“Exactly. Ketai forged you into his perfect weapon. He made vindication your whole world. It was all you knew, and he was all you had. Of course you did everything he asked of you.”
“I did things of my own accord, too,” Wren says, looking away. Her words come out hard as stones. “At the White Wing’s palace. I didn’t have to kill Eolah. I got scared when it seemed she might disrupt our alliance with them.”
“And you knew it’s what Ketai would have asked of you. Just because he wasn’t there doesn’t mean his voice wasn’t in your ear, whispering. Look at Aoki,” I say. “When someone gets into your mind, they don’t just go away like that. They live there. They put down roots.”
Wren grimaces. “How is she?”
I recall the conversation we had in the garden a few days ago. “She’s getting better.”
I loved him, Lei. I thought he loved me.
It’s the first time I’ve heard her speak about him in the past tense. That’s got to be progress.
“She’ll never forgive me,” Wren says.
“Maybe not. But you have to forgive yourself.” I lift my hands to her cheeks, cradling her face. “I believe in you, Wren. I’ll help you, and you’ll help me. We’ll work on forgiving ourselves, together.”
She closes her eyes, tears welling at their corners, and whispers, “Can you forgive me?”
With a sob, I pull her close. “Oh, love,” I say. “I already have.”
When both of us have spent our tears, we sit side by side, my head on her shoulder, warm water swirling over our legs. Our wet cheeks shimmer. With one finger, I trace a word on the muscle of Wren’s thigh.
“What are you writing?” she asks.
“Your name. I know he isn’t here to ask, but… I think I know why Ketai chose it for you.”
Wren waits for me to go on.
“It’s written the same way as endurance,” I explain, a little rushed, knowing what I’m saying is only a theory. “The character is made up of two symbols.” I draw them with my fingertips. “A blade, and a heart.” I give her a tentative smile. “That’s you, Wren. Ketai might have chosen it for its literal meaning, seeing as you’re what has endured of the Xia, and your endurance is one of the things that makes you so strong. But look at the way it’s written. A pair of symbols. Balanced. Two parts of a whole. You’ve been made to believe your strength is all about the way you fight, but it’s about your heart, too. The way you care. The way you love.”
Wren looks so touched by my words it aches my own heart. I can tell she doesn’t believe it yet. But I’ll help her see.
For as long as it takes. I’ll be here.
“Speaking of names,” I say, “how do you like Ai’s?”
Wren smiles. “It’s perfect. You were going to tell me about his Birth-blessing pendant?”
“Not pendant. But yes. Want me to show you?”
She’s frowning now, curious. “Show me?”
“You’ll have to come to the house to see it properly,” I say, reaching into my robes where I’ve tucked a folded piece of paper for safekeeping. “But Blue drew this to give you an idea. Turns out, she’s quite an artist. Who knew? She’s been painting all sorts of things. Portraits of us, and Ai, and Kuih, and she does these hilarious cartoons. We have to hide those from Tien, though—they’re mostly about her.”
Wren opens the paper I’ve handed her. The picture is of a tree—but not a normal tree. There are paper leaves tied to its crooked branches, and on each of them are words.
Wren’s fingertips move over each one. “This is… you made…”
“It isn’t anything like the one in the Temple of the Hidden,” I say, suddenly embarrassed, unsure if what we’ve done is somehow offensive. “But there’s this little bonsai tree we’ve always had. It was Mama’s pride and joy. She looked after it so well, and I was in her and Baba’s room one day before Ai was born after we’d been discussing what to do about his Birth-blessing, and I saw it, and it reminded me of the paper tree in the temple, how safe and blessed that made me feel, so I wondered what if instead of names, we wrote the things we wished for Ai’s future…”
I stop my rambling. I’m scanning Wren’s face, worried about how tense she’s gone. But when her eyes flick up to mine, her gaze is bright, incandescent—the same look she’s given me countless times. A look that is fierce, and pure, and true.
A look that never fails to set my heart alight.
“I love it,” she breathes. Then, setting the paper aside, she brings her hands to my face and beams at me, a smile so wondrous it makes my stomach swoop. “I love you.”
She kisses me with the same force of her look, and my blissful day turns into a long, sweet, blissful night. And with it, the promise of—just perhaps, if I am lucky enough—a long, sweet, blissful life.
THERE IS A TRADITION IN OUR lands, one all castes of demon and human follow. We call it the Birth-blessing. It is such an old, deep-rooted custom that it’s said even our gods themselves practiced it when they bore our race onto the earth. Once, we used magic to perform the custom, shamans crafting the small golden pendants that held our fates. A single character that would reveal a person’s true destiny; whether our lives would be blessed, or whether our fates were something far darker, cursed years to be played out in fire and shadow.
Since the war, magic is hard to come by. The earth has slowly begun to recover from the Sickness, and over the past few years the faint thrum of magic has started to well up again in pockets all over Ikhara. A few of the shaman clans not decimated by the old rule have started practicing magic again. Still, it’ll be a long time yet until enchantments are once again the norm.
Without magic, parents have been practicing Birth-blessing ceremonies in their own ways. I hear some write prayers on stones they plant in their gardens, a seed they hope will grow its own kind of power. Some cast little wooden boats onto rivers, watching their prayers take sail. Some make their own charms and trinkets, placing a lock of hair inside, so their children will never be without some piece of them, even after they are gone. Others hide words within—sometimes one, sometimes many, as we did with Ai’s Birth-blessing paper tree—capturing their wishes in ink and sweeping calligraphy, sealed in anything from boxes and lockets to coiled shells picked from sandy shores.
I might be biased, but I prefer these forms of the tradition to the old one. In the end, what fate could be more precious than the one your parents dreamed for you when you were still barely a dream yourself? What words could guide you more gently through life?
No child should ever have to burden the weight of a Birth-blessing word like Wren’s again.
As for Wren, she—like me—now carries a new word with her wherever she goes. We threw her old pendant away shortly after our trip to the Southern Sanctuary, on one of my visits to the Jade Fort. My own pendant was never recovered from the palace, and though I initially missed it, I’ve come to think it fitting it was lost. The fate it held for me all those years has been freed, after all. I have grown my wings. I have learned to fly.