“You don’t understand.” Neri hesitated, as though unsure whether he ought to share this with her. He drew himself up and set his jaw. “My father said this is how we stop the Harvest.”
Ysira shook her head. “He’s manipulating you.”
Neri’s face fell. Maybe she’d been too harsh. But he said, “I’m not stupid; I know that. But I’m so close. I can’t just go home.” Desperation colored his tone, now, and he spoke as though short of breath. “He won’t let me.”
At first, Ysira thought Neri was on the verge of panic, but then he began to wheeze. He doubled over, struggling for air.
“Neri!” Ysira reached toward him in alarm.
He shoved her back, weak but insistent. “I don’t—” The words seemed stuck in his throat, as if his airway constricted around them. “I don’t need your help.”
Gods. He really was Ged Semira’s son, wasn’t he?
Neri coughed and wheezed, kneeling on the rock and tugging his collar away from his neck. What was probably only minutes felt like an eternity. He looked anywhere but at Ysira, and as the attack receded, a dark flush of shame crept up his cheeks.
“Your episodes,” she realized. “That’s what Damir was talking about.”
She knew Neri had health problems, though she’d never learned the specifics. Over the first few years of his life, Ogden had made a number of calls to the Citadel, about which Ysira had never asked. But she’d paid attention. She tried not to wonder whether Neri would have survived to adolescence without Ogden’s intervention.
She must have let too much of her feelings show, because Neri seemed upset with her. “It’snotlike that.” After a few breaths, he went on. “It’s not even that bad.” Another few breaths. “There’s a healer; he treats me once a cycle, and it’s gotten much better. It passes. I’m not weak.”
“Of course you’re not,” said Ysira, and meant it, but Neri eyed her with suspicion. At his age, she might well have felt the same.
“You don’t have to come,” he informed her. “I don’t—” He paused again to cough. “I don’t understand why you’re trying to protect me.”
Ysira offered him her canteen, tactful as if approaching a skittish cat. He took a sip of water, though he still glared expectantly at her.
“I’m being paid very well.” She hesitated. “Besides, Seth is . . . my friend.”
“He’s never mentioned you.”
Ysira shrugged, pretending not to care. “I enjoy my privacy.” She watched Neri for a moment. “You don’t have to prove yourself to Ged.” Instead of responding, Neri pointed at the ledge from where they’d fallen. “We can’t go back the way we came. And we have to keep moving forward, right? Those things—” He swallowed, face going a bit grey. “They might follow us.”
Ysira surveyed Neri, impatient all over again but impressed with his tenacity. He also had a point.
“What are they?” he asked.
“Osuun. It’s Zal,” Ysira admitted, “I’m not sure what it means.” “Lost.” Neri frowned. “It meanslost.”
The word evoked a strange sadness in Ysira. She sighed. “I think they were people, once.”
This is who we are without the gods,the priests said, spreading tales of madness and depravity. Others whispered that the Osuun were the Harvested, transformed by the gods and set loose to roam the canyon for eternity, sating their monstrous hunger with the flesh of anyone who dared disturb these ruins. Ysira remembered so little of her own Harvest; for all she knew, she had narrowly escaped becoming one of them.
She glanced upward, to the ledge that was still vacant. For now. “All right,” she said at last. “We’ll go through the arch. But we’re not following your trail.”
She motioned him ahead of her. Cowed for the time being, Neri slunk through the stone passage to a crumbling stair. His brow furrowed as though his thoughts had formed a massive knot in his head, requiring all his energy to untangle. Ysira knew the feeling. It nagged at her as they climbed in a tight spiral, until the stairway opened on a ruined hall. They climbed through rubble from the fallen ceiling, between toppled columns bathed in the eerie light of the eclipse.
Twice more Neri had to stop and catch his breath. Whenever Ysira moved toward him, threatening to offer a hand, he squared his shoulders and quickened his steps.
Though it would not do for him to catch her staring, Ysira struggled not to. She had never before let herself think of Neri as her son. She found herself trying to deduce what came from her and what came from his father, searching for evidence of her own parents in him. Neri’s elegant facial features and obsidian eyes were Ysira’s, but his skin was a darker brown, his hair black. He looked more like a Semira, more Telu than Zal.
Ysira’s father would’ve hated that. Yeran Naktis had been a destitute grifter from the Knots, but he’d taken such pride in his Zal bloodline, telling Ysira they descended from conquerors. He’d have been horrified as she picked her way through the ruins of their people’s ancient glory, no longer able to decipher the written language he’d risked so much to teach her.
The jedaat glared at her from all around the hall, its sharp geometric patterns the sole adornment on these stark stone faces. Yeran had died when Ysira was eight; she remembered little of him but his cruelty. And yet, the notion that he would be disappointed in her stung nonetheless. Perhaps she understood Neri’s stubborn insistence on proving himself to Ged better than she liked to admit.
Neri had stopped in front of a massive frieze. His voice echoed in the silence. “Was this a temple?”
He squinted at the frieze. It depicted seven spheres, caught in a spiraling current around an eighth, much larger. The sun, with their world and its celestial neighbors. Art in Zivora never depicted them so clearly, as though the Church preferred not to remind people that anything existed beyond this sphere—Celes Lor. Yet they could not erase the sky and the stars, let alone the sight of Oe at night. On the frieze, the ringed giant shared a path around the sun with Celes Lor. Two tiny circles denoted the moons Ixion and Nue.
