Kai thought Rasia had tried to kiss him yesterday. Maybe. He wasn’t sure. It could have been a figment of his imagination; she could have meant it as a joke, but it didn’t seem the same as when she had been goofing around earlier. If only Kai had been brave enough to stand his ground and find out.
Kai jolted out of his reverie to find Rasia staring at him from where she stretched one leg atop the windship railing. All throughout the day, she’d been scrutinizing his every move and action. He thought about the almost-kiss again. Was he crazy to consider the possibility that Rasia, maybe, had a flame for him?
Rasia asked, “Are you magic?” Kai’s stomach plummeted at the question. “I thought I was crazy at first, but your eyes glowed yesterday. And today, I noticed you adjust the sail before the wind.”
The dragon-wing sail snapped overhead. Kai had no idea what she meant. “. . . is that a bad thing?”
“Steering a windship is reactionary. The wind shifts and a windeka adjusts the sail. But when you get caught up with multiple tasks at once, you adjust the sail for a wind change that happens vibrations later. Famed windekas who have studied wind patterns and seasonal charts their entire lives can’t anticipate such minute wind shifts as you do. It’s not . . . possible. I thought you didn’t have magic like your jih, but I don’t know how else to explain it.”
“That’s not magic. I feel the wind like everyone else,” Kai said, becoming more and more uncertain as he watched the rising skepticism on Rasia’s face.
Rasia lifted from her stretch. “No. What do you think the flags atop the windships are for? Windekas check it for wind direction, or they lick a finger and stick it in the air. They do these things because they can’t anticipate something that hasn’t happened yet.”
“. . . you don’t do any of those things.”
Rasia paused, squinted at him, and then explained. “I use my hair.”
She tossed a hand through her hair as some sort of demonstration, then frowned when her fingers got caught on a knot. She tore at it. A strong breeze swept through, waving both her and Kai’s shoulder-length hair to the wind’s mercy. Kai got the general idea.
“I always know which way the wind is blowing, but for how it’s going to blow . . . I can make reasonable guesses on how the currents are going to act in a certain season, but I don’t actually know.”
Kai’s frown deepened as he absorbed the implications. They both terrified and angered him. He’d been aware of shifting wind currents his entire life, but that wasn’t how magic was supposed to work. The magic-born didn’t come into their powers until at least five years-till, but inexplicable strange phenomena had been happening to Kai all his life. Kai was partly convinced that all the strange occurred only in his head, and it wasn’t something real and physical like tah’s magic. She could grow trees from barren ground. For Kai, magic wasn’t literal rainbows like it was for Nico. Kai lost days.
How was he supposed to know if he was magic or just crazy? He never would have known what happened at the oasis if Zephyr hadn’t been there to anchor his sense of time. Magic was terrifying; it was out of his control. And if he had no control over it, how did Kai know that the things he hoped to accomplish in life were done by his own hands?
“Are you crying?”
Kai hid his face in his hands and ran. He fled down the stairs and slipped down the last few rungs. He searched for someplace to hide, but everything felt too open. He scurried into the cave and farther into the gloom, into the tight tunnels of rocks where the ground slipped wet and dipped into a silent pool of water. Kai crouched in the darkness, trying to hold it together and failing so abysmally as he croaked out sobs.
“Kai?”
Kai jumped at the sound of Rasia’s voice, which echoed louder off the cave walls and ricocheted around him.
“I want to be alone,” Kai mumbled.
Whereas Nico would have honored his request and given him the space to work through his ugly tangle of emotions, instead, the darkness shifted. Kai sensed Rasia coming closer. She patted her hand along the cave wall until she slapped down on his head, his face, then his knee. She sunk right next to him, and Kai tensed, irate by her refusal to leave.
“Look . . .” Rasia’s disembodied voice rang out from the blackness beside him. “Ysai-ji has made me well aware that at times I can be quite, a little, just a touch, insensitive. I don’t know what I said wrong. Actually, I’m really fucking confused here. What did I do? Why are we in the dark? Do you hate me now?”
“No, Rasia. It’s nothing to do with you. It’s me. It’s . . . I . . .” Kai pressed his hands to his eyes with the sudden guilt caused by Rasia’s confusion. He sucked in a breath, but the admission came no louder than a reedy whisper, shaped into words for the first time in his life.
“I have magic,” Kai said, unable to run away from it any longer, “but it’s broken. It’s never worked right for me. I can’t control it, and I hardly know when it’s happening. This is the first time I’ve gotten any sort of chance to do anything worthwhile, and it’s all a lie. All the progress I’ve made with the windship has been my magic all along. How can I ever accomplish anything if the magic accomplishes it for me? How can I possibly know what’s me and what’s not? I’ll never know who I am, or what I’m capable of, because I have this stupid broken magic I can’t control.”
“O . . . kay,” Rasia said slowly. Kai heard her shift her legs, stretching them out to rock a foot against his. “I . . . have mixed feelings about magic. It’s not fair. Nico’s magic gives her this huge advantage compared to everyone else in the Forging. Is she all that amazing if she was born with this innate ability others don’t have? I don’t think so, but everyone else is always so fucking impressed.”
“Then I met you, and I realized I have a sort of magic of my own. Compared to all the others in the Forging, I began much further ahead of the starting line than everyone else. I know the Desert. I know windships. I know all these things because Shamai-ta taught me to know all these things. It’s why I needed to break his record or why I have to hunt a dragon, because doing the same things expected of everyone else isn’t a challenge. I need to challenge myself. I always need to be better. I hate standing still most of all.”
“We all have magic in our own sort of way. The small little things that make up you—the way you remember and observe details, your smarts, and your magic—all add to the fact that while others might have the potential to be a good windeka, you have the potential to be a great one. But all that potential means nothing without hard work. You’ve still got to put in the work, Kai, no matter where you’re starting from. And that hard work is on you. It’ll always be on you. That’s the only thing any of us can ever truly control.”
Rasia’s words felt like a lifeline tossed into a sea of storm clouds. They buoyed him out of the waters of his insecurities and self-hate.
“And no offense, but Nico can summon rainstorms and Avalai Ohan had human-eating plants. In comparison, you’re essentially a human weathervane. While it’s an everyday type of useful, it still sucks. I’d want fire-breathing or something. You’ve been rolling nothing but reds your entire life, Kai.”
Kai found himself smiling at her dark observation. He tensed a moment when her head dropped on his shoulder, then he slowly decompressed under the anchor of her touch.
“Once,” Kai whispered softly to Rasia, “Suri complained how easy it was to get lost in the Grankull. I told her to just listen to how the bones sing. She looked at me like I was crazy. I told Nico about it, and she looked at me like I was crazy, too. Nico didn’t hear the bones until she was three years-till. I’ve never not heard them, and I never knew I was the only one who could. It’s terrifying to think the world is one way when it isn’t, and to be uncertain of it every day afterward. For so long, I’ve tried to ignore the magic and pretend it wasn’t there and hope it was all in my head.”
“You’re smart enough to know that won’t work,” Rasia said. “Perhaps it’s time for you to stop thinking of your magic as this separate thing that needs controlling and accept it as a part of you.”
“It’s supposed to be controlled. That’s how it’s supposed to work.”
“Is it, though? There’s a lot of magic out here in the Desert, and as far as I can tell, what defines magic is the fact that it doesn’t have any sensible rules. I can’t possibly understand what you’re going through, and I can’t imagine what it’s like to have no control over something so . . . big, but it’s got to be tiring fighting that every day.”
Kai dropped his face in his hands. Rasia was right about that part—that it was a fight. Every. Single. Day.
He had plenty more secrets, and Kai couldn’t hold their oppressive weight any longer. He needed to release them. “I want to tell you something, but promise not to tell jih?”
Rasia laughed at that. “To this day, Nico still doesn’t know I’m the one who cut her hair first day of school.”
“That was you?”
“Focus. You were going to tell me super-duper secrets.”
Kai drummed his fingers along his thigh, grounding himself. “I hear the bones of the Elder sing. I apparently track wind like a sixth sense. I don’t sunburn. I’ve never gotten heatstroke. High noon doesn’t bother me. I drink less water but have formed the habit of drinking more because Nico worries. Sometimes, I lose track of days. Recently, in the last day or so, I know where you are. I wake up and know you’re outside running beyond the canyon or on the windship. I have a better sense of it when you’re exercising. My eyes glow. I don’t know for what reasons, but it happens enough that little jih was surprised to learn no one else’s eyes do the same. Those are the things that I know. The things I’ve kept in my head.”
“. . . I’d still prefer the fire-breathing.”
A laugh burst from Kai’s chest. It echoed and echoed and echoed, circling around them like draining water. Kai’s lips twisted into a wry smile. “No, you don’t. Because then it’d be too easy.”
Kai figured she’d have a sharp comeback in response. Instead, a thoughtful silence ensued until Rasia admitted, like her own secret, “Yeah, you’re right.”
They sat in that darkness for a while, comfortable in it now, until Kai gathered all the courage he possessed in every grain of his body and whispered, “I think . . . I think you tried to kiss me yesterday, but so often for me the world seems one way when it isn’t. I have difficulty discerning reality on my own, and even more so now, because you constantly challenge all the truths and expectations of what I thought I knew. I don’t know what the world is supposed to be anymore.”
Kai could feel Rasia’s smile curl against his shoulder. She stood with mischief and teasing and an island of airy delight. Full of any and everything Kai never thought possible.
She declared, “The world is what we forge of it.”