Page 42 of Immortal Longings
“Careful with my feelings, Makusa,” she says wryly. “I don’t like being accused of nonsense.”
She pretends not to notice the increasing pressure on her ankle. Anton pretends not to be gripping so hard he could snap her bones with just one extra twinge.
He smiles languidly. “Are you playing games with me, Princess?”
“Maybe I am.” She peers out from the nook. No one is around. No threats. “Would you like that?”
“I like where this is going. Keep talking.”
Calla mirrors his smile. With a swift yank, she tugs her leg free from his grasp and loops her sword back onto her belt, the metallic sound grating at her ears.
“I think we’re done for the day. Same time tomorrow?”
She’s walking off before Anton has the chance to respond.
Although the Weisannas are merely a part of the larger palace guard, they often feel like a unit of their own, pushed into major assignments and sent out on patrol at double the frequency. Galipei knows each and every one of them: his distant cousins and second aunts and thrice-removed uncles. So longas they have the Weisanna eyes, their life has been charted from birth. Their kingdom needs them. San-Er needs them. With such a power, one cannot shirk their duties.
Galipei ducks into the pharmacy, pushing at the plastic curtain draped over the doorway. The air-conditioning rushes out, and he drops the curtain into place again before he’s yelled at for letting the cold escape.
At the counter, there’s a woman in dark glasses, rushing around her cabinets. Jars of herbal medicine from the provinces are organized side by side with boxes bearing complex labels from the factories in San. When Galipei was younger, he was afraid of the yellow roots in the corner, floating in clear liquid. He used to say they looked like brains, reaching with their stems and ready to invade their victims.
Then he would get a solid thump on the head with a rolled-up newspaper, and he would laugh and laugh, asking to be thumped again because it was funny.
The woman at the counter takes off her glasses as Galipei approaches, crinkling the lines around her silver eyes.
“Hello, Aunt,” Galipei says softly. “Have you eaten?”
A Weisanna can leave the palace guard if they wish. But it is the most shameful decision to make, an unforgivable crime as far as the rest of San-Er is concerned.
“Ah, an old woman like me doesn’t get hungry often anyway.” She pulls open a drawer behind the counter. “What will it be today? Muscle pain? Headache? You need more rest, less running around. What would your parents say if they were still around? Can’t start a family if you’re bone-tired all the time.”
Galipei can’t hold back his smile. Though it was the palace who raised him—fed him, clothed him, put him through the academy and supplied extra lessons to train him into the guard he would become—it was his aunt who loved him. She was ostracized when she quit, but that doesn’t matter to Galipei, no matter how much his other cousins whisper about his visits.
“It’s not for me,” Galipei says. His smile drops. He looks around, ensuring that there are no other customers browsing the single shelf in the store. There’s one surveillance camera propped up near the clock on the wall, but San-Er’s security does not have sound. Nevertheless, he lowers his volume as he leans in.
“Do you have cinnabar?”
His aunt’s brow furrows. “For what? Are you trying to create an immortality elixir?”
Galipei shakes his head. “Why is that your first thought? Maybe the palace wants to carve lacquerware and needs decorative powder.”
Slowly, his aunt starts to rummage through her lower shelves. Her face is still in a grimace, mostly because Galipei didn’t actually answer her original question. Cinnabar, a mineral that Talin mines from its borderlands, comes into San-Er in moderate amounts to be used in the factories for its vermillion-red color.
It’s also highly toxic.
“I have it in powder form,” his aunt says carefully. Every Weisanna goes through the same training units; they possess the same knowledge from the palace. If Galipei has come looking for a toxic substance, there’s little else he might be using it for.
“You keep in mind”—his aunt isn’t looking at him as she packs it up, screwing the lid tight and placing it carefully into a paper bag, but he feels the sharpness of her words nonetheless—“you can always leave the palace. It’s not so bad out here.”
“I can’t,” Galipei replies. The idea is unfathomable to him. “They need me.”
“Your crown prince needs you, you mean” is her reply. With a shake of her head, his aunt passes him the bag. The top has been folded over multiple times, as if she still wants to prevent him from accessing the mineral despite being the one to give it to him. “He is more poisonous than all the cinnabar in the world combined.”
“He’s not—”
The plastic at the door rustles, bringing in another customer. Galipei swallows his words, keeping his face angled away so that he’s not recognized. His aunt, too, puts her dark glasses back on and waves him off.
“Use caution, my boy,” she warns. “That’s all I have to say.”
