A month later.
Kamuna lingers in death, but as a soul now. She’s been watching over our girls, and every morning, she visits me, just as Illyas once did. She still has a bit of her old power, but it’s pale, like tea leaves strained too many times.
She tells me about Layala and Sayil, of their magic growing. The two of them, each complementing the other.
Layala visited me once, only for a minute. Her magic, though it’s gaining strength, is still too weak to allow her to stay longer. But I visit her every day in death. She is so happy, her face so radiant, her smile brighter than I’ve seen it in such a long time.
“There is so much to learn and explore here, maman!”
I don’t say, You could have said the same in life. Instead, I smile at my daughter and try not to think about how blue her eyes are and how they should be dark as the night sky. Their souls look like the bodies they were threaded into when they were raised, not like their original skins. It’s happened before, I know, when souls take on the color and shape of their new bodies, but it’s jarring, though I’m grateful Layala is alive. No matter what skin her soul has taken on.
Sayil has warmed up to me and comes running when I visit, throwing her long arms around my neck to hug me.
“Hakawati,” she says, then spills into a long tale about how her day went since I last saw her, which was yesterday.
I’m feeling lighter, seeing my daughter and Sayil, who’s become her sister, so happy.
Every time I see Layala, she offers me the same promise, though I never ask it of her. “I will find baba, and I will bring him back.”
“I know you will, Layala,” I lie. “I know you will.”
I offer her a plucked flower, a white one, with edges limned in brown, a few of the petals yellowing. She cups it in her hands, and the flower blooms to life, brown melding into white. She smiles at me, her smile so like Illyas’s I can’t breathe, even with the wrong skin she wears. But I smile back at my child, at Death, and I think, let her be happy, let her be safe. Let her be.
Back in life, I’m alone in my cottage. I don’t go into town unless I need something, as I always have. Except this time, I don’t have Illyas’s visits to look forward to, and I don’t have Layala around.
I do have maman, though I don’t bring her out much. She tires too easily, and I feel bad forcing her out of her slumber.
Instead, I make sure Kamuna’s soul seed is safe in a jar of holding water, tucked away on my shelf, where I look at it every day.
I’m passing souls along, like I did before.
But the days stretch on before me, and I decide, for the first time in years, to make a visit deep into the woods.
The woods are dark and deep, and sunlight doesn’t cut through the thick canopy of leaves and branches above me. The air smells of sweet rot, of leaves and dirt and rainwater. The leaves rustle, and tree branches creak as a breeze stirs through.
Animals scurrying by are shadowy figures, and every tree root could be a snake in this dark.
It’s been a while, years really. But my feet know the way still.
Time has shifted the once-familiar earth, and where there were natural landmarks, they are moved or gone altogether. The stone I thought would be before me is really to my right. And where I thought the great tree with the exposed trunk stood is shifted to my left, the little bark left on it clawed into ribbons by animals.
Still, I am greeting the landmarks, one by one, like old sentries posted at city gates: the nest of rocks that always seemed to me to be the jagged teeth of a slain giant, the tree trunk strangled with thick vines.
The path ends abruptly at a cabin built of hewn logs, leaves, vines, and moss. It looks as if it’s been molded out of the dirt and trees themselves. The air is heavy with the scent of rotted leaves, and I hear moving water nearby. I learned from Kamuna that part of death’s river, the part that leads right to Nahr, flows through this part of the woods.
I owe the river witch a visit.
Death is the same as ever, just as gray and dull as when I left it not even a full day before. I find the boat I used before and float down the silver river, calling out for Nahr.
The river witch is lying on the riverbank, watching me with her slitted eyes.
“You’ve returned,” she says.
“A favor for a favor,” I say. “Your sister, I’ll raise her now.”
The river witch smiles, and her teeth don’t seem as sharp as they did before. I notice for the first time her tongue is rimmed with scales and splinters of bone. “Follow me, Hakawati.” She chuckles to herself. “It’s good to have Death’s mother on my side.”
As she shoves my boat forward, she swims alongside it. “Your daughter has proven most friendly. Her and the other one.” Nahr pauses for a moment. “Two Deaths,” she says. “That’s never been before, I don’t think. At least, not in my memory.”
But then she’s guiding the boat down the river and toward the pond Sayil’s body was buried in before. Nahr disappears under those waters, and she returns what feels like years later, carrying a body out of the pond.
The river witch’s sister is made of salt and the brine of the sea. She is pale, with white dust coating her skin.
I raise her with clay from death’s soil and blood from the river witch. The sacrifice was not needed, the witch being made from death itself, in a way that not even Layala was, being death-touched.
“I owe you, Hakawati,” Brine says.
“You do not,” Nahr says sharply. “She owed me a favor, and she has now repaid it. You owe her nothing.”
But Brine bows her head to me anyway.
“We will avenge you,” Brine says. “As we will ourselves. For Earth did this to us.”
I’ve told both witches my story, and they have told me theirs. We’ve had hours in death, together, and all three of our stories have converged onto betrayal by Earth.
“I will hold you to that,” I say.
“As Hakawati or as Death’s mother?” Nahr asks.
“Both, neither,” I say, confused by what I feel. “As a woman,” I say finally.
The two sisters bow their heads at me.
“We have a third Sister,” Brine says, “who spends her time on a mountain, in a nest. She will help us, for Earth smote her, too.”
“We have a fourth Sister,” Nahr says, but her nose is wrinkled. “She will not help, perhaps, but—”
“We will convince her,” Brine interrupts. “Leave her to me. I am her favorite.”
“I will leave you now,” I say. And since I’m already in death, I find Layala and Sayil, just for a few minutes.
They’re happy, smiling about some new piece of magic they’ve realized they have.
“Maman!” Layala calls, beaming at me. “I was able to fashion a marid out of river water and clay!”
A river witch, I think. And my mind goes to Nahr and Brine, wondering who fashioned them.
“And I was able to create a roc out of a piece of the sky and some feathers I found,” Sayil says, stretching out her arm to the heavens. A large bird, with a beak like a hawk’s and eyes as golden as the sun, latches onto Sayil’s arm with claws as long as fingers.
I smile at them, and though it pains me to leave my daughter behind, I return to my life, to my cottage, and to my day.
Keep them safe.
Keep them happy.
Let them find good love.
Let them know peace.
Let them know their hearts and minds.
Let them be.
I count out each wish-prayer on a bead and repeat each one until the words have blurred together and I no longer can make them out.
The next morning, I step outside my door to a ground filled with so many red seeds, I need two baskets to carry them all inside.
I am Hakawati. My job is to tell the stories of the dead, to pass them along to Mote.
And this is what I do, with my basket on my hip, and stories to tell settling sweet on my tongue.