“Why would we?” I respond without thinking. She wasn’t talking to me, but I don’t want to hear the regret in Tutay’s voice. We really have gotten too comfortable around Suyai. All of us speak freely as if she were one of us.
“You’re doing it for Cashan,” Suyai says, shocking all of us. She shrugs and looks directly at me with the saddest smile I’ve ever seen. None of us has spoken about our reasoning out loud. Not clearly. Not truthfully. “You’re doing it for love.”
I open my mouth to disagree, to fight the accusation, to say this is simply a debt that must be repaid. Cashan depleted all his life energy for us, for people who are seen as nothing. That’s unacceptable, and I need her to know that. But Suyai shakes her head. I don’t get a word out.
“Rei is such a fool,” Suyai says, and it’s like I’m in her head all over again. I can feel the waves of love and desperation, of equal parts fury and resignation. What has Rei done for love rather than selfishness?
Suyai faces Tutay as if she already knows how this is all going to end.
Chapter 25
The lakes don’t work, and Suyai is in danger.
We’re past the fourth lake, the last on our way back to the bridge, our underwear wet with sacred water that glides off our skin. The temperature begins to drop as the sun hides behind the mountains, and it’s only that, the severe cold of a god overshadowed, that breaches past the numbness.
Because the eye of water didn’t work. The other lakes didn’t work. Nothing worked, and I had to see my best friend projected in the sky by the Aya Runa.
I ran to Mare when it happened, seeing his little hand rub his eyes to focus his stare upward. Suyai wasn’t hurt like the others. I could tell right away. Her injuries didn’t come from blunt-force weapons, and a lot of the injuries, the bruises, the bones jutting out, she sustained were from blocking hits. She must have had what the others didn’t.
The ability to fight back.
Why? I couldn’t process the image fast enough to figure it out. I wasn’t capable of it. I couldn’t do anything other than stop Mare from seeing the same image that brought me to my knees.
He fought against me. He beat his small fists into my stomach when I pulled him close, and hebegged. He called outher name and pleaded to see her, but I couldn’t. I whispered into his ear that I couldn’t, not right now. I whispered that he had to trust me, that it would be okay, that she would be okay. With every word out of my mouth, he calmed down until I was just hugging him rather than forcing him in place.
Me, though, I couldn’t calm down. My heart beat its way out of my chest, but when I looked down, there was no organ pulsating on the ground. Only Mare was crumpled atop the dirt.
The next projection broke me. They made Suyai spar against one of their own, and I knew it had to be one of their own. The Aya Runa member who beat Suyai possessed a power enhanced by the Feline, unlike anything I’d ever seen before. A power more potent than the whisper network imagined the Aya Runa to wield. Those bruises, those bones jutting out… I saw the divine creation of each one.
Somewhere in my haunted memories, Mare is still shivering from the ice water between our bodies. I am still whispering to him. The princess is still reaching out, still trying to touch me, and I always flinch away. Somewhere, those memories live on forever, each one of us tiny figurines acting out the moment everything changed.
Now, in the quiet and dark of a clear sky, with the mountain air turning the water on me to ice, I return to my body.
“You said it would work,” I whisper, then repeat it louder so the princess knows exactly who I’m talking to. “You said it would work.”
“I said I had to try–”
“Mare, go back to camp and get out of these wet clothes. The princess and I are going to talk.”
“But–”
“I’ll explain everything to you. I promise. But I need to talk to her first,” I say, unable to listen to the painful rasp of his voice.
Mare stays in my arms for a few more seconds, tightening his grip on my arms to a punishing degree, then obeys. He pushes out of my arms, his leather sandals barely making a dent on the ground despite his heavy steps. He’s mad. Good. I’m mad too.
I can’t wait until he’s out of earshot, so I whisper when I want to shout.
“You said this would work. Why didn’t it work?”
“Don’t you dare put words in my mouth,” the princess hisses. “I said I had to try.”
I can’t think straight enough to remember that conversation. It’s too long ago. The soldier and the princess in the cave are too different from the two motherless women speaking now. Yet, I can’t stop the memories of the feelings after, the hope, the love. It’s not a memory I deserve to keep.
I repeat myself, knowing it’s out of a hopeless need to get a different answer than the truth.
“Why didn’t it work?”
“I don’t know!” she shouts. “I don’t know, but the Guardians won’t speak to me. They never have, not until you showed up, and they said one thing. One cursed thing. They told me totrust you. But they didn’t speak when my mother was drowning me, and not now when I did it myself. They don’t want me. They don’t–”
