The wind had picked up, and as Kiva walked back to the village, the long grass licked at her ankles and her dress whipped off to the side, pulling so hard at her body that it seemed as though the fabric might lift her off the ground and carry her away.
Kiva was dizzy. Her head felt as though it was floating above her neck, disconnected from the motions of her arms and legs. Her body seemed some foreign thing. She hardly knew herself. Her own actions were confusing to her, her thoughts a jumbled cacophony.
Why had she allowed Matthew to kiss her? And why had she kissed him back?
Even now, she didn’t know. Romance was forbidden to the Vagra—she was the mother of all her people, and couldn’t allow her allegiances to the Vagri to be clouded by love for any single person. For Kiva to kiss anyone would be viewed as a betrayal by the Sisters.
And the fact that she’d fallen for a Stranger, well—that could only make things worse.
Kiva clenched her fists at her side. It wasn’t fair! For everyone else but her, things were so simple—if Thruss or Rehal wanted to be with a boy, and that boy wanted them back, then they could be together. But for Kiva, the Vagra, nothing could ever be that easy. Everywhere she went, she heard the voices echoing in her head: the voices of the Ancestors, the voices of the Sisters, the voices of all the Vagri. She’d heard them for so long that by now, she could no longer recognize the sound of her own voice, her own thoughts.
Kiva’s mind wandered to the possibility that she’d kissed Matthew not because she wanted to, but out of some ulterior motive. After they’d broken off their kiss and disentangled from one another, Kiva had told Matthew that he would face a choice, that soon he’d be forced to side either with the Vagri or with his own people. So, had she kissed him to control him? To bring him over to her side? To give him something to think about as he made his decision?
Was it possible that even when she broke the taboos of her people by kissing Matthew, the Ancestors were controlling that, too? That even her sins weren’t her own?
Kiva shook her head. As soon as she allowed herself to think it, that she’d kissed Matthew to manipulate him, or because she was controlled by the Ancestors, she knew it wasn’t true.
No. She’d kissed Matthew because she wanted to. Because finally, after so many seasons of thinking about everyone but herself, she’d found something that she wanted. A desire that was hers and hers alone.
For so long, she’d felt lost—her own voice drowned beneath the cacophony that echoed in her head. But in Matthew, somehow, she’d found herself again.
The Sisters could be damned if they didn’t understand that. The Ancestors too. The last Vagra had been torn apart by the struggle to please everyone but herself. Kiva didn’t want to make that same mistake.
As she grew closer to the village, though, a sense of unease grew within Kiva’s chest. On the plain, between the village and Matthew’s ship, things were so much simpler. There, the two of them could be free of the crushing expectations of both their people and just be themselves—Kiva and Matthew instead of the Vagra and the Stranger. But when she returned to the village and he went back to his ship, things would start getting complicated again.
She came close to the edge of the village and saw her old favorite spot, the small clefted swell where she’d first seen her vision of the Strangers, the place where she’d first met Matthew in a dream—even if he couldn’t remember it. Her steps slowed. She looked down at the spot, then up at the looming rise. The village lay beyond.
Whatever waited for her there among the crowded huts, among the crush of people, each with their own desires, resentments, and schemes—she wasn’t ready to face it.
She knelt in the grass and nestled into the cleft. She looked up for a moment at the slowly fading light of early evening. In her mind she could hear the background chatter of the Vagri and the Sisters. She pushed them away.
Then, Kiva closed her eyes and thought of Matthew—of the warm strength of his hands gripping her by the waist and the nape of her neck, and the soft press of his lips against hers.