Panting a little, Feather Cloak steadied herself and surveyed the council. Standing, she looked even more enormously pregnant, so huge that it seemed impossible she hadn’t burst. “We will come home,” she agreed. “Yet there remains a danger to us. We will come home unless the human sorcerers now on Earth use their magic to weave a second spell like the first. Then they could fling us back into the aether, and we would surely all perish, together with our land.”
Pain cut into Liath’s belly. She tucked, bending slightly, reflexively, but the pain vanished as swiftly as it had come—it was only the memory of her labor pains the day her mother had told her the story of the Great Sundering, and the threat of the Aoi return.
“The only one who can stop them is you,” Anne had said.
Had Da known all along? Was this the fate he had tried to hide her from—serving as Anne’s tool? Pain stabbed again, but this time it was anger. Da hadn’t helped her at all by hiding the truth from her. He’d only made it harder. Ignorance hadn’t spared her, it had only made her weak and fearful.
“To use magic in such a way seems like the act of a monster,” she said at last, measuring her words, aware of the anger burning in the pit of her stomach. “But I have heard of a story told by my people of a time known as the Great Sundering, when the Aoi—”
“Call us not by that name!” cried Cat Mask. “If you come in peace, as you claim, why do you keep insulting us?”
“I do not intend to insult you!” she retorted, stung. “That is the name my people call you.”
“Don’t you know what it means?” asked Green Skirt.
“No.”
Cat Mask spat the words. “‘Cursed Ones.’”
“What do you call yourselves, then?”
They all broke out talking at once.
Feather Cloak lifted a hand for silence. “In our most ancient home, we called ourselves The-Ones-Who-Have-Understanding. After our ancestors left that place and came over the sea, we called ourselves The Ones-Who-Have-Made-A-New-Home. Now we call ourselves The-Ones-In-Exile, Ashioi, which also means, The-Ones-Who-Have-Been-Cursed.”
“Ashioi,” murmured Liath, hearing the word she knew—“Aoi” —embedded within it. Was that how ancient knowledge survived, only in fragments like the florilegia Da had compiled over the years? Surely Da had understood the true purpose of the Seven Sleepers. What had he been looking for in these notes and scraps of magical knowledge? Had he wondered how a spell as powerful as the Great Sundering could come to be? She had to work it through in order to understand the whole. “Wouldn’t it also be true that if such a huge region of land fell to Earth again, it would make a terrible cataclysm?”
“Maybe so,” said Eldest Uncle, “yet if this land approaches close by Earth and is flung away again by a spell woven by human sorcerers, that act, too, will cause manifold destruction. The tides of the universe spare no object, for even when bodies do not touch, they influence each other. If you are trained in the craft of the stars, then you understand this principle. No part of the shore is safe from a high tide, or an ebb tide. Either way, Earth will suffer.”
Twilight came suddenly; the gap in the ceiling darkened so quickly that spinning dust motes caught in shafts of light simply vanished as shadow spread. For a moment, it was too dark for even Liath to see. Then the Eagle Seat and the Jaguar Seat began to glow, illuminating the two figures who stood on their backs: Feather Cloak and Eldest Uncle. In that gleam, the shells and beads decorating their cloaks and arm sheaths took on new colors, roots of scarlet and viridian that shuddered deep within.
His final words, like an arrow, were aimed at her heart. “The only choice is whether my people perish utterly, or whether we will be given a chance to live.”
In her mind’s eye she saw the ruined city that ended at a shoreline so sharp and straight that a knife might have shorn it off. A knife—or a vast spell whose power beggared the imagination and left her a little stunned—might have sheared off the land so, cutting it cleanly as one slices away a piece of meat from the haunch.
To contemplate the power of such a spell, such a sundering, left her sick to her stomach and profoundly dizzy. She went hot all over. Her blood pounded in her limbs, and the hot taste of fire burned on her lips as a wind roared in her ears.
Who would perish, and who would live? Who had earned the right to make that choice?
The room blazed with heat. The council members cried out as fire blossomed at the heart of the Eagle Seat, engulfing Feather Cloak entirely. Liath staggered at its brilliance, yet within the archway of leaping flames shadows writhed.
