Free Forged by Fire by Janine Cross Page B

around your scrawny neck till it chokes you.”
He grabbed my chin and jerked it up so that I was look ing at him. Again I was gripped with the urge to smack his leathery hands aside.
“More is demanded of the Skykeeper’s Daughter than silence,” he hissed. “Much more. I’ll light a fire under your feet till it blazes and consumes you. So help me, rishi via, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll force you to fulfill your destiny yet.”
We stared at each other, frustration, contempt, and fury showering like firesparks from his eyes, aversion and defi ance smoldering behind mine.
He snapped his hand away from my chin. “Move aside,” he growled, twitching like a leathery toad skewered on a stick.
“No,” I said, and yes, I was afraid of him in such close quarters, madness foaming from his eyes, but no, I couldn’t hold my tongue as I should, that cursed insolence I’d inher ited from my mother looming, as ever, to the fore.
He went still. I swear his eyes glowed.
“We’re supposed to be mating,” I said, nostrils flared. “Even the quickest fuck takes a little longer than this.”
An interminable time passed, him poised on the brink of dervish anger, battling inner demons for self-control.
Breathing heavily, he moved away from me. Bandy legs braced, hands clenching and unclenching, he waited the ap proximate length of time it might take a man to sow his seed in a woman’s womb. With the stab of a finger at the door, he then indicated we should leave.
His ferine eyes burned through me the entire time.
FIVE 123
    I
solated from neighboring rishi kus by a sea of jute, featon, and fallow soil, the cocoon warehouse was an islet unto itself.
    A good place to disappear, that.
Wind. Rodent squeak and child chatter. The swish and whisper of feathery grainheads beneath a hard, empty blue sky. I felt infinitesimally small on those undulating plains, exposed daily to the sun’s bone-bleaching glare and the night’s myriad stars. Small, but relatively safe from Tem ple’s grasp.
Within a matter of days I grew used to the rhythm of life out there, succored by the illusion that I was experi encing the security of my childhood.
Long before each dawn, I woke to the rousing of the water fetchers, those women whose daily duty it was to walk the many dusty miles through the dark to the Sangsusif Chodo, the Indulgent River, with great urns upon their heads. They returned just as the sun began rising, and woke their chil dren, who would then stumble, yawning, to the arbiyesku’s kadoob field, a furrowed tract of land surrounded by gnarled slii trees.With their infant siblings strapped to their backs, the children would till, harrow, weed, and irrigate the stubblemulched earth, returning with a sack of wizened tubers.
After partaking of a meager meal of cold roasted kadoobs—or sometimes, nothing but silty water—all but the very eldest of the arbiyesku would then go work the surrounding fields. The elders who remained—those lame and bent by age, who didn’t walk so much as lurch and scut tle and drag themselves forward—did kwano duty, touring round the stinking warehouse, weaving amongst the yam dalar cinaigours, looking for kwano snakes to behead. They found few, for the kwano snake is a jungle serpent, but occasionally their rheumy eyes located a snake—kwano or otherwise—that had slithered into the warehouse, at tracted to the fetor of death, and the intruder was always decapitated in a flurry of revulsion, panic, and fear.
Temple teaches that the kwano snake is the embodiment of evil; the Progenitor, the father of all kwano snakes, is the eternal enemy of the One Dragon. Thus the yamdalar warehouse needed to be daily eradicated of the diabolic snakes—along with any other hapless snake that had slith ered into the vicinity.
While the elders were thus engaged, the rest of the ar biyesku tilled arid soil, breaking up weed-choked clods, cultivating the meager crops that sustained them. Gaunt bodies dotted the fields for