Chapter 6 Rae
CHAPTER SIX
RAE
I clamber onto Amaryll’s shoulders, my drenched white dress bunching around my hips. I long to tear it off me, throw it away as I did with my shoes which were the first thing I lost when I jumped into the sea.
I wonder if there is any law in the arena stopping me from undressing—but maybe the soggy fabric will help me climb up. The white surface of the tower looks smooth and slippery.
And like I thought, my wet dress sort of sticks to it as I climb, giving me some much-needed traction.
“Go get it!” Amaryll yells from right below me, and I barely suppress a fit of unhinged laughter.
First off, yelling and laughing is unwise—some sea monsters can and do leap out of the water to catch their prey, and despite what people think, they aren’t deaf.
And second… Holy wights, laughing feels so normal. Takes me right back to where I started. Back to being human. And that’s not good.
My hands slide on the tower’s surface, but I dig my knees in and hold on, moving one leg up an inch, then the other.
My thigh muscles burn as they bear all the strain, my hands offering no help. The top seems too far away, and it occurs to me that even if I had my magic, it would have been wasted here.
Out in the air, as on land, my power fails me. It was made for the water, for the ocean. It calls to the water, to the waves, to emotions, weaving names with music, calling to the deeper parts of the soul. I’m not just a mermaid, that’s for sure.
My power wasn’t made to lure sailors to their death, but to control the fish swarms and guard the sea. It was made to name things and change them by that power.
It’s water, death and rebirth at the same time, depending on what drives you, on who calls your name on the shore, and what drives me is black sorrow, a grief I can’t fit inside of me, a rippling fury that’s eating me from the inside.
Darkness spills inside my mind, just like every time I think back on the past. Dark mist and patches of light illuminating a scene here, a scene there. Blood. Screams. Pain. Sorrow and death.
Clenching my jaw, I keep climbing the tower. Little by little, I conquer its height, move over its length like a spider. The air grows brighter, the wind stronger, shaking me like a leaf. I catch a glimpse of another woman climbing a tower nearby and a sense of strange triumph fills me.
You give us trials and we survive.
Yet I’m still not in the clear, and the top of the tower is too far off. Stopping, I take a breather, trying to ignore my burning thighs.
And even as I hang onto the sleek surface of the pole, I can’t help myself: I turn and look around at the arena.
Yeah, I’m looking for Jai. I admit it.
Where is he? There aren’t so many of us in this trial, and two have already been eaten, but it’s a big arena and all these bobbing towers are in the way, blocking my view.
“You okay up there?” Amaryll calls out from below.
“Fine!” I call back, frowning, still scanning the flooded arena. Where is he, where…?
A twang inside my chest, like a plucked string. Such a weird thing.
It is him. I know it.
He’s alive.
And then I see a black Raven drak swooping down, long claws dipping into the water. Lifting someone out.
It has to be Jai. He’s the dragon summoner. Nobody else can call a drak to do their bidding.
Frowning, I look away, glance up at the tower top—and jerk back when a huge reptilian maw greets me, the fetid breath hitting me in the face, a stench of rotting fish and guts.
“Drak!” I’m slipping down, quickly losing what little grip I had on the smooth surface. “Draks!”
“Whoa, girl.” Amaryll grabs me, stopping me from hurtling back into the water. “Are you okay?”
“No, I’m not. There’s a drak. At the top.” I point, and we both look up in time to see the green drak take off, beating enormous leathery wings.
“Shit,” she breathes. “You almost became drak breakfast.”
“Exactly. Not my favorite way to go out.”
“This didn’t work out.” She scratches her head, shaking out her long dark curls. “How are we going to get that flag?”
“I’ll have to climb back up.” The prospect makes my limbs heavy. “Do you have anything sharp, like a knife? I think the surface isn’t very hard. I could use it to haul myself up.”
“I don’t have anything.” She sighs. “Listen… have you ever considered that it might be a trick?”
“A trick?”
“Making us climb these towers. What if there is nothing up there? Meanwhile, the fae are watching us through their fancy telescopes and laughing their asses off and the draks pick us one by one.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me,” I admit, “but from past experience, the towers have their purpose, and the red flag on top is there for a reason.”
“Yeah, to attract the draks so they can eat us!”
She may have a point there. Yet my gut tells me I need to get back up there, get that flag and whatever comes with it.
More draks fly by and I gasp when I see them carrying someone in their claws. The man is struggling and yelling. My blood freezes.
Draks hadn’t been an issue in the first trial. They were kept out of the arena, probably with the use of magic. Whoever designed the trial of the air, though, apparently felt that draks fit right in.
Jai can talk to the draks, command them when needed. Why isn’t he commanding this drak to bring that man back down? I’ve lost Jai from sight again but the tug in my chest pulses occasionally, like a second heart.
“Hold still,” I whisper, hauling Amaryll against me as more draks fly overhead. “And think happy thoughts.”
“Happy thoughts? I’m only praying they haven’t seen us.”
“Let go of your fear. Dragons can smell it.”
“Oh, great.” She huddles against me, soft and vulnerable and I think, she has a daughter, a family to go back to.
The tower sways with the waves and I don’t want to think what’s causing them, because any moment now a tentacle or a long neck ending in a maw full of teeth will slither up the narrow base of this tower and try to get us.
Overhead, the drak holding the man in its claws roars a plume of fire and flaps again those leathery wings, vanishing beyond the walls of the arena.
How many of us are left now? I wonder if Mera and Axwick are still alive. If she wasn’t the woman the sharks ate, and he the man caught by the serpents or the drak.
“I’m going back up,” I decide, pushing Amaryll slightly to the side. “Lift me.”
She nods, lacing her hands together to give me a leg up, when a pale streak dives down from the top of the tower. Amaryll shrieks, stumbling backward, and I barely catch her before she topples back into the waves.
I look up. “Remi!”
“Remi?” She reels in my arms, and I push her against the tower as the darakin flaps his wings and hovers over us. “What’s going on?”
“Catch!” he says inside my head, and the moment I open my hands, he drops something in them.
A red piece of fabric.
A red flag.
My mouth hangs open. You didn’t…
“I went and got it for you!” he purrs inside my mind. “See? Useful.”
You are indeed! I think back, fisting my hands in the fabric, a tremulous smile on my lips. My eyes sting. Gods, he sounded so much like my brother just now. Thank you.
A pleased feeling fills my mind, and I realize I’m feeling his joy as he flies off.
“Look at that darakin, helping you!” Amaryll is staring at me. “Wait, is it the one who rode on your shoulder during the ball?”
“Yes. That’s Remi.”
“Remi. A darakin with a name. Is that normal?”
“I wish I knew.”
Giving herself a little shake, she straightens and pries the flag from my hand. A twisted piece of metal dangles at its end. “What is this?”
“Either some form of sacred, insane art,” I say, “or—”
“A key,” she whispers.
“A key?” That honestly hadn’t occurred to me. It doesn’t look like any key I’ve ever seen. “Are you sure? Opening what?”
“See these notches? It has to be a key. My father was a key-maker. I’d bet my pretty eyes on it. Speaking of eyes…”
“What is it?”
She tips her head. “Are you seeing that?”
I turn and stare. A round platform is rising from the sea—rising and rising, like a mountain in the middle of the arena. Water is sluicing down its sides in rivers, and the surface looks like lace, like a hive, hollows carved with caves and tunnels, and inside them creatures are writhing.
Wyrms?
“What are they expecting us to do?” I breathe.
“Climb up there, I’d bet,” Amaryll mutters.
“And then?”
She glances at the palace. Then back at the platform that is now level with the lowest palace terrace. “Find another dragon to ferry us over, as we did in the first trial?”
This is the trial of air. It’s as if they expect us to sprout wings and actually fly over there. Here I can’t even sprout fins, let alone turn into a bird. But if we had draks to ferry us…
“Could it be that simple?” she mutters.
“Simple?” I frown. “What are you thinking?”
She clutches the key to her chest, eyes narrowing. “A key. The harnesses need a key…”
The harnesses need a key? Has she hit her head too hard? I glance again at the platform that has stopped rising and seems to have stabilized… when warm air wafts around me.
No, not warm. Hot, laced with a stench of sulphur, rot, and acrid smoke.
Oh no…
“Draks!” she yells, “Fire, fire—”
Grabbing her hand, I yank her to the edge of the tower base and together we jump back into the infested sea.