Chapter Nineteen Lettle
Chapter Nineteen
Lettle
Afa’s voice had grown hoarse from the story. He closed the book, his face wet with tears.
‘Now you are acquainted with the whole of me. I am the villain, I am the hero.’
He is definitely one of those.
‘Genocide,’ she said. ‘Occupation. Erasure. You are the world’s greatest monster, and yet you are also the world itself.’
She knew she should loathe him, and she did. But his sadness was great enough to elicit sympathy, even if it was unwitting.
‘Hady’s surname is Jani?’
‘Yes.’
Lettle nodded. The puzzle was slotting together.
‘What I don’t understand is how my sister was able to be bound to an obeah–she is not fae.’
Afa jumped down from the throne and picked a plum from a nearby tree. ‘Because the spell is not cast on the fae, it is cast on Mosima. Any who reside there have the potential to be faebound, as you call it.’
This news shocked her. She wondered whether, if she had stayed in Mosima, she would have become faebound by now.
He looked into the distance and sneered. ‘Hady even sent a missive to the elves inviting them to Mosima as a refuge from me. As though I were dangerous.’
The gaze he turned back to her was triumphant. ‘But the Wasted Marshes I had made were too treacherous to cross; they separated the elves from the rest of the world. So, they sequestered themselves.’
‘And forgot their history,’ Lettle added, her mouth dry.
‘Indeed,’ he said, skipping back to his throne.
One of the soulless obeah came running over with a flask. ‘Wine?’ Afa offered Lettle.
She shook her head; this was no dinner party.
Afa shrugged then swigged from the bottle before grimacing and handing it back to the obeah. ‘You were right to refuse it–it has soured in my time away.’
Lettle hadn’t taken her eyes off the obeah, her mind whirring with all she had learned. ‘What of the soulless obeah here? How have they come to be?’
‘A few hundred years ago, I experimented with different spells. Finally, I found a way to exorcise the soul from unbound obeah, allowing my people to move on to the afterlife.’
‘Couldn’t you have just killed them?’ Lettle said humourlessly. After all, mass murder was an easy thing for him.
Afa didn’t comprehend her tone and looked at her in confusion. ‘Alas, that would not have helped my endeavours, would it?’
‘So instead you made the obeah your specimens?’ she said with malice.
‘Exactly,’ he replied, clapping his hands together as though she had solved a riddle.
Lettle felt bile burn the back of her throat. She swallowed hastily. ‘Is this how you intend to fix the problem you created? Release the souls from the obeah?’
She looked at Ajax. The obeah was watching her, his eyes narrowed as he listened in an apple tree above them.
‘No, it is not very efficient. I am only able to free the souls of obeah who stumble upon the sanctuary. Hence the small gathering you see here.’
From Lettle’s rough calculation there were fifty soulless obeah in the sanctuary, maybe more.
‘And they follow your every command?’
Afa reached out a hand for one of the obeah to nuzzle. It did so with little affection.
‘Yes, it appears free will is also tied up in a soul. The only frustrating thing is I have to inform them when to eat and drink. Unlike him.’ He pointed to Ajax, and Lettle’s heart began to pound. She didn’t like Afa’s attention on him.
‘He cannot harm me, and though I can enforce a modicum of control, he is capable of making his own decisions.’ Afa laughed. ‘At least I do not have to tell him when to defecate.’
Lettle worried at a seam in her tunic. She had pressed a hole through the fabric without realising.
‘You said you figured this out a few hundred years ago?’ she said.
‘Mayhap three hundred years? Give or take a century. I stopped counting the years long ago, so I am relying on your tale to situate me in time.’
Lettle moved into magesight, her gaze lingering on the darkness within the obeah’s chest. It was lightless, without the spark of a soul. Her mind stuttered on a thought.
‘The Lightless,’ Lettle whispered. ‘That’s how there are fae without obeah bound to them.’
‘Lightless.’ He rolled the word on the tip of his tongue. ‘An interesting term.’
She didn’t like the way he savoured it. ‘They’re the unbound fae who have been ostracised all these years.’
Afa tapped his chin in wonder. ‘Fascinating. That suggests that those in Mosima are predestined to bind with certain creatures. Ha! Even after a millennium of study I can still be surprised.’
Lettle wanted to throttle him. ‘How many obeah have you exorcised from their souls?’
He shrugged. ‘Some I used for future experiments, others died of old age. So I truly could not tell you.’
Lettle balled her hands into fists. Afa didn’t care that he was the reason for a seismic shift within the fae’s society.
‘Besides, didn’t you tell me that the elves have been killing obeah for weapons? I wasn’t the only one to contribute to the Lightless. ‘He seemed to enjoy saying the word, so he repeated it three more times. ‘Lightless, Lightless, Lightless.’
Each time he said it, some of Lettle’s anger ebbed into weariness. He was right, she too was to blame for the Lightless. She had killed many obeah to talk to the Fates over the years.
She rubbed at her temples and looked at the soulless obeah with new understanding.
Was Golan’s obeah among them? He had blamed himself as though it were a shortcoming, a lacking, but that burden of guilt was not his to bear.
But neither did it seem to affect Afa. His mouth curved upwards with a half-smile. She hated how he used her friend’s face to twist it into something different.
Alder, how I miss you. He was the last piece of the puzzle that hadn’t slotted into place.
‘If Hady bound you here, how is it you can go outside?’ What of my friend?
Afa splayed his arms wide as he pointed to the sanctuary walls. ‘I told you I have perused every book that has ever been written in the human language. I knew I could not break the spell of my prison, especially one this intricate. But I could leave as someone else.’
His gaze snapped to Lettle’s and he adopted the teacher’s intonation that was so similar to the Alder she knew.
‘Did you know that it isn’t the soul that makes us who we are, but our past?
When I discovered this truth, I was finally able to grieve for my family.
They died the day they lost their memories. ’
‘So you found a loophole?’
He frowned at her turn of phrase.
‘A way to subvert your prison,’ she explained.
‘Yes, in a way. Thirty years ago, I wove a spell that strips me of my memories as I cross the threshold from the sanctuary to the world beyond. It is a loophole, as you put it. It allows me to leave the boundary Hady put in place.’
That must be how Alder can get into Mosima too.
‘And this,’ Afa said, holding up the grimoire, ‘is a diary of all that has come before, so the shell I am outside of here could be replenished with the parts of me. That is why I wrote it in the language only I could understand.’
All this talk of Alder being a shell was making her angry. ‘But Alder doesn’t speak human, he entered this world with little more knowledge than a babe.’
‘Forsooth, over a thousand years old and it is strange to be foiled by ignorance,’ Afa matched her scorn, but for a different reason.
‘I did not know my alternate would not be equipped to succeed. I tied a rope to myself just in case, to lead me back down the stairs. I was lucky for my foresight, as in a blink of an eye I was back in the sanctuary without the diary. The oaf you call Alder had left it above.’
Though Lettle smarted at his jibe at Alder, she was distracted by her own realisation. The pieces of memory Alder had started to recall correlated to Afa’s tale.
‘And that was thirty years ago?’
‘Yes, according to your timeline, as that was when your prince’s obeah stole the diary from the cave.’
‘Why didn’t you go back for it?’
Afa looked into the distance, his lip trembling ever so slightly in a rare expression of vulnerability.
‘I spent hundreds of years planning my attempt to leave; two decades alone weaving the first line of the spell to strip myself of my memories. After my scheme was thwarted and Alder,’ his mouth twisted as he said the name, ‘returned without the diary, I wintered for decades: not eating, only sleeping.
‘I would have stayed like that, I think, for the rest of time,’ he said. Then he pointed to a fissure in the cavern’s ceiling. It leaked water from the waterways above.
‘But such is the way of the world, it will always change around me.’ His eyes glistened as he tapped a single finger on his forehead. ‘Drip. Drip. Drip.’ His voice cracked. ‘They were Hady’s tears, each reminding me of my purpose.’
Lettle looked away from him. His grief was hard to witness, perhaps because it looked like her future.
He cleared his throat. ‘So, I left the cavern once more, hoping this time my vessel would find the diary and read it. And now we are here.’
The grimoire sat between them.
She lowered her head into her hands. Her head felt heavy with everything she had learned.
She closed her eyes and breathed in, settling her thoughts.
‘Lettle?’
She sat up, startled.
Afa was so close she could feel his breath on her arm. His face was a mask of concern.
‘Are you feeling well? Shall I get you more food?’ he asked.
It was in moments like these that she could see the sweetness in him that Hady must have loved.
‘I’m all right,’ she said. She pointed to the grimoire. ‘So there are no spells in that at all?’
Afa’s eyes brightened and he smiled widely. ‘There is. A spell I have worked on for centuries. I can unbind the obeah from the fae and then bring the humans back.’
There was a slight hesitation in the way he spoke and Lettle presumed it was a reflection of his excitement and nothing more.
‘Then speak the spell,’ she said.
He flashed her an annoyed glance. ‘Tarnation! Have you not been listening? The binding can only be unravelled by the one who spoke it.’
‘I thought Hady was dead.’
‘She is. But my descendants’ blood will do just as well,’ he said.
Rayan and Furi.
Trepidation fizzed in her veins. She didn’t like the idea of Rayan speaking an ancient spell.
‘There is no other way?’
Afa stood, the ground shaking with his anger.
‘Do you think I promise false? Centuries it has taken to write this weave. The graves with no names were some of the few bodies I experimented with. I carved them and bled them, I twisted their bones and lost their souls. Nothing, not even my own disgust, would stop me from this cause. And you are here asking if there is another way?’
Lettle’s stomach churned as her mind conjured images of his exploits. The earthquake stilled and Afa tilted his head, surveying her like a book he was analysing.
‘You are sickened by my actions? But understand this, there is only one reason I have not unravelled my binding to the earth. To undo what I have done. And nothing, not even your judgement, will stop me from this path.’
He sat back in his throne with a sigh.
‘The human magic has done you much damage,’ Lettle said once she was sure his anger had cooled.
Afa’s voice was sharp. ‘And the Fates you call to, tell me, how much damage have they done to you and your life?’
Lettle bit down on her tongue and thought of Rayan.
The knowing smile Afa gave her let her know he had read her expression well. Then he shut his eyes and murmured quietly to himself.
‘Love and power make fools of us all…’ he said in a sing-song voice.
‘The sleepwalking,’ Lettle said abruptly, her eyes sparking wide. ‘That’s you, isn’t it?’
He opened his eyes lazily. ‘Magic cannot bind the line between sleep and wakefulness. Though even then I had little control of my body–all I knew was that I needed to return to myself, to here.’
Lettle felt dizzy, like she too traversed the land between sleep and wakefulness.
‘So we must travel to Mosima?’ she asked.
‘Yes. We must unravel as well as create anew.’
‘And what of the sacrifice?’
‘An unravelling requires none; it is undoing a knot in the fabric of the world. It does not take but gives back.’
‘But creating the human bodies? That must require a penance?’
‘There will not be one, for I will speak that spell,’ Afa said dismissively. ‘And as I have said before, I am the elements of this world and I can turn it to my needs.’
Lettle stretched her left arm over the gold edge of the throne. The damaged muscles in it ached but she hadn’t noticed the pain since she had arrived in the sanctuary. It was only now in the silence that she felt it twinge.
The quiet wasn’t comfortable, but Lettle made herself savour it. She had learned too much, too fast.
And what she would learn next would be the most important part.
Afa picked up the grimoire and handed it to her.
‘I have waited a thousand years for this spell to be spoken. Will you let me teach it to you so you can share it with my descendants?’ He asked the question as if he was speaking about something small and as inconsequential as the weather.
She could say no. But that was a false choice.
So she did the only thing she could. She said, ‘Teach me.’