“Are the kraal’s harvesters in good shape?” she says after inserting the last peg and wiping her hands with a cloth. “The New Year’s harvest starts soon. We should address any problems quickly so we get started on time.”
A wave of discontentment rises up from Salo’s chest. “You’ll have to ask the queen to send an Asazi to help you out with that. I won’t be working machines for much longer.”
Nimara sighs and returns to tinkering with the little levers on her machine. “She can’t force anyone to come, Salo. You know that.”
“I’m a man, all right? The son of a chief.” He waves a hand around the workshop. “I’m not supposed to know how any of this works. I’m not supposed to want to know. I should be a ranger, punching logs with my fists and subduing wild stallions.”
“You know what I’m wondering right now?” Nimara says, folding her arms and giving him a hard gaze through a window of information. “I’m wondering when you’re going to quit feeling sorry for yourself and finally do what we both know you should have done a long time ago.”
Salo flinches. He expected balm for his wounds, not salt. “I’m training with the rangers, aren’t I? I’ll face the uroko again and earn my steel.”
“Not at all what I meant.”
“Then what do you want from me?”
Nimara places her palms on the table. “I’m talking about that thing you’re letting rot inside your talisman.”
“Shhh!” Salo gets up and closes in, stopping on the other side of Nimara’s worktable. “You don’t know what you’re talking about! If anyone finds out . . . by Ama, you can’t tell anyone, Nimara. Promise me you won’t.”
She stares at him, a challenge in her eyes. “This is exactly what I mean. You have the means to do something—you’ve had the means for a while now—but you keep choosing to do nothing.”
“I can’t do anything!”
“Yes, you can!”
The liquid in the sphere suddenly turns blue. With a defeated sigh Nimara grabs a rack of empty vials, places them beneath the sphere, turns a valve, and begins to fill one of the vials with the liquid. “You know the problem with you, Salo? It’s never that you can’t. Oh, no. It’s that you won’t even try.” She plops a cork stopper onto the vial and proffers it to him. “This’ll help you recover from all the running around you’re doing.”
Salo hesitates, then reaches forward to accept the vial, but she retracts her hand at the last moment. “Have you thought about what difference you could make if you were just brave enough to come out with your secret? What difference you could have made when the witch attacked if you never hid it in the first place? We’re defenseless without a mystic, Salo.”
“You will be our mystic!” he says.
“I’m eighteen,” she says. “Statistically, I still have several more years before I achieve an Axiom good enough to live with for the rest of my life. What do we do until then?”
“I can’t, all right? I just can’t.”
She leans forward, her gaze unwavering. “Salo, that witch could return at any time, and she’d still find us defenseless. But we don’t have to be! Stop caring about what people think for one second, and you’ll know I’m right.”
Salo groans, feeling exposed, like he’s being attacked. “The queen would never allow it,” he says weakly. “It’s sacrilege. She’d sooner have me exiled.”
“You don’t actually know that, do you?”
“Nimara . . .” He looks down at the floor.
“Your fear is depriving this clan of something it desperately needs. Plain and simple.” She finally hands him the vial and starts filling another one. “I have fifteen patients to take care of, and these tonics aren’t going to make themselves, so.”
Taking that as his cue to leave, he thanks her for the tonic and flees the bonehouse. But her words stay with him in his waking hours like painful scalds on his skin and come out in his nightmares through Monti’s lifeless lips, accusing him, asking if he knows.
Do you, Bra Salo? Do you know what difference you could have made that day if only you weren’t such a coward?
The queen comes to address the clanspeople on the first Onesday after the attack.
The Ajaha welcome her with their lively stick dance, kicking up dust to the powerful beat of barrel-size drums, but the mood is far from festive as the woman rises from a wicker chair to deliver her message.
Her presence seems to thicken the air. Backs are stiffer than usual, brows are creased, and not a single wailing baby can be heard anywhere. In all Salo’s years attending clan meetings, he has never once witnessed such a thing.
But this is hardly surprising, considering the vision standing before them.
Salo reckons that if the malaika of dusk came down from the heavens, if she traded the stars and nebulae draping her body for glass beads, copper bangles, and cascading bronze skirts, if she set aside her corona of twilight for a towering crown of copper feathers—if she did these things and her splendor became flesh and she walked the earth as mortals do, she would probably look something like Queen Irediti of the Yerezi Plains.
The queen is a six-ringed mystic—the most powerful sorcerer in the Plains—and cuts a tremendous figure of sharp, imperious beauty so worthy of her station you would never mistake her for anything other than what she is. Her bright umber eyes are oppressive pools of knowledge you would do well to avoid. The copper crown adorning her head doesn’t just glint in the encroaching dusk like mundane metal; it sparkles, it coruscates, it scintillates, like something forged in the heart of a star.
Is it any wonder, then, that the clanspeople, who are unaccustomed to such potent blends of beauty and power, should quail when confronted with one such as she?
The suns have just set, while the moon is rising full in the east, partly covered by a blanket of golden clouds. Most people have seated themselves on their mats or stools, though many of the unmarried young men litter the edges of the gathering as they always do. Salo has chosen to stand at the very back of the gathering with a few cowherds, not far from the clan mystic’s vacant hut.
The Ajaha are in full regalia today, forming thickets of burnished red steel and glimmering spearpoints all around the compound, each with his best posture since their queen and mystic is in the kraal. VaSiningwe and the ten elders of his council sit on the timbered porch of the council house behind the queen, facing the gathered clanspeople with grim expressions. AmaSibere is among them, too, with a clearly repressed smile, and that is enough to confirm Salo’s worst fears about what’s about to happen, because nothing that can make a Sibere look that smug can ever be good for a Siningwe.
“When our Foremothers settled the Yerezi Plains centuries ago,” the queen says, in a powerful voice that carries across the compound, “they understood one thing many of our sister tribes did not. They understood that mystics are not here to live as demigods but to serve the people on Ama Vaziishe’s behalf. We are here to be the vessels of her benevolence, the conduits through which she blesses her children so they may live long and prosperous lives.
“Why else would she have blessed us with knowledge of red steel and an ancestral talent so potent it has made Yerezi mystics the envy of the Redlands? While mystics everywhere else enslave and terrorize their people, we bless and uplift ours. While they extract worship from unwilling lips, we inspire joyous songs of praise.