Page 98 of Her Radiant Curse

I pretend to scoff. “You in the morning? You never could have gotten up in time. And training in midday is the worst. You’d have fainted from the heat.”

She laughs, and the deepness of her tiger voice makes goose bumps rise on my skin. I thumb her cheeks, trying to dry them of rainwater, and find a streak of black fur among the white. The opposite of the white streak in my hair.

What a family we are, now. She a tiger, me a snake.

“All my life you’ve protected me, Channi,” says Vanna softly. “I used to hope that the curse wasn’t real, so you’d finally get to live your own life. So we could disappear into the trees together and not care what anyone thought of our faces. That was all I really wanted.”

“Then that’s what we’ll have,” I promise her. “After Angma is gone.” I sweep the hair from her eyes. She doesn’t look convinced.

“Could you fight her again?” I ask. “Angma has your body. If you win, you’d get it back.”

“I wouldn’t win,” Vanna whispers.

“Vanna, you have half a dragon pearl in your heart. You have magic!”

She flinches, as if she’s suspected this before but never dared believe it. She shakes her head. “Don’t look at me like that. I’ve seen what she has planned, and we can’t win against her.”

“What does she plan?”

“She’s going to rally the demons in Mount Hanum’anya. There will be hundreds of them. Thousands. Once they’ve been summoned, she will paint the world with ash and thunder—and…”

I’m unmoved. “And what?”

Vanna’s pupils turn black and hollow under her hooded eyelids. “And she’ll return home. Back where it all began. That is where all this will end.”

Sundau. To the jungle with the crooked tree.

“What an event that will be,” I say dryly as I scrape mud off my sandals’ soles. The rain is finally stopping. “We’ll have to go.” I tilt my head. “We can ask Rongyo for help.”

At the suggestion, Vanna cringes. “You go. I’ll stay.”

“Under the durian tree?” I almost laugh again, but my humor flees when I imagine the guards finding her and killing her. “Come with me,” I say gently. “He’ll understand.”

Vanna makes an adamant growl. She won’t budge.

I take a different tack. “What about Oshli?” I ask.

At the name, my sister’s head lifts. Just a hair. “Where is he?”

So. She does care about him.

I shouldn’t be surprised. Oshli, has always been there. It was Oshli who sneaked Vanna her favorite shrimp noodles when Lintang decided they were too greasy for the family, Oshli who painstakingly transcribed by hand Vanna’s favorite romances and epics from the temple library so she might have her own copy to read at home with me. Oshli, the only other person who looks after Vanna’s best interest, even if it displeases her.

“I don’t know where he is,” I say at last. “Let’s go find him.”

I know she’s tempted, but her lower lip quivers, and she shuts her giant, furred eyes tight. “Can I tell you a secret?”

“You can tell me anything.”

She hangs her head low. “I was praying this morning…that I wouldn’t have to go through with it. The wedding, I mean. Do you think…”

“That all this is your fault?” I shake my head vehemently. “No.”

“I thought I wanted to be a queen, Channi,” she says ruefully. “It was what I dreamed of for years. But I think what I truly wanted…was to be my own. To not be defined by…by this—” She makes a low growl at the light pulsing in her chest.

Her confession silences me. I’ve always known that Vanna’s light is a curse of sorts, predetermining her worth in the eyes of others. But until now, I never realized how unhappy she must have been. I never realized how much she fears it.

“I did think about running away—from the contest and from today,” she admits. “But I wasn’t brave enough. I thought I’d get caught and dragged back.”

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