Skylene briefed her on all that had happened: the stealing of the boat, the plan to destroy the soul catcher and the success at doing so, and then their destruction of the boat. It was an official report. Dariel knew that Mór would have heard the details already. Still, they all waited through it, Dariel searching for any signs of thoughts behind Mór’s eyes. He could not read her at all. Just looking was a pleasure of sorts, though. Was it because of who she was, or because beneath the shivith spots he saw Wren in the shape of her eyelids and the roundness of her face and the way her cheekbones rose to prominence? Was it Mór he loved looking at, or the lover Mór reminded him of? He really wasn’t sure.
If Mór received the news of the soul catcher’s destruction with any personal emotion she did not show it. She did, however, take Dariel’s hand in hers. She pulled him forward a half step and placed his palm against the center of her chest. “The People praise you,” she said, “and thank you. You have done for us something we had not managed to do in all our years here. You arrived with knowledge we do not possess and used it to aid us. Likely, you cannot know the good you have done, but still I praise you for it.”
Her expression while she said this was as firm as a nanny’s measuring out a disobedient child’s punishment, but after a short pause the corners of her lips—first the right and then the left—and then her cheeks as well tilted into a grin. “It’s a start, at least. We won’t kill you … yet. Come look at this with me.”
The two moved away from the others, climbing the sloping stone, which was coarse underfoot, with granules that crackled and popped free beneath their weight. A flock of long, slim birds flew toward them over the hillocks to the northwest. They were black silhouettes against the reddening sky, until they dropped into shadow and stood out white against the deep green of the trees.
“Beyond here, the land is wild,” Mór said. “The Westlands. It is not unpeopled. Just wild. Beautiful beyond measure. Before the Lothan Aklun arrived, the Auldek tribes had settled portions of it, but their inland cities are ruins now, their cultivated fields reclaimed by forest and jungle.” Her voice had grown conversational in a way it had never been with him before. “The Auldek like to hunt us on their kwedeirs, but there are regions of Ushen Brae that even the hunting parties have never reached. The Auldek are powerful in their way, but they live only on a thin sliver of coastline, afraid of the sea on one side, with a wall against the continent on the other. They were satisfied with that.”
“But you are not?”