Chapter 12 #3
There’s a small cave up ahead, something that Mare and I must have spotted at the same time, given how he starts running toward it when I notice what it is.
I grew up finding little crevices like that to sneak into and hide.
Mare, with a sister like Suyai, did it less for fear of scaring her.
He was so young when we took him to Lima that I’m surprised he’s reacting this way at all.
“It’s big enough,” he shouts from inside the cave. I hear him huff something incomprehensible as dirt gets knocked out from the cave entrance. “No monsters here!”
“That means he’s knocked down all the webs and killed the spiders,” I find myself saying, not sure why I’m sharing the information when the princess is so pointedly ignoring my existence.
It’s worth it when I see the corners of her lips twitch up. She almost smiled. I want to see that again, almost as much as I want her attention back on me when she shouts. One urge wins out.
“We’ll stay the night here and head to the closest town in the morning, get whatever you need to power up again, and then head to the lake. You can raise Isla Del Sol there. Then we won’t have wasted so much time.”
“You are incredibly naive,” is all the princess says, with no intonation to hint at her mood other than boredom.
That makes me angrier than anything else she’s said.
“Because you know so much,” I drawl, hoping the sarcasm is sharp enough to hurt. “You must know more than the Guardians, of course. Probably more than the Gods. You have to with the way you’re talking, right? You have to believe you’re smarter than Pachamama herself to be this arrogant–”
“Do not speak to me about arrogance,” she hisses, and a part of me shivers with the anticipation of her attention.
We stop walking, and she faces me head-on.
“You were giddy to take up this mantle, this-this curse! You are naive, arrogant, and a fool. If you knew that the day at the throne room was only the beginning, if you knew what they were planning to do to you…”
She bares her teeth and then sharply looks away, like she can’t stand to look at me. The second of exhilaration at her attention is gone. I spit out more fire to try to get it back.
“You mean what they’re planning for you to do to me?”
Her head whips around, and there are her eyes again, this time wide open with horror.
“So you did hear,” she says, more to herself than to me. “You’re even more of a fool than I thought.”
I can tell from her silence that she’s expecting me to lash out like I have been, but there’s nothing there for me to be angry at. Yes, I’m a fool. Suyai has told me that enough times. That won’t stop me from doing what I need to do for us.
The princess searches for something in my face and sighs. The fight leaves her, and she’s back to looking half dead.
No, I want to say, don’t go. It’s as if by keeping her angry, by keeping her eyes on me, I can keep her breathing.
“You’re–” she’s cut off by a droplet of water bouncing off her nose. We look at each other for a second before running toward the cave where Mare waits.
In the minute that it takes to get there, we both get soaked. It’s like that, soaking wet and already shivering from the mountain air, that I realize I should have checked the cave out myself first.
Because it most definitely is not big enough.
“Don’t move, Mare,” I say, grabbing his shoulder as he wiggles in place to accommodate us. “You’ll get wet.”
“You’re wet, Rei. You’ll get sick, and it’s getting colder, and…” he teeters out as his mind rushes to think of every possible negative outcome that could come out of this. He impossibly has both Suyai’s catastrophic thinking and my poor impulse control.
“We’ll be okay, uh, Mare,” the princess struggles to say his name. I feel her warm breath on my neck.
The cave is just tall enough that I don’t need to hunch if I’m at the entrance, after which it gets shorter and shorter.
Mare is the furthest to the right, and I try to push him deeper into the cave, both to keep him out of the rain and because he can actually fit.
The princess, however, is still getting rain on her back from where she’s slightly hunched at the entrance.
I sit down and try to make myself as small as possible to give her space to sit too.
She takes the invitation, and we all adjust to try to fit under the shelter.
No matter how much we move, either the princess or I will have our legs out in the rain.
“This is ridiculous,” I say. I’ve lost track of which one of us has shoved and pulled the other more to try to get them out of the rain. Mare is protesting from the back as he gets pushed deeper into the crevice. “Come here, ow. Stop moving. Just relax for five seconds!”
I forcibly take the princess’s legs and place them on top of mine. She’s just an inch away from sitting on my lap. She lies down, turning hard as stone and enough heat radiating from her face that it warms up my own.
It’s like this that we see the sky in front of us light up, not with lightning or stars, but with a projection.
A projection of the Inka and her children unveiled.