Haka’atu grinned. “If you ever want a break from being king, come and keep my accounts. My moai took twenty-two years. I say we can do yours in twenty.”
“What about nine smaller moai? Could you not make those in one ninth the time?”
The island king flopped a hand over his eyes as he laughed. “Nine! You want nine?” His fingers wiped at tears. “If it were as easy as chipping out some more rocks from volcano throats, I’d have a hundred thousand moai and own all the islands. That would be bad. Who would my matatoa battle? No, no, you can only have one moai. And unless you want a warrior-size moai, it’s going to take twenty years. Is it a deal?”
Orluvoq watched her king think long and deep, and she realized she knew vanishing amounts about his motives. Would he snap at this dangling chance for power? Did he catch a noisome odor from this realm and wish to escape down their tunnel and seal it for good? Was he content to rule their world of ice, or had he seen the vitality here and coveted it too? After considering all the options, she finally understood that it was too hot to do any thinking and went back to watching.
A moment later, without any ceremony, Qummukarpoq, king of the Nuktipik and all the world, transfixed the large man with his stare and spoke. “It is a deal.”
A splutter of dread painted her heart. Twenty years. That was a very long crawl.
And a very steep price.
The Nuktipik freeze embraced her as she lighted through a castle window on the heels of Qummukarpoq. She’d never had cooked food before, but a belly full of it slowed her thoughts. There had to be something she could say, or a moment unguarded in which she could slip away. The magic had been wrought. He had no more need of her.
“Every power we can muster, we must.” The king paced as he spoke, more agitated tonight than she’d ever seen him.
“What do you mean?”
He stopped and pointed a glove toward the island paradise they’d just left. “Were you not just with me? Those Rapai’i can decimate us anytime they so please. What is tuuaaq against moai?”
She sensed an opening. “Then let’s collapse the tunnel. Send the world back to what it was yesterday.”
“And how would they view that act of diplomacy?” His face moved more humanlike than usual, pulled by upheaval. “We know not the extent of their arm. They could burrow through as we have, or simply swim. We are known. Our only chance is to preserve an amicable channel until we have at least one great moai.”
This was not why she’d come. Not the strength she’d been seeking. Now she saw that while she may have fancied ruling the world, she couldn’t live up to protecting it. She couldn’t even bear the weight of her own frail spirit.
“I can’t…”
“And yet you must. We must.” The blue of his candle nipped cold across her ribs. “How many pathways were open to you, and yet you chose to walk this one?”
“Couldn’t we just tell them that we don’t know how long the tunnel will stay open? They didn’t seem that bad, honestly.” How much of his sayings was truth, and how much was his desire for greater power?
“You heard him. They war with neighboring island kingdoms constantly. Unless we keep a strong treaty, it won’t be long before their eyes turn to our land.”
“They didn’t really have the clothes for it,” Orluvoq said, mostly to her hood.
“There is another step we must take to bolster our position even further.” He moved closer, and his features snapped back to that tense, inhuman calm. “I need an heir.”
Cold flounced in her stomach. She backed up a step. Mother to the heir. That would certainly strip her chances of ever leaving. “An… heir?”
“The reasons I desired a strong, angakkuq wife are twofold. To probe Qilaknakka, and to produce a strong, angakkuq child.” His dark eyes caught the candle’s cast and flung it toward hers. “The first has been fulfilled. The second soon follows.”
His face, grim, ghastly, unmoving. His stature, towering, thin, shadowed. The cold, inside, inside, inside. Needling her to run. She couldn’t bear his child, for that would mean bearing him. Whatever strength she might have gained so far, it hadn’t been far enough for that.
“I can’t…”
“I am the greatest angakkuq the ice can remember. And more than that, I am the greatest tirigusuusik.” His eyes narrowed, but only the bottom lids. “Emotions are but a momentary hindrance, whether mine or others’. If you feel your emotions are hindering you, it will take very little for me to make that not so. I am giving you the opportunity to choose. If you do not take it, I will.”
She broke the eye contact and stared at his cold-oozing candle. Her gorge pushed at the bottom of her tongue. Travel to the start of the world to gain knowledge, she had thought. Become queen, become strong, she had thought. Can’t hide forever, she had thought.
She had thought wrong. From tremulous knees to the ache in her scalp, she wished she’d seen plainer the wisdom of vanishing. How her parents would anguish if they knew what she had come to. Would they soon be seeing any of the girls she had ravaged? They had only ever loved her. Why must the price of love always be pain?
But then, she had no love for Qummukarpoq. Perhaps that made it safe. She could pin her lips up in smiles when visiting her parents to spare them. If the king might die, or might say to her awful things, it wouldn’t hurt because there was no love.
As much. It wouldn’t hurt as much. Besides, what other option lay before her? She had forsworn hiding, and now it had vanished.
Her gaze fell to the floor and she ground her teeth. Why had she come?
Why had she left?
She wet her lips and, in the darkness of the upper room of the ice castle at the foot of Qilaknakka, she spoke.
“Very well, husband.”
Interlude
25 Years Old
Orluvoq watched her daughter play with the bone snow goggles, holding them to her face and pretending they let her see all the way to Nunapisu. Soon enough. Soon enough. She listened to the life of the castle—the various servants and angakkuit she had insisted they invite—and missed it already. Seven years and it almost felt like home. Not quite enough to keep her, though.
“Qaffanngilaq,” she said. Her daughter didn’t look at her through the goggles. “The aurora will be out in just a few minutes and we’ll be off to grandma and grandpa’s. How about we go give your father a farewell?”
“Okay.” The six-year-old girl pulled the goggles away, wiping her nose in the same motion. She ranged ahead of Orluvoq through the halls, stopping to inform any passerby that she was going to run the aurora. She babbled the same speech to an itinerant Rapai’ian, and he nodded while understanding nothing.
The queen smiled a genuine smile as she watched her daughter frolic. Finally, she was going home. Sulluliaq—that’s what they’d taken to calling the glowing tunnel through Qilaknakka—persisted. It had been over five years since she had sapped any beauty, and still it gaped wide as the day they’d carved it. After weeks of importuning, the king had finally acquiesced. She would be taking Qaffanngliaq for a months-long stay at the end of the world. And if she forgot to track time, well, it might just end up being years.
That last episode of beauty leeching had gone well, discounting her spirit screeching protest. It still hadn’t been an unimpeded sweep of prowess, but she’d cut off exactly where she’d intended. Then came the begging.
“I’m as beautiful as I ever was before Qaffa’s birth. Let us test Sulluliaq. If it closes next month, then I will take more beauty. But if it would stay open a year and we waste all our people’s beauty in the meantime? There will be nothing left to open it again.”
Qummukarpoq had nodded short agreement, and Sulluliaq had held. It presaged well. Orluvoq may never have to drain another sliver of beauty.
That was what she recited to the surface of her mind. Recessed in some slimy crease wriggled a darker knowledge. Despite every scoff of indignation, every lick of lament, she wanted more. Longed to feel tha
t apex power flux of finally taming the blue; to glimpse again the surety her first parents provided. For though she still used the cold candles to better accomplish anything she would with the warm, she never quite strayed all the way into the things to avoid. All of that crawling came at the price of someone else, and recalling that always stole the sting from her strength.
So she avoided it, even as she needed it. As Nalor had quipped years ago, she hated that she loved it. Somewhere between Nunapisu and the last of the islands, there had to be something else. Some way to crush helplessness without crushing anyone else.
“Daddy.” Qaffa ran up to the king as they reached the darkness of the high chamber.
He paid her an austere smile and a pat on the head, then turned his gaze back to the window and the sunset-depleted sky. “You’re still set on taking her tonight?”
“Of course,” responded Orluvoq. “It’s been ages since I saw my parents, and I know they ache to see their granddaughter.”
“Of course.” For a rare moment, he held no candle, flame color regardless. “If you want to begin her courtship with candlework, that would be very beneficial. If not, we will start her studies when you return.”
“I will do what I can.”
The king wanted their daughter to become a great tirigusuusik. Orluvoq wanted to keep the path of the azure fire far from the girl’s feet. For seventeen years she’d heaved against the crooked horn, and never had it once brought true joy—unless one counted Qaffanngilaq herself. Qaffa deserved a better path.
“Very well.” He tipped his crowned head toward the window, at the slender bough of green light ornamenting its way through the sky. “It would appear your pathway has arrived.”
Arsarneq spilled out like a goddess’s lost needle and thread, then lanced through Qilaknakka and settled into stasis. A low woosh followed its track. Qaffanngilaq clapped her gloves and began to shout a children’s chant about the aurora.
“Alright, alright.” Orluvoq pulled some leather bands from her ample backpack and held them out in front. “Come over here and strap in.”
Qaffa trotted over, stood before her mother, and fidgeted through the entire battening down. Orluvoq might have been vexed, but she was just as antsy. All tassels cinched up, she stood with a grunt and pulled out a candle. Probably should have lit it before strapping a squirming human to her chest.
She turned her eyes to Qummukarpoq, the last interplay they’d exchange until the sunless murk of deep winter. “A few months, then.”
“Even so.”
The world broke into roaring chaos.
Orluvoq pitched to the ground. The king jumped to a crouch and a candle exploded blue in his hand. Qaffa squealed death.
As the drawn-out boom still shouted its ire, Qummukarpoq dashed to the window. For the first time, Orluvoq saw pain cross her husband’s eyes, flickering blue in the dark. “No,” he said, and jumped into the night.
She struggled upright as the roaring blended into a never-ending crash, like leagues long ice sheets plummeting from the sky. Finally, she pulled her face above the windowsill. Her heart began to burble in acid convulsions.
“Mama?” came Qaffa’s voice. “What is it?”
Orluvoq’s tongue would not be loosed. Spectral green burnished the wall of water at the start of the world, and where there ought sit a tunnel, there thundered a waterfall. Gouts unceasing issued from the ocean wall. Particulate mist ghosted across her cheeks and nose, thrown from where the torrent met the sea behind the castle. Sulluliaq had collapsed.
She stood up enough to pop Qaffa’s head over the ledge. “My little asasaq. We might not be going to Nunapisu just yet.”
Qummukarpoq landed on the sill and Orluvoq jumped back, eyebrows high. “Unfasten her,” he commanded. “Sulluliaq mustn’t remain closed. Quickly.”
Her brain chewed on that for a stitch too long before she reached to undo the harness. The sooner it was open, the sooner she could leave. She called and someone came running to watch after Qaffa, and then she was skywalking to the roof.
The king landed amidst the hummocks and turned to her. “How much tuuaaq do you have?” Unearthly urgency pinched his face to stern angles. “Never mind, take this.” He proffered a modest stang of the sweet tooth and she grabbed it.
She begged time to stop. To spare her a finger tally of breaths to make her own decision. That was a lot of tuuaaq. Time seethed forward. She crushed the tusk in her teeth. The king, not sparing a moment for the high to hit her, sank his eyelids shut and beckoned to Arsarneq with unnameable might.
It heard his call, yielded to his yank, and groaned revolt as it splintered from its nest of sky. Euphoria unspooled in her veins. Muffled soundscape. Lips drained numb. Speckled taste of shark blood. Silver string around her spine. Falling skyward. Knees hitting the roof. Candle following. Green. Greener.
By warp and woof he snagged the flaxen light of all creation and wrestled it toward the castle. He governed it into a narrow rill and thrust it upon the queen. Arsarneq collided with her hooded head and shattered. She barely noticed.
Emeraldine fractals chattered across the rooftop, etching rhomboid graffiti in every direction. Qummukarpoq swore, mental grip stuttering, and tried once more with what control remained. Green brilliance soared through the dark like an arrow loosed for the queen. It met her skull and dissundered into ten thousands of powdered fragments spewing up into the night. The king stumbled. Arsarneq tore itself from his grip and flew back toward its nesting grounds, howling its basso pique as it retreated.
The king coughed. “It’s rejected you. Light your candle again.”
Orluvoq’s brain understood the intrinsic meaning, but the implications slipped by on frictionless skis. “What?”
“Get a blue flame going so we can actually speak.” He bent to the roof, picked up her candle, and pressed it into her glove.
Her thoughts circled as she stared at it. Finally, she fumbled around with her mind, pressing against the flame. Clarity snapped into place. Or, some did. The high was too strong for the blue to offset entirely. “The aurora. It didn’t work,” she said, realization piercing deep.
Her husband took her eyes in his, greased by a veneer of blue. “It will. Hurry.”
Within her danced dread clad in boots of glee. The need she had been trying not to want for years capered forward to meet the king’s command. Tonight, she would steal again.
In a smoke of euphoria, fear, and longing, she skywalked back into the castle. There in the high room, two women stood with arms wrapped around Qaffanngilaq, and nerves wrapped around them all. Orluvoq pointed to the one on the left. “Take my daughter to a lower floor. Quickly.”
The servant rushed to do her bidding. The other woman, finding herself alone with the queen, balanced a question on her brow, hoping the queen would take it up.
“Kinnugu.” Orluvoq turned her attentions on the girl. “When you came to the castle, you swore an oath to serve me. Correct?”
“Yes?” Kinnugu touched the tattoo on her chin. She couldn’t have been older than Orluvoq’s twenty-five.
“Sulluliaq has collapsed. The islanders will be angry, might see it as us betraying our agreements. Sulluliaq must be reopened. I call upon you to help me.”
“What… do you mean?”
“Kinnugu.” Orluvoq swallowed, not even knowing what emotion filled her. “I must take your beauty.”
The woman’s pretty face soured with fear. “I’m sorry?”
Orluvoq nodded. “So am I, but the king has commanded. Will you give it freely?”
“I…” Kinnugu’s hand inched from her chin to mask her mouth. “What happens if I say no?”
The queen slid her gaze to the window and Qilaknakka beyond. “I cannot speak for the king.”
“Oh.” The puff of air blew so soft it didn’t even fog the air. Kinnugu’s eyes dropped to the icy candle in the queen’s hand. Twin tears ran the course of her cheeks. “Then yes.”
She fell to her knees, hands
in her lap. Orluvoq drew nearer and stitched together spellwork in her mind.
“Will it hurt?”
Orluvoq’s formulations fumbled. She looked down, realizing she would be the last to ever see the girl’s face. Though, she suspected, not the last to see her tears. “No more than losing any other loved one.”
Then she struck.
Inhibitions shedding. Chill regimenting outward. Skin slurping off the face. Muffled voice screaming around chokes. Gauze of blue misting from skin holes. Power sledding into the queen. Drawing. Pulling. Taking.
Living.
She wished it would surge on forever. But she held it in check. Bore rein upon its rushing. She was in control here. When she felt she’d had enough, she sliced the connection. Kinnugu’s face slapped back into place, and the woman slumped into a weeping heap.
Orluvoq had done it, and never had she felt a greater confidence. No external hand to guide her. Five years since the last attempt. Hadn’t taken a drop too much. All the years of her youth, this surety was what she had been in quest of. She loved it. Loved every gloried second.
And yet.
She flicked her eyes to the heaving remains of Kinnugu. The woman creaked her neck up just enough to peek out from under her hood. Orluvoq’s chest seized at the ghastly visage.
The crawl. What price it bore.
Through the tuuaaq high, through the beauty high, through the power high, the thought struck once more her muddy heart. There had to be something more. In all the ice below and ocean above, there must be found a better path.
She pushed the burden aside. No better path would be found tonight.
Orluvoq skywalked back to the roof and landed beside the king. Having espied her coming, Qummukarpoq swayed in the thick of his parlay with the river of green. It broke from the heavens and careened toward them. Orluvoq’s chest forgot its seizing of moments before and took to soaring. It was coming, cutting its trail of legato zigzags. When it struck her—
The past and the future flashed white, all incinerated by the thin, endless edge of the present. She saw the stars. All of them. She was in the depth of Nunapisu. She was in the reach of Qilaknakka. She was in the height of the wall of cloud past the islanders’ ocean. Every name yet to be sung. Every body yet to be bent. Every spirit yet to be spun. It all snarled and yammered, begging for creation. Pleading for a mother.
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