she told him. “Into the cage. There’s food and water for you.”
All fight sapped out of him, the black lion hauled himself forward and flopped into the cage.
Inside, he ate and drank as Tamra drove the cart back toward the training grounds. Raia didn’t speak. She just drank from the canteen and looked up at the stars.
“It must have been a beautiful night for a run,” Tamra said conversationally.
Raia smiled, albeit weakly. “It was.” Then her smile faded. “I think . . . we might need a little more practice before the real races.”
“That might be a good idea,” Tamra agreed.
Chapter 10
Clothed like an ordinary traveler, his augur pendant tucked beneath his shirt, Yorbel boarded a westbound ferry. He hadn’t realized he’d become accustomed to the berth that people gave augurs until he was mashed between a dozen unwashed laborers on the ferry platform. He tried to breathe only through his mouth.
The river air tasted sour this close to the city’s docks. The fishermen were loading their boats with bait—barrels of fish heads and dead crabs. But as the sails puffed with breeze, the ferry sailed farther from the capital, and the air began to smell sweeter. Lilies grew thick by the banks on either side, and Yorbel saw farmers already at work in their fields, ankle-deep in watery soil, hurrying to harvest before the yearly floods began. He had almost been one of those farmers. Both his parents had been, until sickness claimed them, and as the firstborn, he would have inherited their strip of land, not far from the city, if the augurs hadn’t spotted him when he was eight years old and seen the purity of his soul.
His most vivid memory of that day was of the sky. It had been a brilliant blue. He’d been out in the fields with his parents, most likely watching a dragonfly instead of helping with the planting, and an augur had strode across the rows, crushing the sprouts.
He remembered his father had yelled, but he didn’t remember the words. What he remembered was how the augur had loomed over him, and he’d looked up and seen the expanse of blue surrounding him. So much blue that the man was left in shadows, and Yorbel couldn’t see his face. But he remembered the augur had spoken kindly and held out his hand. He’d given his parents gold for the crushed plants, and then he’d taken Yorbel with him.
His mother had cried blue tears—at least that’s what his memory said, though he didn’t see how that could be true. Tears were clear. The augur had told him they were happy tears, because his parents knew it meant that in his past life he’d earned this honor, but Yorbel hadn’t been sure. He hadn’t been certain of much those early days. He liked the temple and his lessons, but he missed his home and his parents. He wasn’t allowed to run free in the afternoons the way his parents had let him, while they rested in the shade of the palm trees. On the other hand, he was allowed to sleep later than dawn if he wished, and to eat as much as he wanted at meals. He’d never tasted such food: oranges so ripe that juice dribbled down your chin, meat so sweet that you’d think it was dessert, and rice that popped on your tongue with spices that made you dream about distant lands.
Odd the things one remembers, Yorbel thought. The taste of citrus. The blueness of the sky. Yet he couldn’t remember the sound of his mother’s voice or the name of the augur who had changed his life. The little things that made him who he was, the choices that shaped his aura, sometimes seemed so arbitrary. He couldn’t remember the day he’d been told his parents had died, when he became a ward of the temple—but he did remember waking one morning and realizing he’d cried in his sleep. His tears had tasted salty, and he’d wiped them away before his teachers saw.
Who can say what shapes a person?
And who could say what shaped an emperor? That was why Yorbel had to search among the kehoks. He believed that the emperor had been a good man. He trusted those who had read his aura, even though he personally had never done so. But the sight of the blue sky, a taste of an orange . . . a moment can change a life. Who knew what moments the