which Kira had closed. She stood in front of it as awkwardly as a kid caught after curfew.
“How soon can you leave?” Lysander’s pointed gaze indicated Ryon’s wound. “Can you travel?”
“Nice to see you too,” Ryon muttered. Maybe Lysander had gotten better at reading lips since they’d last seen each other. How long had it been? A year? But his cousin looked ten years older.
Ryon considered the shortest way to phrase his answer. “We will leave as soon as we can.”
Lysander tilted his head, then pulled off his right glove one finger at a time. He signed, “We?”
Ryon made a point not to look at Kira. Surely she couldn’t understand their sign language—the Malaano probably had their own series of gestures to communicate with their deaf. The tribes tended to just use symbols for each letter and spell everything out in the air. Signing a single sentence took forever.
Which might have been one reason why Lysander was so angry all the time. So the fact that he seemed afraid instead unsettled Ryon more than the urgency to get them to leave.
“She’s with me,” Ryon signed.
Lysander raised an eyebrow. “With?”
Ryon wasn’t about to go down that rabbit hole. “You cut your ears.” He noticed. Lysander’s hair was long enough to dangle in his eyes, but his ears poked through to reveal pointed tips: the tribal tradition to identify someone who couldn’t hear.
Their family had decided it was a barbaric practice and that Lysander wouldn’t go through with it when he’d suddenly lost the majority of his ability to hear two years ago. Maybe Lysander had finally come to terms with the loss.
“It wasn’t my decision or my choice,” Lysander murmured. Then he signed, “You prefer Malo girls, huh? If you like her, you shouldn’t have brought her here.”
Ryon felt his neck flush as he pieced the letters together. He glanced at Kira, but she looked as clueless as ever. “I’m just escorting her to Jadenvive,” he signed.
“Right.” Lysander looked back at Kira. “You should leave for the Roanoke immediately. They have a camp due east, on the Mossu River.”
“Roanoke?” Ryon glanced between the two of them, wondering what they could possibly want from the small tribe of religious river-folk. He began to sign the question, but Kira cut him off.
“He thinks they might have medicine that could cure my mother.” The hope in Kira’s eyes shone, innocent and invigorating. “Would their camp have a carriage or trade caravan I could take to Navarro?”
“No. They’re nomadic; they only carry what they need with them. They live off the land.” Ryon threw his blanket aside and slid his legs off the side of the bed. “I’m sorry, Kira, but I have to get to Jadenvive as soon as possible.” He steeled himself for her reaction. But her feelings weren’t as important as reporting the location of this pyramid to the chieftess before someone got hurt.
Kira frowned and tapped a finger on her lips. “Would someone in Jadenvive have the medicine?” She took a few steps closer to the bed, though still a notable distance from Lysander. “I need to get back to my family as fast as possible too.”
Lysander looked back and forth between them with a spark of impatience until Ryon signed her question to him. “Possibly,” Lysander answered, “but the Roanoke have the best healers among the tribes. And they don’t prefer big cities like Jadenvive.” He glanced at Kira’s stack of scrolls beside the bench. “You have one of your fancy maps?”
Ryon let his frustration speak for him as he stood and carefully stretched. His lost maps represented months of scouting work.
Kira reached a hand out to steady Ryon, but he waved her off and asked, “Are any of those blank?”
The sound of rustling parchment filled the room as Kira dug through the scrolls, and Ryon opened the inkwell on the slim desk in the corner. He checked the nib of a quill with a brilliant red feather with white streaks. The desk didn’t have a chair, but he needed to stand anyway. He didn’t want to lie down again for a week.
Lysander gave Ryon two blank pieces of parchment before Kira could find one. Ryon took them with a nod and dipped the quill into the inkwell. The scent of squid ink, though harsh, soothed him with familiarity. This wasn’t his favorite nib design or the nicer quality parchment that he bought from the sleazy vendor in Jadenvive, but they would do.
He began sketching a map in small scale,