The Feverbird's Claw Read Free Page B

leered at her. Dark paint was spread across the nose and cheeks as if a big winged creature perched there. A hand tried to stuff some food into Moralin’s mouth. Moralin spit the food out and curled into a ball.
    In the nightmare she was running to her mother. Everything around her was turquoise, exactly the way the sky had looked from the top of the city wall when she was dangling in midair, seeing nothing but sky, feeling terror and the flickity-flick of soft rain against her face. In her nightmare Mother was not smiling and not frowning, but standing just beyond Moralin’s outstretched fingers. “Mamita,” Moralin called in the dream, even though she wasn’t a little girl anymore. “Mamita, wait.”
    â€œChagat!”
    Moralin flashed awake. She was sweating, and her bones ached. Her earlobe stung where the ring must have gotten torn out as she struggled. Slowly she opened her eyes to silver-pale dawn.
    â€œChagat.” The warrior poked at her with his snakestick. The strange word was rock-ugly. He had taken the bird mask off, and she could see his matted hair and glinting eyes. He shook the stick at her as if she might fight. Or cry out.
    In the fighting yard she had thought she liked fear, that fine, shimmering tightness when she could feel every muscle singing. But that fear wasn’t like this feeling, her breath fuzzy in her throat as though she had swallowed a mouthful of winged insects.
    After a moment he walked away, turning once to scowl at her. Moralin eased her breath out in a shaky sigh and scrunched her velee into a kind of pillow, twisting her fingers tenderly into the soft silk cloth. If she ever got home, she’d wear the velee and never complain. “The cloth saves us,” Old Tamlin often said to her. “It’s the only way.”
    She closed her eyes, but her mother was gone. The ground was like cold, lumpy bones under her hip, and the red glissim of the trees irritated her even when her eyes were closed. Deep in the woods a feverbird screamed.
    She groped in her pocket for the serenity stone she’d carried since her seventh year. In a small home ceremony Grandmother had put it into Moralin’s hand, saying, “Someday, my child, anyone who looks at you will see only smoothness.”
    She found the center, glossy from where her thumb had rubbed it. From Old Tamlin, she had learned that you could be perfectly still even with insects crawling on you. Who would want to look around an Arkera camp anyway?
    At home her family would be waking up to the smell of festival foods, to joy cries and the fine harmonies of the chants floating out from the temple. How could she have ever been angry with her mother? If she could just get home, she would never quarrel with anyone again.
    The night air was cold. Had anything harmed her while she slept outside under the angry eye of the pale moon? Cautiously she rubbed her aching feet against each other. Her legs were sore, too. Everything hurt. She lifted the serenity stone to her lips and whispered, “I wish I were dead.”
    Instantly she was afraid. Delagua girls had died yesterday. Wait, Cora Linga, she thought. Don’t listen to my foolishness. I didn’t mean it. Could Cora Linga hear her? By now Moralin was far away from the temple where the Great Ones lived.
    She tried not to think about what might be breathing in the red forest. Grandmother told haunting stories of forest creatures that tore people to pieces hundreds of years ago when the Delagua had roamed this area, living in tents, fighting the Arkera for food and scarce water. That was before the city with its comforting, thick wall. Before a mysterious messenger of the Great Ones gave a Delagua royalborn the secret of making silk cloth, cloth that felt like water rippling in a person’s hands, cloth so sumptuous that caravans came from faraway kingdoms to trade for it. People whispered that the thread came from the fuzz of special