Drowning in Fire (19 page)

“Which have stayed the same for, what, a thousand years or so?”

She eyed him askance. “Or so.”

“And you’re okay with that?”

She came to her knees in a quick, smooth movement. Her torso loomed above the points of flame, looking like she was growing out of the fire. Maybe she was. “What are you suggesting? That I just leave my people?”

Brilliant, Keko. Bravo. He opened his arms wide. “If the shoe fits. If you’re unhappy, if they’ve shunned you, you have the right to leave. You don’t have to stay there and live with their scorn. You aren’t alone anymore. This isn’t a thousand years ago. Hell, it isn’t even a hundred. You can walk out of that valley and survive in another place.”

Like San Francisco.

That thought made a fist and punched him right in the chest. He tried to ignore it, but the ache, the longing, was too great.

“I can’t do that,” she said, but he saw the conflict marching across her face.

He put every last bit of heartfelt conviction into his voice. “Yes, you can. If you are unhappy, change your life so you can be. If you don’t like the way things are with your culture, leave. By sticking around in that valley and living in that shithole of a Common House because someone told you to, you’re only reinforcing what you hate. You’re giving them power over you, and I can’t believe that you, of all people, would allow that. It’s a different world out there now, Keko.”

Flames flickered in her eyes, but he saw them for what they were: a mask over her sorrow.

“God, you’re so arrogant!” she spit. “You think you have all the answers but you don’t know anything.”

“So tell me!” Now he was on his knees, leaning closer to the heat. “Dying for personal glory is so old-fashioned, so selfish. This isn’t the fucking Middle Ages where you run off to slay the dragon to win the prince. If you think I don’t have the answers, tell me what I need to know so I understand.”

She rocked to her feet and glared down at him. “No.”

“Why not?”

Backing away, out of the firelight, she was almost taken by the darkness before she lowered herself to the ground and stretched out on her side, giving Griffin her back.

He still kneeled there, watching her, until he heard her say, faintly and into the black of night, “Because I don’t trust you.”

NINE

“How do you know you’re heading in the right direction?”

Keko didn’t turn around, didn’t even slow down, when Griffin’s voice came up behind her. His eventual arrival had been expected. She hadn’t even bothered to disguise her path.

The first, predawn chirps and squawks of the birds had awakened her. After putting out the fire and taking the ash and smoke back into her body, she’d struck out for the coast without a glance backward.

“Because I know.” She threw the words over her shoulder as she sidestepped a fallen tree, half rotten.

She wasn’t Ofarian but even she could tell she was approaching a place of legend, as though the old magic was calling to her. Excitement mixed with the fire dancing in her belly.

A landmark from the Queen’s lover’s tale appeared on her left: a slope of land that looked like a woman’s body arched up in ecstasy. She would follow that to a specific ravine and waterfall, splash her way to the ocean, then scrabble around a rock ledge lining the harsh coast to find the Queen’s hidden cove and her final prayer.

“The chief told me about a prayer.”

Griffin didn’t sound out of breath today. He sounded strong, alert. Focused.

“What did he say?” Keko asked, feigning boredom.

“That the Queen carved something into a stone in the evening, and in the morning her lover woke up to find her gone. There’re a whole bunch of holes in that story. Care to fill them in for me?”

The thing was, a little part of her wanted to tell him. An even bigger part of her had actually enjoyed their heated discussion last night about religion. She could hear the skepticism in his voice—about what she was doing and about the Queen. Though he’d been fed lies about her true quest and seemed to be eating them up—as she wanted—his cynicism about the Queen bothered Keko greatly. If he would know nothing else, he would know the correct history about the woman Keko revered, religion or not.

“When the Queen split the Chimerans from the Primaries,” she began, “she moved them all around the Big Island trying to find the Source.”

Griffin fell into step beside her, but she didn’t look over at him. She just kept talking, her eyes on a specific place ahead where the land dropped dramatically down to sea level.

“Wherever she moved she carved prayers into the lava rock, pleading with the Source to reveal itself. It never answered, but she could feel it, dream of it. She tried thousands of different prayers and thousands of different pictures, trying to find one to make the Source acknowledge her.”

“What were they of?”

How could he watch her and still walk a straight line? It was disconcerting.

“Mostly people. Chimerans. But she tried animals, objects, ancient symbols from the old world.”

Griffin reached up to lift a branch that dangled across their path, but Keko’s arm shot out to get there first and lift it up for herself. After he went under and she let the branch snap back, he looked at her with odd amusement. She turned and walked on, making him catch up again.

“The prayers are still there, you know,” she said.

“Yeah? Where?”

She shrugged. “All over the island. The state protected all the petroglyphs—that’s what the Primaries call them—and they put up signs about how no one really knows what they mean. You can walk right up to them, I heard. In the middle of golf courses and resorts and stuff.”

“Wow. But not the one we’re headed to.”

“No, not the one I’m going to.” She let that switch of words sink in, then added, “The others are all in huge groups. This one is alone, hidden. Her final prayer. The one that worked.”

“This man, this partner and lover of hers, said that the Queen found the Source, but how did he know that since she was gone when he woke up and he never actually witnessed it? How do
you
know that? How can you be so sure?”

Keko stopped and turned on him. “Because the Source killed her and made her a goddess. It gave her back to us in the way it wanted her to serve.”

He made a sound of disbelief that she wanted to snatch from his throat. He kept running his big hand between ear and chin, over and over again. It took him a long time to speak, and when he did she wished he hadn’t. “What if she really fell into the water and drowned? What if she tripped down the side of a cliff and snapped her neck at the bottom?”

She narrowed her eyes. “It won’t work, what you’re trying to do. Trying to discredit my beliefs.”

“I’m trying to make you think in another way. I’m not going to stop either, until I know you’ve given this up.” He let out an exasperated sigh. “You’re relying too much on faith.”

“I would say you don’t rely on it enough. I remember that about you. How you know exactly who you’ll be talking to before you enter a room, exactly what you’re going in there for. You draw road maps between every possibility and make planned detours to get your way. You won’t do anything if it’s not planned, not considered a million different ways.”

“Because I have to. It’s my job, my responsibility, to think that way.”

With every moment that passed, the closer he seemed to draw to her. He was like a magnet and she couldn’t pry herself away. She could feel herself losing focus when she could least afford to. If she couldn’t tear herself away from his nearness, she would have to use their proximity. Manipulate it. Bring him in closer to throw him off guard so she could find a window and escape through it.

Keko leaned in, tilted back her head. “I also remember what you’re like when you let it all go. I remember, so, so vividly, Griffin, how your walls cracked and you just . . . surrendered.”

For a moment she thought he’d gone Chimeran, because the heat that flashed in his eyes was potent and nearly visible.

“It was the first thing I thought when I saw you,” she went on. “That I wanted to break that cardboard leader into a million pieces. You were my delicious, forbidden challenge, and I knew I was going to love seeing you crumble. I knew I was going to love seeing you strip down and get into what you truly wanted.”

Though the air was moist and Griffin was made of water, his voice sounded scratchy and dry. “And did you love it?”

“You know I did.”

She’d forgotten she was supposed to be using this situation and these words for
her
benefit. She’d inadvertently neglected her original intent. Her honesty had just slipped out because he—even after all these years and across their great divide—could still make her crumble, too.

Stupid, stupid.

He shifted on his feet. Just a little movement, but enough to break the spell. Enough for her to nudge herself back a step. Once she’d done that, her whole body turned and she walked away.

He followed a few seconds later. This time he trailed in silence.

When she came to a steep decline peppered with rock and tricky soft ground, and flagged by the telltale landmarks, she pointed. “I’m going down there.”

At the bottom trickled a silver line of a stream, twisting its way to the ocean. Follow that, and she’d find the hidden cove sheltering the Queen’s prayer.

Griffin came to her side, peering down. “Where you go, I go.”

 • • • 

At midday, she finally scrabbled over the last part of the treacherous, jagged lava rock shelf that paralleled the ocean, and stepped into the Queen’s hidden place. It was little more than a crevice in the island, a narrow fissure carved by water and wind over millennia, bordered with steep green land, carpeted with vegetation, and divided from the sea by a small stretch of black sand.

This was where she’d find her fate. This was where she’d discover how to heal her people and vault her name into the heavens.

“Are you sure this is the place?” Griffin asked.

All morning he’d never trailed more than a few feet from her. Not when lowering themselves down to the stream bed. Not when picking their way over the slippery banks. Not when clinging to the rock ledge along the ocean. Now he jumped down from the rock, landing on the sand right next to her.

“You can’t feel it?” she said.

The shimmering black sand clung to her toes and the soles of her feet. Peering down the length of the little valley, she found another landmark the story mentioned: a promontory of rock sitting halfway up the cliffside that looked like a face. The nose was worn and the chin shallow, but it was a face. Somewhere below that, in a bed of
pahoehoe
lava rock that rippled like frozen, smooth, black water, the Queen’s prayer would be waiting.

“I do feel . . . something,” Griffin said, and when she looked over at him, he was frowning. He stared off into the tangle of trees and brush between the beach and the prayer.

She smiled. “See? Told you the—”

He lifted a sharp hand, his eyebrows drawing together as he squinted hard into the valley. “Not the Queen,” he whispered, impatient. “A signature. A Secondary signature.”

Keko swept a long look over the small valley, the whole thing easily spread out and visible to her eye. The place was untouched, virtually impossible to get to unless you shimmied along the rock ledge like they had. The surf was white and angry against the beach, admitting no boats.

“No one’s here,” she said.

“That you can see,” he murmured cryptically, his eyes flitting from side to side.

“Then let me get what I came here for and we can get the hell out of here fast.” She was about to correct herself, to backtrack and say “I” instead of “we,” when she realized exactly what he’d revealed, what signatures he was talking about.

Senatus backup. Other Secondaries—more Ofarians? Air elementals?—come to help him keep her away from what she needed to do. Fuck
that
.

“You asshole.” She spun and took off running, but not before she saw the shock on his face.

“Keko, wait!”

No way was that happening. She sprinted, her toes digging in the sand, her thighs pushing her off the narrow crescent of beach and onto firmer ground. Her arms swung ahead, slapping aside branches and leaves, making way for her bullet of a body.

Behind her Griffin was shouting her name, crashing after her. He’d have to take her down again, and even that wouldn’t stop her. She’d crawl for the prayer with him clinging to her legs, if it came to that.

“Keko, stop!”

Then there was nothing but the wind in her ears, and the sting and scrape of bark and leaves on her skin as she flew. She could see the land just below the face in the rock now, the patch of lava rock tilting toward the ocean that would hold the prayer. She could see the lone, gnarled
Acacia koa
tree pushing up through a crack in the rock, bending over the prayer, its canopy sheltering what had been carved by the Queen’s hand.

Almost there. Push. Run. Charge.

The valley rumbled. The ground shook, branches and flowers and hanging fruits vibrating against the wind. She momentarily lost her footing, stumbling to one side before correcting herself. All she could think was: What sort of magic was Griffin loosing at her back? What were his minions doing to try to stop her?

And finally—how would she humiliate them all when she succeeded?

A cloud of birds dislodged itself from a stand of red flowering
ohia
trees off to her right and took to the sky.

Another terrible rumble. Except this time it didn’t come from behind. It originated in front of her. Near the prayer. She could see it plainly now, the flat rock of the histories, the thing her people had been forbidden to search for but which was now hers.

The earth was angry, its shaking tossing her from side to side. The Senatus would have to do more than that to get her to turn away. A Chimeran warrior woman was hunting. Didn’t they know nothing could ever block her from her quarry?

Distantly, she realized that Griffin had stopped shouting.