what had frightened everyone in the council. But if I asked directly, I suspected she'd clamp up like a shell. 'The palace was a busy place after Axayacatltzin's death.'
Her lips tightened, her eyes moved away from me. I thought of the tar. 'Before his death, too, wasn't it?'
'I was a fool. I came in too late. Axayacatl had told me–' She closed her eyes. 'He told me that I need not fear the future. And I believed him.' Her hands came up, as if to push me away. 'Fool.'
He had told her… I thought about it for a while. Unbidden, a memory was rising to the surface of my mind, a deep voice on cold shores, and a shadow that became more and more indistinct the further it walked into Mictlan, and its words to me, a mystery that had remained unsolved.
'He did something,' I said, slowly, carefully, building my sentence in the same way a child will pile wooden blocks in the mud. 'To make sure his choice was respected. He and Tizoc-tzin–'
Oh gods. Was I truly sitting here, accusing the former Revered Speaker of colluding with Tizoc-tzin, of arranging the summoning of star-demons to sway the council his way? I couldn't possibly…
'You're wrong,' Xahuia said, in the dreadful silence that froze my heart. 'Axayacatl was many things, but he was a warrior first and foremost, a servant of Huitzilpochtli. He would have wanted to do the right thing, and preserve the Fifth World.'
'Then why–' I hesitated, but now I was standing on the brink, and all my careful dancing had done nothing but bring me closer to the bitterness holed up inside, the raw memories of the past few days. 'Why is the council so frightened? Why did so many of them disappear, or buy the strongest protections they could afford? Why…?' What had Quenami and Tizoc-tzin tried to kill me for?
My voice trailed into silence; embarrassed, I hovered on the edge of an apology, but Xahuia went on as if nothing had happened. 'You forget. I was one wife among many, and I very much doubt he would have confided in women, in any case.' She didn't sound sad, or angry, just stating a fact.
'So you don't know anything?' This was starting to sound more and more like a waste of time, whatever Nezahual-tzin might have thought.
She shook her head. 'I didn't say that, merely that Axayacatl's plans were beyond me.' She shifted slightly, moving away from the glare of the sun and the pinpoints of starlight in the sky. 'But I wasn't completely inactive.'
I couldn't see what she was hinting at. 'You had spies in the palace,' I said slowly, as much for effect as to compose myself. 'You saw–' I stopped, then. What could she have seen?
When I didn't speak for a while, she went on, with a tight smile, 'I can't give you much, Acatl-tzin. Not much at all that you won't already know. A councilman went missing…' She stopped, raised a hand to her throat as if to remove something lodged in her windpipe.
Pezotic. 'And you don't know why,' I said, carefully. If that wasn't what she wanted to tell me… 'But you know what happened to him.'
'I know where he went. Pezotic,' Xahuia said, with a quick, fierce shake of her head. 'For all I know, it isn't where he is now. But still–'
'Go on.'
'I had him followed because he was a coward, and a weakling. A man who could be bought.' Her lips curled up, halfway between a sneer and a smile. 'He bought passage on a boat headed east.'
'East?' I asked. 'Into Texcoco?' It would have been convenient, but I was reasonably sure luck was not with us. From the start, it had never been.
'No,' Xahuia said. 'To Teotihuacan.'
Of course. Teotihuacan, the Birthplace of the Gods, a sacred place where the gods had made the sacrifice that had led to the birth of the Fifth Sun, a place of pilgrimage and of worship, a place of safety, the bastion of Their strength.
'He might have moved,' I said.
'He might,' Xahuia agreed. 'But it's all I can give you, Acatl-tzin. Take it and use however you wish.'
'Thank you,' I said. I rose and bowed to her, in the same fashion as if she still had been imperial consort. Her gaze rested, for a moment, on me; that of a weak, broken woman, grounded by her brother's magic and utterly at his mercy. 'I'm sorry,' I said.
'Don't be.' She did that peculiar half-smile, with no hint of joy in it. 'It's a game, Acatl-tzin. That's what you never understood. You have to be ready to gamble it all in order to win. And sometimes, you lose.'
'I can't play that kind of game,' I said.
'I know. But you'll find that all Revered Speakers can.'
Xahuia's words still echoed in my mind as I walked back to Nezahual-tzin, who stood waiting next to a scowling Teomitl with a half-amused smile on his face.
'So, did you find out anything?'
'What you expected me to find. It's all a game to you, isn't it?' I asked.
He watched me, as dispassionately as one might watch a mouse or an ant. 'Perhaps. Perhaps nothing is real, after all… just the gods, putting us on the board with the other
'You're the one putting us on the board,' I said.
'Why so much anger?'
'Because we've wasted time,' I said. 'Because we're here in Texcoco, indulging your taste for mysteries while Tizoc-tzin is getting elected.'
Nezahual-tzin's shoulders moved in a gesture I couldn't read. 'There was nothing you could have done about it, Acatl.'
I knew. And the Southern Hummingbird strike me, it hurt, as much as obsidian shards, as much as salt in wounds. He'd disgraced me, sent Teomitl fleeing away from his own city, insulted my sister, who, unlike us all, had no means of defending herself. I hoped she was safe, that Tizoc-tzin hadn't thought to follow her out of the city. 'Still,' I said, as we walked away from the basin, 'still, there was another way.'
