“The reaper spider?” I croaked, any strength in my voice lost. “The mulapo seeds? The jellyfish and the dead chicken?”
He studied at me. My steady, calm uncle.
Always the first to extinguish my aunt’s scorching accusations, always the last to make me feel like an outsider. I trusted him the way I trusted my father.
A muscle tightened in his jaw, and my eyes darted to my trowel.
I twisted toward it, striking out a hand, and he drove into me, his knees landing heavily on my arm. Something popped in my elbow, and a blazing fire shot up my shoulder and into my neck.
My uncle wasn’t a big man, but he still shoved me down flat, jutting a knee into my chest as he reached for the long fishing knife strapped to his hip. I wrenched my torso underneath him, legs scrabbling over the fresh soil, leaves shaking over our heads.
“I’m not a witch,” I pleaded. Just beyond my fingertips, the wooden handle of my trowel shifted at my touch.
“Do you know how many ships came to Leihani each dry season before you were born?” he asked, his bare kneecap carving into my breastbone. The air in my lungs oozed out, and I gasped without it, willing my lungs to reinflate. “They came every day. They bought all the fish we could catch, and I thought—” he forced his knee harder between my ribs, “—I thought my family would never go hungry. Do you know how many come now?”
He waited for me to answer. I shook my head. Maybe three a week? The ships were important, but I’d never really paid attention to them. None of the women did. Naheso leaned in, and I felt my fingers twitch, the pads of my hands suddenly numb.
“We’ve had three since the lastMihauna,” he breathed. “Three ships in four weeks. Do you know why?”
My mouth opened, but all that left it was a garbled, choked sound, thin under the rustle of wind in the trees. His gaze hardened, as if he wanted to hear my answer. As if he needed a confession from my lips, a validation for any doubt he might have later. He lifted off my chest, only a fraction of an inch.
It was all the space I was given, but I greedily took it. Leveraging my heel into the roots of my breadfruit, I bucked my hip against his weight. He caught himself with a quick arm into the earth, but I’d already wormed my way backwards. Soft soil fell over my eyes as I burrowed the back of my head into the ground, reaching for the trowel. The handle shifted into my fingertips, and I wrapped my hand around it.
With a low snarl, he forced himself over me again, a hand tight over my throat. I slashed the trowel into the side of his head. It slammed with enough force to send an electric jolt through my wrist, then continued across his face, the iron tip of the blade cleaving a muddied track over the curve of his cheek bone. He shrieked in surprise, throwing his weight backwards, his flailing feet kicking my waist as he lurched away.
I turned to my side, a string of coughs wracking my body. My feet felt like iron weights as I stumbled away. Trees rustled under my clumsy hands. I dropped into the swamp lines, the intersection between my taro plants and my neighbors’. Naheso tumbled in after me and I ducked low in the marshes, desperate to catch my breath. A leafy crash sent stalks wavering overhead, the side of his face suddenly visible between trees, the gash inhis cheek now a vivid splash of red among the emerald foliage. His eyes followed the obvious tracks left by my bare feet and panicked body, our eyes meeting through the swaying canes.
His hand curled into his hip, and he ripped his knife from its home.
“Because no ship wants to trade with an island that lets a witch steal its sailors,” he spat, weaving through the taro toward me.
“I’m not a witch!” I twisted between the stalks, tearing arrowhead leaves from their stems as I forced my way through swampy water, until I backtracked too far, wedging myself tight.
Naheso followed me step for step, halting to stand in the path of my only way out, watching as I struggled to free myself.
“I know that. But it doesn’t matter if you are or not.” He looked down his nose at me with resignation. “It only matters that they’re afraid.”
He plunged the knife forward, and I stiffened, waiting for the feeling of sharpness in my abdomen, for the sound of steel slicing through muscle and bone. But a strange sizzle met my ears instead, sharp and poignant and soft, almost crispy. A chill pressed against my bare stomach, and I gazed down to find his knife stuck fast in a crystalline sheet of ice, like the one I'd broken under the volcano. The sensation of dripping water slid over my fingertips.
We each gaped at the knife, mouths open in stark confusion.
My mind spun, but I didn’t have time to question its sudden appearance. The weight of the ice set the knife off balance in his hand, and it slipped from his fingers, ice shattering over the murky taro roots at our feet. The shining blade plopped into the swamp, bright in the shallow water.
His gaze shot to mine, his mouth forming a single word as he stared at me in sudden horror.
Witch.
I burst towards the dropped knife. He flinched, reaching for it too, but my fingers wrapped around it first. Naheso batted my forearm, grappling for the blade. Rolling away from him, I shot for the gaps between trees. Thin mud splashed as I wriggled away, but the taro was too thick to run with any speed. He lunged for me again, and I felt his fingers constrict around the back of my neck, yanking me back.
I managed to turn and face him as I went down, his hands reaching for my throat. Knees sank to either side of my ribcage, the marshy water drawing me in. Liquid sloshed in my ears, and brown-green muck was all I could see. That, and a wrist thrust under my chin, fingers tightening around my neck, its arm disappearing somewhere above the surface.
Slime and algae coated the marsh-floor, just enough for me to wiggle out from under him. Naheso’s free hand scrabbled for the knife, and I slashed blindly at it. I aimed for his arm or hand, the thing clawing at my limbs, with all the force I could muster. But the knife drove into tissue too deep to be either.
Ropy muscle tore under the the blade, each strand giving like the creeping vines of a mulapo, chopped from the branches of trees it had grown into. I forced it in with all my strength; his flesh a repellant to my blade, body pushing back against the steel.
Naheso froze, sensing the assault to his flesh. His hands left my neck, and I shifted out from under him.
The taro around us swayed, the only sound in the marshes besides my gasping breath and dripping hair. I crawled to my feet. Naheso remained on his knees in the water, fingers gingerly brushing the wooden handle of the knife jutting from his back. Blood oozed from the wound, thick and shining, falling in lethargic globs around the hilt.
