Xiala had thought travel over land on foot had to be the most miserable form of travel, but she quickly amended her opinion once she was on the back of the great bird and the people below her reduced to the size of ants. She did not know how these Tovans withstood it, never mind preferred it. Insanity, all of it.
She could feel the muscles of the eagle moving beneath her, both powerful and incredibly fragile. Her rider had tied a rope belt around her waist and hooked the other end to her own belt.
“That way, if one of us falls, we both fall,” she’d said with a grin that did not reassure.
Only when she had attached both belts to the saddle they shared did Xiala feel secure. But falling was only one of the worries of air travel. There was the chafe of sitting in a saddle for hours at a time, there were the high-altitude winds that made her nostalgic for Tova’s comparatively balmy winter gales, and there were the bugs.
She had not anticipated the bugs.
Her rider also had a solution for that: a triangle of cloth to wear over her nose and mouth and a warning to keep her head down. Once again, insanity.
“If I ever make it back to the sea, I swear to never leave it,” she muttered to herself at least a dozen times that first day.
But to her surprise, after the trials of adjustment, she began to understand the appeal of flight. They covered many miles, the landscape rapidly changing below them. Snowcapped mountains ceded to endless grasslands, the only variation the snaking flow of the Puumun River and its tributaries running ever eastward. They avoided fluctuations in the weather, noting growing clouds that portended storms and adjusting to avoid them. And once they flew over a herd of massive furred beasts that stretched across the plain and would have stopped Ziha and her march dead in their path.
They made camp on the banks of a river that night as the sun set. Nuuma and Iktan retired to a tent to talk privately, and Xiala found herself huddled around a fire surrounded by strangers, and soldiers at that. But someone had a flask, and they passed it around, and after she’d swallowed her share of the unfamiliar fiery liquor, the absurdity of her situation settled around her. She lay back, staring at the mass of stars overhead.
“A flying Teek,” she whispered to herself. “Who would believe it?”
A figure dropped down beside her, and she glanced over to find Terzha stretched out, hands behind her neck, eyes on the night sky. Xiala knew she should be wary of this warrior woman, the matron’s daughter, but the alcohol buzzed pleasantly in her head, and after a day of silence, she ached for company.
“What do you see when you look up there?” There was a slight slur in Terzha’s voice.
“The way home.” Xiala thought of the navigational houses of the Teek. “If we were on the sea, we could follow the stars and find our way.”
“Show me.”
She shifted, uncomfortable. “It is a Teek thing. It won’t mean anything to you.” She had a flash of memory, Serapio’s hand in hers as she traced the star houses in his palm. You study the stars, but I am made of the shadow between stars. He had said that to her once, and the thought of it now made her ache. How many miles was he from her, how distant was she in his mind? His heart? She vowed again she would return to him as soon as she could find a way.
Terzha squinted. “I’ll tell you what we say. See that constellation? We say it is the home of the ancestors of the clan Water Strider, and those trailing stars are beetle shit.”
Xiala coughed.
“We don’t say it to Water Strider’s face, of course,” Terzha amended. “So the way to Teek is there? Below the beetle shit?”
Xiala closed her eyes, ignoring the Golden Eagle woman’s drunken jibes. Instead, images of her homeland overwhelmed her. The crystal waters, the warm breezes, the swaying palms. “There is a secret cove I visited as a child,” she murmured. “That had the most beautiful shells.”
“Shells?”
“Seashells. We harvest them. Wear them on our clothes, in our hair. Trade them for other nations’ wealth.”
“The detritus of dead animals.”
She cracked an eye open. “You have a dark mind, Terzha of Golden Eagle.”
“I attended the war college in Hokaia and trained with the spearmaidens there. They are a dark-minded people.”
“I know someone who trained with a spearmaiden.”
“Do you? The firstborn daughters of matrons rarely attend the war college. It is the secondborn’s calling. Witness Ziha and her military ambitions. But Mother saw the wisdom in sending me. She knew war would come, and Golden Eagle would need me to lead not just as a matron but as a general.”