Outside Night Shadow Star’s palace, Fire Cat practiced with his war club. Dressed in full armor, shield on his left arm, he leaped forward, using momentum to swing the club in a deadly arc. Skipping to one side, he dropped to a defensive crouch, shield up to block an imaginary blow.
His muscles ached, but he launched himself out of the crouch with a reminder that in battle no one stopped to rest. Gasping for breath, he continued his drills, forcing himself to the edge of endurance.
As the sun had set, he’d watched a procession of Earth Clan chiefs as they climbed the high steps to the Morning Star’s palace. Across the smoky night, he could hear drumming and flute music mingled with the sounds of laughter.
Which spurred him to continue until his legs trembled under him and he staggered. Despite the cool evening, sweat beaded and ran down his body.
Finally exhausted, he pulled the leather helmet from his head, having slain a thousand imaginary Four Winds Clan warriors. He could almost feel the smiles of his ancestors.
Head back, eyes on the cloud-puffed sky, he slowly ambled toward the veranda and stepped inside.
Night Shadow Star’s palace was lit by a low fire, its smoke pooling under the high roof to deter mosquitoes. Inside the door, he shucked off his armor and laid the club and shield to one side by the wall bench.
In the rear corner, Green Stick and Clay String tossed a cup full of gaming pieces onto a cloth, counting up points. Winter Leaf sat to their right, pushing a bone awl through fabric as she fastened freshwater pearls to one of Night Shadow Star’s skirts.
Fire Cat found one of the water bottles and stepped outside to sluice the sweat from his body. Relishing the cold water, he poured it over his hot skin.
Reentering, he took stock. Firewood was piled neatly on the other side of the door, the cooking pots cleaned from the night meal. Bedding lay folded and ready, everything in order. A far cry from the day he’d finally taken control of the household. The place had been a shambles, Night Shadow Star having sent herself on a soul journey to the Underworld.
To his relief, since then she’d refrained from rubbing datura paste onto her temples and attempting a repeat of such dangerous Spiritual excursions. She’d barely survived the last one.
“Did you slay them all?” Clay String asked, looking up from the game.
“All but the ones who turned and ran.” Fire Cat stripped off his wet breechcloth and pulled a hemp-fiber hunting shirt from the box beneath his bed. He and Night Shadow Star’s household servants had come to a sort of understanding, though it remained tenuous at best.
“How’s she doing?” He gestured to Night Shadow Star’s door.
“I think she’s asleep.” Winter Leaf looked up from her sewing, her voice dropping. “You saw the way she looked at supper?”
He nodded. Night Shadow Star had been preoccupied, worried. It had taken all of his wiles to get her eat. When she had, it had been in silence, her eyes vacant, the muscles bunching under her smooth cheeks as she chewed.
“Trouble’s coming,” Clay String said. “Piasa’s told her something.” He glanced at Fire Cat as if in hopes that he knew.
“She didn’t tell me.” He walked over, staring down at the gaming pieces. Each was a polished flat of bone, hash marks cut into either side to denote value. “Who’s winning?”
Green Stick indicated Clay String. “If we were playing for stakes he’d own everything I possess down to the clothes I’m wearing.”
Taking the moment, Fire Cat seated himself on the bench to watch as Clay String dropped the gaming pieces into a cup, shook them, and cast.
“Fifteen. I win again.”
Fire Cat eased a knee up. “Was she ever happy?”
Clay String paused, glanced uncertainly at Night Shadow Star’s door, and in a low voice said, “After the last resurrection of the Morning Star. When she married her husband”—he wouldn’t say a dead man’s name—“the living god had this palace built for her. What was it? Two years before you … um, he was killed up north. They were young and very much in love. Some said too much so for a political marriage. No one who knew her before her first woman’s moon would have believed it, but after she married, she changed. Became responsible in the ways a lady should. She was taking her place in the Council House. People expected she’d become the next matron when Wind either passed on or took the Great Sky’s mace. She’d just turned eighteen when the news came of the disaster up north.”
He avoided Fire Cat’s eyes. “It was like part of her died with him. She just … well, changed. Like all the life had run out of her souls.”
“That’s when she started hearing things, seeing things that weren’t there.” Winter Leaf shooed a pesky fly. “For days she’d be excited, almost frantic—do this, do that—and she’d rarely sleep. Then for a moon following, it was like deflating a fish bladder. She’d barely have energy enough to get out of bed. Everything was black and depressing. We never knew what to expect. And Matron Wind and the tonka’tzi, they were half frantic.”
“She started using the datura,” Green Stick added. “Rides-the-Lighting gave it to her. For at least a little while it seemed to help. And then, just before your arrival, she threw us out. Told us that no one was to enter, and she retreated to that altar she’d built back there. That’s where the Keeper found her, her souls lost in the Underworld.” She shrugged. “You know the rest.”
“Was she always drawn to the Underworld Powers?”
Clay String looked appalled. “On my ancestors, no! She’s Four Winds Clan! Her brother’s body is the home of the incarnated god. No, this started after her husband’s death, when she decided she was going to send her souls to the Underworld to find his afterlife soul.”
Which, of course, was where she would have expected to find it. Fire Cat had ordered Makes Three’s body chopped up and tossed into the Father Water outside Red Wing Town as a gift to Piasa and an insult to Cahokia.
He grunted at the bitter irony. Not only had he ended up serving her and those selfsame Powers, but after the sacking of Red Wing Town, his own relatives had been dismembered and tossed into the river by War Chief Spotted Wrist.
“You’ve been good for her,” Winter Leaf said softly. “You know that, don’t you?”
“Power, for its own twisted reasons, has thrown us together for the time being. The only thing keeping me here is my oath. And I wouldn’t have given that had I known who I was talking to that night.” He gestured toward her door. “As for her? If Piasa would let her, she’d like nothing better than to hang me back in a square and repay me for every minute she’s suffered.”
And with that, he rose, angered at the hollow sensation in his gut. Of course she’d torture him to death. Only by the barest act of will had she once stopped herself from driving a blade into his heart.
“We’re both prisoners,” he muttered as he walked to his bed beside her door and crawled under the covers.
He’d barely closed his eyes when memories swam up from the depths of his souls. Rain pounded on his back and head, stippling the lead-gray surface of the Father Water as lightning cracked and banged around him. His fingers were entwined in Night Shadow Star’s wet hair as he hauled her naked body from the river. His heart began to pound as he laid her in the canoe. Straddling her, he stared at her slack face, the eyes slitted and vacant, her lips parted. The long swirl of her hair shifted with the water sloshing in the canoe bottom.
How cold she’d been as he laid his trembling hands on her chest and pushed down. Water had burbled from her mouth. Again and again, in rising desperation, he kept pushing.
And then, as panic filled him, he was leaning over her, pressing his mouth against her slack lips. Breath by breath, he exhaled his life and souls into her, willing her to take a part of him and live.
And she’d taken a breath, coughed, and breathed again.
Delirious with relief, he’d thrown himself onto her, seeking to share his warmth as they drifted aimlessly with the current.
She was looking up now, her marvelous dark eyes drinking his life soul. Her supple arms rose, wrapping around him and pulling him down onto her soft body. Her breasts pressed into his chest, her legs twining themselves around his waist …
He jerked awake, intimately aware of his erection.
What possessed him? It hadn’t ended that way. When she’d recovered enough to sit up and hug herself into a shivering ball, he’d paddled to shore. Led her to a farmstead where he’d ordered the dirt farmers out of their house and thrown all of their wood onto the fire.
He’d bundled her in blankets, raided their store of cornmeal, and fed her a hot soup.
“Blood and fire,” he muttered as he waited for his erection to fade. “What’s wrong with me?”
He heard a soft mewing, the sort of sound a newborn puppy made when deprived of its mother.
Rising, he stepped to her door hanging, parting it to peer into her dim quarters. She lay on her bed, the dark wealth of her hair atop one arm.
“Please, don’t make me do this,” she whimpered through sleep slurred speech. “Not … to him…”
His heart like a cold rock in his chest, Fire Cat pinched his eyes shut. Refusing to meet the servants’ eyes where they sat in their corner, he flopped back on his bed and clamped a forearm over his ear in the futile search for silence.
Sometime in the night he came awake again. Night Shadow Star’s dream pleadings were just loud enough to mingle with the continuing celebration atop the Morning Star’s mound. And both were like torture.