Tuk shakes his head. “Just a headache. Sorry, were you saying something?”
“I was telling you about the visions I saw in the lake. There were stars and—Tuk? Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I think I’m getting a migraine,” he says.
“Ugh, me too.” Ilapara tilts her head back, pressing the flats of her palms against her eyes. “By Ama, I can feel it throbbing behind my eyeballs.”
“Must be an echo of what I’m feeling,” Tuk complains. “Like someone’s raping my skull or something.”
“Not a pretty image, Tuk,” Ilapara says.
“Not a pretty headache, Ilapara.”
A familiar uncanny feeling sinks into Salo’s bones. He stops tending to Tuk’s injury and watches the others closely. “Do you recall what we were just talking about?”
They blink, both looking confused. “That’s weird,” Tuk says. “I must really be tired.”
“What were we talking about, actually?” Ilapara asks.
“I don’t remember either,” Salo says, returning to the injury on Tuk’s arm.
When he’s done with the salve, Ilapara offers to wrap the dressing. He agrees and steps aside, and though he keeps it off his face, his thoughts are now troubled.
By now both suns have cleared the horizon. A new day in the same old world, and yet it has never felt more alien to Salo.
What does it mean that he can know things others can’t? What is it that makes them forget? What did those visions mean?
“A question, Salo.” Alinata has snuck up behind him.
He turns around, instantly held captive by her intense hazel gaze. “Go on,” he says.
Alinata is the queen’s apprentice, the envy of every Asazi her age, and she oozes it. Salo can feel just how deeply her bones draw from the queen—so deeply she’s probably as powerful as any mystic of middling ability. She also has one of those faces no formula for beauty can conceive, only a happy accident of birth.
A weapon, that face of hers, designed to ensnare and disarm.
“I’ve seen the skill nexus you hid in your workshop,” she says. “By all accounts it should have taken your mind the first time you used it. Why didn’t it?”
An ambush. She wants to see how I react. “And how is it you were in my workshop, Si Alinata?”
“Please, Alinata will suffice. And I searched your workshop soon after your awakening. Queen’s orders, of course.”
“Of course.” Salo considers his options and decides that being honest won’t hurt. “I suppose the secret to the skill nexus is wanting what it offers so badly you’re willing to die for it. Bit of a paradox in that way; you’re less likely to die if you’re willing to die.”
“And therein lies my second question: Why were you so determined? I can’t imagine it was the thirst for power. You don’t seem the type.”
This is probably the question Alinata wanted to ask all along, but Asazi are never straightforward. “Not power, just the answer to a question,” Salo says.
“And what was that question?”
Salo’s lips twitch at one corner. “That’s a bit prying, don’t you think?”
“At least tell me if you’ve found the answer.”
Salo began his journey to understand why his ama cared more about her damned Axiom than she did about him. He thought he’d found the answer. But now . . .
“I thought I had,” he says. “It turns out I’m still looking. If I find it, I’ll be sure to let you know.”
She studies him, calculation sparkling behind her hazel eyes, and then she smiles. “You do that.”
Later that day, a bridle path through the jungles leads them away from the northernmost Tuanu village and into the Bonobo province of the KiYonte Kingdom. Ilapara rides ahead while Alinata follows from above, and they race northeast toward the World’s Vein, the roadway that will lead them safely across three provinces and into the city of Yonte Saire.
The jungles are so dense they feel to Salo like a vast green cocoon. At one point he and the others ride through a stretch where a thin haze drifts about the forest floor, shimmering in the streaks of sunlight lancing through the high canopy. Salo wonders at how it swirls and parts before Mukuni’s paws like water before the prow of a ship, spreading away like a living thing.
A patrol of spear-wielding legionnaires in orange tunics stops them as they approach a bamboo village. Its buildings are nestled within the jungles so seamlessly Salo could almost believe they were grown rather than built. As for the legionnaires, they all bear the exact same tattoos on their necks—conspicuous lines and motifs of the jungle bonobo—markings Salo might have considered pretty were he not aware that they were born of a curse.
He is apprehensive at first, but the legionnaires leave him alone as soon as he flexes his KiYonte and explains that he is a pilgrim walking the Bloodway, showing them his queen’s medallion as proof. The mystic Seal emblazoned on it seems to be all the proof they need.
So he rides onward with his companions until late afternoon, when the jungles come alive with the howl of chatting apes, the cackle of hunting birds, and the guttural rumble of something distant and probably monstrous. The sounds are a visceral anthem in homage to all that is bestial and untouched by humanity, and Salo finds it mildly unsettling. He is no stranger to the wild savannas, but a uniquely primal essence inhabits these jungles.
They set up camp in a semiclearing just off the path, which, judging by the charred signs of a campfire and the conveniently arranged logs around it, has seen much use by travelers. While the others tend to the animals, Salo wanders deeper into the jungles with his bow, his leather quiver slung over his back.
The lighting is poorer in these jungles, and there’s a whole lot more cover than he’s used to, but he knows to tread softly on his feet and to keep his eyes open. Easy to get lost in the wilds, and sometimes the hunter can become the hunted.
He soon spots a pair of game birds with colorful plumage foraging for grubs and insects in the thick layer of dead foliage on the forest floor. They are too conspicuous to be bush fowl, but he figures they’ll still make a tasty meal. He spied an okapi among the trees earlier, but he let it go; it was a bit more than they could eat in one sitting, and the city isn’t far away.
He goes down on one knee, hiding behind a mossy tree trunk. The raucous call of a parakeet can be heard coming from somewhere deeper in the jungles. Above him a boa constrictor coiled on a branch stirs. He ignores it.
An iron-tipped arrow is already nocked on his bow. He draws the bowstring to his ear and holds his breath. It’s a secret he’s never told anyone, but training his mind in ciphers drastically improved his archery. With the appropriate muscle memory, hitting a target became the simple matter of executing a calculation.
He’s about to let loose when Alinata steps in front of Mukuni and claps her hands to catch Salo’s attention, like she knows Salo can hear and see through the cat’s eyes and ears if he wants to.
“Salo, come back to camp,” she says to the cat. “Now. It’s urgent.”
He must betray his position to the game birds, because they squawk and flutter off in alarm. He utters a curse, slightly annoyed by Alinata for ruining what would have been an easy kill.