The Skybound Sea by Samuel Sykes Page A

that would mean more to a round-ear. He stared as she waved briefly, then awkwardly bowed as though it meant anything, and then turned and slipped out of the forest.
    The Howling lingered behind her, shrieking and crying long after she had vanished. She was frightened, she was confused, she was barely a shict.
    Still …
    “You seem surprised,” a voice answered his thoughts from the bushes at his back.
    “Not surprised,” he replied without looking behind him.
    “Then what?” another voice, deeper and darker.
    He had asked them to stay behind. Their presence would only have frightened her further. She wasn’t ready to rejoin a people she wasn’t sure she was a part of.
    That will change
.
    “I’m not convinced it will, Naxiaw,” Inqalle said, emerging from the underbrush. “She’s been around humans for a long time. You agree the
kou’ru
have infected her.”
    “Diseases can be cured,” he replied.
    “We hope, at least,” Avaij added, his voice sharp and smooth where his sister’s was rasping and harsh. “We’ve all heard her Howling, though. If she can’t be cured—”
    “Then what, brother?” he asked. “We leave her to die? Kill her?”
    “Of course not,” Avaij replied.
    “Maybe,” Inqalle said.
    “We do not kill the sick.” Naxiaw rose up from the earth. “We treat the sickness, we kill the disease.”
    “The human,” Avaij muttered. “You’re convinced that the death of one round-ear will bring our wayward sister back.”
    “Not convinced.”
    “Hope is not something for the
s’na shict s’ha
,” Inqalle said. “Our people
know
.”
    “Then you know we cannot kill her and we cannot sit back and let her suffer.”
    He turned and regarded his tribesmen. He wondered how the human would see them: tall and proud, limbs corded with green muscle and dotted with tattoos, black hair hacked and hewn into crested mohawks. Their weapons were sharp, their eyes were sharp, their canines were sharper still as their lips curled backward.
    Humans had tales about the greenshicts, his people. They feared them, rightfully. This human might look upon them with terror in his blue stare. This human might fight back. To survive was the nature of disease.
    But in these two, Naxiaw saw only brother, only sister, their Howling speaking clearly. If they doubted his methods, they did not doubt his goals. They would not let their sister suffer.
    It would hurt, of course. She was attached to the silver-haired monkey, asmuch as she might wish they did not know. She might rave, she might rail against them, she might even mourn.
    No illness was cured without pain.
    Kataria drew in a long breath and released it. When the last trace of air had passed her lips, she opened her eyes.
    “No,” she said. “You are wrong. The answer isn’t in blood. It hasn’t been so far. And the answer is not in you. I offer you no apology and I ask for no forgiveness, brother. Everything I have to find out, I can’t be told. I have to find it. If it means going with the humans, then so be it. Live well, Naxiaw. I will.”
    She nodded firmly, smiling. There it was. Everything she had been holding inside her, everything she had refused to admit to herself, much less to the
s’na shict s’ha
.
    She had said it and believed it.
    If Naxiaw had actually been standing before her, she would have been just fine. As it was, the pig-sized, colorful roach in front of her merely twitched its feathery antennae and made a light chittering noise; as far as personal epiphanies went, it seemed unimpressed.
    “Oh, like you’ve heard better,” she said with a sneer as she stalked past it.
    Despite the insect’s lack of approval, she came out of the forest lightheaded. The meeting with the greenshict had gone well. Ominously well, considering she had told him it would be their last. She hoped he understood that. She hoped he
heard
that.
    She could still hear the breathy, fumbled excuses in her own ears. She couldn’t
understand
them, of