“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. Ask me another question. Ask me the one you want to know. The one you’re avoiding because you don’t want to get angry. Look at yourself, Sinchinrei, you’re already so fucking angry. Ask me the question.”
And she’s right. She’s always right.
“Who did this to you?”
“My mother and now my mother’s dead.”
I grab the collar of her blouse and stretch the shirt until the top button pops open, and there it is.
It’s inflamed and red, angry as if it’s fresh, but I know it can’t be. Yanami couldn’t have gotten this under my care while beingmyprincess. There are no stitches, no blood, yet it’s raw like an open wound.
I haven’t touched it tonight. It felt off limits, like a door that would lock the moment I knocked. It was a privilege just to see Yanami’s bare skin, to taste her, to touch her, to feel her. It was enough. The secrets could wait, I had told myself. But I was wrong. There’s no waiting.
Because Yanami’s mother did this to her, and now her mother’s dead.
“Ask me what happened,” Yanami commands.
I’m past the point of trying to stop this.
“What happened?”
And she starts. Yanami starts with the story of her mother, 18 and burdened with the knowledge that she’s the rightful Inka, fated to take down the False King. She goes into her own birth, born amidst political uprisings and discontent. She tells of assassination attempts and claims of false thrones. Fires and attacks that not even the Inka’s blessing could control.
“The Samay Stone has been passed down from Inka to Inka, as old as the Sun Staff. It’s the mechanism for sacrifices. You sacrifice people, and the stone transfers their samay to someone else. But after the last calamity, the stone was lost. Hidden. No Inka had access to it, and things got worse and worse until my mother. She found it, and she learned how to use it.”
I shake my head in disbelief. I remember stories from my aunts. Despite the years of sacrifices, the droughts continued, the flooding and the fires still came. Until the Inka overthrew the False King. She stopped the sacrifices, and the Guardians, content with a true leader on the throne, protected the empire once again. And then the legendary princess’s power was revealed, a samay unlike any other.
A samay that never ran out.
The princess waits for it all to sink in, and just as my mind starts connecting the dots, she continues.
“Turns out the False King was right about sacrifices, but didn’t have the right tools for it,” the princess lets out a broken laugh. “A sacrifice without the stone does nothing. Our ancestors would cut holes in the hands of the sacrifice and the one receiving the power. Then, they would nestle the stone between them. There needs to be a connection deeper than the flesh between all parties. My mother had an idea about how to make that happen.”
I focus on my anger above all else because if I don’t, I’ll be sick.
“She couldn’t start sacrifices again with the political climate like it was. So she had me. She hid the stone inside me and– and,” Yanami's voice had been steady up to this point. Now, she stutters, and her breathing speeds up. She’s hyperventilating when I reach out to cup her cheek.
She flinches away from me so hard she falls back.
“That’s why the Aya Runa want me. She must have told them. You said you could never hate me? Well, you don’t know me. You don’t know what I’ve done… what I’m capable of doing.”
“I could never hate you.”
“Soldiers. Mothers. Children. Anyone alone, any easy target, anytime my mother needed something done, I had to go out, and I had to kill and,champion, it is not a merciful death. If the Aya Runa know this, then they’ll want me to do it again.” She’s hysterical. She’s on the ground and crying, her hands digging into the earth. Her blouse stays open, and the firelight creates valleys of shadows from the raised skin.
“But the worst part isn’t that,” Yanami says, but her breath stutters halfway through her last word. She takes two deep breaths and continues. “The worst part is that I promised myself I’d never do it by my own will, but you know what, champion? When I saw my mother die at the hands of the Aya Runa, all I could think about was how I should have killed her myself.”
At that, I get up. I sit behind her and pull her to my chest. She struggles for a moment, but just like I hoped, she sinks into my body.
“I’m sorry, Yanami,” I say and kiss her sweat-soaked hair. “I’m so sorry.”
“For what?” she whispers at the ground.
“For taking that chance away from you,” I respond before I think it through.
She turns to stone in my arms, and I wonder if I said the wrong words, if I pushed her past the point of no return with my dark truth. But then, like a flash of samay, she turns around and kisses me with enough force to push me onto my back. We fall together with a thud.
