“I thought I should tell you, my lady,” she said. “With the state of affairs outside being what it is, I’ve taken the liberty of assigning a guard. Your husband agrees with me. I don’t expect any harm to come to you while you’re here in the temple, but still, we can’t be too careful about you and the baby.”
The way she said “baby” was so pointed that Nahoa blanched. What did she know about Ahi’s illness? Was she implying that she knew its geas origins? And if so, did that mean she had caused it? But then why threaten her with it now? Nahoa’s head hurt with the puzzle that no piece of information seemed capable of teasing out.
“I wish you wouldn’t,” Nahoa said. “It’s hard enough around here without some soldier following me around all day. I’m sure Ahi won’t like him.” Actually, her daughter was far more likely to love the new face, but no need to admit it. A guard would make it much harder to hear from Pano safely.
Though perhaps that was Makaho’s true purpose?
Makaho shrugged apologetically. “I understand the inconvenience, truly. But we only have your well being in mind. I hope you’ll bear with it?”
Pretend I have a choice.
“Of course.” She attempted to move forward, but Makaho still blocked her way. She gave Nahoa an appraising look.
“I trust Ahi is well?” the head nun asked.
“Yes. Fine. Perfect. And she’s probably very hungry by now, so if you don’t mind. . .”
Makaho smiled and moved aside with a little bow. Nahoa walked away, her pace a hair short of a run. The guard was already stationed outside the antechamber doors when she arrived, and Malie was arguing with him in a whisper.
“This is absurd,” she was saying, with the air of one who is repeating herself. “We have no need for further protection here in the bowels of the fire temple.”
“There’s a war on, miss,” he said, also with an air of repetition. “The head nun wants you to be safe.”
“Does she imagine the rebel hordes are going to storm the gates?”
The guard pursed his lips, as there was no safe answer to this question. Nahoa shook her head and grabbed Malie by the elbow.
“Come on, he won’t move, and you know it. The old bag sent him.”
The man lowered his eyes and seemed about to stammer out some sort of apology or introduction before Nahoa slid the door shut. They walked into the inner chamber, shut that door, and knelt against the far wall.
“I don’t think he’ll be able to avoid a guard,” Malie whispered.
“I know. Do you think we should warn him?”
She rolled her eyes. “Please. Pano’s been sneaking around where he doesn’t belong since you were sucking on screw pines. Don’t worry about him.”
But Nahoa did worry. She worried if he was safe, if the rebels had actually made the bows and arrows she’d given them the plans for, if he’d eaten, if he’d come back. But now he couldn’t.
“My lady, ” Malie paused, her eyes as wary as the guard’s. “Do you know why she’s guarding us, after all this time?”
Nahoa thought back to her strange conversation with Makaho. “I think she’s worried. About Ahi. Like she knows something about what happened and she’s afraid for her.”
Malie took this in. “You don’t think she did it.”
“I don’t know.”
“I think you’re right. I think she has too much to lose, and she must have learned something that made her afraid for you.” Malie paused, and then said pointedly, “Something about the people you’ve been consorting with?”
“About. . .but Pano would never—”
Malie held up her hands in preemptive surrender. “I know, I know. You trust the gardener.”
Nahoa had never understood Malie’s consistent distrust. She’d just attributed it to her generally wary and sour nature toward other people. But now, so closely echoing Nahoa’s own private worries, it made her furious. “What’s so damn wrong with the gardener, Malie?”
“He used to work for the old bag, you know. Not when you first met him. A few years before that. Half the gardens you see on the bayside are his.”
No wonder he could sneak through the temple so easily. Nahoa had never even wondered. Her stomach felt curiously tight. She reached for Ahi, but the child was sleeping. “So?” she said. Her voice was small.
“Well, isn’t it funny, my lady? That he used to work for Makaho herself and then he worked in the Mo‘i’s house, and now suddenly he’s some flaming revolutionary?” Malie spoke as quietly as ever, but her words seemed to fall from her lips like embers.
“Not suddenly,” Nahoa said, remembering. “He was writing pamphlets against the Mo‘i when I was there.”
Malie rolled her eyes. “Yes. Pamphlets. Not wars.”
“Well, things have changed, haven’t they? Half the world blew up! It’s not as though he could have kept tending the Mo‘i’s orchids while half the city starved, and my own bloody husband responsible!”
Malie froze. She seemed surprised. “It never was just about Pano, was it? Why you agreed to help.”
“About Pano?”
“I’ve seen how you look when you think he can’t see.”
“Ahi likes him,” she said, though this seemed inadequate.
“Ahi likes everybody.”
“He likes Ahi. He’d never—” Nahoa stopped herself because she seemed to be trembling. Her throat felt tight, like she might cry. “He’d
never
.”
Malie’s expression—previously so hard and cold—melted like a handful of the snow outside. She embraced Nahoa, a gesture so unexpected she could only submit to it. The tears began not soon after. “Shh,” she said softly. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I hope you’re right.”
13
T
HE SNOW FELL AND FELL UNTIL the afflicted citizens of Essel likened the blanketing white to a shroud. Even the children were admonished not to play in the towering drifts, lest they lose themselves in the powdered ice. What little food had been available vanished for all but the wealthiest, those with servants to pay or admonish into braving the weather with armfuls of sennit braid. People disappeared and were discovered hours or days later, frozen, eyes closed and bodies gently curled as though they had simply lain down for a nap. Some claimed the water spirit was punishing them for giving too much to fire. Essel’s solitary water temple—never well kept and in recent years close to collapse from disuse—drew crowds so large they had to line up in the street.
There was a war on. The Mo‘i’s soldiers had marched through the streets some days before, when the snowfall had just been a pleasant novelty and not a sure sign of the apocalypse. For the first time since the eruption, no one could see Nui’ahi. Bereft of their sentinel, the citizens of Essel watched the low-grade war being fought in the heart of the city with apocalyptic fatalism. The northern borders of the rebel encampment were slowly expanding, largely by dint of the fact that the Mo’i’s army had unwisely chosen to burn the buildings that might otherwise have provided them with cover.
But who could have guessed that the ragged rebel forces—largely composed, it seemed, of seventh-district farmers and firstdistrict beggars—would have found some way to arm themselves with Bloody One-hand’s most deadly weapon? It had to be that black angel, the soldiers whispered, as did the townspeople nearby. That strange girl who had come to their city and never left. The harbinger of the great sentinel’s fire now seemed to carry the snow like a mantle over her great black wings. She flew over the city, silent as a nightmare. A shadow was all the warning anyone had through the enshrouding whiteout of the snowfall. And looking up, the black angel’s face was never quite visible, though her eyes seemed to glow like embers.
On the third night the snow fell, the angel circled thrice overhead, sending those of the Mo’i’s soldiers who saw her plunging to their knees, heads bent, palms out in supplication. Edere kept his head tilted up, and for a moment it seemed she held his gaze before vanishing into the misted night. His unnatural calm gave way to unnatural terror. He clutched the ax the Mo’i had given him and muttered, “Ancestors grant our souls mercy,” a half-remembered prayer whose meaning he only dimly understood. His grandmother had said it sometimes in extremity. But she was from a deeply rural island on the outskirts of Okika and prone to rustic superstition. He’d heard that the black angel made any man she touched shrivel like a withered vine. He’d heard that she’d been seen cavorting naked with the fire spirit on the rim of Nui’ahi. He’d heard that she used to be a girl, a diver who had traveled from one end of the earth to the other in search of a spirit to give her wings. He didn’t believe any of the stories. He didn’t care who she had been or what she did or said—she was the black angel, and her presence meant death on a scale his rustic grandmother could never have imagined.
She was lucky to have died all those years ago. The home her father built had burned down in the second wave of fires. Edere had joined Bloody One-hand’s army to save his mother and sister from starvation. And it hadn’t been such a bad job so far. Edere and his cadre of the Mo’i’s soldiers had been waiting in uneasy truce for days. Sometimes a stray rebel arrow would land perilously close to their front line and sporadic fighting would break out until cooler heads prevailed on both sides. Two of Edere’s friends had been wounded that way—medical runners took them both to the tents, but he privately wondered if he’d see either of them alive again. Wounds festered, particularly the deep punctures made by the arrows.
It was nighttime and snowing and the black angel had silently watched their camp for days. No one expected that the next rebel arrow to land among them would presage more than the minor skirmishes they’d already encountered. But the arrow that punched through his neighbor’s neck heralded a volley that found marks throughout the lines, judging by the shouts and curses and screams he heard like ghosts from the snow.
“Weapons out!” came the frantic cry of his group’s chief, seemingly unaware of the arrow shaft poking out of his left forearm. “Forward! Forward!”
But there was no need for them to meet the rebel enemy. They’d already come, silent as the black angel under cover of night, to finish this unholy war once and for all.
Edere fought them with his ax, which he had only recently learned to use. He was tall and unusually large; his opponents were even less familiar with their weapons than he. It would have been easy work to dispatch them—they were in so close now that their archers didn’t dare fire for fear of hitting their own. But every time his sharp blade connected, he could feel muscle and bone parting from the force of the blow. He could hear their screams and see the blood that sprayed in the wavering light from the fires. He slipped on the now slick, steaming snow, but his opponent was already lying there, groaning and begging for mercy.
“Back! Fall back!” came the cry up the line, and Edere realized that he was almost alone here by his campfire. The rebels rushed forward to claim the land. His erstwhile opponent—a woman, he saw now, and almost as young as his sister—lay still and moaning in her own blood. Edere stared. Her intestines spilled onto the snow like straw in a badly packed mattress. Had he done that? He realized that he might even know this woman, in another world, another life. He might have bought breadfruit from her; he might have seen her playing with her friends on the street corner or fishing off the pier. She was just another Esselan, devastated by the eruption. Just like him. He knelt, though rebel soldiers swarmed closer.
She still breathed. Blood dribbled from her lips into the snow. She locked her gaze with his and he could see her terror and her pain so clearly he wanted to vomit. He had done this. The ax fell from his numb hand.
“What’s your name?” he asked. Someone was yelling at him—not a rebel, one of their own, one of the medical runners braving the conflict to pick up wounded stragglers. Edere pushed him off.
“What’s your name?” he said again to the girl, bending his head so that he might hear her better. He couldn’t save her. Nothing could. But he couldn’t let her pass beyond the gate like this, anonymous and unmourned and transient as a snowflake.
She lowered her lids. Her breathing was hard and labored.
“Come! There’s nothing we can do for her! You have to come!” the runner was shouting. Edere ignored him.
“I have a sister,” he said. “Her name is Uele’a, she’s your age.”
The girl coughed. “I don’t know. . .anyone. Like that. Everyone’s dead.”
Everyone’s dead. For a hysterical moment, it seemed as though she meant it literally, that they were the only two left alive in all of Essel, in all of the islands.
“I’m Edere,” he told her, dimly aware that something had happened to the frantic medical runner.
“Leipaluka,” she said. He held her hand. The fear in her eyes receded like a tide. She smiled a little. He watched as her eyelids drooped and her breathing grew more and more shallow. He was almost sure she had died by the time one of the rebel soldiers yanked him to his feet.
The medical runner had also been captured and Edere regretted that he had been the cause of another man’s misfortune. He was half-gray and looked unspeakably weary—Edere wondered how such an old man had taken a job ferrying wounded soldiers out of the battle. Perhaps he too had lost everyone, like Leipaluka. Or perhaps there was someone in his life he wanted to protect.