“Good-bye,” Bithesi said. “It’s a thing friends say to each other when they part. A grace note, in the midst of our small business, our comings and goings, our mortal squalor. A simple thing to say. You’re not mortal, but you might try to remember.”
Lakini had no answer.
Bithesi glanced up at Kestrel, and her gaze lingered. The wounds on her face were healing, and the scars were forming pink on her hands, but her cheekbones stood out and her eyes glittered as if fevered.
“Would you like to help?” Bithesi spoke to Kestrel as she would to a small child.
Kestrel reached out a trembling hand to the dog. She paused, looking searchingly at Bithesi, her hand suspended in the air.
She touched the dog’s side. Torq jerked in response, then quieted as she gently stroked his short, coarse fur.
Bithesi waited until the dog’s breathing grew regular before raising the threaded needle with her right hand and pinching together the sides of the cut with her left. She muttered something that sounded like a short prayer or invocation before she bent to her work, stitching the animal’s skin back together with tiny knots, delicate as the embroidery on a lady’s court dress.
Torq’s eyes jerked open and he whimpered, but Kestrel placed a firm hand on his neck and kept stroking his side, and he didn’t stir.
“Good-bye, Bithesi, my friend,” said Lakini.
She would not say
Lakini waited a long time at the barn entrance, feeling the cold air on her back and the barn warmth on her face. From one of the corners where the wall met the ceiling, a nesting dove cooed. Bithesi focused on the dog’s wound as if nothing else existed. Kestrel glanced up at the deva once, a serious look that recalled the grave manner of her daughter.
“Good-bye, Lakini,” said Bithesi, not looking at her.
Kestrel turned toward her, still keeping her hands on the dog’s side. She gave a small, tight smile.
Lakini smiled back and slipped away.
Standing in the mud outside the barn, Lakini became aware that she held within herself the small hope of staying at Shadrun, of finding for herself the idea that the mortal races called “home.” But with the realization came the knowledge that hope lay stillborn inside her. However many years she had spent at the sanctuary, even if she stayed here a century more, she would always be apart. The place would be familiar, even comfortable to her. But she would never cherish it in her heart, or long for it when she was away, as a crofter did his hovel or Bithesi her stables.
Home … Lusk had tried to find it with his adopted human family, until the chance violence that always threatened to engulf the mortal destroyed them and made him the twisted creature he had become-and was doomed to be forever. Kestrel had found it, and it had been torn from her. Bithesi wove her home around the animals she tended, finding a warm place inside the meditative task of caring for them.
The moments she had spent in Bithesi’s company were her home, Lakini realized, and the many years she had spent with Lusk. But Lusk’s madness had taken one home away from her, and Bithesi’s mortality the other.
Something stung her eye, and she halted, blinking. The sting became a mild burn, and the burn gathered into liquid within her eye, and as she shut it briefly, a drop of moisture fell to the dust at her feet. The burning was gone.
Lakini touched her cheek in wonder, feeling one more drop there. A tear. She had wept. Was that one of the consequences of denying her reincarnation? Would she become more mortal?
Was it a punishment or a reward?
FOOTHILLS OF THE CURNA MOUNTAINS, BEASTLANDS
1600 DR-THE YEAR OF UNSEEN ENEMIES
The heat of the day still lingered, cloying and oppressive in the still air. In the tall, dry grass, a few insects chirped wearily. Now and then a birdsong sounded from the low trees that clustered in deep, stream-cut ravines that threaded the foothills.
A figure trotted through the dry grasses, casting a long, thin shadow diagonally over the ground. It was a human boy. He had the scrawny frame of a child, but his face, gaunt and anxious, hinted that he was older. He was clothed in worn leggings and a thin shirt, and his feet were bare and calloused.
The Boy-he had had a name once, but his masters had called him nothing but “Boy” for so long, he’d forgotten it-cast a worried glace at the sun, reddening low over the foothills of the Curna Mountains. If he didn’t find the runaway swarm and capture the queen by nightfall, one of Lord Mahijith’s hives would be lost.
The Boy didn’t think that Skreetchu, the raven-headed kenku overseer that supervised the lord’s outlying estates, would show mercy to a slave who lost a valuable swarm.
For one thing, busy with the extra task of changing out soiled straw in the stables, he’d been late going out to the hives. Despite the heat and his weary shoulders, he enjoyed the walk to the outer fields. A rare, refreshing breeze tumbled past him, cooling his sweat-soaked shirt, and the wheat was ripening in great golden knots on top of swaying stems. The Boy strode down the worn path between one furrowed field and the next, spreading his fingers at his sides to touch the stiff stalks on either side. Past the thick rows of grain the world fell away in gentle curves, humping and mounding in the distance until the foothills reared up and became the Curna Mountains, with their sharp, white-capped precipices and knifelike, purple-shadowed sides. He paused and breathed deeply, fancying he could feel the mountain’s icy breath in the hot air.
Sometimes he pretended he came from a cool climate and would someday return to a place where a handful of chilled snow could cool a hot face after the labor of the day. Perhaps he did. He had been sold into Lord Mahijith’s household as a child, and he remembered little before that. He didn’t know if his dim impressions of a protective father and a gentle mother were real or simply products of his imagination.
The haystack-shaped hives were arranged in two even rows. His first task was to check the perimeter to see if the wards that protected the combs and their sweet treasure still held. Only Skreetchu knew the cantrips that would keep bears and other hungry animals from scenting and tearing apart the hives, but the charmed crystal in his pocket would tell him if they needed renewal.
The Boy frowned. In the distance, a black cloud hovered over one of the farthermost hives, a cloud that flexed and compacted into a black ball and then spread out until he could see its component parts. Bees-thousands of bees, hovering over their hive, when they should be returning from their labor and settling in for the night.
Giving the quieter haystacks a wide berth, he trotted toward the cloud, keeping his breathing in check. That was one of the first things he’d learned after Skreetchu assigned him to care for the hives-it never was wise to panic around bees.
The contented buzzing of sated bees, always an undertone in this section of the fields, changed as he approached the golden speckled mass. The sound was higher, not threatening, but excited, and the hive in question was not, as he feared, smashed by some marauding animal whose craving for honey had overcome its fear of being stung. The woven straw dome on its stand was whole, and bees still crawled in and out. Some perched in rows near the entrance, cooling it with their furiously vibrating wings.
The cloud of bees over his head swooped left and right, looking for all the world like a single entity rather than a disparate swarm.
Realization struck him like a sharp blow to the belly. The hive was swarming, half its inhabitants splitting off from its mother and old queen, and this was the new queen’s mating flight.
The Boy had not expected such a thing-bees swarmed in spring and early summer. If the queen led her
