Interlude 7
You are a prisoner in a land of unknown magic.
But it is not an inhospitable cage, this island.
Though waves strike the offshore reefs and sandbars with purposeful violence, the water that washes the beach is thick with fish and turtles.
Wild melons and berries grow in patches, and the soil is littered with a sturdy green root that can be peeled and boiled until palatable.
Though you were tricked here, with the dying screams of your people ringing in your ears, you are a survivor and so you set about surviving.
With the knowledge of millennia of those who worked the land, who gathered and grew and made lives out of hardship, you take root in this foreign soil and flourish.
Upon a bluff that overlooks the sea, you build a sturdy, warm house of wattle and daub with a round roof in the manner of your first people and surround it with gardens.
The plants and animals may be alien, but you slowly learn which ones can be eaten, which ones ease pains.
Coaxing the weeds into a orchard, gathering the oddly stunted peafowl for laying eggs, it is all a great amount of work, but it is good work that distracts you.
Pares begins speaking in more than hushed short words; he laughs.
He is young enough to forget your traumatic flight here—or so you hope.
For a small boy, for a woman weary of humanity and all its violence, this isolated land offers an adventure, a break.
It reminds you of your origins, and one morning when you wake up, your snoozing son snuggled into your side, you remember your first name, one you assumed long forgotten.
Lab. You are called Lab.
Pares shivers, and guilt threads through you.
Lab had access to wool, to spindles and looms, and a flock of reliable fluffy sheep.
There is no livestock on the island and you’ve been unable to conjure anything, relying on mending the increasingly threadbare garments you arrived with and piecing together patchwork hides from the small animals you hunt.
Your stolen magic behaves in bizarre, unreliable ways here and you get the overwhelming sense that this island is different, snipped from the world you knew.
Gone are the hints of other magic, whispers of an Unseen Realm of water spirits and fire elementals.
Whether you can still sense the myriad possibilities, whether you can manipulate fate, you do not know, for the spindle is hidden away in a small trunk you carried from your drowned city.
The spindle felt so dead and cold in your hands when you first arrived, like its very vitality had been stripped, that you set it away.
Besides, the only person you would be able to test it on is Pares, an experiment you dare not try. But in that lies another dark premonition. For it is not just woolly livestock missing from the island.
It is people. Oh, there are hints. Piled stones upon the graves of skeletons that turn to powder when uncovered.
The crudely dug shafts chill your blood, as do the finely honed stone tools, green copper knives, and the simple beaded bracelets on the long dead.
They remind you of your origins, a time so distant, it feels like a dream.
Whoever these people were, they are long gone; likely slaughtered, if your experience of humanity is anything by which to judge.
Or perhaps they were kidnapped and sold as slaves; you recall too well the predators who prey on coastal communities from their sleek ships.
Even so . . . this isolation is a blessing.
At first. You are content to prune your plants and your potions, to master the new ways that your magic behaves and mind Pares.
Except for the griffins who dwell in the hills, there are no predators on the island.
Pares can run and play, free as he likes on the beach and in the nearby jungle.
You are tired of humans, of their violence and constant needs.
There has been no break in the spindle’s possession; during the worst and bleakest of times, you wondered if you would ever find a reprieve, an end.
Now? This is almost pleasant. You enjoy tending to your child and the opportunity to grow a home rather than feast on its razing.
Your hunger is a low simmer, manageable.
Though you greatly desire vengeance upon the marid, you are aware they have you outmaneuvered, and you do not wish to suffer their wrath again. You are not lonely.
But Pares is.
“I wish there were other children to play with,” he says on a warm evening over a meal of sweet greens stewed with coconut milk and pale creamy nuts. It has been two years since you were stranded. “When do you think we’ll be rescued?”
Never. But you have not told your son this; he is too young to lose hope. So, you say what you always say, the food turning sour on your tongue:
“Soon, love. This is too fertile and gentle a land to remain empty.”
Pares glances at the ocean. From upon the bluff, it is clear how lethal the approach is: the vicious, tearing waves, the glittering black rocks. He shivers. “I hope they have a sturdy ship.”
But no one comes. Not after three years. Not after four, nor five. Ten.
Pares grows like the weeds you constantly uproot.
Your home is larger; your adolescent son has taken to building with his hands to spend the restless energy churning his blood.
For his restless spirit, there is no such outlet.
He spends his mornings hiking the length of the beach, completing a full rotation of the island every week in search of new arrivals.
But he finds none and when he continues to stay away, you hunt him down.
And there, where the jungle and beach meet, is a raft.
It is remarkable, you will admit this. The sea, the marid, ripped the rowboat away from you with the first high tide, but Pares was prince of a coastal kingdom and he clearly recalls well the vessels of his childhood.
The hull appears strong, as does the rudimentary rudder.
There is even a sail of woven plant fibers, an ingenious creation.
“What do you think?” he asks from behind, startling you. His voice cracks, both from apprehension and the awkwardness of his age. “I wished to surprise you when it was done. There are but a few more details left to complete.”
You turn around, glaring. “What do you intend to do with this?”
Pares appears confused. “Leave. Amah, no one is coming to save us,” he insists when you shake your head. “Do you not see? This is our chance to escape!”
“The waters are too dangerous,” you argue. “We will be pushed back, broken on the rocks.”
“You don’t know that!” Pares has largely forgotten your perilous journey here.
He was too young, and it was too painful, his fledgling mind pulling a veil over the memory.
“I used to go sailing with Berizhou all the time—” You flinch, the name of the priest who betrayed you an unexpected slap.
“I know you fear the sea,” he continues as you glance at the ocean, the crashing waves in the distance that beat too hard.
“But I can keep us safe, Amah. I promise.”
He is not entirely wrong; you do fear the ocean and not only because of the marid.
In your eons of existence, you have possessed every tier of humanity from emperors to slaves, but never in all those many millennia have you been a sailor.
Fishing folk, yes; marid that swam in rivers and upon the shore, yes.
But not a sailor. You have no desire to see the land recede into watery blue, to fear that your host will die, that they and their effects—including your spindle—will be pitched to the bottom of the deep sea and trap you there forever.
And if you are honest, you have never forgotten the pirates that slaughtered your first family, your truest one, and annihilated your world. You do not want any salt-soaked souls contaminating your own, but your fear has left you ignorant of traveling in this manner.
“No,” you decide, more firmly. “It is too dangerous.”
“I don’t care!” Pares’s voice cracks again. “There is no future here, and I would rather drown than die a lonely hermit!”
There are so many worse fates than dying a lonely hermit, my son.
However, he has a point, one that keeps you staring at the rushes of your ceiling many nights.
What is your future here? If your host’s body dies before Pares, would you doom him to isolation?
You cannot imagine passing the spindle on to him.
There is an intimacy, a seduction with new hosts, a bodily possession deeper than bedplay, and the prospect of one of your children taking it has always been anathema to you.
You do not contemplate him dying before you.
That is worse. Instead, you look at the boy swiftly becoming a young man.
He should have been a king, with many wives, many children, a bright and challenging future.
That is what he was raised for. And yet time has left you too bitter, too distant to be properly sympathetic.
Pares could be enslaved, could be tortured, could be crucified and left to die on the road as a warning.
You have witnessed coups in which former princes are thrown from the walls, burned alive, sacrificed to foreign gods, and he is upset he might have to die a hermit?
With a snap of your fingers, you set the boat ablaze.
His screams will ring in your ears for days. Pares will not speak to you for a year and when he does again, his voice and spirit are ghosts, all joy vanished. But not for long.
Because as you long claimed, people do eventually come.