At long last, the rays of the rising sun met the chamber of rites, signified by the slivers of orange light coming in through gaps in the wicker walls. The only other light remaining in the chamber came from the dull glow permeating through the stomach cavities of all the Kothai undergoing their trial. And they were Kothai now, all of them. Not one light had gone out before the sun's rays touched the chamber again, meaning that they had all succeeded, and now their only task left was to fill their stomachs and drown the wasp once and for all. As an aid towards that end, the rhythm along with which they drank gradually increased until, within the hour, they had all drowned their wasps and the glow inside all of them had gone out.
The Donai princess’s torch bearers were brought back inside shortly, still possessing their ever burning blue flames. They rejoined their princess at the rear of the chamber.
After collecting all the cups and reigniting the torches scattered throughout the chamber, the shamans all left, save for the one with the swamp lion cloak. He stood in the same central spot he had when announcing the rules for the night wasp trial several long hours previous. “Good, then. Besides a few who failed to start, we have an overwhelming showing from our young warriors. And you are warriors now. All of you. Kothai.”
Cheers, grunts, nods, depending on what each newly christened of their warrior class felt was appropriate. Out of all of them, only two remained silent. Banon had his reasons. Good, bad, or simply that from what he had seen in the trance that he did not understand yet. All swirled around in his mind.
“Now,” the shaman said, drawing back Banon’s attention. “Each group, when called upon by the name of the Kothai, will approach me and declare in front of his kinsman and emperor the name of the woman who will take his name and follow in step with him along the path of the warrior.”
The selections went off as could be expected. Most of the time, the two attendants who had not been chosen were not all that surprised, given many of the new Kothai here had been paired with those they already shared existing bonds with. However, when it was Banon’s time, he did not find a decision coming so easily.
He stood at the head of the chamber, Iala, Goija, and the one he still did not know the name of standing alongside him. He could practically feel his fathers eyes on the back of his head, and beyond that, he suspected somehow that Lonka was somewhere watching this in hiding. He shifted awkwardly, for once in his life finding confidence and evasive concept. It wasn’t that he didn’t have a clear choice in mind, but he had seen so much in these last few hours, so much that had changed the way he saw his own future.
Banon glanced once at the shaman’s expectant face, shrouded in shadow as it was. And then, instead of addressing the room, he turned and spoke up to his father. “If the emperor would permit it, I would request permission to choose a wife after my duties negotiating with the Donai family’s representative are over with.”
Poh raised an eyebrow, but did not outright deny him. “You would put on hold such an important decision?”
“With respect father, the first negotiation between peoples in more years than I have on my life is of a weight of importance that is above anything. Such is the strength of that importance that I do not feel clear of mind enough to make this decision until I have done my duty in representing the needs of my people first.” And it wasn’t entirely a lie, either.
There was a soft clicking noise coming from Tema’s direction, but Poh ignored it, simply nodding. “Very well. You may break yet another tradition, and somehow I doubt it will come to haunt you the way it would any of us.”
***
After he had made his curious declaration, the huge Ooura who she was soon to negotiate with had simply stood off the edges of the chamber while the rest of the other Ooura young men–who were now officially Kothai–made their choices, giving Lythilyn plenty of time to stew. She knew her angle, but she was also painfully aware of how many holes there were to poke in her plan. All it would take was a little inquisitive thinking on the part of her opposition and she would have a lot less leverage than she would like.
She bit her tongue so she wouldn’t make a more outwardly obvious gesture of frustration. The likelihood of one of these savages putting the whole puzzle together was slim, she reminded herself. The emperor's son had already seen through her to some extent, but he only knew that she was compromised in some way. There was no way he could possibly know to what degree, let alone that she was not here with official permission. Even her own mother would have more than likely kept the secret of her surprise departure under wraps. Appearances, when it came to royalty, usually mattered more than reality. All the same, Lythilyn’s absence would certainly be noticed the moment she returned home. She just hoped she could return with something valuable enough to sway the opinions at court in her favor.
“Now, my son will serve you the delicacy of our people, the Dragon Eagle.” Poh’s voice carried across the chamber, shaking her out of her worry for the future, only to replace it with worry for the present. She also wasn’t entirely in agreement about her being served what appeared to be an uncooked, even recently deceased bird. She hardly expected the corpse was even cooled yet.
Thankfully, a large clay platter carrying a bed of still smoldering coals was hastily brought over by Oouta servants and placed on her table, which at least reassured her that these creatures had the decency to cook their food before they–and in this case she–ate it. The next to approach was, as expected, the son of Poh himself. Banon, she remembered him being called during their first meeting.
His skin, like all of those around him, was a smokey tone of light grey. His hair, on the other hand, was practically a beacon of color now that the torch light in the chamber had been restored. As he approached, that rich orange color gained a striking tint to it thanks to the uniquely colored flames her surrounding torch bearers carried.
He plopped down into a cross legged position on the other side of her table spread, completely ignoring the anxious shifting of hands on crossbows all around them. He drew a knife made from obsidian, thankfully having the grace to do so slowly and in full view of her guard. The knife was set down next to the platter of coals as he moved onto other things. He held the corpse of the massive, golden feathered bird in both hands, and with equal parts disgust and confusion, she regarded the fact that one of the barded talons of the eagle was still lodged deeply in his palm. With a single, violent motion, he tore it free, sending blood spattering in a remarkably–and unfortunately–wide radius.
She clenched her jaw, forcing herself not to react as a gob of hot blood ran down her face. In between then, the coals belched steam as his blood sizzled upon them.
From there, without a word, he sat back down and began to pluck it one feather at a time. She raised an eyebrow, wondering why this hadn’t simply been done beforehand by another. But, she assumed, it probably had something to do with the fact that the bird had not left his person since she had first seen him with it. Tradition, she mused, was quite often the death of sanity.
As he continued about his monumental task of removing each of what must have been thousands of feathers by hand, another tray was brought out by the same Ooura who had brought the plate of coals.
It was placed in front of her with the briefest of explanations. They claimed the translucent, rubbery bowls with which a whitish grey meat had been served in were the suction cups from a jungle kraken's tentacles. Each ‘suction cup’ could have probably wrapped around her entire head twice over, so, while she was impressed to see something that looked so much like the unique shape and texture of a kraken suction cup, she found it impossible that it came from an actual living kraken. The meat, however, she already knew by the smell was undoubtedly kraken. There were few things that had such a unique smell as the jungle krakens flesh when cooked. It sort of smelled–and to a certain degree, tasted–like the bottom of a lake.
The Kraken meat had already been cooked, so, tentatively at first, she took her first bite. It was… remarkably better than her previous experience with the species. Perhaps it really had come from a specimen big enough to have produced those bowl sized cups. There had to be something that made it different, because if it was not the age of the creature itself that had shifted the quality of the meat so much, then her people had been preparing them completely wrong.
While she continued to eat–and pretend it was only slightly above acceptable to her pallet–Banon simply plucked the feathers. There was a pile beside him now almost as high as the table, neatly stacked into a stable formation that suggested he had infinitely more practice plucking birds than his status as son of an emperor might have let on.
Several more minutes of this passed until, finally, the Ooura sitting across from her finished his work. Setting the last feather aside, he then reached for the knife he had left on the table, and with it, he began at first to cut such thin strips off of the mighty carcass that she would have likened it more to peeling a fruit than butchery. Deliberately, he placed each slice, skin side down, onto the coals in front of him.
The air filled with the sound of sizzling flesh and an overpowering scent of sweetness. Banon waited until the sizzling began to die down, and then flipped the meat strips to their flesh sides.
Some minutes later, the pile of golden brown eagle meat had grown large enough that Banon began to distribute it between them. She stared down at the strips of yellow tinged, sweet smelling meat in the fleshy bowl for several seconds before deciding that, if they really wanted to poison her, they already would have. The moment she took her first bite, all notions of anything besides the wondrous texture and the honey-esque flavor filling her mouth fled away. Her hand was already reaching to grab another slice before the gruff voice of the Ooura across from her gave her pause.
“Your people,” Banon said to her in garbled, albeit understandable Pyathen, while he pointed at her. Then he pointed at himself. “My people.” Then he took a bite himself. “If we can… E–E–” he looked to be searching for a word.
“Eat?” she asked.
He raised an eyebrow briefly, then nodded. “If we can eat together, we can k–keep the war–”
“I can speak your language. So just speak that,” she interrupted in his own language with perhaps a touch more annoyance than she wanted to let into her voice. Much as she would never admit it, the prospect of doing anything besides filling her belly with what had been laid in the bowl in front of her was suddenly about as enticing as sleeping out in the jungle with its ever present buzz of life for another night.
“Tell me,” Banon began, thankfully in his own language this time, “how is it that your grasp of our tongue is so complete? My only practice with yours has come through those of your kind who were weak enough to allow themselves to be captured rather than die as warriors.”
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“I have very good teachers, who have very good information to rely on themselves. Go on, finish what you were trying to say before in my language. I am curious.”
Banon nodded, then considered her for several moments before proceeding to finish his silly little speech of peace, after admitting to regularly torturing her kind for information a moment before. “If we as the younger generation can eat together, perhaps, eventually, it can be us who change things in the future. Even we, as heirs to dynasties, do not have the time nor the power to accomplish this within our own lifetimes, but peoples uniting is not impossible. Just look at your own family, and your own imminent marriage to an Enka. This is not a small change. This is a uniting of not only peoples, but ways of doing things as well.”
She hid the shock that he was somehow aware of her promise to the Enka prince well, probably only because he had brought it up so casually himself. She could not help the disgust from bleeding onto her face in regards to his other points, however. “If you think that, then you have not read history. You have not learned from the mistakes of our ancestors.”
Banon swallowed a mouthful he had been chewing for longer than the others. “And what mistakes are those?”
“The mistake of considering Ooura as a people, and not a group of animals tearing at one another in the forest.” She made sure it was a whisper she only hissed loud enough for him to hear. She was still terrified that any affront could lead to an immediate battle breaking out, but this was the angle she had chosen, and she was not planning on letting a little fear shatter a plan that she had spent months concocting.
“And yet you come here,” he replied without pause, tearing another strip of meat from the carcass and eyeing it quizzically before setting in down on the coals. Odd, that. She had expected them to eat like savages, but the Ooura she had watched eating so far were actually remarkably delicate with their food.
“I come here out of necessity. If you don't know that by now, then you do not know much.”
Banon nodded. “You come alone, with a small guard, and you accept my fathers bargain to join us in the chamber of rites. The way I see it, each decision has made you more vulnerable than the last.”
Well, there was some consolation in that mutual understanding. If he had been shrewd enough to assume she wasn’t the real heir to the Donai and instead a disposable game piece, they might have killed them all by now. Of course, she was the heir, but since she was here against the will of the current figurehead of their regime, forcing her to bring only a small honor guard trustworthy enough to go about something like this, it had been one of her primary worries in this whole endeavor. Apparently, both the one in front of her now and the Ooura’s other leadership seemed to be the perfect blend of smart and stupid for her own plans to have made it this far.
She leaned forwards until the could feel the heat from the coals on her neck, doing everything she could to appear imposing despite her circumstances. “Vulnerable, yes. I am vulnerable, but I am not my people. I should not need to explain to you the situation your entire people are in. You could kill me here. Yes, you would sustain losses in the chaos that followed, but I would taken off the board. Do you know what would follow next?”
Banon was completely motionless, waiting, though his expression was stoney and unrelenting.
She forced a small smile onto her lips. She needed to sell herself as ruthless during this next part, otherwise it would come across as hollow as it felt. “Things are already unstable in my family,” she admitted. “There are factions that seek to burn so much of this forest you and yours will have nowhere left to hide, and while I believe they are fools, I also know they are right about one thing. They are right that we could do it. It would be a push unlike any in our history, a crusade that would cost us thousands of lives. But it would work. And then it would be over. No more threat from your kind. A permanent, and one that you might be surprised to learn how close it is to becoming the one that is chosen. It wouldn’t take much to push us over the edge towards such an action. Say, something like an heir to a prominent family murdered during a last attempt at diplomacy. Now you see, while I may appear vulnerable, it is me who has the leverage here, not you.”
Banons expression fell, and for a moment fear panged in her gut that she might have just pushed things too far, sewing her own undoing. When he abruptly stood, for a half a moment, that thought became a sure inevitability. But instead of enacting an impulse towards violence, he turned on his heel and then began walking back through the chamber towards the dias the elders and emperor sat upon.
Once there, the huge Ooura stopped, looked up towards his father and emperor, and they began speaking back and forth with one another. She couldn’t make out exactly what was spoken, but contrary to her worries that she had played things too up front and ended the negotiation before it could begin, it appeared the purpose of this disruption was not for Banon to call things off. Rather, he was already on his way back over to her table. When he arrived, he sat down in the same place as if nothing had occurred. Banon did not acknowledge her, even with a glance, opting to continue feasting on the eagle instead. A moment later, she learned why.
“My son has made another request.” Emperor Poh’s voice carried easily from all the way at the back of the room. “While normally, we reserve this for the end of the ceremony after all have taken their wives, it will be done now instead.” A short, terse silence filled the chamber, only broken up by scattered grumbling. “Bring out the sacrifice,” emperor Poh declared with an unnerving note of almost cheer in his voice.
Her eyelid twitched.
Despite her assumptions, and her learned histories and all the political games that she had read taking place in them, she could honestly say that her first diplomatic mission had been, almost start to finish, full of unexpected events. And this moment was no exception as Lithilyn watched a short–relatively speaking–Ooura woman escorted into the middle of the chamber by two older Ooura men–presumably Kothai.
Now that the apparent sacrifice was closer and lit well by the torchlight, Lithilyn’s breath caught as she took in the state of her. For one, she was more a girl than a woman, barely older than a child. Secondly, and horribly obvious, was the state of her skin. All over, her body was covered in rippling scars, and dotted by ulcers.
The realization was instant. Lithilyn knew how their new chemical weapons effected flesh, even if she had never witnessed them in person. And yet… how? Those injuries were the mark of the acid from their launchers, not from the sickness brought about by ingesting contaminated water and soil. Her stomach wavered at the thought of her own kind using their weapons of war on a child that could not possibly have been anywhere near a battlefield. She bit down, forcing away the tells of her uneasiness. One glance towards Banon, whose eyes were locked on her, told Lithilyn that she had not kept her reaction as well concealed as she hoped.
Unfortunately, Banon’s withering stare was the least of her worries. Though at first the wounded girl had seemed hardly aware of her surroundings, her eyes now found Lithilyn’s, and in them, the Donai princess saw a kind of rage and hatred that she would have never been able to understand from the second hand battlefield reports she was accustomed to. Just as quickly as it had been laid bare, the hatred faded in favor of pain as the girl began a fit of retching and coughing.
And just like that, Lithilyn’s entire world had changed. Her goals were the same as they had been before, yes, but the means, perhaps, would need some minor reshaping. Otherwise, Ooura or not, she no longer had quite the same surety of how much higher her place was above them.
“You have never seen it in person,” Banon guessed.
Finally, Lithilyn remembered to breathe. “Yes,” she admitted, her mind swirling in too much chaos to worry about saving face for the moment.
The two of them, heirs alike, stared at each other for a long moment. Lithilyn was sure she knew what was coming next. He was going to press the advantage. It was exactly as she would have done if she noticed her opponent on the back foot from an unexpected surge of emotions.
Instead, Banon took in a long breath before he next spoke, and when he did there was not a trace of hostility in his voice. “Good. If you had seen the consequences and still spoken as you have, then I would have already given up this negotiation.” It was then Banon’s turn to lean in, though unlike when she had, his was not for the purpose of intimidation. If anything, his voice had never been more quiet and calm then when he next spoke. “If my people are animals, then yours are monsters.”
Lithilyn had no response for that as Banon leaned back away from her. And it seemed he wasn’t waiting for one, as his eyes were drawn back to the young girl covered in scars.
Another group was approaching, one made up of those same strange women wearing woven clothing with tassels of fur hanging out all over. Together, four of them were carrying a large wooden object. It was only when they set it down next to the sacrifice that Lithilyn got a hint as to its purpose. There was a body shaped cavity carved out in the center. From there, her eyes began to catch more and more details, each more impressive than the last. The entire sarcophagus–for that is what she now knew it was–was covered in ornaments made from feather and fur, and any seemingly bare section of wood was proved to be much more when she focussed long enough to make out the carvings. There were hundreds of figures in the carved wood, some shaped as Ooura, some as various beasts from the jungle. But there was one unifying theme.
Every creature depicted on its surface had red paint placed appropriately to imply wounds, and those wounds were not minor. The entire sarcophagus, every inch of it, was covered in dying things. There were lone flecks of blood here and there, but far and above the majority of the red paint depicting gushing wounds that formed pools of red on the imagined ground beneath the bodies. There were even entire rivers and streams where the blood from all that was dying coalesced, which wove across the canvass of death and decay.
If it wasn’t for the overwhelmingly grim nature of it all, she might be far more focussed on the quality of the craftsmanship. Even if multiple Ooura had worked together to create this thing, she had no doubt the effort would still have been a massive undertaking across weeks, if not months.
The acid-scarred girl was first lifted and then set gently into the cavity inside by the two Kothai that had led her out there in the first place. She didn’t protest. She hardly seemed lucid, in fairness. She coughed, a grinding and raspy sound, before settling down with her eyes half open.
As the fur-clad women took their leave, the two Kothai did the opposite. Each of them pulled out long, obsidian knives from their primitive belts. Stepping in closer, they both fell to one knee on either side of sarcophagus.
Lithilyn had expected there would be some kind of additional ceremony. Another rhythm, perhaps prayers said, but there was nothing. Only the subtle sound of flesh pulling apart in the quiet room as the two Ooura men slit her throat and plunged obsidian through the flesh of her chest in tandem. Lithilyn’s entire body flinched, betraying her despite her knowing what was coming.
“You will not look away,” Banon said.
As much as she should have resented taking such an overt command from him, within the tone of his voice there were hooks that pulled her focus back towards the young Ooura girl at the center of the room.
A few seconds of silence followed, only to be interrupted by the sound of blood running out of a gap in the wood and into what she now realized was a basin designed to collect it. Next, for some ungodly reason, the eyes were carved free of the young girl’s face. As barbaric as it was to watch at first, the now disembodied eyeballs were carried away with a palpable reverence.
After that, each new Kothai was brought over to the basin, all taking their turns painting their faces with the blood. All did it wordlessly, and with the exact same method of first dipping two fingers into the blood, and then swiping the red from the top of their forehead down to the tip of their chin. Banon went last, though after painting himself in her lifeblood as all the others had, he lingered long enough to press his lips to the scarred forehead of the dead girl, muttering something quietly that Lithilyn could not make out. And when he returned to sit with Lithilyn, she was finally ready to speak again.
“Fine, you have made your point,” she said.
“And what point is that? I thought you cared nothing for the ‘animals’ tearing at one another in the forest.”
She fought down a curse. He couldn’t have seen through her that easily, and yet, the brief smirk on his face while he watched her squirm said otherwise. Well, just because one card from her hand was shown did not mean she didn’t have others to play. At this point, she may as well come clean on the fronts which she was already exposed. “I speak for my people. That does not mean I agree with every sentiment of every one of them, just as you surely do not either. Their interests are mine, however, in some things, even those with the best of intentions lack the forethought to see the consequences of their actions coming before it is already too late.”
Banon made a wide smile. “I could not agree more. Now that we have shed our false masks, let us begin the real negotiation. No more games of push and pull.”
