The Drowning Eyes Read Online Free Page B

supplies loaded.”
    Shina decided not to ponder whether that was meant as an insult. She trudged down the gangplank and headed along the dock, only stumbling a little bit on legs that were used to a ship’s deck.
    The sun was climbing, and the streets were waking up. Shopkeepers’ children were setting baskets of colorful fruits in front of stores; goats and chickens demanded their morning meals beside the butcher shops. In front of a temple to Shula, a line was forming for public breakfast. Although Shina stopped to bow to the green-haired goddess, she kept a quick pace as she made her way uphill.
    Doubts and worries had begun to swarm around her head like flies. She’d only met Aksa-auntie once, and that had been a brief introduction at a temple dedication ceremony. There was no guarantee—maybe not even a likelihood—that she would recognize Shina, that she would recognize Shina as a student Windspeaker, that she would believe that Shina was the last one alive after the raid on Tash.
    As she got closer and closer to the temple, Shina became more and more certain that she was in the wrong place. She was passing big, ornate houses now, and servants gave her suspicious glares as they swept the verandahs and hung the shade mats in the eastern openings. The packed sand of the road was becoming rockier and loamier—after it passed a tall purple house with a lush garden in front, it narrowed to a dirt path just wide enough for a pushcart.
    Just approaching the temple was enough to calm Shina’s thumping heart a little bit. No, it wasn’t the temple on Tash, or one of the familiar rural temples where the students would go to learn alongside the grown Windspeakers, but it was a storm temple nonetheless. Wherever Shina went, these simple round mud huts with their roofs of dried leaves would be home.
    When she reached the threshold of the hut, Shina knelt and prostrated herself. After a few moments, she heard an old woman clear her throat.
    “You can come in,” said a worn voice. Shina rose, tightened the bottom knot on her shass, and stepped inside the temple.
    Aksa-auntie sat, as was customary for Windspeakers, on a round seat of black stone that had been brought up from the Sunrise Temple on Vihar. Dressed only in a simple linen frock, she had her white curls shorn as short as Shina’s. She had always been a small woman, and in her old age her posture had become stooped from the weight of her eyes. Although the heavy stone orbs had been pitch black when they’d been put in (like everyone else’s), nearly seventy years in Aksa-auntie’s head had turned them a beautiful pale pink. The green veins spreading across them had begun to develop purple spots like flowers on a vine.
    “You’re nervous,” Aksa-auntie said, cocking her ears toward Shina. Her button nose twitched as she sniffed the air. “You smell like smoke, and you’ve been on a fishing boat.” Aksa-auntie beckoned for Shina to come over. She grasped in the air as she approached. When Shina was close enough, Aksa-auntie grabbed her skirt and held it to her nose, then gripped her leg and felt her way up to her hand. Shina winced at the touch, but let Aksa-auntie pull her arm to her face and sniff it.
    “You’re wearing clothes that aren’t yours,” she said. She sat back, took a deep breath, and let out a short laugh. “And you hurried up here.”
    “Yes, auntie,” Shina said.
    “Give me your face.”
    Shina held her breath and shut her eyes as she bent down for Aksa-auntie’s inspection. The old woman’s thin, frail hands were gentle as they brushed against her cheeks, prodded at her eyelids to see if they contained living flesh or cold stone.
    “You know,” Aksa-auntie said as she released Shina’s head, “I once told somebody that I hoped I’d never give this compass to anybody.” She motioned for Shina to step back and stood up, leaning on a rough wooden staff. “But now that you’re here—” She shook her head as she walked to a