Chapter Seventeen Afa #2
The babies, I think. Has the magic taken the twins too as sacrifice? Unborn and half-human?
Hady, tell me you are well.
Silence.
But I can still feel her connection to my soul, so I look through her eyes and I see what she sees.
She is standing in the centre of the fae, who not long ago had been holding her prisoner. They were the lucky few whose bones were not crushed beneath their falling city. Hady looks down, her hands cradling her body, and I feel relief. The twins live.
The fae cower beneath her, frightened as she weaves a spell. I smile.
Do not show them mercy, Hady, I tell her. Destroy them all.
She bends down and presses her hands to the dirt. From beneath her fingers a sapling grows.
‘Obeah, come to me,’ she says.
She calls them to her, to finish the battle, I think.
I try to hear the words of her spell through her ears, but the wind and rain steal the sound.
The sapling has grown, a baobab tree.
Hady? What is the purpose of this?
But she is silent.
I feel the air shift with movement. The obeah around me leave to answer Hady’s call.
I follow.
I’m coming Hady. I’m coming.
I can feel her pain, but she is still silent in my mind. She does not kill the fae.
When I am close, I feel the earth groan and shake. Hady has torn it apart. I watch through her eyes as she builds a cavern around the tree she has grown, a paradise, a haven.
Is it not a marvel, my love? There is no penance for this magic you weave. Strike at the fae and I will come to this new home you have built for us.
But still, she does not kill the fae.
I arrive at the cavern’s edge. Hady waits for me.
I go to embrace her, but she pushes me away. This time I know for certain: she is terrified of me.
‘Is this what you wanted?’ she says. She is crying. I try and wipe away her tears but she will not let me touch her.
‘No. I did not want the humans to die,’ I admit. I grieve too, does she not see that?
‘There are only a hundred fae left, Afa. Do you know how many people you have killed this day?’
Many hundreds of thousands.
The hunger in me is not sated, but I don’t say this to her. She can feel it.
I notice that the home she has built for us is woven with a barrier of magic. I marvel at her genius. Because the truth is, Hady has always been the better binder.
‘Is this the protection spell you have been working on?’ I ask.
I step forwards across the threshold but I am accosted by a thicket of brambles that grow and force me to retreat.
‘You are not welcome here, Afa,’ she says.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I have bound those who reside in here to the human souls in the obeah, you cannot kill one without the other. I will not let you erase the fae. You are not a god.’
Can she not see that I am? I reach for the roots of the brambles that separate me and Hady, but I feel resistance.
‘Your magic will not work here,’ she says.
‘How?’
‘I have bound our children’s blood to the land; it is theirs to mould, not ours.’
The tree, the tree she had grown. A complex binding, to incorporate the humans and fae too.
‘You have been planning this,’ I say.
‘A contingency only.’
I am revulsed, betrayed. ‘Why?’
She answers my question with one of hers. ‘Did you ever think what you would say to our children when they asked where their people were? Both humans and fae gone?’
I have no answer.
‘When I had you promise to not speak the spell it was not just for the sake of humanity, but to protect you. Afa, you are lost. You no longer know why you fight, only that you wield a blade and strike without thought.’
Anger is hot in my veins. ‘You speak to me of cost, of sacrifice, but you have turned the humans into parasites. Their life force and your magic is bound together.’
‘Not parasites,’ she hisses, and it startles me. ‘We will live in harmony here.’
‘Without me?’ I say.
She looks away. ‘Your ancestors were right to forsake their power.’
I am wrathful now. ‘Who are you to pass judgement? You are fae, you cannot understand what it is to lose your history, your power.’
She looks sadly at me. ‘I am the mother of your children, Afa.’
Her words sting and I fall to my knees. ‘My children, my children.’
‘They will not know you,’ she says.
I go to her, pushing through the thorns that scratch at my skin. With bleeding hands I reach for her stomach.
The ground surges up around me to block me from her path.
‘Mosima is ours. No child of our blood will be defenceless here. Do not come here again.’
‘Mosima?’ It means freedom in the human language. She wishes to be free of me. I start to panic. ‘Do not leave me, Hady.’
‘It is not I who left. You broke this world when you bound us to it.’
‘I can fix it! I can fix it all. I’ll learn how to give the humans back their bodies…’
‘And what of the fae? Those you murdered, whose souls have gone to the beyond?’
I cannot help the scowl that forms on my face. ‘You saw how they treated us. They would do the same.’
‘But they could not do the same. Only you, Afa, know how to bind to the earth.’
‘Do you castigate the blacksmith for making the sharpest blade his own? No. This was no equal playing field.’
‘A playing field.’ She shakes her head. ‘Life is no game.’
I realise then that she no longer loves me. That I have shattered what was between us.
‘Please, Hady. Let me love my children.’
‘No,’ she whispers. Then she turns and says ‘Aiftarri.’ The magic of the boundary parts for her, then ripples closed.
I try to follow. ‘Aiftarri! ‘I shout. ‘Aiftarri! Aiftarri! Aiftarri!’
But the boundary does not admit me.
In my rage I conjure animals of teeth and poison, I fill the land around Mosima with swamps and springs that bubble sulphur. Only when my anger is spent do I stop and listen to the silence.
I am alone. Truly alone.
What have I done? It is my first true feeling of guilt.