I See Fire | Wattys 2021/22 Shortlist | ✔

Chapter Fifty-Seven

At last the torchlight of the villagers behind us reached the great, shadowy thicket. I couldn't help but stare in awe. It was exactly what my mind had painted it to be. Great tree trunks twisted around one another, their roots and branches indistinguishable in the snarled wooden snakes' nest that filled the space between the ground and the leathery-leaved branches that clawed at the sky.

We circled it first. People stopped as they came into view of the scene on its other side. More Centzon Huītznāuhtin lay scattered around two motionless figures in the middle of an immense wheel of lightning traces. It radiated outwards from here, so vast, even the very center of it could have spanned Grillo Negro. Its outermost rays must reach across the sky.

The first figure was Cihua, fallen and bound to the ground with roots like iron bars. She had her own localized set of lightning marks, which drew spider's legs out from her motionless body. They were Coyol's, frostless and gouging. Coyol must have stood behind her and let Cihua feed on her magic to fight. She really would throw every ally she had to their deaths before she let the enemy touch her.

On the ground behind Cihua was the moon goddess herself.

Coyol lay at the very center of the sky-wide lightning wheel. Had I not known better, I would have thought she was asleep, on her side with her hands tucked up and resting on the battered, ice-crusted grass. Her hair, still glowing, spread out behind her and framed her still face. Unlike Cihua, she looked peaceful.

She had escaped the deepest pit of hurt and abandonment as a child, and spent centuries fighting her family in search of closure for her pain. Had she found it in the end?

Villagers around me bowed their heads. A heavy hand rested on my shoulder. Abraham's fingertips touched his forehead, chest, and each shoulder with the slow ceremony of farewell. I closed my eyes.

When Abraham spoke, his rich voice was soft. "With kings and with counselors of the earth, who rebuilt ruins for themselves; or with princes who had gold, who were filling their houses with silver. Or like a miscarriage which is discarded, I would not be, as infants that never saw light. There the wicked cease from raging, and there the weary are at rest. The prisoners are at ease together; they do not hear the voice of the taskmaster. The small and the great are there, and the slave is free from his master."

Jem squeezed me gently against his side as I swallowed back pain as sharp as a fishbone in my throat. I put my head on his shoulder again. Abraham asked Emma something I did not hear. She said to leave the goddess where she lay.

I could have stayed there for an hour had Emma's tug on my sleeve not reminded me why we were here. Jem let me go, and we followed her back to the broad side of the thicket. There among the roots was a gap that wouldn't fit a rabbit. Emma motioned for the other villagers to wait. At her touch, the structure groaned. The crack widened, until Emma's small frame at least could slip through. Jem and I waited for it to keep growing, then followed her into the darkness.

The claustrophobia of the wooden tunnel lasted only a heartbeat before I emerged into a space beyond. I lit the flame in my hand. We were inside a box of tangled wood the size of a single-story house from the world before. When Emma dismissed the giant, shimmering snake wrapped around its edges, it was quiet and safe-feeling in a way I would never have expected had I imagined it myself. On the floor, still covered in blankets of thin roots, were the motionless forms of the gods.

Jem was already kneeling beside one of them, instructing Emma to pull back the blankets. That proved too slow, so she made a gap instead for him to reach through and check Chal's pulse. She was alive. They moved together to the next god, then the next, repeating the good news until I had to sit against the wall and put my head down just to keep from crying. My heart nearly stopped when they took twice as long beside Xolotl, but Jem's face assuaged my worst fears. Xolotl was still hanging on, if barely.