“You don’t know what it was like, being in exile. I never laid with a woman when I wasn’t dreaming of you, remembering…”
“You’re possessed of twisted and polluted souls, Brother. Hurry up. The sooner we’re down, the sooner we’re in a canoe. The sooner you can have another chance at calling Piasa’s souls.”
He continued his descent. They were past the steepest part, and could now turn and walk the rest of the way. She ground her teeth, wanting to spit on his rain-streaked back.
“How long were you in contact with Sun Wing?”
“A couple of years,” he told her. “She was such a simple thing. And so easy to understand. I watched a girl just like her down among the Pacaha. She became my inspiration. Funny how seeing things from the outside suddenly makes you understand. Like Sun Wing, she’d been given over to indulgence, fawned over as the youngest, but perpetually frustrated by the knowledge that she’d never be the ruler. That’s when the voices told me to contact Sun Wing, to begin telling her stories, dangle the possibility before her. I only had to tempt her, and she was mine.”
“Why did you take Lace first?”
“No matter what Sun Wing might have told me, giving her proof that I was clearing her way to the tonka’tzi’s chair could only reassure her.”
“Did you feel nothing when you killed Father? Tortured Lace’s husband? Slit her throat and cut the baby out of her body?”
“Did I feel it?” He threw his head back and howled in ecstasy as he shook fists at the storm-lashed skies. “You should have felt the Power! The rapturous joy that almost burst my chest and bones. Sister, think. No man alive has ever offered the blood of Morning Star House in sacrifice. Then, to follow it with Sun Wing’s and yours? Perhaps the Keeper’s, or Matron Wind’s?”
They were walking side by side now, hurrying down onto the beach. The rain-grayed sand was firm under their muddy feet as they approached a line of canoes, each marked with a family or clan emblem. This early, and given the intensity of the rain, the beach was abandoned.
“I felt like I had the sun burning inside me.” His face expressed a reverential awe. “To have experienced that … like a blinding light searing through my heart, lungs, and gut? Blessed gods, Star! Not even the tingling jetting of semen can compare, and it was consuming my whole body. Pleasure, pain, joy, harmony, ecstasy…” He sighed. “The only other time I felt anything even close was that night when my seed exploded inside you.”
“Lucky me.”
She reached the closest canoe, a small dugout crafted from cedar. Given the blunt bow and thick hull, it was probably a dirt farmer’s. She certainly didn’t recognize the designs painted on its sides. The section of rope that tied it to a stake upslope looked old and ratty. Though firmly beached, the rope provided additional security should the river rise unexpectedly.
She untied the knot, glancing in to see three paddles.
“I can assure you, Brother, what I felt that night was nothing but pain. Every kind of pain, physical as well as soul-bruising disbelief and that shattering sense of betrayal. I know what we got away with as children. We were evil, Brother. And you have just grown worse.”
He seemed to be ignoring her, pointing up at the slope. “Someone’s coming.”
She followed his finger, seeing a muddy, bloody, man slipping and sliding as he followed their path down the drainage-cut bluff.
Fire Cat. She bit off a hollow chuckle. “Come, let’s be on the river. The sooner we’re away, the sooner I can fulfill my promise to you and Power.”
Together they pushed the canoe out onto the rain-stippled water. Night Shadow Star jumped into the bow and picked up a paddle. Mud was running from her moccasins to mix with the rainwater pooled in the hull.
As Walking Smoke hopped in the stern and began to paddle out into the river, she untied her calf-high moccasins.
“We’re not evil,” he said reasonably. “Just like in the Beginning Times, we are changing the world. First we brought back the Morning Star. In the future, when people sing of the Wild One, they’re going to sing how Thrown Away Boy, who would have sacrificed his sister, brought Piasa from the Underworld to this one.”
He uttered that silly little laugh that once had charmed and then infuriated her. “And yes, I would have killed you that night. But it wouldn’t have been permanent. I would have brought your souls back. Given you another body. Not only did I love you that much, it would have been epic.”
“You’re not Thrown Away, or the Wild One, or any such nonsense. I’m not Corn Woman! Chunkey Boy wasn’t the Morning Star, either. That came later. He was nothing more than a mean little boy, and later a violent youth, who never had to face the consequences of his actions. Not until the living god took him.”