The woman kept blowing smoke in Tavi’s face, making him cough and his eyes water. No matter how many times he pled with her not to, she took a pull on her long bone pipe, eyed him dispassionately, and billowed mouthfuls of thick, bitter clouds on him. Then she retreated to the far side of the bare, fired-brick room where she had him trussed to the center pole, crouched easily over a long, loose scroll of reed paper, and marked notes on how he responded. If he coughed, she made little marks. If he endured stoically, she made little marks. If he cursed her… well, he hadn’t quite found the courage to do that yet, but he was sure that if he had, she’d have made more little marks. It needled him fiercely to be examined like a bug, but not as much as the fact that she was too far away for him to see what she was writing.
He’d seen a handful of unfriendly, chalk-covered faces as she’d dragged him to this bare hut with a packed earthen floor. He told himself that he was imagining it when he saw hunger in the Hinta tribe’s eyes. You don’t actually know if the old stories are true. Most of Ryki’s tales were exaggerations, and it makes sense that the more distant a tribe is from our lands, the more outlandish the tales would become over time. That’s how people work. The unknown breeds fear and distrust. She’s probably just observing me to make sure I’m not dangerous. He jerked his wrists against the ropes for the hundredth time, and they did not give. Or she’s writing down all the best recipes for cooking me right now. It could be that, too.
The smoke started to clear, and he snuck a glance at the woman as she scribbled. It was hard to see past the white chalk that made two solid lines from her hairline, around both eyes, past the corners of her mouth, and down her neck to the collarbone, but he tried. She looked like any normal woman of the Lost: black hair, brown skin, dark eyes, and rough-woven clothes not too dissimilar from what he’d seen the Shinsok and Iktaka wear. She might have seen twenty summers, or perhaps twenty-five, and her face was serious and firm. He wasn’t used to thinking of women as hunters, but she had that air – not so fierce or volatile as Zulimaya, perhaps, but passionless and precise like a panther. She hadn’t hurt him all that much as she’d tied him up and dragged him back to her town, but her hard, quick hands left him no doubt that she could whenever she wished if he gave her reason.
“Do you have children?” he blurted, tired of her silence and her endless clouds of smoke. “All the women your age in my tribe have at least one or two.”
Her gaze pinned him to the pole, and he flinched. Not so dispassionate, then. Her jaw tensed, and he could see the violence gathering in her.
“Sorry,” he said quickly. “I shouldn’t have asked.”
She kept her dark eyes on him and sat perfectly still for an unnervingly long time before relaxing ever so slightly and returning to her note-taking. “Breeding at first opportunity is what beasts do,” she said quietly, her eyes on her scroll. “And barbarians.”
“Also very small tribes living in difficult conditions that require as many hands as possible to survive,” Tavi said, regretting his rashness even as he spoke. She might eat you, stupid. Keep your mouth shut. It’s not like you owe the Catori any defense, anyway.
She cocked her head and considered him again. He might as well have been a dewdrop monkey that had started spouting mathematical formulae, the way she was inspecting him. She got to her feet, and he tensed as she approached.
“Please don’t hurt me,” he whispered, looking down.
She made a huffing sound that might have been a laugh or a sound of annoyance. “Am I going to beat a child? Why would I do that?”
“I don’t know,” he said, nettled. “Why do you keep blowing smoke at me?”
“I’m testing your spirit,” she said. “The smoke draws it out.”
“Uh,” Tavi said. “Do you mean spirit like my courage and toughness, or like a… spirit kind of spirit? Do you think I’m dead?”
She flicked a hand at him and walked back to her scroll. “Of course you’re not dead. I caught you in my ropes, didn’t I?”
“And what’s the smoke supposed to do?”
“Just because you are not dead doesn’t mean other things inside you might not be.”
He blinked. “You think I have some kind of evil spirit driving me?”
She shrugged. “Everybody has spirits driving them. It’s just a question of which ones.”
Taavi licked his lips and tried to figure out the best way to respond. Some of the loremaster’s stories talked of such things, but none of the Catori took them all that seriously. The only spirits they ever really paid attention to were the Ones Beneath, and the ancient ancestors in the earth had no interest in taking the bodies of the living. They were beyond such things. Still, he’d seen since leaving home that the other tribes had their own, widely varying beliefs, and offending the woman seemed like a bad way to proceed.
“What would bad spirits do in the smoke?” he asked.
A tiny smile creased one corner of her mouth, and she wagged a finger at him. “I will not be tricked. If I tell you, then your spirits will simply do something else, and I still won’t know.”
“You’ve been at it for half a handspan,” he protested. “How long does it take for the spirit to respond?”
She stood again, frowning at him. “The more powerful the spirit, the longer it takes. Either you are harmless, or you have a demon spirit that could kill us all.”
“I…!” He struggled to find something reasonable to say. “Do I look like I have a powerful demon spirit?”
“No,” she replied, deadly serious. “That is why I have to be very careful.” She picked up her bone pipe again and drew on it.
“Don’t, please,” he pled. “I’m harmless.”
She blew the smoke in his eyes, and he coughed and retched.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
“I hope you are,” she said, consulting her notes. “A spirit as powerful as yours might be? It could poison us all.”
He was just getting his coughing under control, but her casual statement stole his breath. “What do you mean?”
She looked at him as if he were a hopelessly stupid child. “Demon spirits infect the flesh.”
A chill spread through him. “Are… are you going to eat me?”
She tapped her notes, frustrated. “Not until I figure this out.”
The gibbering, unreasoning fear of a little child gripped him. “You can’t,” he whispered. “You said you wouldn’t hurt a child.”
She shook her head, confused. “It’s not hurting. Why would you say that?”
He yanked against his bonds again. Nothing. “How is it anything but hurting? You kill someone and you eat them! I can’t even think of anything worse.”
She looked pained and disappointed. “I’ve never understood how the lower tribes lost track of this truth. To eat someone is to take them in and keep them forever. When it’s an enemy, like you, it makes us stronger, and when it’s those we love, it’s the last, most permanent kind of union.”
Tavi stared at her, horrified. “You eat your families? How could you?”
“How could you not?” she replied, seeming just as revolted as he was. “You live alone, forever isolated. I contain multitudes.”
“Until you squat and shit them out, at least.”
She slapped him hard across the mouth. “You mock sacred things because you don’t understand them. I don’t blame you for your ignorance, but that doesn’t mean I will put up with disrespect.”
Indignation welled up in Tavi’s chest. “You’re going to kill me and cook me, and you’re mad because I’m not talking about it right.” He spat at her. “I’ll talk how I want.”
She stepped back and wiped the spittle from the shoulder of her roughspun tunic. “You sneak into our lands and sully our winds with who knows what kind of spirits. Surely you did not think to survive.”
The frustration grew ever deeper, and Tavi let it take him, jerking and bucking against the ropes like a trapped hart. “Should I have stayed in the mists? I was supposed to just know this was Hinta land, was I?”
The woman rolled her eyes and picked up her scroll, jotting down another note. “You have a lying spirit, then.”
He spat at her again even though she was too far away to hit. “I fought things that walked like men but looked like frogs, and if they caught you, they’d stick their tongues up your nose and lay eggs inside your head. I wish they’d catch you.” He pointed at his scarred, pitted leg. “I met some creature that hides under the sand and carves holes out of you even as it digests your skin. Does that look like a lie?”
She edged closer, looking at his leg without getting right in front of him, presumably in case he spat a third time. He wished his feet were free so he could kick her in the face. “Those are interesting wounds for one so young. But no one enters the mist unless they are tired of life and too bound up by their spirits to give themselves to the tribe.”
Tavi bucked one last time and slumped down, exhausted. “Don’t believe me, then. What do I care? I have a hundred evil spirits in me, and they’ll kill you all if you so much as take a taste.”
She shook her head. “Now you seek to save yourself with more lies. If you are too toxic to nourish us, I will take you out of our lands and kill you to keep your spirits from returning.”
“Fine. Do that.” He squatted on his haunches as best he could while tied to the pole, resting himself. “I’d rather have my carcass eaten by something that doesn’t make a weird ritual out of it. And by the way, your whole spirit thing is stupid. Killing someone with bad spirits would just let them all free, wouldn’t it? What’s to stop them from coming right back and entering the rest of you idiots?”
The woman retreated to her scroll and chewed on that, her chalk-painted face creased in thought. “They would be too scared to return.”
“Sure of that, are you?”
She fixed him with a cool stare. “Sure enough. But I do not think you have evil spirits, or at least not many. I think you are just a scared boy who wants to live.”
Tavi sighed, tired of trying to make her see sense. “That’s exactly what I am. Not that you care. I’m supposed to go find Xochil’s magic so I can help my brother, not be a snack for cannibals.”
Suddenly the woman was in his face, cripping his chin with hard fingers, a snarl on her face. “You belong to Xochil?”
Tavi tried to jerk away, but she was too strong and he had no leverage. “No! I’ve been fighting him for the better part of a year.”
She backed away, her eyes hard and mistrusting. “More lies.”
He glared right back. “Lady, you can put me in a pot and call it holy or you can take me to your borders and slit my throat, but if you try to say that I’m anything to Xochil but an enemy, I’ll turn into one of these spirits you believe in so much and haunt you forever. We tried to kill him and failed, and I’m trying to go to his house and take his magic, whether you believe it or not.”
She bared her teeth and clenched her fists as if she were about to attack him, no matter what she’d said about attacking a child. “You are a tormenter spirit. How do you know what to say?” She took the knife from her belt and raised it high.
Tavi squeezed his eyes shut, whimpering at the sudden expectation of death. She was going to cut him open right there and spill his blood all over. Not yet. I can’t die yet! He sobbed in fear, hating how weak, how small, how young he sounded.
Further and further he drew in on himself, bracing himself against the cutting he knew would come, knowing that it would still hurt unspeakably, and clenching even further. There was no way to prepare, and he couldn’t stop himself from trying.
The pain never came. Opening an eye, he saw through a sheen of tears that the woman was gone. Now the sobbing came in earnest and he let the tears flow unashamed. He was still going to die, but not yet. That was good enough to be going on with.
The time stretched on interminably and no one came for him. He worked on his ropes to no avail; he couldn’t even get his fingers onto the knots. He prayed to the Ones Beneath, knowing that they would never hear him from so far away. Tarek didn’t even believe in them anymore, he knew, and maybe he was right. Ancestor spirits living in the trees just because their bodies were buried near the roots didn’t make a lot more sense in the light of day than evil spirits making a person sick because they ate the human flesh the spirits infested. Mostly, though, he talked to his absent older brother, telling him everything that had happened and everything he wanted, just as he would do if Tarek were there with him. It was something to do, and it was comforting, in a hollow sort of way.
When the light was turning to dusk underneath the crack in the wooden door to his brick prison room, the chalk-faced woman stormed back into the room and stopped right in front of his face.
“Hello,” he said. “I’ve thought of several good reasons why you shouldn’t eat me.”
She ignored his words completely. “Three years ago Xochil came to us and shared our bread for a fortnight. We didn’t know it until later, but he cut all the children younger than ten while no one was looking, one by one. Just a tiny scratch on the arm. Most of the children said they didn’t even notice when it happened. Those that did thought it was an accident, that his fingernail had snagged on their skin. None of them said anything. Why bother? What child doesn’t have a dozen scrapes at a time?”
She stepped even closer, looking him in the eyes. “Nearly all of them got black spots on their mouths and down their throats just a day or two after he left. Nearly half died within a moon, and the rest took half a year to recover.” Her words ground to a halt and her eyes brimmed with tears. “My little boy died moaning in my arms and shitting blood. The name Xochil will be told in our stories for a hundred generations and cursed until the sun dies.”
Tavi had no love for this woman or her tribe, but even still, he had to admit it was a terrible story. “From what I’ve seen of him, I can’t say I’m surprised… but I am sorry.”
She had her knife in her hand again, but before Tavi could even tense, she’d moved behind him and cut his ropes. He stumbled free, rubbing his sore wrists and trying not to fall over out of complete shock.
The Hinta woman took him by the arm, pushed him into a sitting position, and sat across from him. “You’re going to tell me everything you know about Xochil. And if I decide you’re not lying, you’re going to take me to him so I can kill him.”