Chapter 16
The kollka isn’t guarded, just like the princess said.
What looked like tiny walls attached to the middle of the mountainside turned out to be giant storehouses, three times my height, and stuffed with food.
They’re made of rustic stones bound with packed clay, topped by thatched roofs.
They have cutouts that let in the biting wind and make it colder inside than outside.
This preserves the food yet keeps us from staying inside too long.
“You’re going to be our lookout. If you hear or see anything strange at all, you scream.
Got it?” I tell Mare. He nods and sits on a rock.
I leave him with the princess’s chumpi as a blanket.
The ceremonial version of the waist belt is long and intricate enough to wrap around him several times.
He bundles up quietly, and his silence unnerves me.
We’re not close enough to civilization to guarantee that more creatures won’t appear.
One night here might be safe, but camping can’t be our only solution going forward.
I hesitate before stepping away from Mare, then shake my head. He can handle himself. I need to trust that.
“Potatoes, jerky, and choclo will be the only things we can really eat from here. If we can get a fire going to heat them, that is,” the princess says, while rifling through the stores to get to those products.
She organizes the ears of choclo, giant corn, and strips of dried alpaca.
The dried potatoes, both the black variety, chuno, and the white, moraya, are the heaviest, but they fit just fine along my chumpi held securely on my waist. It’s an unconventional carrying method, but it’s the best we have.
It’ll hold at least enough for tonight and breakfast.
The storehouse is made of narrow corridors filled with a variety of dried foods.
The walkway is barely enough for one person, so the princess stays behind me.
The princess has long since stopped handing me food, so I walk faster to make it out the other side.
Neither of us says anything, and though the time seems to drag on forever inside the freezing storage unit, we’re out of there before the sun is down.
“Give me a sec to readjust this,” I say, already fidgeting with the weighted garment.
It’s severely uncomfortable at this point, but no amount of messing around with it is changing that.
“Never mind,” I snap my mouth shut at the sight of the princess leaning over Mare to wake him up with gentle strokes on his cheeks.
My eyes drag over her body like a physical caress.
The princess clears her throat, and I blink hard, forcing back my focus. I was staring at her waist and legs the entire time. I tamp down whatever embarrassment I might have felt from that and instead focus on taking in the pretty flush on the princess’s cheeks.
Mare is asleep on the ground, chumpi wrapped around him like a cocoon. The air isn’t as biting out here, but it’s starting to cool.
I move some of his hair out of his face, then nudge at his shoulder. His incoherent, half-asleep mumbles bring a smile to my face. It’s been so long since I’ve seen him this vulnerable, this calm. I’ve gotten used to him being a bundle of energy, ready to fight at a moment’s notice. Just like me.
“I’ll carry him,” the princess says, voice as tender as Suyai’s when it comes to Mare. I look at her with one eyebrow raised. “So that we get there before the sun is fully gone. Come on.”
I don’t argue, and to my surprise, neither does Mare.
He climbs into her arms without a fight and stays slumped on her shoulder the whole way up.
The extra weight on my body reminds me that it would have been more detrimental to our hike if I had chosen to carry him too.
I expect to feel some sort of inadequacy, but it doesn’t come.
All I feel is a slight awe and heartache.
The princess is a piece of our Guardians on earth, but Mare still deserves to be carried by his sister.
Yet instead of worrying about him getting too cold, Suyai is stuck in Lima alone.
She’s probably cursing me as we speak or organizing a group to search for us.
Maybe she even had time to use her specialty and read where the princess was taking us during the attack.
Maybe… I stop my thoughts before they get too realistic, before they delve into terrifying territory.
When the cave comes into view, I’m mostly free of the image of Suyai as just another dead soldier.
We settle in and put Mare in the crease between the ground and the rock wall.
The cave is as safeguarded, both from the elements and potential attackers, as the princess promised, though it’s less a cave and more a series of slabs of rocks leaning against the mountainside.
It goes deep enough in for Mare to be safe from the smoke of the fire that I start at the entrance.
Still, it’s insulated enough for the fire to keep him warm.
The ground is all dirt, and it gets all over my clothes as I kneel to strengthen the fire.
The princess is organizing the food we brought up with a single-minded precision that can only mean she has something on her mind she’s trying to avoid.
No one looks at cans of vegetables that intensely for no reason.
“What’s on your mind, princess?” I ask. The silence may be strong, but so am I.
“How uncouth of you to ask me that,” she replies, prim and proper even in a cave covered in dirt. It startles a laugh out of me. She jumps in surprise, then returns to staring at the jars with increased concentration.
I try again.
“You’re not going to heat them up with your staring, no matter how much you try,” I say. Nothing. Not even an eye roll. “I mean, maybe you can, with the blessing of the Guardians and whatnot, but I think it would be much less of a pain to put it over the fire.”
She remains stone-faced.
“Though I will say if heating some choclo is what convinces you to get your mimicry back, then by all means–”
“Have you considered I can’t get my mimicry back, or do you just speak without thinking through the reality of our situation?” she snaps.
“Um, definitely the second one,” I say, not that my words matter. Her words matter. The confession she let slip in a moment of frustration makes all the difference.
I hadn’t let myself consider that she couldn’t get her mimicry back.
It shouldn’t be possible. She’s the legendary princess of the empire.
She’s the only child of the Guardians who’s allowed their powers without consequence, who’s not spitting in their face with every use.
Yes, her hair may blanch, but it comes back to life. It always does.
Why wouldn’t it now?
“Stop looking at me like that,” she snaps. “I didn’t say that for you to gawk at me.”
“Why say it then?”
“To get it through your thick skull that you’re better off leaving me behind and finding another mimic to raise the island.” The force with which she speaks threatens to knock me down. For certain, she means it.
“How do I know you’re not just lying?” I say before I can think it through, and, damn, I should have thought it through.
She flinches as if I hit her. There was a softness in her before that I didn’t notice until it was gone. I want it back, but I don’t know how to do anything else but keep going.
“You could be saying that so I leave you alone. Why else would you not be able to get it back now when you have before?” I ask.
“You have no idea what you’re speaking about.”
“Then enlighten me!” I shout. My voice reverberates through the cave walls, and I suddenly remember Mare sleeping in the back. “Enlighten me, princess,” I repeat in a whisper.
She finally looks at me, placing the choclo on the ground with enough force to cause an earthquake. Even with her hair white and short, there’s a power inside the princess that makes part of me excited. Not that I would ever show that.
Her posture straightens and turns her spine rigid. She rises, looking like the megalithic Gods that rise from the ground. She can’t mimic the Guardians’ powers right now, but her innate samay is more than enough.
She steps in front of me and, without hesitation, pushes my shoulders. Her strength knocks me back, and I fall onto my elbows. I feel everything from the bits of rock digging into my skin to the leftover heat of her hands on me.
“I don’t owe you a damn thing, champion. Remember that. Whatever I tell you is because I choose to, not because of your misguided sense of entitlement.”
Leaning over me, she looks like a being straight from the heavens. The awe that I thought I had shaken off once we left Lima is back in full force.
“You are so beautiful,” I say, and I’m rewarded by the dark red flooding her tan skin. It’s not proper for a soldier like me, but when have I ever cared about propriety?
The princess falls to her knees and huffs out a laugh.
“You’re impossible, you know that?”
“I’ve been told.” Often. By more than one person, but especially by one person. The princess laughs again, and the feeling exploding in my chest reminds me of happy days spent rolling in the grass with Suyai.
“I need to get the Sun Staff, princess, and I don’t want to fight you every step of the way, but I’m not going without you.”
“You know passing the trials won’t change the plans the Inka has to get rid of you,” she says.
“I know. I don’t care about her plans. I’m going to change their minds another way.” My easy response sparks something in her.
“How?” She looks at me, and I see a hint of the child she must have been in her eyes, stubborn but hopeful.
“No clue,” I answer, and that child is locked away again, replaced not by the dead-eyed confidence I hate but by a new subdued version. The princess doesn’t look mightier than all, but she’s not filled with childish hope either.
“You’re delusional. You really think you’re going to barge into Lima with a silly rod and play the hero?”