Chapter 18 Toran #2
The word had come from Nes, and yet he couldn’t believe she’d said it.
Because there was no tight knot of conviction in her syllable, only a loose tremble of fear.
Maybe the night in the brawlhouse had clouded his judgment, but he hadn’t thought her capable of such an emotion.
Not after he’d cornered her in the prison and she’d come at him with claws out.
Even that day in the Drowning Square, it hadn’t been fear he’d seen in her eyes before the platform exploded but desperation.
He watched Nes’s gaze flit from Genna, to the boat, to him. “You don’t need me. I’ll wait for you here. Or”—she turned her back on him and the tiny boat—“over there.”
She was several steps away before he could blink. “Wait.”
He needed her. She could not help him by staying on these docks.
“Wait,” he said again. “You’re not backing out of our deal, are you?”
She whirled on him. “No.”
There was that unbreakable conviction he’d come to expect from her.
“Then get in the boat, Nes.”
“No.”
He leaned down so they were nearly nose to nose. Her breath was filled with the harshness of black coffee. He had the strange desire to suck it out of her.
“Is there a problem with the boat?”
She lifted a hand to his face, and for a second he thought she might cup his jaw, might smooth her fingers over his cheeks. But then she pressed her palm to his nose and pushed him back. He had to bite his lips to keep from grinning too hard, even as he stumbled at the strength behind the shove.
“No.”
“Then what is the problem?”
He watched as her face changed and Nes disappeared before his eyes, some horrific memory yanking her down to her own depths.
He took her hand, thumb slipping inside to caress her clammy palm, his fingers skimming her knuckles until he felt the pulse at her wrist. It could have been a stone skipping over the water the way it tripped through her veins.
Toran felt the urge to smooth it out, to do anything to pull her back to the surface.
“I can’t swim.”
The words were weak and muffled, and he wasn’t sure they’d come from her lips.
“You can’t swim?”
“Don’t make me repeat it,” she hissed, that bite returning. “Why do you think I live in the only city sector without canals?”
If he were honest, he’d thought she didn’t have a choice. “We won’t leave the boat.”
She shook her head and shoved her hands in the pockets of her skirt. Through the fabric, he could see how her fingers danced, fidgeting with something she kept deep inside.
“We made a deal.” He nodded to her pocket, to the ring he was sure her fingers continuously turned over. “We’re in this together. I can’t go without you.”
It wasn’t a lie. He hadn’t been out on the water since Loriana drowned.
He didn’t want to face the ocean alone. He knew it was irrational, but he had visions of finding Loriana’s bloated body floating on the surface.
And, for some reason he couldn’t name, the thought of Nes being there with him made it all easier to swallow.
Nes huffed out a breath. “What if the boat tips? That thing looks about as reliable as a one-wheeled carriage.”
He snorted. “It’s held more than three people before.”
“How?”
“We’ll be all right. The ocean is calm today and, if we do somehow tip, I won’t let you drown.”
“Even if that means drowning yourself?”
He stopped smiling at that. He’d seen her fear but hadn’t realized how deep it ran. “You’re really that scared?”
“I’m not scared,” she shot back, chin high. “I’m just keen on survival.”
So were they all.
Toran studied her. “If I die,” he said, “I promise I’ll save you first.”
“Careful there, Captain,” she said. “Deals can be broken, but promises are meant to be kept. I fully expect you to pay up.”
“I will. Should the time come.”
She raised a brow at him as she pushed past. Her shoulder brushed his arm, and she slowed at the contact.
He watched as Nes climbed into the boat on shaky legs. For all her bravado, she couldn’t seem to hide her body’s reaction. She sat in the bow on the small triangular bench while he settled onto the long one at the stern, Genna in the middle.
Genna gently pushed them away from the dock, and they drifted out into the open water. The boat didn’t rock, didn’t tilt. It bobbed on the surface as Genna began to row. Nes hunched down, clinging to the wood shaping the rowboat.
The ocean was quiet, but it was not soundless. Their boat glided along the water, ripples butterflying in their wake, a soft shh, shh unfurling with every pull of the oars.
Leaving the docks, they headed for the sloping rock wall beneath the castle.
The seawall rose high above them, the tops of the rock curled out as if trying to mimic the waves.
The castle sitting atop the stone, with its dark blue spires and beautifully painted stained glass, looked like a palace built for the Goddess, Nephele.
It loomed above them as they rowed closer.
Toran glanced over to Nes. She’d lifted her head to stare at the castle. With the color leaching from her cheeks and her lips pursed tight, she looked like she might be sick.
Two strokes and the boat slid around an outcropping of rocks. There, tucked against the shadowed, smooth pane of stone, were the symbols, carved straight into the rock.
He leaned forward, his fingers gripping the edge of the rowboat. No, that was wrong. The markings hadn’t been carved. They’d been burned. Deep gouges stained black with the soot of harsh flames. But it was impossible to burn stone in such a manner.
Impossible without magic.
He understood why Genna wanted to bring them here before the tide rose. It was low tide now, and already the water lapped at the bottom of the symbols. At high tide they’d be completely obscured.
He stole his gaze back from the symbols, glancing at Genna just long enough to ask, “Can you read it?”
Because these weren’t like the isolated symbols they’d found in the Drowning Square or the Holy Triad. These were in rows. With spaces between them. They weren’t just symbols. They were words.
“It’s a message.”
Toran jumped. It was as if Nes had plucked the statement right from his brain. She was leaning over the side of the boat, her neck stretched thin as she strained to get closer to the stone. It seemed her curiosity had overtaken any fear.
He watched her, suddenly unable to look away. “From the Witch?”
Both Nes and Genna shook their heads.
“No one knows for sure who—or what—wrote it,” Genna told him. “The Brotherhood has been trying to decipher the language since it was discovered decades ago.”
Language.
He stared at the charred rock, at the precise carvings, at their depth and sheer size. A single line was longer than the length of his entire body.
“The monastery knows about this?” Toran asked. “Does the King?”
Genna pulled the oars inside so the boat floated a little ways from the wall.
“I’m sure the King knows. But it’s the monastery that’s been working to learn its meaning.
My father’s spent years of his life trying to translate it.
Ever since I was little, he’s been more devoted to the Goddess and this message than he has his own family. ”
Toran knew Genna’s father was a monk in the Brotherhood.
To be inducted was one of the highest honors Orlonea had to offer.
Brothers in the National Monastery were tasked with ensuring the people’s devotion to the almighty Goddess, Nephele; keeping what little written scripture they had left intact; and recording Orlonea’s history.
They weren’t just monks. They were scholars of the highest caliber. The respect held for them was tantamount only to that for the royal family and, he supposed, himself. But the bitterness in Genna’s voice as she spoke of her father was impossible to miss.
“Years?”
Genna nodded. “And other Brothers have spent decades before him, but they’d only been able to pick up bits and pieces. Never the pattern of the language.”
He turned back to the symbols. They weren’t going to help him. This message—whatever it said—predated the Witch they were hunting now.
“Switch seats with me?” He directed his question at Genna, but his eyes had returned to Nes. She didn’t seem to notice as he and Genna kept the boat even and swapped places. He wondered if she’d forgotten they were there—if she’d forgotten where she was.
Nes, who’d been terrified of getting in the rowboat, now seemed poised to jump out of it. She had a knee resting on the edge, hands on either side, the majority of her weight suspended over open water.
She looked like a tree. Majestic and curious and thoroughly incapable of ceasing her growth. Her lips moved as she mumbled to herself the same way the leaves on trees brushed and whispered to one another.
“And you?” he asked Genna. If her boastings were true, her expertise on languages ran deeper than any scholar of the last century. “How long did it take you to decipher its meaning?”
Beside him, Genna grinned, the wide stretch of her lips radiating self-satisfaction.
But on his other side, Nes turned her head. Their eyes met. In hers he saw age-old fears. Rings in her irises like the rings of years inside a tree trunk.
“Three years,” Genna said. “It says, ‘I am still here. You cannot kill me.’ ”
Toran didn’t have time to process the translation before Nes’s knee slipped and the boat capsized, dumping them all into the ocean.