She peered through the slowly brightening light, her gaze flitting over shadows that she could quickly identify. Where was it?
The guards would be back from their short patrol of this wing and she had to be out of the throne room before they did so. She had made up a story if she got caught, but they would know she had no good reason to be in here. She should leave now. But she had to see what it was.
She scampered across the granite stones of the floor toward the throne, her ears tuned to the hallway outside. Hurrying behind the raised dais, she saw the heavy stone box that her father used to store his most precious treasures. She bent low to get a better look at the clasp that was still hidden by the shadows of the early morning.
It was locked.
Ree slumped in defeat. Her father’s engineers had created this lock specially for his treasure box. A metal rod went through the lid of the stone box and the box itself. In the middle of the metal rod was a small wood compartment containing the lock. The locking mechanism had several moving parts, each of which had to be moved in a certain direction and left in a specific position—all in an exact order. All of this had to be done perfectly for the lock to release.
Ree had no idea what the sequence and positions were. And she had no time to try to puzzle the mechanism out. The guards would be coming back soon and she couldn’t very well leave the room with them standing outside. There would be questions.
She would make time another day. The gleaming image of the cloth-covered object wouldn’t leave her until she discovered what it was. Shelu and her father had spoken in such hushed tones, their heads close, that Ree knew her curiosity wouldn’t let go until she knew what the secret was. And Father would refuse to tell her about it, like usual, proving he didn’t trust her. If you couldn’t trust your daughter, who could you trust?
Ree hurried toward the door of the throne room. She paused for a moment to run her hand over the beautiful jewels encrusting the left armrest of the throne. In the pale light of the autumn morning, the reds, blues, and greens of the gems glowed with cold fire. What a waste to put them on a chair; precious stones deserved to be worn. She had to tear herself away; she could get caught at any moment.
Ree listened at the door, peering through the crack between the door and the wall. She saw no guards and heard no footsteps. Holding her breath, she slipped the handle off its rod, opened the door just enough to squeeze out, and hooked the handle in the rod in the hallway wall.
“Princess?”
The loud voice made her jump. Her heart stopped, then fluttered somewhere deep in her stomach. She turned to face the two guards. They looked like they could be twins. Each wore the decorative sash of brown bear skin, her father’s house animal, with the insignia of the temple guard branded into the bear skin. They both had shaved heads with dark tattoos—starting at the very top of the head and moving out in a spiral from there. Both guards wore a simple loincloth with a dark leather belt that held an obsidian-bladed dagger and in their right hands they held spears with obsidian tips.
“Princess Ree,” one of them said. “Your father has told you not to enter his throne room without his permission. We are commanded to tell him if we see you disobeying.”
The two guards lengthened their stride, coming to a halt only a few feet in front of Ree.
She prayed her voice wouldn’t give her thumping heart away. “Oh, I know.” She kept her voice casual. “Isn’t he in there already? I just wanted to ask him if I could take Titan out this morning after breakfast.” She thanked the First Fathers that she had taken a moment to come up with a story.
The guards looked at each other, then back at her, their eyes narrowed and suspicious.
Ree kept her eyes on their faces. She had to show no sign of worry or concern.
The guards exchanged another look. “No, the king is not in there. He has not finished his breakfast yet,” the guard on the left said.
“Oh,” said Ree. “I’ll go find him!” She tried to make her voice sound excited, but it came out as almost a squeak. Before the guards could decide whether to believe her, Ree turned around and walked away. They’ll tell him about what I said. Now I really do have to ask him if I can take Titan out today. She strode as confidently as she could, turning right at the next hallway, making her way to her father’s quarters.
Soon, she thought. Soon I’ll be thirteen and they’ll have to be nicer to me. They won’t be able to order me around. She continued walking down the shadowed hallways, making her way toward her father’s quarters.
Chapter 4
Duty
The morning’s chill woke Lakhoni. He shifted, hissing at the pain in his body. He felt as if his joints and bones were fused tree branches. Cotton filled his head, a dull throb at his crown reminding him of the blow he had been dealt. He carefully levered himself up, stiffness in his neck forcing him to move his entire upper body as he searched the hut with his eyes.
No blanket.
Confused, he pushed himself first to his knees, then to his feet, swaying precariously for a moment before he put a hand on the wall. His ankle held his weight better now, but still pulsed with every beat of his heart. Each movement produced a hiss from between his teeth. He sat again, carefully, and tore a frayed strip of leather from his breeches. He wrapped his ankle tightly.
Why would the raiding party take his family’s blankets? It wasn’t as if the blankets his mother made were special. Confusion combined with the heaviness already in his head. They steal our food, our valuables—and now our blankets. How were these acts any better than the Usurpers? Stories of the Usurpers stealing and murdering came to the village all the time. This is no better.
Lakhoni stood again and stepped to the doorway, one hand going to the animal skin that hung there.
Blankets. Stupid. He was avoiding thinking about what would greet him when he went outside.
He had a duty. He could not leave his people, his family, outside any longer. Scavengers would no doubt appear soon. He hesitated at the task he knew was before him. Lakhoni searched for his courage. He was fourteen. Nearly a full-grown man.
Murderous raiding party.
There. His courage sparked in the heat of sudden anger. His body trembling at what would greet him, he stepped outside.
Bright morning sun stabbed his eyes. He closed them, gasping. He blinked and stared at the ground until his eyes became accustomed to the blinding light. He saw movement. Scavenging birds flapped and pecked. A sick groan escaped his lips, long and low. But fury took over and the groan became a shout. A scream. His pains were forgotten as he hurtled forward, waving his arms in wild gyrations, curses flying from his lips.
The vultures squawked loudly and lifted off, their ungainly wings flapping heavily, frantically trying to reach safety. Lakhoni wanted to snatch the birds and tear them to pieces, vent his fury and revulsion on them, but he was too slow. They flapped up and flew to the west. Lakhoni scanned the ground for a rock. Snatching one, he hurled it at the departing birds, praying he might hit one.
The rock fell into the trees. The vultures, untouched, flapped in wide circles, moving farther off, probably back to their homes near the waste.
Lakhoni screamed a final curse upon the birds, the words tearing through his throat. He felt as if he had swallowed a handful of sharp obsidian arrowheads. His throat was raw, his chest on fire. Lowering his head, he focused on the form on the ground in front of him.
His father, Zeozer.
Lakhoni fell to his knees, his battered body protesting. “Father.”
His father’s death gaze transfixed him. Lakhoni tried to close his own eyes, knowing he should reach out to close his father’s. He could do neither. The stick his father had been using to get around on his injured leg lay some ways away.
It looked as if his father had abandoned the stick in a hurry to get somewhere.
Lakhoni found his paralysis had dissolved. He reached out and touched his father’s forehead, then gently closed his eyes. A sudden t
remble wracked Lakhoni. His thoughts moved with the speed of an oldster telling a favorite story. His father. Where was his mother? And Alronna, his sister?
He had a duty. He must care for the dead—the dead that surrounded him on all sides, searing his eyes. Perhaps not being able to see Lamorun’s body after he fell in the last war with the Usurpers had been better than this.
A sound somewhere between a grunt and a scream exploded from his mouth, his chest feeling as if it would cave in. Lakhoni tried to hold the next scream back. He feared the weakness that threatened to spill from him. He didn’t know if he could pull himself out of the torrent if he let it flow.
He imagined that he was inserting a rod of hardened iron into his spine. He gritted his teeth. He had a duty.
He passed a cursory look around the village center. Too many to bury. He would have to burn them and do both dances: death and fire.
Lakhoni pushed himself to his feet. Wood first. He moved toward the forest. With two hours’ slow work, Lakhoni was able to build a large pile of dry branches and logs scavenged from near the huts of the villagers.
As he turned from the pile of wood, he shook with exhaustion and grief. He knew what he must do, but he worried he couldn’t do it. His head still hurt. So did his side. The more minor pains had faded with the work, although sweat stung in his cuts, and his ankle still twinged in pain with every few steps.
How could he be expected to drag everyone he had known his whole life into a pile, then set them on fire? How could he touch—
He choked back a moan. Why couldn’t I die with them and let the animals and forest do their work?
“Why?” he whispered to the cool breeze blowing through the village. It gave no answer.
He stood before the branches, his thoughts a haze of pain and burning grief. The torrent within him surged. He swallowed tightly, clenching his lips tightly closed.
“No.”
He had no answer. He would never know why. He looked around the village, not seeing the bodies this time, but seeing ghostly memories. Marna heating rocks for ancient Yeval’s feet. Enormously fat Salno waddling through the village, carrying his pouch of herbs he used to make healing teas.
“I can’t. I don’t know how,” Lakhoni whispered.
But if not him, who would pay the final respects for the people he had loved and who had loved him?
“I’ll do it until I can’t anymore. The First Fathers would understand.”
He turned and, before he could think any more about it, he crouched, hooked his arms under the nearest limp form and walked backward. Carefully laying the body onto the branches, he tried to avert his eyes before he saw the person’s face. He wasn’t fast enough. It was his cousin Jona. Lakhoni reached out quickly, closed Jona’s eyes and turned to the next.
If I go fast enough, I won’t think about it.
He worked for hours, deliberately staying away from his family’s hut. He found that if he could turn off his thoughts and just focus on the physical labor, it was much easier. Coming upon the body of his dog, Ancum, jolted him with fresh pain. He knew it was wrong, but he placed Ancum’s body on the pile as well. He was my family also.
The work cleansed him of the fuzziness that had plagued him. The raiding party must have gotten ahead of him and left someone behind to catch any people outside the village. That hunter must have hit Lakhoni, thinking he had dealt Lakhoni a death blow. Mother always said I had too hard of a head. He clamped down hard on the pain rising in his throat, blinking tears away.
Lakhoni bent to the next fallen villager. Without thinking, he looked at the face.
His mother, Sana. Lakhoni’s breath disappeared and he sat heavily, his arms still hooked under his mother. Her light brown eyes were empty.
“Mother.”
Air slammed back into him. His lower jaw shook as he tried to control the shaking that took hold of him. His hands, between his mother’s arms and torso, trembled. The need to flee filled him. He tried to get to his feet, tried to pull his hands away. He couldn’t remember how to stand.
Dead. His mother was dead.
His mother. Killed with a casual slice of a hunter’s dagger. Dead. The word flashed through his mind again and again.
Lakhoni felt the tears on his face and knew he couldn’t hold it back. Too much, it was too much. Murdered. His mother, with her kind nature always ready to comfort any child in the village.
His body shuddered as the torrent of grief exploded like a stopped-up river through a weakened dam. His chest heaved, his mind flashing through images of her. Cooking in the family fire pit. Giving his father her special smile. Her unusually straight teeth glinting in the firelight.
Sobs that shook his soul poured out of him. Lakhoni curled over the body of his mother, soaking the dirt with his fear, grief, and anger. He rocked back and forth, high-pitched moans escaping his clenched mouth, tears without end streaming down his burning cheeks.
He stayed that way for some time, until his body was spent, his soul empty.
No, not empty. Nearly empty, but there was still something there. Something hot, raw, and painful like a fresh wound.
But this pain was good. Hot, flowing stone coursed through his muscles. He felt as if he could walk through a tree, as if wind would bend around him. Lakhoni stood, lifted his mother’s body in his arms and carried her to the soon-to-be-pyre.
Exhaustion and pains forgotten, he finished his work quickly, realizing by the position of the sun that he must have been bent over his mother for a long time. Last was his father. He was much heavier than Lakhoni’s mother, but Lakhoni lifted his father from the ground as well, knowing he must not drag his parents through the dirt.
As he straightened from the funeral pile, a thought struck him. Where’s Alronna? Hope surged through him. He hadn’t found her body in the village yet. It was said that sometimes raiding parties would take people back to the king’s palace to serve the king. Could she be alive?
Lakhoni began to feel as if he might know why he was preserved. He would find his sister and rescue her.
He wanted to make an oath of vengeance, but knew that was not his place. His vengeance would have to be directed at the king, and the king was appointed by edict of the Great Spirit and the First Fathers. Perhaps not vengeance, but he would finish here and then hunt those who took his sister. Alronna would not be stolen like Lamorun, to die in some unknown and unseen place on the order of the king. Lakhoni would find and free her.
He took two fire stones from his family’s hut and gathered tinder. The first spark caught and he coaxed the flame to life with his breath. In minutes, the dry branches under the bodies caught, orange flames questing skyward.
He cleared his head and thought of the dances he must do. His ankle hurt, but he could do what had to be done—some of the stone strength from earlier still remained in his muscles. He began, starting slowly and allowing the movements to steadily take over his body. Lakhoni began the chant that allowed the spirits of the dead to let go of those they left behind. Now came the part where he must name the dead. If this had been a normal Death Dance, the village would say the dead person’s name together.
Only me. For all of them
“Salno. Jona. Yeval. Marna. Omior.” He continued, his eyes closed as he gave in to the dance. He left his parents for the end. As he twisted carefully, sliding his left foot in then stepping backward, his hands reaching toward the fire, he sang, “Zeozer. Sana.” Lakhoni turned a complete circle, lifting his arms toward the darkening sky.
An unexpected voice made him jump.
“Why do you sing their names?”
Chapter 5
Panther
Lakhoni blinked, trying to make out the speaker in the jittering shadows of the now-blazing bonfire. He saw nobody, only the swelling darkness under the trees at the edge of the village. “Who said that? Who’s there?”
No, the voice had been too close for it to have come from the trees. Lakhoni turned a slow circle, beginning to wonde
r if he had imagined the question and the speaker.
“You know that does no good, don’t you?” The voice came from behind him again.
Lakhoni spun again. Nothing . . . again.
“Who are you? Where are you?” A chill oozed up Lakhoni’s neck. Was this a spirit come to rebuke him for his slowness?
“Right here, cub.”
A deep shadow on the side of one of the huts writhed. Then part of the shadow detached itself from the rest of the darkness.
Lakhoni’s breath caught in his throat. Fear made his muscles weak and his legs feel as if they were the branches of a young sapling. Was this one of the vengeful spirits Salno had often spoken of and that Lamorun had scoffed at?
The person—or creature—stepped into the firelight. The figure stood at least two hand-lengths taller than Lakhoni, and Lakhoni had already reached his father’s height. The man wore a deep red loin cloth that looked to have been made from a bear pelt. His left shoulder was covered by some kind of shining material—it looked to be bronze or something similar—and bracers of the same material stretched from his upper arm to his shoulder.
A wicked-looking obsidian dagger was strapped to the belt of the man’s loincloth. A quiver of dark-fletched arrows peeked over his right shoulder. But it was the man’s face and torso that injected the fear into Lakhoni. The man’s head was shaved, bald and shiny. Black tattoos swirled all over his scalp, face, and neck. The intricate patterns gave way to what looked like a snarling image of a panther on the man’s chest. The panther’s long white teeth seemed to glint in the light of the funeral pyre, its lips almost appearing to quiver with life. Countless scars covered the man’s chest, stomach, and arms.
This was worse than a vengeful spirit. This was a demon in flesh, one of the Living Dead that mothers warned would steal misbehaving children from their sleeping pads if they continued to disobey.
As the man approached, his movements tight like a drawn bowstring, but graceful like the panther on his chest, Lakhoni instinctively stepped backward. The heat of the roaring fire just behind him brought him back to himself, the pain awakening him from his fear.
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