Nomvula

62. Epilogue

Asanda knelt before the invisible box. Well, invisible no longer. The fire had burned every fibre of life in her garden. Rain and two days of harsh winter sunlight had baked the ashes into a clay that had hardened over everything. The beams that once held up the mesh walls were burned to stubs, and with no bones, the roof sagged low enough to brush the stone table in the middle of the ruins. The invisibility runes etched into the box had only half adapted to the grey-black ashes; half of it still held the shades of green and yellow of the ferns it had been hidden under.

A late autumn wind stirred flecks of white ash off the lock. No. An early winter wind -- there were teeth in the breeze, and far beyond the yellowing hills, the Wayfarer was a ribbon of glass against the glare of the sun.

Asanda brushed the back of her fingers over the lock. Its inscriptions hummed under her touch, warming, transmuting. The lock turned from iron to jade. She twisted it and the lid popped open.

Inside, the box was lined with panels of citruswood. Thrown carelessly – angrily, really – into the corner of the box was the rune eye. It stared back at her, little more than a plain leather pouch bound on either end with scabs of burnt hair, but it stared. Into, through, beyond her. Scalp tingling, Asanda cast her eyes aside from it and took what she had come for.

Khaya came up the stairs just as she shut the box and rose, glass hammer in hand.

She turned as she heard him padding across the plastered ash. Spirits, what was she wearing on her face that made him hitch in his step like that. He stopped halfway across the garden and looked almost ashamed for stopping, but he still kept the stone table between them.

"Khulu wants you down for breakfast."

She stared at him, and for a moment she was the rune eye, piercing through his essence. He had lost weight in the days following that final struggle with the Sunspear, not much, but there was a thinness to his nose and neck, and a sunken shadow bored into his face by sleepless nights and abandoned meals. But woven into his flesh was his spirit, a violent thing battering against the inside of his skin, waves throwing themselves against a cliff face.

"Asanda, did you hear me? Breakfast."

He spoke calmly, as though he feared she would startle and leap off the roof. But under his voice were the undertones of his spirit, the restlessness, the... seething. Not for the first time in the last three days, her stomach heaved and a spasm crawled across her back. The voice was air pushed through the flesh, but it was also spirit pushing into the world as fire pushes smoke through a chimney. His flesh spoke with love and shared grief but his spirit was a smog. Hearing him speak was like trying to drink milk and vinegar at the same time.

"You need to leave," she said, then winced.

What she had meant to say was that he needed to go eat, and she needed a little more time alone, but that would have cost her more words than she had just then. It didn't help that her voice broke into a rebuke with the words.

Khaya rubbed his eyes, and a great sigh pushed out of him. "And go where, Asi? If I go to the dining room I'll have to watch Khulu stare at her porridge until her chin quivers and she gets up to leave. If I go to the kitchens, all the gossip will die as soon as I sit down. Whoever's there won't say a thing but their sympathy... it'll... I don't know."

"Cloy. Like honey."

"Exactly. But even that's preferable to the Long Walkers who keep hounding me about sending a pursuit after the Inner Plainers."

Asanda's brow twitched. "The Inner Plainers?"

"They snuck away in the middle of the night and took Dumani's corpse with them. If they present it to King Kani before we can explain ourselves--"