joined his sisters at the windows. “I never heard a storm like this before,” Sayree said.
“Me, either!” Karah sang out.
Eriff threw open the window and peeked outside. Clouds raced across a clearing sky. Thunder boomed again, roaring. Screeching.
The small house shook on its very foundation. It sounded as if the sky was tearing open. Eriff’s heart bounced with the thrill of it. Then a shadow passed over the house.
“Look!” He came up on his toes as an enormous, gleaming starship descended toward the horizon. Ribbons of white clouds trailed behind it. It was going to land! “Father! Is it a Coalition ship?”
“Yes.”
Eriff wasn’t sure what they’d have done if the answer had been otherwise. If the Drakken had come, it would be to slaughter them all. They had no mercy, no religion. While the Coalition worshipped the Goddess and all Her descendants, the Drakken were nonbelievers. His mother told him it was why they’d split from the Coalition long ago. His father said the Drakken Empire had spent nearly every year since trying to invade the Holy Keep on Sakka and take the goddess-queen in a real-life game of Sech.
Eriff’s mother answered a banging at the front door. Rion, chief of the planetary watch, stormed in. “Visitors, Deklan. We’re mobilizing!”
Eriff’s father was already pulling on his boots. “Who are they, where are they headed and what do they want?”
“Coalition deep-space patrol ship. Eastern quadrex. Don’t know yet. They stopped answering questions after we exchanged the basics.” Rion shrugged. “Or maybe our radios just weren’t too good.”
“Are they ever? We’d better cobble together a welcome delegation and hightail it out to the landing site. Otherwise they’ll think we’re a bunch of backward rimmers.”
“We are backward rimmers,” Eriff’s mother pointed out.
His father pulled her close for a quick kiss. “No need to shout that fact.” He tucked a hunting knife into his belt, and a flashlight. Then he forked a slab of grilled eel into a piece of flatbread, splashed on some hot sauce, rolled it all up and stuck it in his hip pouch. “I’ll be back later with all the news.”
Eriff grabbed his bow and arrows and ran to the door.
“Where are you going?”
“I’m off to hunt.” And hunt he would. He’d hunt the off-worlders. He wanted to see what they were made of, these ship-dwellers, these folk from the central worlds. The land of Sech and goddesses. And he’d do it all without their knowing. No one on Sandreem could move through the forest as silently as he could.
“You haven’t eaten dinner.” Suppressing a smile, his mother set a plate of food under his nose. With one whiff of the aroma, all thoughts of starships vanished. He sat down hard and dug in.
There was only one thing Eriff loved more than Sech, and that was food. Each bite was its own wonder—the contrasting tang of the spices and the textures; the crunch of cuttle-squash, the moist, smoky flesh of the grilled eel; the sweetness of grass ale with the sour aftertaste that made his cheeks ache.
When he was finished, he made the sign of the goddess over his heart, thanking Her. “And you too, Mama.” Then he grabbed his gear and ran outside.
This time of year the sun hung low in the sky all night. Everything was bathed in soft, pink-orange light. Eriff’s feet bounced soundlessly off the spongy forest floor as he raced along narrow, shadowy paths secret to everyone else but him. Drowsy tree barrets chirruped. Water left over from the rains fell from huge, furry icquit leaves high above, landing with a plop, plop, plop sound that soon drowned in the noise coming from the spaceship in the clearing.
He stopped short. The craft was huge—bigger than twenty or thirty cottages. Impossible that it could get off the ground! But he’d seen it fly. It was white, blinding white, and triangular: heavy-looking with stubby wings. But in the air it had looked so graceful. It reminded him of the ancient rays that glided below the waves of the inland sea but that flopped clumsily when stranded on the beach.
Something stank—metallic and hot. The cooling engines. A sneeze pushed up his nose but he swallowed it, his eyes watering. To get a better view, he shimmied up the trunk of a tree, springing from branch to branch like a whip-tailed conifox. Crouched low, he waited for the ship’s crew to greet the group of Sandreemers just now arriving at the ship.
His father and the others nervously smoothed their