“Wipe that look off your face,” the princess growls.
“Okay, okay. I’m going to go wash up,” I say and almost make it out.
But the princess stops me by grabbing my arm. My bad arm. I can’t really be blamed for the scream I let out.
It’s all a little blurry after that as the adrenaline fueling my body runs out.
Chapter 20
Intiraymi marks the winter solstice, and I feel the strength of the season when I wake up before sunrise. It will be the shortest day of the year tomorrow. Today we’re heading to Cusco. It will take us all day, but we should arrive before sundown with enough time to find lodging.
My first memory of Intiraymi feels like it takes place in a different world. My mother still lived with us, but she made the trek to Cusco alone regardless of how much I wanted to go. I remember her loading coca leaves onto her back. She wore full traditional Andean clothes back then, a striking difference to the luxe tunics she wore in Lima. Her lliklla was stunning. She hated weaving, but she excelled at it anyway, and her lliklla showed off that natural talent.
It wasn’t too colorful. Our original community is too high in the mountains to have an abundance of resources for dyes. It had iconography of mountain peaks and the cosmos, our greatest joy being the sacred peaks surrounding us, and many community members working as shamans and diviners. I remember the chaskas, variations of stars, most of all. They were encased in red diamonds, and it’s the closest thing I’ve ever seen to the beauty of the night sky above our house. My motherwas never proud of being Andean, but that lliklla should have brought it out of her.
Now, I’m donning a lliklla I have no connection to. It’s predominantly blue, black, and brown. The colors come from a greater abundance of resources than I ever had at home. The blue is beautiful. I can admit that, but nothing else about it stands out to me. That’s the intention, but something pulls at my heart when I put it on.
I remember finding my mother’s old llikllas after she left and tying them around me like capes. She took only the bare necessities when she trekked to Lima, even though she knew back then she would never come back. We all knew.
Her llikllas were thick and long to protect from the cold, but I had the strength to hold them on my shoulders and the agility to never trip on them. That meant something to me back then, when I thought approval would be right around the corner.
Now, it actually is.
“We’re engaged,” the princess says, and that breaks through my memories. “Mare is your little brother, and we always planned to go to this year’s Intiraymi in Cusco to ask for good fortune before our union.”
I don’t know what expression is on my face, but Muna is chuckling behind his hand.
“Now, we’re going to offer our greatest treasure to pray for the Inka’s life. We’re from a mining community, and the muki’s horn has been helping us find metal veins to strike for decades,” the princess continues.
She can’t just be moving on from the engaged thing, can she? Except she is.
“Our parents are too old to take care of Mare alone. If they weren’t, he wouldn’t have come.”
“Wait, can we go back to the part where we’re getting married?”
Muna bursts into laughter. Asshole. This was probably his idea.
Though when I look at the princess’s satisfied face, I have a feeling it wasn’t.
“We’re not getting marriedyet.We need to wait for all this to be over,” the princess says, so factually it almost fools me.
Muna’s laughter gets louder and louder.I get it already.
“It’s what the lliklla says,” the princess continues. “Tula is engaged, and it shows it right here.”
She points to the whole heart iconography, the only icon in pure black, right at the center of the garment, where the two halves are stitched together.
I could bring up that Tula probably has garments from before her engagement, but nothing comes out of my mouth. How could I deny this? How could I say no?
That’s that.
I dress my wound again. We don our disguises, and we’re out a few minutes later.
Muna’sfinal words to me replay in my head hours after we leave.
She doesn’t try to pretend that you’re someone you’re not. Don’t let that make you worse.
At that moment, anger had flared deep in my gut, and I left without much of a goodbye. Now, it echoes in my ears like one of the Guardians.
