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When she arrives he celebrates with flowers.
It’s soon, it’s far too soon, and he knows. From harsh and bitter experience he knows. Sina is barely able to stand and the rains bring a gentle droop to the buds around the village. Everyone around him urges caution, asks him to wait a couple of weeks before he really welcomes her, before he accepts her as a part of their life. Motunui goes quiet with a watchful hope, its eyes on the fale of the future chief and his wife.
She came with the rains, his father reminds him. Sometimes even the strong cannot handle the cold.
So instead of decorating her sleeping basket and covering the fale posts in flowers, Tui stands in a clearing near the shore and spends an hour imagining just which flowers he would’ve used. But, he reasons, he never actually plucks anything, so it doesn’t count.
She’s not even moved from coconut milk to the breast when he is forced to admit he’s stopped waiting.
Moana, cruelly named as she was by a grandmother who insisted on something historical (“in the tradition of Matai Vasa, son, nothing to do with the sea”), is not unlike the force of nature she shares a name with. Beautiful and terrifying, and more than a little demanding of respect, she comes into the world screaming and refuses to be ignored. Any other parents and she would’ve been welcomed with thunderous cheer. Instead the village goes quiet with the memory of those they had lost before. When he looks into Sina’s eyes he sees that underneath the love and joy is a terror that forces him to stay his smiles and stifle all laughter until the council are sure this is the one they can finally name heir.
He is guarded. He is.
But she’s healthy, despite all their fears, and try as he might that sliver of hope wriggles its way into his heart far too early, and the first time her strong fingers curl around his he knows all hope of caution is lost into the wind.
He loves her. Before he can even properly welcome her he knows that he loves her.
So a week after the birth, without any real reason for his behaviour, or any real plan to come up with a fake reason for his behaviour, he finds himself standing before Sina in their fale, a hibiscus flower in his hand, his heart fuller than his head.
Something in Sina cracks when she guesses what the flower is for.
“Tui, no,” she says. “We promised. Two weeks. Two weeks before we get our hopes up.”
“I know,” he says, and it’s like coming out of a dream. “I know. I don’t even know what this is for, I just saw it and I thought … “
She’s sleeping soundly in Sina’s arms, like she was always meant to be there, like she was the only child of theirs that Sina had ever held.
“It budded after she was born,” he manages, and then winces at just how pathetic an excuse that was. “Then it bloomed after the storm last night. The only one. The rest of the plant drooped and its buds fell off but this one—It’s like her. It came with the rains.”
Sina is grateful for the gift and she looks back at him with a fierce love that always warms his heart, but she refuses to wear it, just as she refuses to put back on her necklaces or earrings or go anywhere alone, even now that Moana is long since born and there is no more risk of the pregnancy going wrong.
One more week, they both agree, until they can really put it to their minds that they finally have a child they will not outlive. It would be one week longer than her brother had lasted, and two weeks longer than any of the rest of them. They just have to wait one more week, and then this all will be over. No more talk of heirs. No more trying, no matter what the council wanted. Finally, they’ll have a child they can watch grow up.
He weaves the stem into the rim of Moana’s sleeping basket. It’s as good a declaration of her status as any.
The flower continues to bloom bright royal red in the cool air of the evening rains, a stark reminder of life amidst all this fear of death.
It was a mistake to hold her right before he had to go up in front of the whole village and take his title as Motunui’s village chief.
“She’s at that grabbing age,” Sina says, failing spectacularly at holding in her laughter. “What did you think was going to happen?”
He tries, gently as he can, to pry her fingers away from his flower garland before she can get them in her mouth. But she’s strong, and she’s stubborn, and she really wants to play with and probably eat those flowers.
“You could help, you know,” he says, only for Sina to laugh even harder, causing the others in the fale to start giggling as well because she was just so shameless about it.
His mother enters the fale exasperated, asking what’s taking Tui so long when—
“Okay, what’s going on here?” she says, looking around at all the faces trying to school themselves back into dignity at the arrival of the late chief’s wife. She’s just recovered from a heart scare but her keen eyes still miss nothing, and it’s not long before she hones in on the source of their mirth. “Tui,” she says. “Really? Now? Son, you do know our people will need a chief at some point.”
He can’t do more than continue to try to separate her from the garland. “I just wanted to say goodbye before I left.”
“She was going to be in the audience, you know.”
“I know that, Mother,” he says, watching helplessly as Moana finally wraps her little mouth all over a blossom. Was it edible? He should’ve listened to his father’s botany lessons while he had the chance. Was this an edible one? No one’s panicking. Maybe it’s okay.
His mother shakes her head. “Give her here,” she says. “I’m her favourite.”
Tui scoffs. “I’m her dad.”
And now it’s like the whole building has joined in on some cruel joke he wasn’t privy to, and his mother’s annoyance melts away into a smug smile of knowing. “But I’m her favourite,” she says, and Sina smiles and shrugs like his mother actually has a point.
Tui sighs as he hands her over, and Moana settles into his mother’s arms with a happy coo. Tui would be lying if there wasn’t a little tendril of fear that she was right and she really was her favourite.
The peace is short-lived. There was a reason they didn’t pry her away more forcefully.
Moana was born with lungs that heralded her presence before the announcer outside the fale could have a chance to declare if it was a boy or a girl. His father would later say that once she gets older she’ll probably have an amazing singing voice, but for now everyone’s eyes are squeezed shut as her indignance pierces their brains via their ears, all force and raw power before she has any skill to control it. Tui barely gets to open his eyes again when he spots her still trying to reach for his garland, and he rushes outside.
A frangipani tree that always seems to be shedding flowers and yet never seems to be running out of them continues to let its flowers fall gently to the ground. He gathers the most beautiful ones—bright yellow centres bleeding out into the deep pink of the petals’ outer edges, no bruises, no curling, no odd brown spots of decay—and rushes back in, squinting as he hands her what he gathered.
The crying stops, and other than the fading angry blush and the stream of fat tears now drying on her face there’s no sign she was ever upset. She grabs at one of the flowers, runs one of her chubby baby fingers along a thick, almost waxy petal, and shoves the whole flower in her mouth.
Tui chuckles, and his mother simply raises her chin.
“Yeah, well,” she says, “I’m still her favourite.”
Children are an increasingly rare blessing in Motunui, healthy ones even more so, so like almost all Motunui’s fathers, Tui treasures what time he can have with his child.
Still, it’s all business today, despite what his wife and his mother might say right before they share a few giggles and knowing looks. He is most decidedly not just using his daughter as an excuse to have some fun while performing his chiefly duties, he is teaching her the general lay of the land, which in itself is a chiefly duty. There’s a difference. And the fact that she isn’t even old enough to speak coherently when he tries to quiz her is irrelevant.
They’re by the shore, having just ended a dispute among some of the net weavers, who viewed the presence of the royal heir as a warning against any unnecessary yelling. Moana was able to point out the boat sheds and the coconut groves. Now was probably the time to try something harder.
“And where do we grow the oysters?” he says, bringing her away from his hold for a bit to see where her eyes are headed. Which, as usual, is apparently everywhere. “Moana. Focus.”
She blinks, before her eyes are back on him. “Papa.”
“That’s right. I’m Papa,” he says. “Oysters, Moana. Where do we farm the oysters?”
She blinks again, before her gaze goes out onto the sea. “Papa.”
The ocean.
He shrugs. He’ll take it.
“These lessons are going well, don’t you think?” he says, going back to simply carrying her. “At this rate, you’ll know every inch of this village by the time you can speak in sentences.”
“Papa.”
“That’s right,” he says. “This is educational.”
Moana gurgles happily against his chest, and Tui smiles.
It’s a few more minutes before she’s babbling again, repeating the same “pa” sounds in that pattern that usually means she’s found something she wants to look at and maybe play with. Tui brings her away again to see what she’s pointing at when—
“Pa.”
This is definitely not something good.
Tui comes closer to the coconut tree, careful to cover Moana’s head and keep a safe distance in case something fell or the dust made her cough. It’s another one, another tree struck by the ashen blight affecting the trees on this side of the shore, the third this season, which means a tree more than last season and more trees recently than he ever remembered growing up. Clearly, whatever prevention and control methods they were currently using were either ineffective or just making the problem worse. He’d have to have another talk with the council after he gives Moana back to his mother for her nap later.
“Papa,” Moana says, reaching for the tree.
“No, Moana,” he says. “You can’t play with that.”
She whines, continuing to reach.
“I told you,” he says. “It’s sick—no, it’s dead. We’ll clear it later today.”
He can’t see it, but the way she’s holding herself she’s definitely pouting as she continues to whine.
He looks around for something closer to the path when he spots it.
“Here!” he says. “Moana, look!”
She’s still reaching when he grabs the nearest flower and shows it to her. “Look at that,” he says, holding a climbing dayflower up to her. “See the pretty colour? Look how nice and purple? Isn’t that better than a dead tree?”
She frowns, and knocks it out of his hand.
“Hey!”
She starts babbling and moving to mean she wants to turn around and see the flowers for herself, and he can’t think of anything else to do so he complies, and as soon as he does she goes quiet just drinking in the sight of everything.
He never really noticed just how much there was along the paths until she forced him to actually look.
Beautiful fallen box fruit flowers flood the spot she’s standing in with white and magenta, while nearby a beach hibiscus bush is yellow with opened blooms, competing for space with a tiare bush, underfoot a small, almost hidden, beach pea. They’re all beautiful in their own way, some of them even edible and nothing for Tui to worry about if she were to stick them in her mouth, and he watches as she considers what to look at today.
“You like choosing, don’t you?” he says, knowing she can’t reply just yet. “That’s why you didn’t like the flower I picked.”
She doesn’t seem to have heard him, but he gets the message. She crawls around a bit, her little knees and hands picking up sand and leaves and the occasional petal, before she slips, falls, and then lifts herself up again to pick up the flower that will hold her attention this time. There’s a barely audible snap, and then she’s sitting up to give it a better look.
Tui kneels to her level to make sure it’s one of the safe ones. He’s been studying with the healers lately. He has a better idea what to avoid now.
What he would’ve thought was she’d pick something big and bright, maybe even something as dazzling as a teuila if there were one around here. What he’s surprised to find is something subtler, and smaller, in her chubby little hands.
“A sea daisy?” he says, squinting at the tiny, wholly unremarkable yellow flower. “Now this, I wouldn’t have thought you’d like.”
“Papa.”
She won’t let him hold it, just let him observe while her fingers trace the edges of the petals.
He lets her look at it until it’s time to bring her back home. He can just say they studied beach plants today, even coming home with something medicinal. That’s still vital chiefly education, as far as he’s concerned.
Maybe he just finds it relaxing to walk around the village looking for flowers to give her, all right? Maybe the place he can get some peace and a nice seat just happens to be a clearing full of a variety of flowers. That coincidentally are some of Moana’s favourites. Maybe he likes to bring her there because she’ll be chief someday and she needs to know all the good places to get away for a bit and regroup. It’s training. He’s training her.
And maybe he has a genuine interest in learning how to make garlands and headdresses, an interest that has nothing to do with his daughter. Chiefs can have hidden depths.
Look, when he gives her flowers to put in her hair, and he makes sure to give her a series of choices to pick from, that’s just to accommodate how willful and unpredictable she can be. Nothing at all to do with the warm glow he feels in his heart whenever he can predict what she’s in the mood for wearing, or brings in more obscure species she can stare at with awe.
And when it’s time for her first public dance for the village, yes, maybe he was the one who made her headdress and bracelets. But he did it for practicality. Because he knows what foliage and weaving patterns make her itch. He’s not spoiling her, he’s saving her performance. And he definitely didn’t cry when the music started and she began to dance.
It’s a rare moment Tui has the free time to climb up the chief’s peak to maintain the area. The village has been getting so hectic lately, what with Moana growing older and more restless, his mother’s heart problems cropping up more frequently, and not to mention the issue of the blight and the strange downward trend of their crops and livestock. The only real incentive he’s had to come back up and check on the pathways and clearings has been the fear of the chiefs of the past finding some sort of punishment for his neglect.
Still, it’s peaceful up here, perhaps because of its sacredness. He can see the village from just about anywhere on this peak, and further off and all around him, the ocean that provides so much and takes even more.
Sometimes he wonders if one day he’ll look out on the horizon and find a boat sailing towards them, and on board and no worse for wear his father and his best friend, revealed to have been alive and well all this time and not, as they had all assumed, swallowed up by unforgiving waves, never to be laid to rest.
He tries not to think about that hope too much.
Or the ocean itself, anymore, for that matter.
Tui looks down at a blossom he had somehow found in his hand, possibly absently plucked while he checked the stone borders or shooed away birds, and his thoughts wander back to the village.
Sina calls Moana her little minnow, a nickname that came out of nowhere and just seemed to stick. In a way he can see it. Moana is small, and sneaky, and absolutely vital to the village.
Tui begs to differ, though he never says it out loud. She’s no bait fish, unremarkable and only useful when they die to attract bigger catches. No, Moana is dazzling, and a part of the land, not above or separate from everyone, but right there on the ground with them, her fate woven with her people. Sometimes she’s quiet and hard to spot, sometimes she’s the most commanding thing in the room. Either way she has the beginnings of greatness in her, and he’s not just saying that because he’s her dad.
She came with the rains. And she brought the flowers with her.
Tui can’t diminish his heir with something as undignified as a nickname, especially not in public. But, he thinks as he watches the delicate purple blossoms sway in the wind, it probably wouldn’t hurt to call her his little petal, even if it’s just in his head.
The day he brings her up to the peak for the first time the flowers are in full bloom, swaying with the breeze as Tui and Moana gaze towards the village they love. They watch the sun set and talk well into the night, and after enough conversation he swears he’s just seen a glimpse of the great chief she’ll one day become.
It’s probably the proudest he’s been since the moment she opened her eyes.
He is with his mother long after she passes, long after the healers leave with their condolences and the sun begins to shine through the tapa screens.
His father disappeared without anyone by his side to hold him or bring his body home to be buried. He would not let the same thing happen to his mother. If no one else comes he’ll stay with her body up until the funeral if that’s what it takes.
One of his orator cousins enters the fale slowly, solemnly, his breath hitching when he gives Tui a hug before he approaches the body.
“Go home, Tui,” he says, his voice tightly controlled to keep it from spilling over into tears. “I’ll watch her now.”
“It’s fine,” Tui says. “I can stay.”
“Please, cousin,” he says, and Tui is genuinely unnerved to hear him speak so plainly and without the ornamentation or poetry characteristic of orators. “Go home.”
So he does.
The walk from his mother’s fale to his family’s is short, a few minutes at most. There’s barely time to notice the beach morning glories beginning to bloom when he finds Sina crying at the fale entrance, surrounded by a small crowd of fellow mourners. At least, that’s what he assumed he was seeing. When they spot him and instantly go silent he begins to reconsider.
As he passes them they convey what condolences they can and move away, but always somewhere nearby, always still watching. Sina’s sister makes it a point to stay right by her side, her knuckles almost white as she holds Sina’s hand in hers, and when Sina looks up at him she’s exhausted and upset but also … afraid? What would she have to be afraid for?
The crowd keeps its eyes on him, and there is the feeling of his stomach sinking and the earth beginning to spin when he notices there’s someone missing from its ranks.
“Sina,” he says, gently as he can, a good, safe distance away. Even now, as the world falls apart around him and something inside him shatters, he doesn’t want to frighten her. He doesn’t ever want to frighten her. But he still needs to know. “Where’s Moana?”
There isn’t a fight, not in front of everyone.
And he doesn’t, as even she would’ve assumed, send her to live with her sister for a few days.
But he does stop holding her hand, and she does start giving him a wider berth as they go about their duties. There are whispered arguments when no one is looking but there’s still also a funeral to arrange, after all. They have to look united on this, for their extended family’s sake, for the village’s.
And they do. It’s all appearances until the night she comforts him from a nightmare, and on the day of the funeral itself, Sina breaks down as the orator delivers his speech, her flower dropping from her hair. Tui, without thinking, without anger, picks it up.
Her hand brushes against his as she accepts it back, and he’s surprised to find himself holding her as she continues to weep.
An eternity ago, when all Tui could think about was to venture out past the horizon, he took a canoe and sailed out into the open ocean, his best friend Vaea by his side.
What he told everyone afterwards was that it was a spontaneous thing—a joyride, really, with no intent grander than to sail around the island a few times and come back home.
What he’s only ever told Sina was that this was a test run to hone their sailing skills, and that they had in fact made plans to afterwards voyage to the east, guided by a fish hook in the sky, a carved green rock to be stowed safely in a pouch in the hold of a voyaging canoe from a hidden cave. He was the Chosen One, he was sure, and Vaea believed it, too. The Ocean, which had given his people so much, asked for his help to take the Heart of Te Fiti across the sea, and save his island from the coming darkness.
He was young then, and far too willing to believe in the nonsense that elders like his mother were too eager to pass on.
Not much older, come to think of it, than Moana is.
(Was.)
(He doesn’t know.)
They found Tui during the low tide, unconscious with his leg caught on a growth of poisonous coral, his skin pale and lungs filled with water.
Parts of the boat would end up drifting back onto shore from time to time, but they never found what remained of Vaea. The Heart—the stone, the ordinary carved rock—drifted away like the rest of the boat, and he would’ve been glad to never see it again.
The nightmares came not long after, and whenever he thinks he’s put Vaea’s death behind him the nightmares like to remind him this was a mistake he can never make enough amends for. He’s lost count of the number of times he’s woken up in the middle of the night, shaking off the fading images of his best friend’s body washing up on shore, bloated and rotting and whole, or drifting in piece by ragged, pale piece, barely even recognisable as human in their decay. It had taken Tui months to be able to stand the sight of the beach without wondering if he’d stumble across a piece of bone, or if a stray bit of broken coral in the distance was a forgotten piece of skull. Even now, decades later, just taking a lagoon canoe to check on the reef is enough to make his hands shake.
He had thought the nightmares couldn’t get any worse when his dreams started featuring his father’s corpse instead.
He was wrong.
Not for the first time in the week since Moana disappeared (disappeared much like his father did, by taking a boat and never coming back), Tui wakes up in tears. But at the very least he wakes up quietly, which is one comfort, and he hasn’t seemed to have disturbed Sina, which is another.
There’s a quick wipe of his eyes before he leaves the fale in silence, Moana’s pet pig in tow.
He finds himself at the clearing near the shore, the one he would bring Moana to to look at flowers. The night jasmines are in bloom right now, almost glowing white in the light of the moon as they fill the air with their sweet fragrance. If she were here she’d be helping him harvest them, giggling as she cracks jokes about his ageing bones and failing eyes.
But she’s not, and he’s not sure when she will be.
So he sits there, Pua by his side, the flowers doing nothing to soothe his fears, the shore doing everything to stoke them.
He’d learned years ago to stop looking out at the line where sky meets sea, at that maddening boundary that only existed to taunt him with the promise of boats that would never come back. It was a cruel hope, he eventually learned, and the sooner he accepted that crossing the horizon meant death, the easier it would be for everyone.
But he looks tonight, just in case, just because the alternative is too much to bear thinking about right now. He casts his gaze as far out onto the horizon as he can manage.
The coming weeks see no bodies or boat pieces drifting onto the beaches or up against the exposed bits of reef, though that doesn’t do anything to stem the nightmares.
Sina smiles as she tries to convince him it’s a sign of hope, that since Tui’s boat and his father’s boat eventually made it back to shore, Moana still being gone means she’s still out there.
He wants to believe that’s it. He wants to believe she’s right. He squeezes her hand and he agrees with her and he keeps the patrols going, and every now and again he’d head back to the clearing of flowers to look out onto the horizon, hoping for the sight of a small voyaging boat in full sail.
Moana was born during a time of rain, when the air would hang thick and hot with an unseen fog and the grass and leaves would grow almost impossibly green. Sometimes the rains came so strong the rivers would overflow, or water would pool on the ground so much that whole swathes of land would be covered in almost knee-high water. The rains brought illness to the vulnerable and death to the weakest of the village, but they also brought life in almost equal measure, giving strength to the crops and fertility to the fields.
When Moana was born buds began to form in the plants around the village, and when the council shaved her head and recognised her as heir Motunui almost exploded in colour as flowers came into bloom.
She came with the rains. And she brought the flowers with her.
So Tui tries not to think too hard about what it might mean when, in the weeks since her disappearance, the blight has all but taken the windward shore, and that one of the first places to wither and die is his little clearing of flowers.
When Sina finds him sitting at his usual spot, surrounded by blackened, crumbling petals, he’s staring out onto the horizon, barely keeping himself from asking if they should prepare a funeral for the one child they were sure they could finally watch grow up.
Her hand slips into his as she sits beside him, and her voice comes out steady and far too measured.
“One more month,” she says, her smile of reassurance hollow and fractured. “One more month before we … come to any conclusions. She’d have been sailing against the wind on the way to Te Fiti. It’ll take time to come back.”
Her fingers lace into his, and the smile fractures further. “She’ll come back, Tui,” she says, and her voice becomes wet and wavering. “Okay? Give it one more month. She’ll come back.”
The dread sinks to the pit of his stomach while the bile rises ominously up his throat, and all he can manage by way of reply is a mute nod and a half-hearted hand on hers.
The month comes and goes, and the blight continues to spread. They never do end up making the funeral arrangements, but it probably does say something that he’s slowly discontinued the patrols and begun to silently evaluate his younger relatives, searching for any signs of chiefly potential.
He stops gazing out onto the horizon. As the days continue to pass and Moana continues to stay missing, he no longer sees the point of looking.
They need to burn the diseased areas to the ground, and Tui has decided that the clearing is an excellent place to start.
The old method of simply removing all trace of the affected plants clearly didn’t work. It could’ve possibly made everything worse, actually, transmitting spores or whatever brought on the blight as what remained of the diseased crops was moved elsewhere. It would be a waste, he knows, and in the village’s current state waste is not something they can afford, but what else can they do? Whatever is driving away their fish had spread from their waters to their lands, and they have to stop it before it goes any further. Fire was sometimes vital in restoring life to a tired old piece of land. Maybe fire will work here. They’d tried everything else.
He and Sina are surveying the outer reaches of the diseased areas, noting which healthy trees and bushes would have to be cleared to keep the fires controllable, when she bends down to touch the blackened remains of a tiare bush.
“We’ll plant new ones,” Tui says, his hand on her shoulder. “Once this blight is behind us, we’ll turn it into a proper garden, more flowers than before. We can even sit on the stumps of the trees we had to clear.”
Sina nods, and she looks around to try to picture what he’s talking about, but her heart isn’t in it. Instead she finds herself looking out, past the crumbling foliage, and onto the horizon.
Tui swallows a lump in his throat.
“Sina,” he says. “It does no good to keep looking, my love.”
But it’s like she hadn’t heard him.
“What’s taking her so long?” she says, like she could gain any answers from standing here waiting. “She should be home by now.”
Tui barely contains a sigh.
“We have business to take care of here,” he says. “Asking these questions won’t bring her back any faster.”
She doesn’t even hesitate when she replies, “Because you don’t think she’s coming back at all.”
And it’s like she’s knocked all the air out of him.
He’d never said anything out loud. He’d never even hinted. He’d squeezed her hand and nodded at every little statement of hope, even looking with her as she checked the eastern shore for any sign of a boat. But she’s the same Sina who saw through the joyriding tale, the same Sina who knew that sometimes “chiefly lessons” meant flowers and piggyback rides, and it shouldn’t surprise him she saw through these lies just like she sees through everything else.
“I’ve watched you,” she says, “quizzing your relatives on their orator language skills. Asking them for advice on the blight. You’ve been checking your family tree with the elders.”
“I can ask for counsel sometimes,” he says.
“You’re looking for a new heir,” Sina says, finally turning to face him, and when he looks into her eyes, behind the love and the anger is the same terror he remembers from sixteen years ago, when she held a sleeping baby in her arms and begged him not to get attached just yet.
His sigh is silent, but once it’s out he feels drained.
“What would you have me do?” he says. “We waited that extra month. That’s weeks gone. She’s still not back.”
(Just like his father. Just like Vaea.)
Sina doesn’t even flinch. “But she will be.”
“But if she won’t,” he says, “don’t you think she’d want us to prepare? That she would want the village to keep going? If she really did go out on some quest to find Maui and stop this make-believe darkness—”
”Our darkness, Tui. It’s real, it’s not just some blight that we can—”
“—Suppose that were true,” Tui says, “does that sound like the kind of person who would want their parents to do nothing while they wait for her to return? Do you think that’s what she left for, so that we just give up and let it kill us when she leaves? That she wouldn’t want us to fight?”
"Of course not.”
“Then why don’t you want me looking for a new heir?”
“Because!” she says, and then lowers her voice back down before anyone around can hear. “Because. If you start planning like she’s already gone,” she says, “that makes it real.”
She swallows, and something in her cracks as her eyes begin to well with tears. “That means we might have lost her, just like we lost Wakaroa, just like we lost all the others,” she says. “It means we’re no longer parents.”
And it’s like coming out of a dream. The heat he had felt building up in him is suddenly gone, a fire quickly doused with freezing cold river water, and all he can manage to do is to look at his wife and try not to follow her into whatever void of despair he hadn’t noticed until now that she had fallen into.
All this time, wrapped up in his grief for his parents and his best friend, wrapped up in his grief for his daughter, he had thought he was the one she was trying to convince, he was the one she was trying to comfort.
He was a fool, is what he was. Still a fool, even now.
“Sina … ”
“I let her go, Tui,” she says. “I helped her pack. I’m sorry, you were right, if I’d stopped her instead she’d be—”
“Gone,” he says, and it breaks his heart to finally admit that. “She’d still be gone. With or without your help, she’d have found a way.”
He takes her hand, and her fingers lace into his.
There’s a promise they both make, even though they don’t say a word, that they’ll get through this, just like they’ve gotten through everything else.
“I’m sorry, Sina, I shouldn’t have—Moana—” and he stops for a second, because it feels like a lifetime ago he’s said her name out loud, “—she was going to go beyond the reef one way or another, quest or no quest. If it ever came down to it she’d have waited until we were both too old to catch her.”
The sound that comes out of her is broken, caught halfway between a sob and a peal of laughter. “She would’ve.”
The blackened leaves and petals waft in the ocean breeze, taunting him with their death. Tui swallows, and tries not to think about it.
“Call me the next village crazy lady,” Sina says, her head settling up against his chest, “but there’s still a part of me that thinks there’s a chance she’ll come back.”
Tui nods, and gives the ache in his heart a chance to pass before he speaks. “It’s not so crazy,” he says. “Half the village think so, too.”
“But you don’t.”
He opens his mouth to reply, but instead he shrugs. There’s no point in lying now.
“I don’t know what I believe, dear,” he says, and that’s as honest as he can probably get. “What what I want to believe, what everyone else wants me to believe, what I actually believe, it’s all a mess. I don’t have any answers here.
“Anyway, what does it matter?” he says. “I believed I was some sort of Chosen One. I believed our daughter was bound to the land. I believed she was happy here.”
“Tui—”
“So who knows?” he continues, despite the waver in his voice. “Maybe I’m wrong about this, too.”
There is a pause before Sina squeezes his hand. Dead petals gather on the ground, and the ocean breeze pushes them towards their feet. “Let’s hope so.”
Tui sighs.
“Look, that whole heir business,” he says, “that’s just a precaution. I wouldn’t want the title to be in dispute if something were to happen and she’s still not here.”
“I know that,” Sina says. “I know. I shouldn’t have snapped.”
“No, no, I deserved that, that was a long time coming,” he says, and then ventures, “I’m actually surprised you didn’t snap like that sooner.”
And there’s a twitch of her lips, an actual ghost of a laugh. Her eyes light up with a spark of her old self. “Don’t,” she says, failing spectacularly at holding in her smile. “And you did deserve that.”
And for the first time in a long time, it doesn’t hurt to be around her.
He holds her closer, and she holds him in return.
They will get through this, no matter what shows up on the eastern shore, no matter what happens with the blight.
“What do we do now?” he says.
Sina grows still against him, just for a second. “We keep the village going,” she says.
“And Moana?”
She swallows. “Two weeks,” she says, and the smile is gone from her voice. “The rains will come by then. We wait two more weeks.”
“All right,” he says, and soon as the words are out of his mouth it’s almost like the air is lighter, like the breeze has brought some colour and life back into his world. “Two weeks.”
It takes some time before he even hears the yelling down by the shore, a little more before he squints to see the withered and crumbling coconut trees and pandanus palms come back to life, blackened dried up stems and stalks turning into vibrant green grass and winding vines of bright yellow flowers underfoot. Sina is gasping at the sight of it all, and when she looks around the clearing she’s almost in tears.
“Tui!” Sina says. “Tui, the flowers!”
The petals at their feet regain their colour, and he bends down and brushes them away to find a sea daisy, tiny and bright yellow against the ashen ground.
The clearing, starting from the windward side and then on towards the village, is coming back to life. Around him the dark becomes a glittering symphony of colour, tiare flowers filling the air with their sweet scent as beach morning glories and candle bushes bud and unfurl in seconds. Hibiscus blossoms and sea mango flowers just about burst open with sunlight, dayflowers sprawl up into the ylang-ylang trees, and a frangipani tree in the distance already starts shedding perfect flowers, bright yellow centres bleeding out into the deep pink of the petals’ outer edges, no bruises, no curling, no odd brown spots of decay. He’s barely able to take in the sight of a huge and healthy pink blossom revived as if by magic in front of his eyes when Sina runs towards the beach without any explanation. He’s still too overwhelmed to guess as to why until he sees it.
There, well past the horizon, just about to cross the reef to get to the shore.
A small voyaging boat, in full sail.
When she arrives he celebrates with flowers.
There’s the big village welcome first, of course, where just about all of Motunui comes out to see the return of their future chief in person, and then the scramble to get her clean and rested while they scrape together a last-minute evening feast despite their current lack of pigs and chickens. Tui’s orator cousin is more than happy to finally be called to do some of his more high-profile duties, and the dancers are almost ecstatic they have the chance to perform something happy. It’s a joy but it’s a drain, and before Moana can so much as get to the part of the story where she meets Maui it’s clear she’s exhausted.
And frankly, so is everyone else. After the death of the chief’s mother, the disappearance of their next in line to be chief, the failing of their crops and seafood stocks, and everything else they’d been dealing with lately, it’s little surprise the party ends far earlier than it should.
Tui wakes up the next morning to find the remains of worm activity on the grounds outside the fale, and the unmistakable dampness on the grass and feeling of cool invisible fog in the air.
He smiles. It rained last night.
And sure enough, maybe from the end of the blight, maybe from Moana’s return, he comes across an entire bush of red hibiscus in bloom.
The sun is already up and Moana is still sleeping when he comes back to the fale, holding a snoring Pua like a pillow. Sina takes one look at Tui and is not amused.
“Tui, no,” she says, continuing to comb her hair. “We promised. She gets to sleep in for a few days.”
“I know,” he says, and he can feel the heat beginning to crawl up into his face. “I know. I don’t even know why I’ve made this, I was just taking a walk and I thought … “
“Dad?”
Sina rolls her eyes. “See? Now she’s awake.”
Moana yawns as she heaves herself up. “No, no, I’m fine,” she says, looking like she’s about to pass out any minute. “A true wayfinder never … “ she nods off before waking back up, “ … sleeps.”
Tui chuckles, and he helps her settle back down onto her bedroll. “Well you’re not at sea right now, Moana,” he says. “Rest.”
“I’m fine, all ready to go. Got houses to fix, kids to teach, tattooed people to … “ she nods off again, and when she’s back awake she’s only down to one barely open eye. “What’s that you got, Dad? That a headdress?”
He strokes her hair. That always helps her get back to sleep. “Later, petal,” he says, and he puts the headdress aside, ready for when she wakes up. It’s as good a declaration of her status as any. The flowers continue to bloom bright royal red in the cool air of the morning rains, a stark reminder of life amidst all this fear of death, and he smiles. “Sleep. We’ve got all the time in the world.”
She mumbles something, and before he knows it she’s sleeping soundly, like she had always been there, like she had never left. Sina sits beside them and just takes a moment to appreciate this, and when he looks into her eyes he sees that same fierce love that always warms his heart.
His hand brushes against hers when he hands over a loose blossom. “Got one for you, too.”
And Sina’s smile is deep and wholehearted as she accepts it and puts it in her hair.
Tui holds her close. If Moana were awake he’d hold her, too. There’s work to be done, he knows, a whole village to check up on now that the blight—the darkness—is behind them, but the village can wait a few minutes, just a few minutes, while Tui just lets himself treasure his family being together once again.
It’s probably the happiest he’s been since the moment Moana first opened her eyes.