Chapter 26
The trek to Lake Titicaca is hard. We can’t stop in any towns, not looking the way we do.
Our polleras are in tatters after using the fabric for our growing list of wounds, and our white shirts are stained with blood.
It feels as dirty as I feel inside. Blood-stained, torn to pieces, unable to go back to normal life until I can find a way to clean up.
Mare’s leg isn’t healing as well now after he used his samay. His limp and the white strands of hair marring his head are reminders of what I lost. I have to force myself not to frown every time I see him, but I slip up at times. Those times, I just have to pray he’s not looking back.
Sometimes he is.
The princess won’t speak to me. I wish I didn’t have anything to say to her, but the weight of my unspoken words is just one more burden to bear.
Just like the burden of a crumbling empire, her anger is fated to fall on me.
When I try to form an apology, it burns my tongue.
When I try to reach for her hand, my own muscles betray me.
I always go after what I want, but my own vitriol refuses to let me want her.
My anger is all that keeps me from falling apart. It’s what lets me focus on the path that will lead me to the Sun Staff and my only chance to become strong enough to save–
I can’t think of her too much, the same way I can’t think of the princess’s distance or Mare’s injuries. I can’t think about any of it until the end finally justifies the means. And it will. I march forward with a single-minded purpose because, gods, it has to.
Any other time, making the journey to Lake Titicaca would be an honor.
It’s not a formal part of the empire, not after they declared independence decades ago, so it’s rare for a citizen of the empire to cross the border.
If they do, they’re usually sent as a representative of the Inka herself.
They go to leave offerings and strengthen the fragile connections we have with the islands of the lake after the reign of the False King.
No matter how much the islands don’t want to deal with us, they can recognize the importance of the lake to the empire.
It is where the first Inka appeared, after all. It would be nothing short of war if the empire didn’t have access.
I look to Mare. He’s grown up hearing stories of Lake Titicaca his whole life, as have I. Anyone involved with the Inkan army has dreams of being sent as a special envoy, though Suyai tried to keep him out of it. I know Mare involved himself with as many soldiers as possible.
“Will we see where the staff was formed?” Mare asks. The princess avoids me easily, but she doesn’t give Mare the same treatment. She responds before I can answer with a simple I don’t know.
“We don’t know exactly where the staff came from, since it was made by Inti in the heavens, but we’ll go to Amantani Island, which is really close to Isla del Sol where Inti gave the Sun Staff to the first Inka.”
“We will?” I ask without thinking. I haven’t voiced a plan because I haven’t formed one yet.
The princess sighs. She sounds more exhausted than angry, and I almost break and tell her me too.
I’m also so tired that breathing is an insurmountable task.
My anger, my loyal companion, is waning.
In its place is a bone-deep sadness. I hear her breathe, and I swear it’s the start of a conversation.
I make up a thousand responses in my mind, but none of them end with her in my arms. Even in my most indulgent fantasies – in my dreams of soft skin and red lips and sweet taste – she feels unreachable.
I need my words from the lakes to not be a mistake. I need to be stronger, and, for that, I need the Sun Staff. There’s no space for regret in my heart when I know my goal, and yet and yet and yet…
I see the princess staring at me, and she immediately looks away.
“Yes, we will go to Amantani,” she says, so long after my original question that I know her anger is fighting her heart too. “We’ll need to find a way to Amantani Island, but once there, strong enough Feline mimicry can raise the island from afar.”
“You never said you had a plan,” I say in disbelief, both at her words and her attention to me.
She responds with a noncommittal hum. She’s done talking to me. But I am a fool, and I can never leave well enough alone. I can’t shake my addiction to her warmth, even if it comes in the form of a blazing inferno.
“Who do you know in Amantani?” I ask.
She sighs again, but this time it’s more of a hiss. She glares at me, and I bask in the light of the sun. She’s so angry her lips curl up in distaste. Good. I'd rather her anger match mine. It’s easier to fan the flames like that and keep her eyes on me.
“I’m helping you plan how to drag me to the place where the worst thing in my life happened, and you still feel entitled to more details. Of course,” she says.
“The worst thing that ever happened to you–”
Mare cuts in before I can finish my question. “Miss Yanami, hold my hand.”
My chest aches because this is Mare curbing my impulses and fixing my mistakes. Again. Every time Suyai and I would fight in front of him, he stayed quiet. That is, until Suyai’s hands began to form fists. Then he would demand she hold his hand and uncurl her fingers until she wound them with his.
I look down and see the princess’s hands flexing after his request. I noticed the tension around her eyes and the bitter lift of her upper lip earlier. I was mesmerized by it. But Mare wasn’t. He saw a serpent waiting to strike, not a hit that was worth taking.
The princess is in shock but does as he says. He takes her open palm and doesn’t say a thing about how it’s shaking. Suyai’s hands used to shake too sometimes, when she was too tired to hide her worry.
We all fall into silence again, but my thoughts are louder than ever.
The worst thing in my life. That’s what the princess said, and I know, through the intimacy of touch, what she meant.
It’s where the stone was put in. It must be.
She never shared that detail, though with a clearer head, I realize how little I know about all of it.
Just a few days ago, the details didn’t matter. Now, they’re everything.
I have no right to know a thing about her, but I can’t stop myself. We set up camp against the mountainside as night falls and settle down to sleep. My mouth speaks of its own accord. With Mare asleep at my side, I whisper across the fire.
“Did the stone come from Amantani?”
There’s no answer from the princess for a while, and I’m almost ready to accept that she’s asleep. Then she speaks, her voice raw in the way that only comes from holding back sobs.
“I’m surprised you thought enough about me to connect those dots, but no, it’s not,” she says.
“I’m always thinking about you,” I say, as easy as the sun breaking the horizon.
“Yes, either about how I’ve failed you or how you can use me. I know.”
My throat clogs up with rebuttals, easy words of dedication and obsession and something deeper than duty, but I don’t have it in me to defend myself from partial truths. “If there’s a problem with Amantani, I can think of another way.”
“No, you can’t. I’ve considered it all, and I won’t be welcomed anywhere else. Amantani is my mother’s home. They won’t turn me away there. They can’t.” She shakes her head as she speaks, and the contradiction isn’t lost on me.
“Your mother’s home?”
She sighs, and I hear more than see her sitting up.
The moment her face comes into the firelight, my mouth drops open in awe.
The skin around her eyes is rubbed raw, red, and puffy.
Her cheeks glimmer with the leftover tears she couldn’t dry.
She’s beautiful, made all the more gorgeous by her fragility.
It’s like cracking a rock open to find crystals.
She shines. It’s a shine that could only be dimmed by my own cursed selfishness.
“I’m going to tell you this because I’ve never spoken it out loud, and I plan to never again once we split ways,” she says.
“You don’t have to,” I say, though I realize as the words leave my mouth that I mean something different than what she’ll understand.
You don’t have to leave. I want to scream it, but that weight, my fated future, stops me.
Could it be that after she leaves, she’ll come back?
Could it be that proving myself to the world would mean something to her?
I hope so, but I know Yanami is not one to be influenced by things like power.
I understand she’s had too much of it already.
So why can’t she understand me?
The princess considers my words, then shakes her head. “I will. Because I’m angry at you. Because I want to hate you and I need you to know why.”
I close my eyes and brace myself the way I would for a physical strike. It’s still not enough. As she begins to tell the story, to rewrite the legend I’ve known for so long, I’m pummeled.
“The first of our people were the two children of Inti the Sun God, who emerged from a cave on Isla del Sol, but the only thing strong enough to break free of Inti’s cave was sunlight itself.
So Inti gave his children, Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo, a Sun Staff made of sun rays to break their way out.
They were told to take the Sun Staff from Inti and find fertile land to build an empire to worship him.
Inti then used sun rays to sculpt the stones in the cave in the shape of a Feline, Ave, and Serpent to create the Guardians who would look over this new empire, the Tawantinsuyo, by channeling their samay through the three realms. As they walked, Manco Capac and Mama Ocllo learned from him and used the Sun Staff to awaken different stone formations in the shape of people to build the populace. ”
The princess stops there.
“I know that, princess. We all know that–”
“Why do the Guardians have infinite samay when we don’t?”
I shut my mouth. It’s such a stupidly simple question, I almost want to laugh.