“Why did they pick me to be Xakixa?” she had repeatedly asked Bear and Precious Wind over the years.
The answer had never changed: “They needed someone of her lineage who could be away a long time. You’re of the same family as the princess; you were an orphaned child without people to worry over you; who better to send far away for what might be a lifetime?”
To which Precious Wind sometimes added, “When the princess fell ill, no one thought that the sickness was necessarily fatal. It was while the matter was still uncertain that they sent me to bring you from Tingawa. Back then, they really thought you might be with her for a very long time.”
“Bear didn’t come until later, did he?”
“No, Bear was sent later. To help me care for you and protect you.”
Xulai knew she must have been very young when she came to Wold, for she had no memories of Tingawa at all. Her earliest memories were of farms and fields and certain places in and around Woldsgard Castle, of Oldwife Gancer, of Precious Wind, of the princess, who had then been in full command of her mind and voice, though her body was already very weak and frail. Woldsgard Castle had been her world, her home. The princess had been the sun that warmed that world. Her family had been a small one: Oldwife Gancer. The princess. Bartelmy, maybe. Bear, though Bear was more like the weather than he was like family: changeable day by day. Justinian, Duke of Wold.
She knew the duke less well than the others. His portrait on the great staircase wall showed him as a powerful, handsome man with golden hair and neatly trimmed beard, piercing eyes, a mouth both stern and kindly. He was now thin, gray, and sorrowful, his eyes bleary from being too often buried among books in his vast library or sequestered among his birds in the tower. He had always treated Xulai kindly, though never too intimately, as though her close company was too remindful of the long dying that had brought her there. Somehow, Xulai had understood this from the beginning. She did not count his reserve as a slight toward herself.
Though many had loved the princess, only Justinian and Xulai and a few others really mourned her. Most of the people of Wold had done their mourning years ago, when it became known she was dying, but as Precious Wind had said even then, “Long dying outlasts grief.” The dying had been long, years long, continuing as seasons passed and returned and passed again. Near the end of those years the princess had lain silent, eating nothing except the broth and gruel spooned down her throat, supposedly insensible of the world around her, balanced on the brink of mortality like a lone, frail tree at the crumbling edge of an abyss.
Xulai, perhaps only Xulai, had known the tree was not as frail as it seemed. There, above that everlasting chasm, Princess Xu-i-lok had driven the fibers of her life deep within the stone, spending her waning strength to stay alive until Xulai would become old enough and brave enough to complete the task the princess had given her, the task of hiding or keeping safe the thing in the box. Xulai had become fully aware of this only in the last two days, and she was now overcome with guilt at that knowing.
Had she known the princess was only holding on until Xulai returned from the temple? If so, should she have made herself go to the temple sooner and ended the princess’s pain? Or should she have delayed, just to keep the princess alive? Which would have been the proper choice? Precious Wind said there was always a proper choice, though Bear disputed that.
“Sometimes any choice is a bad choice, only slightly better, if at all, than doing nothing,” he said sometimes when a quandary presented itself. “Ofttimes I know I can do only this or that, and I will regret either!”
Without mentioning either the princess or her own late-night quest into the forest, and certainly without mentioning what had happened in the princess’s room when she and Abasio had returned, Xulai had probed at Precious Wind, hoping for some enlightenment. “Someone should have told me what was expected of me. I’m supposed to be a soul carrier, but no one has ever explained anything about it!”
“There is little enough to explain,” Precious Wind had replied. “When a Xakixa arrives after a death, he or she keeps watch beside the tomb for three days, announcing from time to time, in formal language, that he or she is the Xakixa, so the soul will know whom to attach to. That is considered sufficient. When the Xakixa arrives before the death, as you did, it is obligatory to visit the dying regularly and to lay hands upon the coffin for the same reason.”
“As if telling the soul you’re still there?” asked Xulai doubtfully.
“Something of the kind. In any case, you have done what is required.”
Nothing was said about hiding anything, finding anything, swallowing anything at all. Nothing was said about searching through darkness for some kind of hibernating jeweled pollywog! Bear and Wind knew nothing about that, and this morning, when Xulai had suggested discussing it with them, it was Abasio’s counsel (as well as that of the chipmunk) that she say nothing at all about it, at least not yet. If the princess had kept silent, then Xulai should keep silent.
The princess had not been taciturn. She had been fond of sayings, “fumitos” in Tingawan, pithy adages that held more wisdom
