CHAPTER FOURTEEN
C HAPTER F OURTEEN
Yennes found herself on the beach once more, hurling shells into the whitewash. “Where does this ocean end?” she asked the mage beside her – a woman who seemed content to stand immobile, staring at the horizon for hours at a time.
“It is not known,” Baltisse answered. Her face was turned up to the sun, her eyelids turned pink from its heat.
“Have you never wondered what lies beyond it?”
“Of course,” Baltisse said, her lips flattening with annoyance at the interruption. “But I am not stupid enough to seek ends I am not ready to meet.”
Yennes frowns at the tumbling waves but quietens. In the last few weeks, she has swallowed more words than she has spoken.
“Try again,” Baltisse ordered, not bothering to open her eyes. “If you’ve finished taking your anger out on the waves.”
Yennes huffed. They had been working for hours. The sun was near setting. Yet she lacked whatever audacity she once possessed that bade her to argue. She lifted her palm instead and concentrated on it. “Igniss.”
“Find the source first,” Baltisse reminded wearily.
Yennes groaned but closed her eyes. She found that strange, dark mass in her belly. The one that seemed content to slumber within. “Igniss.”
“Coax it out,” Baltisse said, her voice bored now.
“I am trying.”
“Barely.”
Yennes gritted her teeth and bit back a retort. She addressed the iskra instead, angling her thoughts toward it. Will you come? The iskra rolled but did not rise. Please… come.
“You sound like my first lover,” Baltisse said conversationally. “He had the very same whine in his voice.”
Yennes rolled her neck. The mage was beginning to grate on her nerves.
“A little assertion goes a long way, sweet,” Baltisse instructed. “Convince it. Do not beg. ”
Yennes steeled herself. Come out.
Leave me, the iskra replied, vapid and listless.
Come!
A lance of pain sliced a path up her spine, and Yennes fell to the sand, gasping. As quickly as it had struck her, the sizzling pain was gone.
“Too much assertion,” Baltisse tsked, not bothering to offer Yennes a hand.
Yennes let loose a frustrated growl, pounding the sand with her fists. “I can’t reach it.”
“Odd,” Baltisse remarked. She was busy intertwining her hands with the wind, as though it existed to dance between her fingers. “I’d have thought that one such as yourself would have more dominance, more grit.”
“One such as myself?” Yennes queried. She could feel the iskra stirring to the call of her rising temper.
“Mm,” Baltisse assented. “A Ledge-born. I can’t imagine someone so faint-hearted would have survived as long as you.”
“You’ve little idea what was survived and what wasn’t.”
“I’ve some idea,” Baltisse rebuked, tapping Yennes’ forehead once.
Yennes’ fingers dug into the ground. She could feel that strange biting cold coating them.
“If it was not fortitude that kept you alive, then it must have been something other. Your wiles perhaps.”
Yennes stood. She faced Baltisse with glistening hands, laced in frost. The iskra pounded through her blood.
“No shame in it,” Baltisse continued, her fingers gracefully curling before her. A whorl of sea mist followed the movements, obediently led in the dance. “I’m sure there was many a man or woman who’d have lent you a side to their bed. One must find warmth somewhere in a place like that.”
“I bartered many things,” Yennes bit out, her voice shaking with vexation this time, rather than fear. “But never my body .”
“Never?”
Yennes froze. In her mind, however, were not images recalled of home and any bedmate she may have taken. She did not remember a lost lover of the Ledge. But other memories assaulted her, and they melted the iskra from her palms in a matter of moments.
Baltisse could see those memories. Hear them. It was clear on the mage’s face. Her eyes widened, her lips parted ruefully, and she was immediately sobered. “Oh,” she said. Gone was the goading lilt. “Yennes… I–”
“I’ve done a great many things to stay alive,” Yennes begins, her voice louder than she had dared to raise it in a long time. “I’ve killed. I’ve taken food out of the hands of the hungry. I’ve cut dead flesh from my own body. I’ve lied and pretended and tricked my way to safety many times over.” Yennes lets the memories assault her once more, sure that the mage sees it too. She makes Baltisse relive what she had to endure.
The mage’s skin turns sallow as she watches and listens. When it is over, Yennes’ hands are trembling again. They seek each other, clasping and unclasping in a frenetic tumble. “If the opportunity arose for me to fuck my way to safety,” she says with more bravado than she feels. “Then I would have done so. I’d say there is a fair amount of grit to be found in that.”
Baltisse stares at her for a long while, and Yennes is loath to look away, but she does. Gone was the girl who would slash and cut the foe on her path. Gone were the ways she could shape her words into barbs that pierced skin. In the back of her mind, she could still hear the words sung to her inside the Chasm. Words that picked her apart and burrowed deep. They no longer rang with that fresh echo. The voices were just memories now, ghosts that she could not rid herself of. But they rattled her, unsettled her, just as they did inside the Chasm.
“You made it out,” Baltisse reminded her, laying a slender hand on Yennes’ anxious ones. “You are safe here.”
Yennes closed her eyes. She felt the tears trickling down her cheeks. “I should not be.”
“Yet you are.”
“My father,” Yennes muttered, tears dripping down her lips. “And…and my–”
“You needn’t cling to what you left behind,” Baltisse said fiercely, gripping Yennes’ wrist. “Those thoughts will consume you.”
Yennes shook her head. “I do not know how to forget it all.”
“There’s no forgetting I’m afraid,” Baltisse said, wiping the moisture from Yennes’ cheek. “But you can unburden yourself. You do not need to borrow blame. Your fate was not your doing, after all.”
Yennes thought she would very much like to know whose doing it was. What cruel being had designed a path so impossible to travel?
“Not impossible,” the mage said, smiling sadly. Her eyes flitted over Yennes’ shoulder to where the Chasm’s opening swallowed the tide. “An unlikely survival is not the same as an undeserving one.”
Yennes and Baltisse stood on the beach a while longer, until the former’s eyes dried. The mage did not wrap an arm around the other woman’s shoulder to comfort her. Instead, she lifted her hand to the wind and manipulated the sea spray into beautiful spiralling patterns with her fingertips, and Yennes watched on.
She watched the sun sink into the sea. She watched the night bleed the sky of its spectrum. And only when it was dark did she lift her hand and close her eyes.
“Igniss,” Yennes said, and a small blue flame danced in her palm. Cold and strange.
“Well done.” Baltisse smiled. “As good as any mage-born.”
“Baltisse?” Yennes queried, letting the flame sputter out. “Will you teach me to fold?”