In the Ruins (Crown of Stars 6)

The blood knives raged, but they were few, and the crowd was many, and the folk who had a grip on the children looked very determined.

“These are the children of dogs! They are not our kind,” the blood knives protested.

“How will they know anything different,” asked White Feather boldly, “if they are raised among us?”

“It goes against our laws.”

“It does not!” she retorted. “In the days before, some among humankind walked together with our people and painted the clan marks on their bodies. In this way, they became part of the clans, and their blood and our blood mixed.”

“Yes! Yes!” cried the blood knives triumphantly. “And that turned the balance. You see what came of it!”

White Feather was burning with anger now. She was as bright as the sun. “I will not listen to you!” she said in a voice that carried like sunlight over the market square, where all commerce had come to a stop. “I listened once, when the last of you still ruled us in exile. What fools we were!”

“You were fools to allow your blood knives to die without training up those who could succeed them.”

“You know nothing, you who walked in the shadows while we struggled, while the land died around us! Hu-ah! Hu-ah! Let my words be pleasing to She-Who-Creates, who sustains us!”

Now she could not be interrupted.

“In those days as the land died and we died, the blood knives still ruled. Many had already died because there was not enough to eat. But in those days, when I was a child, there was a great sickness and most of the remaining people died. Dogs feasted on corpses, for there were none to prepare them for the death rites. Vultures grew fat on lean flesh. Bones lay everywhere. And still we died. After this, we abandoned the cities. The few of us who still lived scattered to the villages. There we lived as the fields withered and the birds laid fewer and fewer eggs. The lakes dried up, there were no more fish, and the rivers leaked away until they ran no more than a trickle of water. And still we died.

“At last the remaining blood knives decreed that in order to restore the balance and placate the angry gods we must offer to the gods the thing we valued most. I was young then, a young woman newly married. I had just given birth to my first child, a daughter.

“The blood knives took her from me and sacrificed her. They said I was young, I would have another, and that the blood of this one would save us.

“But my womb was parched. Like the land, it was dying. I had no other child. They sacrificed the only one I bore, and the sacrifice was for nothing. The land died because it was uprooted from Earth through the magic of the human dogs. This reason, and no other. We died, and we had no more children. Don’t you see? The blood knives were wrong. And in the end they died, too.”

She balanced the first child on her thin hip and grasped the wrist of the older girl as well, drawing her close. “I will take these two girls to replace the one I lost. They are mine, now. I claim them, according to the law, as is my right. I will not let the blood knives sacrifice any child of mine. Not again.”

The blood knives turned to Feather Cloak, who had set her feet on the dusty earth of the marketplace.

They said, “There must be a sacrifice.”

“Two goats from that herd,” she said, “and captives of war, strong warriors. But not these children.”

The eldest leaned close, his breath sharp with the smell of pepper, and he whispered, “You will regret this.”

2

AT the Heart-of-the-World, peace seemed to reign. In all the wide land that lay south of the great pyramid, called the Mountain of the World’s Beginning, the Lost Ones had come home and made themselves busy in a hundred ways: building, sweeping, gossiping, mating, planting, fishing, hunting, trading, digging, bathing, carving, plaiting, weaving, grinding, sewing, minding the children, and all the rest besides.

But in the council chamber of the exiles, two brothers argued, while Feather Cloak and half a bundle of trusted councillors watched.

“How can you have managed so quickly, in no more than half a year,” Zuangua was saying, “to make the priests so angry?”

“You were always first to complain of the power hoarded by the sky counters,” said Eldest Uncle with a crooked smile.

“Yes, but I did so where they couldn’t hear me! Yet the Feather Cloak must go to the marketplace, and you do not even counsel her in the proper way to observe the authority held by the priests. Now their knives are raised against you! They make no secret of it.”

“Have you come here only to scold us?” asked Eldest Uncle.

Feather Cloak sighed. The journey back from the city on the lake had wearied her mostly because she could see what was coming. She had hoped for a respite, but hard on her heels had come Zuangua carrying a mantle-load of arrogant anger. She had refused to speak to him until Eldest Uncle could be fetched from the watchtower on the border where he made his home. Now, she listened as he shook his head impatiently at his twin brother’s words.

“I came here to warn you! I speak up for you exiles as much as I am able, because of what binds us, my heart and your heart, but those of us who survived in the shadows have many complaints!”

“Complaints!” cried White Feather.

The others—Green Skirt, Skull Earrings, and seven others, all of them from those who had endured exile together—echoed her outrage.