Chapter Fifty-Two Hanan
chapter fifty-two
hanan
They recoil as soon as the otter-cat outs me.
I hadn’t predicted the presence of magic aboard this vessel, but it did feel almost extraordinary how the blessed ship emerged like a dream from the storm.
In truth, I thought speaking otter-cats were fanciful stories.
His words hold weight with them, as though confirming a truth they already suspected.
Their faces are twisted in disgust. I can’t blame them. Magic is misunderstood, ever feared.
‘Is it true? Do you have power?’ Ris asks.
‘Yes, but you don’t understand what happened,’ I implore. ‘They used me.’
‘If you are magic, and you came from the Bastion, you must be . . .’ Finlyr says, slowly putting the pieces together.
‘The priestess,’ I confirm.
Ris is struck by paralysis as she watches me, slack-jawed. ‘Holy Aistra.’
Finlyr grabs her arm, and the crew moves close together, keeping an eye on me as they mutter. Where would I run? I have no desire to return to the ocean. I wouldn’t leave Raina.
Children and a talking otter-cat. Are they a family?
What are they doing out here? I stare again at the bodies, dead but animated, moving in repetitive rhythmic fashion.
These were once people, their bodies marking the violence of their death and decay.
Now they are husks, moving by rote, by distant memory.
I haven’t yet discerned what power impels them to move like this, but I want to know it.
I feel the same strange, bright and burning energy that I did in the bowels of the Tree.
Fresh anguish, like a wound reopened, at the emptiness of my power stilled within me.
‘So the queen is after you?’ Finlyr asks eventually, breaking from the group and pacing the deck. He’s broad and tan in the same way as Ris; people of hard labour and hard lives. I would have been someone like that if I hadn’t been touched by magic.
‘She will be, eventually,’ I say quietly.
‘Paranish, that’s just perfect,’ he says, still pacing. ‘Here we are trying to find this cursed treasure to placate that bitch. Meanwhile, we dredge up the number-one enemy to the crown. We may as well just throw ourselves into the Maelstrom now and die.’
I try to understand his babbling speech. ‘Maelstrom.’ I hold on to the word. It feels familiar, like a memory from a dream.
Finlyr continues to unravel. ‘That’s assuming we still make it there.’
‘What is the Maelstrom?’
They all look at me. Isagani shakes their head.
I sigh. ‘Look, they already hurt me and banished me,’ I say, opening my hands in supplication. ‘Who am I going to tell? What do I have to lose?’
Finlyr looks at his crew.
‘Fine,’ Sinigang says eventually.
‘The Lahon Maelstrom,’ Finlyr confesses.
‘I know a little of it.’
‘Well then you’ll know nobody’s made it back alive.’ Finlyr glares.
‘Apart from you,’ Isagani says, tentatively hopeful.
‘You’ve been there before?’ I can’t hide the surprise in my voice.
‘At a distance was plenty,’ he corrects.
‘And what do you hope to find there?’ I try to keep my voice level, curious but afraid.
Finlyr and Ris shrug, making non-committal noises.
‘Do you know what’s down there?’ Biba asks, approaching me slowly.
A Maelstrom. Cursed treasure.
She was a trickster and a thief.
She was a traitor to the crown.
She was corrupt beyond belief.
Follow her way and you will drown.
I have nothing to lose and everything to gain. A seed is planted in my mind, a sprouting hope of power regained. I find myself smiling.
‘I’m not sure,’ I say, crouching down beside her.
She reaches out to touch my hair and seems surprised when I don’t flinch away. She gently brushes it out of my face and in my periphery I can see a few locks, dark as they were before the binding.
‘You had sunshine hair, but now it’s back to midnight hair,’ Biba says.
I remember the energy pulsing between us down in the captain’s quarters.
‘Your daughter is blessed, isn’t she?’ I ask, standing up.
Ris and Finlyr are poised like animals about to fight or flee.
‘I was a priestess. I’m not afraid of her, and neither should you be.’
I don’t need them to like me, just to trust me. For now.
‘She is touched,’ Ris says, and I can see she is ill at ease with the notion.
‘It is a gift,’ I reassure her.
‘You were raised at the temple,’ she says after a time.
I nod.
‘What . . . what was it like there?’
Ris’s question has a weight to it, as though my answer could shatter her. She is hanging on my every word; I feel Biba watching me. She is hungry for knowledge of a place where there are others like her. I’m conscious of my face, my mannerisms.
I try to smile at Biba. ‘It taught me a great deal. It was the only home I ever knew.’
The half-truth feels like poison on my tongue, but Ris looks relieved.
She brings her daughter into a tight embrace.
There’s a fierce protection there that eclipses the fear radiating off her.
I shuffle the pieces in my mind, wondering what Biba’s gift could have to do with their being on a contract for the Bastion.
Sinigang slinks up to me and settles by my feet.
I catch him surreptitiously looking at me out of the corner of one half-lidded eye.
I am tempted to put up the wall, to dance around the naked truth.
I have given them morsels of truth, enough to trust me.
I shield my face with my shroud of hair, a dark reminder of who I used to be.
It’s as though their realisation of what I am has released a dam built against acknowledging my crimes, and now my chest is being crushed by the weight of water.
I have survived by ignoring the shadow in the corner of my mind.
‘The undead crew all have names, you know,’ Sinigang says casually.
I turn to stare at him.
‘Not what they were called in life,’ he continues, ‘but the children hold a great affection for them.’
‘That’s . . . macabre.’
‘Any more macabre than what you did?’
I think of Pocket and the future I had imagined for him when I freed him from his cage in the Bastion library. It had given me solace to think of him unbound, untamed, free to make anywhere his home and owned by no one.
‘What can you feel?’ Sinigang asks, his intense expression making my skin prickle. His words are so gentle that they are a death by a thousand cuts, and I’m caught in a reverie. I am compelled to answer him truthfully, as though he is weaving a truth spell with his look.
‘Nothing,’ I confess.
‘You were no petty witch. You were a priestess. I don’t think you would accept that fate.’
‘I should be dead. I’d rather be dead.’
Soft as a gentle breeze, he admits, ‘You still reek of magic. It’s faint but it’s there.’
I close my eyes and feel for any ember of magic.
His energy is in the distance, so close and yet out of reach.
It’s the rumble of thunder and lightning striking, an approaching storm.
I feel him underneath my hand, his wet fur on my fingers.
He’s letting me touch him. I can feel his heartbeat, slow like crashing waves upon a beach.
I yearn for it, so much I want to push my hand through his flesh and bone until I can touch it.
The fact I can feel him, even faintly, is torture.
My desire to take from him if I could terrifies me.
I snatch my hand back. ‘I’m sorry. I would never—’
Sinigang looks at me, less afraid than curious, as if he’s reading my mind, ‘You would if you could. Power calls to power. Energy cannot be created nor destroyed, only transferred.’
‘What do you mean?’
The boat lurches, and my hand slides across the wood, catching a splinter. I stagger back, clutching my hand. I wait for the moment the skin will begin to stitch itself together. It doesn’t come. It never will. Sinigang looks to the wound and then back at me.
‘With time, you can find the sweet in the salt.’
I have nothing to say to that. Expelled from the only places I’ve known, and having my power stilled within me.
A bird whose wings have been clipped. The others are ungifted, or more like unburdened, by magic.
They catch glimpses of what they think it is: the delicate power Biba possesses, something wild and untamed, creating out of love and joy.
It isn’t the hardened branches tied down and trained to grow only higher, reaching for the sun, never out to each other. Crown-shy.