Page 31 of Humans Don’t Have Horns (A Crown of Blood and Magic #1)

Chapter Nineteen

Lian

In the morning, Shana ties a belt to my waist and adjusts the makeshift Mongan dress in a way that makes me very aware of how my body looks.

She tries to convince me to let her do my makeup, but I can’t shake the Aldonian ways to that extent.

The dress alone would be considered outrageous.

It reveals so much of my legs. In Aldon, I never even revealed my ankles in front of others.

Emek comes into the tent and, without a word, starts to comb my hair.

I’m beginning to realize that boundaries are perceived extremely differently here.

Shana gazes from one of us to the other in evident shock, and she leaves.

While Shana is the most outgoing and joyful person I’ve met in my life, Emek is definitely not.

No, Emek mostly looks at me as if she hasn’t quite decided if she wants to kill or simply maim me.

I stand still, barely breathing, waiting for an explanation for her strange actions.

There are no servants among the Mongans, and I’m not sure it’s only because they’re poor.

They are so different than the Puresouls that I struggle to wrap my head around it.

Because then they are also the same as all humans are.

I’ve already managed to figure out that Shana helping me get dressed has more to do with her being obsessed with clothing and makeup than anything else.

So Emek combing my hair makes me tense and wary. It feels intimate, motherly, even. I swallow a lump in my throat as the idea hits me.

“I thought you should know of a vision I had many years ago,” she says as she begins braiding my hair. “The Goddess, at least at the time I assumed it was the Goddess, showed me a baby with white hair and white eyes, and the baby was destined to grow and save us from a great darkness.”

I freeze at the meaning of her words and at their resemblance to what Amada told me.

“I looked for that baby for years. But then Daton brought you to our camp at Minera’s command.

I was blind. It is always surprising to me how the desires of the heart can make you ignore the clearest things.

I desired A Mongan savior. But here we are.

” She grimaces and drops her hands from my hair.

My hair is beautifully braided into a crown.

I turn to her and realize it wasn’t intimacy she was after.

It was intimacy she was trying to evade by avoiding my eyes.

Hers are like an abyss of pain at that moment. “You know of my sister,” she tells me.

I nod to her.

“She was my twin. And I thought nothing would ever hurt me more. But then I had children, and the Shavirs made me hurt more. Because for our children, there is a special kind of pain in our heart,” she says.

I gnaw on my lip in dismay. I want to say I’m sorry. But I remember Daton’s reaction to those words, so I only nod at her and keep my tears at bay. She nods back as if that was the correct response, and then she leads me to the main tent without another word.

On our walk, my mind drifts to what she told me of her vision. I wonder if only the Mongans know of the role Amada set for me, or if any Puresouls are aware as well? And how much was revealed to them? Is she aware that I’ve been punished and have no special abilities now?

Was Daton’s following me and saving me due to her vision?

Just wondering that makes the wound in my heart bleed again.

I’m beginning to doubt everything that happened between us.

Seeing him last night made me think maybe I imagined it all.

I’m sure there was a physical attraction.

That was clear enough. There’s nothing else I can be sure of.

Not after he just left me there at the waterfall.

If he had an agenda, then he wouldn’t have left, would he? These thoughts make my head hurt, and stab at my heart, so I just push them all aways. What he truly wanted doesn’t matter. Not anymore. I need to just focus on that major issue of the world coming to an end instead of fretting over a man.

As we enter the tent, Daton is sitting on the ground listening to a Mongan woman who talks to him in a low yet earnest voice.

They stop, and turn to look at me. They’re both armed with axes and a chain of knives strapped to their chests.

Daton’s face is reticent, and that blankness hurts me in a way it shouldn’t.

The face of the woman sitting beside him, by contrast, is full of hostility.

She looks about my age. After Kala’s explanation of Mongans’ horns, I can see she is not yet a hundred years old.

But I’m struggling with the exact age. She could be twenty or eighty, as far as I can tell.

She’s strikingly beautiful. Even though she is sitting, I can tell she’s tall, and her body looks fit and strong.

Her hair, unlike the black hair of the rest of the Mongans, is ruby red.

It’s braided in double braids, which on anyone else, might give an innocent appearance.

Her almond-shaped eyes almost glow with their ruby shade, and the black makeup around them makes them vivid and sensual.

Her lips are lush, even as she snarls with distaste at me. She’s not a fan.

Daton introduces her to me, as if completely unaware of her contempt, as Niska, his second-in-command. He’s never mentioned her, but he’s also never mentioned any of his warriors or friends, come to think of it.

Then Bahar, who I met last night, enters the tent.

He is Emek’s mate. He is armed like Daton and Niska, and I’ve been told he is Daton’s third-in-command.

He’s a stocky guy, shorter than Emek, and brawny.

He nods to all of us and sits down on one of the cushions near Emek.

He is followed by two women dressed like Emek, in brown garments embroidered with colorful patterns of stars.

One of them looks to be in her thirties and the other at least two hundred.

They introduce themselves as women of the Goddess.

The older woman’s name is Anavel, and the younger is Hama.

They are far more friendly than Niska. Then again, the corpses at the entrance to the camp look friendlier than her at the moment.

Niska is now seated between Bahar and Daton and makes a face as if she smells something rotten every time her eyes set on me, which I find pretty ironic, since she lives in the swamps. Not for long. I wonder how they’ll react to this request of mine, to move out of the swamps.

Emek calls me, and it takes her two attempts before I notice.

I’m too busy being annoyed with the way Daton is seated, all laid back and comfortable, one leg bent and the other stretched on the rugs.

His hand is on the back of the cushion Niska is leaning on, his head tilted toward her as she talks to him. I feel like smacking him and her both.

“Lian!” Emek’s tone is impatient now, and she smirks at my surprised look, her eyes darting between Daton and me.

Great start. “We would be happy to hear your plan,” she says, and when I don’t answer, she adds, “About the demichads.” I again wonder if she told Daton of her vision.

I wonder if she told him before smuggling me from the camp.

It makes my skin crawl. It couldn’t have all been a lie. Could it?

I clear my throat and sit down. “The demichads will rise in full numbers two months from now. Until then, we need to prepare for the impending battle. There are several terms that need to be addressed for us to have a chance at winning this battle. First, Mongans and Puresouls must fight the demichads side by side.” I know I just dropped a bomb on them, but I don’t know how to sugarcoat it even if I wanted to.

“This is bullshit,” Niska spits, then stands up to leave the tent.

“Sit the fuck down,” Daton growls at her. She sits, looking like a scolded child. The rest of them look at me with taut faces. They loathe Puresouls and have no trust in them.

Daton rubs his face with his hand. “Lian,” he says slowly, and I can see he’s struggling with choosing the right words. In the end, he only grunts one: “Why?”

“A week ago”—and if there is some kind of reward for maturity, I think I should win it for not adding to that, after you walked out on me —“I was approached by a direwolf, who taught me how to speak to Amada herself. Amada is soaked in blood from the killing between Puresouls and Mongans. She wants the bleeding to stop, and if we can’t do that, then we will all die. ”

“The way for us to win the war is peace?” Bahar scoffs, his eyebrows high.

“I guess that’s one way to phrase it. But that’s only one part of it. The demichads will need to be killed at the impending battle. And you can’t defeat them alone. There are too many of them and this is Amada’s way of making sure the killings are stopped.”

“But we are not the ones who do the killing!” Hama exclaims in protest. I don’t answer that because it’s not my place to rank guilt or any other thing for that matter.

I glance at Daton. The man who mended my heart only to break it.

He’s shed an amount of blood that no Puresoul has managed to.

Maybe because he’s lived longer than us, or because he is more gifted at killing than any Puresoul, or because his hunger for revenge is insatiable.

I suspect it’s all of those things. He has killed so many that his name was the only name Amada mentioned in that context.

And yet she also ordered me to save him at the same time because as much as he is a problem, he is also a solution.

Our eyes meet, and he straightens himself as if reading my mind.

His gaze doesn’t leave mine as he refuses to apologize for what he has become.

“Lian,” Anavel says now, her voice soft, “we follow the Goddess. She is our only God. I don’t know how you—”