Chapter 31
After everyone but those locked in the Fodder wagon had left, éadha sat for what felt like a long while on the short grass of the combat ground.
A huddle of daisies by her feet nodded their white heads in the sea breeze.
She stared at them sightlessly. She knew Seoda was dead, knew it from the hollow place in her chest where the thread binding them together had snapped.
But to do as Maebh had ordered, to open the wagon and see Seoda’s lifeless body, touch it, lift it, bury her in the restless sea. How was she to do that?
So she sat there unmoving on the grass until an image came into her mind of the other people still chained in the wagon, trapped beside the body, and the horror of that finally drove her to her feet.
Moving stiffly, every muscle protesting, she opened the wagon doors.
She was met by the smell of sweat, urine, and fear so familiar from the holds, its wrongness stark as it seeped out into the sea air.
As she did, every face in the wagon turned to look at her—all except one.
Seoda’s small white face was leaning against the doorjamb as if she were only sleeping a while.
She’d probably only been a few years older than éadha, but she looked at least twenty more, her emaciated body aged by the months of relentless channeling.
In death none of her beauty remained except for her hair, still the same beautiful chocolate brown.
Her hands lay limp, and trailing out from under her sleeve was a small strip of white silk, the same silk she’d used to make éadha’s skirt.
It was tied around her wrist with one end still coiled in the palm of her hand as if she’d been gripping onto it like a talisman while Senan had been draining every scrap of life out of her, over and over again until he’d taken everything and she’d died.
A sob rose inside éadha then, her face crumpling as she said, “I’m so sorry.”
With hands that shook, she unlocked the chains that bound the Fodder. But when she moved to lift Seoda out, a gray-haired woman sitting beside her said quietly, “Grianán. This one time, while we can, let us say goodbye.”
éadha stepped back wordlessly. As she did, one by one they began to reach across the narrow space to brush Seoda’s cheek or squeeze her hand, whispering their goodbyes to her, because in the holds you could never speak out loud.
éadha turned away. She had no right to be part of this grief.
They had a right, these people who’d suffered alongside Seoda.
But she had no right, not when she’d failed her and, in failing her, let her die.
Behind her, the men and women began climbing out of the wagon.
They were clearly exhausted, but there was, too, an unyielding determination to honor their friend as four of them carefully lifted out the little body, wrapped her in a white sheet taken from beneath the wagon and carried her down to the shore.
There they placed her in the boat then helped éadha push it out into the waves.
When she reached deep water, éadha shipped her oars, but she couldn’t just tip Seoda over into the sea as Master Joen had ordered.
Instead, holding the body in her arms, she dived down with her.
As she swam, she could feel her strength beginning to return, her silver fish flickering into life, and it felt like treachery.
On the seabed, she arranged a grave of stones to hold down the white sheet, uncovering Seoda’s head so that her hair floated free, waving in the current, and she could see the sunlight dancing on the water above her.
With her power returning, she could hold her breath for a long time without needing to return to the surface.
As she worked, she thought of what Seoda had said when she’d stopped the elevator to give her the dress, and éadha asked how she could bear it, and she’d replied, You have to break, accept there’s no way out, no way around.
This is all there is for you now. Once you’re broken, you can learn how to just exist, that the only way is to go through it.
And then if you do come out the other side, what you have is a husk that still walks, still breathes, that maybe one day you can fill up again with things that are worth something.
It’d been such a small hope. To lose everything just not to die. But Senan couldn’t even leave her that.
An unspeakable sense of futility rose inside éadha then as she looked at her hands, cut from prying up stones to weigh down the body. What was the point of her power if it’d never be enough to stop someone like Senan?
She understood now why she dreamed of dragons.
It was a dream of finally being able to stand against them, these evil men.
Tilting her head back, as she stared up at the water’s surface and the empty sky beyond, from the deepest part of her she sent out a great wordless cry, “Mahera!” from deep underwater.
Just for one instant she thought she felt a response, an answering tremor along some impossibly long, invisible thread.
Afterward she still held herself down there beside Seoda, unwilling to let the water carry her back up to the surface because then it’d truly be over, and she’d have to face what came next.
Almost idly she wondered how long it’d be before her power ran out once more and she drowned.
Would she just fade out there on the seabed beside her friend?
But in the same moment an obdurate refusal rose inside her.
The Masters had brought too much death to this island already.
Leah had died here. Seoda had died here.
Countless Fodder had died here. All those deaths, so easily erased.
She wouldn’t give them another.
So eventually, she swam back to the surface and rowed ashore as the sun began to set. The people from the Fodder wagon were there, watching her.
Still dripping wet, éadha told them, “I won’t bring the wagon back until Maebh sends someone out to look for us.
When they come I’ll say the burial went awry and I was waiting until daybreak rather than waking everyone bringing back a wagon in the middle of the night.
So do what you wish, just try to stay out of sight of the House.
But for now, I’m spent. Wake me whenever they send out the guards. ”
So saying, she sagged down to the ground and was asleep almost before her eyes had closed.
She slept on as the sun set and the moon rose over the eastern shore, as the stars appeared, first one, then many, and spun across the sky.
She didn’t see the people wolfing down the bread stored below the wagon.
She didn’t see as they built a fire beside her from driftwood, though the sweet smell of applewood as it burned might have eased her dreams. She didn’t see two of them row out and with old skill catch fish unused to being hunted in this Channeller domain of force-grown food.
She did surface briefly as an old woman held her and gently tipped a warm fish broth into her mouth before drifting off once more, warm now at last, within and without.
The people sat long around the fire that night, murmuring quietly back and forth, before climbing back into the Fodder wagon at the first sign of the sky lightening over the sea.
The first éadha knew was a gentle but insistent shaking.
She opened her eyes to the old woman’s face staring intently into her own in the early light of a hazy morning.
“Grianán, you must wake. The fair one, he comes, and you must be ready.”
éadha wiped away the drool from her mouth and stared at the woman, still befuddled by the heaviness of her sleep. The woman climbed into the Fodder wagon, closing the door after her.
éadha climbed to her feet and saw a figure on horseback approaching, someone from the holds no doubt come to check where their Fodder wagon was.
She breathed in deeply, at once grateful and surprised that she felt almost fully restored to her power, her silver fish giving a welcoming flick as she bent her mind a moment to it before looking toward the rider once more.
There was a light sea mist that stretched its tendrils across the combat ground, and it was hard to make out features.
But something in the turn of the head, the impatient kick they gave their mount as it scrambled up onto the level ground told her who it was.
Senan.
Automatically she began building her thought-wall, but as she did, Seoda’s pale face flashed into her mind, and she stopped. The facade of mundane thoughts fell apart. Unguarded and empty-handed, she raised her head to face him as he cantered up out of the mist.
“I thought I’d find you here when you weren’t at Matins,” he said, reining in his horse and looking down at her.
“What is it you want, Lord Senan?” she asked, staring levelly at him.
“You asked me a question yesterday. Ask me again.”
Between jaws suddenly clenched so hard they hurt, éadha said, “I asked why you killed that girl.”
“Because I can. Because you needed to know that. Because I can see it in your eyes even though you try to hide it. You haven’t learned yet.”
Her voice still steady, éadha asked, “What, precisely, haven’t I learned, Lord Senan?”
“Watch your tone. It’s simple. If you don’t want to spend the rest of your life shackled to a Fodder seat in the holds, you need to get it into your head that I control you. I own you. And I can end you anytime I want, just as I did that girl.”
“So why didn’t you? If you had a problem with me, why not take it out on me? Why kill her when she was nothing to you?”