“No!” Mokoya made a mad tense for the fourth knot and missed. The naga swung one wing at her, and she tensed a layer of solid air between them, the naga bouncing off it with a sound of rage.
“Wanbeng, run!” Mokoya gasped, a moment before the naga struck her with a ball of raw force, water-nature. She flew backward. Her arm made an ugly sound as she landed, and instinct drove her into a roll. Jaws descended, and Mokoya narrowly escaped their massive snap.
She tensed through earth-nature, pulling the naga’s head to the ground and keeping it there.
In her mindeye she saw probabilities converging upon her, driven by her manipulation of the Slack. She knew what was coming. She welcomed it.
“Tensor!” Wanbeng was still alive, thank the fortunes. She felt the girl’s effort in the Slack, trying to wrest back control of the situation, and felt a spark of admiration.
Mokoya pulled at the fourth knot as the naga clawed at the Slack, but its soul was so ragged the motion came out glancing and crooked. A spasm through water-energy, meant to bury her in a wave of lifted sand, only flung her backward. Something in her hip tore as she landed, and she cried out.
The fourth knot, frayed by the naga’s frantic attempts to tense, had come undone. The soul-graft was loose in the Slack, anchored only on one point. It was unraveling and flailing in all directions, pulling at the soul essence of the naga, tearing it. The Slack warped with the unnatural energy, and the naga arched over her in both physical and metaphysical pain.
The naga knew who was causing it all that pain.
Mokoya braced herself as the naga snatched her up with one clawed hand. She felt gravity lurch as she shot skyward, her lower body crushed under massive pressure. Pain consumed her, and black spots burst through her vision.
There was only one thing on her mind. Mokoya pulled at the last knot as hard as she could. There was no time for focus or delicacy: just a pure surge of energy into the fabric of the Slack.
The fifth knot broke. The graft tore away, unraveling into nothingness.
The naga screamed. There was motion, an impression of being flung into the air, gravity calling, speed, a blur of dark and light. Something that looked like the sky whirled over Mokoya, and then her body struck ground, broken and crunching, a sack with a ripped seam spilling its warm contents onto sand.
The sun was rising, and she wasn’t really in her body anymore. The thing that was Sanao Mokoya dwindled to a string of thoughts as her consciousness faded.
There. I did it. I changed what couldn’t be changed. I’ve cut the red threads of fortune.
Now I am free.
Chapter Twenty
SUNLIGHT AND BREEZE GREETED the cemetery like old friends, daubing the koi pond with light and the hillside with the pattern of leaves. The gentle fingers of willow trees swayed in the wind, brushing their tips against the gravestones in the Sanao family quarter. The ground exhaled the scent of yesterday’s rain as Rider knelt before the newest stone in the quarter, the red paint on the granite still vivid. From a distance came the faint hubbub of life, the chatter of voices from inns and the old songs of cowherds.
Rider tensed a small flame and lit a stick of incense. Smoke unraveled from its tip, redolent with sandalwood and ash.
As Rider stood, Mokoya took their hand. “Thank you for coming with me today.” She swept a glance over her daughter’s grave, bright and blissful, and felt her belly grow warm. “I wish you could have met her somehow.”
Rider squeezed her fingers. “Your memories of her are enough.”
Screams and laughter intruded upon their peace: the twins, playing a game of catch-the-thief. Rider colored. “Children! This is a graveyard, not a playground. Show some respect.” The twins looked at her, stifled their giggles, and vanished behind a willow tree. Rider sighed.
“Let them be,” Mokoya said. “They’re only children.”
They watched light dancing over her daughter’s headstone. “Could you have imagined this,” Rider said, “all those years ago, in the dust, when we first met?”
Mokoya laughed. “In those days, I tended not to imagine happy endings.”
Rider squeezed her hand, where a symphony of reds was spreading upward. She returned the gentle pressure. But even as she did so, there was a sense of something not being right, like a dislocation between vision and reality.
Someone was tapping on her forehead.
Mokoya wrinkled her brows. There was warmth around her, and softness: a bed, padded with cotton, heated to the right temperature, the air sharp with cleansing herbs.
“Don’t you think you’ve slept for long enough?”
Mokoya opened her eyes. Akeha’s face hovered over hers, his expression arranged into one of fond disgust. She found her voice in a throat cracked and dry with disuse. “Akeha? What—what happened?”
“You’re alive, even though you shouldn’t be.”
Mokoya blinked. Akeha spoke to someone off to the side. “Go and fetch the Head Abbot at once.” A patter of running feet.
As the calm of the graveyard receded from her—Vision? Dream?—the reality of the present flowed into place. She lay on a bed in a high-roofed room, royally appointed, the sheets brocaded and the bed drapes fine and rich. Silk screens, not paper, stood in window frames. Somewhere a bird sang.
“Don’t try to sit up,” he said.
She tried anyway, and something in her lower back twanged. She dropped onto the bed with a grunt. Memories filtered back to her, of the last fight with the naga, of her mortal wounding. She tried to move her feet, heavy under a blanket. One foot twitched awkwardly, then the other.
“You didn’t lose any organs this time, if you’re wondering.”
“I thought I was dead.”
“You were. Good as, anyway. Heart stopped, everything broken . . .”
“But, yet, somehow I survived.”
“It’s a good thing you made a new friend. I don’t know what kind of Quarterlandish black magic they practice, but they managed to . . . stop you somehow. Stop? I don’t know what that means. They tried to explain it, but it sounded like nonsense.” He shrugged. “Anyway, they kept your spirit with us until we brought you back here.”
“They’re alive?”
Akeha receded to the post at the foot of the bed. “You’ll be happy to hear that no one died in your little heroic scheme. Well, except for the naga. Couldn’t have saved it anyway—it was too badly hurt.”
“And the city?” she asked.
“Rebuilding. It’ll take a while.” He snorted. “Even with the help of Protectorate troops.”
Mokoya tried sitting up again, and this time got as far as her elbows, where she stayed. “So Mother’s troops are in the city?”
Akeha shrugged; he looked tired. Mokoya sighed.