The Burning City (Spirit Binders) (46 page)

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Authors: Alaya Dawn Johnson

BOOK: The Burning City (Spirit Binders)
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“I see the great spirit sometimes, near him. It watches Parech like a merchant would a tasty fish.”
“The great death wears a mask, Tulo.”
She glowered at me. “A hungry mask.”
“Ile told me to save him.”
“He knows?”
“I think he’s guessed. The son is as perceptive as the mother.”
“And the father. Parech will know if you try to do something.”
I took a deep breath. I had been planning this for years. It scared me more than even death itself, and I had not thought that was possible. But there was nothing left for us but to try.
“A little girl stomping her foot at the wind,” I said.
“What?”
“That’s what Parech said this crusade of mine really is, when I first told him. He might be right. It might be better to let him die than disturb so much for his sake.”
Tulo gripped my shoulders hard enough to leave a bruise. The years had not mellowed her, nor had motherhood, but they had subtly turned the planes of her face from that of a girl to a woman. They had given her an understanding and a sense of self the younger, hotter, more angular Tulo of five years ago never possessed. I loved her as much as I ever had.
“You don’t mean that,” she said.
“No. I don’t.”
I told her my plan.
“So you figured it out?” she asked. “What the death doesn’t know?”
I told her I had, though I was by no means sure. She believed me, as always. Hadn’t Parech told me he envied her trust? I went to find Ileopo and tell him. He’s almost too young, but the calm, clear-eyed way he took the news tells me that he can do his part. Oh, when he looks at me like that, as though he can’t quite make out what I’m thinking and his very impotence amuses him, I feel his father in my heart like a scar. I could not bear Parech’s absence. Perhaps even less than I could bear Tulo’s. At least she has shared herself with me. Her heart has always been cruel and harsh, but never closed like Parech’s. We have been with each other for nearly six years and not once has he ever said what he feels for me. I think, now, that neither of us dare.
And so his son will conspire with his lover to deceive this man who has given up so much for all of us. He will hate them for it, but he will forgive them. I do not know that he will ever forgive me. I recall his fury when I first told him the outlines of this plan. I recall his horror at the thought of me entering the select ranks of great spirit binders. The Akane hate all such things, and he still shares their essential prejudices.
And they might not be wrong, at that.
Spirits above, what am I doing? Will it be enough to save him?
Tomorrow I will go to Parech and tell him that his son is dying. He has caught the fire sickness, I will say, and it’s ravaging this body. If he helps me bind the death spirit, I will say, we can save him. Parech will not believe me, of course he won’t, and so I will propose to use an old geas, one of my very first, and take us all temporarily into the spirit world. For the first time, Tulo will see her son. And Parech will see, because I have arranged it to be so, a careful convocation of death sprites, apparently attached to his son. And he will agree, because it will never occur to him that I would do so much to manipulate him.
Tulo and Ile will stay here. Parech and I will travel to the inner islands, one of the ones not taken up by the fire or water bindings. I will sharpen his metal blade, because such a huge binding will require a like sacrifice. He will not know what that sacrifice is until his refusing would kill us both. And then, in the event, the death spirit will be bound, his life will be saved, and he will know how I’ve deceived him.
Then he will remember what we did in Okika to that poor Maaram soldier, almost certainly dead. He will remember that he taught me all I’ve ever needed to know about using others to get what one wants. Some may say Parech is immoral because he does this without qualms to those he does not know. But I know I am the worse person, because I am doing this to a man I love more than my own life.
A man I love.
I love.
 
Aoi is dead.
PART V
 
Ipa Nui
 
14
 
H
IS SISTER HAD BEEN JOINED BY A NEW GHOST, but at least this one didn’t speak. How could she, when he had ripped out her throat with his own hand? Emea regarded the bloodless, voiceless ghost of the stablegirl with distaste.
“Was that truly necessary, brother?” she had said, when he staggered back into his rooms, his hair and clothes still wet with blood. His servants had taken one look at him and ordered several baths drawn. It always took that many when he got like this.
“You told me to do it,” he said, running his hand through his hair long after all the blood had been rinsed away. Before, with Nahe, it had never been this hard. Even after Nahoa left, his deeds had never seemed to cling to him. His nightmares were of losing his wife and child, not of the horrors revenge had driven him to deep in the bowels of the house. But now he saw that sad little girl everywhere he went, and he felt her blood on his skin long after he had scrubbed it all away.
“You told me to do it,” he said again, when Emea didn’t respond.
Her blue-flame eyes had never seemed more inhuman. “No one told you to tear out her throat like some animal.”
“She nearly killed my child.”
“She was how old? Ten, eleven? The old nun told you she didn’t act alone.”
“I’ll get the one truly responsible. I will win this war, and I will punish the ones who have hurt my daughter and then this nightmare will be over and Nahoa will come back to me.”
Emea snorted. “Come back? You truly believe that, brother?”
“She will. She said she would, once I stopped all this. And I will stop all this as soon as I win the war.”
The little girl’s ghost shook her head and began to cry. Her lips shaped words, but he didn’t try very hard to read them. Emea turned and pushed her aside, but her hands went straight through. She clucked her tongue.
“Win the war, will you?” she said. “Better get on with that, dear brother. Because it looks to me like you’re losing. Funny, those Okikans seem to have long memories.”
“This isn’t the Maaram war.”
“Not yet.”
Neither of them would leave him alone, so he fell silent and scowled into the heat of his hearth fire. The old harbor had been well and thoroughly lost. He still had the superior army, superior weapons, and control of the majority of the island. But the fact that the rebels had managed to carve out even a sixth of the city for themselves filled him with baffled rage. He ought to be discussing plans with his chiefs or fielding parlay requests from whoever styled themselves the leader of the rebels these days. He ought to be combing his list of prisoners for informants and spies he could send back out into the shockingly porous rebel army. Instead he sat and brooded, alone save for his ghosts.
She had screamed, but not very loud. She had offered him secrets and said something about sennit braid, which had gone utterly unremarked at the time but kept coming back to him now. A stablehand had offered the Mo’i her entire life’s savings, and it amounted to little more than a few ropes of cord.
Why did I kill her?
he wondered now, far too late. What was that incoherent rage that had come over him, blotting out even the semblance of rational thought? Why not just imprison her like he had the others who crossed him? And if he had to kill her, why like that? Why like some mad animal in need of a mercy killing?
He recalled Senona Ahi and Kaleakai, the two guardians who had told him so starkly that he needed to kill himself to secure the great fire. He would have assassinated them, too, if it weren’t for their power and influence. The stablehand had been his to kill, because she meant nothing to anyone.
He shivered. He reminded himself of Nahe, coolly calculating the misery he could inflict on people by virtue of the power they held. Emea had meant nothing, and so Nahe had treated her like nothing for all their years together.
“How did this happen?” he said aloud, though not to his ghosts. “When did I become like him?”
“Don’t flinch now, brother,” said the apparition who was certainly, absolutely not his sister.
“You aren’t real,” he said.
Her blue flames crackled. “Real enough to kill for. Real enough to die.”
 
“But what can we do with her?”
This was not the first time this question had been asked this night, among these three. And, Lana thought, each set of answers seemed more tepid and unworkable than the last. She and Nahoa and Pano sat close to the fire, with the table Eliki always used for her work pushed aside. As the night wore on, Lana kept expecting their erstwhile leader to put in an acerbic, cool-headed suggestion that they would all argue with and then agree to. But now two of Yechtak’s soldiers guarded her in a house one street away while she stared with a stern, unnerving distance at the wall. No one had thought to restrain her. It had seemed unlikely she could overcome the guards.
“Can’t you just let her go?” Nahoa said wearily. “What can she do now, anyway? There’s three armies in this damn city and she doesn’t control any of them.”
Pano, who had hardly spoken since the rebels had secured the old docks, regarded Nahoa with bleak intensity. “You don’t know Eliki,” he said. “We could turn her out with just the clothes on her back, and she’d return with an army in a year.”
“But why would she want to?” Lana asked.
“She doesn’t trust anyone else to win.”
“Haven’t you already won?” Nahoa said.
“You think your husband will just let us stay in the heart of his city?”
Nahoa bit her lip and fell silent. Pano added another log to the fire, though it seemed to Lana that the flames were plenty bright.
Some rebel leaders we make
. She wanted to sleep. She wanted to cry. She still didn’t understand how all this had happened.
“What would Eliki do?” Lana said, in a creaky attempt at humor.
Pano didn’t even bother to smile. “She’d kill her,” he said. “And if I objected, she’d lie and do it anyway. Eliki is fond of elegant solutions.”
“Like with Ahi,” Nahoa said, and then they both fell silent.
“We have to tell Yechtak
something
in the morning,” Lana said finally. This was also not the first time she had said this. As before, they both glanced up and then away, incapable of speech, let alone finding a solution. She couldn’t stand it. She stood up and started to pace.
“We can exile her,” she said. “Some place far away and hard to reach from Essel. The Kalakoas. We’ll give her likeness to all ship’s captains so they won’t take her back here. We will publicly condemn her actions and prove that we are not just another version of Bloody One-hand. And we will send a message to the Mo’i and Makaho to negotiate a truce.”
They both stared at her. As well they might. Lana felt as she had earlier that day, when she declared herself the commander of the rebel forces. As though she were on a precipice, staring down at her certain death. Like casting a geas, really. She felt for the red mandagah jewel beneath her shirt, so much a part of her now she hardly noticed its warm presence on her skin. She had been given responsibility once and had done all she could to avoid it. Perhaps this would work better. It could hardly turn out worse.
“Why would Kohaku agree to a truce? Pano just said he’ll keep fighting.”
Lana glanced at Pano, and it was clear from the intent way he watched Nahoa that he had already guessed Lana’s solution. “Ahi is no longer at the fire temple, right?” she said.
Nahoa frowned. “I told you, Malie took her to her mother’s house in the fourth district.”
“So you—” Lana began, but Pano shot her a warning look and took Nahoa’s hand.
“If you agree to help us, my lady,” he said, “we could end this.”
Nahoa blushed from the roots of her hair to her neck. Pano controlled himself better, but there was a certain quality in his stillness, like he might explode if he didn’t move very carefully. Lana finally realized what should have been obvious from the moment they sat down together in this room.
“You want to use me with Kohaku just like Makaho did,” Nahoa said.
Pano flinched, but he just said, “Yes.”
“But he’ll know you’d never hurt me.”
“And what if one of his soldiers’ arrows does?”
Nahoa opened her mouth, yanked her hand from his, and started to curse roundly and fluently. “Damn it, Pano! Why does it always have to be like this? Everyone twisting me any way they damn want for their own stupid reasons? Even you! Why can’t you all just leave me and Ahi in peace? I wish you’d all go away forever.”
Lana started to speak and then thought better of it. Pano looked as though Nahoa had stabbed him through the chest. He took a few gulping breaths.

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