I See Fire | Wattys 2021/22 Shortlist | ✔

Chapter Fifteen

I was in the house again, and the girl was back at the window, watching the night outside. She was older now, fourteen or fifteen, and her white hair had fallen past her shoulders and halfway down her back. There was something in her eyes that made me shrink towards Tezcat's corner. He wasn't there.

The girl reached out and touched the invisible field in the window. Gold energy radiated outwards from her hand, but she did not move as it crackled, up her arm and over her shoulder. A door thumped shut and elephantine footsteps advanced down the hallway. The girl removed her hand.

Her mother entered the room, smiling. Too widely. Her appearance—timeless, it seemed—had not changed, but the curve of late pregnancy pushed her snake-skirt into a downward arc. The girl's eyes slid to the bulge with a flicker of something nasty, but it was gone before I could confirm it.

Pregnant?

Oh no... oh gods.

My hand found my mouth of its own accord. I knew this story. I knew this myth. I knew who the girl was, now, and how this was going to end; I'd seen it carved on a rock facing a temple the last time I'd been locked in a vision like this. Inside the mother's womb was the future sun god, destined to be given everything this girl and Tezcat had been denied. I could not fault the girl for the poisonous glances she kept sending it.

Oh, if the Mexica had known even half of the backstory.

"It's time," said the mother. "Are you ready?"

The girl dragged her gaze away. She nodded.

"Turn around and let me see you."

She wore a white dress, simple, but stunning on her slender, maturing frame. Her mother looked satisfied in a sickening kind of way.

"A proper young woman. Coyolxāuhqui, goddess of the moon. See? Your mother was right. You grew into your role after all. And your brother. He loves the shadows. He loves the night." She gave a toothy grin. "You will all work well together in the world my boys are building. Light their way when they try to fight that monster at night."

"Tezcatlipoca isn't light," said the girl in a voice like glossed ice.

Her mother waved her hand. "Oh, no, he's just night. Your older brothers will help you. The Centzon Huītznāuhtin. They've been training while I taught you here." Another grin. "This whole time. We'll have two little families. One loving the sun, the other the night."

She manipulated her children to play roles in the world she had dreamed up. This girl was the moon goddess. Her older brothers were the stars, four hundred strong—clearly the earth goddess was not bound by the usual bodily restrictions of pregnancy.

But why? Why the split house; why the violent treatment; why the walls and confinement that kept the siblings from ever seeing each other? Did the mother want passive obedience from these ones, and thought this was the best way to get it? I grappled with the question, playing out every option in an attempt to make sense of such a senseless act. Abraham's deep, honeyed voice could calm any tormented person as he recited bible verses, saying God—the one, all-seeing, almighty God—had a reason for everything, even if we did not understand it. That no death or act was outside his plan.

My shoulders slumped. And then I did. No, I crumpled, right to the ground in the house, my face in my hands. If these were the deities that ruled the skies, there was no plan. These were people, capable of as much love or cruelty as we were. They were people, and sometimes people did things that simply couldn't be reasoned with. And now I had to live with that.

"It'll be lovely," said the girl, her voice emotionless.

"Are you ready?"

The girl held out her hands. Her mother took them. Gold crackled around them, encasing first mother, then daughter, then beginning to flow into the daughter's hands. Where the threads of energy touched her, they turned silver. More and more built up until the pair faced each other, each wreathed in living, snapping light of two different colours. The girl's white hair flickered. As the energy kept flowing, it took on a silver glow. It lifted from her back as the last burst of gold flashed across the distance between the two of them and went out.