“That in itself is enough to make the little ones of this continent of little importance!” Cavodu retorted. “We’ve enough trouble with ephemerals: the Cove Islands overrun, the harbour roads infected with brigands who capture our people and try to wrest what tech we have remaining… as if they could use it, did they have it! Savages, all of them, and we still have people held hostage we cannot retrieve!” He shook his head. “I understand, more and more, why the Domina extols the dangers of contamination. I never thought a day would come when I would curse a species’ evolution.”
“And what of Maloh?” Sivan protested. “She isn’t contamination! She’s been one of us since she first came to our borders.”
“Nor is she alone,” Jorda added. “Maloh and ones like her are nothing like those savages who took the Islands. Many seek us in curiosity and peace instead of conflict. And the ghoteh might be primitive, but the ones we’ve encountered are truly innocents, artless as any of the wild animals they hunt and live beside.”
“Encountered. Despite the Compact forbidding it. I’ve heard the argument before, my son, and from your lips. You, of all of us, know what happens when boundaries are broached.”
Jorda looked away, frowning.
“What has already happened,” Sivan pointed out, curt.
Hands behind his back, Cavodu stepped over to the open balcony, looking out over the tangle of green. “I find it more likely this native boy has been bred from his own kind.”
“It’s been centuries since his kind has possessed any usable psi abilities.”
“True.” Cavodu shrugged. “Yet rumours persist, hints that betray this much: the little ones might still hold this planet’s powers close and secret.” He turned, eyed his son and daughter. “You were born here; you did not experience Landing. And it is true that there is something about this continent in particular. A force seems to… guard it. Somehow. Perhaps it is merely the continent’s nature. Perhaps it is something more secret, and practiced.”
Sivan frowned. “Something that can pass, unaffected, through a threshold matrix?”
Silent for long moments, Cavodu let his gaze wander back to the open balcony and beyond. “That is troubling, yes.”
“Also,” Sivan said, lower, “the boy informed me his people find ‘ghoteh’ insulting.” As her father’s nostrils flared, she admitted, “I cannot pronounce the full name. But he said I might call them”—a pause, to curl the word properly upon her tongue—“kowehokla. First people.”
“They have strange names, many of them. All twists and clicks, stops and slurs of tongue,” Jorda muttered. “It seems but a breath ago. Merely twenty cycles of a world around its star. Two heartbeats, nothing more.”
“To them, twenty cycles is nigh to a fifth of their entire existence,” Cavodu inserted, stern. “If they survive to age, with the lives they lead.”
“What is he like?” Jorda’s voice was soft, almost wondering; he leaned into the wooden post, nearly whispering to Sivan. “Do you know, I called his mother Brena because of the fire in her hair and the embers from it, all over and even darker than her skin. She called them ‘freckles’.”
A slight smile quirked at Sivan’s mouth. “Well, the child of your little lost firebird has freckles as well. He stands barely here,” she cut a line across her ribs, “small and quick as a mouse. His hair is black as yours, but sleek and straight, with muted fire erupting beneath the sun’s gleaning. He has the animal eyes that gleam in the dark. And his soul is keen as starstone. But,” her voice hardened, “that soul is breaking. Jorda. It is your power that has wakened in him, not that of any throwback ephemeral. I would swear to it.”
Jorda looked down, lips tightening. Sivan turned from him and walked over to Cavodu, hands open and beseeching. “Father. When the Domina speaks of contamination, you always speak of responsibility. Our people have set this in motion through action, unmeant or not, and now this little one will suffer because of what we have left undone!”
“Is your charge of nonintervention with these gho… these khowehokla so made of star-metal and fire that we cannot answer a call to which we gave voice?” Jorda followed his sister, steps measured. “We cannot hold out our hand to aid in a circumstance we made?”
Cavodu did not turn to them, but his eyes shifted, spinning with flecks of light, echoing the tangled jungle and ever-moving waters far below.
9 – Council
He and Palatan weren’t late, after all.
Just outside the entry to the Council dens, the chieftains waited. A full assemblage, this time, of the allied tribes and moieties, with myriad Clan- and tribe-markings, their ceremonial attire comparable to Skybow’s arch through light and wet. Conversation, just as multihued, rose up into the massive, overarching branches of the ancient ones guarding the entry to the council den: a pair of grandfather wyrh trees, thick and gnarled, intertwined as the veins tracing a ropeKeeper’s forearms.
Našobok had possessed scarcely four-and-one summerings the first time he’d climbed those wyrh trees… and received two Suns’ of ostracism for his insolence. There were few severe punishments meted to ahlóssa; Našobok had in his youth encountered them all.
As they came closer, the talk dipped into murmurs, then whispers, then ceased altogether as they noted first Našobok, then Palatan walking beside as if they were equals.
Nevertheless, greetings were tendered: full honours for Alekšu, bare nods for the wyrhling. None moved forwards or offered to include them.
“I gave you warning,” Našobok murmured towards Palatan. “You should have come in from behind.”
“My favourite thing, that,” Palatan quipped, and Našobok gave a groan, retorted:
“I’ll say, considering how many offspring you’ve sired. It must be true, how you always claim any good stallion drives his herd before him.”
Another grin. “So now you’re one of my mares, wyrh-chieftain?”
“Ai,” Našobok drawled, “and that’s likely.”
Palatan laughed outright. A few eyes cut their way, just
