Naxiaw looked up and stared across the clearing at the young woman sitting cross-legged at its edge. She stared at him intently. There was no more fear in her green eyes anymore, no more tension in her scrawny, pale body. Her ears rose upright, each one twitching and attentive.
“And that’s when I knew what it meant to be a shict.”
She took a long moment before she spoke. When she did, he wasn’t listening; words were something she was too good with, something she used too often. His ears twitched, listening to her other voice.
She could still speak through the Howling, the wordless language of their people, but in the same way that a child could still speak. The voice of her mind and body, spirit and anger, was a sporadic thing: snarling one moment, spitting the next, then whimpering, then weeping, then roaring.
She tried to hide it behind words. She tried to distract from it with questions she thought were insightful. But he could hear her Howling. Just barely.
He said nothing to her spoken words. He stayed silent as she rose up from the earth and offered some excuse that would mean more to a round-ear. He stared as she waved briefly, then awkwardly bowed as though it meant anything, and then turned and slipped out of the forest.
The Howling lingered behind her, shrieking and crying long after she had vanished. She was frightened, she was confused, she was barely a shict.
Still. .
“You seem surprised,” a voice answered his thoughts from the bushes at his back.
“Not surprised,” he replied without looking behind him.
“Then what?” another voice, deeper and darker.
He had asked them to stay behind. Their presence would only have frightened her further. She wasn’t ready to rejoin a people she wasn’t sure she was a part of.
That will change.
“I’m not convinced it will, Naxiaw,” Inqalle said, emerging from the underbrush. “She’s been around humans for a long time. You agree the kou’ru have infected her.”
“Diseases can be cured,” he replied.
“We hope, at least,” Avaij added, his voice sharp and smooth where his sister’s was rasping and harsh. “We’ve all heard her Howling, though. If she can’t be cured-”
“Then what, brother?” he asked. “We leave her to die? Kill her?”
“Of course not,” Avaij replied.
“Maybe,” Inqalle said.
“We do not kill the sick.” Naxiaw rose up from the earth. “We treat the sickness, we kill the disease.”
“The human,” Avaij muttered. “You’re convinced that the death of one round-ear will bring our wayward sister back.”
“Not convinced.”
“Hope is not something for the s’na shict s’ha,” Inqalle said. “Our people know.”
“Then you know we cannot kill her and we cannot sit back and let her suffer.”
He turned and regarded his tribesmen. He wondered how the human would see them: tall and proud, limbs corded with green muscle and dotted with tattoos, black hair hacked and hewn into crested mohawks. Their weapons were sharp, their eyes were sharp, their canines were sharper still as their lips curled backward.
Humans had tales about the greenshicts, his people. They feared them, rightfully. This human might look upon them with terror in his blue stare. This human might fight back. To survive was the nature of disease.
But in these two, Naxiaw saw only brother, only sister, their Howling speaking clearly. If they doubted his methods, they did not doubt his goals. They would not let their sister suffer.
It would hurt, of course. She was attached to the silver-haired monkey, as much as she might wish they did not know. She might rave, she might rail against them, she might even mourn.
No illness was cured without pain.
Kataria drew in a long breath and released it. When the last trace of air had passed her lips, she opened her eyes.
“No,” she said. “You are wrong. The answer isn’t in blood. It hasn’t been so far. And the answer is not in you. I offer you no apology and I ask for no forgiveness, brother. Everything I have to find out, I can’t be told. I have to find it. If it means going with the humans, then so be it. Live well, Naxiaw. I will.”
She nodded firmly, smiling. There it was. Everything she had been holding inside her, everything she had refused to admit to herself, much less to the s’na shict s’ha.
She had said it and believed it.
If Naxiaw had actually been standing before her, she would have been just fine. As it was, the pig-sized, colorful roach in front of her merely twitched its feathery antennae and made a light chittering noise; as far as personal epiphanies went, it seemed unimpressed.
“Oh, like you’ve heard better,” she said with a sneer as she stalked past it.
Despite the insect’s lack of approval, she came out of the forest lightheaded. The meeting with the greenshict had gone well. Ominously well, considering she had told him it would be their last. She hoped he understood that. She hoped he heard that.
She could still hear the breathy, fumbled excuses in her own ears. She couldn’t understand them, of course. But she hoped Naxiaw was a little more accepting of incoherence.
And how could he not be? She chastised herself. What with that stirring performance of stuttering excuses and half-concocted logic, it’s amazing he’s not here beside you right now to give you a teary hug before he sends you to a human, the kind of breed that he’s sworn to kill and you are, too.
Were. She corrected herself. She had been sworn to kill humans, or so she thought. She had listened to the old logic that told the old reasons that supported the old story. The one that said humans were a disease that threatened shict and land alike, hence they must die.
And for as long as she could, she believed them.
But that time was over. The old story had never resonated with her as it should. The old reasons had never carried enough weight. The old logic had brought her nothing but a distinct pain in her belly that grew sharper every time she looked at Lenk and he looked back at her.
And they both remembered that night, when he had looked into her eyes with a blade to his throat and called out for her.
And she had turned her back on him.
But this isn’t about him, she told herself as she crept into the daylight. No, no. This is about you, and what you know is a shict and who you know you are and who you have to kill and what you have to do and how many times you have to tell yourself this before you finally believe it.
It was getting easier, at least.
Daylight met her with the sun rising higher in the sky as dawn was left behind and a bright, angry morning took prominence. Coming from the darkness of the forest, she was nearly blinded as the sun cast a furious glare off the sand.
It wasn’t enough to blind her to the flurry of activity, nor to the dread welling up inside her at the sight of work at the shoreline.
The center of the scene was dominated by the restored companion vessel they had salvaged, trying its hardest to appear seaworthy and aided ably by its scaly attendants. The lizardmen known as Gonwa worked diligently: sanding out its roughness, testing the sturdiness of its mast, securing its rudder. There was a vigor to their work, a frightening eagerness to get this vessel and its passengers to sea.
Considering said vessel was to deliver them into the maw of an island whose location was known only to the flesh-eating serpents and skull-crushing lizardmen who dwelt there, Kataria suspected she should feel a little insulted.
Not too late, you know, she thought as she began to trudge across the sand toward the worksite. You could still kill them all and run. They’d never see it coming. Well, Lenk might. . I mean, you did want to kill him only a week or so ago. But only two people know that.