ten years to be on a ship to Tova and had no desire to linger in the foreign city that under a layer of fragrant black copal smelled of blood, hot stone, the sweat of laboring men, and sour ambition.
In truth, his journey had begun the day he was blinded. That had also been the day of his mother’s death. Both had happened under a swallowed sun, and his journey would end under much the same sky in a brief twenty days—ten years and uncountable miles from where it had begun in Obregi.
The ten years in Obregi without his mother had not been easy. Many of them were marked by his father’s benign neglect, and those that were not had instead been informed by the intentional cruelty of his tutors. Love, after his mother’s death, was not a thing he knew.
But he did have something that others lacked, something he would have willingly traded for love had the bargain ever been offered. He had purpose.
“A man with a destiny is a man who fears nothing,” he whispered to himself.
He had said the same to Lord Balam. When the pilgrims who had brought him from Obregi to Cuecola had dropped him at Balam’s doorstep, the lord had inquired about his past and his tutors and, of course, his mother. Serapio had told him as much as he thought prudent and kept the rest to himself. He did not think Balam truly wanted to know about the horrors of his childhood or what he had endured to arrive at this point. A morbid curiosity did not justify an inquiry into his pain after all, and pain it was. But Serapio did not dwell on it. In twenty days, none of the brutalities of his childhood would matter.
But first he had to get to Tova.
An hour after Balam had left him on the ship, he had heard the crew arrive. They had readied the craft all morning, their tread heavy and their voices loud as they dragged large things across the wooden deck and tended to the ship’s hull. Once he had heard a sailor with a thick unfamiliar accent ask another about the “priest in the hut,” but his companion had quickly hushed him and told him that was “Balam’s business and none of ours.” Serapio had determined he must be the priest in the hut and frowned at the misnomer. But otherwise, the morning had been pleasant. No one had bothered him, and he found himself appreciating the almost company of the men. His previous travel companions had been pilgrims who had sworn a vow of silence.
Around midday he heard more than just the banter of sailors preparing for a voyage. There was a confrontation of some kind on the docks, a handful of voices raised in argument. One he recognized as Lord Balam’s.
Concerned, Serapio pulled a small skin bag from around his neck and opened it. He licked the pad of his index finger and dipped it inside. Star pollen clung like shattered light to his wet skin in a fine sheen of silver dust. He pressed his finger against his tongue and sucked it clean. It had a slightly bitter taste, sharp and acrid.
The effect of the drug was almost immediate. Dark light infused his body, rushing through his bloodstream and opening his mind like a night-blooming flower opening to the moon. He threw his mind out and found a willing host. The crow launched from the tree, climbing skyward, until Serapio could see everything as if from above.
There below him in dock was his ship with the crew. They had all stopped in their work and were facing landward, looking at the pier. They leaned against upright oars or sat on the edge of the railing, as if watching a play.
Serapio urged the bird farther.
Men stood arguing, Lord Balam among them. The others he did not know. One was stout and sweating through his woven shirt despite the mild weather, a sash of office tight across his middle. Another man was bare-chested and bejeweled, with a tail of gray hair peeking from below a short box-shaped headdress. His attire marked him as a man of wealth, but he was otherwise plain.
The crow turned back toward the boat. And Serapio saw her.
She was striking, hair the color of plums that trailed to her waist in thick coils. Skin brown and smooth and face wide and attractive, but her mouth was flattened to a thin line in what looked like rage, and something roiled from her body that pulsed with energy, wound and waiting. It was so real, so alive, he could almost hear it. A song like the echo caught in a seashell one of his tutors had brought him from his coastal travels, or the shimmer of a rainbow after a summer rain, tangled between the hills of the valley where he grew up.