34 A Woman and Her People
A WOMAN AND HER PEOPLE
Brawna Baltain sat on the edge of the craggy mountain overlooking the God Jaw. She found herself returning to this place often, drawn to her grave like a remorseful ghost. The heat warped the air, almost making the rock bend and shimmy. Her eyes had played many tricks on her in this canyon.
She took a bite of the dough-wrapped hare tart she’d taken from Waldovia for lunch and only lightly grimaced at the taste.
If she ever took over that place, it would be solely to introduce them to salt.
Bravis would have knocked this baneful “food” from her hands if he was here.
Her twin had had the fanciest tongue. He’d sprinkled cri powder on every meal he’d had, somehow immune to the acidic spice.
Silvery tears clouded Brawna’s eyes just as that heat played another trick on them, a slash of black across the canyon. She wiped them away just as she felt another presence approaching. Then another, and another, and another.
She reached for her sword, unfazed at sending another Micrean roach to their doom, before the smell of her opponents floated in on that caramelizing air.
Cri powder. Ash. Yimri.
A metallic clap sounded behind Brawna’s head, and she turned to find a line of strange, blunt weapons pointed at her.
“I told you it was her,” said a woman with black tattoos scrawled from her chin to her fingers, smirking at the man beside her.
The man aimed his weapon at Brawna, and she smelled yimri from down its long barrel. He pressed his lips into a line of disbelief. His tattoos curled around his ears and lined his jaw like a beard.
Like Bravis’s had.
Brawna touched her cheek. Their skin was brown and warm, like hers. Their noses proud like hers, their hair shining black in the piercing sun, like hers.
“Who are you?” Brawna asked in her birth language.
The man blanched, but his sister—because Brawna noticed that they were twins—grinned.
“We are Gora and Ga-le Baltain,” she said. “Twin Bears of the Bahn-Nuk.”