Desert Rising - Kelley Grant Page 0,1

the undulating dunes, leaving only a brilliant pink-and-yellow afterglow.

Sulis turned to her mother’s body and lifted the flame high enough to thrust into the tinder at her feet. When the wood caught, she proceeded up to the body of the feli, lighting the tinder underneath. Finally, she reached her mother’s head, and, tears streaming down her face, she lighted the tinder under the thick cloud of ebony hair. Infused in oil, it flared and crackled.

An ululation, high and shrill, rose around her as mourners wailed their pain and ushered Iamar’s soul to the One. Sulis felt her knees buckle as the scent of burning hair and flesh wafted from the pyre. She gagged, and her father caught her around the waist, steadying the torch as she fell to her knees. Her grandmother took the flame and handed it to the keeper, who would feed the fire through the night.

Sulis clung to her father, but he remained stiff against her, looking away as she sobbed harder into his shoulder. He held her until she quieted, then escorted her over to the thick, woven mat where her brother already sat for their nightlong vigil. He kissed the top of her head.

“Remember I love you, now and always,” he said. They were the words he always said before a long trip, and her eyesight blurred again. He was leaving them.

Kadar silently put an arm around her, and she wiped her tears on the shoulder of his mourning tunic, letting her shudders quiet with the comfort of his touch. Sulis recognized Aunt Janis’s voice rising above the other women’s laments and saw her kneeling, reaching toward the flames, with Uncle Aaron’s restraining hands tight on her shoulders. Aunt Raella stood silently behind Uncle Tarik as he knelt, mourning his sister. Sulis looked around for her father, but he had disappeared into the night.

“He’s gone,” she murmured to her twin. Kadar understood whom she meant. “He told me good-bye.”

“Will he come back?”

“I don’t think so. Not with mother dead and her killer free. No, he will search for her killer until one of them is dead.”

She stared into the fire as Kadar threw his head back and keened, his voice rising with those of the other mourners. The fire crackled and danced, and Kadar buried his face in his hands. She pulled him to her, holding him as he wept for both of their parents.

Sulis’s own tears had dried, and she felt calm amid the storm around her. She wondered if this was what her mother had felt before she left for Illian the last time—putting herself back in the danger she’d fled fourteen years before. Sulis felt it, the call that had taken her mother away. Her entire life, she’d felt as though something were calling her name—but from a distance. When she’d touched her mother’s feli, she’d felt a connection to something greater. Her mother had told her that connection was to the One. In the past few days, since her mother died, that feeling had turned to a call, a pull to the Northern Territory, to the Temple of the One. It was as though her mother’s burdens passed to her upon death, and she had to succeed where her mother had failed.

Sulis sat in the darkness, feeling this new space inside her as Kadar fell asleep, and the mourners drifted off to their own jetals. It made her feel alone, apart from her family and friends. The low voices of her grandmother and aunts seemed to come from a different world, one that was closed to her now that her parents were lost.

Aunt Janis knelt on the mat beside her. “Sulis, do you know where your father is?” she asked quietly.

“He’s gone,” Sulis said, looking into the fire.

“He’s taken his horse. Did he tell you where he was going? Aaron wants to go to him, to make certain he’s all right.”

Sulis looked over at her aunt. “He won’t find Father,” she said with certainty. “He told me good-bye. He won’t be back.”

Aunt Janis put out a hand and stroked Sulis’s hair.

“Oh, child, you are such an old soul,” she said. “These shouldn’t be your burdens.”

“I am what the One wants me to be,” Sulis said stiffly, repeating what her mother used to say.

“You are yet a child, in spite of your calling to the One—and having to grow up too soon,” Aunt Janis said. She shifted closer to Sulis, and her nimble fingers began weaving small braids in Sulis’s thick hair.