Chapter 17
“He needs a healer.”
Nina whirled around, shielding Kasik’s body with her own. Shayim stood just inside the door, her hands folded in front of
her and her face in that perpetual intimation of calm that made Nina want to scream. Her mind was a swirl of panic and chaos,
of doubt and confusion. These people, with their soft words and reassurances, had killed Kasik, for there was no world in
which he came back from his current state, even with a healer.
“What have you done to him?” she hissed through gritted teeth.
“We haven’t done anything. It seems that the creatures of the Tuta Kulla got to him before we did.”
Kasik’s skin beneath her hand was on fire. There were no other injuries on him that she could see, no blood pooled underneath
him on the ground. If she could collect the plants she needed, she could try to keep him alive. “I can heal him if you let
me gather what I need.”
Shayim looked at her intently, head tilted and eyes narrowed. “Is that what you really want?”
Nina sucked in a breath. The question rankled her, even if it was something she had considered previously. She glanced back
at Kasik, the sweat on his brow glistening in the dim moonlight pouring in from above, his bound wrists tied to the pole above
his head, and she nodded.
She couldn’t let him die any more than she could take his life herself. “Yes,” she said confidently.
Shayim nodded as if Nina had passed a test. “Good. Then you have everything you need already.”
The woman was maddening. Nina looked around the tent, at the barren dark that stared back, and shook her head. “I don’t understand,”
she said slowly.
“Yes, you’ve made that perfectly clear.” Shayim sighed, then stepped closer. “Perhaps I will be clearer. You have a vast and
untapped power within you. I know you feel it,” she added when Nina opened her mouth to object, “and you need not ignore it
any longer. You are Ikara. The true chosen one.”
Ikara. The beings with attay from the story Kasik had told her. The word had spoken to her then, and it spoke to her now, a gentle
murmur that brushed the edges of her soul with truth and knowing. But Nina wasn’t supposed to be there, and she certainly
wasn’t powerful. They had come for Sacha, and she had offered herself in her sister’s place. What a coincidence it might be
that they had collected an Ikara as they had done for centuries before.
Unless they knew, and it was truly Nina’s own ignorance and lack of self-control that led her there.
“You can heal him, Nina. You could save his life, or you could take it and free yourself.”
Nina shook her head. “Only the gods can do such a thing,” she whispered.
“A god’s power resides within you, if only you are brave enough to accept it.”
Nina scoffed. “I am not brave,” she firmly said, remembering the regret and whispered pleading she had made to the gods. “There
is nothing to accept.”
Shayim shrugged her shoulders. “Then he will die.”
“I know exactly what I need. My mamay taught me and if you—”
“He is beyond your plants and prayers, Nina.”
She stiffened. Her hand tightened into a fist by her side. “Let me try. You would allow him to die to prove your point?”
“It’s you who is doing so in fighting your true nature.”
Kasik twitched. His breathing paused, and Nina turned with dread, waiting for his chest to rise again. It did, but the moments
in between felt like an eternity. She closed her eyes and exhaled.
If there was attay within her, Nina had no idea how to find it, but more importantly, it would mean that her life had been a lie. Her
entire childhood was comprised of moments when she thought she was losing her mind, where she would close her eyes tight and
count to ten and hope that when she opened them, the golden threads swirling in the air would be gone. Times where she would
rest her head on her mamay’s lap and beg to know what was wrong with her.
You must learn to control yourself, her mamay would say. A different version of the same idea every single time. Nina had thought it comforting then. Now she
saw it for what it was.
The hiding, the avoidance, the distractions. Had they always known, or were they drowning in denial just as she was?
To learn the truth was her only option. If not, the unknown, the possibility, would eat her alive. “Fine,” she said aloud.
“I’ll play your game.”
“This is no game, girl. It is the will of the gods.”
The dirt floor was cool beneath Nina’s legs, and she was grateful for the length and thickness of the aclla robe. Kasik’s
body pressed against her side, and Shayim sat across from her. Moonlight drifted in from above and bathed them in a circle
of pale blue light.
“The gods enjoy the chaos of challenge and the reward of adoration,” Shayim began.
“In order to achieve those, they imbued their creations with free will. Water will flow where it may choose. Fire will burn eagerly. Wind can be a gentle caress or devastation. And man can follow their greatest desires.” She placed a hand to her chest and inhaled deeply.
“Do you know of the gods-touched, the Ikara?” she asked.
With a curt nod, Nina said, “Kasik told me the story.”
“I’m sure he did.” Shayim folded her hands in her lap. “I will tell you the truth, but first, I will speak to you of your power.” The woman leaned closer and pointed a finger at Nina’s chest. “You have seen
the light, yes? The golden threads?”
Nina said nothing, but her stunned silence was enough for Shayim to continue. “That thread is a person’s life. Their will. It is the choices they have made and will continue to make. My attay allows me to See those choices like the quipu we use
to send messages. Knots on threads. Even now, I can See what has led you here and that you will face many challenges ahead.”
Her gaze drifted to Nina’s right, a hazy sheen settling over Shayim’s vibrant brown eyes. “But you,” she said, her attention
snapping back to Nina’s face. “You can hold those threads in your hands and bend them to your will.”
Nina looked away, remembering all the instances of seeing threads of gold, faint yet present, mockingly close but impossible
to grasp. The only times she had succeeded were when Sacha was in danger. That day beneath the raging sea. The boys in the
market.
And in Kasik, in the forest when he had walked ahead of her, a light that had beckoned her closer.
All along, she had held power in her hands. She had touched it, used it, and then just as easily disregarded it, preferring to believe that she was a child prone to delusion. She was mostly
glad her illness didn’t affect her like Sacha, content to ignore and repress all hints of confusion and strangeness to make
it easier for their mamay.
It was Nina who had been lying to herself.
The saliva in her mouth had gone thick and sticky. She swallowed. “I’ve seen it, but it never stays long.”
Shayim nodded slowly. “The more you use it, the more control you will develop, but there are also obstacles to consider, the
first being internal. You are not an endless well of power. Using too much attay at once will drive you to madness. I spent
most of my childhood in and out of consciousness as my body adapted to Seeing so many threads of life. The second thing to
consider is external.” She gestured to Kasik. “He wears the achilla around his neck, as do all of the emperor’s men. It prevents
the Ikara from touching their wills with harmful intent.”
A stone forged by the gods to offer protection from those who wish to harm us. The woman in the market hadn’t been lying. The stones did protect from harm, just not in the way Nina had thought.
“You can heal him, if you truly wish to, but if there’s even the smallest seed of doubt, the stone will protect him. Of course,”
Shayim mused, “you could simply remove it. Or do nothing at all, since he is already at death’s door.”
Nina stared at Kasik, at the stutter of his breaths and the beads of sweat rolling down his temple. He had been so full of
life not long ago, and now there she was with his life in her hands. How strange it was to have the power to choose, and what
a privilege. The choices she had made that led her there were fraught with fear and obligation. Responsibility. She had lectured Kasik about how different they were, and all along, it might have been that they were exactly the same.
Nina had a duty to her sister, to her family. Kasik’s honor belonged to his emperor, and it was clear they were both willing
to risk their lives for those they served. Now Nina was being given the chance to determine whether Kasik’s existence served
her purpose. She could let nature take its course and be free of blame. Just another charge under the emperor’s rule who had lost his life in service.
But would she be blameless if she sat back and did nothing, knowing she had the power to do something? Even if it didn’t work. Even if her efforts were in vain and she was only saving him to settle a debt.
Whatever the reason, the thought of losing Kasik filled her with dread. She told herself it could have been anyone and she’d
feel the same, but Nina was beginning to understand that she had become too adept at lying to herself. “What do I do?” she
finally asked.
“Close your eyes,” Shayim instructed. Nina let go of her distrust and denial, let herself float in the sea of renewal, and
obeyed. Shayim continued. “Now focus on Kasik and your intentions for him. Imagine you can see his source of will and it will
show itself to you.”
Nina took a deep breath. In her mind, she saw herself applying the medicinal paste to Kasik’s back, worrying over the heat
of his skin and the streaks of infection that had begun to spread. She remembered the way his arms had held her beneath the
tree, how she had felt protected in his embrace after the terror of facing the achiyanga. She imagined him whole and healthy
once again.
“Ah, there it is,” Shayim murmured, and when Nina opened her eyes, the room was aglow with a golden wash of light from the
threads burning at the center of Kasik’s chest. “To heal him, you will have to take control of his will. Convince it to bend
to yours.”
It was what she had been trying to do with her words since the moment he came to collect her. A battle of wills that she had
been consistently losing. But this was different, and Nina could see exactly what needed to be done and how to do it. Shayim
had been right that the threads were will, but they were also the essence of life. The core of who a person was—their wants
and needs, dreams and hopes, fears and secrets, all inextricably twisted together.
It was the light of a god, a kernel of their power in each and every one of them, and Nina could grab on to it with fists clenched. She could squeeze and take and grind it into dust.
With that thought, Kasik’s light dimmed, but across from her, Shayim’s light stayed bright and malleable. “You don’t wear
a stone,” Nina said, staring intently at her chest, mesmerized by the strength and possibility of that vibrant light.
“I do not require protection from the Ikara,” Shayim snapped, and Nina’s head jerked back to her face. “Now, focus.”
Nina breathed deeply and homed in on her intentions. They pierced through to Kasik’s will like a knife sharpened by desperation,
igniting the dim threads until they were burning so brightly that Nina thought the whole world might see. Power coursed through
her. Into her mind and heart and fingers until she was reaching out and trailing a hand through that burning light, fully
expecting it to scald her skin.
His will was hers to command. And Nina finally fully understood that she had never been powerless a day in her life.
“Carefully command his body to heal,” Shayim urged. “A gentle encouragement toward life.”
But there was nothing gentle about the way Nina’s power moved. It was greedy. Hungry. The threads of Kasik’s will were spread out before her mind’s eye like a tapestry, and Nina was the weaver, her attay like
a needle that slipped beneath the threads of flesh and bone and sinew, spreading until he was consumed with her will, with
her desires come alive. She didn’t encourage so much as devour.
Right before her eyes, Kasik’s wounds began to heal. The dark of infection bled away to light. Torn sinew mended and fused
from inside out. Skin was cooled and tension eased.
She was saving him. Attay coursed through her, the strength of life in her hands headier than any feeling. Never could she remember feeling
so complete.
“That’s enough, Nina,” Shayim said, but Nina was lost to her efforts, drowned beneath waves of power and purpose and awe as the broken pieces of Kasik’s body mended.
She felt like a god then, giving life and forcing fate to bow at her feet.
The rush of it, the pure thrill of possibility—she could have reveled in it for eternity.
“Nina, that’s enough!” a voice insisted, but it was distant and unimportant. All that mattered was this attay at her fingertips.
It felt like a well within her, vast and endless, and yet, she could see the end clearly. Realized only too late that she
didn’t know how to stop, and as she poured all her will into healing Kasik, her own body began to shut down, as if it were
being sucked dry.
She would have given her life for Kasik right then, just as she had given her life for Sacha, but strong hands grabbed her
face and somehow also grabbed her attay and shoved it back into her body, where it wound into a tight spool, contently sated,
and went to sleep.