Fires of the Desert (Children of the Desert Book 4) (51 page)

Ibiti
rattled, a higher, tighter tone, in the silences between each
shaska
strike:
tik-tik-tiktik-tik-tik-tiktik.
A hissing, ocean-wave sound came at rhythmic intervals from a
va,
a rigid frame completely covered with tautly stretched animal skin and partially filled with sandy grit.

Torches in sturdy, tall braces defined and illuminated a circular area in the center of the room. The black smoke they gave off stung Deiq’s nose and eyes, and smelled of ceremonial herbs: sage, cedar, and cinnamon, instead of the lighter orange and floral notes he’d been expecting. It clashed with the lingering, mildly almond taste of the water he’d been drinking over the last hours.

He didn’t like this at all. A feather-joining ceremony, as he recalled, was much simpler than this. Perhaps Evkit intended only to honor him as a First Born. He tried to believe that, as he stood in the center of the circle, waiting for Alyea to arrive. This part, at least, made sense to him: the weaker of the two parties always arrived last, and petitioned to be granted the honor of marriage.

The body painting should have been part of the ceremony, though, not done before; but his entire body already bore lurid, wide blue lines, swirling in patterns he only vaguely understood. Which also disturbed him. As did Evkit’s suspiciously blank expression, from his spot just outside the circle, and Deiq’s own lack of clothing; they’d left him a glorified loincloth, for pity’s sake—and a
white
one.

The entire thing felt wrong, and sent foreboding prickles up his back and arms.
Devious;
he’d been a fool to forget that Evkit never did anything simple. Had this been planned all the way along? Had Alyea’s
deal
with the teyanain prompted her proposal? She was going to regret it immensely, if so; one didn’t manipulate a First Born casually—

“Be calm,” Lord Evkit said, his eyes glinting with black amusement for just a moment; the first words Deiq had heard in several hours. The servants who had bathed and dressed him had been resolutely silent, indicating their requests with gestures and pantomime. “Be calm, ha’ra’ha. Be still. Keep feet warm.”

Deiq glared, which only widened Evkit’s smile.

“Normal to be nervous,” Evkit said. “Very normal. Be calm, be still. All is fine.”

Boom-tiktik-boom-tik-boom-tik-boom-tiktik-shhhhhh-boom.
Deiq set his teeth and shut his eyes, pushing aside his strong desire to rip the little rotworm limb from limb on the spot.

Evkit might be right, though. Deiq’s previous marriage had been a simple matter of a ship-captain flicking seawater across their faces and a few words exchanged. Nobody had been particularly intense over the matter. It had been a convenience, a practicality. She’d been very sedate about the entire thing, and as calm over the later divorce.

Deiq suspected Alyea wouldn’t be
sedate
over any notion of divorce.

What the hells am I doing?

Be calm. Be still.

I’m out of my damn mind.

A rattling boom from all four shaska drums striking in unison caught him out of his brooding nervousness. Utter silence descended.

Even hidden behind a robe and hood of a deep crimson silk, he recognized the curve of Alyea’s hips and shoulders as she stepped into the circle and moved to stand facing him. She kept her head down, her face hidden; remained just out of his reach, and folded her hands together inside the wide sleeves. Not a sliver of flesh showed, from head to toes, just the flowing, slippery folds of fabric. He couldn’t help wondering what she had on
underneath—

Bloody
useless
loincloth. He gritted his teeth. Hearing a faint, yipping chuckle, he glanced over to glare at Evkit and lost all interest in physical matters.

Athain were moving into position around the circle.
Four
athain, taking up positions that would put them, if one sketched the lines out, between the shaska drummers. A square turned sideways to a square, and a circle within that.

He jerked a much more ferocious glare at Evkit, realizing now, with that configuration clear in his head, that the teyanain lord stood exactly at the northwestern point: the control point, the master’s spot. Evkit, by standing there, claimed the highest rank of everyone in the room—and Deiq was, implicitly, allowing it.

Alliance or not, publicly declaring subservience to Evkit hadn’t been part of Deiq’s plans.

Evkit’s smile didn’t falter in the least.

“Be calm, ha’inn,” he said. “Be still.”

“You fucking rotworm,” Deiq said thinly. “This
isn’t
a feather ceremony.”

“I never say so,” Evkit returned, utterly serene. “You mistranslate. Not my fault.”

“I—” He blinked hard, trying to think against the fury flooding his chest.
Hanaa-aerst-yin.
Mistranslate? How could he have done that?
Hanaa:
joining;
aerst:
feathers—wait.

Aerth
meant feathers or flight.
Aerst—
damnit
—aerst
was an obscure dialect word, one he hadn’t heard in a long time—trust Evkit to resurrect something from the dawn of time—

It came somewhat clear, then. Something to do with
chains.
And
yin
put a stamp of unbreakable permanence on the matter. He should have paid more attention to his niggling worry at the time. Divorce wasn’t going to be an option.

Gods,
what had happened to his brains? They’d turned as useless as the loincloth. He was thinking more like a randy human than a First Born of late.

They were going to literally
chain
him? To a
human?

“Oh, hells,” he said, despairing and disbelieving all at once. “You can’t be
serious.”

A line of some twenty teyanain filed in, silently forming a ring just beyond the positions the athain had taken. They were barefoot, dressed entirely in black, their faces hidden behind masks a deeper shade of red than Alyea’s robes. Each one had a pouch at his waist. Each one, as Deiq watched, tugged open the strings of the pouch and scooped out a handful of a familiar white powder. Then they stood utterly still, as though frozen in place.

Gods, for that volume of stibik to be in their hands—the teyanain had a hell of a stockpile hidden in their fortress. Given what it was
made
of, that raised some frightening questions in his mind, but this—like every other time he’d faced the stuff—wasn’t the time to ask them.

Do you have ha’ra’hain bones in that pouch, seer?

Four athain and Evkit stood within five strides in any direction
—not
a safe environment for brooding or wondering. Deiq shut his eyes and made himself stop thinking of anything more important than the breath rasping through his throat and nose.

“Very serious, ha’inn,” Evkit said softly. “Very, very serious, this marriage you ask for.”

Silk slithered. Something heavy scraped as it settled against the stone floor nearby. Deiq drew in a long breath, let it out, and opened his eyes.

A large, elaborately worked chest had been set down to his left. Two slender, androgynous teyanain figures stood to either side of it. Studying them, Deiq guessed they were child-castrates: an old and thoroughly barbaric custom he’d thought abandoned hundreds of years ago.

This seems to be my day to be wrong about everything,
he thought sourly. Neuters held tremendous symbolic value in ceremonies like this. Most desert Families opted for Callen of Comos, but of course the teyanain would have to be different about this, as with everything else they did.
I really shouldn’t be surprised by anything they do.

Alyea, free of the concealing robe, proved to be wearing a crimson version of his own loincloth. A disorienting array of thin blue lines looped around her slender limbs. Thicker bands wrapped around her upper arms, wrists, ankles and thighs; thinner lines meandered over her shoulders and circled her breasts. A teardrop shape circled her stomach, hip to hip, point upwards and lower curve just above the line of the loincloth: lines branched out from the teardrop at eight points.

No lines circled her throat. Something about that bothered him, but he couldn’t remember why it should matter. He tried to trace out all the connections with his gaze, in case that might give him the answer; had to shut his eyes again, dizzy.

“You want stop this, ha’inn?” Evkit asked.

Deiq’s spine went rigid. He directed a ferocious stare at the little teyanin lord.

Evkit stared back without expression. “You want stop this,” he said, nodding towards Alyea, “you just say to her. We all walk away, right now. I not force you, ha’inn. This is too serious, too dangerous to all of us.”

Deiq turned his head, every fraction of movement feeling as though it took a day, and looked at Alyea. She looked back, absolutely serene.

“I’m
not afraid,” she said, and folded her hands over her stomach.

“This isn’t fear, Alyea,” he said evenly. “Fear is when you don’t know what’s going to happen. I
know
this isn’t going to go well. We can find another ceremony. A safer one.”

Her chin lifted: at first he took it for defiance, then realized the angle was wrong. She’d exposed her throat. Her unpainted throat, bare in every way.
Kill me and get it over with.
Her dark stare remained directly on his face.

Deiq drew in a trembling breath. He glanced around at the waiting athain, the circle of guards, the darkness beyond.
I’m going to kill her. The moment they lay hands on me and cause me pain, make me feel vulnerable, I’m going to lose all sense and control, and start attacking everyone in sight. Then I’ll go down in a cloud of enough stibik to lay me out for fifty human years. Evkit knows it. I’ll be helpless in his hands.

But if I back out, I lose all teyanain respect. I lose that alliance I just secured. No force, hells. He knows I understand the touchy honor issues involved in this situation. I’m the one who asked him for the marriage. I’m the one agreed to this damn mess. It’s my own fault, like he said, that I mistranslated. I should have said no. I should have convinced Alyea to wait until we returned north. Gods, I’m an idiot. How did I let her talk me into this?

I’ll lose Alyea if I back out of this.
That was abundantly clear from the single chin-lift. She was willing to
die
here, because of whatever idiocy they’d filled her head with. What had they told her? That she’d live forever? That he’d
love
her? Idiotic. She was only a human, no matter how interesting; he didn’t
need
her company.

But—he didn’t cause her pain, and he
still
wanted to understand why. If she died or refused his company, he’d never know the answer. Despite his earlier declaration that one didn’t say
no
to a ha’ra’ha, he couldn’t actually
make
her allow him near. He couldn’t punish her into obedience, not after what she’d endured—she’d lost too much fear of pain for that to ever work with her. Nor could he stomach the thought—now—of twisting her mind into accepting him.

Either path would make him no better than Kippin.
Kill me first:
his thought, this time.

No human had ever spoken to him the way she did.

What if Alyea was right, and he
could
overcome what he’d always considered instinct? What if he had a
choice?

She wasn’t
afraid
of him. She saw his nature with clear eyes; she accepted it. Hadn’t he just been thinking of giving her some extended time, with kinder intentions than his gift to Kippin?

He drew in a long breath, another. “Are you sure you want to do this, Alyea?” he said, more hoarsely than he’d intended.

She brought her chin down and gave him an unblinking, flat stare.

He shut his eyes, just for a moment, then looked to Evkit and nodded once.

The shaska drums began again, ponderous echoes; the
itibi,
the
va.
Where the initial sound had been slow and meditative, now it held a definite pattern, a sense of slowly quickening, rolling motion.

The athain knelt and began a low, droning chant. The hair on Deiq’s arms prickled, stiff and cold. He breathed in tendrils of sage smoke and forced himself to a distant sense of calm.

The two castrate children—impossible to gauge their age: somewhere above normal puberty, at a guess—lifted the lid of the chest. Inside, among other things, lay a mass of silvery chains, links no wider around than his thickest finger.

Please, gods, if you exist after all—
but they
didn’t,
he’d watched the damn humans develop their religions, it was all fantasy and wishes. He abandoned the rest of the half-formed prayer with a sigh, wondering if Alyea were bothering. Probably not. Judging by the clarity and steadiness of her gaze, she’d locked herself into some insane human mindset that saw this entire situation as rational.

If we get out of this alive, I’m going to kill you with my own hands,
he thought, and grinned without real humor at the ironic foolishness of that.

The castrates filled two fist-sized stone cups with something colorless out of a leather bag: not water. As they brought it closer, Deiq’s nostrils flared at the sharp vapors coming from the cup. Some form of teyanain mountain lightning, with—something—he couldn’t place it.

He closed his hand around the cup, wishing they’d given him a lake of the stuff.

“This is commitment aloud,” Evkit said. “Ceremonial. Touch cups, bow, say intentions, drink all at once. The woman go first. Ha’inn, you drink if you accept her intention, then say yours; she drink if she accept yours.”

That, at least, was tradition as Deiq understood it.

Stone clicked against stone, Alyea’s hand steady. They bowed, matching their movements exactly; Deiq smiled a little as he straightened, amused over that. Had he been copying her movement, or she him? It didn’t really matter—and yet it did, to a distant, already aggrieved part of his mind.

Alyea said, very steadily, “I intend to give as I am given, support as I am supported, serve as I am served, by your side in all ways, through the rest of my life, however long that may be.”