Chapter Forty-Seven Hanan
chapter forty-seven
hanan
My body tries to heal itself, painfully slowly.
For every piece that tries to knit itself back together, I rip again, as though I’m in a storm of glass.
It’s flaying my skin and dousing my insides with alcohol.
It’s pulling my body through a jagged hagstone.
Like a fist around my lungs and someone holding my head underwater.
My eyes and nose and mouth are full of dirt.
I am buried at the base of the Tree, the hum of the dead a deafening cacophony.
My body is useless to me right now, so I reach out with my mind.
I feel lighter, like I’m crawling out of my bones into the dirt.
My mind grasps out for the roots that bind me fast, connecting with everything and everyone that has ever been.
I try not to let it overwhelm me this time and I begin to move my fingers, my physical body, within the dirt.
I writhe and stretch until I find something solid.
I try to make out its shape with my fingertips: rough and smooth in places, long and narrow.
Then another, similar to the first. And then something round, with two holes and a serrated line.
By Aistra, my touch tells me what it is, but I want to disbelieve it.
Touch is the only sight I have down here.
It is a body, a skeleton. My mind is penetrated by another’s thoughts, a distant singing:
She was a trickster and a thief.
She was a traitor to the crown.
She was corrupt beyond belief.
Follow her way and you will drown.
The same song the drunken Umasans had sung the night of Magliyab: the festival of flames.
I can feel the roots extending even deeper into the ground, following them like a winding path to another place, distant yet connected. There’s an energy there; it burns bright and brilliant, like nothing I’ve felt before. I ache to go to it. It is like a fire for a lost traveller.
The Magliyab festival is for her. Priestess Sinaya, my ghostly adviser. So the priestess did succeed in stealing the gift before she was expelled. They made an example out of her. Obey or die.
Take root where the sea meets the sky.
Hearing these voices feels the same as during time in the cove, when I created the remedy for the queen.
My time as a Temple Sister feels so long ago now, but it has been less than a year.
Everything I had worked for was a lie. And when I tried to warn them, they silenced me.
As they have so many other priestesses. I thought it was only the Bastion, but the rot goes all the way to the core. Everyone is complicit.
I want to die. I lie there and try to let myself decay.
It would be so easy to sink into the roots, to let the Tree reabsorb me as it so desperately wants to do.
This is what we were told would be our end, a noble and holy one.
But dying would be too easy, and I’ve suffered too much to let it stop now.
I crawl to the surface, every fingernail’s breadth of purchase hard won.
My body and my mind are in disarray, and I try to bring them together, to muster any sliver of energy I have left.
I push against the dirt, loosening the binds of the roots, until with a final gasp my grave lets me go.
The air is ice in my lungs, but it is ecstasy to feel anything.
I pull myself up by the loose stone slabs until I am lying on my back, dirt in my eyes, staring at the night’s sky in the temple chamber.
The Tree reaches up as if to touch the stars, and I have never hated anything more.
I make my way to my feet and twist and hack at a branch until my hands are bleeding. It finally gives way with a snap. I’m taking this. I’m taking some of the power back.
I lean against my roughly made cane, feeling the ambient energy spark up my arm. That’s a good start.
I trail blood up the winding spiral staircases until I reach the Mothers’ sanctuary.
It’s the only logical place where they would be.
At first, I thought they would have returned to the Bastion, but the queen would want as much gifted energy as possible to protect her.
Better to stay here where she can hide behind the Mothers’ skirts.
They have posted Salvacion and the Seaguardians at her quarters along with casting a protective circle. She must be terrified.
But what they haven’t accounted for are shadows.
I know this place like my own body, and I use the dark corners to my advantage.
Eventually they will sleep, they will change shifts, they will pause.
The Mothers are nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they are with the Temple Sisters, reassuring them that today’s horrible events are nothing to lose sleep over.
I bide my time. As for the protective circle, I have a theory and only one opportunity to test it.
I find my moment when a Seaguardian relieves Salvacion, just enough time for me to slip past unnoticed.
I take my new cane and drag it across the threshold of the chambers, only breathing again once I sense the circle has been broken.
The energy has been disrupted by the remnant of the Tree, and I’m grateful for it.
The princess is sleeping in a makeshift bassinet next to the queen’s bed. She barely protests as I lift her out and place her in the sling I find nearby. She burbles gently.
‘You are mine, Raina. You need me.’
The queen sleeps soundly, which disgusts me more than it should.
After all the harm she’s inflicted, her mind rests peacefully at night.
I stare at her, taking one last look. I gave this child her life back; she is as much mine as she ever was yours.
Everything that lives must die, the queen always tells me.
But how can something live without a heart?
As we escape from the temple, I know what the queen will do when she finds Raina is gone. She will scorch the earth, but I won’t be there to see the destruction.
I climb back into the wooden boat in the aqueduct and follow the halo of light ahead.
I struggle with the oars, the water splashing over me.
The aqueduct reverberates my struggles in an eerie echo, and the dim light throws strange shadows off the walls.
I have to keep rowing. Finally, I reach the curious metal door I saw when we first arrived at Aistra.
I ease the boat to the wall of the tunnel and reach for the grooved handle – some sort of lever.
The door slides back to reveal a giant, spiralling screw.
Water sloshes through the open door and pulls the boat onto the base.
I look up and between the spokes of metal I can see the sky.
Now I notice the crank in the chamber. I reach out for it and begin to rotate.
The giant metal beast springs to life, groaning and sloshing.
Sheets of water fall from the opening at the top.
I yell and turn the crank the other way.
The mechanism turns, and we’re spiralling upwards as it funnels the water from the aqueduct to the top.
We’re spat out onto the open ocean, between a rocky outcrop.
The boat is thrust by the current and we emerge from behind the rocks.
I see the Bastion, high on the hilltop in the mainland.
My limbs burn and scream as I row, and I give every lungful of air to getting away. Then the waves are pushing me. The Bastion becomes smaller than the stained-glass window of the temple.
I am not built for physical labour. My body’s strength is in its mind, not its muscles.
How I wish it were otherwise in this moment.
My arms are weak and shaking by the time the Bastion has disappeared from view.
I turn into the tide and rest for a moment.
There is a satchel containing skins of water and breads and cheeses stowed in the boat, no doubt forgotten by the Seaguardians.
I try to eat slowly, to make it last. I give some water to Raina, who takes a little but then begins to search for something else.
She whines and wraps her hand around my finger.
But nothing happens. I can smell sea salt, but that’s too real, too present.
No woodsmoke, no calamansi, no petrichor.
I can only hear the sloshing of the waves against our rowboat.
I look deep into myself and try to find the invisible string that will connect our energies.
It is a snuffed candle within me. I can’t access my powers.