“You mean she planned to start a war and trained her daughters accordingly.” The words slipped out unthinking, but Xiala did not regret them.
“That’s one way of looking at it.” She rolled to her side to face Xiala. “The other is she prepared for the inevitable. Peace cannot last forever. Times change, and it is better to be on top than to be crushed at the bottom. Shells are pretty, yes, but they are already dead things when you find them. And they break so easily. And then they are dust.” She rolled to her feet, looming over Xiala. “Careful not to break, Xiala, and leave behind only pretty dust.”
And then she was gone, back into the night.
A foreboding rolled over Xiala, as real as a wave in deepening water. She pulled her blanket up around her shoulders, her back to the waning fire, and tried to sleep. But all she could think about were beaches scattered with the broken bodies of Teek, and Terzha standing triumphant over them, her heel grinding them into sand.
* * *
They were up before dawn, another day of riding before them. She managed to avoid Terzha, but Iktan tracked her down over a cold breakfast of corn cakes and dried strips of a meat Xiala didn’t recognize.
“If all goes well, we reach Hokaia this afternoon,” xe informed her, chewing at the meat as if it was a personal affront to breakfast itself.
She wanted nothing more than to get away from Golden Eagle. Terzha had unsettled her, and the premonition of Teek’s destruction felt like a warning. She berated herself for even mentioning Teek navigation the night before, but a more reasonable voice in her head assured her that Terzha was no seafarer, and besides, she had not said anything that Terzha might use to find her homeland. Nevertheless, she worried.
Mother waters, she wanted free. Cuecola was not so far once they reached Hokaia. But Cuecola might not welcome her back. Lord Pech likely still held a grudge, and if not him, the tupile from the Kuharan jail. She did not know if she could count on Lord Balam to defend her. She had gotten Serapio to Tova as promised, but then she had lost a very expensive ship and crew. The jaguar lord might not look generously upon her. But there were other ports, other places along the coast she could hide until this war passed her by.
And what of Serapio? she thought. Would you leave him to fight these vipers alone? Never mind the treachery in his own clan that Iktan had alluded to. No, she had followed Iktan from Tova knowing that she could find a way to help Serapio by spying among his enemies, and she was determined to see it through. What she found in Hokaia would be what he needed most. And once she understood Golden Eagle’s war plans, she would find a fast ship back to Tova. And if she could send a message to Teek, a warning that war was coming from the outside world, she would do that, too.
They came in over Hokaia as the sun began to settle low on the horizon. The network of rivers that ran around and through the city sparkled in the setting sun, and the vast mound city glittered brightly along its wide avenues and waterways. She thought perhaps she had never seen a city so breathtaking. Tova was something out of a story, its buildings and banners clinging to the cliffside wreathed in clouds and held together by silky woven bridges. And Cuecola was the hot breath of the world, heavy with humanity and jungle sweat and the decadent memories of magic. But sunlit Hokaia blazed orange and red and joyful, a defiant splash of heat across the yellow winter grasslands, and she was thankful, if only for a moment, to experience it from a vantage point that no other Teek had likely ever seen.
The city itself was divided into four main plazas laid out along the cardinal directions, with a massive three-tiered mound in the north. Before it, a river ran neat along man-made banks to empty into a lagoon, and Xiala could make out boats docked at its shores. Her breath caught at the sight of black-hulled sailing ships, and she leaned over as if to get a better look.
“Careful!” her rider chided, and she immediately straightened.
They looked like Teek ships, the fast ones that made quick work of distance, the ones they called tidechasers, but surely there could be no Teek in Hokaia. Unless some had come to trade. Her heart sped up. Perhaps she could give her warning to these Teek and, at the same time, gather some news from home. It had been more than a decade since she had seen another Teek, and she knew return was an impossibility, but to even hear news… it would do her good. She rubbed at her legs. She suspected being back at sea would cure her land sickness, too, but she might also ask the visiting Teek if they knew a remedy. Suddenly, she felt a glimmer of promise at the prospect of getting to Hokaia.
The Golden Eagle riders spoke to each other in a series of complex hand motions to make themselves known, and together they descended toward the central mound. The top of the earthen structure stretched a mile long at least, the building at its top running the width of the back end. It looked big enough to house a thousand people, and Xiala wondered if it was temple or palace. Iktan’s history lesson rose in her memory, and she knew this must be the place where the Treaty of Hokaia had been signed. Palace and temple, she thought to herself, as the great birds landed before it.