Chapter 41
I’ve been out here for at least an hour now, and I don’t know when the last time I saw the shore was.
Water swells up on either side of me, the waves taller than how far my head peeks over the surface.
I float up and then back down, hoping I’m kicking my legs the way Roiven said, unsure I’m making any difference.
In my head, I thought it would be simple: I knew what direction my familiar was in. Now that I’m out at sea, unable to feel him, I’m not sure I’m steering at all. An ache burns in my legs and my mouth tastes like salt from all the spray. For all I know I’m going the wrong way.
A smooth gray shape breaks the water ahead of me, then submerges. Another one to my left, its dorsal fin the only thing visible for a moment before it vanishes from view. I clench my teeth tight.
The ribbed spines of the fin look just like a reaper’s.
The upper half of my body rests on the flotation device Roiven made for me. I grab the strap with my left fist and sink underwater for a moment. When I open my eyes, the sting of the salt barely registers.
Three reapers. No, a fourth, coming up out of the murky shadows.
I can feel their glassy eyes fix on me as they circle.
Their lower jaws protrude from their faces, jagged teeth that may look miniscule compared to Sava’s, but could still shred me in seconds without problem.
Each of them is bigger than I am. My heart pounds erratically.
I shove the bond closed so Roiven won’t try to come save me.
My right arm isn’t working. I can’t fight and hold the strap with my left. But if I let go of the device, I’m probably dead. I can’t feel my familiar anywhere and I still don’t know how to swim.
I haul myself back up above water and take a gulp of air. The device isn’t big enough to be a raft. I can’t get my whole body on top of it. And if a reaper decides to take a nibble of it, it’ll be destroyed.
Something brushes against my leg—the side of one of the reapers. I yelp and drag my feet in toward me.
I don’t have much time to think. The strap on the device is long enough I can fit it over my head.
I don’t care if it’s a stupid plan, I have to try something.
The moment one of the reapers decides to take a bite, they’ll all taste blood and that will be that.
I shove my head through the strap. Taking a deep breath, I plant my face back into the water, floating on top of the surface, able to see below but not breathe.
I fight to get my legs up onto the surface with the rest of me, to give the reapers the smallest possible target.
One of the reapers tilts up toward me, his large jaw flexing. I pull the sword Roiven made from its scabbard. The movement is slow underwater, requiring more muscle than normal. I grip the hilt tightly, conscious that if I drop it, it’s gone forever.
As the reaper rises toward me, I slash the sword down. The reaper slides away out of the path of the blade and twists back towards me, opening his jaw to bite my foot. I can’t maneuver fast enough to get my sword over there. Instead I cock my knee and kick him in the nose with my heel.
The reaper jerks back and then lunges towards me, my waist this time instead of my leg. I jab with my sword and slice a cut on its back. A puff of blood escapes into the water.
The reaper thrashes away from the blade. I kick my legs but there’s nowhere to go. I’m running out of air and I can’t possibly swim fast enough to escape.
Blood in the water. One of the other reapers clamps its mouth down around the one attacking me. Then another one does. The fish I cut thrashes, but it’s too late. It’s only the work of moments for the other three to shred it to pieces.
I fumble getting the sword back into its scabbard, already kicking my legs in desperation to get away as fast as possible. Grabbing the devices’ strap with my left hand, I shove it back up off my head and surface, gasping for air. I hug the device to my chest and kick like my life depends on it.
“Do you really want me to die out here?” I call breathlessly. There’s no answer. I pop up over another swell, then back down. “Do you know what it was like for me?” I kick, and kick again.
I’m not going to make it, am I? I’m just going to kick my way out into the middle of the ocean, and then I’m going to drown.
And I’m probably going to panic when I do, and Roiven and Sava will feel me panicking and leave Aveinor, and I’ll be the reason everything fails.
I allow myself a dry sob, then grit my teeth and kick again.
“They made me hate the sea. They made it hurt every time I even thought about you, or who I might be,” I say.
“I guess that’s as fair a reason to hate me as any, but I really don’t know what I was supposed to do.
I don’t know why you chose me, or how, but I only even realized you did a few days ago.
And if I knew then what I know now, I never would have pushed you away.
So I’m sorry. But I can’t change the past.”
A larger wave than the others pops me up high into the air, so high I can nearly make out a strip of hazy ground in the distance. And then I slide back down between it and the next wave, and all I can see is water again.
The kraken is back.
Not in the distance, where I sensed him initially. But here. Below me, and to every side, immense, my awareness of him filling the entire sea.
My hand shakes. I grip the strap, sink back beneath the water, and open my eyes.
The bulbous head of the kraken is far below me, a dim glaze rising up from the black depths of the sea.
A tentacle twists closer to me, reaching up.
I grip the float tighter as the narrow end of the tentacle—still wider around than I am—curls around my waist. And then, the kraken pulls.
He knows I can’t breathe underwater, right? I can’t even speak to tell him that. But there’s a mountain of force behind the gentle tug and the float Roiven made me comes down with me, sinking beneath the ocean’s surface.
Down, down, down, until the world darkens around me, the light thinning. The float escapes my grip as the kraken’s tentacle shifts around me. I watch it soar up toward the surface, through the dark.
Maybe I should be scared. But it feels like coming home.
At last I come to a stop. The kraken holds me up in front of one massive eye. I swear stars are swirling in the inky surface.
I can’t breathe. How am I supposed…
Breathe, the kraken’s voice says, a dry crackle in my head. My chest hurts and I take a gulp even knowing it will be the death of me. But it’s air that fills my mouth, not water, and if my eyes still sting from the salt they aren’t underwater anymore.
There’s a bubble of air around my head. I gasp, frantic to fill my lungs with more air. What do I do if the air bubble vanishes?
Why are you so quick to assume I would hurt you?
“I don’t know how to breathe underwater.”
You are mine, little knight. I will not let harm come to you.
“Then why did you let me get taken in the first place?” I say, before I can think. I regret the words immediately, certain he’s going to shut me out entirely. But the kraken only pulls me closer, until his giant eye is the only thing I can see, like he’s studying every detail of me.
I was not fast enough to stop it.
“What do you mean?”
He pulls his other tentacles in toward himself, and I can practically feel the ocean shudder with displaced water. A group of small fish dart past my head, just outside the bubble of air.
Your mother was my last bonded.
“My…” my mouth goes dry. Roiven said it wasn’t about bloodlines. But if the kraken was my mother’s familiar, too… “My mother was…?”
I want to know everything. Who she was, what she was like. But all I do is stare as the kraken continues.
The queen of witches. We managed to push back the death ships, together. The witches were reclaiming their lands. So when a group of witches sailed between isles to re-wild the lands, I let her join them instead of taking her myself. I needed to hunt.
The idea of a kraken this large needing to eat makes me wonder how the seas aren’t empty—and just how deep the water goes.
An assassin struck, he continues.
“Someone betrayed her?”
Your mother used to let deserters from the Empire join, until the Empire felt the tides turn against them, and realized they could use her kindness to send traitors into your midst. This was faster than slowly draining your lands…
which they had resorted to, since I made travel by ocean an impossibility for them. He sounds smug.
“So someone attacked my mother.” Someone she’d welcomed, from the Empire. The thought makes me sick.
I felt her death, down in the abyss. I could not rise fast enough. With her dying breath she begged me to save you as your father put you in the water. The moment you touched the sea I claimed you as mine, but I could not reach you, before…
“The War-Father took me,” I breathe. This part of the story, I know, at least a little, through the dim haze of memories.
Even without the enchantment on me I can’t remember everything.
Some details are perfectly preserved, the blood and the screams, the terror, the nets they used to drag me from the ocean and the War-Father’s metal hands as he dug me from the netting.
By the time I reached sunlight, the death-god’s people were sailing toward their barriers with a knife to your throat.
This, I think, was their aim—not just to kill my last bonded, but to remove me from the war.
I did not dare strike and cause your death.
And then you vanished to the other side of the enchantment and I did not know if you lived until Savasaeirn tried to kill you. Dragons.
The way he thinks the last word feels scornful and affectionate all at once.
“They made me afraid of the ocean,” I tell him.
There is no end to their cruelty. The ocean has always been your birthright, even before I claimed you as my own.
“Roiven didn’t know you were still alive,” I tell him. “Why didn’t you keep fighting? Why…?”
The loss of two bonded in one day was… upsetting.
Perhaps I should have realized you were alive, when I did not bond again—perhaps they kept you alive so I could not bond again—but I mistook it for grief and did not realize the truth.
I lost my taste to meddle in mortal affairs. I lost my taste for most things.
“But mortal affairs—”
Look around you, little knight. Your Queendom is not mine.
And my dominion is vast. When I realized you lived, you seemed to hate your own people, hate me…
I admit this hurt. I tried to take you, when you fell flaming into the sea, but you hated the ocean so violently I could not even reach your thoughts.
So I sent you home, through the barrier, on a wave.
“Why not take me to the Tower? Why not see if they could…”
It was not what you wanted. A familiar and a witch cannot force each other.
“Even though I was Enchanted?”
Your mother Tavesea, dearest of my heart, hated the death-god. But who am I to judge, when witches live for mere centuries and feel so deeply?
My body goes rigid as a surge of fear crashes over me, like a wave bowling me off my feet. Roiven, and Sava. Something’s wrong. The tentacle around me tightens, just barely, and the kraken drags me closer toward his eye.
I see I am not your only bonded.
“Something’s wrong. Roiven, and Sava…”
Ah. Then would you like me to fight again?
I stare into that giant, inky eye, the word yes on the tip of my tongue. I need his power, desperately, but who am I, to drag this ancient sea-being back into this conflict? In another world, another time, maybe I could have sought him out just to know my familiar. Not because I wanted something.
I know how it feels to be made into a weapon.
“I want these lands to be safe,” I whisper. “I want them to stop killing witches and draining the Enchanted. I… I want to save Roiven.”
And this is why you came to find me.
“Yes,” I whisper. “I’m sorry, if that was the wrong reason, but Roiven…”
Do not apologize, little knight. I will gladly hunt their battleships again. Shall we take back our seas for once and all?
“Yes,” I whisper. I can barely form the words. Something’s wrong with Roiven, and I don’t know what. Does Aveinor even still exist? Am I too late?
You must show me where to go, the kraken speaks into my mind. I squeeze my eyes shut and try to locate Roiven through the bond. He’s far away from me, but I can feel his direction.
And suddenly, we’re flying, faster than I knew was possible, through the sea instead of the sky.