The Burning City (Spirit Binders)

by Alaya Dawn Johnson

  “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

  BOUND 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.”

  Kai stared at her and then realized how much she still didn’t know. It took a long time to tell the whole story—the bits before Kai knew Lana and everything after. Leilani smiled at him when he stumbled over seeing Lana for the first time. Too late, he wondered if he should gloss over the circumstances of Pua’s death, but the words tumbled out of him.

  “So you two. . .”

  “We are fine,” he said. “We understand each other.” In the presence of the woman for whom his aunt had died, he felt the buried embers of his resentment cool and crumble away. Leilani was alive and Pua was dead. Nothing he did could change that. Now, he found his sadness made clear by the thought that if someone had to be alive in Pua’s place, he was glad it could be her.

  “I lost my mother,” Leilani said, “when I was Lana’s age now. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through, except perhaps giving Lana away. And I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

  Kai could hardly meet her earnest gaze. He looked at her hands, instead. “Some things are never simple. Sometimes everyone is wrong and everyone is hurt. Lana and I have forgiven each other. And you have nothing to be sorry for.”

  Akua returned an hour or so later with a bag full of food and a piece of paper in her hand.

  “You might be interested,” was all she said before it dropping it in his lap. Leilani looked over his shoulder as he opened it.

  The water guardian is at our mercy, read the plain, evenly spaced script. You will cease all hostilities immediately and discuss options at our leisure.

  Kai looked up at Akua, who was watching his reaction with a certain grim amusement. “I hope you enjoy being at the center of Essel’s great civil war. Makaho just had that delivered to the rebels.”

  Lana stared at the note for nearly a minute and when she finally shut her eyes, it was almost entirely out of anger, not fear or grief. Yechtak, who had come with the soldier that delivered it, put a tentative hand on her shoulder.

  “I cannot read the binder language,” he said softly. “What does it say?”

  She told him. The letter was brief enough, after all. And Kai was not dead. At least she knew that. How the head nun had managed to capture a water guardian she had no idea, but at least he was not dead.

  “The water guardian?” he said, frowning. “I do not. . .he is a legend of your binder mythology?”

  This made Lana smile. “He’s very real, for a legend. All the bound spirits have guardians. It’s part of the cycle.”

  “An unnatural cycle,” he said, and though Lana would just have dismissed him before, she now stayed silent. The more she read Ino’s book, the more she wondered about the bindings. They seemed so inevitable and necessary, and yet humans had lived for thousands of years without them.

  “What will you do?” he asked.

  “Cease all hostilities, I guess. Not like I wanted hostilities in the first place. If they could capture him, then they could probably hurt him. We can’t just surrender. But we have Nahoa and Ahi at least. That’s a sort of stalemate.”

  “So it is all right?”

  She shook her head violently and sank to the floor. “No. Not all right. Not at all.”

  “Iolana, is this water guardian, is he someone—”

  “Yes.”

  Yechtak had grown up in the year since she’d last seen him. It wasn’t just his height or his subtly thinner features. It was his carriage and grace and his quiet absorption of ways that must seem endlessly foreign to him. But in the instant of her admission he looked away, and she thought he seemed very young again. She remembered the strange night when she had woken up to him kissing her.

  “Yechtak. . .”

  “I also have a wife,” he said. “She would have had my child by now.”

  A father? So quickly? Time truly changed everything. “You must miss her,” she said.


  “I hardly know her. She was my mother’s choice.”

  He was giving her the sort of speaking look that she remembered from their journey alone to the wind shrine. But she had grown as well, and she understood what it meant. “I don’t feel for you that way,” she said. “You must know that.”

  The old Yechtak would have blushed with embarrassment and misery, but this one merely nodded. “I have known since I saw you again. It’s all right. You are a black angel.”

  She smiled at him and they were companionably silent for several long minutes before the Okikan chief stormed in, bringing the cold with him. His name was Arai, a holdover from the ancient Maaram tongue. Only the oldest lineages on Okika retained the traditional names.

  “There was a message?” he said, walking brusquely over to her. “Show me.”

  She raised her eyebrows—much, she thought, as Eliki would have—and handed him the note.

  “You mean those rumors were true? The water guardian?” He shook his head. “The black angel and the water guardian. You Esselans don’t do half measures, do you?”

  Lana could have pointed out that she was probably more Okikan than Esselan, but just shrugged. Arai was tall and unattractively skinny, with a blustering, intrusive demeanor that she supposed had been counted on to achieve whatever bargain the Okikan council thought to wrest in return for their help. What that might be, he had yet to inform them, but she knew Eliki was right to expect it.

  “Well, we must discuss this. It causes difficulties. Where’s Pano and the woman?”

  “Nahoa is getting her baby and Pano is with her. What sort of difficulties?”

  He gave her a withering look. “What do you think? We need to press our advantage and conquer the rest of the city before your Mo’i can regroup. The council has an interest in a governing arrangement more amenable to both your people and mine.”

  Lana had a sudden, fierce wish for Eliki’s advice. But she’d been escorted to a ship that morning and the soldiers were even now printing the pamphlet celebrating their victory and listing her sins. As Eliki had asked, it tasked her with the deaths of Sabolu and Leipaluka and those who died in the snow, in addition to the plot to kill Nahoa’s child. Pano had written it and Lana wondered, given the bleak look in his eyes, if he wished that they might have kept Eliki’s treachery secret. If she hadn’t exposed the rebel leader so hastily in front of the crowd, perhaps they’d still have the benefit of her counsel. And yet, how could she trust anyone who was willing to go so far for her cause?

  “We’ll discuss it when they return,” was all Lana said.

  Arai gave her a long look that wasn’t quite a glare and left. He forgot to shut the door.

  “Yechtak,” she said. “How on earth did you convince them to come here?”

  “Everyone knew the black angel had joined the Esselan war.”

  “But still, how did they believe you represented me?”

  He smiled. “I called a wind.”

  Nahoa, Ahi, and Pano returned a few hours later and they held their meeting with Yechtak and Arai. Yechtak stayed mostly silent, but Arai interrupted nearly everyone’s speech with the pressing needs of his council. Pano’s tone grew so even and steady that Lana knew he was furious enough to spit. Nahoa seemed to realize this as well—she handed him the baby in the middle of the meeting and Lana could almost see his calm returning.

  “Your Mo’i wouldn’t dare kill the water guardian,” Arai repeated. “We should press on.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Pano said. “There’s a reason we call him ‘Bloody.’”

  “Even he can’t be so mad!”

  Nahoa, Pano, and Lana shared a silent moment. Then Nahoa cleared her throat. “He might be,” was all she said.

  For once, Arai didn’t argue. Scowling, he agreed to send a carefully worded reply to the fire temple. They agreed to the truce, they reminded them of the presence of Nahoa and Ahi in their camp, and they suggested that both parties meet in a neutral location some days hence to determine if a peaceful arrangement might be made.

  Lana didn’t think Arai was particularly happy about discussions of peaceful arrangements—for a man who had never witnessed a war in his life, he was remarkably martial. However, he held his peace. Perhaps he was just waiting for a better moment to strike at the Mo’i. Lana knew they’d have to keep a careful eye on him.

  “The fire temple messenger brought a body, too,” Arai said, after they gave the note to a courier. “Didn’t you know? Some girl. At least it’s cold out. Why don’t you Esselans burn bodies with some decent speed?”

  “Our burnings will be tonight,” Pano said grimly. “Along with the rest of Essel.”

  Nahoa begged off, grabbing Ahi and almost running away before she would have to see the body again. And even Lana, who had seen a great deal of death in the preceding days, nearly vomited into the lingering snow when she saw the bloody hollow of the girl’s throat and her pale, bruised face.

  Arai, for once, found himself speechless. The soldiers covered her body again, averting their eyes. Makaho had sent a note. It read: “I would have her burned with honor.”

  “Your Mo’i did this?” Arai said finally. His voice was hoarse.

  She and Pano just looked at him. Arai turned away.

  They held the burning by the water, as dictated by long-standing Esselan tradition. The old harbor hadn’t seen such a conflagration in centuries—there weren’t often so many to burn at once, after all. Lana herself put Sabolu’s body on the pyre, unable to shake the memory of another funeral for another dead girl. Her best friend had drowned in a flood because Lana had been too late to save her. Lana still dreamed sometimes of a certain shade of red, dark and fiery—the color of Kali’s hair as it shone in sharp sunlight. Now Sabolu, as well, had gone past the gate.

  By the time the bodies had all been prepared, the gathered crowd had swelled into the thousands. They were eerily silent save for the occasional ritual wail and muffled sob. Many held fresh copies of the latest rebel pamphlet, and Lana wondered what they thought about Eliki’s absence. Lana did not know much about Esselan funeral traditions and, besides, the thought of standing before such a crowd terrified her. It was Pano who climbed atop a stack of boxes started to speak.

  “Se maloka selama ua ola, ipa nui,” he said, his voice deep and carrying. For all those words were associated with death, it was unusual to hear them at a burning. Mostly, the grieving did not wish to be reminded of death’s immutability. The only sound now was the delicate susurrus of the crowd’s quiet shifting, the smack of the waves against the wooden docks.

  “They have gone past our knowledge, but not our affections. With their sacrifices, we have won a victory that few among us believed possible. They have given their lives so that our great city might go another way, might move from cruelty and injustice and the arbitrary whim of a madman and toward peace and a voice for all its citizens. That they will not be able to see this new world they helped create is a grief we will always feel. But honor and remembrance are all any of us can give them now.” He held the torch aloft and for a moment its fiery hues blended with the sunset behind him. The crowd gasped. Lana thought he would light the pyres, but instead he walked over to her and handed her the flame.

  “I think they would see you do it,” he whispered.

  I didn’t want this. She never had. But finally, she had learned to accept it. She lit Sabolu’s pyre first, and the flames quickly spread to the others. She spread her wings to fan them. As bodies sometimes do, Sabolu’s shifted as though alive on her bed of flames. Lana watched impassively until the fire covered Sabolu’s face. She turned around. Deep in the crowd, a few people had begun to sing. At first, she assumed it was a traditional funeral chant, but as the chorused voices grew stronger, she realized their choice was far more unusual. The song had quietly gained popularity in the city ever since she and her father had played it in the aftermath of the eruption, but she’d never expected the force it could have when thousands tur
ned its melancholic beauty into a ballad of palpable rage and grief. She faced them alone. “But within my heart, hope battles fear,” she sang, and they answered:

  “For I do not know what lies beyond the gate.”

  The fires burned all night, and though the crowd thinned it did not fully disperse. The grieving made a steady procession past the high, bright flames. A west wind thankfully blew the ash toward the sea, and the heat of several hundred burning bodies kept her warmer than she had been for a month. Ahi loved the flames. She reached out her chubby hands and laughed when the pyres blew off sparks. Nahoa grinned and played with her until she fell asleep. Looking at them, Lana felt an unexpected pang. But surely someday she’d have children of her own? If she could get Kai back. If she could rescue her mother. Leilani would love to be a grandmother.

  Someone called her name, a voice familiar and comforting and dearly missed. She looked up. Her father had been watching the flames, but now he approached her, awkward and diffident.

  “I asked at the fire temple when I didn’t hear from Sabolu. They said she was dead. They said. . .” He shook his head. “I can’t believe what they said. I thought she was safe.”