Chapter 64 Hakara
Hakara
Langzu – on the road from Bian to Xiazen
There are always points in history where people feel stuck, the forward progress of society a wheel with a stick caught in the spokes. But if enough pressure is applied, if even one person is forceful enough, the stick can be broken and momentum restored.
The rain turned into a miserable downpour, my hand throbbing terribly with each move I made.
I could barely breathe through it. Nioanen had torn his shirt free, and he’d used this to bandage my wound.
I gritted my teeth, trying to ignore both the sensation of my bond with Rasha stretching and the strange twin heartbeat in my chest.
I strode over to Velenor and Lithuas. Nioanen was behind me, tending to Talie, Zayyel dissolved back into the air. Alifra had made it through, yet again, without a scratch.
Lithuas stood by the side of the road, her sword nestled in the grass. She was the soggiest, saddest-looking elder god I’d ever had the misfortune of seeing. They were speaking in low voices, Velenor soft and coaxing. “We can protect you from him, if you’ll let us.”
“No. You can’t. You mean to fight him. How can you protect me?”
“We can try.”
I shook my head as I approached, water dripping from my hair. It was an effort to speak. “We doesn’t include me. You want to break with Kluehnn? You want to start making things right? Where did you send Dashu?”
She glanced up at me, silver eyes a dull gray. “All the way back to Kashan, where we have more resources. In the den just past the barrier.”
A weight in my chest eased. If we knew where he was, then we could find him.
She licked her lips. “Don’t you want me dead?”
I glanced at Khatuya’s body. Rasha’s friend.
Her black hair was plastered to her forehead, the rainwater now spilling from her open mouth, trickling over the grooves of her bark-like skin.
“May seem strange to someone like you, but I’ve had enough of killing for today.
You spared Nioanen. You spared Velenor. Maybe we spare you. ”
“I won’t fight for you,” she spat back, though her venom was mild.
I shrugged. “You and Nioanen can handle this,” I told Velenor. I grimaced, a fresh wave of pain washing over me. Funny how pain could just take over a person’s body like that, from just one tiny severed finger.
Velenor nodded. “I’ll offer you the same bargain you gave us. You disappear into exile. You don’t interfere. See how it feels, Bringer of Change, living a life without real purpose. Maybe someday, when you’re done with that, you’ll come back to us.”
Lithuas gave me one last, angry look before leaping into the air and shifting into a bird.
We watched her go. Alifra joined us, one hand on her hip, her buoyant hair flatter in the rain.
“We should find a place to regroup. There’s a village ahead of us, with an inn.
It’ll be small, and we’ll have to share rooms, but if Talie shifts back into a cat, we should be able to make it work. ”
Nioanen let me lean against him as we walked, and for once, I didn’t feel resentful of the help. Maybe I was just too tired. “You won’t be able to hide for much longer,” I told him, half delirious as we walked.
His golden wings shook. “Maybe I’m done hiding.”
Alifra paid the innkeeper enough money to avoid any questions.
We ducked inside and hurried to two adjacent rooms, and somehow I ended up alone with Nioanen.
He dug into my bag, found some clean bandages, dried and re-dressed my wound, his hands gentle.
He helped me get out of my wet clothes and beneath the warm sheets of one of the two beds.
I shivered, fighting against sleep, knowing there was more I had to say to him.
“Defender of the Helpless, eh?” I said, my tone light.
This time, when I said it, he didn’t flinch. He caught a feather of one of his golden wings between his fingers, pulling until it slid free. “I suppose, in the end, that is who I am.” He rose to go, but I grabbed his hand.
Without meaning to, my touch turned to a caress.
Our fingers twined together, his thumb rubbing at my palm.
“Velenor told me I should be dead.” I couldn’t look him in the eyes, not when we were this close.
I knew if I did I would fall into them and I wouldn’t be able to think.
“At first I thought you must have done something to the corestone inside me, to keep it in check, to keep it from killing me. But then I remembered that Nioanen’s…
your greatest magic was augmentation. You didn’t do something to diminish the corestone’s power.
You did something to augment me. The glow when I use it.
” I swallowed. “It’s like a god’s aura.”
“Hakara.” Again, that tone in his voice, like he was afraid of losing me. He was immortal. I was not. He was always going to lose me.
I pressed a hand to my chest, still aware of that twin heartbeat. “It’s a seed, and seeds grow. I can feel it. It’s sprouting roots.” The carving in the ruins, the god with the corestone at his lips. “The gods once swallowed them, to become the trees.”
He let out a sigh.
I watched his face as I spoke. “You used to take them into your bodies willingly. You used to die, to become one with the trees. But when the mortals cut them down, used them for their own whims, you became less and less willing to do so. You stopped. You made a pact not to speak of it, to hide the information, to let it be forgotten.”
His touch was light against my palm, his gaze on the floor. “If the mortals could be so selfish, why couldn’t we?”
I squeezed his hand until he looked at me. I was afraid of falling into that gaze, of losing all reason, of never coming out – but I could never let myself be ruled by fear. “We have to make this right.”
A thousand years of grief stared back at me. “There is no way to make this right. All of us tried.”
I set my jaw. “Fine, fine. So we’ll just try different things than you did.
” I’d stopped running. I understood myself better now, understood my flaws, the way I’d let them hurt the people around me.
Maybe grief wasn’t a thing I could shut away, but it wasn’t a thing I needed to let swallow me either.
It was simply a part of me, beating alongside everything else, just like the corestone sprouting roots inside my chest. I could use it to shape myself, or I could let it shape me.
He leaned in close, kissed my forehead with a tenderness that made me inexplicably want to cry. “You are terrible.”
“First things first—”
“You are in bed. You need rest.”
I ignored him, waving my injured hand, immediately regretting it.
I let it sit back at my side, trying to forget it existed, sucking a breath in past my teeth.
“Well. That may be true, but we need to find Mull, extract him from that den, find out what he knows. Rasha is acting under duress. We need to get her out as well. And we rescue Dashu.”
“Just that?”
“Well, there’s fighting Kluehnn and all his godkillers. After I rest.” I already felt pulled into the mattress beneath me, my mind sinking. “You’ll see, we’ll find a way. Our world is broken, our team is broken, but all we have to do is put it back together.”
His voice was light. “Is that all?”
“You and all the elder gods may have tried to make things right, but I haven’t. And you’ve got to let me have a crack at it too, haven’t you?”
A hand brushed the hair from my cheek. Something warm and wet struck my hairline, trickling past my ear. “You can accomplish all this after you rest?” The humor in his voice was tinged with sadness. “Then you had better sleep, Hakara.”
I slept.