“Everyone always looks to you for answers,” she says. “More so than even Taavi now.” Her tone lightens, like the thought pleases her. This girl trusts me and lord only knows what I did to deserve it.

I shift in my seat. “I just try to be true to who I am. I’m just me.”

“Out here I feel like it’s my chance to figure that out,” she says, drawing circles in the dirt. “Show the Macazi who I can be for them.”

“Don’t be who they need you to be. Be who you need to be for you.”

She smirks, considering.

Why is it always so much easier to give advice than take it?

“How do you know who you are?” she asks.

I sit back and take in the dregs of the night air. That’s a good question. “I guess I think about where I came from.”

She studies me for several moments. “You will make a good Queen.”

“Rojala, I’m not going to rule Ghizon.”

A stolen peek of moonlight darts between the branches, illuminating her tilted-eyed stare. She didn’t hear the Ancestors. She wasn’t out there. This is her unadulterated opinion of me too. Her conclusion grates and I pick at my skin. Thoughts of home swim in my memory. Tasha’s tie-dye everything, my old bed. Moms’s hug. My lip trembles. I bite it so it stops.

“If you’re not going to be Queen, then who will?” she presses. “Who would be better?”

“I don’t know, but…” Pressure builds in my head as my thoughts trail off. I hop up and Rojala startles.

Her eyes follow me. Stick to me with admiration—or maybe expectation. Or some muddled mix of the two. “Well, Queen or not, wherever you end up, I’d like to go there too.”

I sigh. Her words pierce through the brick of panic to the soft center underneath. I pick a red berry from a flower on a bush. It’s stubbornly attached to thick petals, but I work it off. I remember these from the Ancestors’ vision before my magic came to me, when I stood on their burial ground and felt them the first time. It feels like a lifetime ago. Then, the berries were everywhere. The little boy in the vision knew them well. I mash the berry between my fingers.

“Kaeli berries,” Rojala says, joining my side, plucking one into her mouth. “If they’re too ripe, they’re really tart. Gotta pick them just right.”

The forest is a fragment of what it used to be. Red used to dot these woods like a Christmas tree. So much destruction. So much death. So much pressure. And this girl sees the fix… the Ancestors see the fix in me? This wasn’t the plan. This was the opposite of the plan.