45. Forty-Five
Chapter 45
The wolf-boat wasn’t like the other fish-craft in Missaniech village, all of which were built for fishing, not speed.
There were a lot of stares when I sailed through the scattered boats. There were even more stares when I tied the wolf to the dock and stepped back onto Nis-Illous.
To my right, the husbands raked salt from the salt-ponds by the water, gathering glistening white piles left by layers of evaporated sea. I saw a baby strapped to a man’s back, and a bigger one sitting to the side beneath a cloth shade, turning over one of the wood buckets in his pudgy hands.
To my left, the old women sat where they always did. One raised a hand to me.
“Eudoria’s girl,” she called in a weak voice. “The old witch didn’t come down for the merchants last week. Batia can sell her cured sausage or grain, if she needs.”
I stared at her for a long moment, my brain slowly trying to make sense of her words above the roar in my skull. Why was anybody trying to talk to me, at a time like this? Couldn’t she see I was in the middle of something? Didn’t she know the world was in pieces?
“Eudoria’s dead,” I managed at last.
I started to walk past them, towards the road to the tower.
“Was it the faerie-boy?” the woman called after me.
I stopped walking and slowly turned. The grandmothers all watched me from their little stools. My mouth felt dry and my head was pounding.
“...Kalcedon?” I asked quietly. She clucked her tongue.
“Him with the gray skin. Whatever his name. He do for her?”
Never mind that he had lived in the tower above them since he was barely older than the babies by the salt-ponds. Never mind that he’d accompany Eudoria down to the village nearly every time she went.
“You’re asking if Kalcedon killed the woman who raised him,” I clarified. The women shifted uneasily, perhaps spooked by the tone of my voice. I lifted my chin. I remembered clearly now why I hated Missaniech and the little towns like it, the little towns like the one I was from. “If he killed the woman he dearly loved. Kalcedon? Who loves to garden? That Kalcedon? The one who cured that root-rot in the village vineyard a year ago? The one who brought down basket after basket of vegetables when that big storm upset the fishing two years back? The one who healed a fisher’s arm when she fell off her ladder, fixing her roof? That Kalcedon?”
The woman waved me off with a scowl, unwilling to answer. I took a step closer.
“No. Kalcedon didn’t,” I said. “ Kalcedon has got a better heart than anyone in this village, you miserable sack of bones.”
The woman spat on the ground. I curled my lip, then turned and hiked the two miles to the tower. She was lucky I was so weak, or else I might have done something stupid, something even prickly Kalcedon wouldn’t have approved of.
By the time I got to the tower, I wasn’t so angry anymore. Not at the old woman, anyways. She could go on being wrong all she liked. I had no energy for anger, not when tremulous, warbling grief sloshed back and forth in me like a trapped sea.
It wasn’t because of her , or even ignorant old folk like her, that the house was empty. It was because of the faeries and the Colynes king that I pushed open the door to an empty tower; that nobody answered when I foolishly, hopefully, desperately cried hello?
I knew nobody would answer. It was just a fantasy that Eudoria was still waiting for me. The silence put a final end to that hope; made me look straight at the truth I’d been skirting. The tower was empty.
It was because of the faeries that Eudoria was dead, that Kalcedon was missing. I didn’t even know what they wanted with him.
But I was going to find out. It had come to me in the hours I spent bobbing on the sea, sailing first one way, then another, feeling like I was going mad.
The day Eudoria died, I’d seen images flickering over the mirrors in her workroom, written spells waking from their sleep to paint pictures on the wall. One of those images had been looking straight at the Ward, at a hazy gray outland figure moving on the other side.
Maybe it wasn’t related. Maybe Eudoria had just been skimming along the Ward, seeing what there was to see. Or maybe she’d known something. She’d met Kalcedon’s mother, after all. And Kalcedon, like the blurry figure, was gray.
At first I’d wondered if the faeries wanted Kalcedon dead. He’d gotten in the way of their plans, rescuing Oraik from the tal-rih. But why spell him and carry him away if they just wanted his corpse at the bottom of the sea? And certainly they couldn’t have mistaken him for anybody else. There was nobody in the whole Protectorate that looked like him; who burned like him.
Even the other faeries didn’t burn like Kalcedon burned.
I’d already guessed at what the Colynes wanted: power. But I’d never thought to question the fae. Dominion over our isles seemed the obvious answer.
What if it wasn’t?
I walked straight up the winding stair to the workroom. I didn’t have the heat to fill any of the oiled sigils on the walls, but someone in Rovileis would. I walked along the wall, squinting my eyes as I summoned the memory and counting out which picture had shown the view through the Ward. I took it down and carefully strapped a cover over the mirror so it could be transported without smearing the precise sigils.
I’d spent so long on the ocean that by then it was already growing dark in Nis. I opened the door to Kalcedon’s room and curled up in the bed, pulling his blankets tight around myself. The urge to cry rose up in me, then sank like a heavy stone.
It was funny. The house felt even emptier than the sea, which made no sense. Out there there’d been no walls, no edges, no end to the vast and undulating water. Kalcedon’s room was tidy and chaotic all at once, crammed full of books he probably hadn’t read, and jars of seeds he was saving, and bad drawings of plants and somebody’s eyes—mine?—pinned to the walls.
But all that life made its emptiness howl.
I meant to leave at dawn. I swapped the old clothes out of my bag for clean ones. I almost left Kalcedon’s awkwardly carved little bird behind, with one wing bigger than the other and tiny bloodstains on its side, remembering how upset he was that I'd taken it in the first place. But when I pulled it out of my bag, I found I couldn’t get my fingers to unclench and set it down. It was a reminder of him and Eudoria, one I wanted close at hand.
When I wandered outside I spotted weeds in Kalcedon’s garden: round green seedlings nosing their way out of the dirt; thick bullying sprouts that carpeted the ground. Vegetables had ripened and rotted in his absence, inviting tiny flies. And though he mostly grew things which could survive the Nis-Illousian landscape, he did water some of what he grew, and those plants drooped miserably.
Kalcedon wouldn’t stand for it, but I had no time to fix it for him. I picked my way through the garden, cracking the stalks of a fennel when I stepped wrong. Then I paused, staring down at one of the larger plants. I moved a broad leaf aside. Here was one small thing I could do for Kalcedon. A taste of home.
When I left, I carried the first of the season’s white melons with me.