Blade Kin Read Online Free PDF Page B

throat to keep out the crisp air, stirred the yellow-hot coals at the edge of the fire with the toe of her finely crafted otter-skin boots.
    She looked out of place, the only human at the celebration. Her awkward features contrasted sharply with the blunt, chinless faces of the swarthy Neanderthal boys with their deep-set eyes. Her long wavy hair was nearly as black as her eyes—far from the hues of the redheads and few platinum blonds among the Pwi.
    Darrissea was thin with a slender artist’s hands, not the knobby fists of a Neanderthal. She wore a brilliant blue cloak embroidered with golden geese flying around the edges, a white silk shirt with a lace collar, cream-colored leather pants.
    Many Pwi boys were wearing only moccasins and long black cotton breechcloths, as if to prove to each other that the chill air did not bother them.
    Among the Pwi, Darrissea appeared almost alien. But even among the humans of town, she’d always been a misfit. Her father had been a freedom fighter—a stern man who hunted slavers and openly fought pirate bands—until he’d died of poisoning right here in town five years back. Darrissea lived alone in his house now, never making close friends with her own kind, somehow more comfortable among the Pwi.
    Darrissea sipped cautiously from a mug of warm green beer, the kind the Neanderthals liked, and scowled at the taste, then peered around nervously to see if anyone would notice her scowl.
    “Would you prefer wine?” Tull asked. “We can have one of the boys go back to town to fetch it for you.”
    Darrissea looked up, and her dark eyes glittered in the firelight. “No. You’re a Pwi, now that you’ve turned your back on the human half of your heritage. This should be a Pwi celebration—even if it means drinking beer that tastes like … this.”
    Fava cut in. “It would not be a bother—”
    “No bother, I’m sure,” Darrissea said. “But you Pwi are taking on too many human customs. A hundred years ago every Pwi on this coast lived in a hogan, but now a stranger can wander the street in Smilodon Bay and not tell where the human part of town ends and Pwi Town begins. You work the farms and mills, but your grandfathers hunted with spears, trailing the mammoth herds.” Darrissea nodded at some of the boys and girls who had painted their faces blue and decorated their hair with swordtail ferns and strips of cloth—not the kind of garb they would wear while working in Ferremon Strong’s fishery.
    No, tomorrow they would come to work with their hair combed down, many wearing pants and tunics like any human. But tonight the young would party the night away in celebration of the wedding just as their ancestors had even done on Anee for a thousand years, perhaps as their ancestors had even done on Earth a hundred thousand years before.
    Though Darrissea and Tull had been speaking English, the universal trading language used by her Starfaring ancestors, Darrissea raised her mug and spoke in the soft nasal language of the Pwi. “ Hezae, anath zhevetpwasha palazh . Friends, let us reverently continue to give life to the past.”
    Tull and Fava drank to the toast, and Tull asked, “Will you give us a poem for our wedding present, something I can read to Fava?”
    Darrissea looked into the fire, dancing flames reflected from her black eyes. “I think your life should be a poem to the person you love. You just live the poem—each act, each carefully measured step, designed to convey your love, so that as your lives unfold the catalog of your deeds reveals the depth of your passion.” Darrissea smiled and looked up at Tull and Fava. “But if you want words on paper, I will give you those, too.”
    Anorath, a young Pwi of nineteen, got up and walked to the beer barrel; his bracelet of painted clamshells rattled as he scooped out a mugful of beer. “I gladly remember a time,” he said, “when Tull first moved here. That old human, Dennoth Teal, had a big peach tree, and every