Bayou Moon - Andrews, Ilona [107]
William picked up the last crossbow from his stack, raised it, and fired without aiming, purely on muscle memory. The bolt sliced into his target next to the other ten or so he’d put into the bull’s-eye in the past hour.
Lark snapped her crossbow, imitating him, and fired. The bolt went wide.
“It won’t work,” Gaston told her with an expression of complete gloom on his face. “I’ve been trying to shoot like he does for the last hour.”
He’d been picking up the bolts out of the grass for the last hour, too, William reflected. The kid shot well enough. Good hand-to-eye coordination, good perception. With proper training, he would be an excellent shot.
Lark jerked her crossbow up, fired another bolt, and missed. “How come you can do it?”
“Practice,” William said. That and a changeling’s reflexes. “I’ve been a soldier for a long time. I can’t flash, so I had to use the crossbows a lot.”
Lark hesitated. “I can flash.”
“Show me.”
She grasped a bolt in her fist. Pale lightning sparked from her eyes down to her hand, clutched the bolt, and vanished. Another white flasher. Figured. Flash usually ran in the family.
“Nice!” he told her.
Lark offered him a narrow smile. It was there and gone almost as fast as her flash, but he saw it.
William turned to Gaston. “You?”
“None of the thoas can flash.” The boy shook his head, sending his black mane flying. The damn hair reached nearly to his waist. On the one hand, it was too long. If you grabbed the hair, you could control the kid’s head in a fight. On the other hand, the hair hid his face. He looked human enough in passing, but he’d fail close scrutiny. His jaw was too heavy, his eyes were too deep set under the wide black eyebrows, and his irises luminesced with pale silver when they caught the light.
Still, the kid needed a shock to the system. Proof that he was done with his family. A rite of passage. William pulled a knife from the sheath. “Cut it.”
Gaston’s eyebrows crept up.
“Cut the hair.”
Gaston glanced at him, glanced at the knife, and took the blade, his teeth clenched. He grasped a strand of hair in his hand and sawed at it with the blade. The black strands fell on the ground.
Lark crouched and picked them up. “It’s not good to leave the hair out,” she said quietly. “Someone could curse you with it. I’ll burn it for you.”
“Thanks.” Gaston grabbed another handful of his hair and sliced it off.
Murid opened her mouth.
Here it is. William tensed.
“It’s almost time for lunch.”
He nodded.
“It would be good if we knew what they were cooking in the kitchen,” she said. “If they’re cooking fish, we need to head to the house. Fish doesn’t take much time. If they’re cooking a pig, we have another half an hour.”
“I can go and ask,” Gaston said.
William sampled the wind. “They’re cooking chicken.”
Murid turned her expressionless dark eyes on him. “Are you sure?”
“Chicken and rice,” he said. “With cumin.”
“That’s good to know,” Murid said. “We have time, then.”
William had an odd feeling that something important had just happened, but what he had no idea. Behind him Gaston sliced another handful from his mane and deposited it into Lark’s hands. William loaded the next crossbow and fired. He would figure it out sooner or later.
LAGAR closed his eyes. It did no good—Peva was still there, even in the darkness of his mind.
“Look at your brother,” his mother’s voice whispered like the rustling of snake scales across the floor. “It’s because of you he’s dead. You weren’t smart enough to keep your brother safe.”
Slowly he opened his eyes and saw Peva’s body, blue and nude, on the washing table. A single lamp hung above it, its harsh glow concentrated by the fixture into a cone. The light clutched at the faces of two women, bleaching them into pasty masks. He watched them dip thick cloths into the buckets of scented water and rub the mud from Peva’s limbs. The dirty water ran off Peva’s skin into the groove