Page 25 of The Last One
“Miasma,” I say, nodding, eyes on the muscles twining and flexing beneath Jadon’s shirt as he lifts the hammer again. Sparks fly from the glowing metal as he strikes.
“Exactly,” Olivia says. “Stay out in the open. Then, after the farming chores, visit the candlemaker across from the school and retrieve the new candlesticks that will be lit in the church’s candelabras. I’m supposed to go, but since you’re here, you can. I think Father Knete will also need you to polish those candelabras and polish the altar and the pews.”
I say, “Umhmm,” as Jadon wipes sweat from his brow with a sleeve and adjusts his grip on the hammer.
He pauses before striking the metal again. Does he sense me watching? He looks over his shoulder and then up to the loft, and our eyes lock. He does. “Hey,” he says, smiling.
Just like he said it in the dream, except we were resting beside each other, closer, much closer. And now, my cheeks burn and I open my mouth to say—
“Be sure to wipe off the sheep shit before you step into the church,” Olivia says.
I grimace at her over my shoulder. “What?”
She scowls. “Didn’t you hear me?”
I turn back to look down at Jadon as a frizzy-haired brunette with a toothy grin enters the barn’s double doors. She’s holding a broken meat cleaver and bats her eyes at him. “I know you just fixed it last week—”
I roll my eyes and sigh, settling back into the straw. “Yes, I heard you. Sheep shit. Got it.”
Olivia rubs her neck, and I notice my left-behind handprints have faded. The whites of her eyes are no longer jaundiced. She looks healthier today than she did yesterday. “The moment I opened my eyes this morning, I remembered where I’d seen a name like yours.”
I perk up. “Yeah?”
She smiles at me and crawls over to the corner of the loft and lifts a bale of hay. “In here.” She pulls out a book, but it’s not an ordinary book. The cover is encrusted with jewel-colored glass. Square red garnets edge the book, as well as circles of mother-of-pearl, tiny squares of green glass, and flecks of yellow topaz. Thick jeweled lines segment the cover into four quadrants. An angel sits in the top left corner, and an eagle sits in the right. A boy holding a sword takes up the lower left corner, and a girl holding a hammer takes up the lower right. Each figure is embossed, and the soft leather looks buttery, as though hundreds of hands have stroked this hide before it found its way to a sooty forge in Maford.
“It’s breathtaking,” I whisper. “But what does this have to do with my name?”
“This isn’t just one story,” Olivia says, “but a bunch of stories. About knights and ladies and dragons. There’s one story about a pretty girl named Larissa and a strong, handsome boy named Hammond, and they’ve been banished from the kingdom of Cahyrst and sent to sail across Devour. That’s a sea far, far away from here. They have these adventures based on the Wheel of Fortune. Trust, war, peace, love, power, death. You know,fate.
“Hammond and Larissa learn that the king wants them dead, and the death warrant is hidden in Hammond’s knapsack. They need to find this safe place called the Mount of Outer Places, but there are monsters on the road and magnificent beasts that they must fight while also avoiding all the king’s men. They both find love, but then those loves are smashed by either fiery rocks falling from the sky or melted and drowned in the Sea of Devour. That’s my favorite one.”
“So, these are cheerful tales, then,” I say.
“Absolutely. See?” She pushes the book toward me and points to something on the page.
I scan the words and find the name.Kaivara.I gasp like I’ve been punched in the gut. My heart rolls with thunders. Kaivara. Kai. My name. I scan the story:
In the mythic land of Toskin, a deity named Kaivara holds dominion over the villages closest to the treacherous sea named Devour. Even though her countenance hides behind a glaring silver glow, she can still survey the lands before her. The parched, cracked earth. The bare trees. The scattered bones of animals. In one hand, Kaivara holds fire, and in the other hand, she holds a cloud filled with rain. Amber glows everywhere her gaze touches, especially around the multitude of people on their knees, looking up to her, their hands clenched in prayer.
“Lady Kaivara,” the cleric pleads. “Please bless us.”
But Kaivara turns her back to them, for they have disobeyed her every command. Though they claim that they have changed their ways, she knows they haven’t.
I continue reading until the end, and that’s when I gasp. I look up to Olivia with wide eyes. “She kills them.”
“Does this story sound familiar?” Olivia asks. “Maybe your mother read it to you?”
A shaft of sunlight slices through the loft’s small window and shines across my knee. “I don’t know this tale.”
“Well, I’ve always hated it,” Olivia says, “and I hate that goddess. She’s just so cruel.”
Neck prickling, I raise my eyes from the page. “Does this town, Toskin, exist?”
Olivia shakes her head. “But the Sea of Devour does. There are towns scattered around it. But then, beyond those towns, walls of sharp gray rock build, one atop the other, higher and higher still, never crumbling, only growing. Heaps of gray rocks taller than the tallest tree, but there are no trees, there are no crags or paths to climb and ascend—the mountain refuses to be scaled by man or beast. And if thereisa top, the mountain refuses to let any eye glimpse past thick white clouds that never part.”
My mind aches trying to imagine a mountain so bold yet elusive, so formidable yet incurious, a mountain thatrefusesto be summited. My skin turns clammy with dread—nothing should be that powerful, that…impossible.
“Maybe I was named after this goddess.” I shift on the uncomfortable hay bale and lift the book into my lap. “And maybe one of the towns around this sea is my home.” I slide my finger down the last page to the illustration of an amber-glowing heap of dead villagers baking under the relentless daystar. The prickles on the back of my neck sharpen. “Why would my parents have named me after someone so cruel, though?”
