The Totem-Maker (part eighty-nine)

The Totem-Maker

Chapter Nine

The Recalcitrant One

(part eighty-nine)

I held my familiar to the sunlight, to have it shine prettily. I was shy of the face, allowing that one could be deluded…

That, having the ambition to succeed, I might invent my successes, with only the timid Moth for company and no worldly friend to doubt me.

My immediate fate was as I’d predicted. The merchant, Tazt Shenath, begged my company that short way up the road, to the stronghold of Lord Ei. He had jested about the game, but was in earnest as to feasting and entertainments.

The woman I’d seen on the Prince’s boat, whose glances for me had been incurious, had brought against boredom, Shenath told me, her husband’s cousin Darsale. Sente, a friend whose news would delight me, had not come.

But if Darsale, then Jute. I had made a promise to Jute, to help her if I could. Arriving in this state, I would be to my old servant something new. I was sorry now I’d embraced Jute’s mocking name for me, put Nur-Elom about as my preference. If I found no cause to speak with her, how would it seem?

Taztam Shenath, the son, moved closer. “They at the Citadel will know you have it.”

“But if they were frightened by my powers, they would send an embassy. Why be conquered? They must believe in their fire-weapons.”

“What do you say?” Shenath asked.

“I have been told it.” I had forgotten the teller was Lotoq. “By some means, with engines of fire, they make their roads impassable. To which I would answer—no magic about it—we will not fall upon them by road, then. We will learn the better way in.”

“The totem will tell you.”

This from his son did not please Shenath. He doffed his hat and struck Taztam a blow on the chest, harmless.

“No…but truly,” I said, “it is the Prince who makes war. I should hardly come into it.”

“But is it,” Taztam asked me later, when we’d made camp. “Is it a wishing stone?”

I did not want hesitation to look like the concealing of dire things. By the handy-come story of Alchas, the answer was paid to me at once. “Taztam, if you ever wish to wish for something…” I smiled. “You may meditate for many years, like a player of the War-Maker’s game, threading out each effect of your desire to make one change in the world’s pattern. In Ami’s scheme.”

Taztam, and others nearby listening, made the sign of piety. I did not; I hadn’t the habit. Priests did not, for priests were regarded of a caste with the lower gods. I saw that I could not be a friend, although Taztam and I were of an age…no one’s ever, it seemed.

They took this difference for a Totem-Maker’s semi-deity.

93

The Recalcitrant One

The Totem-Maker (part ninety)

(2018, Stephanie Foster)