“Who are you?” the man cried, imploring hands up as he dropped to his knees.
“I’m called Lady Night Shadow Star, of the Morning Star House, Four Winds Clan.”
“He wants you.” In growing light, she could see tears tracking down the man’s face. Finding no give in her eyes, he threw himself prostrate, facedown on the packed clay.
“He’ll get me. But first, you tell me. Who’s in there?”
The man was groveling, his chest heaving as he sobbed. “High Dance and Columella, their children, Lady Lace and Sun Wing.”
“Are High Dance and Columella working with Walking Smoke?”
“No. They, and all of their children, are captive, too. Part of the ritual.”
“And you were supposed to let me pass? Who else might be on that list?”
“The Keeper and the Tonka’tzi.”
“And if a squadron of warriors were to show up?”
“The Tula were to run inside and warn him. I was to tell the squadron commander that if he tried to approach, the hostages would be killed before he could take the palace. All Walking Smoke wanted was time. He told me he would be finished by midday.”
She nodded to herself, glancing around. Her attack had come so silently, she hadn’t even awakened any of the sleepers.
“Who are you?”
“River Rock. A Trader. He hired me because I speak Caddo.”
“What did he Trade for your service?”
“He said I’d get a copper headpiece.”
She pivoted, slamming the war club’s spikes down on the back of his skull. River Rock stiffened, lungs contracting in a huffing grunt. His arms and legs jerked and quivered as he died.
“Bad Trade,” she told him before she stepped over and kicked Feather Wand awake.
“Lady Night Shadow Star?” he asked as he peered up in the dim dawn.
“Get up. Find War Chief Brown Bear Fivekiller or his second. I need the Four Winds Clan squadron assembled around High Dance’s palace. As soon as you alert them, contact the Earth Clans, same message. Tell them no one is to come or go without my permission.”
“Yes, Lady!” he leaped to his feet.
“Where are Sun Wing’s warriors? Surely she had an escort.”
“She didn’t bring any, Lady. She said she didn’t need them.”
“Pus take and rot you, sister. What were you thinking?”
But she knew: Walking Smoke would have instinctively understood—and cautiously manipulated—the spoiled youngest child; arrogant and ambitious, she’d have been ripe for conspiracy.
Night Shadow Star glanced off to the east as the first drops of rain began to spatter on the hard-packed earth around her. Morning Star? Why did you place her, of all people, in charge of investigating the assassination attempts?
But then things were never as they seemed with the Morning Star.
She started up the steps, replacing her war club and nocking another of the stone-tipped war arrows in her bow. She was nearly to the top when she heard the screaming from inside.
* * *
A woman didn’t survive to become a Four Winds House matron if she proved even the slightest bit squeamish. The demands of the matron’s position included sitting in judgment, making life and death decisions, and watching them carried out. It included participation in declarations of war, and living with the consequences of doing so. A matron’s choices and judgment had the potential to ruin an entire people, to end in bloodshed, war, and fire. In case of the worst miscalculation, it could culminate in the butchering of everyone you knew, and the possibility that you and your family would die of torture while hanging in some enemy’s square.
Never in her life had Columella seen a person in such absolute and abject terror as Sun Wing when Walking Smoke’s Tula lifted her bound body from the floor.
Panic contorted her young face. Tears soaked her cheeks. Her mouth had gone shapeless and kept popping open only to close slightly before opening again. Snot bubbled in her nostrils each time she screamed.
But terror even silenced those, strangling her cries into a strained whimpering accented by half-formed squeals.
Sun Wing’s body appeared paralyzed, seized as solid as river ice, her fear-glittering eyes having fixed on a pointless eternity. Urine dripped from her thighs and buttocks.
As the Tula carrying her lifted Sun Wing’s wet rump high and lowered her head toward the bloodstained pot, an eerie wailing screech broke from her lips. Sun Wing’s hair had come undone and fell in a midnight swirl across the bloody, vomit-soaked matting. She seemed to come to her wits, glancing this way and that, meeting Columella’s pitying eyes. Her gaze was that of a mindless thing—some inhuman and crazed creature. Then she jerked it away to fix on the corrugated ceramic pot as one of the Tula positioned it to catch her blood.