Child of Flame (Page 45)

Liath displayed her empty palms. “I hold no secrets here. I came to learn what I am.”

“What are you?”

“In my own land, I am known as the child of mathematici, sorcerers who bind and weave the light of the stars—”

Nothing, not even their reaction to her name, could have prepared her for the uproar that greeted these words.

“Daughter of the ones who exiled us!”

“Heir to the shana-ret’zeri, cursed may they be.”

“Kill her!”

“Silence!” roared Feather Cloak. For an instant she seemed actually to expand in size and to take on the features of the eagle, so that as her person swelled and her features sharpened it seemed she might transform into a creature that would fill the entire chamber and swallow those who disobeyed it.

Silence swept down like wings. Liath blinked. In the next instant Feather Cloak appeared to be nothing more than a very pregnant woman with lines of exhaustion around her mouth and the habit of command in her voice. “What do you say to these accusations?”

“In truth, honored one, the story of your people is lost to me. None among humankind knows it now. Our legends say that your kind lived on Earth once, but that you left because of your war with humankind. It is said that you left Earth in order to hoard your power, so that when you returned, you could defeat humankind and make them your slaves.” Hastily she gestured to show that she had not yet done, because Cat Mask, for one, seemed eager to throw speech back at her, like a spear. “These are the stories and legends told by my people. I do not know how much truth there is in them. It happened so long ago that all memory of the truth is lost to us.”

“But not to us!” cried Cat Mask. “We recall it bitterly enough!”

“Let her speak,” shouted Lizard Mask. Like a lizard, he threw his breath into his chest, all puffed out. Little white scars, like lines marking the phases of the moon, scored his dark skin. All at once, she realized why the men seemed so like Sanglant: not one of them had a beard.

“How can none remember it?” asked elderly Green Skirt. “My mother and aunts suffered through the cataclysm, and I can recite their stories of that time as easily as I breathe. How can it be forgotten? We were at war with the shana-ret’zeri and their human allies for generations. It cannot have passed so easily even from human memory.”

Others murmured in agreement.

“No,” said Liath. “If the measure of days and years moves differently here than there, then more time has passed for those living on Earth than for you, here in this country. According to the calculations I know, your tribe has not walked on Earth for almost two thousand and seven hundred years. That is over a hundred generations, as measured by human lives. All we have left from, those days are ancient memories shrouded in tales that make little sense to us now, as well as the remains of what the ancient people built. Yet fallen buildings cannot speak.”

“One hundred generations!” Even the hostile White Feather seemed struck by this fact. “My mother’s mother died in the Sundering. I had the story from my aunt and my mother’s brother. No more time than this has passed, here.”

“Then I pray you, tell me the story,” said Liath. “Tell me what happened in those days and how you came to this country.”

“Beware how much you tell her,” murmured Skull Earrings.

“Aren’t you the one who advises accommodation with the human tribes?” retorted Cat Mask gleefully.

“Accommodation, but not surrender! That is why some among us agreed when the Impatient One told us her plan. If we tell this one too much, and it can be used against us—”

“I will speak.” Feather Cloak’s words, as always, silenced the others. “How can the truth harm us? I can only recount the deeds of that time as they were given to me by my aunt, who wore the serpent skirt and danced below the altar of She-Who-Will-Not-Have-A-Husband. Alone among us all, Eldest Uncle remains. He witnessed. Perhaps he will again tell us the tale.”

He was hesitant. “It is nothing I desire to remember.” He looked at Liath as he said the words. “Yet worse will come if we do not remember.”

The council members, even those who had spoken in the most hostile way before, moved back respectfully as he descended to the council ground. Behind the standard, raised on a squat column of stone and concealed up to this moment from Liath’s sight by the arrangement of the standing councillors, lay a carving rather like that of the eagle on which Feather Cloak sat. This one resembled a huge cat, lionlike but scarred with lines that seemed to indicate dapplings or lesions upon its stone coat. Its head, tail, and paws thrust up from the stone as if it had been caught in the instant before it fully emerged out of the rock. Eldest Uncle clambered up on this high seat and settled himself cross-legged on the curving back.