Sea of Strangers

by Erica Cameron

  “Do you think you can do it, Khya?” Tsua’s expression an odd combination of concern and determination.

  “I have no idea.” I had to hide in caves under Itagami to create these wardstones in the first place. It had drained me dangerously low to make more than two or three in a day, but I’m stronger now. I’ve learned how to funnel desosa through myself better. And Natani is here to help channel the power if I need him to. I can do this. I have to do this. “I’ll try.”

  I move to start now, but Tyrroh shakes his head. “Tomorrow. I doubt we have to worry about enemies or wind here, so release your wards and rest. You’re not messing with whatever this is fresh off three days of travel.”

  Although instinct pushes me to argue, he’s right. The day of rest I’d had while Chio healed wasn’t enough. I’m tired, drained, aching, and still too cold. Playing with the Kaisuama’s energy in this state would be dangerous. And potentially deadly.

  But even when I step onto the cracked, glowing stone the next day, after two actual meals and more than twelve hours of sleep, it doesn’t feel any safer. This feels like standing on the north wall of Itagami in the middle of a storm, hoping I’m strong enough to keep my feet on solid stone while the blasting wind tries to knock me into open air.

  “Will you stay nearby?” I ask Natani, hoping I don’t look as nervous as I feel. “I might need someone to bolster me against this.”

  “Of course.” Natani moves to be within arm’s reach of me.

  Tessen is already that close, and he holds out his hand until I take it. Then, lifting my hand, he presses a kiss to the inside of my wrist and whispers, “Be careful, Khya. Please.”

  “I promise.” No way am I dying here. Not for an overpowered wardstone.

  Once I have the wardstone set in the center of the clearing and everyone but Natani pushed back to the trees circling us, I close my eyes and concentrate on the impossibly deep well of desosa undulating under our feet. I approach it cautiously, like it’s a hungry teegra I’m trying not to disturb, and I only reach for the thinnest of threads. Even if I can use that to power the wardstone, it’s ten times more power than what I’d been able to store inside it before.

  Then the energy sparks. Tessen shouts my name.

  It’s too late. The spark creates another, creates another, creates another. A chain of bright lights building in seconds until the whole thing seems to explode.

  The shockwave blows us off our feet.

  I fly back, flailing for anything solid to hold on to. The ground finds me first. I land hard, my head smacking against the stone. Vision blurred and doubled, I try to move. Where’s Tessen? Natani? I need to find—

  A hand on my shoulder keeps me down. I can’t see who it is.

  “Tessen! She’s here,” Sanii calls. Seconds later, more hands join the first, one of them holding me down and the other moving constantly, touching my head, my arm, my chest.

  “Khya? Open your eyes. Can you open your eyes?” Tessen sounds frantic. I try to do what he wants.

  My eyelids won’t move at first. When they do, all I can see is white, like the desosa is all that’s left in the world. I blink and breathe, fighting through the haze.

  The mountain slowly comes back into focus. My gaze jumps, landing on one thing barely long enough to register it before moving on to the next. Trees shaking and swaying in a wind I don’t feel. Chunks of gray rock broken and scattered across the clearing. Wehli screaming, blood gushing from what’s left of his arm.

  “No. No!” I roll to my knees, trying to get closer. I should have been able to stop this. My wards should have been up and I should have—

  “Khya, stop. Stop.” Tessen wraps his arms around my waist, holding me back. “Let Zonna work on him, and you need— Please, Khya. You’re still bleeding. Stop moving. You need to stay still until Zonna can heal this.”

  “No, I can’t— How did that—?”

  “Wehli pushed Natani out of the way.” Tessen inexorably draws me back down to the stone. “The wave knocked even the andofume sideways and blasted across the valley. It did a lot of damage.” He holds me tighter; I’m not the only one shaking and unsteady.

  “Are you hurt?” Twisting, I search what I can see of him for injuries. There’s a scratch on his face and blood seeping through a cut on his shoulder where something sliced through all his layers of cloth and skin. He must know I see them, but he shakes his head and insists he’s fine.

  When I glare, he adds, “Nothing deadly. Nothing that won’t heal on its own.”

  “What about the others?” I hear voices, but my vision is still foggy. Focusing on anything farther away than Tessen’s face isn’t easy.

  “Scratches. Bruises. A few concussions. Maybe a broken leg.” He closes his eyes and rests his forehead against mine, the tremor running through his muscles getting stronger. “Blood and rot, Khya. I thought— The flare hit so fast I couldn’t warn you, and then you— It was like you just vanished. You flew back so fast, and I thought—”

  “Shhh, I’ll be fine.” I try to massage the back of his neck to loosen the tension I feel there, but I can’t get enough pressure behind my fingers. All I can do is rub soft circles on his skin. That, and the disbelieving look he shoots me, are solid signs I’m not as fine as I wish I was. Exhaling, I say, “I know, but as soon as my head stops hurting, I’ll be fine. Wehli…”

  I can’t hear his screams anymore. Why can’t I hear him?

  “Zonna is with him, and the worst of the pain is gone, but Zonna couldn’t—” Lips pursed, Tessen glances across the clearing and quickly away. “Wehli’s going to lose most of his arm. It was too badly crushed by the rock for even Zonna to save it.”

  The news is like another blast, one that sends me deeper into my own mind.

  My fault. My mistake. If I had been better or faster, I could have saved him. All of us. Yorri. I’m supposed to be the strongest fykina mage in memory, but what good is that when I can’t use it to protect the people I care about?

  The world blurs again, and my own blood rushing through my veins drowns out Tessen’s voice. I can feel him, though, and so I let myself use him as an anchor, something solid to hold me in consciousness until Zonna can leave Wehli’s side and help those with less important injuries. But even after Zonna’s cool, familiar magic seeps under my skin and erases the worst of my symptoms, the thoughts are still there, chasing each other in endless circles that get tighter, finally becoming one massive fear.

  You’re going to fail everyone who came here with you, and it won’t even matter. Yorri and everyone else you abandoned is probably already lost and gone.

  But no. I won’t. Once I prove to Tessen and myself I’m well enough to eat something and keep it down, I check on Wehli—asleep with Miari and Nairo guarding him. Then, I head deeper into the trees. Surprisingly, though Tessen’s gaze tracks my movements, he doesn’t follow me. Then again, the only dangers here are ones we create. We’re not even setting a watch. There’s no one in these mountains to watch for.

  When I reach an outcropping of rock cutting through the trees, I climb on top of a large, flat stone. I sit with my back against a tree trunk and pull my knees to my chest. Eyes closed, I tilt my head back and focus on the sound of the trees and the feel of the energy that so hated being poked at. I try not to listen to my growing fear. It’s hard to convince myself that Varan doesn’t already know how to undo the immortality he created. I can’t believe whatever reason he had to keep Yorri and the other prisoners alive still matters. It’s too easy to picture Varan wiping out Ryzo and the rest of my squad just on the chance of them knowing too much.

  It’s been almost two full moons since we fled Shiara. So much could have happened there, and our time in Ryogo has been fruitless at best. Far worse than that for Wehli.

  Because I couldn’t protect him.

  “It’s not like you to run away from things, Khya.” Sanii’s words jolt me out of my head.

  I take a sharp breath, looking down at em from my perc
h and hoping my face doesn’t give away my thoughts. “This looks like running to you?”

  “A form of it.” Ey climbs up, then sits across from me, eir expression placid. “Wehli woke up for a few minutes. I’m sure he’ll be fine. He laughed when Miari made a joke about being glad we weren’t in Itagami anymore because at least here he wouldn’t be demoted—there isn’t anywhere to go.”

  Bellows, that’s true. The kind of debilitating injury he has is one of the only ways a nyshin can drop an entire class, be shoved back from the front lines and the wilds of Shiara to become an ahdo guarding the city. “He won’t have that option here; there’s no walled-off haven we can use to keep him safe. Unless we left him with Ahta and Dai-Usho until we were ready to leave, and I can’t imagine he’d let us.”

  “Don’t even suggest it,” Sanii warns. “Realizing he wasn’t going to be shunted out of the position he earned seemed like the only thing that made him smile.”

  “Not like it matters. I don’t have the power to order anyone anywhere.” I knock a small chip of stone off the side of our seat. “What do you want, Sanii?”

  Ey shifts closer. The silence stretches longer and longer until I’m about to drop to the ground and leave. Then ey says, “Tessen said you’re beating yourself up about Wehli and Yorri and anything else you can find to blame yourself for.”

  “Well, if he says it it must be true,” I mutter sarcastically.

  “When it comes to you? Probably.” Sanii puts eir hand on the rock between us, palm up, an offering I don’t take. “We knew the desosa here was dangerous before you touched it. Wehli knew. He’s injured because he’s Itagamin, not because of you. He put himself in danger to save a clansman. If Wehli hadn’t acted, we would’ve lost Natani—the rock would’ve broken his neck.”

  “But I should’ve been able to—”

  “Work your usual magic while flying through the air from a blast that left you with a concussion?” Sanii looks at me, affection and exasperation in eir large eyes. “You really do have an impossibly large sense of responsibility for the world, don’t you?”

  I swallow, looking down and tracing shapes on the rock. “Yorri always thought so.”

  And I should’ve listened to him, because look where my responsibility has gotten us.

  “What do you know about the bond, Khya?” Sanii asks, almost too low to hear.

  “The sumai?” It takes me a moment to remember the stories I’ve heard about soulbonded partners. And it was usually only stories, rumors, and general knowledge—no one teaches the full truth until you request approval for a sumai. “Mostly what everyone knows—that you’re connected so deeply one can feel the loss of the other and— Oh.”

  “Exactly. There’s so much more to it, but if you’re only going to remember one thing about the bond, remember that. As long as I’m standing and whole, Yorri is alive.” Ey smiles grimly, eir large mouth twisted. “The day I drop to the ground and start begging you to let me die is the day you’ll know we’ve lost.”

  “But I’ve never—” My words trip on my tongue, the relief of Sanii’s revelation making me lightheaded. “I knew that, but sumai pairs are always on the same squad and on the same duty shifts, so I didn’t know— You can still feel it? Even when we’re so far away?”

  “I think when you’re talking about souls bound by the desosa, there’s no such thing as too far.” Sanii shrugs. “I hope that’s true, anyway. I’m choosing to believe it until circumstance proves me wrong, because I can’t feel much, but I’m sure he’s alive.”

  I close my eyes and take a long breath. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” Ey doesn’t speak again until I open my eyes, then ey gestures to my niadagu cord. “Show me what you’re doing with this. Maybe I can help figure out what’s going wrong. After we go back, though. Wehli will want to see you when he wakes up again.”

  Breathing easier, I nod and follow Sanii back to the camp. But Tessen stops us on our way back, deep furrows marring his forehead. “You need to see something.”

  He leads us east through the trees, only taking us a hundred yards or so before he points at a group of trees. I look, but… “I don’t have your senses, Tessen.”

  “Those were rotten and dying when we arrived. And these…” He heads right, and the closer we get to the edge of the valley, the fouler the air surrounding us smells. “These were healthy and thriving yesterday.”

  They’re definitely not now. All the trunks are cracked open, the cores empty and rotten, and only a few yellow-brown leaves cling to the branches above. The plants covering the ground are decaying into putrid muck.

  I cover my mouth and nose with the atakafu. It barely helps filter out the smell. “What happened?”

  “The power flares, I think,” Tessen slowly says. “We knew plant growth like this should be as impossible as it is on Shiara, which means it’s probably able to grow because the katsujo’s power is so close to the surface here, right?”

  “That’s what we guessed.” I poke the edge of one of the tree’s hollows. The wood crumbles under my finger. “You think that if the power is why there’s life here, the flares are what kills parts of it? Too much or too little in certain spots?”

  “Exactly. But Khya…” Tessen tilts his head back, the lines of worry on his face getting deeper. “It’s no wonder trying to use the katsujo went wrong. Look at what it’s capable of doing to the land in a single day.”

  “Bellows, Khya.” Sanii rubs eir hand over eir mouth. “If that’s true…”

  We run back to the camp and explain what Tessen found to the others. It doesn’t help us find a solution, but it does show us the kind of force we’re up against and proves we might have gotten away with less loss than we should’ve expected. Knowing that doesn’t ease any of my guilt about Wehli’s injury. I need to find a way to make sure nothing happens to anyone else.

  For the next several hours, we’re either helping Miari and Nairo care for Wehli or we’re working, and each minute is another that proves my brother’s soul chose well.

  Sanii, especially as the bitterness of eir placement as yonin ebbs further into the past, is insightful, determined, and incredibly quick-minded. It’s so clear how ey would’ve both supported and challenged Yorri’s intellect, even though I’ve never known them as a pair.

  But under it all, I know we’re going to have to try again. The reason we risked the trek out here hasn’t changed, and so even while I work with Sanii, I let the desosa in the clearing seep into my body, trying to adjust to the unpredictable ebb and flow of it and the way it can switch from stinging to soothing in instant-quick flashes.

  Tessen was right—something is broken here. But how the bellows are we supposed to change that? The Kaisubeh, if they exist, clearly haven’t fixed what Varan broke, so we might have to find a way to work with what’s here. And I will find a way. Until then, maybe, if I can learn the pulse of Kaisuama, my next attempt to use its power won’t end like the first.

  Chapter

  Twelve

  “What if it’s a katsujo?” Osshi’s question is hesitant, like even he doesn’t think he’s right.

  But Tsua pauses and looks at him with curiosity. “I don’t know what that is.”

  “My father… I began studying our history because of him,” Osshi explains. “When I was young he told me the ancient stories, and one was about how the Kaisubeh built the world. It was said that they poured their own blood into their creation, and it fed the soil and gave life to the animals. The story claims the rivers formed from the channels the Kaisubeh’s blood ran, and that traces of their power are still in all water, but nothing I’ve seen has ever made me think that’s true. This, though,” he says, gesturing to the clearing.

  I turn that over in my mind, trying to fit it into the other stories Lo’a told us and what we’ve learned here so far as Zonna traces a glowing crack in the clearing. Nodding slowly, he says, “So they thought the rivers were the veins of the world. That’s clearly wrong, but m
aybe they were only wrong about the leftover power being in the riverbeds. And what happened here is… Well, if the land were a person, and this is a vein, and what Varan did to it would be like leaving someone to slowly bleed to death.”

  “I—yes. Maybe.” Osshi runs his fingers through his long hair. “If what my father told me has any truth to it.”

  “Clearly, it does,” Sanii says absently, eir gaze distant.

  “Only in that it exists,” I protest. “It’s here, but that doesn’t mean it has anything to do with the Kaisubeh.” Really, the only thing I’ve seen that makes me think they might be real is Imaku and the effect that rock has on immortals.

  If Sanii hears me, ey doesn’t respond. But then ey blinks, sharply focused on me. “You used your wards to pass through Suzu’s. Can you do the opposite here?”

  “I don’t understand.” What would the opposite even be?

  “Don’t think of it like a vein, think of it like a river.” Sanii’s eyes kindle with excitement, the expression so reminiscent of Yorri in a moment of epiphany it’s almost painful. “The Ryogans think of the desosa like a river and a spell its banks, right? Well, it sounds like Varan blocked the flow and forced this river to flood. The banks have been crumbling, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be rebuilt after the barricade is removed.”

  “You…you think I should create a ward around this valley to seal in the desosa?” Even as I question it, my mind is spinning, trying to figure out how to make the idea work. “I don’t have enough wardstones, and even if I did, we’re back to the problem of removing whatever magic Varan worked that caused this. I’m not capable of—”

  “You are. And removing the block is what we should be worried about.” Tsua is looking toward the clearing and the rolling, glowing energy seeping through the cracked stone. “You’re right that your wardstones won’t be enough to contain this for long, so what if, instead of using them as a cage, you used them as a guide to give the katsujo’s desosa a new purpose? There’s enough power here to fuel anything you create for centuries or more.”