Chapter Twenty-Seven #2
“And what?”
Gods, he could be difficult. “What did she say, Soren?”
“Nothing that made much sense,” he hedges. “Though my memory may be a shade hazy. Have you ever tried to hold on to your wits in an opium bath?”
“I can’t say that I have.”
“Not easy, skylark. Not easy at all.” Humor creeps into his voice.
“Though perhaps it’s a good thing I do not remember with perfect clarity.
That seer looked older than time itself, with wrinkles to match her years…
and a propensity for walking around in the nude whenever she saw fit.
” He pauses. “Which seemed to be every waking hour of the day.”
I bleat out a laugh. “Be serious, will you?”
“If only I were joking.” He heaves a mental sigh. “By the time I dropped in on her, she was addled. Spoke mostly in riddles with no answers. At one time, however, she must’ve been sane enough. She spent hundreds of years in the emperor’s employ, counseling Belenus on all matters before his demise.”
“And yet, she did not see the Cull coming and think to warn him,” I say wryly. “Makes one doubt her gifts.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
“Did she tell you anything else? Reveal any more clues about how we are meant to restore the balance, should all four Remnants appear?”
There is a long pause. “Nothing I comprehended at the time.”
“And now?”
“It’s been a hundred and eighty-five years, Rhya. She is dead and gone, her insights with her. Though the memory of her wizened form may never fully fade from my mind’s eye…”
I do not entertain his attempts to distract me. “Soren.”
He sighs. “Yes?”
“If you are withholding something—”
“Fine. I can admit now that perhaps I was wrong about the prophecy.” He cuts me off. “But meeting a rambling, raving seer was hardly what altered my opinion on our joined fate.”
My brows arch high on my forehead. “Oh? Then what did?”
He is silent. Hesitant.
“When we first met, you planned to happily watch the world burn from afar,” I pester, undeterred. “What changed?”
“I talked to you for ten minutes.”
I suck in a breath. “Me?”
“You,” he says quietly.
Skies.
For a few moments, we continue to channel, saying nothing more. I focus on the wind flowing out of me, a steady current filling the coal-hued sails that furl outward from the square rigging overhead, doing the same for our sister ship across the sea.
A sudden pulse of maegic down the bond catches me off guard. This one is not meant for the waves that thrash at the hull, nor for the deep currents that carry us along. It is exclusively for me, washing straight down the bond and wrapping around my soul. The maegical equivalent of a warm embrace.
A sigh slips from my lips. “Soren—”
“I have long despised my fate. I saw it as more a curse than anything, this endless existence,” he tells me in a voice devoid of all self-pity.
He is purely stating a fact. “After these last few weeks, I am finally beginning to take a different view of things. I am finally beginning to look forward to an unending lifetime…for I no longer imagine spending it alone.”
My heart is pounding hard, my knees threatening to give out. Gripping the rail to keep myself upright, I try to cover my own ridiculous reaction with a lighthearted remark. “Has Vaughn agreed to move to Hylios permanently, then?”
“Rhya.”
“Yes?”
He waits. And waits. And waits, until I have no choice but to give a serious answer. I shake my head in the darkness and offer up the only thing I have: truth.
“You speak of forevers. But forever is a very long time.”
He is quiet for a long stretch, processing this. I fear he might sever the connection without saying anything else. But eventually he responds, his inner voice low with meaning.
“There is no amount of time with you that would ever be enough.”
There are no words I can muster to equal what he has just said to me. Instead, I send a pulse of maegic back down the bond to him—a soundless affirmation that, I hope, matches the one he gave me.
A moment later, he laughs as I send an errant tendril of wind to ruffle his hair. Even across the dark waves, I can hear his joy echoing to me beneath the green-streaked sky.
On our third day at sea, the strip of coastline that runs along the horizon off our starboard bow changes from the thickly forested tracts of Eastwood to an eerie expanse of peaks and plateaus that jut into the sky like disjointed fingers.
“The Reaches,” Soren tells me when I ask. “See that dark patch, farther south? Where there seems a near constant cloud cover? Those are the Shadow Steppes. The terrain there is nearly impassable. The silt storms never cease, whipped to a frenzy between the bluffs.”
As we sail closer, the air grows denser, the skies above darkening with the promise of inclement conditions. I cast nervous glances upward as we sweep along choppy blue waters.
If a storm breaks out here…
Sensing my tension, Soren strives to distract me. He points out landmarks as we pass by, his words a comforting current in my head, forcing out the anxious thoughts.
“Those high dunes there, off the starboard bow? The Shifting Isles, they’re called. Huge shoals of desert sand that change constantly.”
“Have you visited?”
“Once, and never again. The nomadic tribes that live there are not overly accepting of strangers.” He chuckles. “I suppose that makes sense. When your territory has a tendency to move overnight, you must fiercely defend whatever claim you manage to stake.”
“People actually live there?” I blink at the hazy island dunes, some nearly as tall as the walls of Hylios, marveling at the thought of such a transient existence. “It seems mad to live thus, packing up your whole encampment at a moment’s notice.”
“Life as a wanderer is preferable to that in the rest of the Southlands, from what I can tell. Just ask those who occupy the Soot Flats of Nythia or the Howling Plains of Carvage.”
I think of Carvage, that sprawling, sand-scorched kingdom at the southernmost point of Anwyvn. Once, it was a thick jungle, teeming with life. The most fertile land in all the realm…
Until the Cull.
“Is Carvage not the rumored location of the Earth Court?” I ask. “Or what remains of it?”
“Yes. I have searched for the ruins several times, without much success. Even before the mortals sacked it, the House of Amaethon was supposedly difficult to find. The most isolated of the four strongholds and the least accessible, tucked at the heart of Anwyvn’s oldest forest. The few tomes I have found on the subject describe a sprawling network of treehouses built into the upper canopy, connected by rope bridges and ladders. ”
“It sounds enchanting.”
“I’m certain it was. Just as I’m certain they thought they were safe there, in their wild jungle.
It had sheltered them for millennia. But mortal axes made stunningly quick work of their sacred groves.
Catapults spread fires quicker than they could be put out.
” A low chord of discontent thrums down the bond.
“After they killed every fae they could get their hands on, the invading armies ripped out the jungle by the roots, then salted the earth to prevent anything from ever growing there again. It is now naught but a patch of scarred dirt, barren and lifeless.”
I cannot fathom the amount of hatred it would take to justify such a measure. “They sought to erase us. Every trace.”
“Some still do,” he warns. “This simmering war will come to a head. And soon. Can you not feel it?”
I can.
It is palpable in the air as our bows cut through the increasingly chaotic seas that churn off the northern coast of Dymmeria. It is visible in the dark clouds that block out the sun overhead, crackling with distant lightning. For once, I cannot be blamed for the foul weather.
We keep far offshore, though the passage would undoubtedly be smoother closer to the coast. We don’t want to be spotted by Dymmerian soldiers stationed inside the many ebony lighthouses that spike up from the black sands at the edge of the desert.
Each time we pass within their sight lines, I do what I can to cloak us with mist and fog, borrowing Soren’s strength to alter the air’s density.
It is more difficult than I anticipated, and results in a splitting pain through my temples that threatens to knock me unconscious.
I cannot hold it for long, even with his considerable strength shoring me up through the bond.
“Can’t say I like sailing in a fogbank,” Deke informs me, his peppery hair catching the wind. “But I’m sure I’d like it better than our odds in a sea battle without any cannons aboard.”
I laugh to cover my anxiety.
Vaughn was right. We should’ve brought a cannon or two, speed be damned.
The closer we get to the Iron Isle, the more precarious the seas.
Now the fins that slice beside our bows are not the curved dorsals of friendly dolphins but the deadly triangles of sharp-toothed sharks.
The delight I’d felt in the wide-open expanse of the Endless Ocean dims to a faint flicker, then disappears entirely.
We are all tense, no longer laughing as we take watch, our eyes peeled to the rough surface for any sign of the shoals that stretch offshore, swept there by the unending sandstorms that rage through the Husk Desert.
They are nearly impossible to see, especially at night.
We err on the side of caution, for we cannot afford to run aground.
Our speed slows to an infuriating crawl.
“How much longer, do you think?” I ask Deke as dawn breaks on our fourth morning.
My eyes flicker west, where Dymmeria bends in on itself like a misshapen horseshoe.
The Iron Isle sits somewhere at the center of that curve, but I cannot yet make it out amid the shadowy waters.
The sea here is so dark it is very nearly black, the surface only broken by the occasional whitecap of a cresting swell.