Chapter Twenty-Three
They waited until Solana woke to place his body on a pyre at the edge of the cliffs overlooking the raging sea.
It burned brilliantly against the gray sky.
Behind her, the city spread, ominously quiet as they dealt with the deaths from the night before.
A factory explosion, they had told her. Hundreds dead in the blink of an eye.
But Solana only had the capacity to mourn for one. A grief so wide, so yawning, that she thought it might consume her.
With every blink, she saw his face. She replayed the night in her head, trying to determine what she could have done differently to be there.
Solana’s eyes bored into Reyes standing across the fire from her, Sami’s ashes swirling in the space between them. Cora’s hand squeezed hers as they watched, but Solana was numb to it. All she felt was grief and self-loathing and blame. Sami’s death had been preventable in so many ways.
If only she had left Reyes’s bed sooner, or not gone at all. If only she had been faster. If only she had made sure Sami left Sonqo and never came back. If only she hadn’t ignored her gift and given in to her childish tendencies to create conflict and avoid responsibility.
If only she hadn’t failed at everything she had ever tried.
Solana told herself not to love anyone else, and yet there she was, mourning the loss of another piece of her heart, wishing she could reach inside and burn it to pieces so she would never have to feel this again.
She had set out to free herself and was paying the price for her selfishness.
And there was nothing she could do to make it right. Except …
If she could reverse the curse, then all of her reckless choices and stupid mistakes would be rectified.
Sami would be free. The muki under the castle could be returned to their families.
Solana could be known as the Cursebreaker of Supay.
She could leave more than death and destruction in her wake.
The curse in Nikolas had felt distant and thin, like an undercurrent too deep to reach. But what if she could command a muki to her, feel inside of it without killing it and find the curse that consumed their souls? She could tear it apart one thread at a time. One muki at a time.
Starting with Sami.
For now, Solana couldn’t think about that. Not yet. First, she had to watch Sami’s body disappear, and then she had to wait until the sun fell and she could use her gift in the same way that had started all this.
Night came, and Sami’s pyre was nothing but embers that she watched unendingly. Her hand was empty, Cora having gone inside hours or days ago. Solana was more alone than she had ever been. More lost than she had ever felt.
She waited, and waited, and waited, just like she had all those years ago, for a father that never came back, for a mother who died and never returned, for a life that she could only imagine but never touch.
The light from the windows of the throne room shone on the ground where she stood.
She moved away from it, into the dark and closer to the edge of the cliff, until she was so close that the toes of her boot hung over the edge.
One more step and her body would fall onto the jagged rocks below.
One more step and she would cease to be.
Except she wouldn’t. She’d come back to haunt and suffer some more.
Perhaps then Reyes could use her own dagger to finally end her once and for all. What happened to her after was inconsequential. She had never expected to be welcomed into Hanan Pacha. She had only ever wanted to be free.
Solana stepped back from the ledge. Behind her, rocks skittered across the ground. A quick look over her shoulder told her that Reyes was there, crouched in the shadows, watching and waiting.
Always waiting.
The pointlessness of life was enraging. No matter the good they did, the people they loved or the choices they made, they ended up cursed and suffering. Men like her father lived while men like Sami died.
All the years she had spent feeling sorry for herself, hiding herself away and accepting a life half lived as if she were some type of martyr.
Reyes had been right to call her a coward, but no more.
She was done with pity, with weakness. Solana would rage against the curse, against the creator god who had condemned them all, and she would begin by calling Sami to her so that she could reverse all the damage that she had wrought.
Before, when she had reached for her gift, it was like skimming the surface.
This time, she waded in knee-deep. It filled her within heartbeats, a sense of otherworldly calm slipping into her veins, between her bones and tendons, wrapped around her heart until it was barely beating, and she could hear beyond it.
The waves crashing against the rocks. Muki skittering across stone.
Families in their homes chanting prayers and whispering soothing words to fearful children.
A brutal wind tore the hair from her braid and tossed it against her cheeks.
Rocks pelted her legs. Seawater splashed her back.
When she opened her eyes, she saw the shadows surrounding her like a second skin, swirling and slithering and beckoning.
In her mind, she saw Sami’s face, spoke his name over and over, felt his hand in hers.
Before her, the space filled with shadows that cleared away to reveal a twisted form of him. Unrecognizable, if she hadn’t called him to her. If she wasn’t so entirely familiar with every crease of his forehead and the way his eyes always watched her, wide and intentional and loving.
They watched her the same even as they were, filled with black and lidless, unable to close as she stepped forward, dagger in hand. He stood entirely still as she placed a hand to the cold, slippery skin of his chest, desperate to feel the heart within that had beat against her cheek so many times.
But there was nothing. No flicker of life. Only emptiness.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered dreadfully. “I’m so sorry.”
The muki’s hand grabbed her wrist. She heard the rocks behind it shift again, but they stopped as it lifted her dagger to its chest and placed the tip right where Sami’s heart would have been. In its eyes was a plea.
Solana shook her head vigorously, eyes and nose streaming, chest aching and splintering.
Release me, his eyes begged, but Solana was going to make this right. She was going to make certain that Sami came back, got to see his family again, and never had to pay the price for loving her.
With shaky hands, she pried her wrist from his grip and took a small step back. He went to follow, but Solana held a hand up, palm out, and shook her head.
Sami’s creature form froze. The handle Solana had on her gift wavered with the look of confusion that flitted across his face.
She blew out a breath and kept that hand up, directed at the center of his body, and reached further into her own mind, into that well of power, to find the thing that kept Sami prisoner.
It was a long descent into darkness. The waters of her gift rose slowly, thick like mud, until her mind was drenched.
Until it felt as though it was stuffed up her nose and in her lungs and every single breath was a chore.
Sami’s body trembled, skin and muscle rippling with restraint.
A low hiss slipped out of its lipless mouth.
The air turned icy, Solana’s breath clouding in front of her, and still she dug deeper.
The curse slipped between her fingers, elusive and intelligent, crafted by a god who was filled with grief at his children’s betrayal. The ground beneath her seemed to slip away, and Solana hardly felt as it cut into her knees, as the blood in her body leaked from her nose and ears.
Still, she reached, she pushed, inserting herself into the crevices of light that speared through the dark, desperate to blow them wide open.
But they squeezed her instead. Ensnared her in their agonizing grief. The curse wrapped itself around her and took bites of her soul, one at a time, until she knew that she would die from its teeth and terror and transform into the curse itself.
It was then she saw it, the truth of the curse.
Where it began, and where it ended, and how small she was in the face of it. How far, and how much closer she needed to be.
When Solana came back to herself, back to Supay and the reality before her, she was on her hands and knees, rocks digging into her palms and blood dripping from her nose.
Sami was before her still, entirely at her mercy and waiting for her command.
The night air swirled and needled like icy fingers of guilt and blame.
Unsteadily, Solana pushed to her feet, ignoring the heat of Reyes’s attention. It pierced through the distance like an arrow between her eyes, begging to be acknowledged, accepted. But this promise was hers alone to break.
“Follow,” she commanded Sami, and whatever light there had been in his muki eyes, whatever awareness he had displayed, disappeared all at once. It was a shell of a creature that walked behind her and into the halls that led deep beneath the earth.
Solana liked to think that he was counting his steps as they walked, same as she had that first day in the castle, planning all the ways to escape the prison she was forcing him into.
She ignored the cold that slithered into her bones the moment they entered the dungeons, and the eeriness that raced down her spine when she set eyes on the hordes of demons in the dark.
It took a mere thought directed toward Sami for him to walk into the cage and join the others, but it took all of Solana’s willpower to close the door and leave him there. She told herself she was doing the right thing. That she would fix this. That he would be grateful she hadn’t kept their vow.