I lie on the floor of her hut, parallel with her alter, while she anoints me with oils and hushed psalms of protection. It was necessary for me to fast for three days before the ceremony, to cleanse my body of any spiritual impurities.
Her hair is plaited away from her face and she looks refreshed in comparison to my impression of her after our reintroduction. The candlelight reflects in the pale brown of her eyes, accenting flecks of gold.
She touches my forehead with her left hand and the center of my chest with her right as her voice raises in magniloquent crescendos. Her magic is tangible; I can feel its vibration on my skin.
It's sudden, the retching spasms that course through my whole body, followed by pain so involved that I can't focus enough to scream. I only manage grunting exhalations. I can't see and Shanti's chanting has evolved into an indiscernible noise; it sounds like someone is playing notes on crystal glasses.
Where my senses were blurred, they have regressed to nothingness. It's as if I'm no longer on the floor or in pain. All that I have are my thoughts that have miraculously synced up.
I strain with my eyes, begging for the blurred vision, and I reach with my ears to hear Shanti's voice. My strength of will is all that I have and it fails me as it did when I called my winds.
Vision comes to me in stills, flashing one by one; stills of women with my ashen hair and blue eyes. The last still is of a middle aged woman, holding a staff, wearing a long blue robe and headdress.
I feel my soul aligning with her own.
I am Uwimana, my brother is king of our people and I am their priestess as my aunt and the aunts before her were clerics. Every king of our village had a daughter that takes the reigns as our spiritual leader and as lineage demands, each generation produces a sorceress much stronger than she who preceded.
My brother's wife has given him no girl child, only hoards of arrogant men, so through the writ of tradition my own powers will increase ten fold on the eve of my fortieth summer.
Bright lady, What will I become? I wonder, crouching down in the plains that surround my beautiful village. I dig a shallow hole in the rich earth with my hands and drop an amulet in the earth, covering it with dirt.
I close my eyes and focus my will into the amulet, I feel my magic spread across the breadth of our land.
This summer will be bountiful.
My hut is as affluent as my brothers; he expects no superior treatment. While they come to him with disputes, they come to me with their entreaties for the Bright Lady.
"Uwimana," Azizi says, entering my hut in his rich purple garb and headdress.
Azizi is my brothers head advisor, we've known him since we were small children and I have loved him all of my life and he has loved me. My brother, Malik, is blind to our affair; tradition demands the pureness of it's priestess.
Malik will murder Azizi if he finds me pregnant and this concern is only doubled by my fear of the consequences that an increase in power will bear on my daughter.
"Hello, love." I embrace him, squeezing him tightly. He pulls away, touching my stomach tentatively.
"How long, Uwimana?"
"She will come in the middle of the summer."
"I hope only to see her face before …" he trails off, not mentioning his fate.
"We will find a way, Azizi. I am a servant of the Bright Lady and as my consort she protects you as well." I embrace him again, lightly this time, holding my head to his chest. His heartbeat is steady and comforting.
It's still dark when he leaves my hut, kissing my now portly stomach through the sheer cotton robe and speaking in hushed tones to our daughter.
It is my maid who betrays us, the day before my increase, a woman who loves me more than herself. Despite all of her devotion to me, she is devout to the Bright Lady and the canons of this village.
When Azizi and I are called before our king, she greets us with her accusations, I feel betrayed by Azizi most of all by his confession. He tells my brother, who has chained him, that he goaded me with wines and seduced me with his superior wiles. He begs for death as payment for his sins, to cleanse the worship of our tribe.
"This will remain quiet, but you will be executed under the banner of treason. When your bastard child is born it will be drowned in the river and burnt." Malik says, addressing only Azizi, not daring to make eye contact with me.
"You wouldn't dare!" I say, approaching him, only to be blocked by his footmen. "Harm, either Azizi or continue with plans of harming my child and I will see the full wraith of the Goddess rain down on your head! I will reverse all that I have done for your people!"
"Uwimana, you have sealed his fate as well as the fate of your child through your own moral depravity! The customs of our people, not my own, demand these measures if you could forbear your station then you too would meet the executioner tomorrow!"
They make me watch his execution from my cell.
The villagers loved Azizi, yet today they quake with anticipation of his slaying, all compassion dies when the arrow meets his chest. His death isn't instant and through my own divine empathy I feel the culmination of the sorrow of never meeting his daughter.
Without plan I fall to my knees, touching the black earth beneath me, my powers flower out of me, too large to be contained by my body. My intentions are clear now that my love will never taste the fruit of this land.
"I take it back," I begin to chant. "I take it back."
I repeat these words in tandem, with increasing speed and pitch, and I watch as the land withers and all of the magic done is undone.