CHAPTER TEN
C HAPTER T EN
Yennes stood on the beach and watched the sun sink into the Terrsaw sea. “It’s beautiful,” she said quietly. All her life, this sun had alluded her. Now she knew its hiding place.
Yennes stretched her arms experimentally, but they did not ache as they should. “You healed me?”
“Mm hm,” said the woman named Baltisse. “Though I suppose you’d rather I hadn’t,” she tsked and moved her wet, ropey hair over her shoulder. “If you wish to do away with yourself, there are far better methods, sweet.”
Yennes frowned. Her body might have been renewed, but her head remained sluggish. “Do away with myself?”
“I could hear your thoughts from the beach. Awfully loud, they were. Sounded like you were crooning yourself to death. Tell me, are you mad? Is that it?”
“What?” Yennes frowned. “N-no.”
“Only a simpleton would take joy in drowning themself.”
“I wasn’t trying to drown myself.”
“No?” Baltisse raised a slender eyebrow. “Your mind spoke otherwise.”
Yennes blinked stupidly, her thoughts too frayed to form quick retorts. “You… you heal and hear thoughts?” she asked, looking the woman up and down. Had she not sensed something unnaturally elegant about this woman on first sight? Something entirely other? “Are you magical?”
“How kind of you.” Baltisse smiled and it was the first softening of her expression that Yennes had seen. While the woman’s body was supple and languid, her face was held rigidly, with a sort of practised dispassion. “I’ve been called much worse.”
Yennes returned a blank expression.
“I am a mage,” Baltisse said carefully. “Though I’d rather keep that information away from the palace, if you don’t mind. Unless you’d like me to toss you back into the wash.” Baltisse nodded to the sea, then gathered her sopping skirts into her hands. “Tell me, girl. What led you into the ocean, if not the promise of dying?”
Yennes’ mouth hung open for a moment, then she shook her head, putting aside the casual mentioning of palaces and mages. “I… I didn’t… I came from the Chasm.”
Upon the utterance, Baltisse froze, rendered still and silent by the word. She stared at Yennes anew. Shrewdly, intrusively.
It was only then that Yennes noticed the way the mage’s irises churned like liquid gold. “Say it again,” she said eventually, glancing over Yennes’ shoulder to the Chasm’s end, where the cliffs divided to allow the ocean passage.
“The Ch–”
“Mother above,” Baltisse interrupted, eyes widening. “And what, pray tell, were you doing in there?”
An answer fumbled around Yennes’ mind. It was mixed with the sounds of her own harsh breathing as she’d run through the Chasm, the voices that had chased her. She remembers the light that had shone from her hands in her desperation, some strange power creeping into her palms and lighting the way before sputtering out. She sees once more the vein of sky above her, impossibly far away. And in her belly, she feels a resurgence of the urgency that had driven her down the path, the desperate plea she had uttered over and over, that she had chosen the right one.
“What were you doing in the Chasm, girl?” Baltisse repeated. Her face had lost all lustre.
“I was escaping,” Yennes mumbled, voice trembling.
“Escaping what?”
But Baltisse didn’t seem to need an answer. Her eyes skittered across Yennes’ face as she remembered the Chasm, then before it Glacia, and before that…
“The Ledge.” Baltisse exhaled the name, as though it were some ancient myth. “You have come from the Ledge.”
Baltisse walked her up the shoreline, over the long stems of lazy grass stalks that bent away from the ocean. Yennes trailed her fingers along the tips, marvelling at their number.
Here, the cliffs tapered back and made way for a cove. In the cliffs’ shadow, a timber cabin stood. Its many windows were filled with glass, revealing the inside. It struck Yennes as odd. Cabins on the Ledge did not have windows.
“Where are we?” Yennes asked Baltisse then. The breeze that tracked over her clothes chilled her but did not sting. It whispered, rather than howled. And the sky was enormous, stretching endlessly over the ocean, unshrouded. Everywhere she looked, the land was covered in trees, shrubs the likes of which she’d never before seen. Surely, this was paradise.
“Terrsaw,” Baltisse said instead. “The very corner of it.”
Baltisse opened the door to the cabin and stepped within. “Come,” she said to Yennes. “You must eat.”
Eat. It had been an age since Yennes had eaten. Her stomach flipped at the mention of it. The mage set to work in her cabin, lighting a fire with a mere wave of her hand. She set a pot atop it and fetched limp game from her rafters – the plumage of the bird was unrecognisable to Yennes.
“Pheasant,” Baltisse told her. “Meat is what you need.”
Yennes hovered uncertainly in Baltisse’s doorway, staring wide-eyed at the cabin’s interior. Yennes thought it smelt peculiar – a mix of burnt foliage amongst other things. It left a strange taste in the back of her throat.
Through the windows, Yennes could see the scope of the ocean clearly. It stretched endlessly. It surrounded them. After her recent tussle with it, it made Yennes blanch. “Will… will…” she stumbled. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Will… the ocean–”
“It cannot reach you here,” Baltisse answered, not waiting for her to finish. “The tide is on its way out. Had you waited in the Chasm but a few more hours, you could have waded through the shallows to reach the shore.”
Yennes had no clue of what the tide was, but she knew she could not have waited for it to aid her. “The Chasm would not have allowed me to stay,” she said firmly. Her hands began to tumble over one another, revealing her frayed nerves.
“What could you mean?” Baltisse asked, her lips pressing together firmly.
“I… I ran from its voices.”
Baltisse’s gaze drifted over Yennes once more, and it only unsettled her further.
Without warning, Baltisse brought a large, square-edged blade down on the pheasant’s neck with a loud thwack, and Yennes jumped.
“We eat first,” the mage said. “Then we shall see about this Chasm and its voices.”
After the pheasant meat and vegetables were boiled and spiced, Baltisse ladled a generous helping into a bowl and passed it to Yennes. The smell emanating from the pot was almost too much for Yennes to bear. It was a task to take the bowl from Baltisse without snatching it from her grasp.
Though it burned, she devoured the stew in moments. When she held out the bowl to return it to Baltisse, it was inexplicably full once more.
“Have some more,” the mage ordered. “Slower, this time.”
Her belly was distended by the time she was done. It was the most food she had ever consumed in one helping. Her body did know how to hold so much, and she vomited soundly into a basin by one of the windows.
“I did tell you to eat slowly.” Baltisse grimaced, her nose wrinkling.
Yennes did not bother to apologise. It did not seem the woman cared much for the wasted meal. “Thank you,” she said instead. “For saving me. For the food.”
Baltisse stared at her. “But what are we to do with you now?”
Her posture was casual – cross legged in a chair by the hearth, her form slouched, and yet still. Yennes could not help but feel malice in those words. Danger.
“You can unclench those hands, sweet. I do not mean you harm.”
Yennes had no weapons to wield regardless, not since she left the Ledge and was stripped naked by Glacian brutes. Even if she possessed a blade, her hands could not cease their trembling. She doubted her ability to use it against a mage.
“Hm. I cannot imagine the life you have lived,” Baltisse said then, turning her gaze to the fire. “Imprisoned in such a place.”
Yennes offered nothing. Once, she would have said something cutting, quick-witted. But too much had befallen her. Too much had been stripped away. She could not summon the fierceness she once depended on.
“Tell me,” Baltisse said. “How many still survive on the Ledge?”
Yennes looked curiously at the mage. “Several hundred. Maybe less. I do not know.”
“Poor souls.” The flames danced in the mage’s eyes. She remained still for several moments more, seemingly lost in whatever thoughts plagued her.
“How many remain here?” Yennes asked, forehead creasing. “In Terrsaw.” She had heard stories of the valley as a girl. Stories that seemed more like fairy tales. It was the place her parents had been taken from. She had never given thought to those who might have survived the Glacian’s raid.
Baltisse chuffed derisively. “A fair few more.”
Yennes nodded. “The people on the Ledge… the ones that lived in this valley before they were taken, they do not like to speak of it.”
Baltisse’s head tilted to the side. “Oh?”
“My mother and father… they did not like to reminisce on what was lost.”
“What did they tell you?”
Yennes fell quiet again. In truth, she could only remember half-stories. Mentions of forests and streams and music and festivals that fell from her mother’s tongue when the yearning softened her, but the sentences were always cut short, always followed by abrupt reproach.
No point in longing for what is lost, pet, her mother would say, shaking her head. We keep our eye on what we have now, lest someone snatch it.
Her father was worse, falling into fits of rage at the first murmurings of the valley. They ain’t coming to fetch us, he’d thunder, throwing what little crockery they had at the walls. Trinkets they had fought so hard to scrounge from the Drop. They ain’t deigning to cross the Boulder Gate. And we ain’t deigning to remember them.
Who they were had remained a source of mystery to Yennes. Though she’d gleaned some knowledge, she’d dared not question either parent further.
Baltisse seemed to have heard Yennes’ answer, despite her silence. She nodded now, and Yennes garnered that this woman did not often make a show of compassion or sympathy. Yet Yennes felt it in that cabin. The woman’s eyes grew glassy as she stoked the hearth.
“Well,” Baltisse said slowly, quietly. “Best you know it all, then.