by S. L. Huang
Rosa was suddenly, viscerally reminded of Mei, barely eighteen years old, shouting in her face. I’m not good for you, Rosa had said. I don’t deserve you …
How dare you, Mei had demanded. The moment I am free to make my own decisions, you tell me I cannot? How dare you?
She’d been truly angry. Rosa had tried to tell her, then, of her last, great crime, the only one Mei hadn’t known, the only lie that had lain between them. But Mei refused to let her.
Maybe she had known, even all those years ago. She’d always been wiser about the world than Rosa had been prone to assume.
And now, once again, Mei was refusing to let Rosa protect her, refusing to live the life of less heartache Rosa had tried to gift her.
She and Xiao Hong both, so willful and stubborn and wrong.
“Go,” Hou Yi said again, disgusted.
“I…” Rosa wanted to say again that she couldn’t, that they didn’t deserve to be saddled with her, that she didn’t deserve to be part of their lives, but none of that seemed to stand up in the face of Hou Yi’s argument. “You need me,” she said finally, faintly.
“What are you afraid of?” Hou Yi said.
PART FIVE
What are you afraid of?
The question burned, even as Rosa rejected it on its face. Besides, it wasn’t right, that Rosa could just go back to the people she loved, that she would face no punishment of any consequence, that she could have Mei and Xiao Hong and they could have her when all the people she had wronged had nothing.
And she had made a commitment, here, to Hou Yi. One that had sudden gravity—Rosa had been so casual, before, about risking her life for this partnership, for what had she had left? Not that she had anything more now, nothing more than the thin potential of a sorcerer’s vision. One their enemy may have had good reason for dangling before her.
Was Feng Meng using this waking dream against them? Trying to divide them, to sever the promise Rosa had made here, the only one she hadn’t yet broken?
But whether at the hare’s instigation or not, the sting of Hou Yi’s words punched deep. Brushing off all of Rosa’s pain and sacrifice—the guilt—the consequences, both those she’d avoided and those she’d accepted, like it was nothing, like Rosa had wanted it—
“You don’t understand,” she said. “You saw one thing and you think you know, but you don’t; you can’t—”
“I understand enough,” said Hou Yi. She retreated from Rosa, drawing herself back as though from something foul. “You run because of your own selfishness. You need this penance, so you force it upon them.”
Rosa tried to form speech, but her mind wouldn’t find the right words in this language. Or indeed, any words at all.
She’s just angry, she promised herself desperately. Both her wife and son betrayed and deserted her, and she thought I was the same, and it stings her that they still seek me …
They still sought her. They still sought her. Her heart leapt and sang, even as it sank, leaden and unsure.
Hou Yi was right. She might be able to walk away, right now, and have everything she longed for.
What are you afraid of?
“This isn’t as simple as—they wouldn’t want me to,” she said, with sudden relief at the truth of the realization. “They would never let me leave you now. And I—this is not—I swear to you, I thought they could be happier without me…”
What did it all even mean? Did they forgive her? Or only want to try?
“You were wrong,” Hou Yi said.
Rosa didn’t answer.
Hou Yi resumed walking down toward the water, with strides so long Rosa had to hasten to catch her.
I can’t leave her now. After … after, she could take time to consider it all.
“You said you’d been to this island before,” she called above the waves, trying to shift the conversation back. “How did you get across?”
Hou Yi let out a snort that sounded like a bitter laugh. “Not the way we will have to go this time,” she said. She turned so fast Rosa almost ran into her. “Do you know what I sought, when I came here as a youth? Immortality. My own death was to be the greatest foe I would ever conquer. I would stay young, and strong, and in my prime forever.”
Rosa blinked.
“The peaches of immortality grow on this island. I didn’t find them, of course—they only ripen once every three thousand years. But back then, eternity was what I desired above all else.”
Rosa was still trying to wrap her head around the idea of speaking of immortality so easily and seriously. But she also wasn’t sure why Hou Yi was flinging this information at her as if she hoped the words were sharp.
“I found it.” Hou Yi laughed again. It was definitely bitter. “I found it! Far later and far to the west, I did a task for a goddess and she gave me the last of the nectar she’d brewed from those same peaches, from the crop that bloomed thousands of years ago. My greatest dream, achieved! And what did it bring me? Feng Meng betrayed me for it. My wife—my wife—” Her voice broke. “Drinking it caused her to change so quickly and completely that I lost her, as surely as if she’d died. If I knew when I gained that drug that it would be such a poison—that instead of finding eternity, I would lose them both—”
Hou Yi took a few breaths to control herself.
“You couldn’t have known,” Rosa offered.
“But I know now,” Hou Yi said. “It was what I thought I wanted, and it destroyed everything I loved. I never sought after it again, and if someone offered me the taste of immortality now, I would not only refuse it, I would flee from the offer as if it were a monster on my heels. As you flee from killing your grundwirgen. We have both tried to run from who we were. But you—you are also running from your family, and I find that inexcusable. Family is more important than anything.”
Rosa could not agree. She thought of her mother—she might have been better off if the woman had deserted her at birth. And Xiao Hong might have been better off if Rosa had done the same.
But even if they spoke only of the family they chose …
“You can’t—you can say that a thousand times, but it doesn’t just solve everything,” Rosa argued.
“It’s enough,” Hou Yi said.
“You’re making it too clean and easy—”
“Because it is easy. It’s the only thing in the whole cursed world that is, and you are willfully destroying it!”
Rosa bridled. “You think you understand more about family than I do? As you keep so insistently pointing out, my family didn’t leave me.”
The accusation fell between them. Rosa’s breath was loud and ragged in her ears.
She shouldn’t have said that. Should not have …
“You want so much to accompany me, Flower?” Hou Yi said. “You demand it? Well, here is how I planned to get across the channel.”
She reached into her collar to draw a heavy pendant out from under her clothes, the type some folk used to keep something precious or dangerous that they dared not store away from themselves, and pried it open to pinch out something small and brown.
“The elixir of immortality was not the only gift I ever received from a grateful god. I was a hero, remember? If you so want to follow me, then chew this. And then swim hard!”
Hou Yi flung some of the bits at Rosa’s feet and thumbed the rest into her mouth. Then she ran at the waves.
Clothes, bow, woman, and all—they coalesced and spiraled in a rainbow of iridescence. Hou Yi leapt, and the transformation finished taking hold of her in the air, until only a large silver fish dove into the surf.
Rosa stood speechless.
No wonder Hou Yi had not told her.
Rosa’s own righteous proclamations came back at her. You need me. They would never let me leave you. Her insistence to herself that she was following a friend for all the right reasons.
She bent and gathered the brown bits from among the stones and sand—some sort of dried plant or fungus, maybe.
She should have expected so
mething like this. Hadn’t Rosa herself received just such a gift once, a bribe from an obsequious witch? What she’d done with her potion she didn’t like to think about.
This one can’t be a permanent transformation, though, can it? Not like the one she’d used. Wouldn’t Hou Yi have warned her if it were?
But even the thought of giving up her humanity temporarily, for the brief minutes it took to reach the island—Rosa’s insides writhed.
You ask too much, she thought, and then, guiltily: She didn’t ask. You volunteered.
She’d volunteered because this was the type of friend—the type of family—she wanted to be. One who didn’t betray and abandon. One who stayed stalwart in times of need.
She thought of Mei, and Goldie, and what she’d done to them both. Now Hou Yi shouted in her face on this lonely beach, telling Rosa she’d deserted her family for selfish reasons, that she’d only sacrificed because it was what she wanted, somehow, in some twisted dark way that was apparently the heart of Rosa’s soul.
She gazed down at the small brown bits of enchantment in her callused palm.
Last chance, they seemed to say to her. Who do you want to be?
She felt sick.
But then she closed her eyes, clapped her palm to her mouth, and ran.
* * *
Rosa lost time between the moment she heaved in a breath and held it, the sea-foam kissing her ankles, and when she became aware of herself underwater.
Everything was color and light, a maelstrom of motion—the undertow dragging her deep, the breakers crashing her toward the shore, the currents tearing her up and down and to the side. Every sense had gone inside out, like her mind had turned slick. She could think, she could move—and in moving, she swam; she could feel herself swimming as if it happened easier than thought—but which way? Which way? How?
She struck off in the direction that seemed to counter the waves, everything rushing sound and vibration with no certainty even of up or down. She only knew she’d chosen the right way when a massive beak stabbed into the water next to her.
Rosa would have screamed if she’d had voice. The water went hot, bubbles erupting just above her where it flash-boiled. She dove, arrowing down for darkness and cold. Another shape darted past her, a fish—another fish, she corrected herself—and the massive, red-hot bird’s head plunged again, this time catching the silvery shape and snapping it up out of the depths.
Had that been Hou Yi? Rosa couldn’t know.
With depth came silence, and pressure, and a sort of smell, like wet seaweed. Rosa grasped for her sense of direction. The cold and pressure began to stall her, and she struggled back toward the surface; she felt like she was gasping even as she could not feel herself breathe.
This time a claw nearly caught her. Fire churned the water to her other side—the cursed sunbirds were everywhere—Rosa dipped and dove, pushing her slick, wriggling body until her fins ached and her skin wanted to burst along its seams. Faster, harder—how far was it? Would this ever end? Rosa was good at finding her way on land, but she could not be certain she hadn’t turned around completely, or been waylaid off to the side to miss the island and be lost in the depths.
She was just beginning to believe she’d finally made it past the sunbirds when she truly stopped being able to breathe.
She wasn’t even sure how she knew. It was somehow the same feeling as being on land and lacking air, only in this form she didn’t even know how to fix it, how to take a breath, if something in the water pressing on all sides was smothering her somehow—she strove and kicked, no, not kicked, she had a tail, but her aquatic body was suddenly uncoordinated. A wall rose up out of the murky darkness—not a wall—mud—tree roots—
Rosa’s senses were closing over and going dark. She thrashed the last few lengths, hardly aware of what she was doing. When she broke the surface, the world bifurcated with a terrible vertigo, and all she could be conscious of was being unable to breathe in two directions at once before some vestige of awareness let her flick herself out of the lapping water and beach herself.
The return of her humanity was surprisingly discomfiting. Her body stretched into limbs and lungs, shapes that didn’t feel right for the first few moments, weighted down by the constrictions of clothes and boots and rifle.
Rosa lay on the pebbled beach and breathed. She felt like she should be coughing, but somehow, she wasn’t. She groped for her rifle with sudden panic to check it over, but it was dry—as were her clothes, save where her cloak had begun picking up the dampness of the ground.
She pushed herself to sitting. The world dizzied her with its solidity.
The beach she’d landed on was on the inside of a wide lagoon. The waves here lapped quietly, mists trailing above them. Some type of lush, fantastic trees towered thickly behind her and all along the shore, their canopy stretching so far overhead that the entire lagoon felt draped in green. The air filled her newly reformed lungs with warm humidity.
She had a moment of wonderment at the climate—markedly different from the nearby coast—before she felt something else. A soft buzz against her skin, like the air was filled with a thousand tiny hummingbirds.
Magic.
The whole island was steeped in it, Hou Yi had said. And Rosa had just swum here as a … she should have felt more disgust. She was a grundwirgen herself now, wasn’t she?
But the reflexive revulsion didn’t come. She’d survived the change, everything happening too fast for her to do more than react, and here on the other side, her expected reaction only felt like a pale shadow of itself. A description of a description, as told to somebody else.
She’d tried to let it go for so long. She realized now—ashamed—that she’d only been clinging harder, convinced somehow that it was part of herself.
Rosa took a deep breath of the healing, humid air, and stood, raking the beach with her eyes for Hou Yi. The stones were small and flat and silty, gleaming in the wet like red-brown jewels, in some places clawed over by tangled cages of tree roots. Water-pebbled vines and wide leaves draped themselves over everything.
Rosa heard Hou Yi before she saw her—thrashing and coughing came from around a cluster of vegetation. Rosa had to scale a knot of stilted, moss-rich root system in order to jump down to where Hou Yi had washed ashore.
Retaking human form was giving her more trouble than it had Rosa. She had gathered herself on all fours, and kept coughing, hacking out mouthfuls of seawater.
“You’re supposed to start breathing the air now,” Rosa said wryly, bending to offer her a hand.
Hou Yi turned her face up with watering eyes. “You came,” she croaked.
Rosa helped her up. “I came. Now let’s finish this so we can go back to hurling insults at each other.”
Hou Yi tried to laugh through her coughing.
Something screamed overhead.
Rosa had her rifle in her hands before she’d registered the sound. She’d heard it too often. Hou Yi, too, had straightened immediately, an arrow nocked and pointed skyward.
“This is where they’re from,” Hou Yi said, though she sounded uncertain. “They may simply be … here, not aiming to attack.”
A second cry overlapped with the first. Rosa glimpsed fire flickering through the canopy.
“They won’t attack unless I tell them to,” a voice said.
Hou Yi and Rosa both whipped around. A man stood only a few paces away, at the border where the narrow beach was overtaken by the jungle.
Feng Meng. Rosa recognized him both from the shape she had seen by firelight and the boy he had been in the dream, though he was much older now, his features twisted and bitter.
And he held a bow. Arrow nocked and drawn tight, the cruelly sharp head aimed directly at Hou Yi’s heart.
Rosa wasn’t sure why he hadn’t already loosed. He’d had the moment, when she and Hou Yi were distracted by the sunbirds, but he seemed to need some sort of confrontation first—or maybe he was confident enough in his control of t
he birds to think he had all the time he desired. But he’d given Rosa and Hou Yi the instant they needed to focus on him, and now Hou Yi, too, had her nocked arrow pointed straight at his, and Rosa’s sights cradled a fatal shot.
Rosa’s heart thumped, her hands slick against the rifle stock. A man in her sights, for the first time in many years. A human form in her sights for the first time ever.
She stood very still, her stance unwavering. The birds wheeled overhead and screamed.
“You brought a friend,” sneered Feng Meng. “Is she your new lover? Will you destroy and abandon her, too?”
Hou Yi did not seem able to respond.
Rosa called out, “We’ve come to stop you. You’re sending the sunbirds to kill and terrorize. We cannot let you continue.”
“I’m only following in the footsteps of my mentor,” Feng Meng said. “You showed me how to respond to grief, dear teacher. I’m only doing as you taught me.”
“I have no wish for you to repeat my worst mistakes,” Hou Yi said, low and shaking. It cut Rosa to hear.
“And it gives me no pleasure to be you,” Feng Meng shot back. “But you hollowed me out and made me into this shape, and whatever I poured into the emptiness, it has still hungered only for your approval.”
“Mine?” Hou Yi said faintly.
“I despise myself,” Feng Meng said. “I despise this thing you made me into.”
Rosa might have tried to allow for sympathy, but she had not spent a lifetime trying to own her past in order to let someone dodge responsibility in front of her. “Your life is your own,” she cut in. “You cannot blame some imagined slights by Hou Yi for the acts you commit now.”
“Ha!” Feng Meng said. “I’m the villain in your little opera then, am I?”
Hou Yi had fallen silent again—Rosa didn’t blame her; she could not have faced her own child this way.
Rosa spoke for her. “I know your story. Hou Yi is not without failings, but nor are you. If you want to make an accounting of her wrongs, then do so, but you stole from her and tried to murder her. You betrayed her and were the reason her wife was driven away. And now you kill innocent people for your revenge, and we are here to stop you.”