“You’ll get sick. You need to get warm.” Our mother stays shockingly calm while soot and cinders swirl around her like swarming insects. She bends over him and wraps him in a hide that was pulled from his own bed. It smells of smoke but is otherwise undamaged. Stroking his hair, she whispers to him, “Roon. My youngest, my most overlooked. I promise you will never be overlooked again.”
“I’m all right,” says Roon. “Take care of Pek and Kesh. They need you more.”
I raise my eyes to my mother’s face, confused. Why do Pek and Kesh need her more than Roon? It’s clear from the heavy look in her eyes that there’s something I haven’t been told.
“What’s wrong with Pek and Kesh?”
Our mother slides a hand under Roon’s back ever so gently, her fingers barely touching his skin, but still, he flinches. His teeth clamp together as he sucks in a sharp breath.
“Mother, what’s wrong—”
“Shh! Don’t upset your brother.” When she finally gets her arm around his back she manages to lift him to his feet, each small movement accompanied by a gasp. Once he’s upright, I notice a cluster of angry red burns, broken and oozing, at his waist.
The sight sends a wave of sickness through me, starting in my stomach and emanating outward.
“Pek and Kesh—are they worse—”
My mother looks at me behind Roon’s back, and the message in her hard glare is clear—they are definitely worse. “Urar is with them,” she says, shooting a quick glance in the direction of the sea. “Just now he led them and several others to the beach.”
As my mother helps Roon hobble into the kitchen, I turn and race to the shore.
As I get closer, sobs and groans reach me and my legs grow strangely heavy. I slow my steps, listening. Has someone died? The last time I heard people cry together like this was at my grandfather’s burial, when I was just a little boy.
But as the line of people at the edge of the sand comes into view, I see that no one has died—at least not yet. These aren’t cries of mourning; they’re cries of pain.
Lying across the rocky soil of the beach are a half-dozen members of my clan: my twin cousins, only eleven years old, two women who are close friends of my mother, and my brothers Kesh and Pek. All of them have at least one limb exposed, some two or three—arms and legs cut free of their garments, lying bare against the dark sand like recently caught fish. But each body part, sticking out at odd angles to be examined by the healer, is mottled by bright red burns. Each face is gray and tight with pain. My aunt and uncle and a third person—the daughter of one of the burned women—help tend to the injured. They hurry back and forth as Urar calls out instructions.
Pek calls to me through clenched teeth. Urar, leaning over Pek’s blistered arm, lifts his eyes for only a moment, just long enough to point to an empty bowl and order me to fill it from the sea. I hurry to do as I’m told, returning quickly to Pek’s side. “The Bosha clan. They were searching for Chev,” Pek says. He pauses, sucking in a quick gasp of breath. “They thought we were hiding him, so they set fire to the huts.”
He gasps again, takes two quick breaths. “A boy lit a torch from the hearth. He hesitated at first, only lighting our own family’s hut. Then the kitchen. He demanded we offer up Chev and his sisters to save the camp. When he realized they had gone, he set more and more huts on fire, threatening anyone who came close.
“Then, when everything was ablaze, Lo came.”
My heart sputters at the sound of her name. Lo? She couldn’t have been here. I’d left her in her own camp when I came back.
They must’ve left her a kayak. She must’ve followed her people over the bay when I was safely out of the way, running the land route.
“When she learned that Chev wasn’t here, she flew into a rage. She went around the camp ignoring the flames, peering into burning huts, screaming Chev’s and Mya’s names.
“Then, calling for the Divine to curse our clan, she ran to the shore. She called them all to the boats and they left.”
“To go south,” I say, more to myself than to my brother.
The healer leans over Pek and drips a steady stream of cold water onto his arm from the shell of a long, thin clam. Pek flinches and squeezes my hand. The healer refills the shell and repeats the process farther down his arm. My brother’s eyes bulge over sunken cheeks, yet through it all he stares into my eyes.
“Go to them,” he grunts. “To Seeri and her family. To Mya.” The healer drapes a soaking hide across Pek’s burned arm and a high, bright cry bursts through his lips.
I clasp his other arm—the whole and unharmed arm that appears to belong to a different man—and lean down to speak directly into his ear.
“Rest now,” I whisper. “And don’t worry. I can stop Lo, and I will.”
TWENTY-FIVE
All at once the beach goes dark as if the sun has set, though it’s not even midday. The storm clouds I’d seen from the ridge—storm clouds that had seemed so far off—have already arrived. With the loss of the sun, the air chills rapidly; the summer morning has been chased away by something that feels more like an autumn afternoon. Wind blows down from the north, sending burned scraps and cinders billowing through the air like snow.