Chapter 30 The Silence #2
Several hours went by, and our progress was pathetic. The spinners were exhausted. We needed wind, else we would die out here, hot, thirsty, and burned like a run of sausages. They hauled me up midafternoon, and I found my appetite gone.
“Eat, Ensign,” said Echo as he rubbed wax on my nose and brow. “Else, we’ll lose you over the side.”
I shrugged.
“Not much of a loss, really,” I said. “It might be a blessing, given my runescars.”
“Please, don’t start,” he said. “We can’t lose heart now.”
“We’ve lost everything else,” I said. “Kit, Hobbs, Fletch, Cable, Dion…Worley…”
My throat grew tight as I bit into the tack and struggled to chew. It was hard, tasteless, and drier than bone.
“Seems I lost Dev and the captain, too.”
Echo moved closer, dipped his head in like a conspirator.
“Don’t fret, dear one,” he said. “There are forces at play between them that we can’t understand. Between all of them.”
“Some damned bargain,” I said. “We should never have taken the Court of Sand.”
“And we would have died in that wave, surely.”
“Death comes to all of us, Doc.”
“As a doctor, that’s not something I’ll easily concede, else I should hang up my wraps and leave the service entirely.”
He handed me a mug of water.
“Here, young cynic. Drink and be amazed.”
I did, and I was.
“What is this?” I gasped, looking at the water splashing in the cup. “This hasn’t been sitting in a barrel for weeks!”
“The ironmages made it,” he said. “They knew our course was charting us through the Silence, so they have been perfecting the incantation to separate seawater from salt. We currently have three barrels of potable water and two sacks of usable salt.”
I gulped again and again. It was very good.
Echo patted my shoulder.
“You see? There is always another way to look at things. Able Whacks in the pit tonight? Smoke is utterly spent, so it’s easy to win.”
I grinned despite myself and climbed back over the side.
It was evening when I saw her sitting on a crate overlooking the port side, holding a book in her lap.
I debated just trotting down to the galley and grabbing my ration before Able Whacks, but the sight of her gave me pause.
She was reading what looked like one of the captain’s journals—the one with the strange incants and Aro’el rune.
I took a deep breath and crossed the deck toward her.
“Daughter,” she said, smiling as she saw me.
“Mother,” I said, not.
She patted the side of the crate. I didn’t sit.
“Is that the captain’s journal?” I asked.
“He has asked us to help construct a spell,” she said. “It’s a very complex illusion.”
“He’s a very complex man,” I said. I couldn’t begin to tell her just how complex.
“Have you bedded him yet?”
“Forge, Mother…”
“You should,” she said. “It would be a strategic move. You would consolidate your power with a Priestlord in your bed.”
Oh, what a roll he would be.
I’m sure my face flushed, and I hated that she saw.
“I have a hammock in the galley,” I said. “I don’t think we would fit.”
“You see? You’ve already considered it.”
Oh moons, how I’d considered it. But it wouldn’t happen now. The Court of Sand had changed everything.
“The Sister Moons are happy for you,” she said.
“Sad for them,” I said. “I’ve chosen Forge.”
“I know the sound of a lie on your tongue.”
I should have gone down for the rum.
“You were dedicated to the Sisters before you were born,” she went on, looking out over the waters. “They take what they are owed. I made the right decision for you.”
“You made the right decision for you,” I said.
“Chimeric is the Tears of the Moons,” she said. “You would be dead if they hadn’t chosen you.”
“Maybe it’s just taking a little longer.” And I tugged at my collar, emphasizing the scars burned across my breastbone.
“Beautiful,” she said, her eyes gleaming. “They tell your story.”
Wayward girl swept out to sea. Wretched woman from a lost frigate. Chaser of chimeric on the infamous Ship of Spells.
“But I don’t know all of my story, do I?” I asked. “There’s one piece missing, one you’ve kept like a dagger under your bed.”
“Your father,” she said.
“Was he the bear?” I blurted. “The one who paid you in pinesap and honeycomb?”
She smiled again, almost fondly.
“Ujarak of the Sound,” she said. “I called him Jak.”
Of course she did.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me he was a mirrormage?”
“Would it have made a difference, Honor? You were set on leaving by your tenth spring.”
“I might have stayed,” I said. “I might have looked for him. I might have learned.”
“Few mirrormages are as lucky as your captain,” she said. “I knew when I met Jak that he would lose himself to the mirror.”
I looked down at my bare feet, surprised they weren’t bear.
“The mirror form is appealing,” she said. “But the more often you become your mirror, the more you want to, and the more you lose of your true self. The life of your mirror consumes you.”
“So, my father chose being a bear over being my father?”
“He was a child himself,” she said. “And you were difficult from birth.”
How words became knives.
“But I suppose I was a difficult woman. I have always been my own.”
True, that. At least she knew.
“He was a drunk,” I said.
“He drank, yes,” she said. “But so does your captain. The mirror is a painful, unforgiving craft. The drink helps numb the sensations.”
She gazed off at the hazy horizon.
“I was traveling through the Spits and met him when I stopped at Sky.” She smiled again. “He was younger than I, and charming. Brave, bold, full of adventure. He wanted to leave while I wanted to stay. Sky is a beautiful, wylde place.”
“I hated it,” I grumbled.
“All children hate their hometowns,” she said. “They think the world has more to offer. Tell me, Daughter—does it?”
I looked up at her. I wanted to tell her all, to spill my sorrow and confusion and struggles and rage onto her proud and perfect head.
She had been a horrible mother, had bent me in ways that had skewed my thoughts and stunted my heart.
But I didn’t know her life journey, either.
I’d been too young to ask, too wounded to care.
And maybe she didn’t deserve my thoughts, my sorrow and confusion and struggles and rage. Maybe they were mine and mine alone.
I was, like her, my own.
“I’m making my way,” I said finally.
“I’m happy for you,” she said. “Even Corvallan had heard of your chimeric.”
“I don’t know what it means,” I said. “But I’ll find out. I’m stubborn.”
“Like your mother.”
Forge, she was right.
“Dream sweet,” I said.
“When the moons meet,” said she.
And so, I left her, trying to control my feet as I crossed the deck and leaped down the stepladder.
I didn’t go to the pit for Able Whacks but carried on down to the galley.
I wept again that night, soundlessly and alone, arms wrapped around the little doll of Bilgetown wood because I had no one else to do the job.
I’d never had arms to rock me to sleep, never had a lullaby or even a kiss good night.
That night, I dreamed I was a bird. I could just reach out my hands and watch them grow feathers.
I could bring my arms down and feel the air lift me up.
Up, up, up over the sea, my eyes sharp to take in all below me.
I saw whales and dragon eels, flocks of seabirds and great schools of fish.
And I saw a winter hawk soaring through a storm toward a ship, reaching out his gray talons to grab a harpy by the hand.
I woke with a start, almost rolling from my hammock with the shock.
I swung for a long moment, heart thudding, feet hanging over the canvas, before I hopped off and onto the deck.
The ship was dark with few lanterns aglow, and I made my way quietly to the companionway near the captain’s cabin.
Dev was on Dog Watch, but still, I stood at the dark doorway, listening for anything that might tell me he was awake and alone.
There, the clink of a bottle, and softly, I rapped on the wood panel that served as a door.
My head was light as I heard the chair scrape. My heart raced at the sound of his step. The door slid open, and he leaned out, his sea-dark hair dishevelled, eyes heavy-lidded.
“Ensign?”
Words. I had no words. Like my dream, they had flown away, and my tongue was now tarred to the roof of my mouth.
“Aro’el?”
My mother was right. He set every fiber of my body aflame, and I knew it was more than the chimeric. He could pluck me like a string on the Worldrune, and I’d sing for him a song of power and pattern and world-ending dread. We were runechasers both.
“I want to be a mirrormage,” I said. “My father was one, and I want you to teach me.”
I met his eyes, could fall into them like a whirlpool, swift and deep.
“I want you to teach me now.”
He stared at me for a long moment, weary and remote but this time warm, like his armor was off and his walls almost down.
Slowly, he reached up and brought his hand to my cheek.
I held my breath as he slid his fingers past my ear and into my hair.
I couldn’t think. I couldn’t move. It was unexpected like the scorpion, and I thought of all the ways he would end me, all the ways he would make me new.
I gasped at a sharp tug of pain.
He pulled away, a single strand of hair pinched between his finger and thumb.
“The process is painful,” he said. “More painful than tugging a strand of hair. Your bones hollow. Your spine cracks. Your organs compact. Your very skull reshapes at the realignment of the rune, and your brain follows suit. Your thoughts become fleeting and disjointed, not linear like Rhi’Ahr or homani at all.
It’s a terrible experience but unlike anything you’ve ever known. ”
The life of your mirror consumes you.
He brought the hair to his lips and blew softly. Before my eyes, it became a black feather. He released it, and it floated to the floor.
“I will teach you, if you truly wish to learn.”
And he held the door open. With a deep breath, I slipped inside.