Nina whirled around, shielding Kasik’s body with her own. Shayim stood just inside the door, her hands folded in front of her and her face in that perpetual intimation of calm that made Nina want to scream. Her mind was a swirl of panic and chaos, of doubt and confusion. These people, with their soft words and reassurances, had killed Kasik, for there was no world in which he came back from his current state, evenwitha healer.
“What have you done to him?” she hissed through gritted teeth.
“Wehaven’t done anything. It seems that the creatures of the Tuta Kulla got to him before we did.”
Kasik’s skin beneath her hand was on fire. There were no other injuries on him that she could see, no blood pooled underneath him on the ground. If she could collect the plants she needed, she could try to keep him alive. “I can heal him if you let me gather what I need.”
Shayim looked at her intently, head tilted and eyes narrowed. “Is that what you really want?”
Nina sucked in a breath. The question rankled her, even if it was something she had considered previously. She glanced back at Kasik, the sweat on his brow glistening in the dim moonlight pouring in from above, his bound wrists tied to the pole above his head, and she nodded.
She couldn’t let him die any more than she could take his life herself. “Yes,” she said confidently.
Shayim nodded as if Nina had passed a test. “Good. Then you have everything you need already.”
The woman was maddening. Nina looked around the tent, at the barren dark that stared back, and shook her head. “I don’t understand,” she said slowly.
“Yes, you’ve made that perfectly clear.” Shayim sighed, then stepped closer. “Perhaps I will be clearer. You have a vast and untapped power within you. I know you feel it,” she added when Nina opened her mouth to object, “and you need not ignore it any longer. You are Ikara. Thetruechosen one.”
Ikara.The beings with attay from the story Kasik had told her. The word had spoken to her then, and it spoke to her now, a gentle murmur that brushed the edges of her soul with truth and knowing. But Nina wasn’t supposed to be there, and she certainly wasn’t powerful. They had come for Sacha, and she had offered herself in her sister’s place. What a coincidence it might be that they had collected an Ikara as they had done for centuries before.
Unless they knew, and it was truly Nina’s own ignorance and lack of self-control that led her there.
“You can heal him, Nina. You could save his life, or you could take it and free yourself.”
Nina shook her head. “Only the gods can do such a thing,” she whispered.
“A god’s power resides within you, if only you are brave enough to accept it.”
Nina scoffed. “I am not brave,” she firmly said, remembering the regret and whispered pleading she had made to the gods. “There is nothing to accept.”
Shayim shrugged her shoulders. “Then he will die.”
“I know exactly what I need. My mamay taught me and if you—”
“He is beyond your plants and prayers, Nina.”
She stiffened. Her hand tightened into a fist by her side. “Let metry. You would allow him to die to prove your point?”
“It’syouwho is doing so in fighting your true nature.”
Kasik twitched. His breathing paused, and Nina turned with dread, waiting for his chest to rise again. It did, but the moments in between felt like an eternity. She closed her eyes and exhaled.
If therewasattay within her, Nina had no idea how to find it, but more importantly, it would mean that her life had been a lie. Her entire childhood was comprised of moments when she thought she was losing her mind, where she would close her eyes tight and count to ten and hope that when she opened them, the golden threads swirling in the air would be gone. Times where she would rest her head on her mamay’s lap and beg to know what was wrong with her.
You must learn to control yourself,her mamay would say. A different version of the same idea every single time. Nina had thought it comforting then. Now she saw it for what it was.
The hiding, the avoidance, the distractions. Had they always known, or were they drowning in denial just as she was?
To learn the truth was her only option. If not, the unknown, the possibility, would eat her alive. “Fine,” she said aloud. “I’ll play your game.”
“This is no game, girl. It is the will of the gods.”
The dirt floor was cool beneath Nina’s legs, and she was grateful for the length and thickness of the aclla robe. Kasik’s body pressed against her side, and Shayim sat across from her. Moonlight drifted in from above and bathed them in a circle of pale blue light.
“The gods enjoy the chaos of challenge and the reward of adoration,”Shayim began. “In order to achieve those, they imbued their creations with free will. Water will flow where it may choose. Fire will burn eagerly. Wind can be a gentle caress or devastation. And man can follow their greatest desires.” She placed a hand to her chest and inhaled deeply. “Do you know of the gods-touched, the Ikara?” she asked.
With a curt nod, Nina said, “Kasik told me the story.”
