Chapter Seventeen Afa
Chapter Seventeen
Afa
Lettle thinks she is untrusting, but she is not, Afa thought as he opened the diary. It had been many years since he had completed its pages, but his story was not yet over.
His future lay in Lettle’s hands now. He looked at her. She reminded him of Hady in many ways. She was kind but sharp with her judgements, and capable of so much more than anyone could ever comprehend.
Afa licked his lips and began to read, his memories falling like rain upon his brow.
He wished he could drown in it.
—
I have a way to end the wars with the fae forthwith, but Hady will not hear of it.
‘If we are earthbound our power will be vast,’ I say.
‘The sacrifice, my love, will be too great to bind our souls this way.’
Our souls. For we are entwined.
She winds her arms around my chest, her swollen belly pressing into my back.
I turn her round, so I can see her beauty clearly.
‘The pregnancy has only made you more becoming.’
She smiles. Stop looking at me with thy eyes, she says in my mind.
I will never tire of her voice in my head.
How can I, when you look like you do? I pull her onto my lap and lay a pattern of kisses up her neck. She looks so beautiful in the fraedia light of the sanctuary.
‘You mean to distract me from your spell, I know your ways,’ she says, sighing. ‘Afa, stop.’ She holds me by the jaw. I try and nibble at her wrist, but she pushes me away.
‘I mean it, you cannot do this.’
I lean back, annoyed. ‘Why not? It will fix everything.’
‘The sacrifice, my love. It will be too great.’
‘So many of my people are dying already, I cannot think it will be greater than that.’
She stands up, cradling her belly. The twins are due this summer; my excitement for the birth is as mighty as the spell I want to weave.
She walks along the walls of the sanctuary, trailing her hands along a row of books.
Not all of the shelves are full, but one day they will be if we are successful in our mission.
‘I was na?ve when I made this place,’ she says.
I frown. The sanctuary was beautiful; it was our haven where we ruled over our citizens.
‘I had read a spell that I thought I could adapt without too much cost,’ Hady says. ‘That is the problem with human magic: no matter how hard you think you understand it, you will never truly be able to predict it.’
‘The magic’s tithe was not that great.’ I try to sound soothing but her face is a mask of regret.
‘While the land prospered here, it dried up the river that used to run through the mountainside. Entire hamlets had to relocate, not to mention all the animals that had lived in the river’s depths. The damage is irreparable, Afa.’
I hate to see her wretched. I go to her and wrap my arms around her. She rests her head on my chest.
‘The elvish diviners speak of a prophecy,’ she whispers, her fingers circling the taut skin around her stomach.
Forever the war will rage, until united, the three shall die.
Humans made low, then fae made lower,
Then elves in ignorance, gone is their power,
Cursed to endure, cursed to survive.
All shall perish lest all three thrive.
I have heard the words before.
‘Don’t you see? The prophecy supports my spell–I can unite everyone with the power of the earth.’
Hady shakes her head. ‘The elves are closing their borders, they want no part in this war.’
‘Well then, they are fools! There is no war we cannot win. With thanks to the obeah, the humans outnumber the fae greatly.’
Hady looks unsettled. ‘With thanks to the obeah? Afa, we killed thousands of fae and many of our own.’
‘And it was not enough,’ I hiss. ‘Still they come for us, again and again.’
‘What will being earthbound achieve?’
‘Our god’s power will be part of us. Prithee, imagine the power.’
‘But what will you do with this power?’ she asks.
Is she afeared of me? She reaches for my hand and I discard the thought.
I bring her palm to my lips and say against its roughened skin, ‘Our children will never know peace unless this ends. I will not let the fae take them from us.’
She pulls free of me and picks up her notebook that lies next to mine. ‘There are other ways to accomplish peace. I’ve been researching protection spells. We can use a root system to weave a boundary—’
‘And they will learn to infiltrate it!’ I do not mean to get angry, but I have seen too many of my friends die at the fae’s hands.
‘Afa,’ she says my name urgently. ‘We do not know what this spell will take from the world.’
‘It will be the final sacrifice, for once we are one with the earth we will never need to trade with the magic again. We will be able to wield the elements without a penance. We will be able to level cities with a breath—’
‘You intend to destroy Lorhan?’ She looks horrified.
‘No, the threat will be enough, of course.’ Her compassion for the people who have killed our friends is grating.
‘Do not do this.’ Hady gets on her knees; it is an effort now. ‘Please, Afa, I beseech you, for our children. Do not do this. Promise me.’
She does not understand that everything I do is in the name of my legacy. Why can she not see that?
But I see the sweat peppering her brow as I help her to stand, and I know this taxes her more than I like.
So I look into her eyes and I say the words she wants to hear. I am not sure I mean them, but there is nothing I will not do for her.
‘I won’t speak the spell,’ I vow.
She grabs my hand and places it on our children. ‘Swear it on the blood of our babies.’
‘I swear it.’
She looks relieved, and I am relieved for her.
—
The next day, Hady is not in our bed when I wake.
Hady? Where are you? I reach down the thread that binds our minds.
She opens her eyes and I see through them. Magical threads, like fallen sunlight, wrap around her hands and ankles. The floor is cold at her back. She is in pain.
What happened?
The fae have taken me ransom, Afa. They wish to discuss our terms of surrender.
I stop seeing through her eyes. I stop seeing through mine. All I can truly see is red, and it is like a film of blood.
I weave the spell I said I wouldn’t. I bind the earth to me, to us; I feel its soul, like the spark of a god, settle into my marrow.
I press my hands into the dirt and feel the pulse of the plants and the animals. I laugh and the ground shakes with me. I smile and the flowers burst into bloom.
This is power that no one will ever understand. No one except Hady.
My love, use your power, free yourself. Then come hither, I whisper in her mind. The war ends today.
I clench my fists and send my magic to the Fae Lands. I want the fae to feel what the humans have. I want their histories to disappear. I want them to be forgotten.
First, I destroy their libraries with a hurricane. Then I crush the bones of their courtyards with an earthquake. Next, I send a flood to wash away everything, and anyone who is left. Finally I cover the land with grass and plants, as though their lands never existed at all.
Gone, all gone, Hady, I say.
But she is silent.
All of this has happened in the time it takes for a moth to flutter its wings. I walk through Kaa’pah’lie with triumph in my heart.
The city is quiet.
‘How can you sleep in times like these? A victory has been had, you should be jubilant!’ I say to my citizens.
But they do not sleep.
I go from door to door but every human I come across has slumped to the ground.
What have the fae done? I think.
I do not understand it. I call the obeah to me and ride forthwith to the village I was raised in.
‘Mother, sister!’ I cry. I have not seen them in many years. A regret I will think of daily.
My sister is not there, I will find her body later by the river. But my mother, she is slumped at the kitchen table, her eyes unseeing. I shake her shoulders. But she does not hear me.
I cry, calling down sleet and snow. She is dead.
But I feel her soul still in the air, for the breeze is now my breath. I look to the sky and it is alight with fire. Not fire. Souls.
Finally, I understand what I have done. Hady had predicted the sacrifice would be great. But how could I have known it would have taken so much?
The souls are dispersing so I try to grasp them, pull them to me, but souls are not of this earth. I cannot twist and turn them to my intent.
But where does a soul taken too early go?
I watch as my people fall like stardust into the only soulless beings in the world: the obeah.
But there are not enough, not enough obeah for all the lost. The rest of the souls are destined to roam until more obeah are born. Trapped in a stasis between life and death.
I call the wind to keep their lights with me, but they will not be caught. Hundreds, thousands of souls are cast adrift without a home.
I fall to the earth. It is my skin now, and I tear at it, clawing the dirt apart.
Despair is something I have never felt before.
An obeah watches me. Its eyes are drops of pearls, silver like mine.
‘Mother,’ I call to the beast that is she. But when I speak her name, she does not know me.
Gone, her memories have gone.
Despair consumes me once more. The magic’s toll is great. For the first time I wonder if its power is too dangerous to wield, but in the next breath I call on my magic.
I touch my mother’s face and try to change the elements of it.
Her body cracks and groans as I try to twist it back into a human.
But I cannot change the fundamental structure of the living.
I may be powerful, but I am still no god.
My mother dies again, her soul this time moving on to the next realm, her obeah body a mangled wreckage.
I look at it in horror. You may think this is when I should have stopped, paused, considered the power in my fingertips. But I thought of nothing but righting this wrong. I called to another obeah. ‘Take me to my sanctuary.’
There must be a way to craft a new body, I think as we ride. For like the God Asase I am timeless too.
My sanctuary is full of all the books we have, so I pull them from the walls, searching for any reference to souls. I do not know how much time passes until I remember my children.