"Only that much?" said Tezcat.

Xolotl passed the gourd wearily to Tlaloc, who trickled a quarter mug for each of them and set the rest aside in a jar for Huitz. I clenched my fists beneath the table. Three days, and still no action on ridding me of Fuego. This time, both Chal and Tezcat were the holdup. The skirmish yesterday had drained them both, and today's matzin ration wouldn't be doing them any favours. I'd asked about alternatives, but any magic that didn't involve making things or energy teleport, appear, or disappear required a spell and a spellcaster. I'd been told the two gods were setting aside magic bit by bit to gather the full power needed for the sealing spells, but against Emma's split-second execution of the first seal, it was maddeningly slow.

Which left me stuck again, forcing a smile as we wound up for a day of who-knew-what, pretending to be upbeat so Jem and Emma didn't figure out that I'd gotten almost no sleep the night before. Half of it was toss-turning anxiety that Fuego had been the one to burn my fingers. The other half was a nasty dream about Centzon Huītznāuhtin, incinerating Grillo Negro by accident, and giant snakes.

I also had to convince the gods that I felt at home and was not, in fact, fantasizing about running away before I finished my Fuego training. This was going to be a long day.

Tezcat raised an eyebrow at the meagre cup of matzin passed to him. At least he was in a good mood.

"Be grateful she didn't find another village to incinerate," said Quet. He snagged his twin on his way by and passed him a white ribbon. "I can't lift my arms..."

Xolotl tied his hair back for him, then dropped into the next chair and put his head down.

Tezcat poked him with a crutch. "Go to bed."

"We're doing things today."

"And you were up all night. Go to bed."

The crutch-pokes grew more and more forceful until Xolotl was prodded to his feet and beaten out the door. Tezcat gave him a last whack across the back of the knees as he escaped down the hallway. The night god returned the crutch to its partner against the wall. "Alright. Let's get down to business, shall we?"

We cleared the table. Tlaloc snapped his fingers, and a veritable marketplace of materials appeared. There were piles of long, thin wood shafts, baskets of sharp-edged stone, baskets of round stone, a basket of turkey feathers, a jar of pitch glue, fluffy heaps of plant fibers, and a large pile of clay on a wooden slab. It was like a colibrí-making operation in Grillo Negro scaled up to five times the size with twice the materials, and I almost expected Graciela to toddle out from under the table, clapping her hands with a fat grin and giggling like her siblings.

"Want to help?" said Chal.

"What can I do?" said Jem.

She tossed him a coil of sinew and a stone to beat it with. I retrieved a bowl to soak the resultant fibres in until they were soft enough to work with.

"Everyone's got paint, right?" said Xochi, claiming the feather basket. "Tezcat, can you make the points?"

He tossed her an obsidian arrowhead he had practically flicked into existence without a spark of magic. She teleported it to the table rather than catching it, and set about splitting feathers. Chal trimmed wooden shafts and cut them to different lengths. When she found bent ones, she steamed them over the fire Xipe had lit in a bowl to melt pitch on.

Tezcat had several more arrowheads now, piled neatly on a square of deerhide. Petal-thin shards of smoky black glass littered another square beneath his hands. He emptied these into a bowl. Tlaloc rolled a clay ball in them and set it on a baking tray.

I watched in fascination as the first arrow came together. Xochi notched both ends of a shaft, then deftly bound and glued split feathers to its tail end. The arrowhead, she handled through a leather cloth. It fit neatly into the deeper notch at the shaft's other end, and in half a minute was bound in place with sinew. Xochi held it out to Xipe, who secured the binding with a daub of black pitch. Xochi inspected the full length of the arrow. Satisfied, she dropped it in a basket and started another.

Tlaloc now had a tray full of clay balls lined up in impeccable order. Xipe took these to the cooking room, where the clunk of firewood on stone indicated he was filling the first layer of the pit kiln. Tezcat replenished Tlaloc's bowl of glass chips. He had produced a surplus of arrowheads, and so grabbed a regular, oblong stone and began chipping it into a sphere. Chal had taken it upon herself to keep ahead of the quick-working Xochi. Two tidy piles of shafts lay on the table between them, one arrow-length, the other longer, like throwing spears.

Quet had taken over a cloud of maguey fibres when we sat down. These had now condensed considerably, and the feather-haired god was knotting freshly twisted twine into a slingshot. A rather lethal-looking slingshot: light, strong, and due to be as long as my arm when loaded. I suddenly understood what the glass-studded clay balls were for.

The weapons manufacturing continued in high spirits until lunch. The god siblings bantered and ribbed each other constantly over anything and everything, and I had to admit I was enjoying myself. My smile, at least, was no longer fake. We ate in the couch room and returned to work until midafternoon, when the kiln finally filled and everyone's hands began to chafe. Xipe and a now-awake Xolotl packed a last layer of fuel in the deep, round kiln. Xolotl lit it with a dart of gold flame, and a few flicks from Chal covered it with a smoke-absorbing barrier like the cookfires possessed.

The lighting of the fire finalized the day's work. We loaded our spoils: baskets of stone shot large enough to fill my palm, a sheaf of throwing spears, and drifts of arrows. Quet had finished five beautiful slings. He handed three to Jem, Emma and I with a coy grin, pocketed one, and tossed the last to Tezcat.

"I'll teach you how to handle them," he said as we fingered the weapons. We had all used slings before, but these were twice the length and meant for shot four times the size. "You should have at least one long-distance defense at your disposal if you're going to stick around."

Xochi chuckled at our skeptical faces, lashing the throwing spears into a bundle the size of a small child. "If there's one advantage we have over the Centzon Huītznāuhtin, it's that they couldn't shoot a frog in a bucket if you loaded their slings for them and showed them where to stand. Chal, how long do you think this'll last Huitz?" 

"Why didn't you just conjure them?" said Emma. She had spent the morning happily splitting feathers and the afternoon learning to knot slings, but the manual labour only reinforced the question. I could already guess the answer.

"Too much energy," said Xochi, hefting her spear bundle onto the table. Her butterfly escaped to her head. "And besides, it's more fun this way. And much more satisfying when you can shoot Centzon Huītznāuhtin with arrows you made yourself."

My eyebrows hit my hairline. Xochi caught the look and gave a grim smile. "When you meet them, you'll understand. They might technically be our brothers, but they're not quite... human. Or god. You'll see what I mean."

"How many of these are you putting in storage?" said Chal, waving a hand at the arrow piles.

"Most of them. I've still got a full quiver."

Chal waved in a more deliberate manner, and all but a handful of the arrows disappeared. The sling stones were sent the same way. Xipe gathered bark and plant detritus from the floor and stashed it for kindling, and by the time Tlaloc walked once around the table, the room was back to its normal tidy state.

Chal stretched her arms. "Who's up for board games this afternoon?"

"No sign of any villages?" said Quet.

"No villages, and no Centzon Huītznāuhtin movement."

Tezcat grabbed his crutches and had claimed the comfiest couch by the time his siblings followed. Xochi brought a worn reed mat and made Tlaloc conjure the low table to unroll it on. There was a design drawn on it in rubber paint: a large X with rounded ends, subdivided into patterns of rectangles, triangles and squares. Some were dyed, others blank. 

Quet plopped down opposite his sister as she unloaded a bag of game pieces and beans."What are we betting?" 

Xipe snapped a plate of tiny cornbread muffins into existence, drawing widespread laughter.

"The stakes are raised," said Xochi. "Steal my muffins and I swear, I will eat your hand."

"Try me."

It didn't take long to learn the rules of patolli, at least enough to make watching it ten times more hilarious. Xochi won by a hair-raisingly narrow margin and challenged Chal, who also lost. Tezcat took the next game and won on a chance roll, challenged Tlaloc and had his muffin hoard pillaged. Tlaloc lost to Xochi, who challenged Jem. He jumped in wholeheartedly.

It was the kind of afternoon that was too nice to go uninterrupted, but no Centzon Huītznāuhtin attacked. Xochi ended up with enough muffins to tide a body through the apocalypse. She shared them around on the grounds that she couldn't possibly eat them all. Xipe made excellent muffins.

"Are we saving some for Huitz?" said Xochi.

"He doesn't need to know." Quet went for another muffin and yelped as it vanished beneath his fingers. Someone had quick reflexes. "What! He can go beg his daddy for food."

Xochi wasn't having it. The last few muffins disappeared into a box that she held out to Tezcat. He sealed it gleefully. Xipe just made another plate.

Ever heard where Huitz came from? said Tezcat's voice in my head as he sat back again. I tried not to grin. We had chatted several times now, after I poked him for more stories about his siblings. He had lots.

I'm intrigued.

In the back of my vision, a scene unfolded. A white adobe house with a thatched roof bathed in the sun. Children tumbled in the grass outside. God children. I strained my eyes, but the blurriness of the house didn't seem to be from my eyesight.

The door opened, and I recoiled as Cōātlīcue emerged with a broom in hand. Suddenly, everything else looked blurry. The gods' mother stood out in crisp detail as she swept the path to the door. Her broom stopped short of something small and green. It was a ball of hummingbird feathers. It gave the smallest spark of magic as she picked it up with a smile and tucked it into her waistband. Was that how gods made children? No. Somehow I sensed this was unusual even by their standards.

Mom was dating. He sent her that.

Seriously? Who?

Name's Mixcoatl. Bit of a weird one, which I suppose is why they got along. Anyway, Huitz is the only one of us with a dad besides the Centzon Huītznāuhtin. Don't ask; it gets awkward.

Okay, but why feathers? That's so weird.

It was Tezcat's turn to grin. Right? We tease him about it all the time. If he ever gets annoying, call him hummingbird.

I doubted I would get the chance, or have the guts if I did. Huitz and Xolotl came home late and Huitz left early, so I'd barely seen him. It was fun to know, though, that the sibling antics here extended all the way to nicknames. I missed my sister.

I also had a sneaking suspicion I had just found out where Grillo Negro's colibríes came from.

Here's another fun one. Don't ever let Quet trick you into believing he does all the things in his people's stories alone. If it wasn't for Xol, he'd have died millennia ago.

Actually died?

I mean, there's been about six or seven times Xol's hauled them out of serious trouble that Quet got them into, but remember the one with Mictlantecuhtli? He's crazy powerful—being god of the underworld has its perks—and he really didn't want to give Quet back his people's bones. He's a bit of a selfish prick. Anyway. So Quet and Xol snuck in, and Quet saw an opening while Xol was scouting, so he took it... props to him, he got past Mict and his wife, but he ran straight into Mict's traps on the other side. Fell into a pit and concussed himself badly enough to put him out for a week, even with Chal and Tlaloc's healing. Xol drew off Mict and got them both out of there.

But he doesn't get any credit for that? He barely even shows up in the story!

Pfff, have you met Xol? Actually, I think they might even have an agreement about that. Xol keeps them alive and Quet keeps the spotlight off him. Everyone's happy.

Tezcat tipped back with his hands behind his head. He shifted his right knee. I'll give Quet a bit of credit. He was the one who got me home when this happened.

I recalled the blurred scenes after he and Quet wrestled a water monster to make land in the water of the world they had made. Did Cipactli get you? The giant crocodile?

We let Quet's people believe it was intentional.

Did he trust me more, to be telling me this now? Or had the blurriness then been from an absence of memory—like his mother's blurred house that Tezcat must never have seen the outside of? Maybe that was why the image of Cōātlīcue had been so clear.

Tezcat had more stories, but now the conversation had shifted to these anyway, so he told them out loud. He was good at it.

The paradox returned with a vengeance when Emma and I were getting ready for bed that evening, confirming my earlier suspicions. We had just spent most of a day making enough ammunition to take out a hundred Centzon Huītznāuhtin, but the mood in the house remained light, even carefree. I doubted this was how the gods really felt, which meant something was being hidden from us to keep us from worrying.

That on its own made me worry more than anything.