Tortall (16 page)

He would be cast from the flock, from the great family of crows. The Rajmuat flock would drive him away, and the flock of his blood family back on Lombyn Isle. He could imagine their beaks tearing at his flesh, their claws digging into his hair and back.

He lifted Ochobai and stood. It would be better if he did it right away. If he used the fountain, he could tell Aly the baby had slipped from his hands.…

Aly.

If he culled one of their children, she would never forgive him. Even if he made it look like an accident. He had tried not to lie to Aly, who had the magical Gift of Seeing lies and other things. The fact that he was a crow confused her Gift; sometimes he
could
lie to her, but he didn’t know if he could do such a big lie without her detection.

It didn’t matter if Aly could See his lie or not. It would be in his heart, rotting away his love for her. How could he give up Aly of the sparkly eyes and glittering smile, Aly of the dancing hands and feet? That was the way he had first seen her, tending a flock of goats. The stubble of hair on her head had shone red-gold in the sun. She moved like a butterfly. She joked with him as if they were friends before he ever changed his shape. She was so much more than a human who treated a crow with respect, even at the start.

Nawat turned away from garden, fountain, and colonnade. Aly would not believe that Nawat was foolish enough to take the baby into the rain, or so slow that Ochobai would drown before he pulled her from the water.

He would cull Ochobai properly, from the nest. He could say he was sleepy and forgot the jars, so he took her to the window. It would be quick, quicker than Keeket. He would stay a proper crow, and lose his mate.

Small fists dug at his chest as he climbed the stairs from ground floor to third. Nawat looked down into Ochobai’s face. She had gone quiet as she struck him over and over. Did she know what he planned to do?

She looked no different from Ulasu and Junim as they
explored something of interest. Ochobai’s interest just now seemed to lie in pummeling her father. She did it with determination.

She does everything with determination, thought Nawat. Like Aly.

He ground his teeth together, forcing himself not to think of Ochobai as anything but a nestling with a disease that would be a problem to the flock. He would be helping her. Perhaps she cried so much from pain in her bones, though the midwife said she was healthy. As far as the midwife, Aly, and every other human were concerned, Nawat would be killing a perfectly normal baby.

Ochobai looked up at him and made a sound. She screwed her face up in a yawn. Nawat stopped, her beauty stabbing him all the way through the heart. Ochobai was his favorite, though he wasn’t supposed to have one. From the beginning he was the only person of all the triplets’ attendants who could quiet Ochobai mid-tantrum. He loved her from her downy puff of dark hair to the tiny nails on her hands and feet. Her grip on his finger was more ferocious than that of her brother and sister, the power in her lungs more piercing even than that of Terai’s older baby. How could he drop this pink nestling, his first, sixty feet to the hard stone flags of Moon Orchid Walk?

She woke him up when he’d come home from missions for the queen, tired of flight, and tired of humans. She spat her mother’s milk in his face, on his clothes, in his hair. When she had filled a diaper, she smelled horrible. She had gotten baby dung on his hands and chest. In the bath, she splashed
so much that she got soapy water in his eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. She hated every toy he gave her.

The guards let them inside the rooms. Everyone was still asleep: Ochobai had not roused them by screaming for her midnight meal.

Nor did she now. She did need the jar—or the window, Nawat thought, his gut in a knot. Do it now, while it is quiet, while no one is awake. Before the Rajmuat flock knows I have not culled her.

Taking her blanket and diaper off, he looked inside her again. There was the wrongness: the part that made all of him that was a crow want to shriek and claw. It battered against his rib cage, demanding that he cull this malformed nestling
now
. It was flock law; it was
crow
law.

Nawat was sprouting feathers as he carried Ochobai to the window farthest from the sleeping women and the door to Aly’s room. He ignored them and the claws that formed at the tips of his fingers. Holding the nestling in one arm, he pulled the mosquito net aside with the other and leaned over the stone sill.

He was about to stretch out the arm with the nestling when Ochobai grabbed two fistfuls of chest feathers and gave them her hardest yank. The crow-man looked at his nestling. Ochobai met his gaze. She yanked his feathers again without looking away.

The crow did not think of his mate. It was Nawat who saw those fearless baby eyes. Did Ochobai even know what he intended to do? How could she, an infant barely two months old?

If he killed her, he would be killing the baby who was
already showing a stubborn streak equal to her mother’s. He would kill the daughter who slept between him and Aly more often than her siblings, because she was calmer with her parents. He thought of those small punches to his nose and his eyes again, but they were not insults. They were Ochobai, fighting two other babies to be the first into the world.

He held her with both hands. “You’re not going to be wrong,” he whispered. “Different, yes. Many of the dwarfs are different, and they have lives and families and work. They are no stranger than merpeople or Stormwings or centaurs. You will need to be a fighter.” He cuddled her against his chest. “I am a fool. I cannot undo what I have become, no more than your mother can un-bear you.”

A trickle of wetness down his leg told Nawat he had brought Ochobai inside before she had done the business
she
, at least, was there for. “I am well served,” he said, kissing the crown of her head. “If I gave you a fright, you have paid me back.” He realized that when he’d had his change of heart his feathers had retreated. Only Ochobai still clung to a few. “You have paid me back
royally,
” Nawat murmured with a wince, feeling sore spots where she had ripped the feathers from his chest. He carried her back to her crib for cleaning with the diaper he had not thought she would need again.

When she was tidy, Nawat carried the naked infant into his bedroom. Aly was awake instantly. Smelling the milk on her mother’s nightgown, Ochobai began to fuss.

“Oh, poor baby,” Aly murmured, holding out her arms. “I’ll take her, Nawat.” As soon as Ochobai began to nurse, Nawat washed off Ochobai’s urine. Once he was clean, he
got into the bed with a burping cloth in one hand and a clean diaper in the other.

“I’m sorry about … before,” Aly murmured. “So very sorry. I’m all at odds and ends. It seems as if I take it out on you because what you say touches me in places where I have no defenses.”

“Hush,” Nawat said, putting a finger to her lips. “I have something you must know, something that will touch you there, and not because of me. Ochobai, Aly. She will not be like Ulasu or Junim. She will be a dwarf.”

Aly looked up at him, her eyes wide in the dark. Through the open door to the nursery, Nawat glimpsed a maid as she lit several lamps. Junim and Ulasu had begun to wail for a meal. Terai and the other wet nurse moved to the cradles as Nawat watched.

“There’s no sign,” Aly said at last, her voice soft in the dark. “Mistress Penolong said nothing. She did enough spells over my womb while I was carrying. Surely she would know.”

“Sometimes it does not show for years,” Nawat replied as the other triplets went quiet outside. “But crows—we know when a nestling will not fledge into an adult like all the rest. We always know.”

“And then you throw them out of the nest, or drop them to the ground, like Keeket,” Aly said. She slid a hand under her pillow, where she always kept a dagger. “You
cull
them.”

“Yes,” Nawat said calmly, keeping his eyes on the scene in the nursery. He had not forgotten that Aly was a dangerous woman. He had to trust her. “Humans will allow a child
that is not perfect, or
some
humans will.” He thought of the tiny baby that had died in a cold winter, buried without witnesses. “I thought I was a good crow, fit for the Rajmuat flock. Instead I am only a crow fit for my own war band, and for you, I hope.”

Aly looked at him. He could feel it, coming from her, the special attention that was her magical Gift. She was trying to See if he lied. “But you will be cast out,” she said.

Nawat dared to stroke his daughter’s soft hair. Aly did not stop him. That was a good sign.

“I will be cast out of the great, cruel Rajmuat flock,” he said. “My war band has faced it, and so will I. We can live with that. It would kill me to lose Aly and my favorite daughter.”

“You’re not supposed to have favorites!” she whispered softly. “You’re supposed to love them all equally!” She slid her hand out from under her pillow with a sigh. “Maybe when you get to know the other two better,” she suggested.

Ochobai had finished her snack. She pinched her mother’s breast to let her know that.

“A dwarf,” Aly said, and kissed her daughter’s forehead. “We will learn, then, all of us. We’ll teach you to
keep
fighting.” She handed the baby to Nawat. “We’ll bring other dwarfs into this household. And no one will mock you for who you are.”

“They will,” Nawat said as he placed Ochobai against his shoulder. “Humans are like crows in that way. Ochobai will teach them better.” He patted her back.

Ochobai belched wetly onto the cloth.

*     *     *

In the morning, Nawat went to the crow barracks to tell his war band he, too, would soon be outcast. He wanted to give them a last chance to leave if they still cared to go. He also wanted to make certain none of them would try to cull his firstborn. He took Ochobai with him, because she began to scream when he tried to leave her behind. Now he waited for his band’s response with the baby in the curve of his arm. He watched each of the born crows, daring them silently to utter a word about his dwarf child.

Instead Bala looked at another of the born humans. “You lose,” she said. “Pay up.” She held out her hand.

The man grumbled and dug in his purse until he found six coins, all of which he set on her palm. “We had a wager on,” he explained to Nawat as other members of the band handed over coins to Bala and one of the other women. “Bunch of us thought you’d get yourself made outcast over Lady Aly. These two thought it’d be one of the babies.” He nodded at the pair who were taking in money.

“Did no one bet on me remaining a crow in flock standing?” asked Nawat, outraged.

All of his people looked at him and shook their heads slowly. “We
are
a bit worried about the Rajmuat flock coming after us, though,
lurah,
” his second-in-command told Nawat. “They can be real nasty.”

Nawat bounced his daughter, who cackled. “I’m going to talk it over with them,” he explained. “I have a bargain I’ll offer. The Rajmuat flock leaves us be, and we don’t hire mages to witch the roosting trees.”

Everyone gaped at him. Roosting trees were sacred. “You’d
do
that?” Bala asked, eyes wide.

Nawat grinned at her and then at Ochobai. “I’m a crow, aren’t I? Cousin to the Trickster God himself.” He lifted his daughter in the air and wriggled her until she drooled on him. “We’re
both
crows.”

Suddenly the crows of the war band began to caw in triumph. The humans jumped to their feet, waving and pointing. In all the fuss, Nawat finally understood he was to look at the back of Ochobai’s head.

A small quill had sprouted there, the sign of a nestling’s first feather.

Bored. I was bored, bored, bored. If I could speak in the human tongues I heard below, I could have made “bored” into a chant. I hated it that I could not speak to humans or animals. I could not even speak mind-to-mind, as Mama Daine does with the beast-People. Many humans called me a mindless animal or even a monster. It made me want to claw them head to toe, though I am not that sort in general. If I could talk to them, they would know I was intelligent and friendly. I could walk among them and explain myself. Instead I had to sit up on this overlook, waiting for my foster parents to introduce me to yet another village full of humans who had never met a dragon before.

I could have stayed in the realms of the gods with Daine and Numair’s human children and their grandparents instead of coming here. I could have spent these long days playing with them and the god animals. I could have even visited my own relatives. Instead I thought that it would be fun to visit Carthak with my foster parents. Thak City and the palaces, new and old, were interesting. Humans create pretty buildings. The Carthakis in particular make splendid mosaics. There were ships to see, statues, fireworks, human
magic displays, and the emperor and his empress. I liked the onetime princess Kalasin, who was empress at that time.