Tortall (15 page)

He crossed his arms over his chest, feeling as stubborn as his mate. “Crow nestlings go outside the nest. Those diaper things are a filthy habit. And they smell. I am sorry Ochobai splooted on the secretary next to the ambassador.”

“There’s another thing,” she said, ignoring his apology. “You’ve been holding our children out the window all this time?”

“Only when no one sees.”

“Are you
mad
?” Aly demanded. “What if your hold slipped? Our nestlings would be as dead as poor little Keeket from this height!” She frowned. “Actually, I’m surprised you got the ambassador’s secretary from so high.”

Nawat beamed. “Ochobai has very good aim,” he explained. “She doesn’t even foul the outside of the nest.”

Aly started to grin, then glared at him again. “This isn’t funny!”

“No, it’s important,” Nawat agreed. “It shows her muscles are healthy.
She
is healthy.”

“She can be healthy in diapers, like a normal child,” Aly retorted.

“My children must be crows!” Nawat cried, his voice harsh. “They must learn the things that crows learn when I am with them! You knew this when we married, Aly! They
may look like humans, but they are half
crow
!” He was so upset that he began to sprout feathers: they itched and pulled under his clothes and dragged at his hair until they fought their way free.

“Crows!” he shouted, and left her. He would not make sense once he got so angry. Had she forgotten the Rajmuat flock? Did she want that fate for their nestlings, or for him?

Sometimes it is hard to be married to Aly, he told himself, not for the first time, as he ran downstairs and outside. Barely acknowledging the guards, he stalked through a gate in the Royal Enclosure. Sometimes she forgets that we are not her Tortall family. I cannot turn myself into a human knight or a human spymaster like her parents. At least Dove is only upset because we soiled a foreigner.

He turned down the path to the small lake near the Royal Enclosure. The beautiful pavilions that stood in the three coves held no interest for him. Instead he found a rock that stood over the turtle beach and sat there until dark, nibbling grasshoppers, dragonflies, and beetles as he watched the fish. Aly would never let him eat beetles at home; she said the way they crunched gave her the shivers.

When he saw the lamplighters come down the paths, Nawat rose and stretched with a sigh. His feathers were gone, had been gone for two hours at least. Ochobai was probably crying for him right now. She usually napped after her late-afternoon pee, and when she woke, after she’d fed, she wanted her father, even if she did hit him. Junim would be circled by cooing maids, while the darkings cuddled
Ulasu—if they did not actually talk to her. It was time to see if Aly still wanted him as a mate.

He certainly did not expect what he found in the nursery. Aly was directing the maids in the placement of three big pottery jars, one next to each crib. She looked at Nawat and smiled ruefully.

“Sometimes I am so busy quarreling that I forget there is always a solution, if I take time to think,” she said with a blush. “I don’t know how you can put up with such a difficult wife. Will these do? It isn’t the same as dangling our children out the window—but really, isn’t this safer?”

Nawat looked from her to the jars. They were wide-mouthed and glazed, with handles for the maids to grip. With care, he could hold the nestlings over them easily.

He went over to his wife and kissed her well. “You are so clever,” he murmured as the nursery women sighed romantically. Then Ochobai began to scream. Nawat laughed and went to pick up his daughter.

The queen was a woman of her word. She issued a number of orders for Nawat’s band that could as well have been handled by the army or navy. The group went up the coast or out to tiny islands that were marked only on the most precise maps. As if to help the queen prove that the father responsible for the Tyran secretary’s embarrassment would be well punished, the belated rainy season began. The crows were forced to ride or sail with the humans or risk being blown out to sea. Generally Nawat’s humans considered the little tasks a very good joke, but the crows still fretted about the danger of outcast status. They sulked.

“
We
have no babies to show the world we are teaching
them crow ways,” Nawat heard one of his people say to another.

“We could sit on the palace roof and mate-feed each other,” suggested her friend. “But will that be enough? How do we know they’re watching?”

Nawat pretended to ignore them. He asked himself the same questions, and he had no answers. To help put an end to the unpleasant trips, he presented the humiliated secretary with ten precious yards of a silk woven on only one of the Isles, a hard-to-get and expensive gift. It was pronounced a suitable apology by the ambassador, and the war band was allowed to relax.

On a rare day at home, Nawat decided not to eat the last of a worm snack. Instead, while Aly was in her office near the queen’s rooms, and the nursery women were cleaning, he took Junim into the bedroom to play. The boy was alert and fascinated by the new toy his father took from his pocket. He giggled and swiped at the thrashing worm that Nawat dangled over his head.

“Catch, Junim,” Nawat whispered. “Catch the treat!”

A couple of the darkings provided comments.

“Too low.”

“Almost had it that time.”

“Uh-oh.”

Nawat thought “uh-oh” was a grab that almost got the worm until the darkings shot out of the bedroom. Without turning to face his mate, Nawat said, “Would you like it? I’m full.”

When she said nothing, Nawat added, “I know they
aren’t supposed to have anything but mother’s milk. I wasn’t feeding, only playing.”

Aly’s sigh made his heart hurt. “I didn’t think it would be this hard. I thought, the longer you were with me, the more you would be …”

A coal of anger started to burn in his heart. When she did not finish her sentence, he said, “Go on. You thought I’d be more human by now.” He called for his feathers in his hair and along his bare arms. When he did it on purpose, he could control how much change took place and where. Junim gasped as the long shafts grew from Nawat’s scalp and skin. The infant’s face crinkled. He grinned hugely, showing pink gums, and reached not for the worm, but for his father. Nawat turned to look at his wife, tilted his head back like a bird, and dropped the worm down his gullet.

Aly walked out.

Picking up Junim, Nawat grimaced as he swallowed the worm. Just now he would pull out a wing feather before he would admit it to Aly, but he really preferred to eat things as a human. The taste was much better when he could chew and savor. Bouncing the boy in his arms, Nawat carried him into the nursery and turned him over to Terai. Even though Ochobai was crying, Nawat left the rooms.

He bedded down with his war band that night. No one said a word about it. He worked on his own gear, sharpening the weapons he used as a human and oiling his leathers. He looked around at every squeak, thinking it was one of the triplets demanding attention—it was an annoying habit he had developed since their birth. He tried to sleep in the
barracks, but every time he closed his eyes, he thought he heard Ochobai’s cranky wail. Instead he changed to crow shape and took a turn at rooftop watch, despite the rain that poured from the skies. Even the weather couldn’t distract him from his family.

When the next member of the band flew up to relieve him, Nawat didn’t return to the barracks. Instead he flew straight to the Royal Enclosure. The mosquito nets on the windows of their room and around their bed were up, but the bed was made and unwrinkled. Nawat changed into human form and went to the clothespress where the drying cloths were kept.

“Aly working,” Trick said from its bowl home over the bed. “Aly told me go away. She in bad mood. Are you in bad mood?”

Nawat sighed as he dried himself off. “I’m in a crow mood, Trick.” It was a lie. Crows didn’t get depressed unless a mate or a nestling died. Only humans got depressed over emotions.

Trick squeaked. “Crows drop darkings from high up!”

“It’s not that kind of crow mood. Don’t worry about it.” Nawat went to a shelf for a sarong and picked one from the stack. When it didn’t even cover his behind, he realized he’d gone to the diaper shelf without thinking. He folded the diaper carefully and replaced it, then went to the right shelf, for the right clothes. Normally he could manage well in the dark, even with human eyes, because he remembered where everything was. “Is she getting tired of me, Trick?”

“No fair,” Trick said testily. “No fair, talk about Aly like that.”

Nawat combed his wet hair back from his face with his fingers. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

He was almost to the nursery door when he heard the darking say, “Nawat good friend to Aly. Aly good friend to Nawat. Everyone grumpy during rains.”

The darking’s words struck Nawat near the heart. The little creatures only gave advice when they cared deeply about the recipients.

“You’re a good friend to us, too,” he said at last, when he had mastered his voice. He opened the nursery door.

Just two shaded lamps were lit. Everyone was sleeping, not a state he wanted to interrupt. The one thing the entire Crow household had agreed upon, that first week after the triplets were born, was that sleep was sacred. The infants left them few unbroken periods of it, so all of them napped when they could.

Nawat heard a stirring of body and cloth, then the slightest indrawn breath. Without a sound he dashed to Ochobai’s crib. Her eyes were open and so was her mouth. “You knew your da had come, didn’t you?” His voice was barely audible in his own ears as he picked her up and checked her diaper with an expert hand. She was dry, a miracle of its own.

He wrapped her loosely in her warmest blanket, the rains having chilled the air. Rather than wake anyone, he sprouted a feather, plucked it with a wince, and left it in the cradle to let the nursery workers know who had the baby. He covered Ochobai’s mouth on her first angry yell and trotted out of the rooms with her. Only after the guards closed the
front door behind them did Nawat take away his hand to free Ochobai’s furious wails.

“Good lungs.” One of the guards was Bala. “She might be a herald one day.”

The other guard chuckled. “Any howler monkey in your bloodlines, sir?”

Nawat grinned and carried Ochobai away from the residential part of the Gray Palace, down the stairs, and out into a colonnade that overlooked the garden between palace and temples. The torches gave scant light to the trees and buildings beyond, but he could hear the falling rain and smell grass and wet dirt. Ochobai sobbed briefly against her father’s shoulder and fell quiet. She gripped a fistful of his hair and yanked.

Nawat bore the painful tug. “You’re an ungrateful little sploot,” he said, giving her the war band’s name for dung and pee shot out of the nest. “All you do is hit me, scream in my ear, burp mother’s milk on my clothes, pull my feathers, pull my hair.…”

Ochobai flailed the hand that gripped his hair, tugging it back and forth.

“Junim and Ulasu are
glad
to see me,” Nawat said. “They smile. They do cute things. They blow little bubbles. You punched me in the eye once. More than once.” He was getting that feeling again, the wrong feeling. It came from his little girl. It was inside her, the wrongness. Now that he was alone with her, without distractions, two months after her birth, he felt it cleanly. It was the sense he had always gotten from Keeket, the one that had made him want to cull the nestling.

Slowly Nawat slid to the foot of the inside colonnade wall, his legs in front of him. He placed Ochobai on his thighs, holding her with his hands curved around her sides. For once she remained quiet, willing to look around at the torches and her father.

Nawat bent over her, letting his crow senses spread through his nestling. He closed his eyes as he found what was wrong not now, but in its seeds at the heart of her bones and organs. Spread through her tiny body, Nawat followed the ghostly path of her future shape.

It would go slowly, so very slowly. She might be ten or fourteen when she stopped growing at the height her brother and sister would be at the age of eight or nine. He saw the curves that would develop in her leg and arm bones, the way her hands would get heavy, the cage her ribs would form for her organs.

He had seen the dwarfs of the human world. One served Queen Dove as keeper of her birds. Others performed with the Players who kept her court entertained at state dinners. He’d seen two of them begging in the street on his arrival in Rajmuat. Later he’d learned that both were spies for Dove’s rebels. A family of cloth merchants in the city had two dwarfs in their shops, a weaver and a little boy.

Something about the shape of Ochobai’s future bones made him remember the winter after he’d taken man shape to court Aly. He was living in Tanair village with Falthin the bowyer. Across the street, the miller’s daughter gave birth in February to the tiniest of babies, one that weighed barely two pounds. For all its size, the baby was fully developed,
not one of the unfortunates who came before its time. It was simply … very small, and very wrong. Nawat had stayed away from it. He’d feared he might peck it, though it was not his nestling or his responsibility.

It had died suddenly, two weeks after it was born. The family buried it after dark, with no priest to say words. Nawat had always wondered if they had done a human kind of culling, killing the baby before it grew, but no one ever spoke of it again. Even its mother said nothing, once she began to appear in public.

That baby had been wrong from birth, as crows saw it. From the patterns in Ochobai’s body and bones, it might be a year or two before a human mage realized that she did not grow well. With crows, it would be different. Nawat was her father. It stood to reason that he would be the first to pin down the wrongness in his daughter. But in a matter of months, perhaps only weeks, other crows would begin to feel it. They would know that Ochobai had to be culled. They would wonder why Nawat had not taken care of it, when she was in his nest. They would look at the dwarfs of the city, working and playing, having children, and they would know that Nawat was acting like a human, not a crow.