The Feverbird's Claw Read Free Page A

inside the closed gates of the city. Hurry. But by now, with the rains over for the day, the city would be full of street noise. And the gates swung open only to let soldiers in and out. Still, Old Tamlin would soon know she was gone. And then? And then he would come after her. Until then? Pay attention. Manage your fear.
    Before long they were surrounded by strange and twisted trees. In temple tapestries Moralin had seen such reddish trunks and thick branches. She looked around. Only the young—three boys, four girls—had been taken. Everyone else must be dead. She saw now that their captors wore bird masks. They carried spears and sticks carved with the writhing bodies of snakes. In her dry throat, her sand breath caught. These had to be Arkera. Age-old enemies of the Delagua.
    They walked and then ran and then walked some more. The Arkera warrior men pushed or hit them every time they slowed down, every time someone stumbled. One boy fell and didn’t get up. A warrior bent over him, and Moralin called out the beginning of a war chant to block out the thump of the spear, the gasps of death.
    The survivors had to walk faster, faster. Darkness opened its wide mouth and swallowed them. After a while the ugly moon rose to glower down with its unblinking eye—white, the color of restless and malevolent spirits. She covered her head the best she could.
    They lost their shoes. Their feet bled. “Mercy.” The girl with patterned fingers raised them in a pleading gesture. She and her friend with the black and gold belt crouched like baby birds, their weeping mouths helpless and open. A warrior tried to force them up, but they refused. He raised his spear.
    â€œNo!” Moralin tried to leap at him, but hands grabbed her, dragging her on.
    On and on. Churning with rage, she staggered forward, cowering under the moon’s terrible gaze. One of the warriors was carrying Salla as if she were a sack of grain, but no one gave Moralin an arm to cling to. Only four prisoners left. She would have been dead already if she had been weak—if she had spent her childhood hours at the weaving loom and dye pots as her mother wanted. Thanks to Old Tamlin and praise the Great Ones, she was not weak.
    When the moon was low in the western sky, they reached a clearing. A mass of Arkera swarmed out carrying flaming sticks, their naked faces horrible. In the whirlpool of sound and motion, Moralin struggled to stay on her feet. Beside her, one of the boys fell.
    She tried to reach out to him, but she was swept along, and in a moment she and the two others were in the middle of a swirling circle. Salla, her dark hair plastered to her face, was weeping. A warrior man, his bird mask fierce, stepped toward her, but a man in a thick cloak made of fern green feathers lifted his hand, and a woman dragged Salla away.
    Moralin grabbed the arm of the young boy who stood beside her, but he just whimpered with a look of dazed horror. She saw a smear of blood on one side of his mouth.
    Arkera women began to circle. One was chanting with a high, wild sound. Every time she went by, she flicked Moralin across the legs with a whippy stick that stung through Moralin’s thin dress. On the third time Moralin waited for her, listening for the voice. An instant before the woman got to her, she reached out, jerked away the stick, and threw it on the ground. The woman howled and jumped toward her.
    Moralin heard Old Tamlin giving instructions. She danced a step backward, whispering, “By Cora Linga, may I die fighting,” and flipped the woman to the ground.
    The circling stopped.
    I’m finished, she thought. Now they’ll kill me.
    The silence lasted five breaths.
    The man in the green cloak laughed, a short, crazed burst of sound. Then everyone was laughing. Moralin smelled the crush of bodies, fought the cloth they pulled over her nose. Everything blurred.
    Sometime later she felt a pinch and opened her eyes. A scowling face