“To what end?” Sibu says. “So we can have you as our mystic? You?” He spits on the ground. “You’ve turned our clan into a laughingstock. I can hear the Sibere cackling at us as we speak. And for what? Just so you can satisfy your sick desires to have what should belong to women?”
Salo can already see himself tipping over and falling, and a part of him recognizes that he has already lost. He tries to catch himself anyway. He takes off his spectacles and lets his brothers see his unnatural eyes, hoping that maybe this will convince them of the sincerity of his words. The world grows too bright and blurry without the magic of his spectacles correcting his vision, yet he can still see Jio’s and Sibu’s outlines etched against the false brightness.
“I didn’t do this for myself, brothers,” he says. “You have to believe me. I did it for the clan and for the people we lost when that witch attacked.”
“Lies!” Sibu says. “This is what you’ve always wanted, and when you saw the opportunity, you seized it. Ama as my witness, I will flay myself and jump into a cauldron of moonfire before I ever accept your blessing.”
“We’ll never bow to you,” Jio says. “Stranger.” And then he tosses his prematurely cut reed at Salo’s feet. Salo doesn’t see it, but he hears the reed’s dull thud as it hits the ground.
A Yerezi reed, severed before it has reached its gainful potential, hitting the dry earth unceremoniously: this is the sound of disownment, a brotherhood coming to a permanent end.
Sibu’s reed follows. “Stranger,” he says.
Yet another reed hits the ground, and another after it. One by one the boys come forward to sever any bonds of brotherhood that may have existed between them or could have existed in the future, each time declaring him a stranger.
He puts on his spectacles to find that his brothers have already walked away. Meanwhile each thud of the reed is like a knife in the gut, tearing up a howling void. But he doesn’t let it take him, not in front of these boys. He stands in silence until they’ve all made their points, the reeds piling up before him. Even the young cowherds he smoked with on occasion are there, and they don’t quite meet Salo’s gaze as they toss their reeds.
“Stranger,” the last one says before walking away. And then it is over.
A hand comes to rest on his shoulder from behind him. “I’m so sorry,” Aaku Malusi whispers. “I’m so sorry, my child.”
Salo wipes his cheeks and speaks without turning to face the old man. “You’ve been here before, haven’t you?”
A pause. “I have.”
“Then you know I need to be alone right now.”
The hand squeezes his shoulder once, then lets go. “I’ll be there at your awakening tonight. I’ll be praying for your success.”
“Thank you, Aaku.”
Back in the shed, Salo sits in the lonely stillness for a long while. At some point, however, the stinging in his eyes overwhelms him, and he hunches up in a corner, convulsing. He hates himself for being so weak, so soft, for crying so much lately it feels like he’s almost always on the verge of tears. What kind of man is he? Is he even a man?
Maybe they’re right about him. Maybe they’ve always been right.
12: Kelafelo
Namato—Umadiland
In her nightmares, a crimson serpent watches from the shadows as men wearing red skulls on their faces push into her body while she bleeds from her stomach, violating her until she thinks they’ll split her in half.
The snake watches while the men drag her screaming daughter out of her hut and cut her down like a rabid hound before leaving her broken corpse on the hard earth for the vultures and scavengers to devour. It watches as her entire world goes up in flames, as she relives that horrid night over and over again. She wakes up crying every time.
She is still alive only because the Anchorite weakened the red mamba’s venom before asking her to kill it beneath the witchwood tree and take its mind stone. The venom still burned like sulfur through her body, leaving her writhing on the ground and screaming in pain for a whole day—one of the prices she had to pay for the spirit’s gift, a torrent of knowledge she would have needed years to acquire naturally. She can already read and write in ciphers just days after that afternoon.
The nightmares were the other price. Sometimes they’re so overpowering she toys with the idea of finding relief via one of the poison vials on the Anchorite’s medicine rack.
On one such occasion she goes as far as getting up from her pallet, tiptoeing across the hut toward the rack, and lifting a jet-black vial of deadly root essence. She doesn’t drink it in the end, but she keeps the vial anyway, and on subsequent nights, whenever she wakes in a cold sweat, she studies it in the starlight coming through the shutters above her pallet. She imagines herself pouring its contents down her throat, her insides turning to liquid and her blood congealing in her veins. She imagines herself gasping for her last breath. Somehow, this makes her feel a little better, and eventually she falls into a dreamless sleep.
If the Anchorite notices the missing vial or hears Kelafelo screaming in the night, she makes no mention of it.
They spend their mornings performing their daily chores. Kelafelo sweeps, washes, cooks, fetches water, and forages for firewood while the Anchorite feeds the chickens and tends her garden with a hoe. After high noon they sit in the yard outside, and the mystic passes on her arcane knowledge. Kelafelo struggles at first to take down everything on paper, still not quite used to the sensation of holding a quill and dipping it into a gourd of ink, but her muscle memory catches up, and soon she acquires a wealth of notes on multiple arcane subject areas.
She learns about the six crafts of Red magic, how casting spells revolves around converting the Blood Woman’s essence into one or more of these crafts. She learns that this conversion is performed in the shards by a great pattern called an Axiom, which she must devise entirely by herself before she meets the redhawk. She learns about mind stones and their uses beyond soul charms, including the conjuring of spirits that can manifest as lightning or fire. Her mind expands with each new thing she learns, and she waits impatiently every day for the suns to arc past their zeniths so that her lessons can begin.
Nightfall, though, brings only dread as she frets about the horrors that will visit her in her sleep. She despises herself for it, for fearing the skull-faced men so much that the thought of closing her eyes makes her shudder. She wishes she could look at them in her nightmares with nothing but the hatred she feels so intensely for them.
She wishes she felt nothing but hatred.
The Anchorite sits her down one day and confronts her. “Your progress is satisfactory, young girl, but I am concerned that you are cutting yourself off from your emotions.”
“I don’t understand, Mamakuru,” Kelafelo deflects. “What do you mean?”
“You are having unpleasant dreams, are you not? I sense you numbing yourself against them. You are shutting out your humanity to make the nightmares easier to bear.”
A surge of self-loathing sours Kelafelo’s expression. “My humanity weakens me, Mamakuru. I cannot be emotional. I need to detach myself from what happened to my daughter, or I will never be strong enough to kill her murderers.”