Chapter 23
At night, Yanami and I sit outside by a dying fire.
We’re not in Cusco anymore, far from it.
We used the chaos in the aftermath of the executions to escape the city.
Mare slept on my back, and we walked past the smell of iron and flesh.
It took hours to find a cave away from it all, but we settled in before nightfall.
Silent. In disbelief.
Mare sleeps in the farthest corner of the cave.
Safe. Covered. He’s unconscious from the use of mimicry, but maybe that’s for the best. In the far reaches of my mind, I realize I don’t want him to see me like this.
Whatever this is. Whatever ugly monster I resemble.
Whatever hero I’m trying so desperately to be.
I can’t see my reflection, but when I close my eyes and imagine it, it’s nothing but blood.
The princess looks a mess. Her white hair goes in all directions from being pulled by her own hands.
Her lips are bitten through and raw. And me, my shoulder aches, and I notice red staining my blouse.
When I take off my blouse with trembling hands, I see that half of my stitches are torn open.
I stare at it and feel numbness overtake me as Yanami runs to wet some fabric and wipe me clean.
This is how we spend the first hour after our mothers’ deaths. Yanami’s hands on me long past my wounds being clean. She’s ice cold, but her hands are steady, wiping over the same spot until my skin is red and inflamed.
Yanami runs her fingers over my shoulder one last time, and they come back red. She stares at it. Does she see blood every time she closes her eyes too?
I almost ask. I almost say something bold, something that should come easily to me, something true. Something like your touch is keeping me alive. Something like please don’t go.
I don’t need to say anything. Yanami stares and stares until she doesn’t. Until she looks me straight in the eyes and touches my cheek with a bloody hand. It’s a phantom touch, there but not there. I feel the dried blood more than I feel her skin on mine.
When Yanami kisses me, it tastes of salt. I lick the tears off her lips and savor each one.
Now, the taste of Yanami’s, my Inka’s, emotions is all I can focus on, all I want to focus on. I’m tired of the blood. I’m so tired of my own thoughts.
“Do you hate me?” I whisper against her lips.
She breaks contact and turns her face to the side, but, before my heart can break, she follows it with a bite to my cheek. It hurts. She’s real, not a ghost, but a real human, beside me.
“Don’t ask stupid questions,” she says.
It’s a phrase I’m used to hearing, but never like this. I channel my relief into ferocity as I grab her chin to pull her lips back to mine.
The fire comes to life. Deep inside the cave, Mare is far away from the smoke and ash that’s surrounding us.
It’s apt. I never wanted Mare to be a part of everything we just burned to the ground.
It’s okay now, because I’m fulfilling my promise to Suyai.
I’m going to bring all of us up in the world once I’m back to Lima with the Sun Staff and the strongest Inka the empire has ever seen.
But first, there’s this. There’s the exciting pain of Yanami biting my lower lip. There’s the hint of her sharp canines against my tongue. There are her hands with the promise of infinite power roaming my body like I’m something stronger. Like I can take it and more.
Her hands get to my hips, and she holds on hard enough to bruise.
“Do you?” she asks.
“Do I what?” I ask back. I’m so lost in her touch, I’m surprised I can talk. In the haze of my mind comes the realization that I’ve never heard the princess so unsure as to ask a genuine question. She’s only ever spoken in commands.
“Hate me,” she says and begins kissing down my neck.
How could I hate her when she’s doing this? How could I ever hate her? I don’t speak in riddles. I struggle enough to say what I mean to ever obscure it.
“Never,” I respond and am rewarded by her teeth on my neck, biting strong enough to leave a mark.
She laps at it with her tongue once she lets go a lifetime later.
There are two points that sting, and I imagine the distinct marks her canines must have imprinted on the delicate skin.
I’ve never wanted to be fragile before, but with her teeth scraping my neck, I want to be made of glass just so she can shatter me.
She returns to my lips, and I’m able to think enough to get my hands to work. I stand and pull her up with me. She stays quiet as I take her away from the fire and all we burned.
It’s when it’s just us, the stars, and the dark, that I wrap my hands around her and make quick work of the knots on her chumpi. It falls with a thud. This allows me to slip my hands in between her blouse and layers of polleras. I finally touch her bare skin.
I don’t try to hold back my moan as my fingers explore the softness of her skin, marred only by the indentations left by her clothes. I get my fill of just that. Every bump on her stomach, every fold. Then I lift my hands and savor the whimper that escapes her mouth.
“It’s okay,” I whisper in her ear. “I’ve got you. I see you.”
“I know.”
I take off her pollera and look at her completely, bare and vulnerable in front of me.
With the light of the stars, I see her.
Afterward, by the fire, we whisper, so low the crackling wood almost overtakes our voices.
“You didn’t say anything about the scar,” Yanami says.
She’s wrapped around me from my left side, my arm holding her so that our bodies are connected at every point.
Her eyes are closed, and only a few moments ago, I thought she was asleep.
We’ve both got our blouses and undergarments back on, though they’re covered in dirt.
I look right above her left breast, where her heart beats, and know exactly what scar she’s talking about.
“Everything I wanted to say was pure anger,” I say after a minute of staring. Yanami keeps her eyes closed, but I have a feeling she knows where my gaze lies. “I’m too tired for anger tonight.”
Not tonight, but tomorrow, when we’re not in each other’s arms, and my hands are free to form fists.
“I stopped feeling anger a long time ago. Until you, I stopped feeling almost everything,” she says.
I kiss her forehead, and she opens her eyes. She takes a deep breath. “Ask me about the scar.”
I have no choice but to obey, but I want to do it my way. I don’t want to explode. Not tonight. “Does it ever hurt?”
Yanami’s eyes widen. Her bitten-red lips open, but no noise comes out.
“No one’s ever asked me that,” she finally says and rolls out of my arms to sit up.
Without her so close, anger returns to my body. My hands clench shut, nails digging into the palm of my hand. I don’t want to explode, but I don’t think there are many answers that will stop me.
“But, yes. Yes, it hurts all the time. Sometimes it’s all I can feel,” she finishes.
I open my mouth to talk, but now that Yanami has started, she doesn’t seem capable of stopping. “Sometimes it burns so much I’m scared my skin will set alight. Sometimes it’s so cold I’m scared I’ll start shaking, and then everyone will know. Then everyone will know I’m–”
She stops.
“Ask me another question,” she orders.
“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 being my princess. 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.
“I could never hate you,” I say between her kisses.
“You’re a fool,” she responds.
I roll us until I’m on top, getting better access to her neck and chest. I’m holding her too hard. I know it. I know the tension in my body is seeping out.
I also know the desperation in Yanami’s eyes.
She wants to be a fragile thing.