“Lady Night Shadow Star?” a voice called in the night. “Are you all right?”
Fire Cat tightened his grip on her elbow as he softly repeated, “Quiet.”
“Lady Night Shadow Star?” the voice called. “Please. Answer! This is your guard. We have wounded here.”
“I know his voice. It’s commander Talon.” To her credit, she barely mouthed the words.
Keeping his lips next to her ear, he added, “Doesn’t matter who’s calling if we give ourselves away.” A pause. “Trust me.”
He felt her nod.
Easing to his feet, he took her hand in his and headed away into the night and wind. The chaos of shouts and cries at Night Shadow Star’s stairway served as a beacon.
“When can we go back?”
“When it’s safe.” He barely breathed the answer, ears attentive, eyes searching the darkness. Behind them in the distant west, white flashes of lightning sent just enough flicker across the stickball field that he caught a glimpse of the World Tree pole.
Someone screamed in surprise and pain back at Night Shadow Star’s.
“There!” Talon’s distant voice cried. “He’s running!”
“After him!” someone else shouted.
“This is madness,” Night Shadow Star whispered to herself.
Off to his right, Fire Cat heard the muffled pounding of bare feet, then a wary call in some tongue he couldn’t understand.
Heart skipping, he pulled Night Shadow Star down.
Blessed ancestors, please! No lightning. All we have is the darkness. Then he thought: They’re armed, unafraid, continuing the attack even though Night Shadow Star’s guard is alerted.
He frowned as two voices hissed in the night, each tense and questioning. The language was nothing he’d ever heard. Dark shadows in the night, they were no more than twenty paces away. A distant flash of lightning illuminated them trotting back toward the west.
A torch was being carried down from Night Shadow Star’s palace. Fire Cat could make out a ring of guards, bows drawn as they stared anxiously out at the night. In the torchlight, a knot of people were clustered around the litter.
“Come,” Fire Cat whispered. Which way? Back? Or would the attackers be waiting, needing only to get a clear shot? Lightning flashed again, illuminating the cloud-thick western sky.
“Where are we going?”
“Anywhere they don’t expect us to go.” He turned east, tugging her along. Heading deeper into the safe darkness cloaking the great plaza.
The Lizard
In many ways I have become a creature of darkness. Like the lizards I have seen in the south, I can change my colors to better mingle in any company or background. As I did that day when I followed Blue Heron up the stairs to the Morning Star’s palace, I can act as noble as the rest of them. Or I can become a humble dirt farmer, as common and simple as I was the day that immigrant family invited me into their little farm for a meal of boiled corn and walnut bread. While I can walk in anonymity in the daylight, I nevertheless feel more at home in the darkness.
Most of that, I realize, is because of the shadows in which my souls are now forced to eternally dwell. They did that to me. Taught me to hate. Hatred, you see, is a blackness all its own. Deeper, darker, as impenetrable to illumination as wet charcoal. It coats the souls, leaves them gasping and desperate for the feeblest flicker. While the body basks in a relentless and blinding midday sun, my souls smother in a midnight longing for so much as the shine of a distant spark.
Another gust comes whimpering out of the darkness and pushes at my body as I loiter to one side and caress the arrow nocked in my bowstring.
I had watched and waited patiently as Blue Heron’s people remained with her litter. So, too, did Sun Wing’s. They barely recognized my presence. Many people lingered in the plaza before the great mound. To them I was but another messenger, an emissary, or perhaps just a curious pilgrim basking in the Power of the Morning Star’s mighty palace.
And then she came, descending the stairs. I recognized her voice, tight with tension, and speaking slowly to the Red Wing she’s taken into her household. I couldn’t make out the words, but savored the bitterness with which they were expressed.
Perhaps because I love her with all of my heart, I’m not the least bothered that hers isn’t a happy life.
Little more than a dark shadow, she led the way to her litter. With but a few more words, she was seated, lifted, and they started off to the west. Even as her porters were feeling their way, I was moving, keeping downwind. As I hurried ahead of them, I unrolled the reed-fiber matting and freed my bow and quiver. Ghosting along on silent feet, harried by the wind but buoyed by the anticipation of how I would send yet another shock through the Four Winds Clan, I found my wolves waiting. They were hunkered down in the inky shadows along the slope of Night Shadow Star’s clay-sided mound.