Guardians of the Desert (Children of the Desert) Read Free

singers as servants rather than nobles. Deiq smiled at the ceiling, reflecting that a thousand years ago there would have been only a jacau-drum beat behind the song, and the singers would have been the leading men of the tribe.
    The chant had run very differently back then: Itna tarnen, itnas talien, itnabe shalla: We empty ourselves into the gods, the gods pour themselves into us, glory be to the gods. Time had changed both pronunciation and meaning; the modern understanding of the old paean was closer to We serve the gods, the gods smile on us, we survive under the glory of the gods .
    Which said a lot about how much humanity had changed since the ha’reye first emerged from their seclusion . . . and how little humans still understood of what they had agreed to.
    These were dangerous thoughts with a full ha’reye beneath the Fortress and a restless, newly bound desert lord pacing around. Deiq distracted himself for a few moments by focusing his vision narrowly enough to track a single dust mote dancing along its erratic path, then widened his vision to take in the entire room without moving his eyes.
    Beside him, Alyea sighed deeply: he blinked back to human-normal vision in case she woke. She rolled closer; he moved an arm and let her tuck in against his side, his mouth quirking in a tired smile. Humans were so damn vulnerable . . . and so stupid at times. Even though he’d promised to protect and guide her, that left a lot of room for interpretation.
    He wouldn’t take that leeway, of course; but Alyea didn’t even understand that it existed.
    Not that she’d had much choice about his presence while she slept. She needed rest before the Conclave, and he wasn’t about to leave her alone again. Besides, the other options for companionship were as welcome as letting an asp-jacau chew his arm off.
    He watched her sleep, reflecting how much more pleasant she was to look at than the grimly suspicious stares of the other desert lords. Her dark hair was half undone from the sensible top-knot that kept desert heat from soaking the back of one’s neck with a continual layer of sweat. Deiq had bound his own hair in a simple tail; perspiring rarely became an issue for him. Alyea’s light clothing, however, already sported several tell-tale dark patches. In true summer it wouldn’t have been so bad, but the weather had begun edging towards the rainy season, and the ambient humidity was climbing rapidly.
    Deiq set his fingertips against Alyea’s temple and gently soothed her body temperature down until the rank sweat-smell faded. She sighed and rolled away again, one arm stretching up over her head and her lithe body twisting like a cat’s; his hands itched to touch her again, with much more than fingertip pressure this time.
    How many times before this have you fallen in love? she’d asked earlier, not understanding at all; and he hadn’t been able to bring himself to explain. She’d looked so hopeful , her dark eyes lit with an intensity he’d seen before; she was still young enough to be romantic, in spite of her insistence that roses wouldn’t mean anything to her.
    He sighed and kept his hands to himself. That would just complicate matters, at the moment. After the disaster her second blood trial had become, she needed extra time to heal—and not just physically.
    So let Alyea think he was in love with her for now. Humans needed that kind of security, and it didn’t really matter. She’d figure it out eventually. Until then, it was pleasant to have her quiet, innocent trust resting against the edges of his mind.
    He knew it wouldn’t last. It never did.
    Eyes half-shut, he watched the dust of decades swirl through shafts of reflected sunlight and listened to the song being sung at the other end of the Fortress.
    Joyfully accepting servitude to invisible forces: how could humans think that way? How could they not understand ?
    A sucking weariness passed through Deiq’s entire body for a moment, hazing his