“Fine words, coming from a Coyac,” Tupoc idly said. “How many hundreds of serfs did your father bring back from Sordon to work in mines and fields?
“One was too many,” Izel bluntly replied.
“Spoken,” Tupoc Xical said, “by a man raised in the light of candles, fed on bread come of servile wheat fields, clothed in robes of cotton picked by their hands and whose tutors were paid with foreign treasures. What is left of you, without the flowers? Not much that I can see.”
Tupoc had spoken the way he always spoke: a bullfighter, twirling his cape to draw the eye before he sank barbs into flesh. Tristan could see it in those pale eyes, the expectation of the twitch and roar. That the other man would lower his horns and charge, that the familiar old game would play out down in the sand. Only Izel looked into Tupoc’s eyes as well, and whatever it was he found there caused in him no anger.
That look on Izel Coyac’s face, the thief thought, looked terribly like grief.
“You were Leopard Society,” he said.
Something like unease flickered on Tupoc Xical’s face, but it passed.
“No such society exists,” Tupoc grinned, a slice of ivory and mockery. “Careful, Coyac, you’ll say too much where the foreigners might hear. What would your father think?”
“I do not care,” Izel said, and pushed back his seat to rise to his feet.
The grin turned expecting, almost eager – he leaned forward a bit and angled his chin to make the punch easier. Only the other Izcalli instead did something that wiped the smile right off his face.
He bowed.
Low, deep. Starkly enough it could not be mistaken for anything else. He straightened only after a long moment of utter silence had passed.
“I’m sorry,” Izel said.
“Pardon?” Tupoc mildly said.
The Izcalli’s perfectly even face looked like a ceramic mask, a solid thing only cousin to a man’s face.
“I am sorry,” Izel Coyac repeated, “for what we did to you, Tupoc Xical. For all that was stolen.”
“Soft-handed noble,” Tupoc smiled. “Nothing was stolen. I was given a gift.”
“We stole that too,” Izel gently said. “The ability to understand that what was done to you is evil. Fundamentally, inexcusably. That all who hold a stake in the rule of Izcalli have failed a thousand thousand children like you, and still do. That we ordered you snatched up in the night, raised to kill and die nameless, so that we might keep repeating the same old mistakes instead of learning.”
And it should have sounded pretentious, Tristan thought, or sanctimonious. A man raising himself up by apologizing. It would have, if not for the devastating weight of that sincerity. Izel meant every word, the thief thought, meant them completely. It was so painfully obvious that not even Tupoc was able to laugh him off and gods did he look like he wanted to
“I am sorry,” Izel Coyac said one last time, “that we taught you it was necessary, what they ordered you do to, because it isn’t. We can be better.”
His jaw locked.
“It’s just easier not to be.”
Tristan had seen Tupoc Xical afraid before. For all that the Izcalli was like a great cat, all death and shamelessness, he was not beyond flinching. It was not always all in his hands and when Ocotlan had dropped dead at the table next to him he’d been afraid. Almost fled. But there was a difference, the thief thought, between fear and being rattled. Ocotlan’s death had made him afraid, but it had not rattled him.
He looked rattled now.
Like someone had snatched the fire and the poison right out of him. And as Tupoc swallowed, answer shying from his lip, the Izcalli felt the gazes of all those around him staring at a naked part of who he was – and reacted the only way that came to him in that moment.
He drew his knife, lunging across the table.
