Chapter 17
“You,” I whisper. Sava shoots up into the sky in a burst of flame and claws. The beat of her wings lifts the hair off my neck and makes me squint into the wind.
The attention of the hulking thing, impossibly large, turns to me.
Most of the kraken’s body remains in the ocean.
But the long ends of two tentacles curl on the rocks of the Bluff, and the bulbous head of the kraken emerges from the sea some twenty or thirty feet off the rockfield’s shore, where the Bluff’s rock bed drops away.
“Go away.” My voice shakes. My head screams as needles of pain lance through it.
Little knight…
Its wet, inky eyes stare at me, unblinking. The pain smashes through me, splitting my head down the middle.
“I don’t want this. I don’t want you. Can’t you just leave me alone?” The pain is as unrelenting as a tide.
Iron bars squeeze around my heart as the tentacles slowly withdraw, slithering across the rock and vanishing into the crash of the ocean’s waves.
The head of the creature remains a moment longer, and then it vanishes, too.
And the ocean is a black mirror shining beneath the moon, the waves rolling against the rockfield.
The kraken is gone. The headache softens, but doesn’t go away entirely.
A deep, soul-crushing ache crosses through me. Rejection, loneliness. I feel like I’ve gutted myself, and on top of the pain and anger I was already feeling, the misery threatens to swallow me whole. But I still hate the thing in the water more than I long for it. I have to.
I press the heels of my palms to my temple, hard. And then, I fall to my knees, cracking onto the hard stone. My breath comes in desperate hiccups as one tear escapes my eyes, and then another. Everything hurts. It’s a pain bigger than I know how to bear.
This is my fault. My emotions are swirling out of control. Sick overwhelm at the death of the exiles, shame for attacking Roiven when he couldn’t defend himself, an empty heartache for the thing in the water, and the crushing realization that everyone I cared about wanted me dead.
Haven’t I been a good soldier? I’ve killed everyone they ever told me to.
Roiven still kneels on the ground in front of me, staring at the ocean where the beast disappeared. His head turns slowly to look at me. Beneath the glow of his orange eyes, I can just barely make out that his mouth is hanging open in shock.
“How?”
I bend over, hands clutched around my waist, and wonder how I’m ever going to survive this pain. I can barely breathe.
“That was the… how did you, of all people, bond to him…” Roiven sputters.
Bonded? No. Oh, no. That’s witchcraft. The pain slams back into my head and I whine, desperate to escape it.
“Make it go away,” I beg. “I hate it. I hate that thing.”
“Cai,” Roiven whispers. My name is a brittle, fragile thing in his mouth. “You should not think such things about your familiar.”
And all of a sudden I’m crying so hard there isn’t any sound to it, and my face burns hot and the tears hurt as they escape my eyes in silent wracking sobs that shake my whole body, and I spent two years mourning a life that wanted me dead the whole time, and if Malkin knew what I was she’d probably have wanted me dead, too, but I’ll never find out, because she’s gone, and I’m still here, even though nobody wants me to be.
Roiven blinks and stands. He approaches me slowly, with his hands raised, like I’m a wild animal. The King of Witches crouches beside me. His hands hover over my shoulders, like he’s scared to touch me. And he should be. I swore I'd kill him.
But at least the ship he sank was a warship in enemy territory.
“It’s alright,” Roiven says.
“Nothing is,” I try to say, but the words come out choked and garbled.
He rests his hands on my shoulders, lightly, tentatively.
And then, he pulls me against his chest, and I collapse against my enemy and cry all the harder.
“It’s alright, it’s alright,” Roiven murmurs. “Breathe. It will pass.”
I don’t believe him. But I draw a ragged breath and hiccup through another, snot dripping from my nose, as the man I hate more than anyone gently pats my left shoulder and murmurs again: “just let it pass.”
“Don’t be nice to me,” I manage to say. “I hate you. And I shouldn't have hit you when you couldn't defend…”
I scrunch my lips up and bury my head in my elbow for a moment. This is too much. And it’s insane.
My head spins harder. Why am I apologizing for attacking a witch, just because he couldn’t fight back? It’s like I’m proving Harfor was right to get rid of me and the War-Father was right to condemn me.
Roiven stops patting my shoulder and just holds me. I feel him sigh, his chest rising and falling slowly beneath me. I’m soaking his shirt with tears.
I push myself up and wipe at my face, gulping for air.
“This is fucked up.”
“Loss isn’t easy,” he says. “Don’t apologize for having kept a piece of your heart.”
The Bluff shudders beneath me as Sava lands. Roiven looks up at her.
“We can’t harm her,” Roiven says. He’s talking to Sava, not me. Words I’m sure he’d say in his head if I hadn’t forbidden it. “Not if she’s his.”
The dragon huffs in response. A warm blast of air.
I don’t want to be “his.” There’s a pounding pressure behind my eyes. I don’t want any of this. I wish I could turn back time and be who I used to be, a knight on a ship fighting in the glory. Things were simple then. Straightforward. I was happy, most of the time.
And yet that life no longer wants me. They abandoned me for two years, and then tried to kill me. Harfor and the War-Father. And now that I know what happened here, at the Bluff, I’m not sure I’d go back even if I could.
I’m going to take the obedience off Roiven, and he’s going to mount Sava and vanish into the night. I’m going to be alone on the Bluff.
I want to talk to the War-Father. I want to hear him tell me that I was meant to die, because if that’s what he believes after I spent my life in his service, I at least deserve to hear it from the Exalted himself.
And if he’s on the front line, headed for the Gray Tower, there’s only one way I could possibly reach him to confront him.
“I can get rid of all of it,” I blurt. Roiven and Sava both look at me. “Your enchantment, I mean.”
“I don’t have a month.”
“How long will it take you to get home?” I ask. “To the Tower?”
“It…” Roiven starts. Sava growls. I think she doesn’t want him to give me information. “...depends what route we take,” Roiven finishes in a mutter.
“You’re worried about them attacking. But you have at least a week. I’d guess more like two. I could at least get rid of more than just the obedience if you take me with you.”
Roiven folds his arms. Sava looks out at the ocean, and I wonder if she’s looking for the kraken, worried it will strike again. It’s hard to imagine a dragon of her size scared of anything.
“How can you be sure?”
“Harfor said they needed more from the council, so she’ll be headed there to report the attack, or to be in place to speak to the council when someone else does. Right?”
He nods his head slowly.
“Rancor—the ship we just saw—she’s fast. But it’ll still take her maybe three days at full speed to reach Barivum from here, where the council sits.”
My tongue is heavy in my mouth. Telling him this is treason. But I can’t bring myself to care as much as I should. I need to get back to the Wild Seas, and the war.
I need to look the War-Father in his cold, Enchanted eyes and ask if I ever meant something to him, or if I’ve just been a tool this whole time.
“They'll be traveling for three days,” Roiven echoes.
I close my eyes, draw a ragged breath, and nod.
“The council doesn’t usually move fast about funding.
But in an emergency, or… in the face of a tragedy,” I add with a gulp, “they might reach a decision in a day or two. There’s not much they can do to build new ships or outfit sailors in any fast amount of time, but if they just want power, well, there are hundreds of people in the debtor prisons in Barivum. ”
“They’ll kill them,” Roiven says flatly.
“No,” I protest. “Not… not directly. Just consecrate them to enchantment. Their families won’t carry their debts or their shames. It’s an honor.” Even as I say the familiar words they feel like stones in my mouth, sharp and heavy and difficult to work my tongue around.
“An honor that ends in death.”
“Everything ends in death.”
Roiven rubs his forehead.
“So we have three or four days until they set out for our land,” he murmurs.
“Three more days travel from Barivum, to reach the Wild Seas, and that’s if they’re really burning through Enchanted. I don’t know how far the Gray Tower is, but...” I have to assume it’s deep in their lands, since we never could find it until now.
Roiven turns to look at Sava, then back at me. I wait, drawing a thin breath through my nose, feeling the wind sting against my tear-wet cheeks.
“Take off the obedience,” he says at last. “And then we can talk about what comes next.”