Page 17 of In Her Own Rite

7

EMERSON

Ican’t sleep.

Each time I close my eyes, I think about Kieran in that ring. I think about Seb, the night he went to go fight. How me and the guys stayed up until two in the morning, drinking and laughing, excited to welcome him home as the first elder among us. The look on Gabe’s face when we saw him stumbling down the mountain, covered in blood, a huge gash in his left leg. The frenzy around us as the healers decided this was too much for their magic, and he had to be transported back to the mainland. The sinking in my gut as I realized: he might not make it. We might lose him.

The heat that’s been brimming in my body for weeks feels softer now, edged out by my anxiety like humming in the background. The only thing I feel on the surface is fear, blind and feral.

I sit up in bed and look out of the window, in the direction of the cliffs. You can’t see much from my room—it’s too far away, and we’re facing just the wrong way—but I can see traces of thekiyyulitabove us, dancing their way towards the highest cliff’s edge. There’s no way I could see any of what’s happening from here. But maybe if I go upstairs, to the library…

I slip out of bed and make my way to the bedroom door, then into the hall. It’s dark and quiet, and in the cold of midwinter I can smell the last of the smoke coming from downstairs, embers of a fire in the hearth that we were all too anxious to enjoy. I take a deep breath, stilling my mind, sensing. The quiet is deceptive; most of thefikais still up. Seb is tense, I can feel it. Gabe is somewhere, numbing a sadness. And Maren?

I head up the stairs to the third floor, then down the hall to the library, where there’s a turret that goes up one more floor for a view of the west side of the island. As I open the door, I see a light in the corner of the room, and slippers at the base of the stairs.

Looks like she had the same idea I did.

I close the door softly behind me and walk towards the turret to peek up the spiral steps.

“Hey,” I say. “Can’t sleep?”

“Nah.”

I climb up the steps to find her with her knees curled up against her chest, an open book sitting beside her, ignored. She’s looking out of the window, in the direction of the cliffs.

“I’m still not used to it,” she says as I crawl to sit next to her.

“Used to what?”

“That you guys can just see the Northern Lights here almost every day.”

“Well, until spring. Then they only start up again in October,” I say, nudging her gently with my elbow. “And you’re one of us now. You should probably start calling them thekiyyulit.”

“Kiyyulit,” she says after me. You can hear a touch of the mainland in the way her L’s come out, broad and lazy. “Litis light, right? What’skiyyu?”

“Kiyyumeans soul. We believe the lights are the souls of the ancestors, coming to visit us.”

“And fight you to the death, I guess,” she says, her voice flat. “Or, at least, to lifelong pain and injury.”

I swallow. “Is that why you can’t sleep? You’re thinking about Seb?”

She shakes her head. “I can’t sleep because Seb can’t sleep. He spent the whole evening pacing, as soon as he got back from the ceremony. I came up here to get some rest. So much for that plan.” She smiles at me softly, and I can see she’s teasing.

I scooch closer to her and lean my head on her shoulder. Her scent is warm and complex: like honey and mainland laundry detergent, even though she’s been living here for months.

“I don’t get it, to be real with you,” she says, and rests her head against mine. “If the ancestors are on your side, why do they go so hard? Why would they almost kill you?”

“They do it to help you,” I say, almost as if by rote. They teach us this in school, drilling Fakari culture and history into us so hard that the words that come out of my mouth are barely my own. “You don’thaveto do the rite. Only if you want to become an elder on pack council. And to do that, you need to overcome your biggest weakness by wrestling with your greatest fear. If you can’t do that, you’re not strong enough to lead the pack.”

“Do you really believe that?”

I think for a moment.

“I think so,” I say finally. “It makes sense that, if you’re blinded by your own fears, you can’t see clearly enough to vote for the good of others.”

“But, like,physicallyovercoming them?” she asks. “I feel like my biggest fear is making a mistake on my taxes and going to IRS-prison. How many people have a biggest fear you can actually physically fight?”

I shrug, my shoulder bumping against hers. I’ve had that thought before, too. I mean,mygreatest fear might take the shape of a person. But how many people can say the same?

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