Her hands, now resting on her chest, lifted slightly. She wasn’t finished speaking.
“Learn from my mistakes,” she said, so softly I had to lean close to hear, “and learn from my joys. Surround yourself with those who’ll love you always, through your mistakes and your faults. Make a family that will find you more beautiful every day, even when your hair is white with age. Be the light that makes someone’s lantern shine.” A long breath, her chest falling. “Will you do this, my daughter?”
I could barely nod, let alone speak. “Yes.”
“Good.” She leaned back, her hair completely white against the snow-laced tree. “Sing with me.”
I tried to, but my tears got in my way. My mouth tasted of salt, and my voice was so hoarse it hurt. But as she sang, I joined in when I could.
Channari was a girl who lived by the sea,
who kept the fire with a spoon and pot…
Toward the end, her fingers went limp. The glow in her eyes faded, and our song melted into the wind, unfinished.
I held her and I wept.
CHAPTER FORTY
My brothers and I gave Raikama a small private ceremony in her garden. There was no procession, no official rites where she would be honored among our ancestors and given offerings of money and food. Even if the palace had been awake, I didn’t think she would have wanted a grand funeral. The only thing she would have wished was for Father to be there.
When it was over, Takkan returned Seryu’s pearl to me. I fashioned a tiny net to hold it in place, knotted it onto a cord, and wore it around my neck. Without a word, I disappeared into my room.
The room didn’t feel like my own anymore. Nothing had changed: not the order of my books on the shelf or the array of hairpins and earrings on top of my lacquered jewelry boxes, not even the arrangement of my silk pillows.
OnlyIhad changed. Unfathomably.
The first thing I did was rummage for a long-forgotten treasure. It was a box covered in red brocade, hidden deep in the back of a drawer under piles of talismans and charms, a decade’s worth of wishes.
Takkan’s letters.
I read them over and over, laughing and crying at his stories, which filled my heart and made it ache at the same time. Many of them were about him as a boy, trying to discipline his spirited sister but often ending up joining in on her adventures. They made me miss Megari, and Iro, and, most of all, Takkan.
I read until my eyes were so bleary the words became blurs of ink. But I couldn’t sleep, not until I placed Raikama’s pearl on my pillow and the starstroke net on the table beside my bed. That, somehow, was enough to assure me that the last half a year hadn’t been a dream I could simply wake from. That my scars, inside and out, were real. That I had promises that needed keeping.
Finally I slept, succumbing to a dreamless void that my brothers later told me lasted three entire days. Snakes surrounded my bedside, and I took them in. I was no longer afraid of them. After all, they only mourned their mother, same as I.
I didn’t know what my brothers did while I slept, but when I woke, there was a mound of swords outside the palace walls, seized from every soldier in Lord Yuji’s army. Takkan and my brothers had collected them, and now the weapons sat in the courtyard outside the apartments my brothers and I shared, huddled in a tight circle, as if they’d been friends for years.
I hadn’t seen Takkan since the Wolf had taken me to the Holy Mountains. Yet sometimes when I was half-awake, I thought I heard his voice, telling me stories. Reading his letters aloud.
He noticed me before my brothers did, and shot to hisfeet.
Seeing him made a spark of warmth bloom inside me, but I couldn’t smile for him. He probably thought this was the beginning of our future…only I wasn’t here to stay.
I held up Raikama’s pearl. Seryu’s too, which I wore around my neck. “I’m going to the Taijin Sea. To Ai’long, the realm of dragons.”
Waves rolled across the beach, the water sparkling like freshly fallen snow. Over and over in a perpetual rhythm, the waves crested and fell, washed up the shore and then ebbed away—as they had done long before I was born, and would continue to do long after I was gone.
Coming from behind, Takkan and my brothers narrowed the space between us, but I wasn’t ready to begin our goodbyes. I wasn’t ready to leave, when I had just come home.
“I still have a few minutes left,” I murmured to them as I watched the sun. It had only risen halfway above the horizon, casting a burnished glow upon the Taijin Sea. Under its light, the water seemed more like gold than snow, with traces of violet from the dying night and beads of scarlet from the aging dawn. The sight, unnaturally beautiful, made my satchel feel heavier. Raikama’s pearl was inside, in its nest ofstarstroke.
“Are you sure you don’t want to wait for Father?” Hasho asked.
“It’ll be better if I don’t.”
It would be weeks before Father and the rest of Gindara woke. Besides, I didn’t know how to tell Father the truth. That I was the bloodsake of Kiata. That I was a rip in the seams that the gods had sewn to keep magic out of our country forever.
