The Burning City (Spirit Binders) (47 page)

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Authors: Alaya Dawn Johnson

BOOK: The Burning City (Spirit Binders)
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“We can,” he said, “if that’s your wish. You only have to ask. We’d never. . .I’d never. . .”
Nahoa’s fury, so immediately potent, vanished in the face of this. She took both of his hands in hers. “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. It’s just hard sometimes. It seems like it will never end.”
“Everything does eventually.”
“I’ll help you. Of course I will.”
They were staring into each other’s eyes and neither had made any move to separate their hands. Lana backed away abruptly and mumbled some excuse about needing to tell Yechtak their decision. They didn’t acknowledge her. She almost ran outside, her eyes stinging. No one had seen Kai in four days. She’d gone through the stacks of dead bodies slated for the pyres, but there was no sign of him. She didn’t think he was dead—he was the water guardian, after all, and surely his premature death would cause more havoc than this constant, barely tolerable constriction in her chest. But where could he have gone? The snow had stopped, as Eliki had promised it would, but the powdery drifts still towered above the cleared roads. She couldn’t imagine how much of a sacrifice it must have taken for Kai to bring that much snow. Maybe he had gone to the ocean and drowned? But that was ridiculous. Kai
was
water.
Shivering, Lana walked over to the house where they had temporarily sequestered Eliki, Yechtak, and the Okikan commander. The guards posted outside the door let her in after a moment of surprise. This house was small and all on one level. Eliki was under guard in the small private room, while Yechtak and the commander slept on pallets in the common area. In theory, anyway. The commander slept, but Yechtak knelt in front of his pallet, his arms raised. He didn’t seem to hear her when she came in, so she called his name gently.
He whirled around and fell back against the sheets. “Iolana,” he said. He was the only person besides Okilani, the head elder on her native island, who used her full name. And he always used it as though he were naming a treasure.
“I thought I would speak with Eliki,” she said.
His eyes widened but then he nodded. “Of course. Wait here. I will wake her.”
Lana thought about letting her sleep, but then shrugged. She was responsible for this disaster. She could deal with the consequences. Knowing Eliki, she would only be expecting it.
Yechtak entered the other room and then beckoned for her to follow. It seemed that Eliki was having as sleepless a night as the rest of them. She sat in her solitary chair, staring at the pages of a book but not, Lana thought, actually reading it.
“The black angel would like to speak with you,” Yechtak said.
Eliki raised her eyebrows but did not look up. Yechtak frowned.
“It’s fine,” Lana said. “You can leave us.”
He hesitated, but then just bowed his head and left. Yechtak had told her some of what had happened in the year since they last saw each other. Apparently, the wind spirit itself had named him her ambassador. Lana had never heard of anyone like that in the legends of the other black angels, but given the almost worshipful way Yechtak regarded her, she could believe it.
“I take it you have judged my fate,” Eliki said, almost amiably. She shut the book without marking her place and coolly met Lana’s eyes.
“I didn’t want this,” she said.
Eliki waved her hand. “Of course you didn’t. You couldn’t have made your reluctance to serve our cause more clear if you’d thrown a tantrum. And since I can’t blame ambition for our sudden reversal of fortune, I suppose I can only blame fate.”
“You chose to kill Ahi.”
“Choice,” Eliki said, “is overrated. Sometimes the other choice is too unbearable to contemplate.”
“A baby, Eliki.”
“Is that what you came here for? To prick my conscience? You’ll have to try harder than that. I’ve had to make mine stronger than iron to get this far.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have.”
“I suppose you think that was a choice, too.”
They stared at each other, silent and calculating, two enemies far out on a narrow ledge. Who would push first?
“Have you thought,” Eliki said finally, “about what it really means for you to do this? I helped start this war. I armed our people and developed the strategy and launched them against the far superior force of our tyrannous Mo’i, utterly sure in the knowledge that hundreds of them would die and we might not even win with their sacrifice. And when I realized that our bows were breaking and might destroy us before we even began, I convinced your lover to take the wonder of a snowfall and turn it into a deadly weapon. You have flown over the city, black angel. You must have seen the bodies of those frozen in the snow. I have almost destroyed this city so that I might save it. I believe utterly in the choices I have made, because they are the only ones I could have made. And if you disagree with me, if you feel that I have crossed a line that should not have been crossed, if you think I am like Bloody One-hand, mad with violence and all unknowing, then disagree with
that
, with those hundreds dead who should not be, and not some babe I did not even succeed in killing.”
Lana leaned against the wall because she was trembling and did not wish to show it. What masochistic impulse had made her come to Eliki this night? She should have known what moral labyrinth she was inviting herself into. And now, how to get out?
“I saved her,” Lana said, and then more loudly, “Ahi is only alive because I used a stronger geas to break your own.”
Eliki’s lips twisted. “Yes, I know. For a conscience, Pano has always been remarkably active. But, fine, my intentions were clear. If it were up to me, the child would be dead by now. Tell me, black angel, why her death weighs so much more than these other hundreds you have witnessed? Why not lock your lover in here with me for the innocents he killed with his blanketing snow?”
Lana swallowed carefully. She hated Eliki more than she had hated anyone in her life right now, even Akua. At least Akua’s sins were unmitigated by this awful, twisting self-justification. Kai was gone, spirits knew where, and here this woman claimed, with horrifying accuracy, that they all shared the blame for innocent deaths.
“You ordered it.”
“But
you’re
the one who believes in the primacy of choice. He should have known what would happen.”
But Lana considered how briefly Kai had been in this city, how little of his life had been spent around humans, let alone in a place packed with hundreds of thousands of them, and wondered how he would feel when he discovered what had come of his sacrifice.
Lana wrapped her arms around her shoulders. She felt helpless, like when she was very young and her mother had yelled at her for forgetting to take off her sandals before she came inside. “Eliki, I can’t argue with you. You’re smarter than me and you know it. But killing a baby for political gain is wrong. You have to know that.”
“Sometimes there are only wrong choices. But there, at last, we agree—there’s no use arguing this. I have finally done something even Pano cannot forgive, and so you must do something about me. Knowing you both, I very much doubt it will be an execution, though perhaps One-hand’s young wife is feeling particularly vengeful?”
“She wanted to let you go.”
Eliki laughed. “Did she? Well then, we have three fools at the head of this army. You should kill me.”
“Pano said that’s what you’d do. He said you preferred elegant solutions.”
“Ah, Pano. He should have stayed with his plants. I never should have sent him to co-opt the Mo’i’s wife. The oldest lesson in the world, and I forgot it: beware handsome men and young women. So what is it, then? Keep me in this room and hope I die quietly? Don’t tell me you’re actually going to let me leave?”
“You’ll be on the next ship to the Kalakoas. Every captain will find it in their interest to never give you passage to our shores. You can try to disguise yourself, but I think it will be difficult.”
“Yes,” Eliki agreed, but absently. She turned back to face the wall. Her throat worked, but no sound came out. “Yes. That will work quite well.” Now Eliki was shaking, though Lana could think of no reason why. She’d sounded positively sanguine at the discussion of her death or permanent imprisonment. “If you have the woman and the baby, you know you can use them to defang the Mo’i. He’s reliably protective of them. It would be touching, in other circumstances. Be careful with the Okikans. I’m not sure what they want, but you can be sure it’s not the liberation of Essel. If you can negotiate a steady enough truce with One-hand, try to make them leave. No one would survive an inter-island war. You’ve at least convinced me of that. Our greatest weapon is our cause. No one likes the Mo’i, Lana. Some are just more afraid of him than others. It might take years, but eventually the people will all be on our side, so long as we behave like the just and equable government he’ll never be. Don’t. . .no matter what, don’t underestimate Kohaku’s danger. He is smart and he is mad, and he has no empathy for those he hurts. Whatever follows him will be even worse. You should kill him, if you can.”
“Eliki. . .”
She still wouldn’t meet Lana’s eyes. “Oh, I know you won’t. Pano might.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Are you?”
“More than I should be.”
“Yes. But how efficiently you dispose of your enemy.”
Lana didn’t realize until she stepped away from the wall that Eliki was crying. Not a trace of the tears had shown in her voice, or even in her posture, aside from the trembling.
“Are you my enemy?” Lana asked, softly.
“When you exile me, I know you will say it’s for the baby. But promise me that you will say it’s for Leipaluka and Sabolu and the ones who died in the snow. Promise me that it’s for every innocent killed in the Mo’i’s fires, and I’ll be no one’s enemy but my own.”
“I promise.”
Eliki sighed and dropped her head to her hands. “My daughter loved this city,” she said in a voice Lana didn’t recognize at all—tired and defeated. “She loved Nui’ahi and the temple, she loved the colored robes of the Kulanui, she loved the spring festival in the bay. I’d pay so she could catch her own worms and they’d roast them for her by the water. This city is everything I’ve ever loved.”
“We will save it,” she said, but Eliki’s sobs had overtaken her words. Lana rubbed furiously at her own eyes and left.
15
 
B
OUND AS A SPRITE, KAI’S WATER SELF naturally dominated his human self. And as the spirit world became clear to him, like a filmy veil slowly pulled back from his eyes, he saw what Akua had done. She and Leilani had been living in this house all along it seemed, a simple sidestep from the human world. Even Kai hadn’t noticed when he visited this place with Lana, which made him furious with himself even while he admired Akua’s deft skill. They seemed as at home here as the ancient sprites, crotchety and torpid, bound to its very foundations and beams. This was certainly the house from Lana’s black book. Perhaps Akua had found it just as Lana had, deducing the clues from the thousand-year-old diary. It was a good place to hide: near the city, but far enough away that no one would notice strange comings and goings. A house protected by spirits and so well guarded that even a guardian like Kai wouldn’t notice it.
He didn’t know what Akua wanted with him. He gathered that she had bound him on Makaho’s behalf, but his grasp of the twisted human politics of this sprawling city was shaky at best. When Akua was present in the house, she stayed mostly silent, wrapped in a cocoon of contemplation too intense to even be called brooding. She was often away. He tried once to push against the binding and was repelled with enough force to send him crashing against the sturdy walls of the room. Akua had left earlier, and so only Leilani witnessed that last humiliation. Kai had never met Lana’s mother before, but after a few minutes in her presence he understood many things that had never made much sense to him before.
“She must think you’re very powerful,” Leilani had said when he pulled himself painfully upright.
“And yet not nearly powerful enough,” he said, and then smiled to leaven the bitterness he heard in his voice.
Leilani did not understand much more than he about the reason for her imprisonment. She had not suffered, but she was clearly lonely. She knew of the events happening in the city, but Akua was a lackluster storyteller and so often distracted that it had been difficult to get a complete picture. She knew that Lana had become the black angel, but she hadn’t known of her role in the current war. Of her husband she had known nothing at all and turned away when Kai was able to tell her that he was safe. She did not cry, but the expression on her face was vulnerable and raw. He ached for her.
“He and Lana shared a home at first. . .” He trailed off when he realized he was entering uncomfortable territory, but Leilani sensed this.
“At first?”
“They. . .he was helping victims in the Mo’i’s tents. She was helping the rebels. It caused problems.”
She sighed. “Oh, Kapa. It was hard on him, maybe even harder than it was on me, not to see Lana grow up. In his heart she’s still the girl we watched climb from the ocean with a mandagah jewel when she was thirteen.”

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