Page 42 of The Seeker
“Language?” Rhys asked.
“Various. Atawakabiche and her clan spoke an early dialect of the Natchez language. The pieces of songs and history I’ve been able to capture have been in the Old Language, of course, but I’ve also recorded stories from a few singers who spoke Tunican languages.”
Rhys was watching Meera, not the map. She was pushing every scholarly button he had—Max would have called this a “nerd party”—but she was also pressing other, more personal buttons. Her mind was relentlessly fascinating. Her curiosity was such a mirror of his own, he didn’t know quite how to react to her.
He said, “You studied this before you came to America.”
“Yes.” She rose and walked to the corner to open a drawer.
“That’s all?”
She glanced over her shoulder. “What do you mean?”
“You’re not going to tell me what drew your curiosity? You must have spent hundreds of years studying with your mentor. When did you have time to—”
“Three hundred ninety-five.” She withdrew a map and walked back, still not looking at Rhys.
He blinked. “What?”
“I spent three hundred ninety-five years under Anamitra’s tutelage.”
“Studying Irina history?” Rhys couldn’t even imagine. He’d thought a hundred years at the academy was grueling.
“Yes.” She moved the weights and rolled up the previous map. “It’s not as you imagine.”
“How so?”
“Learning with Anamitra…” Meera gazed out the dark window as a car’s headlights swung past. “It wasn’t study. Not like the scribes think of it, anyway.”
“But your life was not your own,” Rhys said, suddenly understanding her fierce need for privacy. “Not until you came here.”
“My life still isn’t my own. That’s not the way it works.” She rolled the new map out, stopping when Rhys put a hand over hers.
The jolt of her energy made his heart race. She let out a long breath and closed her eyes as Rhys eased her fingers open and pressed her palm to his. Meera’s shoulders relaxed. She rested her forehead in her other hand as Rhys let her magic flood his senses.
“What are you doing to me?” she whispered.
“You need this. Too long in isolation—”
“Causes a dangerous buildup of soul energy that can lead to anxiety, loss of focus, and in extreme cases, hallucinations.”
“That’s right.” That wasn’t why he was doing it. He just wanted to touch her. Wanted to ease some of the burden he saw in her eyes. “What happened in Udaipur? Why did you leave?”
She pulled her hand from his, breaking off the connection so abruptly Rhys felt as if something inside him had torn.
“This is where the Wolf lives.” She spread the map and repositioned the weights. “Not that I have an exact location, of course.”
He forcedhimself back to the reason he’d come to New Orleans. “Why here?”
Meera pointed to a neat red dot that lay on a bend of the Mississippi River where the state of Mississippi butted into the state of Louisiana. “Because this is where the last major battle occurred, which was the battle that killed the Tattooed Serpent.” She moved her finger southwest to the bend of another river. “This is the last-known sighting of the Wolf after her brother was killed.”
“She could have traveled.”
“And this…” Meera spread her hand over a large area of the map marked in green. “This is the Atchafalaya Swamp. Somewhere in here is where our sister Sabine was lost. And somewhere in here was where the Wolf found her.”
They were sittingin the living room across from each other, drinking red wine that Meera had opened after dinner.
“So Sabine,” Rhys started. “She sounds… eccentric.”
