Daughter of the Sun by Barbara Wood

Author:Barbara Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-312-36368-0
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2007-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Thirty-eight

HOSHI’TIWA cried out.

Ahoté turned, his expression puzzled, and then he broke into a smile. “There you are!”

“Come out now. Quickly!”

“I was told I would find you—”

“Ahoté, this is a holy sanctuary! The gods live here!”

He ran from the forbidden glade, and they flew into each other’s arms. Hoshi’tiwa held tight and closed her eyes. She never wanted to let go. “You came,” she murmured. “You kept your promise.”

He held her close, murmuring her name, pressing his lips to her hair. Ahoté had pined and yearned and agonized through spring, summer, autumn, and winter, torn between his duty to the clan and his love for Hoshi’tiwa, refusing to marry a girl chosen by his father, earning the displeasure of the elders but determined to find Hoshi’tiwa until his father conceded that the boy could not go on like this, that for the sake of the Memory Wall and the clan Ahoté be allowed to find Hoshi’tiwa.

And now he had her and was never going to lose her again.

She drew back, tears of joy in her eyes. He was not just Ahoté—he was her family, he was the adobe houses, the cottonwoods, and all the happy memories of her young life. And then she saw the little figurine hanging on a string against his bare chest. “You found it,” she said.

Ahoté looked down at the comical owl she had made for him. “I searched every tree and bush and branch, I overturned every rock and stone. It took me days, Hoshi’tiwa, but I found it.”

“How did you know I would be here?” she asked, filling her eyes with the sight of him. Ahoté, a year older, perhaps wiser, whom she had feared she would never see again.

He explained that he had gone to the Potters’ Guild, as that was the logical place to find her, and was told that she was harvesting clay. “A woman named Yani told me how to find the trail. And here you are!”

Hoshi’tiwa was glad now she had confided in the older woman. “In case anything happens to me,” Hoshi’tiwa had said to Yani, “you must know where the golden clay is found.” But she had told Yani nothing about finding a hidden glade, and twice encountering Lord Jakál there. “Look,” she said, reaching under her dress and bringing out the curved, sharp bear claw. “I have not removed it once. I have kept you against my heart all this time.”

“We can go away now,” Ahoté said. “We can go where the Lords and the Jaguars will never find us.”

Hoshi’tiwa’s smile faded. A year ago she would have run off with him. But things were different now. There were her sister potters and the honor of the guild—and Lord Jakál—and all the people at Center Place. Somewhere in the year she had been away from home, Hoshi’tiwa’s allegiance had shifted. It was not a betrayal of her own family, she knew, simply an aligning of herself with a new one, like a bride moving away to a new village, still loyal to her family but bonding with the new.

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