Chapter 25
The children are waiting when I reach the bottom.
Four of them, the oldest perhaps thirteen, the youngest nine.
None of them look related. A golden pickfisher, the small, shrill-voiced birds that like to scavenge from washed-up carcasses, flutters after them.
A rat hops along the stone ground. My lips curl down.
Familiars, if I had to guess.
“Avreen says she’s a knight,” the oldest child says, giving me a grim, accusing look. He’s got big ears. His eyes burn with dark green fire.
“She’s also my guest,” Roiven answers, so diplomatically it's hard to remember he despises me.
“Will she go away soon? Hesfus doesn’t like knights,” one of the younger ones says. The rat reaches her and climbs up her side. The girl scoops it off her hip with comfortable familiarity and settles the creature on her shoulder. I try not to shudder.
The fucking rat looks right at me and squeaks, baring its teeth.
“Cai and I have things to discuss,” Roiven says. “Get on. We’ll talk later.”
The children hesitate. Roiven raises his eyebrows and the younger ones jog off, headed away from the ocean and deeper into the ravine. The oldest takes a second longer to glare at me before he follows.
A moment later the ball skips past us, bouncing as it rolls.
“You were supposed to catch that!” the oldest child yells to the one with the rat.
They remind me of the children on Amkrieg.
I jog forward and stop the ball with my foot, then pick it up.
When I turn around Roiven is watching me closely, and the children stare from a distance, looking horrified.
With my luck, if I throw it I’ll knock one of them over.
I hesitate, eyes flicking to Roiven, then roll it towards the children along the ground.
Roiven starts walking slowly down the road that lines the crevasse, the other way from the children. I follow wordlessly, feeling uneasy. I don’t want to find these people relatable.
So many children on this island, and Roiven seems to care about them. It’s hard to reconcile that with the image I’ve always had of witches as bloodthirsty, soulless bastards willing to do anything for power.
“If you didn’t sacrifice anything for your bond…” I start.
“I didn’t.”
“Then how did it happen?”
“She chose me.”
I raise my left eyebrow. “You’re a terrible storyteller.”
A faint smile shadows Roiven’s lips, but it doesn’t reach his eyes.
“You want to know? Fine. I was twelve, late to not be bonded yet. We were thirsty, so I scaled up a cliff hoping for freshwater on the other side. A sea titan must have had its nest at the top, because it attacked when I was about thirty feet up.”
I whistle. Titans are dumb, but they’re ferocious.
The homes we’re walking past are sort of charming, with circular glass windows cut into the ravine and bundles of dried flowers hanging above the doors. Each home’s entrance is up a few feet off the ground, with steps, ramps, or ladders, as if it sometimes floods here.
“I couldn’t let go without falling, but it raked its talons into my back and was about to knock me off the rock. Savasaeirn saw. She’d just lost her bonded, so she saved me.”
I frown. Something about the story doesn’t make sense to me.
“Why did you have to look so hard for water in the first place? Drought?”
“Our village was destroyed,” he says flatly, his voice without emotion. “It wasn’t hidden, like this one. I had to figure out how to take care of my little sister.”
“It was just you two?”
He shrugs, but his eyes won’t meet mine.
“Our older brother went out on a ship and didn’t come back. When the Hellion came our parents told Aria and me to run, but they stayed behind to fight. Nobody who did that lived.”
My throat goes tight. The War-Father always talked about what the witches took from us: the barren islands, which Roiven claims are actually our doing, and the dragon attacks that mean only warships can enter the Wild Seas.
But I’ve never heard anybody talk about the things we take from the witches.
“I wouldn’t have expected a king to come from a village. I’d have thought your parents would live at the Gray Tower.”
Roiven’s jaw hardens.
“I’m not king because of bloodlines,” he tells me. “My father was a fisherman. My mother made clothes. I’m king because Savasaeirn chose to be my familiar, and she was the strongest of the ancients we had left.”
We round a bend in the crevasse. Another three children are playing here.
They’re younger, five and six, with dolls made out of bone and fiber.
Nor, hanging up laundry with an eye on the children, gives Roiven a silent nod.
The children don’t look up from their game.
Roiven skirts around them, so I do too. There are another half-dozen doors ahead of us.
The sound of the ocean is louder, almost immediate, a pounding rhythm. I shudder.
“Where are their parents?”
“The adults here watch after them.”
“What about birth parents?” I ask, even though I can guess.
“Mostly gone. Where were yours?”
I open my mouth to tell him the War-Father raised me, but that’s not who Roiven is asking about. A shadow falls over us. I tilt my head back to watch Sava fly overhead. I blink away the bright sun and look around the crevasse again.
“There was a shipwreck,” I say.
Roiven pauses in front of one of the doors, and knocks. The door swings in before I can tell Roiven I’m not sure I want to talk to anybody here, and the words freeze on my lips.
She’s blonde, and broad-shouldered, with enchantment lines on one side of her face and scars on the other. And I remember her instantly, though she looks different now, not so starved and glassy-eyed. She’s wearing a long-sleeved tidy dress and a belt with a knife on it.
Three years ago. A transport run. The manifest didn’t have her name; they never did, but it marked her as a debtor.
She looks down at me, then at Roiven, from her raised doorway. The Witch King nods.
She puts a hand over her heart, as I shake my head swiftly, at a loss for words.
“This is the knight,” Roiven tells her.
“I’m sure you don’t remember me,” the woman begins. She grips the doorframe tightly, her chin wobbling a little.
“I do,” I croak. “Of course. I do.”
“I didn’t know if I’d ever have a chance to thank you,” she says. “So. Here we are. Thank you. If not for you, I would be dead. I will never forget what you did.”
“You don’t…” I take a step back, feeling ambushed. “I don’t need to be thanked. I’m just glad you made it.”
The woman shakes her head.
“I am alive because of you, lady knight. When Nor said there was a knight here who could pull enchantment, I hoped it would be you.”
“Why did you come here?” I blurt. Roiven folds his arms.
“They were willing to take me in. It was that or live in solitude, as a hermit and an outcast, fearing I’d be captured.”
“But…” I start. I cut myself off before I can tell her that she isn’t safe with the witches, because I can’t very well say that in front of Roiven. And anyways, it’s instinct and memory that bring the words to my mind, not conviction.
Isn’t she safe? Safer than she was on a Hellion. Anyone who saw those marks in the Empire would know exactly what she was, and where she was supposed to be. They might drag her right back. But here? They've welcomed her. She has a home.
“Will you come in?” she asks, and steps back to let us.
I gulp, peering past her into the dark home, lit by the dull flicker of an oil lamp. There’s a rug on the floor and a sitting bench. And yes, I want to know who she is, and how she’s survived, but…
I can’t. I look at Roiven, hoping he’ll read my expression well enough to know that this is more than I can handle. I never wanted to see the ones I rescued as real people, because it would make the ones I lost, and the ones I killed myself, hurt all the worse.
“Maybe tomorrow,” Roiven says. “Thank you, Hevrin.”
Hevrin. I won’t forget it. That was supposed to be you, I think silently to the ghost of the Enchanted with the fishscaler. I wanted this for you. Not fire and drowning and fear.
“Can I know your name, lady?” Hevrin asks me. I blink back to the present, my throat tight.
“Cai,” I whisper. “It’s Cai. Caiteven.”
She smiles sadly at me, and I turn away, my head spinning. Roiven nods to her, and I hear the door close. I brace my hand on the wall, my body trembling. If the Empire is good and the witches are evil, then why is she safer here?
Roiven steps closer.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that would bother you,” he says, his voice low. “She wanted to meet you, to thank you.”
“I’m no hero.” My voice shakes.
Roiven frowns.
“To her, you are.”
“Do you know how many hundreds like her I’ve killed?” I whisper. “More. More than hundreds. And I saved… thirty-two. I think. From all that.”
“But you saved her.”
“By luck,” I whisper. “She lived, they died.”
“Yes,” he agrees. “They died. And if it weren’t for you, she would have died too. What made you do it? Why did you risk your life?”
“I had to.”
“Somebody was making you?”
“No. Of course not; nobody could know.” Not even Harfor. “But it was wrong. It was all wrong, and they told me using the Enchanted was the only way to stop worse things from happening to everybody, but I… I did not even question it. What kind of fool….”
The witches aren’t evil enough for me to justify the deaths of even one Enchanted, much less the cost of the whole war. Even if Roiven has been showing me a carefully curated truth, they took in Hevrin. Isn't that proof enough?
“What are you going to do about it? Are you going to return to that life or are you going to fight for one where things like that don’t happen?”
“You could have warned me she was here,” I whisper, and look back at the closed door.
“I thought it would be a pleasant surprise.”
“I am glad she’s alive,” I tell him, in case he thinks I’m that heartless.
“I know. Would you like to keep walking? Or would you like to see if Hevrin will still have us inside?”
I nod down the ravine. Roiven steps down the path and I follow him, around another bend in the crevasse.