SULIS STARED AT her mother’s still form on the pyre, trying to memorize the details of her face. It was serene, her expressive eyes closed, the welcoming smile gone from her lips. White silk hid the arrow wound on her neck. It had festered and refused to heal, the poisons stopping her heart.
Sulis’s gaze followed the white silk down her mother’s body to where it draped over the still form of a great cat, the temple feli who’d paired with her mother before Sulis was born. Rafael had paced beside her mother all the years of Sulis’s life and now lay with her mother on the pyre, his head resting on her stomach.
Sulis had found them in this position when she’d brought in the morning tray. She’d called out to her mother and put her hand on the feli’s rough fur, but neither had woken. Though her mother had been strong enough to survive the long caravan from Illian to Shpeth, her heart had given out when she was safe in her own jetal. Her feli followed their bond past the boundary of death.
Sulis could picture them like this in life, lying together in the shade on a scorching afternoon while Sulis napped beside them. Her mother, Iamar, laughed when the feli flopped beside her, and she’d pushed his big head off her lap.
“Too hot, Rafael,” she’d said. “I don’t want a fur coat. Go lie on Sulis.”
Sulis closed her eyes, yearning to climb the pyre and curl up with them, to rest her head on the feli’s side and hear him purr, with her mother’s laughter echoing around her.
“I will light the pyre,” she’d told her aunts this morning, insisting when they protested: “I’m the eldest. It’s my duty.”
“She’s only twelve,” Aunt Raella had murmured.
Sulis had raised her chin stubbornly as her grandmother studied her. But her grandmother had nodded.
“It is her privilege,” she’d said.
The sun was setting in the heat-bleached sky, casting shadows over desert dunes that stretched into the distance.
The time was nearing. Sulis’s legs shook beneath her, and she clenched her hands so they wouldn’t tremble. She listened to her grandmother speak the sacred words that would send Iamar’s soul to the One, and suddenly she wanted nothing more than to hide in the jetal under her bedcovers until this was all over. She wanted to be a little girl again, to run into her mother’s arms and be comforted. But she was the eldest daughter, and her mother was dead. Everything had changed, and she felt old, as though she’d skipped ten years of her life and become, overnight, a woman.
A hand slipped into hers, and she darted a quick, grateful glance at her twin, who stood beside her. Kadar stared straight ahead, his expression stoic except for his eyes, which swam with tears. Sulis looked away quickly, not wanting to give in to the luxury of weeping before her task was done.
Her grandmother’s voice ceased, and Sulis looked to where the tall, regal tribeswoman stood at Iamar’s head. She looked gravely at Sulis, then across to Sulis’s father. He stood alone on the other side of Iamar’s body, staring at his feet. His brow was set in furrows as he scowled at the sand. Sulis had heard him shouting earlier, out in the hot desert, screaming at the One for taking Iamar just as he’d brought her home.
“Gadiel,” Grandmother said to Sulis’s father, gesturing for him to come forward.
“Sulis,” she said, and gestured with her other hand.
Sulis released Kadar and stepped forward as her father did, her heart almost leaping out of her chest. They stood before her grandmother, who held a staff with an oil-soaked rag tied around one end. Gadiel brought out his flint and struck a single spark, a good omen for the speed at which Iamar’s soul would go to the One. He took the lighted torch and handed it to Sulis. She grasped it with both hands. The torch was heavy, of a longer length than usual to extend her limited reach, and she concentrated on holding it straight and proud. It would be shameful to let it tip and extinguish in the sand because she couldn’t control her trembling arms. She pursed her lips and forced her body to still.
In front of her brother and the crowd of mourners, Sulis walked with the torch to her mother’s feet and stood facing the setting sun, her father’s hand warm on her shoulder. The last of the blazing orb sank beneath the undulating dunes, leaving only a brilliant pink-and-yellow afterglow.
Sulis turned to her mother’s body and lifted the flame high enough to thrust into the tinder at her feet. When the wood caught, she proceeded up to the body of the feli, lighting the tinder underneath. Finally, she reached her mother’s head, and, tears streaming down her face, she lighted the tinder under the thick cloud of ebony hair. Infused in oil, it flared and crackled.
An ululation, high and shrill, rose around her as mourners wailed their pain and ushered Iamar’s soul to the One. Sulis felt her knees buckle as the scent of burning hair and flesh wafted from the pyre. She gagged, and her father caught her around the waist, steadying the torch as she fell to her knees. Her grandmother took the flame and handed it to the keeper, who would feed the fire through the night.
Sulis clung to her father, but he remained stiff against her, looking away as she sobbed harder into his shoulder. He held her until she quieted, then escorted her over to the thick, woven mat where her brother already sat for their nightlong vigil. He kissed the top of her head.
“Remember I love you, now and always,” he said. They were the words he always said before a long trip, and her eyesight blurred again. He was leaving them.
Kadar silently put an arm around her, and she wiped her tears on the shoulder of his mourning tunic, letting her shudders quiet with the comfort of his touch. Sulis recognized Aunt Janis’s voice rising above the other women’s laments and saw her kneeling, reaching toward the flames, with Uncle Aaron’s restraining hands tight on her shoulders. Aunt Raella stood silently behind Uncle Tarik as he knelt, mourning his sister. Sulis looked around for her father, but he had disappeared into the night.
“He’s gone,” she murmured to her twin. Kadar understood whom she meant. “He told me good-bye.”
“Will he come back?”
“I don’t think so. Not with mother dead and her killer free. No, he will search for her killer until one of them is dead.”
She stared into the fire as Kadar threw his head back and keened, his voice rising with those of the other mourners. The fire crackled and danced, and Kadar buried his face in his hands. She pulled him to her, holding him as he wept for both of their parents.
Sulis’s own tears had dried, and she felt calm amid the storm around her. She wondered if this was what her mother had felt before she left for Illian the last time—putting herself back in the danger she’d fled fourteen years before. Sulis felt it, the call that had taken her mother away. Her entire life, she’d felt as though something were calling her name—but from a distance. When she’d touched her mother’s feli, she’d felt a connection to something greater. Her mother had told her that connection was to the One. In the past few days, since her mother died, that feeling had turned to a call, a pull to the Northern Territory, to the Temple of the One. It was as though her mother’s burdens passed to her upon death, and she had to succeed where her mother had failed.
Sulis sat in the darkness, feeling this new space inside her as Kadar fell asleep, and the mourners drifted off to their own jetals. It made her feel alone, apart from her family and friends. The low voices of her grandmother and aunts seemed to come from a different world, one that was closed to her now that her parents were lost.
Aunt Janis knelt on the mat beside her. “Sulis, do you know where your father is?” she asked quietly.
“He’s gone,” Sulis said, looking into the fire.
“He’s taken his horse. Did he tell you where he was going? Aaron wants to go to him, to make certain he’s all right.”
Sulis looked over at her aunt. “He won’t find Father,” she said with certainty. “He told me good-bye. He won’t be back.”
Aunt Janis put out a hand and stroked Sulis’s hair.
“Oh, child, you are such an old soul,” she said. “These shouldn’t be your burdens.”
“I am what the One wants me to be,” Sulis said stiffly, repeating what her mother used to say.
“You are yet a child, in spite of your calling to the One—and having to grow up too soon,” Aunt Janis said. She shifted closer to Sulis, and her nimble fingers began weaving small braids in Sulis’s thick hair. “You and your brother are very welcome in our jetal, love, as you have been this past year. Aaron and I love you as our own.”
I’m not ready for this, Sulis thought as she leaned against her aunt, the hands plaiting her hair bringing her back to herself. I need to learn so much about the Northerners and their great Temple. How do you even get to Illian? How do you pair with a feli? If you pair, does the Temple consider you a pledge? She closed her eyes, letting her aunt’s touch comfort her. She would keep learning. When she was ready, Illian and the Temple would be waiting.