Khaya was waiting for her downstairs, sitting on the edge of her lemonwood desk under the glow of one of the few remaining lights, arms crossed, shoulders rounded. He looked up from the tome balanced on his thigh as Asanda brushed a mote of dust from the ladder off her dress.
"Do you think Mama will mind if I dig into her koffee?" he asked casually. "With the buna being spoiled and all."
Khaya is young, her mother had once told her. The young act calm in grave times for two reasons: to hide and to call out without words.
Asanda looked over at their mother, thick iron chains binding her to the bed on the far side of the room, eyes looking up at the ceiling.
Asanda turned back to her little brother, slipping the rune-eye into her pocket. "What is it?"
He yawned. "I haven't slept since yesterday. A nice mug of–"
"What is it, Khaya?" she huffed.
His shoulders tightened again. "I heard Mama wants to use the rune-eye."
"She does." Asanda's lips flattened. "You were snoring like you were asleep."
"I was, almost... then I dreamed of koffee." He put the tome on the desk and pushed himself onto his feet, so they were of a height. "I'll do it."
"You can't."
"I can't or you won't let me?"
"You can't," Asanda said, foot tapping. She touched her brow. "You're not a longthinker. Khaya, there's no time for this. Help Anathi where she needs you. If Lifa wakes up, brew a mug of dusktea for him."
He had the petulant look of a sibling ready to fight a losing battle. "You want me to make tea while you go out doing important things?"
"A moment ago you wanted to make koffee, do both if it will help." Asanda turned her back to him and crossed the room.
If you think keeping a man alive in great moments of pain is not important, then you're throwing away all the trust I have in you. It wasn't until she was by the side of the bed that she realised she had not said that aloud to him. She was about to look over her shoulder at him, but then her eyes locked with Ma, and her purpose became singular.
Ma's eyes reflected the bedside candle, the bruises on her eyelids a corruption of her sun-rich skin. "Ready?"
"It's not me it'll hurt." Are you sure the Sunspear is locked away?
Ma frowned, twisting the little scar on her top lip. "As sure as I can be. Remember, I will guide you. Listen as though I were your own thoughts, and trust both our judgement as if it is yours alone."
"Yes, Ma." Asanda pulled out the rune-eye necklace and put her locks through it before looping it over her head, careful to keep the pouch of woven hair from touching her own. "I'm ready."
Ma sighed, the chains over her chest rising and falling. Even after twenty years in the misty highlands of the Hundred Hills, she kept the complexion of a Sunlander by milling corn at noon under the eye of the sun. It was the deep red-brown found only in the grain of fine leather or burnished bronze. As little as her mother spoke of the Sunlands, she still preferred ostrich-shell beads over the glass ones so popular here, ochre to calamine, the peaceful valley watchers of prosperity over the harsher, harder spirits of the South. When she sighed, there was only one spirit she was suppressing.
Ma's eyes fixed on Asanda, unflinching. "Do it."
Asanda pulled down the wall behind which she kept her fear. It pushed into her back like the heat of an open oven, drawing out beads of sweat on her neck. Before she lost her nerve, she willed both walls together to form one and centred it in her mind. The weight of everything she was and wished to be, the pockets of lack that were what she was not, the threads of stimuli that made her human, the ocean of mind and the spirit stream, all this she put to the left side of the mind, the heart side, through which all life moved.
The weight of it made her bedroom tilt to the right. The lack on the right side of the wall was like holding an ear to a conch; it made her eye water and threatened to drive her to madness in the next few heartbeats unless she acted quickly. Asanda twisted a thick strand of her mother's afro and tore it off at the roots. She twisted it around the pouch of woven hair, then twisted the tip of her own lock around it and held it over the candle flame.
Unblinking, Asanda watched the flame burn white.
The smoke of melting hair filled her nostrils.
The gravity of her mother's soul filled the right side of her mind, and at once she was half and whole.