needle of antler. She put the stuff down hastily, feeling foolish, and stood. She hoped she wasn’t actually blushing.
Ana, leaning heavily on her stick, was trying to stand. ‘It’s the Pretani, is it? We’ll go down the mound and greet our guests.’
‘No need.’ The Pretani woman took charge. She walked up the steps cut into the side of the mound and stood before Ana. ‘Giver. My father told me all about you. It’s an honour to meet you.’
‘Acorn?’ Ana reached out with a bent finger, and stroked the woman’s cheek, the line of her brow. ‘You are Acorn. You have your father’s cheekbones. I remember Shade’s cheekbones . . . And now you’re the Root of the Pretani. A woman!’
‘Much has changed.’
‘And for the better,’ Ana said firmly. ‘Thank you for speaking to me in my own tongue. That’s respectful of you. And you’ve come a long way.’
‘We came for our father,’ said the younger man, stepping forward. He put down his bag, and Dolphin could hear a rattle of bones.
‘Kirike.’ Ana’s face twisted into a smile and she held out her arms. Kirike came forward and embraced his aunt; he was a stocky man, built like his Pretani father, and he overwhelmed the slight, hunched woman. Ana reached back for Dolphin. ‘Come to me, child. You two haven’t see each other for much too long.’
So Dolphin came face to face with Kirike, the boy she’d grown to love as they grew up together, the man she’d lost in the great falling-out after the Pretani war. She felt fifteen again as the two of them stood there on the mound. ‘You haven’t changed.’ She touched his bearded cheek. ‘And yet you have. Does that make sense?’
‘No.’ He smiled. There were lines around his eyes and on his forehead, under a single kill scar. ‘But you always did talk in riddles.’
‘When we were young I thought you looked like your mother Zesi. Now you look more of a Pretani, like your father.’
‘Is that a bad thing?’
‘No. Because I can still see my Kirike in there, under all the years.’
He slapped his belly. ‘Under all the weight, you mean.’ He leaned forward, and said a few halting words in the tongue of Dolphin’s mother, the tongue of the True People from across the ocean. ‘You still smell of the sea.’
Dolphin laughed. ‘And you of the forest. You must meet my children. Four of them. All boys.’
He grinned. ‘I left my own litter at home. Three girls!’
She held his gaze for one more heartbeat. ‘What might have been?’
‘What indeed? But we must make the most of the world as we find it.’
‘Well,’ Ana barked, ‘that’s an attitude I’ve been arguing against my whole life, I must say.’ She hobbled forward to Kirike’s bag, poking it with her stick. ‘I take it this is the old man?’
‘Let me.’ Resin stepped forward, opened the bag, and picked out the Root’s skull to hand to Ana.
Ana took it carefully and touched one cheekbone with a bent fingertip. ‘Poor Shade! He was a good man, you know - better than the rest of you Pretani put together, and certainly better than his father and brother who were both little more than animals.’
Dolphin murmured, ‘Ana—’
‘No, it’s true, and it has to be said. If anybody deserved to be born into a better world it was him. I always thought, you know, that if he’d been born in Etxelur he’d have made a good priest. He had the right instinct about people.’ She glared at Sunta. ‘Shame you never met him, child. He might have taught you a few things.’ Carefully she handed the skull back to Kirike and turned her face to the sun, closing her streaming eyes. ‘It’s a beautiful day - best of the year so far. Why wait? Isn’t it a good enough day to lay poor old Shade down for his final sleep?’
Dolphin glanced at the Pretani. ‘It’s not the equinox yet, Ana. We haven’t arranged a proper ceremony, a procession—’
‘Well, I know that. But would Shade care?’ Ana turned to the Pretani. ‘From what I remember of your father—’
Acorn said, ‘You’re right, Ana. He was a warrior who longed for peace, a leader who longed for modesty. He wouldn’t want a great fuss.’
‘Yes.’ Ana reached out, and Acorn took her hands. ‘Just us, then, his family and those who knew him. Anyhow there’s time to change your mind; it will take me long enough to make my way to the Northern Barrage, curse