and she could feel her old-bones weariness melt with anticipation of hearing it.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a breeze of children bearing three bowls of water among them, one for each of the returning Quraiters: Akashia, Ruari, and Yohan. There no water for the stranger, who was not yet a part of the community or its traditions.
Brawny humans suffered almost as much as half-giants in the Fist of the Sun. The stranger’s thirst hung like an aura around him, an aura she observed closely through her veil. He stood still, like the kanks, while the others drank, giving away nothing of his inner character.
A strange stranger, indeed, if he could watch mouthfuls of water splash and vanish in the dirt without blinking his eyes or running a pasty tongue over salt-cracked lips.
Where had Kashi found him?
And though she’d kept the question strictly within her own thoughts, Kashi looked her way before returning her half-full bowl to the children. Kashi pointed them in the stranger’s direction and gave them a gentle shove before coming over.
“I have brought a stranger to Quraite, Grandmother,” she said in the formal tones the occasion required. “He calls himself Just-Plain Pavek. He acted without thinking to save Ruari’s life during—”
“He’s no stranger! He’s a templar!” Ruari interrupted, surging between the just-named Pavek and the children, knocking the bowl out of their hands before the stranger got anything to drink. “A street-scum, filthy, yellow-robe templar. Don’t trust him, Grandmother. Send him away before he brings more disasters on us. Put him beneath the trees!”
She felt a gasp of horror and revulsion ripple through her community. Ruari’s snarling, desperate face blocked her view of Pavek, but sidelong glances at Akashia and Yohan confirmed the basic truth of the youth’s angry words. The pieces fell into place: the scars, the resignation, the apathy on the smooth, hard surface of his mind.
It was easy to think of templars as beasts; they thought of each other, and themselves, that way.
But Akashia had brought him here, and Yohan had permitted it. “Why?” she whispered, unable to purge the shock and outrage from her voice. “What place can there be for a templar in Quraite?”
“A former templar, Grandmother. A fugitive.” Akashia replied in an uncertain voice. “The templarate put a forty-gold-piece price on his head because he’s seen our zarneeka powder transformed into something he calls ‘Laq’—”
Her ancient heart stuttered, and she heard the rest of Akashia’s words with half an ear. Laq… older than the oldest trees, older than King Hamanu or his square, high-walled city, the syllable-sound awakened sadness and fear in Quraite’s guardian spirit. Zarneeka bushes had survived since the days of abundant water in the shade of the trees Telhami and her predecessors nurtured. As the trees had spread, zameeka had spread, too, until there was enough to share with the downtrodden and aching folk of Urik, who called it Ral’s Breath. But Laq, like the delicate yellow flower of her dreams, had been forgotten.
Until now.
Who had dredged Laq from its well-deserved grave?
Hamanu?
The Lion-King had the skills and the inclination to wrest the dark secrets from the dilute powder called Ral’s Breath, but if he or his defiler-minions had done so, they would have given their seductive poison a self-celebrating Urikite name.
“Grandmother—? Grandmother—?” Akashia knelt quickly, her wind-blown hair trailing on the ground before her. “I’m sorry, Grandmother. It seemed as if he told the truth; at least he believes he tells the truth. I thought—I thought you should hear him yourself, see him yourself. It’s my fault. Mine alone. Ruari never trusted him, not for a moment”
She rested gnarled hands gently atop the younger woman’s head. Of course Ruari had not trusted the stranger. Ruari couldn’t look at a human man without thinking of his father, and when that human man was also a templar the hatred redoubled. No matter that this Pavek was much too young to have been the yellow-robed scum who’d ravished Ruari’s elfin mother and left her for dead in the midden-heaps outside Urik’s walls.
That man was long dead. Ghazala’s kin might have shunned her while she carried her ill-gotten son, but they’d avenged her promptly. For Ghazala and the rest of the Moonrace tribe, it was over, forgotten. For Ruari, the hatred had begun at the moment of his lonely birth and was entwined in his own flesh, neither wholly elf nor human. It wouldn’t end for Ruari until he accepted himself—which Telhami did not expect to see, even if she lived to