Page 113 of In Her Own Rite

His body stays limp, motionless, and now thekiyyulitare dancing harder, faster, frenetic around me. They’re enveloping me, swirling around my arms, over my hair like a breeze. I put out my blood-soaked hands in front of me, and I see the lights swirling around my wrists, through my fingers, dancing around the knife, and on my empty palm like heatless fire.

It really does feel like a breeze now, and I feel a brush behind my ear as Kieran’s paper flower slips out, guided seemingly by the lights into my blood-stained palm.

“What’s happening?” I whisper. I’m scared now, and instinctively I want my mom here, her wisdom with me.

And then I hear her voice.

“Emerson.”

I look around, frantic. The lights are swirling around me faster and faster.

“Mom? Where are you?”

“When the moment comes, remember.”

“Remember what?” I ask.

The lights are choking me, blinding me, coming so close that I can’t see the ring anymore. Everything is light: green and blue and purple, brighter and brighter until they’re white and I can’t see anything.

“You have everything you need to do this. Be strong. Who you are is enough.”

And then, in a snap, they’re gone.

“Mom?” I ask, looking around. But thekiyyulithave disappeared, and now I’m standing in total darkness.

I can’t see anything. It’s so dark here that for a moment, I wonder if maybe I’m dead, and the beast of my father killed me in the ring. But I still hear the soft roar of the ocean far below the cliffs, and something else, too. A whine.

It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust, and it’s so quiet up here, so dark. Finally, the edges of the rocks of the ring come into view. I look to the entrance of the ring and see that the massive body of my father’s wolf, the memory of him, has faded.

I’m alone.

Or—am I?

I hear something. A rattling, a whisper. It’s coming from the center of the ring.

I walk closer, the shape of something—a body, or some kind of wounded animal—coming into view. Its frame is large, but it’s clearly sick, its breathing tearing through it too fast.

“What…?” I mutter, trying to get close enough to see without making myself vulnerable. At the sound of my voice, it snaps at me, furious, wicked. I can smell thekattaka, somehow, from somewhere far away.

I grip tighter onto my knife, taking the fighting stance, and realize as I hear the rustling of paper that the little flower is still resting in my other hand. I’m scared, and it’s a different fear than when I saw the mirage of my father. That fear was frantic, rattling through me, close to the surface. This one is deep, primal, as though somehow my body knows something my mind does not. Stripped of the lights and any semblance of what’s happening, I feel my own mortality closer than ever.

And then, as the beast turns its large yellow eyes to me and I see the scarring warping its face, a horrible realization slithers over my body, sinking into my skin, wrapping itself around my bones.

It’s my father.

Not my father from memory. Not my father but from thekiyyulit. My actual father.

“What?” I gasp, my mind doing the math. Kieran’s rite was almost two months ago. There’s no way he fought my father and that he’s been up here this whole time, waiting. The cliffs are too remote, and there’s not enough food up here to survive more than a few days.

At the sound of my voice, he barks at me, snapping. But his body is weak, and he can’t seem to get up. I look closer. There’s something wrong with his back; it’s twisted. He seems sick, and I can see his ribs sticking out of his side, some kind of open wound. He looks close to death.

My mind races through possibilities. Is this a mirage, too? The trickery of thekiyyulit? But it can’t be—the dark skies feel like a message, a confirmation from the ancestors that what’s in front of me is real. But if that's the case, how did he get here?

He must have come to Saroe with the rest of the Remnant group. Maybe he came to the ring after the first few attacks. I try to piece it together. He would have been in the caves with the other man, Laurent, on the day of the fire. Laurent left, and for whatever reason, my dad was left behind with the marshals close by.

Where on Saroe would you go, if you had to hide? Where is the most remote place, where no one ever goes, except for this rite a few times a year?

My breathing is coming quick now as it all falls into place. He came here to hide. The same frost that delayed my rite by a week must have kept him from going down when he wanted to, to steal another boat or hurt more people. He’s been trapped up here for—what is it now? A week? Maybe more? With nothing to eat but weeds and grass.

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