CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I AM RELUCTANT TO LEAVE THE BUNKHOUSE the following morning, despite the promise of Callisto’s constant company for the next week of patrol. The truth is, I’ve taken to the long days in the Arena even more than I suspected I would. Before training under Adoni’s watchful eye and sharp tongue, I knew the Alexia honed their skills with sweat and tenacity, but I didn’t understand the half of it. They do more than ride horses and shoot arrows —these women embody the Virtues in a way I didn’t realize I craved. The barracks are full of diversity, uniting women from all over Nedé in a common cause. Simplicity undergirds their schedule. Ingenuity improves weapons and horsemanship. And self-restraint —for Siyah’s sake —the discipline they possess in training their bodies and minds puts most of us to shame. If it weren’t for the prospect of becoming Nedé’s ninth Matriarch, I’d beg to stay —to submerge myself in the challenge of mastering my mind and body, of living in community, and keeping peace in Nedé. To become fully Alexia.

But, ready or not, our group hits the road by dawn, leaving the stone Arena to resume testing its usual students without us. We head west from Phoenix City on Highway Volcán, the same road that brought Mother and me to Finca del Mar so many weeks ago. As often as I have eagerly anticipated arriving in Phoenix City, today I am equally pleased to leave behind the shops and houses, the ever-present bustle of Nedéans, and especially the Finca and its residents.

Our patrol comprises Trinidad, me, Brishalynn —fantastic —and four other Alexia whom Trin introduces as Fallon, Merced, Angelica, and Valya. I recognize Fallon and Valya from our training sessions. They worked as combat partners and operated the moving targets. The other two I don’t recognize, but they are Alexia through and through, the usual hard exterior contrasted with the beauty of the female form, accented by close-cut uniforms. Valya’s long braid falls from the back of her head like an intricate rope. Fallon’s is cropped short as grass the goats have sheared. I’ve always been fascinated by Alexia hairstyles. They prove that whether a woman enjoys fussing with style or not, she can be equally fierce and beautiful.

The six Alexia horses, sleek and dark —except for Midas’s ombré mane and tail —keep a quick pace, much faster than I’m used to on lengthy rides. Lexanders are bred for strength and stamina, meaning today’s seventy kilometers to the outpost? They’ll ride it and ask for seconds. Callisto has no breeding advantage, but I’m confident her brio —or plain old pride —will motivate her to keep up.

I settle into the sway of my mare’s back, my lower body mirroring her movements. I still dislike the saddle, but I can’t complain about the extra padding today. Though, even with that luxury, I suspect Bri’s bony rear end will be feeling the kilos tonight. She already shifts uncomfortably. Is it wrong to enjoy her flustered discomfort? Surprisingly, she doesn’t carp, though. In fact, she seems to have abandoned her obnoxious alter ego this morning. I’d even say she seems thoughtful, if I thought her capable of introspection. Maybe she suspects Trinidad will mysteriously “lose” her between Phoenix City and the outpost if she gets out of line. Trin just might. She has often rewarded Bri’s disrespect with double conditioning or a superior combat partner.

The wide, dirt Highway Volcán more or less parallels the Jabiru. It keeps at least four hundred meters south of it, but never more than two kilometers, allowing the road to run a straight course, unlike the coiled river that, I’ve heard, would be twice as long if pulled taut. We’ll follow the highway all the way to our patrol assignment which, in a stroke of good luck, happens to be the western edge of my home Province. When Trinidad conveyed our assignment in the predawn light this morning, I didn’t even try to hide a smile. I’ve always been curious about that area of Nedé. Today I’ll finally get to see it.

According to Trin, we’ll spend the next seven days patrolling the western swath of Amal, along Camino del Oeste, checking in on the sparse little towns and fincas brazenly occupying the outer edges of the Province. Jamara, Nari, and Yasmine were assigned with another handful of Alexia to patrol the northern border of Fik’iri Province.

The day stretches on, heat and pungent horse sweat our constant companions. By noon we near the center of Nedé, where the four Provinces touch. This is familiar country. Bella Terra lies scarcely a kilometer north, tucked between us and the Jabiru. When we pass the twin rain trees that mark either side of the road home, I strain for a glimpse of Mother’s finca, though I know it will remain obscured by the gentle rise of a hill.

Strangely, the place I was so anxious to leave now beckons me. I long to stroll through the neatly cropped rows of cacao plants, breathe in the tall canopies of orange tree blossoms, run recklessly down the hill to the stark-white villa, nestled in the center like a milky quartz stone on a bed of moss.

Bella may not be “home” anymore, but it must be part of who I am, because being near it soothes me, like one of Mother’s songs. I can almost hear the little Gentles’ happy mealtime chatter, see Mother’s soft face smiling at their antics. And Tre. Something deep in my heart aches when I imagine his one-dimpled smile, laughing at something I’ve said, under our fig tree on the riverbank. I miss him. I miss them all. Having tasted the coldness of Finca del Mar, having witnessed the twisted agenda of an aging Matriarch, the warmth of Bella —the light and the love I once experienced there, once despised there —feels as much a part of me as the horse that carries me past it.

Stupid Rei. I had a place I belonged but didn’t see it. Certainly never appreciated it. Now I’m on my own, and I must shoulder whatever comes next with the independence I fought so hard for.

By midafternoon we pass the last recognizable landmark: a Materno finca I visited once with Mother. With each step, I venture farther west than I’ve gone before.

Highway Volcán is maintained by Gentles, but ripples and crevices from recent rains force us to slow our pace. The area’s hardwood trees were cleared long ago —during the foremothers’ time —and the fallow interim has allowed bushes, grasses, and vines to overtake the remaining clusters of palms, abandoned structures, and younger hardwoods. In every direction, nature devours nature. Only the occasional village, or a finca’s tidy fields, hold back the overeager foliage.

The monotony of tangled green and oppressive heat dull the novelty of our adventure. I sing quietly to myself to keep from nodding off.

You take one, and I’ll take three,

And I’ll meet you there, at the mahogany tree,

Where the fire don’t burn, and the dark water’s deep,

We’ll save them there, at the mahogany tree.

You follow the mare, and I’ll follow a stream,

And we’ll leave them there, at the mahogany tree . . .

“What’s that song?”

Trinidad’s voice snaps me back to attention. She brings Midas alongside, her gold-tipped curls bouncing in time to the horse’s steps.

“I don’t know the name. Mother used to sing it to me.”

“I like it. One of the old songs?” she asks, seeming genuine. Everything about Trinidad is genuine, though. She can come across hard as teak, but never false. She says what she means, does what she says. I like that about her. I trust that about her.

“It must be. You haven’t heard it?”

She shakes her head.

Strange. It’s a tune I’ve heard since infancy; the words as familiar as Mother’s dark hair and hazel eyes. If it’s not one of the old songs, where did she learn it?

I ponder the words as I hum it again, but their meaning remains ambiguous. I’m not surprised. Most of Nedé’s songs border on cryptic, like so many poems written for beauty before sense; otherwise, I’m told, the Brutes would have punished the women for the songs’ bold indictments against their cruelty.

Trin keeps riding, silently, beside me. The others are far enough before and behind that I chance a more personal question. “Did you always want to be Alexia?”

After a moment, she stretches a hand to her boot, retrieving a short dagger. Its metal handle sparkles with inlaid turquoise and bone-white quartz.

“This was my Nana’s,” she says, rubbing her thumb over the stones. “She was Alexia, many years ago. It was her only weapon . . . and she never had to use it.” She slides the dagger back into her boot as she continues, “When I was small, she told me stories of her travels, how being Alexia gave her the opportunity to explore Nedé, helping women settle disputes —she was good at that, the old softie —bringing news to the outlying towns and such. When it was time for me to choose a destiny, I knew I wanted to serve Nedé like Nana did, help others and see everything it has to offer.”

I smile at the thought of Trin knee-high to her Nana, dreaming of one day becoming who she is now. And I smile because I can relate.

Trin shifts her weight and tips her head toward the bow slung over one shoulder. When she speaks again, her voice is quieter, for privacy or out of sadness, I’m not sure. “But the Alexia are no longer what they once were.”

She seems lost in memory, or caught up in the realization. I wonder if she’s ever shared that with anyone. Whom else could she talk with so candidly? I doubt Adoni. Not her Alexia recruits either. That leaves me —a headstrong Candidate who has somehow come to consider her a mentor . . . maybe even a friend.

“What are they now?” I ask, not sure I want to hear the answer.

“We are both more and less.”

I recognize the clipped tone as her way of finishing the conversation. Though I’m dying to press further, I restrain my curiosity. Instead, I attempt to decipher her meaning.

More. Because of my own Grandmother’s patronage, the Alexia are stronger, better trained and armed, than at any other time in Nedé’s history. That part of Trin’s answer is easy to guess. But less? How are the Alexia inferior to what they once were?

I mull on the question for the better part of an hour before a tentative answer surfaces in the form of a memory. The day Jamara almost killed Bri, Trinidad had approached Adoni. I remember her concern, the frustration twisting her face. She wanted Adoni to call it off, but the leader wouldn’t budge. She would have let Jamara murder a Candidate in the Succession, on what I assume were the Matriarch’s orders.

Trinidad joined the Alexia for adventure and peacekeeping, like her Nana, but it seems their role has morphed into Matriarch Teera’s personal militia. Grandmother has turned them into a weapon. And that brings another puzzle, one I may be unable to solve no matter how many kilometers we ride: Why?

By evening we near the junction where Highway Volcán tees into Camino del Oeste: a north-south road that parallels the Jungle. Though I’ve never seen it personally, Dom Bakshi insisted we study the maps in the schoolroom until we knew Nedé’s geography as well as our own home’s. Unlike the two-dimensional maps, this vantage point vividly illustrates how Highway Volcán got its name: the enormous cone-shaped remnant of an ancient mountain rises menacingly out of the Jungle Wilds straight ahead of us. It’s known as El Fuego, and I’ve heard it occasionally smokes, though it hasn’t erupted in the history of Nedé.

The Divisadero Mountains —this morning just small lumps on the horizon —rise east of the border like green giants, rock faces peering out from tangles of hair, guardians of the Jungle. Thick clouds pass over their heads like swirling crowns, backlit with golden light. A waterfall pours uninhibited from a lush, rocky outcropping halfway up El Fuego to the Jungle below, rebounding in a swirl of white mist. Birds soar and swoop, searching for their next meal. The mountains roll into the distance, and I’ve never seen such gradients of green: fresh as new grass here, almost black in the unknown beyond.

I never expected the Jungle to look so . . . beautiful.

The sheer wildness of it produces a strange, hollow feeling inside. Beautiful, yes, but disquieting and fearsome too. I’m in unknown country now, having to trust the Alexia around me to know what they’re doing and where they’re going. I trust Trin, at least.

As heaven’s lights fade, the glass windows of a small finca about half a kilometer ahead burn with warm lamplight.

“We’re almost ‘home,’” Trinidad assures us.

“Are we staying there?” Bri asks, motioning toward the villa. They are the first words we’ve heard from her in hours.

Trin smirks. “If by ‘there’ you mean the camp along the river, yes we are.”

I strain to distinguish shapes in the dying light, and can just make out a clearing between the road and a closer section of the Jabiru. The camp, as Trin called it, comprises a twenty-by-thirty patch of ground, cleared of brush and mostly hidden by the surrounding foliage.

We set up for the night just as the last graying light gives way to blackness. Fallon retrieves a bundle of dry kindling from her pack, then works with a few logs to grow a flame, though it’s still so hot I want to jump in the river.

“What’s that for?” Bri grumbles. “You trying to roast us?”

Fallon is roughly Trinidad’s size, though at least ten years older. She points to three fat scars that nearly encircle her otherwise impeccable bicep.

“So this doesn’t happen to you.”

A shudder runs through me, and Bri’s eyes widen, but neither of us respond. They must be claw marks —puma, jaguar, who knows. The Jungle mountains loom above us, dark and mysterious now, keepers of unseen predators likely just waking up, hungry after a long day’s nap. I unroll my blanket as close to the flickering flames as I can get. I’ll sleep by the fire, even if it roasts me like a plucked curassow.

As the world goes dark, the steady buzz of insects comes to life, louder and more layered than I’ve ever heard before. I try not to think about the Wilds or what might prowl there, focusing instead on the red-orange flames curling over the wood. Other than the outdoor kitchen, we rarely had reason for fires at Bella Terra; I can’t remember ever sitting and simply staring at one. Now I’m mesmerized by the collision of flame, fuel, and oxygen, entranced by the tongues of orange licking the sticks clean, burping up clouds of smoke in satisfied billows, leaving behind bony embers pulsating red and white as they cool.

When my face burns too hot and my eyes sting from dryness, I roll onto my back and watch the spirals of smoke and sparks float up to the stars. Ten thousand shining pinpricks dust the black canvas, but I find familiar friends in the heavens.

When we were children, Dom Bakshi would make up stories to help us remember our lessons. They illustrated history, language, geography, and the like. I’ve long forgotten most of them, but one story refused to be lost to childhood. I can still picture Dom Bakshi’s shiny bouffant of hair, the slight bob of her head as she recounted the tale, eyes full of wonder and intrigue:

“Long ago, the gods issued Nedé a challenge,” my tutor began, with her usual flair for frequent dramatic pauses. “If an Alexia ever successfully shot the sun, they would grant her to become an immortal goddess. However, were she to miss, she would be swept up instead to the heavens and transformed into a starry warning to others. The gods were very arrogant, you see. Siyah, the first Alexia defender, was said to have been so strong and so accurate that she determined to do it. So she pulled that string back with all her might and shot her arrow high with a prayer. It flew fast, straight, and true. But when the gods realized that a human was about to claim immortality, they changed their minds and sealed up the heavens. Her arrow struck the layer of atmosphere between the sky and the expanse beyond and stuck fast between the worlds, like a needle in a pincushion. The Nedéans were outraged, naturally, but the gods ignored their accusations of injustice and set Siyah in the sky regardless, where she blinks overhead tonight, bow at the ready, blade at her hip.”

It’s a silly story, I know, but the true bits —Siyah being our first Alexia, the starry dot-to-dot that resembles her —served their purpose: I’ve always been able to find the Siyah constellation in the night sky.

I find other star patterns, and each one makes me feel small, even the comparatively tiny cluster of stars at Siyah’s heels called the Rooster. I hate roosters. But from his tail . . . My eyes trace the glowing pinpoints of light to find the pronounced hindquarters and outstretched tail of The Great Mare as she gallops across the sky. I’ve always loved the Mare best, for obvious reasons. I begged Dom Bakshi to tell me a story about that one too, featuring my Callisto, made immortal in the skies by a God who knew she’d be mine before time began. Mother always said he made Callisto and me for each other. I didn’t wonder then whether she was right about his existence, or if the Virtues were our highest calling, as I later learned most Nedéans believe. No, back then I was content to pretend I was Siyah, riding my divinely appointed, shimmering mare through the heavens, galloping trails of stardust till dawn.

But now —sleeping on the ground far from my childhood home, training in a Succession I’m desperate to win —now I wonder. The answer feels important somehow, and not just because I could really use some help. As I’m drawn down the hazy tunnel ushering my mind into sleep, I find myself hoping she’s right.

A violent slicing sound startles me awake. It’s almost as dark with my eyes open as closed, but I just make out Bri’s snarling face over me, her eyes glistening in the dying firelight, before she hurries away. A silver short sword pierces the dirt next to me, glinting centimeters from my chest. I scramble to my feet in shock, staring at the sword, trying to orient myself: it’s night; everyone else is asleep; I think Bri just tried to kill me.

No, she would have sliced through my skin if she wanted to kill me. Her aim’s not that poor. I squint in the darkness, expecting to see her gangly limbs sprinting away in the distance, but instead she’s leaning against a tree overlooking the river.

I yank the sword from the ground and sneak, trembling and breathing hard, toward her, with every intention of doing something rash. As I close the distance, raising the blade to shoulder height in anticipation, she lifts her eyes to me. But instead of fighting, running, or even speaking, her mouth turns down, and she stares out at the river again. Moonlight reflects off the water, giving her face an eerie glow. The illuminated tear track down her cheek does nothing to quell my fury. My arm accelerates toward her, and I bury the tip of the blade into the tree trunk just beside her own chest.

“You’re welcome,” she says, trying to sound snarky, but her voice quivers.

It had to have been her test, and she willingly failed. This girl —I’ll never figure her out.

“Why didn’t you do it? You hate me. You could have gotten rid of me and been rewarded for your obedience.”

She draws herself up, forcing a half-hearted smile.

“You don’t give my jealousy enough credit, Rei. The Matriarch didn’t put me up to it. I wanted to kill you all by myself. . . . At least, I thought I did.” She tugs her sword from the tree and sheathes it. “Turns out, I’m not as wicked as I thought I could be. You know, killing the saint who saved you —there’s probably a special place in hell for people like that. I couldn’t do it. Ironic, right? I was going to take you out so I could have a shot at Apprentice —had the story all figured out too, how you were conspiring with the Amal senators to do Teera in, how she would reward me for my loyalty —but my cowardice only proved I’m not worthy of the position. I don’t have it in me to do ‘whatever it takes.’”

“That’s not weakness, and you know it.” I exhale the dying embers of adrenaline and lean against the tree trunk in her place. “Removing your enemies is easy. Learning to live with them takes strength.” I’m surprised at my sudden wisdom.

The quiet rushing of the river fills the silence as the minutes pass, until there’s little room for more talk.

“Do me a favor,” I quip, standing to leave. “Don’t wake me up again?”

She rolls her eyes, but relief seeps through the show.

I leave her alone with her regrets, wondering which failure pains her more: that she wanted to kill me, or that she couldn’t.

Returning to my place by the fire, a sleepy Trinidad questions me with her eyes.

“Everything’s fine,” I say. And I think everything is. Somehow I don’t believe Bri will plan another attempt on my life.

At least not tonight.

Sleep proves too slippery to catch, though, so I watch the pulsing embers for a while. If Grandmother still hasn’t given Bri a test, maybe my obnoxious co-Candidate is right. Perhaps Grandmother isn’t giving her due consideration. But what of me? Still no challenge. Could I be so favored that Grandmother doesn’t see the need to test me? The possibility both relieves and unsettles. I’d rather not be forced to prove my allegiance in some contrived trial. But if she doesn’t see the need, what does that say of her assessment of my malleability? Is she so convinced I’d do anything —anything —she told me to, for the good of Nedé?

As I wait out the darkness, I go round and round with a slippery quandary: Will I? What am I prepared to compromise in order to rule Nedé, to remain friends with Tre, to help other Gentles like Neechi and Little Boo? Do I have what it takes to win, if victory forces me to betray the very conscience I’m trying to follow?