People of the Morning Star(92)
He turned on his heels and slipped in his haste, barely catching himself, before he streaked like a panicked fox down the stairs.
“But … Wait! Rot take you, come back here!” Blue Heron demanded angrily as the youth raced away. For a couple of tens of heartbeats she fumed, then sagged. “She’s alive!”
Smooth Pebble exhaled in weary relief. “I’d better be about getting some food into her.”
“And I’d better be about finding the source of these arrows.”
“Will it really help?” Smooth Pebble asked.
“Probably not.” He shrugged. “But you never know what might turn up.”
“Let’s hope it’s not what you said,” she muttered darkly, expression wary. “Brilliant evil? You watch yourself, thief.”
“You, too, berdache. You’re too good a sort to go the way of Field Green.” He said it with levity, but nothing cut the fear in her eyes.
Thirty-one
“We had no warning. I was just rising from my litter when the arrows shot out of the darkness.” Night Shadow Star looked bedraggled and filthy, her hair stringy, the muskrat cape having lost some of its fluff. Her toned legs were mud-caked from the calves down to her feet. Somewhere she’d lost her sandals. The brown dress looked like something a dirt farmer would wear in from the field. But worst of all, the set of her eyes expressed a deep-seated fright.
Blue Heron turned her attention to the Red Wing. He looked equally unkempt, his hair matted, mud splotched everywhere. The normally disagreeable set of his jaw had softened. So, too, had his continual expression of loathing. Now his tattooed face with its lines and patterns had grown introspective. Like Night Shadow Star, he, too, reeked of a charnel house’s cloying odor.
“No shouts of warning?” Blue Heron asked. “No reason for the attack?”
“It would have been easier to bear if someone had cried out, ‘Die, you foul camp bitch.’ Instead they attacked in complete silence.” Night Shadow Star paused. “But for the gusting wind and hissing arrows.”
“We heard from your guard and the surviving porters that someone yelled, ‘Run’ and ‘Ambush.’”
“I did,” Fire Cat told them. “That’s when I grabbed the lady and jerked her backward off the litter.” His gaze went half-lidded as he added, “She wasn’t particularly pleased with the gentle and dignified manner of my assistance. Especially when I threw her kicking and screaming over my shoulder and ran for it.”
“At least I didn’t charge headlong into an open latrine, Red Wing,” Night Shadow Star shot back.
He gave her a diffident look. “You might at least warn the people living next to that marsh not to drink the water.”
Blue Heron heard the tension behind the words. The reason why Night Shadow Star had saved the Red Wing still eluded her, but her current concerns lay elsewhere. “How many of them were there?”
Night Shadow Star shrugged, but the Red Wing met her gaze, his own confident as he said, “My guess, after thinking about it, is that there had to be at least four, maybe six, total. They were lying in wait on either side of the mound base when we got there. Given the way the palace ramp and staircase extend, they had us in a cross fire, as if we were the center of the X. Pinpoint accuracy wasn’t necessary, just shoot at the screaming shadows with as many arrows as possible.”
“It worked. Field Green, three guards, and most of the porters are dead.”
“I would have been, too.” Night Shadow Star frowned into a distance only she could see. “I heard the arrow hit Field Green in the chest.”
“In the dark like that,” Fire Cat told her, “someone had to take the first hit. It was simple chance.”
“But you managed to keep my niece safe,” Blue Heron interjected, a cold thought creeping between her souls. Just as that culprit Seven Skull Shield saved my life. And both—if we can believe Night Shadow Star—were around to do so at the insistence of Piasa.
For long moments she studied the younger woman, her memory dredging through her niece’s tumultuous childhood, her unsettled and rebellious adolescence. No girl could grow up normally in the midst of the Four Winds Clan’s fractious politics. Let alone in the Morning Star’s presence. Her grandfather, and then her brother had sacrificed their lives, souls, and bodies to provide a temporary abode for the god’s resurrected Spirit. The girl had had a special bond with both Chunkey Boy and Walking Smoke. Why shouldn’t she? No other children in the world grew up in that rarified environment that had them literally playing at the feet of a miracle.