In the vision, a tall human woman ran at his side. She wore clothes made of skins like all Lycaon, and she carried a short blade in one hand. Her long hair hung down her back braided into a thick rope, and it swung back and forth as she ran. She must be Turk’s secret mate.
Another surprised cry broke the silence of the vision, and Frieda glanced to her right. Sasha moved forward, but the Aqinas kept hold of her hands to keep the circle complete. “That’s Chris Sebastiani,” Sasha cried out. “She was with me when the Romarie ship crashed. She had to leave me for dead when the Lycaon rescued her and the other women.”
The other man in the little group was Ursidrean. Frieda didn’t recognize him, and the water gave no hint who he might be. But she tried to tear herself out of the circle when she saw the other woman. Her brown hair hung loose past her shoulders, and she wore close-fitting pants and a fitted shirt. She didn’t run as fast as the Lycaon. She kept close to the Ursidrean. “Emily!”
Deek murmured into her ear. “Don’t step out of line. You’ll break the connection.”
She yanked harder at her hand. “That’s my sister Emily. We thought she died when the Romarie ship crashed.”
A watery knowing swept over her. No images interfered with the collective vision of the convocation, but some buried part of Frieda understood what happened to Emily. She fell out of the ship when it broke up in the atmosphere. She must have found her way to the Ursidreans somehow. That must be why she stayed close to that big Ursidrean male now. Anybody could see they cared about each other.
“Don’t break the connection,” Deek told her.
Frieda took a step forward against his restraining hand. “I have to go to her. I have to at least tell her I’m okay. She probably thinks I’m dead. This could be my only chance to find her and communicate with her.”
He pulled her back with such force that she spun around to face him. “Don’t step out of line, Frieda. This is much too important. The factions are making peace, after centuries of war. We can’t allow anything to interfere with that.”
“I have to go,” she insisted. “I can’t be happy here until I see my sister.”
“I thought you’d settled that,” Deek remarked. “You said you would stay and join our family.”
Frieda glanced toward the vision. “That was before I saw Emily. She’s right there in front of me. I can’t turn my back on her.”
“If you go out there,” Deek warned, “you won’t come back.”
The vision shifted again, and Donen and Renier embraced in fraternal greeting. They talked together, and then welcomed Turk into their circle to represent the Lycaon.
Sasha spoke up. “I have to see Chris. I have to tell her I’m alive. I can’t let her go on thinking I died in the crash.”
Her words gave Frieda courage. “I’m going, too.”
Fritz answered them. “We will all go. We will join the factions in their bid for peace.”
Frieda whirled around. “You can’t all go.”
Fritz smiled at her. He still held Sasha’s hand. “We can. We will see what these factions mean to do. We shouldn’t sit aside and let them negotiate without making our presence known.”
Frieda burst into a radiant smile. Fritz let go of his brother’s hand, but he held onto Sasha. The vision evaporated before their eyes, leaving the unchanged meadow in its place. Fritz set off across the meadow toward the center of the circle, and the other Aqinas fell in line behind him with their hands still joined.
By the time Fritz reached the center of the meadow, the circle turned around behind him and left the way clear for him to keep going. His rhythmic steps tread the waving grass, and he danced across the meadow toward the wall on the other side. A deafening roar rose, as it seemed to Frieda, out of the very sky. It rattled her bones like thunder, but instead of loud claps, it rolled on and on in a continuous devastating tide. The howl of wind or the crash of surf on the beach couldn’t hold a candle to this. The noise crushed Frieda’s spirit. She would have cowered on the ground and covered her head with her arms to protect herself from it, but the Aqinas drew her ever onwards, closer and closer to the wall and the noise.
A black hole opened at the base of the wall. Not a glimmer of light shone from its depths. It wasn’t a tunnel or a door, but a yawning maw in the fabric of space, and every Aqinas passed through it and ceased to exist. No shadow remained of the bright-clad people. One after another, they fell into that hole until Frieda remained with only Deek on one side and Jen on the other.
They gave her no chance to hesitate. She’d made her decision, and she ceased to exist along with them. The noise pulverized her into nothing, and her consciousness blinked out. Then, as suddenly as it began, the noise stopped, and a mind-numbing silence took its place. The silence destroyed her being more cruelly than the noise. She would have given anything to get that noise back to fill the void.
An icy cold pierced her soul, and her eyes snapped opened. The broad sky spread over her head, and the same plain she saw in the Aqinas’ collective vision lay exposed under it. The two columns stood face to face across the chasm with a winding river tracing its bottom.
Nothing penetrated Frieda’s mind but the cutting cold. The warm contentment of the Aqinas world, the beauty of the meadow and the multi-faceted sky, the delicious smell of grass and flowers thriving under the sun—all were gone, gone forever, never to be restored. In their place, the cold struck to her very core, and an endless gulf separated her from every other being in the universe.
She held to Deek’s hand for her very life. He anchored her to the world she left behind. He wouldn’t let her fall into the vacuum. He would find a way to take her back there. A trickle of water slithered across her toes. She looked down. She was standing, along with the other Aqinas, in the river at the bottom of the canyon.
And all around her, the frigid air, the empty, hollow air stabbed through her skin to the very center of her being. Nothing connected her to anyone or anything anymore in this empty world. The water was gone, leaving nothing—nothing!—in its place.
Across the riverbed, her sister Emily stood with the others. She started back in surprise when the Aqinas appeared, but Frieda registered her emotions only from a great distance. Emily’s eyes swept the line of Aqinas. They skipped over Frieda’s face. Emily didn’t recognize her own sister. The same mistrust burned in Emily’s eyes as burned in the others’. She hated and feared the Aqinas. She believed the stories she’d heard.
All Frieda’s desire to reach out to her sister, all her notions of educating the Angondran people about the Aqinas and their world, all vanished along with the water. She felt no connection with anyone anymore. She cared about one thing only, and that was keeping contact with the water at her feet. If she stepped out of that riverbed, she was lost forever. She would never find her way back to the Aqinas world, to the home, the family, the beauty, the belonging. She wouldn’t sacrifice that for anybody, least of all Emily.
Fritz greeted the Felsite leader, but even he made sure to keep his feet in the water. “We meet again, Alpha Renier.”
Frieda had to summon all her concentration to comprehend what they were saying. When her eyes wandered back to the faces of Emily and the other women, the men’s voices broke up into gibberish. They were talking about peace, whatever that meant. These people couldn’t understand peace. Peace existed in the water—nowhere else. Without the water to connect them, they could never fathom a concept as delicate as peace.
Then Fritz turned to the women. “I come to seek you and your kind. I come to communicate with you.” His attention disturbed them, and they shifted back and forth on their feet. They withdrew from him in silent revulsion. They would withdraw from her, too, if they ever realized she was there.
The woman Sasha recognized, the woman she called Chris, frowned at him. “What could you have to say to us?” She wanted nothing to do with him. None of them did.
He waved his hand toward the Aqinas
in the line, and Sasha stepped up onto the dry land. The moment her foot left the water, a blank expression covered her face and the light went out of her eyes. She stared straight in front of her, and her voice lost its ring.
Emily swept Sasha up and down with her eyes. The lifeless mask of her face horrified Emily more than the others, but Sasha approached the group and stopped in front of Chris. “I came to speak to you.”
Chris stared at her for a moment. Then her mouth dropped open. “Sasha!”
Chris rushed forward, but something in Sasha’s wooden demeanor made her stop short of throwing her arms around Sasha. She took hold of both her shoulders instead.
“Do you know this woman, Chris?” Emily asked
Chris gazed into Sasha’s face. “I only met her once, but I thought she was dead. What happened to you, Sasha?”
“I thought I was dead,” Sasha murmured. “I don’t remember exactly what happened.....”
From her place in the line, Frieda recognized it all. Without the water to anchor her, Sasha’s mind drifted with the fickle air. She couldn’t remember what happened to her. She glanced over her shoulder at the Aqinas to try to get her bearings. Nothing could restore her but the water. She longed for the water as much as the rest of them.
“The Romarie strangled you,” Chris told her. “It happened right in front of me. Do you remember the crash?”
Sasha blinked. “The crash....”
“What’s the last thing you do remember?” Chris asked.
Sasha hesitated. “It was raining.”
Fritz spoke up. “She washed into the river in the rain. That’s where we found her.”
Emily stepped forward. “Are you coming back with us? Is that why you’ve come?”
“I’m not coming back with you,” Sasha replied. “My home is with the Aqinas. Fritz….” She waved over her shoulder.
Chris nodded. “I understand. I guess the Aqinas Alpha has a human mate just like the others.”
Sasha smiled for the first time. “You can’t understand how comfortable and warm it is with the Aqinas. It's so comfortable and warm…..”
Chris and Emily glanced at each other. “What else can you tell us about the Aqinas?”
“There’s no questions there,” Sasha told them. “There’s no fear or wondering, and everyone embraces you in a warm, loving embrace.”
In her addled state, poor Sasha tried to explain what the Aqinas world was like, but they could never understand. While they talked, Fritz scanned the line. His eyes stopped on Frieda’s face. Through the trickle of water at his feet, he saw. He understood. She would never leave the water. She wouldn’t step out to speak to her sister. Her sister meant nothing to her here. She couldn’t get away from this place fast enough.
Chris sighed and nodded. “I’m glad you're happy there. Is that what you came to tell us?”
Sasha shook her head, but Fritz spoke up again. “There is another.”
“Another what?” Chris asked.
“Another human woman,” Fritz replied. “She came to us four days ago.”
“How did she come to you?” Emily asked. “Did she fall out of the Romarie ship like I did?”
“She came through the river, like Sasha,” he replied. “We found her at the mouth of the Borlass River.” He waved his hand toward the south.
The Ursidrean standing near Emily interrupted. “The Borlass River? That’s more than five hundred miles from here.”
Fritz shrugged. “That distance is nothing for the river. This woman is known to you, and she cannot rest until her people know where she is. She dreams every day and every night that her people are frightened something happened to her. She wants them to know she is safe.”
A shudder passed through Emily. “What does the woman look like?” She already knew the answer.
He held his hand up to his chest. “She stands about this tall. She has small hair, like this, around her head in small black curls.”
“Frieda!” Emily cried. “Where is she? Is she safe? Is she all right?”
Fritz nodded and smiled. “You are her people. She sent us here to tell you she is safe and happy. She is with us.”
Emily took a few steps toward him, but Chris held her back. “When can we get her back? If she’s worried day and night, we should get her back.”
He shook his head. “She is only worried for you. She worries you will worry about her. She is safe, and she will stay with us in the water.”
Emily narrowed her eyes at him. “How do I know she really wants to stay with you?”
“We wouldn’t keep her if she didn’t want to stay,” Fritz replied. “As Sasha said, it’s a very warm and comfortable place in the water with the Aqinas. Anyone would want to stay.”
Chris murmured into Emily’s ear. “I think we can believe him. The Aqinas are Angondrans like the other factions. They value hospitality and care of strangers. They wouldn’t keep Frieda against her will.”
Emily shrugged her hand away. “How can I see my sister for myself if I want to hear this from her?”
Poor little Emily and her tiny, insignificant emotions! She would never know the peace of the water. She would never know togetherness with other people. The air would always seal her away from everybody else. Nothing could induce Frieda to experience that isolation again—not for anything.
“You are always welcome to come to our territory to see her.” Fritz waved his hand over the company. “Any of you would be welcome.”
Chris turned to Emily. “Do you want to go see her?”
Emily shook her head. “Not now. Another time maybe.” Of course she didn’t. None of them wanted to see the Aqinas world. They would rather huddle in fear and cold on land.
Chris took Sasha’s hand. “Are you sure you don’t want to come with us? There are other human women in our factions. You wouldn't have to be alone with the Aqinas.”
“No one is alone among the Aqinas. Everyone knows your thoughts and feelings, and everyone loves you with a pure open love. It’s nothing like the way people live outside the water.” Sasha’s eyes already drifted back toward Fritz and the river. It was pointless to explain.
Sasha and Fritz took their places in the line and joined hands. Chris and Emily moved away. A surge of relief washed over Frieda. Her last connection to this wretched world crumbled into nothing. She was going home. A thunderous crash smashed into her ears. The scene vanished before her eyes, and the black void closed over her head.
Chapter 10
Frieda stood in the middle of the meadow and scanned the landscape in all directions. The wind tussled her hair and whipped her long white robe away from her body. The fresh breeze tingled in her nostrils.
The sky overhead shimmered a prism of every color, and the sunlight glittered over the waves in a million blinding sparks. Two enormous sea creatures, one slightly smaller than the other, crossed the sky and sent ripples through the water in their wake. The sun and wave patterns played on the stark white wall in the distance. Only a few people walked to and fro under the wall today.
Frieda brushed her hand over the tips of the grass. The longer stems poked up under her robe and tickled her legs. She turned her back on the wall and gazed toward the corner of the forest leading to the village. Just then, Deek came around the corner and strode toward her. “I thought I’d find you out here. What are you doing out here all by yourself?”
“Actually,” she replied, “I went to see my old house.”
He cocked his head to one side. “And how is it?”
“It isn’t there anymore,” she told him.
He studied her. “Does that surprise you?”
“Not really,” she replied. “I haven’t been back to it in months, and I would never want to live there again. I suppose it only makes sense it would cease to exist, now that it’s not part of my life anymore.”
He nodded and waited for her to say something else.
“But my plants ar
e still there,” she went on. “That’s one good thing.”
His eyes flew open. “Your plants?”
“The ones I tended when I first lived there,” she explained. “The ones I had growing in my window box. When I moved to the village, I planted them out in the ground under the trees, and they’re still there.”
“Congratulations,” he explained. “You have a green thumb.”
“Not really,” she replied. “They were the same species as some others growing in that part of the forest. They would naturally do well growing on their own, and as you say, I didn’t really do anything to them. It was more the idea of doing something with them that got me interested.”
He took her hand. “I’m glad it did.” They started walking toward the village. “Are you okay?”
Her head whipped around. “Why do you ask?”
“I wondered,” he replied, “after you saw your sister again at the convocation last night.”
“Why should I not be okay about that?” she asked. “I’ve seen her dozens of times.”
“I know,” he replied, “and every time you see her, you get very quiet for a day or two afterwards. You don’t regret your decision to stay here, do you?”
“Not at all,” she exclaimed. “I guess that’s why I get quiet. I keep thinking how much more I love her now that I’m here. I couldn’t love her like this if I was on land.”
“How does that work?” he asked.
“I don’t think I ever knew what love was before I came here,” she replied. “The water makes loving others so easy and natural. Out there, on land and in the air, love is a constant battle. You have to fight every minute to love the smallest thing, like a plant or an animal. With people, it’s much more difficult to the point of impossible. I wouldn’t want to try it again. I’ll stay here.”
Damen (Dragons of Kratak Book 2) Page 59