I felt like curling into a ball.
Somewhere between the shock of Talys's sudden arrival, the realization that my men could get killed tomorrow, the excitement of seeing Miyani again, and the shame of having let everyone down, I just wanted the world to stop turning.
Doesn't work like that.
How would you feel? You've been deployed to an active war zone in the middle of a jungle filled with plants that will eat you, giant alligators, very, very, very big snakes, and suddenly this girl you grew up with back home shows up. From hundreds of miles away through high, icy mountains and squadrons of mosquitoes. No warning, no explanation, boom. There she is.
What do you mean how would I feel? I'm not Sarina; I'm a voice inside your head. I'm really just proof you're crazy.
Ahmi crossed her arms and shook her head at me while Lacius carried their two boys downstairs.
Bilal slapped my arm. "Good speaking up, friend! The Legend of the Jungle-Tested really came through for us, didn't he?" He shook his head, turned, and left. "I'll see you in the morning."
Dax furrowed his brow, looked away, and left with the others.
A Na'uhui woman sneered at me. "Why you no speak? I come because this!"
I shook my head. "kupade."
She sucked her teeth and walked away.
Caleb Jungle-Tested, they'd said. Jungle accepted him, he speaks. Except he didn't. And because I sat quietly, obsessing over Talys's sudden arrival, all of my men could get killed tomorrow. We weren't ready.
I was distracted.
That's not an excuse.
Miyani brought her picnic basket. God, she was cute. I loved her round face, the way her smile reached all the way across and her eyes scrunched up with her cheeks when she looked at me. And those legs. The curve of her thighs gave way to that lush arse with nothing but a white silk flap draped over…
Ugh. Spare me.
While she and Talys spread out a red-and-white checkered picnic blanket and opened the basket, Blue and I gathered up some bag chairs left behind by the people we fought to protect. He snatched up an extra, piled it on top of the others, gave out a low squawk and tilted his face, fixing a blue-yellow eye with a black vertical slit on me.
He dropped another onto the pile and croak-squawked at me again.
"That's a terrible idea!" I said. Beside us, Talys and Miyani pulled ceramic containers from the basket. Elsewhere, two other families also brought dinner, others sat around talking, but most everyone else had left. "Let's do it!"
I grabbed two more and threw them on top of the others, and between the two of us we piled up twenty bag chairs like a giant hill. I held out my hand and bowed. "After you."
Blue jumped into the air, curled his neck to barely miss the lantern string, twisted his body around, and landed his back in the middle of it. I followed, stretching my arms out and falling face-first like a rigid board onto the pile.
I had to just lay there for a while, basking in the sensation of the mountain of cushions with tremors of Blue wiggling his body back and forth beneath me. My face was in a crack between two of them, so I had room to breathe.
What did you think about?
What if I lost Renou? What if I'd pulled him from that trap, listened to his impassioned speech at the Lake of Doom—
He's the only reason you guys had any respect over there, and you know it.
His favorite library exhibit was the classroom down on the first floor behind the children's books. They'd taken a threader apart and had demonstrations the children could play with to see how the spring loads the flywheel or some gear mechanism. There was a box of gears and axles in one corner that several children were building things with, and Renou was talking two older kids through how to calculate gear ratios. The look on Janaya's face was pure adoration.
"Ahem." Miyani stood beside our mountain with her arms crossed and her lips pursed. She scolded us in her high-pitched voice. "Chairs not cheap! You break? I look."
Beneath where Blue had corkscrewed around, one of the bag chairs had a tear a few inches long, and small, white beads spilled out onto the floor.
"That one was like that," I pointed. "We found it like that."
Blue clicked once and lifted his head with a chirp. Talys's dark, curly hair shook with the rest of her in laughter, and Miyani scowled at me, scowled at Blue, raised her finger, and fought off a giggle. "You two! I watch! Come, we eat."
What if Ajak was killed tomorrow? How would that be a fair ending for him? Branded and sold. What does that do to you? What does that even do to your mind? I didn't know anything about the man, but he picked up the native short bows faster than us Herali who'd grown up shooting. He deserved a better shot than this.
Miyani had packed a paper package, thick as a handspan. Talys unwrapped a slab of meat with a long, heavy bone at one end, covered in black and green specks. Blue chirped and eagerly snatched up his dinner, and Talys maneuvered the paper beneath him. He set his forelimb talons at each end and slowly buried his triangular teeth into it.
A different high-pitched, girly voice called my name. "Caleb?"
A handsome Na'uhui woman with a flat face and soft, gentle yellow eyes and her hair in white cornrows down her back stood beside me. "Come see me first thing in the morning."
"Before breakfast?"
Behind Dr. zʊɣi, a potted plant like a tall leaf rose along one of the stone columns that made up the wall. She smiled and turned to my old friend. "Good evening, Talys!"
"What the…"
Holding her hand was a girl of six or seven with dark skin like her mother, dark-green hair, and eyes the color of polished silver. 'ækimi crossed her little arms and scowled at me. "And how come you never mentioned the kind of work her mother did? That's a crime against humanity!"
The doctor covered her face in her hands and tried to laugh that off. She turned and led the little one away, peeking over her shoulder, "tomorrow morning! Before breakfast!" and joining a man with the same silver eyes who sat on a bag chair beside the stairs.
"Bye!" Talys waved.
"Talys, how long have you been here?" I begged.
From the center of our thick, woven-hemp blanket, she took a steaming flat cake, filled it with a brown paste, and drizzled some kind of black, clumpy sauce on top before folding it up. She sang her words up and down the musical register. "Oh Caleb, you know there are ways to go about getting the information you seek!"
"Wha—?"
"Point of order!" She held up a finger and chomped down on the thing she'd made.
She can't be serious!
Blue raised his snout, letting a strip of meat hang down on one side of the half-exposed bone, and chirped excitedly.
"Yes OK!" Miyani nodded.
Talys's emerald-green eyes went wide. "You know this one?"
"Yumi explained. Yes, we play." Miyani sat leaning away from me, propped up on one arm with her knees together out front. While her eyes drifted haphazardly along the stone arches of the ceiling and her lips feigned an innocent smile, my eyes snagged on the silk pulled taut over the crease of her sex. She sat up and took the view away, flashing me an evanescent, wicked grin.
For dinner, she had a wide, shallow, wooden pot filled with flatcakes and two ceramic pots, one with bean paste and the other with creamy potato stew. For drizzles, she brought black, shiny frog-eggs, and another I didn't recognize, like chopped brown things with bits of red things drowned in a quarter inch of oil. Miyani kissed my lips and stirred that one vigorously before spooning it over some potato stew I'd slathered over a flatcake in my hand.
"You like! It has, eh… mushroom, salt termite, ʃaxu-berry, is good!"
While I sank my teeth into thick chunks of potato peppered with tiny explosions of flavor, Miyani poked my side, sat back down, and mouthed a word at me with a big grin. Touch!
Yes, I wanted that. I wanted that very, very much.
"Miyani," Talys sat up straight. I struggled to wrap my head around the fact that it was her sitting across from me. She'd dressed as the natives, in a gold-embroidered brown-silk yithi, leaving the rest of herself bare. Tufts of curly hair draped over her shoulders leaving her voluptuous breasts barely visible.
Some boyfriend you are.
"The first question serves as the baseline. Which is hotter: hellroot or nice pepper?"
"Mmm…" Miyani sat up and thought about it.
What if Haron was killed tomorrow? With Ghuni saying… what she'd said about his body, the way he took it was so… when they left earlier, they were hand-in-hand. This was the same man Shoyi had grabbed in the middle of Ta'o's lesson to sleep with him. He'd put up one-hundred-forty-five kren to do a shoot-out with Ahmi's husband because apparently Lacius no longer accepted challenges for less than that.
There's a guy who knows how to be what he wants to be.
Miyani shook her head. "Is impossible. Is depends."
"Motion to compel." Talys raised a finger.
Blue chirped.
"fe-kum," I seconded her with a mouth full of food.
What's going on? Talys refuses to eat vegetables that aren't grown a certain way. Bread is OK as long as it's not too weird; Dariana's beer bread with dates and pistachios was too weird. Normal bread. Not weird bread. No weird cheeses, either. Fruits are carefully scrutinized; wild fruits and berries are strictly off-limits. As for meat, see sections 3-9 paragraphs four through eighty, all sub-paragraphs and cross-references checked.
Talys slathered creamed potatoes onto a flatcake, spread a line of termites on one side, frog eggs on the other, and savored it with her eyes closed. "You are required to choose one."
And nothing spicy.
Miyani squinted and crossed her arms. "Fine! I choose nice pepper. Go!"
"I claim the first question," I raised my hand. "Talys, what are you doing—"
"On what grounds?" She smirked. Behind her, some local women had tossed several bag chairs out of the way and gathered the wooden partitions from the corners to put them back in their usual places.
"Uh…"
Blue clicked lightly and lifted his snout, covered in meat juice. He thrust out his tongue and licked all along his mouth, beneath his chin, up along his nose, and over each eye. He fixed one eye on me and squawked again, tapping his snout to the floor twice.
"He says," Miyani started.
But I understood him. "He says it's torture, and torture is against the rules. You torture me with the obvious question of why you're here, how you got here, how long you've been here, why you left Gath…"
"Caleb, that's more than one question."
"Why are you here?"
"Hmm." She sat up and brushed a speck of salted termite from her plush lips. "I'm here because I want to be here."
And she looked at Miyani as if it were her turn.
"Insufficient!" I cried. Blue seconded me with a click.
Talys glanced between us. "Fine. Let me think where to begin."
She set her food onto a plate and took a deep breath.
What if Kaye got killed tomorrow? How many of Miyani's people were left? I'd assumed he was the son of the older couple who ran the cafe. Turns out he'd followed Miyani to Carthia against his parents' wishes while they stayed behind and got massacred. The old couple fed him, let him stay at their place, and gave him a job.
Talys wiped her fingers on the blanket and flattened out the flap of brown silk in her lap. "My mum died."
"What?" I sat up straight.
She shrugged. "She was on her way out, Caleb, you know that. While you were in Kyoen, Mother Searnie gave her one year. That was three years ago, so she beat her by two. That's worth a few points, right?"
A tear fell down her cheek. She wiped it and looked away.
"Even better," I said. "That's a multiplier; she tripled her score!"
Talys lowered her eyes and smiled. With another deep breath she added, "the last thing she said to me, she said she was holding me back and told me to go to bed. And I knew. I went to bed knowing, and I should have stayed up with her, I knew she was…"
More tears fell, and she wiped those away.
She shuddered. "I'm sorry. You'd think I'd be used to talking about it by now."
Miyani stroked her arm. "Is hard. Always is hard."
Talys took a deep breath. "So there's that, then the letters arrived, and then Sarina left—"
"Sarina left?
Apparently I left.
"Nope!" she raised a finger. "That is a separate question! Miyani, it is your turn."
"It's Blue's turn," I pointed to my left.
Talys's shoulders sank. She rolled her hand in the opposite direction. "Caleb, we go this way. We've always gone this way, and you know that. Miyani. You may pose any question to any one of us."
Miyani glanced back and forth between me and Talys with a sly grin before settling on her. "Talys. You say to me, something that, eh… you know that Caleb never say to me."
"Ahh!" Talys sat up straight and smirked. "He has psychic powers!"
"I do not."
"It's true. Sarina proved it."
"She disproved it. She redesigned the experim—"
"Order!" Talys raised a finger. "You do not have the floor!"
My next flatcake was beans with frog-eggs. The last time she'd packed this for the two of us, she brought three bases and six drizzles, including a powdered cheese mixed with dried hellroot.
The castle at Praying Mantis had a special, covered garden where we grew hellroot. That was the only source for Carthia; no one's had it since.
"It was a total accident," Talys sang. "The three of us had done a lesson on probability, when Sarina decides she's going to do a scientific experiment on him by holding up two cards and asking him which one is the goblin."
"Her eyes gave it away," I explained.
"No matter what she did, he got it right. Even when neither of them were the goblin, even when she held up two goblins, he called it. Every single time."
"Because she gave it away! Look. As soon as she put the cards face-down on the table without looking at them herself, I couldn't do it."
"That wasn't the only time you read minds, Caleb."
Miyani raised an eyebrow at me. A drop of white sauce fell down from the flatcake in her hand and plopped right onto her breast. She lifted her eyes to me with a subtle grin, looked down at the spill, and up to me with a much wider grin.
I launched at her and licked her clean, being sure to wrap my tongue over her taut nipple several times over. She pushed me away with a light giggle, and I mouthed a word back at her. Touch.
What if Rolon got killed tomorrow? I couldn't lie, I found his incessant talking soothing. He made me feel grounded in this world, listening to him regale everyone with stories about his home and where he grew up. That very morning over breakfast, he was telling us all about this maple-and-pecan pie his mum made for Bawseth and how him, Aydel, and Daemon would hike into the mountains during the winter and come sledding down or throw snowballs at each other.
What if his voice went silent?
Talys turned her face away from us and took another bite. "My turn. Miyani. Tell me the first thought that came to your mind the moment you saw him?"
"Mmm." She looked up in thought. Blue gave her a few clicks, and she nodded. "Yes! OK. We, me and Blue, we make hai-po-the-tik."
"A hypothetical?" Talys chirped.
"Yes! We say, if we hunt, kill who first."
Talys giggled at that. "Like before you switched?"
"Yes. I say Davod. Eh… we don't know name, but is Davod."
"Right?"
"Blue say Caleb. And first thought, eh… why him?"
"Why him!" Talys laughed.
Miyani spread some chopped mushrooms-and-termites onto a flatcake, folded it over, spread another layer, and folded it over again. "I ask every day same question. Maybe one day, I know answer."
And she gazed at me with a big smile.
I was going to show her why, all night if she let me.
Blue raised his snout, licked his eyes again, and gave out a string of clicks.
"He say, why Carthia?"
"Why Carthia?" Talys squinted at the lizard. "Hmm."
The flickering lamplight from the overhead candles danced across her skin. Elsewhere in the room, three other groups of people had picnic blankets. Outside the archways on the balcony, a cluster of older women from the harvester's guild stood talking with wine glasses around a small casket.
"Among everywhere I could have gone, why did I choose Carthia. Is that what you mean?"
Blue clicked once.
"Well, let's see here. I could have gone to Saen, but you know why Dariana came to Gath, and as far as I know, nothing's changed."
"Object!" Miyani raised a finger. She bit her lip. "Eh… fʊ'isu. Eh…"
I had to guess at that word. "Context?"
Blue clicked in agreement.
"Con-tek-st," Miyani sounded it out, popping the last morsel of her latest creation into her mouth. "Who is Daya…?"
"Dariana?"
"Yes."
What if I lost Turic the Big Fat Guy tomorrow? The first round of the top eight, they had him against the same kid who'd flipped Haron. The kid tried the same trick on him, but couldn't get his hands around those barrel arms. Turic grabs him and throws him out of the ring. Top four, he goes up against Rool. One thing Rool had on him was reach, and he kept jabbing from the outside and wore him out. The battle for third was against some veteran Herali who'd been here for years, and I think he was just tired. He looked tired. Ta'o called for the fight to begin, Turic slams his fist into the man's face, and he's out. Just like that.
Talys wiped her fingers on the blanket and folded her hands in her lap, answering in her melodic voice. "Dariana is from Saen. Picture a huge desert, nothing but sand everywhere, and the way it's hot like it was today, it's like that all the time."
"Yes, but, eh… is girlfriend with Caleb?"
Talys squinted at me.
"They have trees," I added. "And they have creeks that cut through the desert, and oases, and in the mountains it gets some rain, and there's a lot of small clans in those areas, too. Bloody good cheese, I tell you. They make this goat cheese with sage, and something about the enzymes, Sarina was explaining—"
Miyani narrowed her eyes at me. Talys shook with laughter. "I believe that's a separate question."
"Is OK." She turned to me, "you distract! You lose one point!"
Blue chirped and squawked in my defense.
Miyani shook her finger and sneered at him. "No! Is distract."
"Second!" Talys bumped her elbow. "Caleb, for causing a distraction, you shall receive one sanction."
Blue stretched out a slow caw.
"Nope!" she shook her head. "As I was saying, Dariana's family were farmers, but these raiders would come through and take what they wanted. Sometimes that meant her body, and sometimes that meant her father's life. Anyway, a place like that didn't have much appeal to me. I thought about Kyoen. Some of the stories you told me about your time there made it sound interesting. But the problem with Kyoen, as with a lot of those places like Ulum, we came through there and the prices there were just insane. Kyoen, Heralia City, much worse I imagine. I suppose I could have gone somewhere crazy like Renash or Chikai; of course I'd still be on my way to one of those places."
"But why Carthia?" I said. "There's literally a war going on."
"I was getting to that," she sang. "It was the one place my mother always used to talk about. Every time one of the neighbors reminded me that I'm not ethnically Herali—I was literally born there and can recite the epic as well as anyone—she would mumble about not having found her way here instead. I thought…" she shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe I could finish the journey for her."
What if Aydel was killed tomorrow? He was in Ulum for that competition; allegedly he was one of the finalists. The world deserved to hear him play and not die in some war.
Talys glanced at Blue with a warm smile and turned to me. "It's your turn."
"What do you mean Sarina left?"
"She left, Caleb."
"You know that's not enough."
"I don't know what else to add to that. After Father Yewan read the letters about Davod and Geraln, she went to her room and locked the door. In the morning her boots were gone, and her wardrobe had been emptied. No one's seen her. The letter you addressed to her is still on Father Yewan's desk."