The corvid took flight.
Serapio closed the sky door. He made his way to the bed and stretched out, tucking his newly acquired knife under the reed-filled mattress. The wound in his side pulled as he stretched out, but he ignored it. Pain was something he could endure, and tolerance for discomfort he possessed in rare amounts. So he settled in to wait for what came next.
Patient as stone.
CHAPTER 8
CITY OF TOVA （COYOTE’S MAW）
YEAR 1 OF THE CROW
Magic is chaos. Seek it out at your peril.
—Exhortations for a Happy Life
Naranpa walked the network of underground tunnels below the Lupine, looking for Zataya. Denaochi had assigned her a servant who helped her bathe and find clean clothes, so now she wore a simple white dress and a red and yellow string belt instead of a bloody, dirt-stained blanket. It was progress, albeit small progress. The servant, whose name was Baaya, had even managed to find her a cloak and a pair of warm, fur-lined boots. Thus attired, she set out, without her brother, to find the witch.
Naranpa had tried to sleep, but it was impossible, despite her exhaustion. Her mind churned between horrors. First, the faces of her fellow priests in various poses of death—throats slit, heads bashed in, some details so gruesome she wondered at her own macabre imagination. And when she wasn’t imagining the violence of her former colleagues’ deaths, she dreamed of men in jaguar skins interrogating her, berating her for her failures, and then choking her until she couldn’t breathe. Feeling wrung out and unsafe even in her own head, she asked Baaya, who was dozing outside her door, to point her to Zataya’s room. She was hoping Zataya might be able to explain the dreams or, better yet, have a way to stop them. And maybe she could ask the witch more about what magic she had worked on the Convergence and if it could be the source of the continual burning in her chest or the strange glow that suffused her hands. Of course, now out of immediate danger and free of the suffocating earth, she doubted whether her hands had glowed at all. Perhaps they had only been a figment of her overactive imagination. She tried to remember if her lantern had truly been extinguished or if perhaps some small illumination had remained, but she couldn’t. Her travails in the tunnels were a blur. If only she had learned more about magic when she had access to the celestial tower’s library. A better grounding in history and southern sorcery would be welcome now.
“A head always in the stars,” Kiutue had scolded her when she was a dedicant newly promised to the oracles, but he had said it with such affection that she had not taken it poorly, even when he went on to chide her. “Look for the pleasure around you, too, Naranpa. You need not always focus on what lies in the heavens. There is beauty on earth, too.”
She had thought then of her childhood in the Maw and severely doubted Kiutue’s declaration, but love for her old mentor had quieted her tongue. The day-to-day world continued to disappoint, again and again, no matter what others believed.
She found Zataya’s room, knocked once, and immediately pushed open the door. She worried that if she waited, Zataya might not let her in.
A powerful perfume greeted her, filling her nose with rosemary, lavender, and mint. She swooned in pleasure. The scent emanated from the steam of small pots bubbling over a hearth fire in one corner of the room. Smoke rose up a long chimney to exit far above them, no doubt bathing the neighborhood above in fragrance.
“What are you making?” Naranpa exclaimed. “It smells wonderful!”
Zataya was hunched over a table in front of the hearth, her long back bent over a mortar and pestle and a mound of wild mint before her. Around her were clay jars of various sizes and piles of herbs and plants, many Naranpa didn’t recognize.
“Shouldn’t you knock?” the witch complained, throwing Naranpa an annoyed glare.
“I did knock.”
“A knock is usually followed by the person inside deciding whether to open the door or not.”
“I was afraid you wouldn’t let me in.”
Zataya grunted, confirmation enough that Naranpa had guessed correctly.
“Although I thought you might want to see me, if only out of curiosity as to how well your working on the Convergence fared.”
The muscles in Zataya’s shoulders shifted, and Naranpa thought she saw something there. Shame? Denial? How strange. She had been sure the witch would want to gloat.
Again, she did not wait for an invitation but took a seat on the stool at the table. She ran a hand over a pile of green pods that looked like they were covered in silvery fur.
“Don’t touch anything!”