“Keep her name from your mouth, Golden Eagle,” xe whispered. “Your clan made promises to me and then broke them. You do not get to blame the dead with your excuses now.”
Ziha swallowed. “There are complications to what happened,” she said, voice as careful as footfalls on a frozen lake, “and I should not speak of them. Perhaps we have strayed too far from why we are here together, traveling treacherous roads with our careless thoughts. Golden Eagle is not your enemy, tsiyo. Or yours,” she said to Xiala.
Iktan’s eyes were hooded, glazed with a deceptive calmness. Xiala remembered xir earlier quip about them all being prisoners. She had thought the comment mocking, but now she wondered if Iktan had in mind a particular bitch when xe had spoken of fate.
Ziha stood. Xiala could see the sweat on the back of her neck, the slight tremor in her hands. “I’ll let you finish your meal. I have things to see to in camp. We will talk again tonight and plan to be moving toward the Puumun River before dawn. Xiala of the Teek, I would very much like to hear what you know of the Odo Sedoh when I return this evening. And perhaps then Iktan can share what xe learned from xir man in Carrion Crow Shield. But for now…”
She bowed slightly at the neck and was out, the tent flap blowing behind her. Words were exchanged with the guards, and they stayed where they were instead of following their commander.
“Looks like we’re under guard now,” Xiala said.
“It’s theater,” Iktan said confidently. “If I wanted them dead, they’d be dead in seconds. Assassin, remember?” Xe had risen and was searching through the trunks and pots in the back of the tent. Xiala heard the clatter of things being pushed aside.
“What are you looking for?”
“I’ll know it when I find… ah.” Xe came back bearing a bottle of xtabentún. “I knew she had to be keeping a bottle somewhere.”
Xiala had not touched drink since the Convergence and was not sure now that she should. But she did not protest when Iktan uncorked the bottle, took the two clay cups left from their meal, and filled them with alcohol. And she said nothing when xe set one in front of her and took the other.
Iktan drank, long and deep, before topping the cup off and settling back in the furs, back propped against a pile of cushions.
“Tell me about the Odo Sedoh.”
She folded her hands in her lap, trying to ignore the cup that seemed to beckon. “Tell me of the Watchers first,” she countered.
“What do you want to know?”
“You’re a priest?”
“Was a priest,” xe corrected, tapping xir cup. “Drink is forbidden in the priesthood. I was a priest until Ziha’s mother and her murderous cousin killed a friend I cared very much about. And then your friend killed all but a few children and graybeards left in the tower, which means there’s not much of the Watchers left.” Xe drank more. “Clearly, people having murderers for friends is the problem here.”
“If there are some Watchers left, couldn’t you rebuild?”
She couldn’t believe she was even asking. Serapio had explained how corrupt they were, the transgressions they had committed. But this person before her seemed lost, and she knew what being lost felt like, so her instinct was to offer some comfort.
“There is nothing to rebuild,” Iktan said with a note of finality. “The Watchers served for more than three hundred years. They did what they could to keep the Meridian at peace, and now war comes, and they are done.” Xe glanced at her. “I think you mistake ‘priest’ for ‘martyr.’？”
“So if you are no longer a priest, what are you?”
“Now I am a person with an enviable skill set and an exciting amount of indifference.”
“I don’t believe that,” she said quietly.
“No? You will.”
She watched Iktan’s face, looking for signs of that cool rage that she was beginning to understand was when xe was most dangerous, and seeing none of it, she ventured, “Can I ask you something?”
“Please do.”
“How is it that you were not on Sun Rock with the rest of the Watchers?”
“Ah, Xiala of the Teek,” xe said, pressing a hand over xir heart. “Again, we must look to fickle fate. I was in a rage when Nara went missing. I blamed myself. Eche tried to claim that Nara had killed the tsiyo at her door and run, and while I am a fool, I am not an idiot. I tore the tower apart, sent dedicants out to search for her, and nothing. I couldn’t prove it, but I knew what they had done. When the time came for the Convergence ceremony, I sent one of my tsiyos in my stead. It was a thing I did often when I didn’t have the patience for their pomp and bloviating, and I was in no mood to stand shoulder to shoulder with those who had killed my friend.”