by S. L. Huang
To Rosa’s surprise, instead of arguing back, Feng Meng’s face crumpled in grief, and tears sprang to his eyes.
“Is this what you tell people?” he said to Hou Yi. “Is this how you remember it?”
“I…” Hou Yi faltered. “I’m not … it’s what happened.”
“Which parts do you deny?” Rosa challenged him.
“None,” he answered slowly. “None…”
He took a shuddering breath. The sunbirds shrieked overhead. Feng Meng did not release his hold on his bow, but he raised his head and let out a piercing whistle.
“I’ve dispersed them,” he spat, the angry mask back in place. “If you think so greatly of yourself and so poorly of me, then kill me now and bury the truth of yourself with me.”
“What truth?” Hou Yi said.
“What truth!” Feng Meng cast a disbelieving glance at Rosa before turning back to Hou Yi. “Did you tell your new lover about your obsession with immortality? Tell her. Tell her! It consumed and defined your every moment. There was no room in your heart for friendship, for affection—even your great ‘heroics’ were only a means to draw the gods’ attention to yourself. And as for me—as for me—”
His voice broke. His hands had begun to shake on the bow, either from emotion or fatigue.
“The only reason you taught me was so your own vaunted skills would live on,” he accused Hou Yi. “I was your legacy, your sad substitute for your own immortality. Until you got your hands on the real thing … and when you did, you were just going to go, you were going to leave, you and she but nobody else—I heard you say so! You told me I was like your son, and you were going to leave me behind like so much rotten meat…”
His shouts had deflated and flattened until they were sobbing pleas. But he drew his bowstring tighter with trembling fingers as if to give lie to the pain.
“I…” Hou Yi’s voice was a whisper. “There was only enough for two.”
Rosa’s sights swayed in her vision. Hou Yi had … and she told Rosa she was deserting her child? The hare had shown them both the truth of that parental love, so strong Rosa had felt it thrumming through her … how could Hou Yi turn her back? How could she even conceive of it?
I would never trade Xiao Hong for a thousand eternities, she thought. But then—what reason did she have for leaving Xiao Hong now?
The vicious truth of it sliced her to the core.
“You thought I wanted to steal the bottle to gain godhood for myself,” Feng Meng went on. “I only wanted to dash it on the ground. I should have known when you lost your chance at living forever, you would try to take the rest of us with you.”
“I was taken by madness when I lost Chang E,” Hou Yi said. “I did … I regret so many things…”
“When you lost—ha! You rampaged because you lost your precious elixir. And it wasn’t madness you suffered; it was arrogance.”
Hou Yi did not speak for a long moment. Then she slowly released the tension on her bow and lowered it. “Perhaps you’re right. I don’t know anymore.”
“Well, I do,” Feng Meng said, and shot her.
It was so fast. His fingers slipped off the string and the bow bounced against the suddenly released tension and an arrow flew straight for Hou Yi, who still had her own bow lowered. She’d started to raise it, fast, so fast, as if she could shoot the arrow out of the air, but then the stone head slugged into her ribs and her body lost all coordination, her limbs going heavy and stiff like a wooden doll’s.
Rosa squeezed the trigger.
She could not miss. She was too close; she was too good a shot; her sights were aligned. But at the last instant something made her pull the shot. Her finger dragged against the stock, her palm jerking upward.
Feng Meng staggered. His bow dropped and he nearly lost hold of it, juggling it from fingers that no longer closed, his other hand groping at his bleeding shoulder. Hurling curses at both Rosa and Hou Yi, he turned and fled, crashing into the tropical brush.
Rosa swung down her rifle and dashed to Hou Yi’s side. She ducked under an arm and got a hand around the other woman’s shoulders. “How bad is it? Sit down—”
“No—we have to—” Hou Yi’s breath tripped over itself, constricting into a bloody cough.
“Stop trying to talk,” Rosa said. “We’re not going after anyone. You’re going to die if we don’t—”
Hou Yi grabbed at Rosa’s cloak, her hand fisting in the crimson material. “He might be right about me,” she said thickly. “I don’t … I don’t know. He might be.”
Rosa didn’t know either. She could offer no comfort. Hou Yi might have been the woman she feared she was.
After all, a judgmental thought prodded, what kind of woman would chase magic and leave her son behind?
And, close on the heels of that: The same type of woman who would flee her own daughter?
Mei should have stayed away in shame. And Hou Yi’s wife … Hou Yi must fear she was not blameless in Chang E’s departure either. It might even be so—Rosa’s mind could not stretch to grasp all the emotional truths Feng Meng had revealed here.
Hou Yi swayed, collapsing. Rosa shoved aside the threatening tangle of obligation and guilt, wrestling Hou Yi over to sink down on a rock. The arrow shaft protruded sickeningly, somehow as massive as a polearm, both their clothes already sopped with blood.
Rosa tore off her muffler and bunched it around the wound. Red stained red.
“The arrowhead,” Hou Yi got out. “Has to be pulled…”
“Bullets you don’t—” started Rosa.
“Arrows you do.”
It would not have been what Rosa expected, being told to tear out the arrowhead—would that not damage a body more? But she was no surgeon. She only knew what little she did about gunshot wounds because of so frequently being the cause of them.
She followed Hou Yi’s stilted instructions, sliding her fingers down the slick shaft, into her friend’s flesh, dark and hot and drenching. Her friend; her friend with a past full of sins as dark as Rosa’s, her friend who had wanted to desert her son, her friend whose son had tried to kill her twice over. Rosa’s fingers found the hard outline of the stone arrowhead and tried to pinch at the edges. Hou Yi grunted and jerked.
Rosa froze, then tried again, more slowly, but her grasp was too slippery. By the time the arrowhead slid free with her hand, as long as her first finger and thin and sharp like a blade, Hou Yi had clenched Rosa’s other wrist so hard she’d left bruises. She had gone white and sweating, her skin clammy and too cold.
Rosa tried to press the wound closed, filling it with her muffler and then her cloak and binding the fabric as tightly around Hou Yi’s chest as she could. The makeshift bandages sagged, heavy with blood.
“Fitting…” Hou Yi murmured wetly. “This death. It is fitting…”
To be killed by her own son. Even with the guilt Hou Yi carried … Rosa could not agree.
“He is so angry.” Tears had begun sliding from the corners of Hou Yi’s eyes, and Rosa was certain they were as much from grief as pain. “So angry at me. I never knew…”
Love, even more than hate, could always sharpen anger to the keenest of points. Rosa again saw Xiao Hong screaming at her, accusing her of sacrificing Mei to save her own skin.
It had never been about saving herself. She had no hope of that. But when it came to saving Xiao Hong’s image of her—then, then she had indeed been a coward. Such a coward.
Why had they not let her stay one? Why had they insisted on chasing?
“I can’t judge,” she said to Hou Yi. They were the most comforting words she knew how to say.
Hou Yi’s hand came up to grip one of Rosa’s, slipping against her skin and leaving sticky tracks behind. “Flower. Please. Before I die … I want to tell him…”
Rosa leaned forward, bringing her ear closer to Hou Yi’s lips.
“I want to ask his forgiveness,” she whispered. “My son. Please. Help me.”
It was a last request; th
ey both knew it. Rosa could not deny her. The two women struggled together to pull Hou Yi’s body upright until she leaned heavily against Rosa’s shoulder, her arm slung across, her boots dragging in a semblance of walking.
They took one lurching step and almost fell, then another, their progress elongated agonizingly minute after minute. She will not last to find him, Rosa thought, but she said nothing.
“Make me a promise,” Hou Yi gasped against her. Blood bubbled at the side of her mouth. “Find your Mei. Find them both, and see…”
The island had begun to shift into twilight, even more so under the soaring trees and away from the clearing provided by the lagoon. Rosa concentrated on finding their feet in the dimness, trying to avoid being tripped by the dense undergrowth.
“Promise me, Flower,” said Hou Yi.
“I don’t—I don’t know if I can.” Rosa’s eyes burned and blurred.
“They want … to forgive you…”
“You asked what I was afraid of.” Rosa kicked through a tangle of vines and roots. “They know … they know all of me, now. They know what I am. I don’t want to see that in their eyes when they look at me.” Her voice cracked. “I want to remember them loving me, not—it’s too hard. You’re right. I am a coward.”
Hou Yi was silent for so long that her harsh breathing in Rosa’s ear and the stumbling shuffle of her feet along with Rosa’s were the only assurance she hadn’t bled her life onto the forest floor. Rosa’s troubles must have become pitiful to Hou Yi, such a weak excuse for tragedy. The other woman had nearly accused her of such on the beach, and now … Rosa’s family still chased her, as broken as such an act was, while Hou Yi’s son shredded her heart. And Hou Yi’s wife long gone, the so-called goddess in the moon.
Perhaps it had always been a metaphor for how lost Chang E had become to her. How irreversible the cost.
But Hou Yi didn’t know the worst secrets Rosa still carried. The past betrayals that tainted every possible future with Mei and Xiao Hong, now that they knew. The truth of what kind of woman she was.
“Tell me,” Hou Yi whispered in her ear then, and Rosa wondered if the strange magic of this island had exposed her thoughts.
More likely they were too similar for Hou Yi not to have understood after all. To have seen the emptiness that was missing from her story.
“Please,” Hou Yi said, the words faint, hitching between breaths. “Tell me the rest. Let a dying woman know … she is not alone … in the dark.”
She wasn’t speaking of the deepening night.
Rosa cleared her throat.
“I told you, I can’t judge. And … I can’t. My hands were stained already, but when I … I betrayed Mei…”
And Goldie. It was so strange, how she could still feel guilt about that. What she had done to the woman who had wanted to steal her life but whom Rosa would always feel she owed, forever, with no amount of logic able to dissuade it.
Until Hou Yi, she’d destroyed everyone she’d sworn loyalty to.
* * *
Rosa tore apart her bed for the seventh time. Clothes and shoes and knickknacks scattered themselves from one end of the room to the other.
She didn’t care. She wasn’t taking them. She only wanted her other cloak, and she couldn’t find it.
And she had to find it, and find it quickly, because Goldie wasn’t here right now and Rosa just wanted to leave, wanted to disappear without fighting or shouting or guilt or explanations. She wanted to go like a coward in the night, away from this friendship that lay around her neck like a lead weight and into the arms of the woman who made her light and free.
“What on earth are you looking for?”
Rosa turned. Puss stood in the doorway, on his hind legs in a way that had always struck her as entirely unnatural for a cat. His boots only made it worse—his legs always looked like they bent the wrong way in them.
“I can’t find my other cloak,” Rosa said, with biting dignity. “Have you seen it?”
“Oh, I have, in fact.” He licked a front paw in apparent unconcern and didn’t continue.
Rosa picked up her rifle. No more than that.
Puss laid his ears back and squinted his eyes at her, as if to scorn her attempt at intimidation. “You pathetic humans. Goldie took your cloak, if you must know. Whatever catfight you two are in the middle of, I want no part of it.” He chortled his hitching hiss of a laugh. “Catfight! The irony.”
Rosa ignored him. She retrieved her hunting pack from where she’d let it fall behind the bed and slung it over one shoulder, then pushed past Puss out of the room, not caring if she knocked him over. Cats always landed on their feet.
* * *
“She’d gone … to bloody you…” Hou Yi said, her voice threaded with weakness.
Shocking, that Hou Yi could see it all so quickly. It had taken Rosa herself far too long to realize, to come to the right conclusion and dash after. How long had Goldie known of Rosa’s plans? When had she contrived to keep Rosa by her side by sullying her in the eyes of her lover? Goldie had planned to slay the Beast in Rosa’s cloak and then … what? Leave the bloody cloak for Mei to find? Or maybe fling a scrap of it at the scene and then alert the King’s Men, determined that if her best friend were to desert her, Rosa’s life would be forfeit as punishment?
“Tell me,” murmured Hou Yi, heavy against Rosa’s shoulder.
“I raced after her.” Rosa forced herself on. “To the Beast’s castle. Mei was not there; she had already fled, to meet me at our rendezvous, where I was supposed to be.”
There had only been darkness, a raging monster of a man, and a girl with gold curls and a red cloak who danced before him, twirling a repeater and taunting.
* * *
Rosa brought up her rifle, shouting, her sights wavering between them.
“You aren’t going to shoot me, Red!” Goldie called, flinging her own pistol back and forth with no regard for the proper handling of a weapon. “You need me. I saved you! We need each other!”
“Shoot her!” the Beast demanded in a roar. “Shoot her, shoot her!”
But Rosa couldn’t.
She couldn’t. She flashed on Mei begging her to promise, insisting that “these things are complicated”—that Rosa must not kill the Beast because Mei did love him, despite all—and she finally understood.
These things were complicated. She knew without trying that she would never be able to kill Goldie, no matter what, even if the woman turned her pistol on Rosa herself. Just as Mei could not punish the Beast for what he had done to her.
Her rifle dropped. Goldie laughed triumphantly, and the Beast wailed and roared. And Rosa felt the bulge in the pocket of her hunting pack, the one she’d kept but never thought of using, the witch’s ugly potion that she’d scorned for years and years but couldn’t bring herself to discard because it was, after all, a weapon. Hardly knowing what she was doing, she drew it out and flung.
The gray-green powder hit her closest friend in a cloud, drifting down over yellow hair and stolen red cloak.
Goldie’s laughing, mocking triumph twisted into shock and hurt. Her huge blue eyes went to Rosa asking why and how could you almost too fast to see, before her features began to contort and shrink away. Her skin went brown and bumpy and her limbs dwindled and curled into themselves and her clothes seared themselves to brittle dust.
In seconds, all that was left of Goldie was a largish, warty toad. It gazed up at Rosa, and she fancied she saw such hurt in those animal eyes, yellow eyes the same color as Goldie’s hair.
It croaked at her, and fled.
The Beast gave a cry and prostrated himself at Rosa’s feet, promising her the world, babbling in gratitude. And Rosa …
She gazed down at him and thought of Mei.
She gazed down at him, and thought of Mei, and thought of how Mei had made her promise not to kill him, how she had promised not to kill anyone anymore, that they would flee together and build new lives.
She gazed down at him, a
nd remembered that he was cursed, that the reason he had stolen Mei’s life was that he needed the love of another, and that he was engineering his release by keeping a girl shut up with him forever with no other company until she loved him back, and how it had almost worked.
She thought of the next girl, and the next, and for the last time, she raised her rifle and squeezed her finger back.
It was so easy.
* * *
“It was the only lie between us,” Rosa said. “The only thing I never told her. Maybe she suspected. I have wondered. Certainly she must have later…”
When Mei had been arrested for the crime. The crushing weight of Rosa’s nightmare becoming fact. It had paralyzed her.
“I think I am … a broken person,” she confessed to Hou Yi. “Too much of my being has been the hunt. Killing. Even the years with Mei and Xiao Hong … I think I was only pretending.”
“Not true,” Hou Yi whispered.
“It is true. I kept trophies; did I say?” She knew she had not said. “Not because I was proud. At least not most of them. But because it was all I had. For so many years. I couldn’t let go.”
“I mean … it is not true … you pretending,” Hou Yi managed. “The reality is … you … you have both the bad and good. You always … oversimplify, Flower.”
And then she started to laugh, though it quickly aborted into a hacking cough.
“I’m not—!” It was hard to argue with someone who was dying against her shoulder while mocking her. “Knowing what I am—I’m not oversimplifying. Stop laughing!”
“You want to be … so tragic a figure,” Hou Yi wheezed. “Don’t worry, I agree you have done … very bad things … I would have killed you myself, if we had met back when I was the hero and you were the villain. But you think too much of yourself. Now we are just two old women.” The momentary teasing strength faded to sadness. “Old women who have hurt their children.”
Old women who have hurt their children.