Stories and Slykars
The walk back from the shoreline gave me too much time to think.
I thought about Teorin watching me from outside my father's estate for years, carrying a plan he had agreed to, deciding something privately that nobody had asked him to decide. The wards getting looser. The question of what happened if they came down entirely.
The questions circled without landing anywhere useful.
The air was wrong. The path that had been quiet every other night was quiet in a different way tonight, the kind that had something in it.
They came from the water's edge.
Three of them pulled themselves up over the shoreline, green-grey, their hands long and slick, fingers bending at angles that made no sense. They did not rush. They watched.
The leather I wore made them hesitate.
I had no magic here. I had my hands and my training and the small blade I kept in my sleeve.
The first one lunged. I met it with the blade not to cut it down but to turn it, steel catching along its arm and forcing it sideways. It stumbled. I drove my shoulder into it and it went down hard.
The second grabbed for my arm. Its fingers brushed the leather and it hissed and jerked back.
Then the pounding started.
"You left them."
"They needed you."
"Colsar will stop waiting."
"You always fail."
The third one knocked me sideways. My head hit the ground and the pounding became unbearable.
Then, very clearly, very calmly, from somewhere behind me, a small voice said:
"Goodbye."
A kiss blown into the air. Black smoke where the creatures had been. Gone without sound or trace.
I pushed myself upright.
Aviaryn stood several paces away, entirely unbothered, her arms crossed, her dark hair loose around her shoulders. Beside her stood the strangest creature I had ever seen. Three heads. All watching me.
"You were taking too long," she said.
She took me below through an entrance I had not found before, deeper than the tunnels I knew. The ceiling was too high to see. The air tasted of minerals and old water and something alive underneath it all.
"Umbrelai," Aviaryn said. Not to me. Just naming it as we walked through it.
I looked around. The name sat somewhere familiar in my memory and I could not place it.
The three-headed creature moved ahead of us. Aviaryn glanced at it. "Flag," she said.
Flag. All three of his heads turned briefly.
I had heard that name before, though I could not remember where.
I was aware of Colsar somewhere above me. I felt the weight of knowing he was there, separated by distance and a ward I could not currently reach. Teorin would already be suspicious. I could not stay long.
Aviaryn produced a small glass and held it out without comment.
I looked at it. Dark. Too dark for water.
"Is this—"
"Yes," she said, with the tone of someone who had answered that before.
Blood. I drank it anyway. She watched me with the expression of someone waiting for a reaction she believed she had earned.
"Well?" she said.
"Thank you," I said. "For saving my life."
She received this as adequate.
"What were those creatures?"
"Slykars," she said. "Demon creatures of the sea. They have always been in Morrath. More frequently lately. They can be dangerous. They once ate a Morrak."
"They can smell the human in you," Flag said.
"They used to call them Siren's pets," he said.
"Why?"
"Because they do to humans exactly what Sirens do. Drain them of their magic. Their essence. Their lifeforce. Until nothing remains."
"Sirens can do that?"
"Of course," he said. "It is part of their biology."
I was still thinking about this.
Dali couldn’t be doing that to Teorin, I reassured myself. Maridale would stop her.
"Do you not wish to repay me?" Aviaryn said. Very still. Very pointed.
"What would repayment look like?"
She reached beside her and produced a thin book and held it out.
I took it. I looked at it. I looked at her.
"Sit," she said, "before I get upset."
I sat, less out of fear and more out of curiosity.
I opened the book and understood immediately. I looked at her and thought about what she was and what she had likely never had.
"The proper way to listen to one of these," I said, "is to get close to the person reading it. So you can see the pictures."
She considered this. "I have never heard of such a custom. But I will indulge it."
She moved to sit beside me. Close enough.
I opened to the first page and began to read.
She listened intently, clearly enthralled and interrupting with questions every few minutes. By the sixth page her breathing had slowed. By the eighth she was asleep against my shoulder, her dark hair across my arm.
Flag looked at her from across the room.
"The princess of Umbrelai," he said quietly, all three heads in unison, “rarely sleeps this well.”
I looked at her and thought about a child who had learned early that the world was not gentle and had become something it could not easily harm.
I did not move until her breathing deepened completely.
My eyes met Flag’s and he nodded. Then I set the book beside her and walked toward Darkway Palace.