By the time we make it to the checkpoint, I’m not worried about not looking like a couple.
We make it past the guards without an issue. The muki’s horn is more than enough. Yet, the princess stays under my arm. She’s cuddled into me all through our walk, as we shuffle between people to find an inn with openings for tonight.
I present the muki’s stone to the innkeeper, an age-weary man in traditional Andean clothing with wrinkles deeper than the folds of his poncho. Its value is more than enough for a single room, so the man, despite his stiff frown, offers us food from the conjoining restaurant in reciprocity.
Despite my feelings of overstimulation, the city is emptier than it would normally be at this time. The inn is quiet in a way that haunts rather than calms. Many people will arrive tomorrow, whether with prayers to save the Inka or desire to get front row seats to the show. The energy of both types of people and everyone in between weighs down the air. The mourning pall of night falls while everyone holds their breath at once.
We enter our room and shut the door, the barrier enough to separate us from the suffocating dread.
“Okay,” I whisper and shake my body free of all the lingering energy. “Everyone okay?”
“I’m fine, but… Mare…” the princess drifts off as I turn to look closer at Mare.
I expect him to look disgruntled, but it’s more than that. His face is red, and he’s breathing hard. His hands are clenched, and I can tell he’s digging his fingernails into his skin. I kneel in front of him and touch his cheek. My hand comes back wet. He’s been crying.
I don’t know what to do when he’s crying.
“Hey, uh, Mare,kori, what’s going on?”
At my direct question, he opens his mouth and just sobs. I look at the princess in shock, and she looks back at me with her eyebrows up to her hairline. I shake my head. She nods, and somehow we end up switching positions, with her in front of Mare and me by our things at the edge of the bed.
She’s whispering something to him that I don’t catch. This is odd. Mare is stronger than the small child he’s acting like now. He made it through the move to Lima without a single tear dropped, and I wasn’t expecting the crowds here to scare him so badly.
I swallow hard. He’s calming down, but I can still hear the occasional hiccup exit his mouth. I’m not the best at predicting people, but how could I have miscalculated this badly?
“… know about mimicry…” The princess’s gentle voice comes through. Mare is nodding his head now, and she hesitantly pats it a few times. I step forward to hear more, and she goes quiet.
“What about mimicry?” I ask.
The princess doesn’t move. Mare looks at me from above her head and then down at her. Then up at me again and back at her. He bites his lips.
“Susu told me not to say,” he says and shakes his head.
The princess sighs and gets up.Smart girl, she whispers beneath her breath. It’s so low it’s a miracle I caught it.
I narrow my eyes at the two of them. What could I have missed in the last few hours of us navigating Cusco? What could have possibly happened that has the princess knowing more about Mare than I do? I voice all this, and all the princess does is shake her head.
“Mare?” I ask him directly, since the princess is ignoring me in favor of pacing up and down the length of the room. “What’s going on,kori?”
He looks better, but now his brows are furrowed like he’s stressed.
“I promised Susu, but–”
“Don’t,” the princess commands, and Mare shuts his mouth like a good soldier.
“This is about Mare. I deserve to know whatever you do when it’s about him,” I say, though I’m less certain than I sound. Why would Suyai have Mare hide things from me? We don’t keep secrets, not with each other.
“I don’t know, not for sure, and I’d rather not,” the princess replies, igniting a red-hot frustration in my stomach.
“Cryptic and unhelpful as always, princess,” I snap, and the princess startles. I swallow hard, and regret burns all the way down my throat. There’s no time to dwell on that, but at least the shame wakes me up enough to soften my voice when I speak again. “Mare, what’s going on? You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, but it might be better for me to know.”
Mare opens his mouth when the princess jumps in again. “You don’t need to tell her. No one needs to know.”
This time, I keep from reacting on impulse. I don’t need to fight with her, not when her words come too late. No matter how close Mare has gotten with her, I’ve known him since he was born.
“It’s the samay. It hurts my head,” he says.
I don’t know if it’s the princess or me who curses, but what does it matter? Because if Mare is sensitive to samay, then it means he can likely do mimicry. Which means I might actually have a plan that works.
