Tidespeaker

Chapter 36

I staggered forward, nearly slipping in my haste.

I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t even say her name. My chest was bursting; my breath snared in my throat. As Zennia fell toward me and we clutched each other’s shoulders, she gazed into my face, eyes roving my features.

“You—you’re—” The words wouldn’t come to me.

“I’m sorry,” she was saying fiercely. “Corith, I’m sorry.”

I gripped my friend hard. I could hardly believe that she was here, that I was touching her. Then the scene seemed to come into focus around me: Zennia. Alive. With members of the Cage.

I studied her. Her face was leaner, the skin on her lips chapped. I saw now that her eyes were pricked with tears.

“Beautiful reunion,” said Kielty behind us. “But I’d rather like to ask you—what in hells is going on out here?”

I turned reluctantly, still grasping Zennia. “You—you let me believe she was dead,” I said. “You said you had nothing to do with her disappearance—”

For the first time, his cheery demeanor faltered.

“I’m sorry about that,” he said, frowning.

“I truly am. Leadership’s orders—we didn’t know you.

This one”—he jerked his chin toward Zennia—“tried to persuade us to tell you everything, but we couldn’t risk it.

We had to…test you. And besides,” he added, eyes twinkling now, “I believe I said, ‘We played no part in the death of your friend.’ Technically true.” He lifted a shoulder.

“Test me?” I whispered. “Bribe me, you mean? Dangle the truth about her like a carrot on a stick?” I turned back to Zennia, wide-eyed, disbelieving.

“I’m so, so sorry,” she said, face crumpling. “I tried. But they said you might report us.”

Us.

I felt like a puppet again. Like my legs might give out at any moment.

“You’re with the Cage,” I said dully. “You…joined them. How?”

She nodded. “It was all Instructor Rhama. He’s a cuckoo, like Kielty, but I didn’t know he was with them, not till the night before my exam…And Corith, I’m so sorry, I had no chance to talk to you. Rhama said not to—”

Kielty moved toward us. By now the rest of the group were clustering around us with hard, narrow gazes. “Explanations later. I’m going to have to insist. Before whatever’s happening up there comes down here.” He lifted an eyebrow at the distant castle, where fires flared and faint yells sounded.

“It’s House Crake,” I told him, scrubbing dampness from my cheeks. I hadn’t even noticed my eyes were leaking. “Arrived in the night. A hundred men. I thought they were you…” I gave a hollow laugh.

Zennia slid in next to me, arm tight around my shoulders. She was staring at my face as though trying to read there everything that had happened in the last few weeks.

An angry murmur fizzled through the group. Kielty shook his head. “We’ll have to abandon ship. Send a crow back to Pen Aryn, say we were beaten to the punch.” He stared fixedly at the castle. “We’ll lie low here for now. See how this pans out. We don’t really have much choice.”

The waves were pounding on the rocks below us. The Waking Tide, cutting off any retreat.

“Hells,” he continued, “I could skewer Crake for this. If we had more people…”

“How many are you?”

“Less than twenty,” said Zennia. “And not all Orha. Some Floodmouths, a couple of Mudmouths, one Gustmouth. And Kielty, of course.” She flashed him a grin.

Still not enough to challenge Crake, not to mention the Cormorants and their Orha, too.

“They’re wearing their own laconite,” I said, grim faced. “Except their Orha, and the son…Iovawn.”

Kielty’s face darkened. “He’s with them, is he? Fabulous.”

I thought of Llir, somewhere in the keep. Barricaded in with his family, maybe. Had Crake got to them by now?

Something in me had stoked into a blaze. As much as I wanted to stay stuck to Zennia, I’d made a promise to myself up there, hadn’t I? I’d vowed I would do what I could to help the family.

And I realized now, with a shudder of shame, how wrong I’d been about Emment Shearwater…

His hesitation, his hollow stares and dark moods.

That hadn’t been guilt; it had been uncertainty.

I’d planted the creeping suspicion in his head that he might have done something horrible to Zennia.

He’d played a convincing villain in their play, but that was all it had been: an act.

“I need to go back up there,” I said. “See what’s going on.”

Kielty eyed me. “You’d be much safer down here with us. There’s nothing we can do. Crake’ll sweep through them in minutes. Trust me, he won’t leave anyone alive. Well, maybe the Orha, but he’ll find a use for you.”

“I have to,” I said. “I can’t just—” My limbs were trembling.

Kielty’s gaze now seemed almost knowing, and I wondered if he’d guessed what was drawing me back. Either way, he said nothing.

“I’m coming with you,” Zennia said.

I shook my head, turning toward her. “No. I already thought you were dead once. I don’t want to be the cause of it actually happening this time.”

“Too bad,” she said with an infuriating smile. “Because I’m not letting you out of my sight again.”

My shoulders slumped. I couldn’t exactly stop her.

“What do you have in the way of a weapon?” Kielty was examining my crumpled garments.

I reached for my knife before remembering what I’d done with it: stabbed Nemaine in order to escape. My blank face must have given me away, because he shook his head and handed me his own rapier: a little rusty but still pin sharp.

“I don’t know how to use one of these.”

“It’s better than nothing,” Zennia said, at the same time as Kielty quipped, “Point and stab.”

The three of us laughed, all a little nervously.

After that the rebels turned back to their boats, from which they were unloading more weapons, leather armor. A few scouts fanned out, seeking hidden places to safely wait out the assault raging above.

Zennia and I began the hike up to the castle, keeping to the mist-wreathed, rarely used paths.

Kielty’s rapier felt odd at my side, an unfamiliar, unbalancing weight.

For her part, Zennia had a crossbow in a holster.

It looked strange to my eyes after a decade of desks and black uniforms at Arbenhaw.

“You sure you don’t want to just leave them all to it?” she murmured, gazing warily up at the castle. More shouts drifted down toward us, the crash of something splintering inside.

I followed her gaze. I couldn’t find the words.

I hardly understood how I was feeling myself, let alone felt able to explain it to another.

The silence was heavy, and after a moment, I looked back at my friend, taking her in.

“They all said you’d drowned.” My voice came out hoarse. “Rexim, Tigo…Emment said he saw it.”

Zennia stiffened but didn’t break her stride. “Emment,” she repeated, scowling slightly. “Yes, he did. He saw me drown.” She met my stare. “Because that’s what I wanted him to see.”

I opened my lips to say, “I don’t understand,” but she must have seen my bafflement.

“I decided to do it before we got into the boat. Before we headed back to the island.” She paused. “How much do you know already?”

“I know about the fights,” I said, hugging myself. “I saw one of them, too. I know you spoke up.” A hot flare of pride, of admiration. She’d done what felt right, despite the danger.

“Okay. I need to go further back.” She chewed her lip.

“Remember when I said it was all Instructor Rhama? Well, it was him who got me this job. The spying, the sabotage…that was meant to be me. He told me about it the night before my exam; said he was putting his life on the line, but that something told him I’d be interested… ”

That memory again: the lecture hall. “Is it true we used to call ourselves Tidespeakers, sir?”

I wondered now if that had been when it started. When he’d started watching her, hearing her quiet scoffs. He must have pinpointed her as an asset: the best of us, a talent too strong to waste.

After Owyn, I made Zennia promise never to run. Never to take her chances with the gallows. I supposed she hadn’t really broken that promise. She hadn’t had to; Rhama had made sure of that.

“The letter hidden in your room,” I whispered. The one I found soon after arriving, only for it to get swept away by the wave. “You said you couldn’t talk about everything you wanted to…and the dates on the back. They were meetings with Kielty, weren’t they?”

“Yes,” she said brittlely. “I’d just got started. But after…what I did at the Veil, Emment said that was the end of my placement. That he’d tell his father and I’d be sent back to Arbenhaw. He said they’d put me in the cellars overnight, then bundle me straight into a coach the next morning.

“That’s when I knew I had to do something. Kielty wouldn’t be able to save me, and there was no guarantee I’d escape on the journey.” She looked at me, brown eyes glinting in the gloom. “I decided to fake it. Fake that I’d drowned.”

“Why didn’t you just run from Emment?” I asked. “He was drunk, wasn’t he? You could have slipped through his grip.”

“No,” she said, thick black brows drawing downward.

Her eyes were on the path, picking out where to place her feet.

“My likeness would’ve been everywhere. Etched in the papers, on posters in the streets…

‘Missing Orha.’ Remember Owyn? This way no one would go looking for me. Safer for me; safer for the Cage.”

My thoughts were jumping, making new connections. Everything now seemed clear as glass. “You called up the waves in the bay. But how? Emment would’ve heard you, wouldn’t he?”

Her lips twisted. “I made sure I had my back to him. Pretended I was whispering to the water to propel us, when really, I was riling it up, agitating it. Soon it was choppy enough to toss us.”

“And then you could get far enough away from him to—”

“Make it seem like I was in real trouble.”

Rhianne’s words echoed in my mind. “He was shaking harder than I’ve ever seen anyone…Got us all up, made us go out there looking…”

A mixture of guilt and pity sloshed in me. Emment had seen what he thought he’d seen.

“Then what?” I said, imagining that night: the darkness, the chill, the rippling waters.

“Swam back to the harbor, then sprinted for the Veil. Kielty was just closing up. I was lucky. Another few minutes and he’d have vanished—I had no idea where he slept at night.

“After that we sent word to Rhama. And Leadership.” She shivered, shoulders lifting. “They weren’t too happy. Sent me down south to help raid laconite shipments, but Kielty persuaded them to let me back. For this.”

And that, I guessed, was where I’d come in.

“It was Rhama,” I said, thinking back to my exam, the memory making my cheeks warm with shame. “My final exam. It was all going wrong. But he couldn’t allow that—he needed me, didn’t he?”

Zennia paused on the path, reaching out.

“I told them it had to be you,” she said.

“I knew it would mean I had a chance of seeing you, a chance to stop you being sent somewhere else. But this job—” She came closer, gripped my arm hard.

“Corith, it suited you perfectly. You know what I’m like: My face says everything.

That’s probably why Rhama knew he was safe to approach me.

And it was hard—so hard—to be around the Shearwaters.

But you…you, Corith. You’re what this job needed.

I knew you’d be better at keeping your cool. ”

I tried to picture Zennia sucking up to Vercha and found myself smiling. My friend’s lips twitched, too.

“I told them I knew you better than anyone. They agreed to have Rhama send you to the island, but they outright refused to tell you about the mission. In case you went straight to Instructor Caerig, I suppose.”

I thought of Rhama’s assessing looks that day. I knew I was far more of a closed book than Zennia. He must have been wondering if they’d made the right choice.

“Corith,” she said, “I put you in danger—”

“It’s all right,” I said, taking her wrist and squeezing it.

The sight of her jerkin’s buttons glinting suddenly brought something else to my mind. I dug in my pocket and brought it out: the brooch I’d given her for her eighteenth birthday, the one Kielty had used to entice me, to prove he knew more about Zennia.

She took it and turned it over in her fingers. “I’m sorry,” she said again, her voice breaking slightly, and I tugged her to me and hugged her close. We stood there a moment, enveloped against the chill, then reluctantly drew back and set off up the path.

“So you went to join the rebels. What’s it like, living rough?” Sidelong, I noted her new, wiry leanness. Her thin, frayed garments. Her hard-set face.

“Not easy,” she said a moment later. “But it feels right. What we do feels right.”

I fell silent. I thought of the headlines in the pamphlets. Bombings. Poisonings. I didn’t know what to believe.

Murderers. Traitors.

I hadn’t thought I was like them. I’d helped them only for information about my friend. But now? I’d seen the Hundred’s actions firsthand. Was I still only aiding the Cage for Zennia?

My thoughts were in a jumble. Pushing them away, I focused on placing my feet among the hollows.

We were near the castle now, near enough to see Crake’s soldiers; there were two pairs of them patrolling the curtain wall.

“Come on,” I said. “We have to get inside.”

We waited for a brief gap in the patrols and sneaked forward.

The castle passageways were burned into my brain, and I intended to lead Zennia past the rarely used storerooms. But as we skirted around the barbican, I saw the inner ward lit up with torches.

A bonfire crackled. Men shouted within. We couldn’t cross the archway without being seen.

“Look,” Zennia hissed, nudging my elbow. “Listen.”

Soldiers were marching from the keep into the ward. I heard boots hitting stone, a harsh laugh I recognized. Uirbrig Crake. He was back outside.