The world is spinning. I need to hold onto the wall to stand. I can barely focus in the darkness of the room. There’s a bed to my immediate right, and I manage to stumble into it. I close my eyes. I think I can sleep now that the worst of it is over.
“Oh, Rei,” my best friend’s voice says from beside me. “What in the Guardians’ names did you do?”
My eyes snap to full awareness, and I face her, Suyai, blurry and sitting at the edge of the bed.
My toothy smile isn’t what she wants to see, but I can’t hold it back.
Chapter 8
“Ileft Mare in the other room. We’re a few chambers down from you, actually. It’s nice they considered that when they dragged him out of his lessons without a single explanation.”
She pointedly looks away from my face. I can’t blame her.
I’m so exhausted that even Suyai’s distinct brand of disappointment and the pain scorching my muscles can’t get me to muster up the energy to keep my damn mouth shut.
“Which lesson? Hopefully, court etiquette. He hates that one.”
“I don’t think he had time to celebrate in between kicking and screaming, thinking he was being kicked out of the palace.”
Oh.
“Oh,” I say, a wave of nausea rising in me that has nothing to do with pain. “That’s not what I meant to happen.”
Suyai isn’t looking at me when I see her deflate.
“Don’t even say that to me, Rei. I don’t blame you forthat. You’re selfish, but not that kind of selfish.”
“I’m impulsive. Irresponsible. Single minde–”
“Single-minded, yes. But never malicious. So I’m going to ask you once because I saw Mare’s face when he ran out of the guard’s arms into mine, and my patience is running dangerously thin. What happened?”
In the low candlelight haze of the room, Suyai looks soft around the edges, like damp clay smoothed out by a bare hand until it fades into the background. There are only two wall cutouts in this room, both directly in front of the door and behind the bed, parallel to the wall. There aren’t enough to light up the room, even with the early evening sun still lighting the sky. I count six candles lit inside evenly spaced crevices in the walls.
My vision blurs the longer I go without blinking, so my eyelids have to flutter like butterfly wings to keep Suyai in sight. In a few split seconds of clarity, when my eyes and the lighting stop their brawl, I notice the small wrinkle between her brows. Her mouth is set in a tight line, and she refuses to make eye contact with me. No matter how much effort I’m putting into keeping my eyes open for her, she does not look at me from the far-left end of the bed.
I know Suyai like the mountains I still call home after all these years away.
She is more worried than angry.
“I’ll tell you when you look at me,” I say, still slurring but hopefully somewhat comprehensible. The more I try to enunciate, the more my teeth and jaw ache from the hours of grinding and biting down. “No blood or bruises. I swear on Inti rising another day.”
She lets out a sound between a laugh and a sob. She catches my eye, and a different kind of pain flares inside me. Suyai and Mare are upset. Because of my actions, because I asked them to be brought to me. From our eye contact, I see the red lines tainting the whites of her eyes, and the image of Mare’s eyes inthe same state invades my mind. Seeing their eyes should put me at ease, like seeing my hometown just beyond the mountain peak after a day of hiking used to, but now I have to look away.
“It’s harder to see you in pain from wounds I can’t heal. I was outside the palace when the fighting started, but I heard from the others. I know what happened to you, and I know what healing they must have done to have you walking now,” Suyai finally whispers, so low I almost miss it. “But I’ll look at you anyway, and you’ll tell me why Mare and I are inside the Inka’s quarters.”
“They had to have told you something,” I say, a part of me comes to life at the thought of a guard announcing thatI, Sinchinrei, am the Guardians’ Hero.
I can only imagine grandeur. My mind makes up a look of pride on my mother’s face that I know doesn’t exist. Not yet, but soon. It is immediately killed by the thought of Mare sobbing in a guard’s bruising grip.
Suyai’s silence says it all. They weren’t told a single thing.
“You’re in the Inka’s Army for Gods’ sake. We’ve given them our whole lives, and they couldn’t even explain what’s going on?”
Suyai knows how quickly I go from subdued to bursting at the seams, and she breaches the gap between us to meet me on the right side of the bed. Her hand starts to rub my head before I can explode. Her fingers thread through my hair like a needle combining two fabrics destined to be one. The pressure is more than comfortable. It is an act of knowledge. She’s been there for every year of my life that created the person I am now. She accepts it, but in the back of my mind, I know the clock is ticking.
Still, my body relaxes before I know what’s happening.
“They told me I’m being added to the princess’s guard unit at your recommendation. I didn’t know Mare would be dragged into it until they threw him into my new quarters.”
