Chapter 49 Hakara
Hakara
The Sanguine Sea
Sailors from both Pizgonia and Langzu claim there is a monster lurking inside the barrier near the anchor, and it is this monster that sometimes ransacks the goods.
Both the council of Pizgonia and the clans of Langzu are skeptical of this claim and strongly believe that any ransacking is done either by the sailors themselves or by pirates.
I hated every moment of our leaving, though we made it quick.
This whole trip felt like it had been an enormous waste of time.
I found myself focusing my anger on the continent itself, furious that they had food and water and fewer godkillers on their lands.
They’d found ways to thrive in this desperate environment, and from the contented looks on many of the faces I encountered, they thought of restoration as a distant thing, something that might happen in the far future.
Velenor pointed out sights to me as we passed through the city to the docks.
The gardens, where water was carried by aqueduct to the green plants, a place everyone was permitted to enjoy.
The towers of the palace, where council members – one elderly person and one young adult from each province – met quarterly to make realm-wide decisions.
Pizgonia considered the wisdom of their elders to be as crucial as the fire of their youth, she explained to me.
“And what of the people in between?” Alifra asked without receiving an answer.
Velenor swept a hand inland, to where she said conical buildings stood in the desert, collecting water in the chill mornings of winter, where it turned to ice and stayed cold into spring and sometimes summer. She spoke of all these things with pride, this place she’d come to think of as home.
And Dashu, Alifra, and I? We had no place like that. My gaze had slid to Thassir and Talie. Then again, I supposed they didn’t either.
Falin hadn’t been exactly happy to see us again, though he was eager to be on his way back to Langzu, burdened with goods enterprising merchants had loaded onto his ship with a promise of some of the profits.
He spent most of his time in his cabin, probably counting out his future earnings.
From his mutterings about altered folk, filters, and the barrier, he had bigger dreams than I’d expected from someone who’d named their boat The Birdeater.
The way back through proved not to be quite as difficult as our first crossing. We’d secured a sheep carcass to serve up to the monster in between, and it left us well alone. Not that it was easy. We ended up back on Langzu’s side so drenched and exhausted we couldn’t speak.
Or maybe none of us wanted to. I was avoiding Thassir as much as Dashu and Alifra were avoiding one another.
Dashu had taken to sleeping on the deck, as had Thassir.
I wondered if Alifra also lay in her hammock at night staring at the ceiling, unsure whether I was awake.
The ocean stretched out before us, other ships near us moving to and from the anchor, Xiazen on the horizon.
And here I was, trying to stave off my thoughts. The Sanguine Sea only made me think of Rasha even more, so I’d holed up in the cabin with a set of cards I’d found in a sailor’s hammock, laying them out on the floor in front of me, playing for both myself and an imaginary opponent.
Dashu and Alifra were on the deck somewhere, probably studiously avoiding looking at one another. And Talie had turned back into a cat. She slipped through the spaces of the ship, content with the silence. Falin seemed as eager to be rid of us as we were to get back to land.
The door to the cabin creaked open.
Thassir took up the entire space, his wings obscuring the hall beyond. I’d thrown open the shutters, and the smell of sea spray filled the room, the wind ruffling my hair.
“May I join you?”
“No.”
He entered and closed the door behind him anyways. Seemed he was taking a page from my book. I could practically feel his mopey gaze on the top of my head.
“Stop looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’m a ghost, and not the kind you’re frightened of.
The kind you miss.” I felt my throat closing up, and continued in spite of my misgivings.
“The kind you wish was still alive.” The breath I took felt as filled with relief as the ones after I’d used the god gems. I’d said my piece. Now it was his turn.
He sat down across from me, folding his legs and wings. Still took up too much damn space. I shifted away a little, to avoid the brush of a feather against my shoulder.
“I wish you could tell me exactly what’s going on.”
He let out a sigh that smelled of sweetness and musk. “I wish I could too. I hope you figure it out, even as I hope that you don’t.”
He lifted the hand I’d laid out and began to play.
I gestured at the cards. “I already know what cards you hold.”
He shrugged. “I don’t care.”
We played a few rounds, all of which I easily won, my mind only half on the cards, the painted figures, the feel of the lacquered surfaces beneath my fingers. “You said you had a family. That you had a son.”
To my surprise, he didn’t stand up and leave, he didn’t shout – he didn’t do anything except lay down his next card.
“Yes. Irael was… he was special to me. It took me a long time – too long – to see he’d been there all along, through centuries, waiting for me to see the same things he did.
That together, we were happy.” He said nothing as I played another card to defeat his.
He drew a card from the stack, grunted. “And then, when I finally understood, when I finally saw him, we had so little time. Kluehnn had driven us from our home. We were on the surface. We tried to make a life out of it still. We nearly succeeded.”
I felt as though I shouldn’t move, afraid that if I did, I would break whatever spell this was that let him speak to me so freely.
“In the end, Kluehnn shattered the world into realms, he restored the first one, and he sent his godkillers after us. They took Rumenesca first. Then they took Irael. And they took our son. I failed Irael so many times in the years I knew him – by never quite seeing him the way he saw me. When the godkillers came to our home, I thought I could protect my family. I was strong enough, but it didn’t matter.
In the end, I made a mistake, and they took them both. ”
The next card he laid down beat mine, and I drew another. “It’s not your fault. You can’t wallow in it forever.”
He lifted an eyebrow, a strange amount of levity in this moment. “Can’t I? I am a god.”
“I should never try to forbid you from healthy actions, lest you refuse them out of your own stubbornness.”
“Not unlike yourself. And your sister? Do you never wallow in that?”
“It wasn’t my fault. I’m at peace with it.”
“Are you?” He moved a card to the end of his hand, considered, and laid it on the floor.
“You bonded her. That suggests there is something there you cannot let go of. You say your parents died, that you took care of her. I have been a parent. Even when my son was alive, I had… regrets. Many of them.” His eyelashes fluttered, limned with silver by the window’s light. “You have none?”
His words speared some deep and secret part of me, a part I’d been trying to push away.
I’d already dealt with the truth, the fact that I’d had a chance to turn back in the barrier to try to reunite with Rasha.
Yet I found, when he spoke, when I was forced to stillness, there were still sad and unpleasant parts of me lurking just beneath the surface.
I began to toss a card onto the stack, but Thassir grabbed my wrist. “No. You didn’t even look at it. ”
Did he feel the beat of my pulse beneath his palm? I tried to pull away, half-heartedly. “What does it matter? It’s just a game.”
“I want better for you, Hakara.” The edge of his wing brushed my bare arm, the soft pressure of feather against skin.
I shivered but didn’t draw back. “If only I could want that for myself.” I tried to say it lightly, but the words fell like stones from my mouth.
If I wanted something better for myself, I wouldn’t be placing my other hand on top of his, brushing a thumb over his knuckles, caught between prying his fingers from my wrist and letting them stay.
Slowly, I lifted his hand to the level of my eyes, studying the veins beneath the surface of his skin, the hairs lifted all along his arm.
I listened for the sound of his breath in this small space and heard nothing except the stirring of the sea and the thundering of my own heart.
He was waiting. I wasn’t sure – didn’t think I could ever be sure – but I felt carried along, magnetized, pulled to an inevitable conclusion as I pressed my lips to the back of his hand.
A sharp intake of breath, and then he huffed out a strangled, impatient sound. It stirred a heat within me that had nothing to do with the corestone.
I dropped the card, tugged him toward me.
This was a stupid, terrible thing to do.
There wasn’t a world where we made any sense – an elder god and a mortal, both filled to the brim with stubborn, vicious thoughts.
But then his arms tightened around me, the cards scattering beneath our knees.
His wings circled us, enclosing us in a private space where everything felt suddenly as though it might work, the outside world shut away.
I wasn’t sure how to move on from this moment, how things might change, how they already had.
Every move I made seemed weighted with too much meaning.
We’d kissed once before, but I’d been dying then, half out of my mind.
This felt so different, so strange. I tilted my head back, daring to press my lips to the base of his throat, wanting to sink into his warmth.