The tower? The voice sharpened with interest. Do you mean the celestial tower? Tell me what they taught you in the celestial tower.
So many things, Nara wanted to say. How to map the courses of planets, how to mold the earth to better mirror the heavens, how to understand celestial patterns and predict the future.
You were a dedicant. But who are you now?
She shied away from the question. There was pain there, something she didn’t want to think about.
She thought of Mama instead, and the last time she had seen her. It had been the day she left to serve in the tower. A spring morning, and her brothers, Akel and Denaochi, were there, but her father had not come. Mama said it was too hard for him to say goodbye.
These childish memories. The voice sounded annoyed, exasperated by her retreat. Forget them. Focus. Who are you now?
A hand trailed across her scalp and then down her neck, the rake of fingernails against her skin raising goose bumps as they passed. She shivered. There was something she was forgetting. About winter and the solstice. And something Denaochi had told her about her mother, something important.
Who are you now? The voice sounded angry, impatient. Fingers that had caressed her moments ago now closed around her throat. She opened her mouth to scream, but only a dry choking cough came out. The hand tightened.
Who??
Nara clawed at her attacker, desperate to break the hold. She couldn’t breathe. Desperation welled up, hard and sudden. She was going to die if she didn’t break free. If she didn’t answer.
I am the Sun Priest!
Silence, like the echo after a bell. And then a swirl of outrage and disbelief.
Why aren’t you dead?
Naranpa froze. That wasn’t Mama.
A feeling, like someone digging through her mind and picking through memories the way she rifled through papers in the tower library. Someone looking for something. Something inside her head.
How did you do it, Sun Priest? Did you read the stars to thwart your fate? Why were you not on Sun Rock when the crow god came?
Fury flooded her mind. Not her own but from someone enraged at her defiance.
The grip around her throat tightened. She tried to scream again, and this time blood poured from her mouth. It dripped down her chin, across her chest. It spread like a living thing, covering her body in a sticky rust-colored blanket. Her resistance crumbled at the horror of it.
Another voice bubbled up. Sorcery? How?
The voice was different. Older, masculine. She recognized it immediately. It was Kiutue, her old mentor. She knew it couldn’t be him, that whatever was digging through her mind was not real. But she felt his presence nonetheless, his shock and disappointment at her heresy. She bent under the burden. The blood oozed down her naked torso, past her thighs, over knees and calves and feet.
Yet another voice slithered into her ear. Oh, Nara. You should have died that day.
Iktan? Her mouth worked around the name, her lips remembering its sweetness, even now. Iktan’s voice was so real it made her weak with want. She knew xe was as seductive as the serpent whose clan xe had been born to, and as treacherous. And yet she desired.
But do not worry. There is a remedy to every problem.
Look! You’re bleeding already.
She looked down. The blood now covered her entire body as if someone had painted it on.
Painted it on.
Her mind shuddered.
A dream. This was all a dream. Her mother had never asked her about what she had learned as a dedicant in the tower, Kiutue had never scolded her for heresy, and Iktan… oh, the ache in her heart at xir betrayal felt the most real of it all, but even that was wrong. Iktan had torn the tower apart to try to save her in the end. Heat flared in her chest, a mini-sun ablaze. It was enough to illuminate the cracks in her tangled nightmare. She grasped the edges of the dream and heaved. Reality rushed in, filling her all at once. She remembered the apprentices painting her body in the witch’s blood, the salt burning her mouth. The bridge, her wild leap, being dragged from the river by—
“Zataya!” she cried.
“Who?” a man in a white jaguar skin asked.
The dream broke.
She reared up from the place where she lay. Her head slammed into a ceiling inches above her. Fabric bound her arms to her side, covered her face, and she sucked it in, choking. Thick clots of earth broke free and cascaded down from the roof. She rolled instinctively, flailing as she tried to free herself from the blanket and avoid the small avalanche she had loosed.
And then she was falling. A short drop, but she could not brace herself, and the ground was hard. It knocked the little air she had from her lungs with the force of a fist. She lay for a moment, stunned. Pain radiated across her back, and she labored to breathe through the cloth. She frantically worked her arms free, finally tearing the blanket from her face. She gulped air as her eyes adjusted to the anemic light in the room. It shone from the dwindling remnants of a small resin candle in a lantern just past her feet. She could see she was underground… in a tomb.