Kanna had been unable to escape the fumes. She ducked her head, and she covered her mouth with the collar of her robes, but still the smell of the exhaust from the military trucks seeped into her nostrils. With her face tilted down, even in the dim light, she could see the script painted in red on the side of the canister as it bounced between her ankles, reminding her once again that what she was inhaling was the waste of Rava Spirits.
She glanced up at Goda. The woman’s handsome face had grown a bit twisted with distaste, and when Kanna followed Goda’s gaze, she saw that they were pulling up to a small opening between a row of tanks that blocked the road. There were a few trucks ahead of them in line, small ones that looked similar to Goda’s—albeit less run-down—and which seemed to carry civilians. Kanna couldn’t make out any of their faces, but she could see their silhouettes moving like shadow puppets in front of the bright lights.
There were soldiers as well, dipping down over the doors of the trucks, handing things to the people inside and receiving things in return. Others were peering into the back cabins, poking and prodding at the cargo before letting people through.
“What are they looking for?” Kanna asked Goda.
“What do you think they’re looking for?”
Kanna shook her head and sighed as the queue moved and she saw that they would be next to face the first checkpoint. “Don’t tell me they’re looking for Death Flower—for Samma Flower. All this paranoia over one tiny little plant is ridiculous. Sure, what it does is horrendous, but I still don’t understand the obsession.”
“You don’t yet realize its power, then,” Goda murmured, her eyes still straight ahead. “Imagine what happened to you in the cave, but multiplied many hundreds of times. That’s what the flower can do if a person can ingest it successfully without poisoning themselves or purging it altogether. It can leave a person empty of beliefs and principles and morals, which makes them very hard to control. Someone who has seen the truth has nothing to lose.”
Kanna stared at the woman. She wondered if Goda was talking about herself. “I thought you said that it allows a person to see the Goddess.”
“Yes, exactly: The truth, the emptiness, the Goddess—same thing.”
“You never make any sense.” Kanna crossed her arms. “‘Truth,’ ‘emptiness,’ ‘Goddess’—I may be no expert in the Middlelander tongue, but these are not synonyms.”
“You’re right,” Goda said. “You are indeed no expert. Either way, it doesn’t serve you to get caught up in the words themselves. You’ll miss what they point to. If I point to that mountain in the distance, are you going to fixate on which finger I used to point to it?”
Kanna narrowed her eyes. She didn’t like Goda’s attitude one bit, but before she could offer an irritated retort, Goda had pulled the truck up beside a soldier who was already leaning in their direction with a weird grin.
“Well, well! Hello there, Goda Brahm. Still not dead yet, I see!”
Kanna thought it was the strangest greeting she had ever heard, but Goda did not appear to be offended. Instead, she rummaged around in her robes and pulled out a folded stack of papers.
“This is my prisoner. She’s an Upperlander, but she’s been cleansed.” Goda shoved the papers into the woman’s hand.
“Oh, come on, don’t be so short with me,” the soldier said as she began flipping through Kanna’s documents. “We have time. I don’t mind holding up the line so that we can catch up. How’s the lovely Priestess Rem Murau doing? I heard she’s at the desert monastery now; I can’t imagine you missed her. You had to go there for the cleanse, didn’t you?” The soldier glanced down at the last sheet of paper as Goda looked on silently. “Ah, yes, here is the priestess’s personal stamp. Must have been nice seeing that familiar face after all this time, huh?”
Something about the look that the soldier was giving Goda made Kanna extremely uncomfortable. It was a twisted grin, like the woman was trying to tease out some kind of emotion. Kanna could not see Goda’s expression, since she was facing away, but she could see the back of Goda’s shoulders stiffen slightly. It gave Kanna the sudden urge to reach out and touch her, but she suppressed it.
“Are you letting us through or not?” Goda said rudely.
“Sheesh, no need to get so snippy!” Then the woman’s gaze grew more intense, her smile wider, but her voice suddenly quieter—as if she were whispering with mock intimacy, “What are you going to do, Goda? Stab me in the neck?”
Goda’s entire body jerked forward in that instant. Her arm thrust out towards the soldier, and for a split second Kanna was convinced that she was about to strike her. The soldier seemed to get that same impression, too, and her eyes widened, and she jumped back.
But instead of hitting her, Goda merely opened a hand. “Are you done?” she asked.
The soldier dropped the papers onto Goda’s palm without saying another word. Goda rolled forward into the next checkpoint.
“What in God’s name was that all about?” Kanna huffed as they neared another gaggle of soldiers that seemed to be glancing into the cabin of each truck in line.
Kanna also noticed that off to the side, there was a group of three travelers pulled over, and she could sense anxiety in their postures. The soldiers were swooping into the back of their truck like a flock of vultures, clawing through the cargo as if they were searching for something.
“She’s an acquaintance of mine,” Goda replied. “We used to work at the same place when we were younger.”
“At the monastery in Samma Valley?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Why was she talking to you like that?”
“She doesn’t like me.”
“Clearly.” By now, this was no longer shocking to Kanna, but she was still confused as to how a simple gardener could have accumulated so many enemies. Maybe nine years prior, Goda had grown some poisonous herb, and other people like Priestess Rem had accidentally eaten it with unpleasant results. Or maybe…
Yes, Kanna thought, of course.
Why had this never occurred to her before? Goda seemed to know all about Death Flower, and she had even admitted to eating it before. Could this have been why Priestess Rem seemed to hate her so much?
Still, it seemed like an odd thing to hate someone for. Priestess Rem’s grudge had appeared to be much more personal, and if possessing Death were something so offensive to the priestess, then wouldn’t she have treated Parama Shakka the same way? Furthermore, Goda was not a slave—and she was clearly not imprisoned—so even if she had grown Death Flower, it seemed unlikely that anyone else would have found out about it, or else she would have surely lost her freedom.
They pulled up to the group of soldiers, the truck beneath them giving out a violent shudder, a complaint that seemed to mean that the motor wasn’t keen on all of the stopping and going—or else that they were running out of fuel, Kanna guessed.
One of the soldiers peered into the truck, and she noticed the canister on the floor. She glanced at Kanna curiously, to scrutinize her face.
“A foreigner? An Outerlander, are you?” the soldier asked. “What’s that you have there?”
“It’s a container of fuel,” Goda replied for her, but she didn’t bother to correct the woman on Kanna’s ethnicity.
Without so much as a gesture of apology, the soldier bent into the open cabin and reached down between Kanna’s feet. Kanna jerked her legs up onto the seat and gave the soldier a startled look, but the woman didn’t seem to notice.
The soldier popped open the cap at the end of the spout with her thumb and she sniffed the canister. While Kanna watched with disgust, the woman took a swig and then coughed loudly, droplets spraying on the ledge of the door until she managed to stifle it by pressing her mouth to the crook of her arm.
When she seemed to have recovered, she looked up. She cleared her throat with a booming grunt. “Yep, that’s definitely fuel.” She waved a hand after dropping the cargo into Kanna’s lap. “I’m searching the back. Stay in your seats and don’t test my patience with any nonsense.”
Kanna glared at her, but the eye contact didn’t last long because the woman climbed into the back of the truck and started shifting around random crates and containers.
“What the hell did she think would be in a fuel canister other than fuel?” Kanna whispered, snapping to the side to look at Goda with indignation.
“The excretions of a vessel, of someone who has gorged themselves on Samma Flower.”
“No, really.”
“Really.”
Kanna made a face. It was bad enough that people ran around drinking other people’s tainted urine, but it seemed that they carried it around in jugs as well. What kind of country have I been dragged into? she asked herself.
While the soldier rummaged around in the back, giving the rig an unpleasant bounce, Kanna tried to distract herself by staring off towards the group of migrants that she had seen earlier, who were now standing not too far from Goda’s side of the truck.
As she squinted over Goda’s seat and through the blazing electric lights, she could make out some of the migrants’ faces this time. They appeared to be Middlelanders—or so she assumed—because two of them were tall, lanky women with dark hair who did not appear to have Outerlander features. The third seemed to be a short young man—though Kanna could still not be sure of his gender—but when she peered into the details of his face more closely, she nearly pulled back with revulsion.
Even through the fair distance that separated them, she could see that he was staring straight at her—or at Goda—and his eyes didn’t seem right at all. They were huge, pupils spread wide like the mouth of a void in spite of the bright lights. His eyelids were strung open. The whites of his eyes gleamed at her. His whole body was shuddering, and as Kanna stared at him longer, the shudders only grew stronger.
He dashed towards them. This time, Kanna did recoil. She jerked away so strongly on reflex that her back slammed against the door beside her. Seeing this, Goda gave her a curious look, then followed her gaze and finally seemed to notice the small man who was running frantically in their direction.
Kanna stared in horror as the stranger jumped onto the side of the truck before Goda could even react. He grasped the collar of Goda’s robes and looked at her with that wide open stare, with those black holes that had replaced his eyes.
Kanna was sure that he was about to attack, that Goda was about to be forced into another fight, but instead he screamed, “Master!” His voice was desperate. “Master, is that really you? I had begged the Goddess to lead me to you before I had to go, to let me see your face even once!”
Kanna blinked. She didn’t know what to do. She sat there, frozen in place, uncertain as to whether she should run or stay put. The man was obviously insane.
Goda took a tight hold of her assailant’s hand and wrenched it away. “What are you talking about, boy?” she said, her tone one of genuine bafflement. From her vantage point, Kanna could see Goda’s face in the reflection of the glass windshield, and the woman’s eyebrows were furrowed with confusion.
All the ruckus seemed to rouse the attention of the soldier behind them. “Hey! Hey you, get back over to your truck! What are you doing over here, interrupting a search?” The soldier seemed to look at him more closely, and then her eyes widened a considerable degree as well. “We have one!” she shouted, lifting her head up to call out to the rest of her comrades. “We have a vessel currently in state! Pull him down, pull him down!”
But the young man gripped the side of Goda’s door to keep steady and he stared hard at Goda’s face. “I wasn’t going to last long here anyway, but I’m sure I’ll see you on the other side of the gate when the time comes. I know you’ll come back,” he said, very calmly, a strange serenity filling his face, a peace that seemed to point to some deep, inner silence beneath the pounding noise of boots on gravel.
He was smiling when a pack of soldiers descended upon him and ripped him away from Goda’s truck. He was smiling when they pushed him to the ground. Before long, Kanna couldn’t even see most of his body through all the commotion, but she could see that quiet, contented smile—and it made Kanna so uncomfortable that she had to turn away.
The soldier who had been searching them jumped down from the back of the truck. She waved Goda off impatiently. “Go!” she said. “You’re clear. Stop rubbernecking and leave!”
Kanna stared straight ahead. Somehow, all the content of her thoughts had dissipated, and only the image of the boy’s empty expression remained in her mind’s eye. She pressed her hands to her face and tried to shake it off, and when she looked back up again, they were already moving.
As they pulled away from the checkpoint and the lights whipped by like a flash, it felt like Kanna was being sucked into the dark void of the road in front of them. Just as Goda’s lantern had lit the way through the darkness of the caverns, the headlights of Goda’s truck lit only one small part of the road, and Kanna found it unnerving that she could see hardly anything outside this bubble of light—only the shadows of the mountains far in the distance.
“What was that?” she asked in a hushed tone, even though they had already sped far past any of the others. “What the hell is going on? Really, what is this place? Have I been pulled into some bizarre nightmare, some dream I need to wake up from? Every time I think I have the tiniest, most minuscule grasp on what’s happening around me, this world consistently goes out of its way to prove to me how wrong I am.”
“Good. Then you’re starting to see the truth: The universe is constantly changing, so you won’t do yourself any good trying to grasp onto some structure that you create in your head. Everything is infinitely strange. Get used to it.”
Kanna shook her head and crossed her arms, unsatisfied with Goda’s answer—unsatisfied with everything. “That still doesn’t explain the boy who ran up to you. Was he just a madman drunk on Death or what? Where did he come from? Do you even know him?”
“I’ve never met him before and I have no idea who he is.” The bewilderment still had not completely faded from Goda’s face, and Kanna decided that the woman was telling the truth, if for no other reason than the fact that she had no conceivable reason to be lying.
“Why would he call you his master?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Maybe he’s been your prisoner before, and he was having some psychotic flashback.”
“No. I would have remembered. They almost never allow women to transport men alone—unless the prisoner is a low-ranking foreigner, and that man was definitely a Middlelander. That’s probably how he made it this far without being caught. Most vessels are Outerlanders, so the soldiers don’t expect people like him to have eaten Flower, and they don’t require people like him to cleanse when coming back over the border.”
Kanna opened her mouth to complain once again about discrimination, but she stopped. Instead, she looked hard at Goda’s face, at the small bits of emotion that rippled through the woman’s expression.
“What’s going to happen to him?” Kanna asked, though she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to know.
“He’ll be executed.”
The wind whipped through Kanna’s ears and the world fell into a pulsating silence for a long while. When the military lights were so far behind them that Kanna could not see the glare on the horizon even if she turned around, the truck beneath them began to rattle again, and so Goda pulled over to the side of the road.
“She’s tired,” Goda said. “We’ll rest here until morning.” It took Kanna a moment to realize that Goda was talking about the truck, but nonetheless the comment made Kanna yawn.
The truck shook back and forth, and the sound of ringing metal echoed through the darkness as Goda climbed over her seat and jumped into the back. Kanna could not see her very well anymore now that the headlights were off, but she could hear Goda pushing crates and other items aside on the flatbed behind her, perhaps undoing the mess that the soldier had made.
“Come.” Goda motioned towards the back of the truck. “There’s another shrine nearby that I stay in sometimes, but considering what happened to you in the caverns, it’s best if we sleep here.”
She spread out the mats that she had stolen from Jaya, and just as they had done for the three nights before, they lay side by side. This time, though, it was in the cool open air, and as Kanna plopped onto her back, she could see an array of stars above her, peeking through the branches of some nearby trees that crouched over them.
We’re near a forest again, Kanna thought. The foliage on the side of the road had grown even more frequent as they had headed West. She wondered now if they had officially emerged from the desert, though it was hard to draw a hard line in the landscape, even if they had just crossed a man-made border into the Middleland.
There were other ambiguities to consider, too. Kanna ventured to glance beside her. She could only see the barest outline of Goda’s face. The woman’s eyes appeared to be closed already, her breath steady, her arms tucked behind her head. It was a pose that Kanna found to be overly-relaxed, considering that the woman was lying there, completely exposed to the elements—completely exposed to Kanna.
Maybe she trusts me now, Kanna thought. Goda hadn’t tied her up or done anything to deter her escape, though granted, by then Kanna knew not to defy the cuff. With mixed feelings, she reached down and pressed her hand to the key through the fabric of her robes, until she felt the metal growing warm. Whether Goda trusted her or not, it was true that some strange connection had materialized between them beyond the cuff, something Kanna could not understand, something Goda had lightly acknowledged earlier that day.
But Kanna knew she wouldn’t have any time to explore it. She pulled her hand away from the key. She stared at Goda’s face.
That natural impulse to touch the woman had come over Kanna again, but it was stifled by the awkwardness that still lingered—and the presence of the key which had grown heavier between them.
* * *
Kanna had a dream. She recognized that she was dreaming, and so this time she was much less afraid when she found herself standing in a strange clearing surrounded by woods, in a body that was not her own.
Her head was tilted down and she was looking at the earth beneath her, at a pair of boot-clad feet that seemed much further away than hers usually were. In her left hand there was a heavy bucket filled with soil. When she looked up, she realized that she could not control her gaze, or the tilt of her head, or any muscle in the body she inhabited.
The body moved on its own, down a path near a little fence, past a tiny cabin. The body was taking her along with it. Before it walked her into a nearby wooded trail, however, a voice rang out behind her.
“You! Stop!”
Kanna turned her head—again, without any direct control. A beautiful young woman stood in the front yard of the house, just on the other side of the fence. Light rays came down from between the trees and struck the woman’s face, giving her an angelic appearance in spite of her black robes. The woman looked very familiar, but even with the awareness that she was dreaming, Kanna’s mind was still not fully lucid, and she found that she couldn’t put a name to the person standing before her.
The woman smiled, her hands clasped in front of her, her clothes giving a strangely severe contrast to the bright greenery around them. “I’ve been looking for you,” she said. “You’re the apprentice, aren’t you? I have a problem with my garden that I need you to solve.”
Kanna’s new body trudged towards the woman—who she now realized was a Maharan priestess—and came to stand with just the closed gate between them. Because she had to tilt her gaze down to meet the priestess’s eyes, and the top of the fence barely reached beyond Kanna’s waist, she realized very suddenly that she was inhabiting the body of some kind of giant.
The giant spoke, and Kanna could feel the voice vibrating as if it were through her own throat: “I’m an apprentice to the horticulturist. I’m not a personal gardener. That’s the job of a temple assistant, so ask one of them.” The body began to turn.
“My my, how disrespectful!” the woman said, though in her eyes she looked amused and not offended at all. “Is that the sort of welcome that you offer a new priestess like myself? Even if I am a novice still, you probably realize that it’s not a good idea to get on my bad side.”
“It’s none of my concern which side I’m on.”
“You’re a willful one, aren’t you?” The priestess stepped forward and unlocked the gate. “Come. It’s not gardening work so much as a dirty deed that I can’t do myself because it’s against my precepts. A pair of rabbits have taken up residence and they’re eating everything remotely green in here. I need you to kill them before they start a family.”
“If it’s rabbits you want gone, then release a snake in your garden and that should take care of the problem.”
“Oh, but then I would have to deal with a snake, wouldn’t I? And it’s against my precepts to kill anything, so I would find myself in the same conundrum.”
The giant stared at the priestess. “What, so you need me to sin in your place?”
“Yes, exactly.” The woman’s eyes looked impish, still amused. “It is the role of a lay person to sin in my place, and today that will be you. I’m not asking; I’m ordering you.”
“Why me?”
“Look at those hands of yours. You could beat anyone senseless. I doubt you’d have trouble hunting down a pair of rabbits—and going by that cold, unfeeling look that you always carry around on your face, I doubt you’d be squeamish about it, either. I’ve been watching you.” She gave Kanna—or the giant—a tiny smile, an expression that Kanna would have thought a touch coquettish if it hadn’t been coming from a priestess.
The giant seemed to notice the look and leaned back. She awkwardly cleared her throat and Kanna could feel the rumble again in her own lungs. To her surprise, she also felt some warmth rising slowly up her face.
“Fine,” the giant muttered. “If you’re ordering me, then I can’t say no.”
So Kanna floated into the garden along with that huge body, and before long she could barely make sense of what was happening because the giant had caught sight of the rabbits and had given chase. The hands that hung below her grasped the tiny creatures one at a time, and with a small knife, the hands slit each of the animals’ throats. Kanna tried not to look, but she could not influence the direction of her gaze, so she had to watch it in great detail.
The giant dropped the rabbits on the priestess’s doorstep.
“What?” the priestess said. “You’re not going to skin and butcher them for me? I can’t butcher an animal. It’s against my precepts.”
The giant sat on the stoop with her knife and Kanna watched for awhile as the rabbits became meat before her very eyes. When the giant went to hand the priestess the small corpses, the priestess finally accepted them, but she offered no word of thanks.
“Come back here in the evening,” she said instead. “I want you to build me a fire in the back.”
“Why? Is starting a fire also against your precepts?”
“No.” The priestess’s smile grew ever more coy. “I’m inviting you over for dinner, of course. We’re having rabbit.”
* * *
As soon as Kanna opened her eyes, the vivid imagery of the bright forest faded, and she was met only with a black sky above her. She coughed, her throat bone dry. She rubbed her face with both hands and tried to move, but she found that the surreal sensation of inhabiting some other body had left her unsure of her own.
When she managed to sit up by pushing herself against the side of the truck, her eyes opened fully and she stared into the darkness ahead of her. Even as the memories dissolved—as they usually did for most of her dreams—the face of the young woman remained, and in her renewed lucidity, Kanna realized…
It had been the face of Priestess Rem.
There was no doubt. The woman’s features were younger, less motherly and more like a girl who had just blossomed into adulthood, but she had looked exactly like Priestess Rem.
I barely stayed near the monastery for three days, and yet this woman is haunting my dreams already, Kanna thought. She let out a long sigh and tried to shake off the residual mix of emotions that she had felt through the giant’s body. Maybe she does have magical powers after all.
But of course, Kanna didn’t believe in that kind of nonsense—in magic, or fortunetelling, or Goddesses, or mystical snakes.
Eventually, when the space around her felt real again, she thought to look beside her, and she found that the mattress that was twin to her own lay empty. A rumpled indentation was still there, in the vague shape of Goda’s tall body, but as Kanna looked around and tried to see where she might have gone, there were no further signs of the woman.
Of the giant.
Kanna stiffened where she sat. On impulse, she grabbed the edge of the border of the truck bed, and she pulled herself over the side, and she slid down the rusted metal until her feet landed onto the dirt outside. She spun around, looking in every direction.
“Goda?” she murmured. Even when she peered far past the truck, there was no one. In the darkness, she could see only the smudged gray image of the trees on the side of the road. “Goda!”
As she turned, a quick flash caught her eye between two of the trees, an orange glow that seemed to come from the heart of a fire. She shuffled down the small embankment that separated the road from the trees, and when she looked through the brush, she found that the patch of woods actually wasn’t thick at all. Maybe twenty paces ahead of her, obscured only slightly by low-hanging branches, the flat side of a stone ridge marked an end to the grove, along with the beginnings of a shallow den carved inside the rock.
Kanna could see that the walls were dancing with the flicker of warm flames, and even from where she was standing, she recognized the wide back of the woman who sat cross-legged in front of the embers.
Because it was not far, Kanna lifted her robe up over her ankles, and she trudged through the leaf litter until she reached the other side of the trees. Her eyes fell into the core of the fire inside the cavern, then up towards the clay-smeared walls. They were etched with strange writing that glared in the light. It was not in any standard script, and Kanna could not read it, but it looked frustratingly familiar, something close to the Old Middlelander writing that Goda had forced on her.
Slowly—because she was still spooked by the possibility of more snakes—she eased her way to the mouth of the den and stood behind the giant.
Goda was facing away, in a posture that reminded Kanna very much of Priestess Rem when she had run into her in the cellar of the tower. She hoped that Goda’s face wouldn’t be quite so lifeless as Rem’s had been. She craned her neck to look.
Goda’s eyes were open.
“Take off your sandals,” Goda said.
Kanna jerked back slightly. For some reason, she had been unprepared for that voice. It bounced off the walls of the small den and seemed to enter her ears with no clear source.
But Kanna obeyed and crouched down to pull off her sandals before she softly inched her way towards the warmth of the fire. Because she could not bear to sit directly next to Goda, she sat down on the other side of the flames, next to a bundle of sticks and brush that seemed to be meant for fuel.
The woman did not greet her. They sat in silence. Kanna wondered if she had interrupted some kind of meditation.
Absentmindedly, as if to disrupt the intensity that seemed thick in the air, Kanna grasped one of the bushy twigs and threw it into the flames. At first, it did not burn. It let off steam, but was not consumed. Startled, Kanna watched until the flames finally began to catch on the leaves of her offering, until she was sure that no miracle had befallen her.
When she looked up at Goda’s flickering face, the woman was watching her. It felt as uncomfortable to Kanna as staring directly into the glaring fire, but Kanna had come in there searching for that gaze, so she did not turn away. She had too many questions.
“Be honest with me,” she said, the images from her dreams flooding her mind again. “Who are you?” She leaned across the fire, feeling the heat pushing against her chest, but she stayed because it allowed her to scrutinize that stranger’s face.
For awhile, Goda said nothing and only watched Kanna through the glow. The flames seemed to frame Goda’s features, and they gave her skin the quality of being set alight. When she finally answered, she had a faint smile in those black eyes.
“I am,” Goda said.
Kanna waited for the rest of the answer, but it didn’t come. The way Goda had spoken made it sound like it was a completed sentence. Kanna shifted in place and shook her head, both because she didn’t understand and because she suspected that she was teetering on the edge of a disturbing realization.
“Who are you?” Kanna repeated.
“No one.”
“Stop.” Kanna shook her head again. “Tell me. I’m serious. Who are you?”
“I’m you.”
After this, Kanna looked away, because she could no longer meet that smoldering gaze that seemed to expect some understanding from her. She leaned back in frustration. She crossed her legs to mirror Goda’s stance.
“I had a dream,” Kanna told her. “Priestess Rem was in it—and I think you were, too. I don’t know. In the dream, I think I was you.”
“Was it a nightmare?”
“Yes.” Kanna rubbed her face with her cold hands, and this eased some of the discomfort that the heat of the fire had been burning into her. “Priestess Rem was younger. She was standing in a garden next to a cottage in a forest, and she asked me to kill two rabbits for her.”
When Kanna quickly glanced at Goda again, the woman’s face had grown nearly expressionless, but there was a faint touch of surprise, and some of the intensity of her concentration seemed to be suddenly broken.
When the surprise faded, she began to stand up.
“That was not Priestess Rem,” Goda said. She made her way to the entrance of the cavern. “We should leave here. Even though you didn’t enter the shrine at first, it sensed your presence nearby and was sending you messages in your sleep. We pulled over too close.”
“Messages?”
Goda didn’t answer. Because she seemed to have no water to waste, she dug her hands into the soil just outside the den and began throwing that onto the flames to stifle the small fire. As she did this, Kanna thought she saw a flash of color pulsing above her. When she looked up at the ceiling of the shrine as the light progressively faded, she noticed all kinds of graven images—of beasts, both realistic and mythical—but most of all she noticed the carving that floated above Goda’s head: the shape of a swan with spreading wings.
Kanna stared at it. It stared back at her with a swirling eye that seemed fueled by the last wink of light, and when that died, the swan and its brothers disappeared.
Outside the den, Kanna followed Goda into the pitch darkness, not questioning for even a moment that the woman knew where she was going. She reached out and grasped onto the back of Goda’s robes. The gesture had become her habit by now, something she did to get her bearings and keep her balance when the terrain was new.
“You still haven’t answered my question,” Kanna said, pressing her face to Goda’s back, pushing herself closer to the one who led her through the dark.
“I answered you three times. Three times is more than enough.”
“How do you expect me to make any sense of those weird answers?”
“Are you really asking about who I am, then? Or are you asking about my personal life?”
“Aren’t they the same?”
Goda slowed down slightly to step over a fallen tree and Kanna followed after feeling her movements. “You know that they’re not.”
“Fine, fine! But you’re still evading my questions. And on top of that, you have the nerve to haunt my dreams while you evade them! You can imply all you want that I’m too dense to understand anything and that I’m missing the point—and maybe that’s true—but you’re missing my point, too: I’m not asking about anything important or all-encompassing, like the answers you keep giving me. I’m asking about something stupid and mundane, and so those are the answers I want, because I’m a stupid and mundane person.” Kanna let out a long breath of frustration, her eyes shut, her nails making indentations into the fabric of Goda’s clothes. “Who are you? I keep seeing bits and pieces of your story, but none of it fits together. Tell me about your life, and then maybe I can come to understand all of this.”
Goda ignored her until they had almost come out of the grove, and then she turned around to face Kanna. The trees rustled around them, letting light through only in patches. The faint shine of the stars and the moon lit up Goda’s eyes, but the rest of the woman’s expression was obscured.
That blank stare only served to make the ire from earlier that day return to Kanna’s blood, though it was wrapped in a different kind of passion this time. “Everyone has some sort of identity, some sort of past—even you! If you had really risen above it as much as you pretend, then it would mean nothing to just tell me, wouldn’t it? What’s with all the mystery? At worst, it would just be a story to pass the time on a long drive to nowhere.”
“I have no desire to serve as entertainment for you.”
“Oh, so now you have preferences? I thought the great Goda Brahm had no personal desires or aversions one way or another!”
Goda tilted her head down low to meet Kanna’s eyes. Her sardonic huff sent steam into the air—steam that filled Kanna’s nostrils—and it was only in that sudden closeness that the woman’s smirk finally became visible.
“Is that what you thought?” she said. To Kanna’s irritation, Goda’s tone was teasing, not at all touched by any of Kanna’s accusations.
“Stop!” Angered, Kanna boldly grasped the woman’s face with both hands and pulled her closer, fingers pressing into the bones, energy radiating through every nerve, until her mouth was nearly touching the source of that breath. With a surge of vulnerability that she could not fight, Kanna locked her open gaze on those black eyes, and whispered through gritted teeth, “Why do you pretend that you’re not human? Stop acting like you’re some disembodied spirit from my nightmares. I know you’ve seen something, too, or else you wouldn’t be running from me. What did you see? Have I also found my way into your dreams? Am I a monster to you the way you are to me?”
Kanna thought she saw a crack then, the barest break in the woman’s expression, another faint hint of surprise.
“I don’t want you in my dreams anymore,” Kanna said. “I want you in the flesh. Only in the flesh.”
“My flesh won’t do you any good,” Goda said. Her eyes were alight again, but with a different sort of fire. Her face was close, but to Kanna’s frustration, she would not move any closer. She only stared, and hovered like a ghost, and huffed warm, living breath.
With full intention—with a taunting insolence—Kanna brushed her lips against the corner of that mouth. The touch was light, and brief, and barely there, a mocking version of what Kanna knew the woman would not give her. It was subtle enough that both of them could have pretended it hadn’t happened at all.
Nonetheless, it was enough to provoke the giant’s fury.
Before Kanna could fight back or even let out a gasp, that warm breath flowed into her. She heard it surge through her throat and ears. She felt it billow into her lungs. A buzz rang so profoundly in her bones that for a moment she wondered if the cuff had shocked her.
It hadn’t.
Goda kissed her.
That breath invaded every inch of Kanna’s body, but more than air was now being exchanged between them, because Kanna leaned hard to meet her, to ravenously consume the monster who had foolishly slipped into the trap of Kanna’s wide-open mouth.
The burning heat of Goda’s flesh—the tongue and the teeth together—both aroused Kanna and filled her with fear once again. Wanting more of both, Kanna pulled Goda hard by the neck of her robes. They crashed against each other. They stumbled back until the woman had pressed her against the trunk of a tree. Goda leaned in deeply, propping her hands up on the bark at either side to keep steady.
But it was not enough.
Without breaking the kiss—without even opening her eyes—Kanna took hold of one of those wrists and ripped it towards her. She shoved the hand between her own legs. She gasped again as the fingers squeezed her reflexively, with just the right amount of roughness, as if the woman had sensed exactly what Kanna had asked for without words. The heat of that hand pulsed against her, even through the fabric that served as a barrier to the touch, and so Kanna scrambled to find the bottom of her own robes, to begin hiking them up in desperation.
But the second Kanna did this, Goda stiffened. The body, the hand, the mouth—they retreated all at once and were replaced with a rush of cold air. Kanna looked on with bewilderment, with mild shock at the sudden emptiness.
Goda shook her head.
“My flesh won’t do you any good,” she repeated, her eyes once again impenetrably blank. “Believe me, you don’t want to know what I am.”
Then the woman turned around and trudged through the trees, until Kanna could only see her ghostly shadow drifting away towards the dark road. Kanna dropped to the ground, her back against the trunk of the massive evergreen, and she looked up at the starlit sky that peeked through the branches above her.
She tightened her jaw. She pressed her hand to her thigh and felt the outline of the key within the pocket of her robes.
Whoever the woman was, Kanna thought, she would be free of her soon enough.