“Had to meet a man about a net.”
Kantu never could manage long sentences whenever Manuway smiled.
“I saw what you did. Thank you.”
“It was little enough. How many dead?”
Grim again and therefore easier to look at, he answered, “Hard to say. More than half of us are missing.”
He recited the roll of absentees. Kantu felt each loss in her own skin, a thin slice of lightning.
“And Crizion jhan Eriphet,” he finished.
“Crizion?” Kantu’s mouth went dry.
If Mikiel was her right hand, Crizion was her left. The daughter of Viceroy Eriphet, a princess of the Audiencia, Crizion had grown up watching the Bird People fly, both on their carpets and off the cliff. She had come to the Rokka Mama in secret one morning, clothed like a beggar.
“I offer myself as blood ransom,” she had said. “Cast me from the Fallgate and have your vengeance.”
And the Rokka Mama had kissed her sad face, on the bridge of her nose, between big brown eyes as wide and wary as a wild antelope’s. And she had said, “My vengeance is to love you. Can you bear it?”
“Crizion,” Kantu repeated, swallowing. The floor moved beneath her like water, and before she could reconcile her own matter to this new consistency, she was on the table beside Manuway with the Rokka Mama’s broad arms wrapped about her.
“Oh, Kantu. Drink. Drink! I don’t know what you were thinking, jumping carpet.”
“Noble self-sacrifice, Rokka Mama.” Kantu swallowed the infusion, which tasted of mint and a mild stimulant. The latter summoned the specter of her usual swagger. “With Manuway captaining, unaware we were doomed for net meat, and Elia leaning so far off the fringe with his slingshot that a whisper would’ve flattened him, it was left to yours truly to act. You can’t say I was wrong. Only look at Manuway. Alive. Whole. Our favorite weaver, bigger and beautifuller than ever.”
Like most Bird People, Manuway was small, with a short torso, wide chest, and a large, shaggy head that sat like a stone gargoyle upon his burly shoulders. He was too thin for his frame, and his skin was laced with scars. Though his features were unsubtle, his black eyes rarely betrayed a gleam of the thought behind them. He had watched his wife Inilah step off the Fallgate while Eriphet smiled on. Her spirit, woven into thread by her widower, animated one of the swiftest, smartest, toughest carpets from which no careless rider could idly tumble.
It had taken some clever maneuvering before Kantu could jump untrammeled by that carpet’s protests. It kept trying to buck her back to safety.
They had been good friends, Kantu and Inilah. Since Inilah’s death, Kantu had striven not to love her widower too dearly.
Manuway stood now, squeezing the Rokka Mama’s shoulders with his battered brown hands. She gave him a tired smile, scratching at her hairline beneath the kerchief. An unspoken question passed between them.
“If you can,” she answered. “Don’t overtax yourself.”
“It is owed,” he reminded her.
Sighing, the Rokka Mama stepped aside. Kantu was given no chance to concur or demur, for she did not realize his intent until Manuway had stooped close to cup her face in his palms.
It was as if she suddenly had no face at all, was nothing above the neck but a nest of downy fledglings, soft and warm and restless with too many heartbeats. She had seen him coax mice and lizards and wrens to these hands, had seen him conjure the dead to his thread so gently that the carpets wove themselves for love of him. Now, beneath his hands, Kantu’s swollen tissues shrank, cuts closed, bruises vanished. With a click, her nose moved back into place, unhappily returning her sense of smell.
The stink of her body, the dried sweat, the dried blood, the gutter where she had lain, the trash she had fallen into, all rushed into her nostrils and left her feeling dizzy and shabby with rekindled memory.
When he was done, Manuway placed a thumb to the bridge of her nose and stroked down to the tip of it.
“All better,” he said.
Kantu tried to swallow, found she could not. “Did you make my nose any smaller?”
“Some of us,” he told her, “like it as it is.”
“For myself,” said the Rokka Mama in her rollingest voice, which could incite in the timid and downtrodden such acts of bravery that poets wept to write of them, “I think it is a very fine nose, a splendid organ, a queen amongst olfactory instruments. You could travel the length and breadth of Bellisaar and never stumble by accident over such magnificence.”
“Unless you fall face-first into a cactus,” Kantu parried. She grinned wryly at Manuway. “Thanks, friend. I owe you one.”
“You saved my life, Kantu.”
“My nose is larger than life.”
He almost laughed then. She saw his broad, oddly bony shoulders move. “Very well. No debt.”
Fearful to twitch or breathe lest his hands fall away from her flesh, Kantu continued to smile witlessly up at him, until a disturbance near the door caught her eye.
“Crizion!”
But Kantu had not slid off the table before the Rokka Mama seized her, dragging her back bodily and placing herself between Kantu and the door.
“Don’t, Kantu!”
“What—?”
“She’s not alone.”
Then Crizion spoke. “To Tesserree, High Princess of Sanis Al, Thirteenth Wife and Favorite of Fa Izif ban Azur, God-King of the Red Crescent, I give you good and loving greetings.”
The Rokka Mama’s grip had not lightened, but Kantu stopped fighting it. Crizion’s forehead bore a blue gem, a costlier twin to the button Mikiel had plucked from the Childless Man, though it glowed with the same eldritch light. It seemed to be embedded in her bone, for the flesh around it was raised and red, and spidery veins ran from the gem down her face and neck. Her chestnut hair was loose, but instead of lying silk-straight as it usually did, it rose around her head, licking the air like flame. When she spoke, blue fire filled her mouth.
“That’s his voice,” Kantu whispered, remembering.
Dreamily, drowsily, almost imperceptibly, Crizion’s head turned, her attention shifting from the Rokka Mama to Kantu. Her familiar face, her lovely, dainty, friendly face, her tiny nose, keen Audiencia cheekbones, shy mouth, eyes gone whimsical and nearsighted from too much scroll-diving, her I-can-outstubborn-even-you-my-dearest-friend chin, her face—Crizion’s face—was almost unrecognizable.
Crizion was not in possession of herself.
Kantu did not mean to move, but her head shook. And kept shaking, side to side. Tears spurted from her eyes, though nothing else in all that long, long night had made her cry.
It’s like staring into the sun, she thought, only to find it staring back.
“To Kantu jhan Izif ban Azur,” Crizion continued in a voice calm and deep as a cathedral bell, “Handprint of the Thundergod, Storm Bird, Rain Bringer, Savior and Sacrifice of Sanis Al, I extend to you my heartmost greetings. And this message: Return the life you stole from your people. The Fa your father begs you.”
“No!” shouted the Rokka Mama. “My daughter is not for you!”
“Return,” said Crizion, “or I will raze Rok Moris to the ground. Woman, man, child, all within these city walls shall perish, crushed by freezing darkness. Their dust shall be swept from the Fallgate, and night shall lay forever across this barren acreage, that no one living will rebuild upon it, and no green thing grow within it for all eternity.”
Kantu did stand now, though she had to cling both to Manuway and the Rokka Mama to keep her feet. Manuway’s grip was no less furious, no less tender than her mother’s, and Kantu knew this meant far more than she had time to understand. The Rokka Mama was wild-eyed, her knuckles white. Her large, lined brow was sheened with sweat. She looked capable of any atrocity.