Skykeeper (The Drowning Empire Book 1)

by S. M. Gaither

  West doesn’t even hazard a guess to my question, but I can feel his awareness shift fully to me, so I say, “Because we’re too much alike. He wanted me to join him, to fight with him instead of against him, and for a minute I…I thought about it. I thought, maybe he is right about all this. The emperor was responsible for the death of his parents, you know. And when Varick told me that, I understood why he was angry. And I felt sorry for him, and I don’t know. It all made a terrifying amount of sense, just for a moment. So maybe deep down, I’m just like him.”

  “No, you’re not.” His reply is quick, certain.

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Let me count the ways.” He laughs, a gentle, chiding sound, so remarkably different from the first night we met. “You are not him, Aven. You’re considerably better looking, for one thing.”

  “I’m serious, West.”

  “Me too. Have you ever actually looked at the guy? He’s hideous.”

  “All I am saying is that maybe the people of this city are right to slam doors in my face.” I sink my elbows more deeply against the railing and press my forehead into my palms. “If so many think I’m wrong, then maybe I am wrong, and I just can’t see myself clearly enough to know that.”

  “So let them think it. You aren’t wrong just because ‘so many’ think so—it doesn’t work that way.”

  I exhale a long, frustrated breath. “Still. Maybe you had everything right the first moment we met. Maybe I am a criminal, a fraud, a fugitive.”

  He shifts uncomfortably, but he doesn’t answer right away. We’re quiet for a long time, until long after the group at the gate has grown tired of their game and disappeared into the dark distance of the city. The moment feels empty and eternal, our bodies tense but fighting weariness, our shadows stretching like giants over the palace gardens directly below us.

  “I was wrong about you, though,” West finally says, disrupting the silence. “I told you before that I changed my mind. And I meant it.”

  I lift my head from my hands and glance over at him.

  “You’re not a criminal. I’m sorry I ever treated you like one.”

  “You don’t have to apologize, West. Besides, this isn’t—”

  “My name isn’t West.” He pushes off the railing and turns to face me. “It’s Kai. Kai Armana. And I don’t remember her name. I remember too much about her still, but I’ve lost that much at least.”

  I’m confused for a moment, but then he pulls out the ring. The lantern hanging by the door casts a direct glow over it, highlighting its warped shape and smudged, tarnished finish.

  “Oh,” I say, rather stupidly.

  “Back home…it wasn’t like here, where you have an army of keepers,” he goes on, still staring at the ring. “We only had one in my village, and for all the ones around us. And one had always been enough, until all those strange things started happening in the northern islands. Because she was a Pure like you, and so she’d always been enough on her own. But that day…the sky opened up that day like I’d never seen it do before. I’ve forgotten her name and I can’t clearly picture her face anymore, but I still remember what it felt like, standing there watching it happen.”

  He pauses. Takes a deep breath that shakes his whole being, and slips the ring back into his pocket and out of sight.

  “I’m sorry.”

  I don’t know why I say it.

  In the days after my brother died, I hated those words more than anything in the world. They felt so meaningless. Like people just trying to cover up a gaping wound with a too-small bandage, and doing nothing but irritating it further.

  But now I understand.

  Because now I’m just like those people. I want to say something, anything—but nothing seems like enough. Perhaps there is no bandage big enough for a wound like this, and so I’m sorry is just an attempt to at least slow the bleeding.

  “The day she died…” The word died seems like it causes him actual, physical pain; he turns away again, grabs the railing before continuing. “That night, I wanted to forget her. I tried to. I went to the capital city, and I found the darkest magic dealers I could, and I forced them to make me spell after spell. And at some point, one of the dealers warned me that I was going to kill myself at the rate I was going, if I kept giving so much of myself to make all those spells, but I didn’t even care. It seemed like a good idea, following her however I could. But the next morning, I was still alive. If you could call it alive. And I still had her. Not her name, hardly her face, but still too many memories of her. Because the spells aren’t discriminatory, you know—they take whatever pieces of you they want, and you don’t get to choose what stays and what goes away.

  “So then I stumbled into some shop, and that’s where I saw your poster. And it didn’t seem fair that you were still living. That you should be allowed to run, to escape—because that’s what I assumed you were doing. So I swore to myself that I would find you. That I would make things fair. But then you were…not what I expected. Still, I kept thinking you would give up. I wanted you to give up, so I would have a reason to hate you, to justify all the stupid things I’d done and thought about doing to you. But then I didn’t end up hating you at all.”

  He goes quiet again, his fingers tracing grooves in the railing. “They say you never get back the pieces of yourself that you give up for that sort of magic,” he says after a minute. “And that’s what I thought I wanted. If I couldn’t kill myself, if I couldn’t follow her, then I at least wanted that forever emptiness, that half-life, something indifferent in between life and death. But then I look at you, and I don’t know.”

  I lift my gaze and find him watching me, his fingers pressed steady and still against the stone.

  “I don’t know exactly what it is,” he finishes, “but I don’t feel empty anymore. And I start to think that maybe I never really wanted that emptiness after all.”

  “That was quite the speech,” I whisper, unsure of what else to say.

  “I had a long time to rehearse while I was being pathetic and miserable on the way here.”

  I nod numbly. And there’s a moment, then, that I don’t think either of us really know what to do with. It’s charged with possibility and with fear and with something like hope. Enough hope that I am afraid to move, so afraid to send it all crashing down around us along with the sky.

  West—it doesn’t feel right, calling him anything else now—figures out what to do with it all first. He takes my hand, and my mind officially loses the battle to keep my attention on anything except him. I don’t know where we’re going to be this time tomorrow, or if we’ll even be here at all, but I can’t think about that anymore. He’s pulling me back inside, away from the flooded streets and that false sky, and back inside seems like a good place to be right now.

  Anywhere he wants to take me seems like a good place to be right now.

  His movement is so quick, so intense, that I half-expect him to just throw me onto the bed, to just start kissing me senseless. But in the end he’s actually very gentle about it, backing me up against the edge of the mattress, leaning me into the pile of pillows and sinking into them with me. His lips hover just above mine for several excruciating moments before he finally lets them touch. Just barely at first, a soft and teasing taste of the chocolate he stole from the kitchens earlier.

  But he’s still too far away. There’s still too much space between us. My hands reach up on their own, knotting through his wavy mess of hair and pulling his face closer to mine. My eagerness makes him laugh at first, the notes rich and intoxicating as they slide down my throat. But he quickly becomes completely focused on the kiss again, on deepening it and crushing his mouth so fully against mine that I can scarcely breathe.

  I don’t care about breathing right then.

  Or about moving, or about anything except for the way his hands are traveling so fearlessly over my body, and the way his lips seem to know exactly where to go and are anything but hesitant to get there now.r />
  The sky could completely collapse right now, and I wouldn’t know it.

  Neither would he.

  After what may be forever, but feels like a cruelly short amount of time, he stops. He breathes a reluctantly content sigh. Then he takes one last playful nibble of my earlobe and collapses against me, wraps me in a tight hug and rolls us both over so that we’re on our sides, face-to-face.

  “You stopped.” My brain isn’t capable of saying anything more elegant or intelligent at this point.

  “Mm-hmm,” he says, his fingers pushing my mussed hair from my face and trying—vainly—to contain it behind my ears. “Because I don’t want it to happen like this. Not with everything else on your mind.”

  “There is nothing else on my mind.”

  He smiles. “Oh, really?”

  “Yes, really. Or at least, there wasn’t until you stopped.”

  “Exactly. And I want it to be more than a distraction.”

  “We may not have another chance.”

  His fingers freeze, halfway through tucking another strand of my hair into place. “Yes, we will,” he says after a decisive moment. “So stop pouting at me like that, you awful, manipulative person, you.” He presses his lips to my forehead and then pulls me closer, burying my face into the crook of his neck so that my sulking is lost in the folds of his shirt.

  We breathe as one person for several moments, his chest pressed to mine, rising and falling, rising and falling. He holds me so tight that I can almost feel the pieces of me—all those wrecked and lost and confused pieces I couldn’t make sense of—pressing back together again. Then he props himself up on his elbow, lifts himself just enough so he can kiss a trail along my throat, across my cheek, to the tip of my nose and back down to my lips.

  “But you should stay with me,” he whispers, leaning his forehead into mine. “Please. At least let me keep the nightmares away tonight.”

  Chapter 33

  I wake to the sound of bells ringing through my city.

  Not as many as before. Not as loud and not as certain, but they are tolling all the same, and their music gives me a moment of peace—of something familiar that I thought I’d lost.

  And then comes the fire on my skin.

  Warnings that are getting stronger, closer.

  I open my eyes. Dreary morning light floods them. I’m in West’s bed still, and I’m wearing his comfortably-too-big-for-me shirt, but I’m alone. There is a pillow and a tangle of blankets and sheets on the chair in the corner. I’m still staring at it when I hear soft footsteps padding in from the balcony. I turn and my eyes instantly find West’s, and the sight of me awake seems to startle him. He stops and leans against the doorway, folds his arms in front of him and watches me with a sleepy little half-smile on his face. But the smile stops at his lips. His eyes are a distant, foggy grey, and his brow is creased with worry.

  I rub my burning arms and try not to think about what the day holds.

  He’s a distraction, at least, whether he wants to be or not. For a moment, my gaze wanders over him, across the tattooed symbols that I now see wrap past his arms and reach all the way across his bare chest. Their black ink seems bolder in this ivory light of morning.

  I want to just keep staring at him, but my concentration breaks—just for a moment—and I notice something in the background: noise. Not just the bells, but voices. Chattering and shouting in the distance. I stretch up and crane my neck, but I can’t see anything past the balcony railing. I start to my feet, giving West a questioning look.

  “What is happening out there?”

  His smile disappears completely. “If I told you it was nothing,” he says, “would you just lay there for a little while longer?”

  The concern in his voice only makes me get out of the bed faster.

  Movement seems to aggravate that magic in my blood even further; it’s as if my body is bound by burning rope, the rough braids twisting around my skin and pulling tighter with every step. But I make it across the room, and I sprint to the edge of the balcony.

  There are people gathered in the distance. More than I can count, spilling through the garden’s paths, leaning against the gates, huddled in little groups that keep darting glances at the sky. At least half of them are dressed for sealing, and the other half I know aren’t even keepers, but they’re here just the same. Too many people, in total, for them to be from just my city; they must have come here from all corners of the kingdom, maybe even further.

  “Your army showed up after all,” West says softly. He’s beside me a moment later, his shoulder leaning into mine.

  I can only stare at all the ones below us.

  People. An army of people. More than I would have ever expected. They actually came.

  West turns around and leans his back against the railing, as if he can’t stand the sight of it all. “I’m not sure why I thought we would have longer than one night,” he says.

  I tear my eyes from the gathering army. “You’re talking about me as if I’m already dead. It’s very reassuring—thank you.”

  He meets my gaze, but doesn’t smile at the deadpanned comment.

  I think we both want to say Everything is going to be all right, but neither of us finds the voice for it. The seconds stretch on, and my skin is burning so badly at this point that I wish I could peel it off and simply release whatever enormous amount of magic flows in my veins. Even with the rush of hope all the people below bring, I still just want this to be over with.

  “I don’t suppose the thought of running away has grown on you since that night by the fountain, has it?” West asks.

  “You think we could outrun the sky?”

  “I think I might be willing to try it, for you.”

  I give him a weak smile.

  But just like that night by the fountain, he doesn’t return it.

  “I just…I hate this,” he says. “You shouldn’t have to tear yourself apart to keep it whole. That’s all I’m saying. There should be another way.”

  I shut my eyes, focusing completely on my magic for a moment; it feels stronger than ever before, and dangerously close to breaking the skin around my heart. Once I’ve forced it back under control, I look back at West, and I shake my head. I turn and start to walk back inside, intending to head to my own room so I can change.

  But then a quick and sudden darkness descends over the balcony, and I end up stumbling to a stop instead. I watch, breathless, as a wall of falling, flickering shadow gathers and sweeps down the palace walls, stretches onto every surface in sight until that hazy, polluted light of morning is completely gone.

  A chorus of shocked voices and cries rises from the crowd by the gate.

  I look up, and the barrier has turned to a rippling dark grey. The burning inside me is forgotten for a moment, sinking beneath fresh, rising terror.

  “What’s happening?” West asks in a dazed sort of voice.

  “Not reasoning after all, it seems,” I mutter without lowering my gaze. “Rifts usually turn black right before they break, but this—”

  “The entire sky is nearly black.”

  “Yes. I noticed, thank you.” My blood insists on reminding me of it all the same; an instant after the words leave my mouth, the magic surges so viciously that my body buckles in automatic response. I crumple against the door frame. Squeeze my eyes shut and grit my teeth, trying to keep myself from crying out. West’s arms are around me a second later, the coolness of his bare chest something of a relief against my blazing skin.

  “I’m fine.” I brace a hand against his arm and fight my way back to my feet. “But I can’t stay here anymore. I have to get dressed. I have to…”

  I had meant to say fight, but I meet his gaze and then I just…don’t manage it.

  But the look in his eyes tells me he understands, anyway. Because he has to. Because there is nothing else now. He pulls me against him one last time, kisses me like he may never have another chance, and then he slowly backs away.

  �
�I know,” he says. “Go. I’ll meet you out front.”

  I nod, and I lift a hand and quickly summon; the magic is so eager at this point that calling it is less difficult than blinking. I release just enough to take some of the force off my insides, enough that I feel like I can manage to move properly. I don’t try to control it.

  I let it go and it rises rapidly upward, a flash of light against the descending blackness.

  Chapter 34

  There is a clearing in the sky ahead.

  Less than a mile in the distance now, stretching wide and bright over the space that, if I had to estimate, I would say is Lake Anwyn. The burial lake.

  It’s a challenge, I think.

  Our scouts reported that Varick and his army breeched the city’s outer ring only hours before those strange shadows overtook the sky. We had expected a full assault on the palace, under the cover of that new darkness—a quick and sudden flood, the same way I was told they destroyed that outer ring. But that never came. Instead, we waited by lanterns, minds growing sick with fear and bodies weak with uncertainty until this clearing of light began to stretch in the far-off sky, bringing with it an entirely new type of anxiety. And the realization that he was taunting us, trying to drag us out, trying to break our spirits.

  Succeeding in breaking some.

  But not all.

  The light at the end of the tunnel. I have heard stories that this is the last thing you see before you die—that light, brilliant and blinding and terribly beautiful—and that you have no choice but to go toward it when your time comes.

  Our procession has been moving steadily toward it for the past half hour, pressing on through the murky darkness.