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“You needn’t fret. I won’t tell him.” Nakri leans forward on her cane. “I wouldn’t recommend you do, either.”
“I’m not a fool.” A knot tightens in my chest. “He’d kill her.”
“Angma has been toying with the two of you,” she says. “Bringing you together as allies, when she knows you are destined to become enemies. Clever tiger.”
I press my lips together. “So the prophecy was wrong.”
“The serpents are keepers of ancient magic,” replies Nakri. “Magic not even they understand anymore. Their visions of the future may come in pieces, often difficult to put together, but they will come to pass…in one way or another. My theory is that he foresaw your sister would need protection from Angma. Someone who would sacrifice what was necessary.”
“He decided that someone was me,” I say hollowly. I’ve always known that I’m the one who must fall.
“Indeed. That is why he poisoned your blood—to give you the strength you’ll need to fight Angma.”
Nakri takes our two empty drinking bowls and presses them together to make a sphere: an impression of the pearl. “Tomorrow, when Vanna turns seventeen, she will at last come into the full power of her pearl. As soon as that happens, Angma will kill her. If Angma can claim both halves of the pearl as her own, she will wield the tremendous powers of both dragon and demon. She would become the greatest sorceress of all Lor’yan.”
It’s my turn to lean forward. “Tell me how to stop her.”
Nakri’s eyes roll back until they are completely white. “The threads of past and present are already irrevocably stitched and cannot be undone. But the threads of tomorrow may yet weave a different path. Choose the right threads, and your sister will live.”
That doesn’t answer my question. “Then what? If Vanna lives, Hokzuh will come for her.”
“So long as the pearl is broken, there will always be those who seek it,” murmurs Nakri. “That is its misfortune.”
My heart speeds up. “Then I’ll kill Angma and give Vanna her pearl. Its power will go to my sister.”
Nakri nods. “That is the only way she will have the strength to defeat Hokzuh. It is the only way she will live.”
I start to rise, but Nakri grips my shoulder. Her eyes are still white. “Be warned. The pearl is no one’s salvation except Hokzuh’s. Powerful it may be, but it has a mind of its own—and will be more of a curse than a blessing to bear.”
I won’t be deterred. After all, none of this is news to me. Hokzuh has said the same thing, about the pearl being alive in its own way.
“Vanna is strong,” I reply. “That’s why the pearl chose her.”
The two bowls in Nakri’s hand snap in half. Her voice falls to a whisper. “Who said that the pearl chose her?”
I don’t get a chance to ask what she means. Outside, the crocodiles lash at the boardwalk with their tails, hissing with an undercurrent of terror.
Nakri blinks, and her eyes are cinder-black once more. The beads on her necklace roll and roll, growing alarmingly fast. “Suiyaks,” she whispers. “Suiyaks are here!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Nakri shoves me aside and opens the wooden trunk I’ve been sitting on. Inside are bundles of dried shrubs, bags of ground teeth and severed fish fins, and jars labeled with animal secretions that I wished I hadn’t read. No wonder the house smells so terrible.
She plucks out a thin vial. The liquid within is a questionable shade of green. “Give this to Hokzuh.”
I tuck the bottle in my pocket, and Nakri shoves me out the door. “I’ve a boat under my house. Take it and go. My crocodiles will keep the suiyaks at bay, but not for long.”
A suiyak smashes through the straw walls, and her chalky eyes take us in with glee. “I smelled you, sister,” she greets Nakri, levitating as she speaks. “Mother Angma bids you well.”
Nakri’s greeting is a hard swing of her cane. She misses, and with a laugh, the suiyak bounces back. But Nakri’s spry. The old woman leaps onto one of her old chests, and without mercy, she clubs at the suiyak’s neck, neatly severing her head.
“It’s the fastest way to kill them,” Nakri explains between breaths. At my feet, the suiyak’s white hair is fizzling into mist, bones turning soft as a fish’s. She melts into a murky puddle, which Nakri mops into a crack on the ground. “Go!”
In the distance, the villagers start screaming. More suiyaks are coming.
Nakri’s brow pinches with distress. “Go!” she urges again. “They’re after you, not Yappang.”
I grab my spear. A suiyak drops by the door, and I don’t hesitate. On my way out, I bash her skull in—with a satisfying crunch.
