Another sister dead today, another Dujia body broken. My heart broken along with it. When will the hatred cease?
Tonight your father heated pots of water over an orange flame and poured me a bath. He lit candles, crushed peony petals and sweet lullablus into the suds. For a moment I saw a life where I was a woman in love with her husband. I hate him most when he is kind, because these are the times it is hardest to hate him.
We argued today, over your name. We both love Mia—we’ve always loved it—but your father wants to give you a strong Glasddiran middle name, and I want something lyrical and feminine. A name is a funny thing, isn’t it? You will bear it for the rest of your life, but you get no say in the matter, and there is no way to know whether that small word will be a burden or a gift.
We settled on Morwynna. In the old language, Wynna means “wren.” So you see, a piece of me will be with you always.
We wrens lay down our lives for the people we love.
Here is what I do not understand: the long-term effects of an enthrall. I can feel my blood aligning with your father’s, my heart in harmony with his.
The thing about going to bed with a monster night after night is that, in the cool light of morning, he no longer looks like a monster.
Today you were born into the world.
A tiny slip of a thing: purple lips, hair fojuen-red like mine, gray eyes like your father’s. I held you, and I wept. I did not know a human heart could be so full.
Every ounce of love I feel is real. It is a relief, to feel love with no doubt, no shadow.
You are mine and you are his and you are all your own.
You are Mia Morwynna Rose, my daughter.
I love you more than you will ever know.
This was where the ink stopped. There were more pages, but they were pale as bone—if not blank forever, then at least blank for now. Not all the love pouring out of her was enough to fill them.
Mia closed the book and laid it gently on the sand. She pressed the red stone wren to her chest. Her shoulders trembled, and the pillar of salt inside her crumbled. She felt her heart splitting open, without a blade, without magic.
The moon pitched itself through the sky as Mia cried and cried.
Chapter 44
Beautiful Vessels
THE NEXT MORNING, MIA paddled the boat herself.
She waited until dawn, but only just. She had spent a sleepless night on the lakeshore, checking the journal every few minutes to see if more ink would appear. Her face was puffy, her eyes red from three years’ worth of tears.
When she arrived at the Biqhotz, she stormed into the library.
“Zaga!” she shouted. “I know you’re here.”
For a moment, the room was quiet. Then the voice rasped.
“You have returned angry.”
“I know it was you. You’re the woman my mother loved. You killed her, didn’t you? You smuggled yourself into Glas Ddir. She let you into our house, let you touch her. She trusted you—and she died for it.”
All Mia’s theories were clicking into place: Zaga loved her mother. Zaga hated her mother. She practiced dark magic—the sort of magic a Dujia could use against her own kind.
“I haven’t touched your mother in many years.”
“That’s right. Three years.” Mia’s fists were clenched so tightly her knuckles ached through the skin. “Why did you do it? I have to know.”
“Still obsessed with the knowing. Still treating love as a text to be analyzed. You treat books as human and humans as books.”
Mia forced herself to breathe, biding her time. She would only kill Zaga if she could confirm Zaga was guilty. Then she would act swiftly, without regret. Yes, Mia was Dujia, but she’d been a Huntress for longer.
Heart for a heart, life for a life.
“I need to know, Zaga. I need to hear you say it.”
Silence. Then, “I did not kill your mother, Mia. Your mother tried to kill me.”
“Lies.”
But she couldn’t be sure. Despite the walls of fojuen fomenting her magic from all sides, trying to read Zaga’s emotions was like hitting a stone rampart. Mia couldn’t tell if she was lying.
“You do not know what your mother was capable of.”
“You’re right, I don’t. But I’m done with secrets and riddles and lies.”
A shadow passed across the miniature waterfall. Mia whirled around.
“Why do you hide in the dark? What are you so afraid of?”
Zaga stepped into the light.
Mia reached for the knife she’d hidden in her boot. She had purloined it from a drunk Dujia stumbling out of the Blue Phoenix in the wee hours of the morning. It was an inferior blade, but it would suffice. She had spent three years planning, dreaming, breathing, living for this very moment.
But when she saw Zaga, she stopped cold.
Zaga was emaciated. She had the look of someone who had been ill a long time. Her coloring was Fojuen or perhaps native Luumi, her skin tawny and olive-hued—or at least it had been. Now it was pale and moth-eaten, her once-lustrous black hair missing in clumps. She was tall but stooped, thin as a willow reed, with a severe face and harsh, dark eyes under deep lids. Her left arm hung limply at her side, fingers curled into her palms.
“Your mother left her mark on all of us,” Zaga said.
Mia’s hand tightened on her knife. But when Zaga took a step closer, letting the torchlight bathe the left side of her body, her stomach twisted. She saw Zaga’s withered arm, her fingernails yellow and decayed. The tributaries of veins snaking up her wrist were clotted black instead of blue.
“You would kill me before you knew the truth. Before you saw your mother’s handiwork.”
Mia recognized the symptoms of neqrosis. The tissue had been starved of blood for too long, causing the muscles to atrophy, the bones to collapse.
“My mother would never do that.”
“I assure you, she did.”
“She didn’t hurt people. She healed them.”
“Are they so different? Both require a manipulation of another person’s body. Whether you hurt or heal them, you assume control over their flesh.”
“They are not the same.”
“Your mother was tempestuous. Unpredictable. She made mistakes.”
“Is that why you sold her off to my father? Forced her into a miserable, empty marriage so she could ‘atone’ for what she’d done?”
“Do you know the most effective way for a Dujia to kill another Dujia, Mia? It is not to touch her heart. This is what the Hunters think: that we clasp our hands over a man’s chest to still his heart forever. We have this power, yes. But a Dujia is most vulnerable at the wrist, not the sternum.”
Zaga drew her right fingers up her left wrist, tracing the black veins, then up over the bony olecranon on the tip of the elbow, all the way to her chest. “If you want to kill a Dujia, touch her wrist when you are angry. The veins in our wrist are delicate but direct, and they make beautiful vessels for rage. If you touch the soft skin of her wrist, you will shunt your rage directly into her heart.”
Mia felt uneasy. She knew these veins well; she had studied them in her books and anatomy plates. She had traced them up her own arms, a map of cephalic and basilic and cubital veins, blue irrigation systems. But now the map chilled, the tributaries slowing. A premonition.
“Your mother tried to stop my heart,” Zaga said.
Mia saw now why she couldn’t read Zaga’s emotions: she was wearing not just one piece of uzoolion, but an entire breastplate. Her chest was encircled in a corset of blue stone. You only wore that much protection, Mia thought, when someone had hurt you.
An awful thing, her mother had written in her journal. An unforgivable thing. Mia couldn’t reconcile this with what she knew of her mother, her gentleness. Was it possible Wynna’s big messy heart had led her to be passionate and reckless, even cruel?
Zaga limped back into the shadows, and Mia cursed herself. Three years she had been preparing for this moment: when she came face-to-face with her mother’s murderer. And she had failed to enact justice.