'You haven't changed,' Huei said. 'Not really.'
I shrugged. 'I've come back to Tenochtitlan. But things are the same. I've been doing nothing much. The usual for a priest.'
Huei's eyes narrowed. 'You cheapen yourself,' she said.
I shook my head. 'You want success? Ask Neutemoc.' Ask Mihmatini; ask Father and Mother. Ask them who had taken them in.
'Not any more.' Her voice, loaded with terrible sarcasm, erased whatever I'd been about to say: we stared at each other in silence, until the noise of a shrieking child broke the awkwardness.
'Uncle Acatl!' A young child, whom I didn't recognise. Mazatl, I realised with a shock. She'd been much younger last time I'd been in this house, barely starting to piece sentences together.
Her brother Necalli was more dignified. I tried to remember how old he was. Eight, nine years old? His head was shaved; he wore the single lock of hair that marked the unproved warrior.
And behind him, my sister Mihmatini, grown from a gangly girl into a beautiful woman, blossoming in the calmecac like a marigold flower. She walked slowly, gracefully, her shirt swishing, revealing anew with every step the glint of jade bracelets at her ankles. Her hair, tied in a long queue at her back, shone like polished obsidian. My heart tightened in my chest.
'The lost brother comes home?' she asked, with a smile.
I shrugged. 'Sometimes,' I said. It had been too long since I had last seen her: my fault, for not finding the courage to walk back into that house in spite of Neutemoc's presence.
Mihmatini made a mock punching gesture. 'Stop being so serious.'
'It comes with the position, I'm afraid,' I said.
She grimaced. 'Sure, and I'm the Consort of the Emperor.'
She sat down, with both children crowding near her. The toddler Mazatl, in particular, kept trying to climb into her lap, and Mihmatini gently pushed her off every time.
Slaves brought refreshments, and a light lunch: maize cakes, and frogs with chilli peppers, spread on the reed mat so we could each help ourselves from the ceramic dishes. I was famished. In fact, I realised with a shock, my last meal dated back to the previous evening. I'd been walking around the Sacred Precinct and the city on a completely empty stomach.
Mihmatini watched me gulp down a frog, and barely hid a smile. 'I think someone's forgotten to eat today.'
'Men,' Huei snorted. 'All the same.'
I hurriedly swallowed, so I could answer. 'Now you're being unfair.'
Mihmatini raised her cup of chocolate to her lips, and inhaled the pungent aroma of vanilla and cacao. 'Maybe, maybe,' she said. She looked at Huei, obviously trying very hard to stifle a laugh.
I'd visited Mihmatini in her calmecac, but had never seen her so relaxed, so radiant. For all that she'd spent the last ten years away, she seemed to be utterly at ease with Huei and the children, so much more than me.
The rest of the meal was much the same: spent on pleasantries, listening to the two women mocking me, and carefully avoiding the shadow Neutemoc's arrest cast over both their futures. Afterwards, I walked with Mihmatini in the courtyard garden, among the marigold and tomato flowers. 'You look well,' I said.
She grimaced. 'I can't say the same about you.' She poked me between the ribs. Surprised, I leapt out of her path, and she laughed again. 'You're a priest for the Dead, not Mictlantecuhtli. The salient bones and skeleton look aren't compulsory, Acatl.'
'Ha-ha,' I said, trying to be serious. But in her company, it was hard to stay so, hard to remember all that waited for me outside. 'I thought you were going to stay in that temple.'
Mihmatini's face turned grave. 'I thought so, too,' she said. 'The priestesses wanted me to stay. They said they had never had a student so gifted with magic. But…'
She shrugged. 'In the end, it wasn't where my heart was. I wanted to go home, find a husband of my own, raise my own children.'
All things that were forbidden to priests. 'I see,' I said. 'And since then…' I started, wondering why she was still in Neutemoc's house, and not married.
She shrugged. 'It will come, in time. I'm not desired.'
'Surely, as Neutemoc's protegee–'
She blushed. 'He's been busy lately.'
My stomach contracted. What had Neutemoc done, again? 'Too busy to look for a husband?'
'I'm young,' Mihmatini said. 'I can wait. It's going to take time for this to be sorted out, I expect.'
'I hope not.' Both for Neutemoc's sake, and for her own. She wasn't young. Eighteen was old, in a land where the first marriages were contracted when the girls were sixteen. She wasn't plain, or poor. But a husband would want a girl able to bear children; and the more Neutemoc and Huei waited, the more prospective alliances disappeared.
Mihmatini must have caught some of my thoughts. 'He means well.'
How could I answer that? 'He's been busy, as you said.' Busy quarrelling with Huei; busy giving in to the charms of a priestess. Great occupations, worthy of a warrior.
A thought occurred to me. 'You sleep here.'
Mihmatini pointed to a small opening, to the eastern side of the courtyard, its entrance-curtain adorned with leaping deer. 'In that room. Why?'
'Do you know where Huei was yesterday night?'
She puffed her cheeks, thoughtfully, a habit neither Mother nor the calmecac had broken out of her. 'Yesterday night? Pretty well. We played patolli all night. And a good thing we used tokens instead of cacao beans, or I'd be out of money.'
I made a sweeping gesture, taking in her red-dyed cotton shirt, her wide skirt with its finely embroidered hem, and the jade necklace she wore around her neck. 'Aren't you already out of money, owning all of that?'
