Jaele swam as well—back to the shonyn bank, where she lay and shuddered before she pulled herself up to sit. She looked downriver, waiting for a glimpse of his head or back, though she knew there would be none. He was far away already, and she was weak, sleep-laden as a shonyn, her seagreen strength forgotten as a vow, a map, a smell of burning. She remembered stumbling from her beach as he vanished into tree shadow, and the memory was so clear that she moaned. Sand and smoke, blood on his forehead and in the water of her bay. Then the forest, the jungle, the wide road to Luhr. Dorin’s hair stirring against his cheek as she told him she would follow the Ladhra River to the sea. The iben’s song of birds and waves, sung beneath barrow stones. She sat beside the Ladhra River and trembled at the knotted pain that had returned to her.
When she stood—later, her clothes and hair dry—she looked at the plants by the shore, the flatboats, the quiet red houses and the desert behind. Her safety, for a time. Now she looked and almost did not recognize the place. A long sleep shaken off; dream scattering in sunlight.
She left the river and walked among the houses until she came to the one where Dorin lay. She knelt beside him and spoke his name—quickly, because she could not bear to watch him sleeping. “Dorin.” And again, because the first had been too soft: “Dorin.”
He groaned and opened one eye. “Jaele, what are you—look, it’s still sunny—what are you doing, waking me. . . .” Both eyes open now, his own voice fading, like a body disappearing into water.
“The Sea Raider was here. I saw him just now, in the river.”
He sat up. “Oh, Jaele,” he said, and they gazed at each other as the river sang and the silver leaves hissed in wind. They did not touch. She felt the deep waiting calm that comes before a dive. “I am so sorry,” he said at last. “Are you all right?”
She drew a deep breath. “No,” she said, and the calm dissipated. “No. He came from the trees—he has been watching me, I am sure of it. And it was him I saw in that storm. He was behind us, Dorin. Following me.” She tasted drying blood. “I do not understand. Why following? Lingering, when he must be sick?” He stayed at the fortress as well, she thought rapidly, dizzily. Maybe he can resist the pull of the ocean for a time.
Dorin said, in his even, careful voice, “He may need you, somehow. As you need him. He too may be haunted.” She wanted to scoff but could not. He went on, “He could have killed you in the desert or here—even at the Palace of Yagol. But he didn’t.”
“He had his dagger,” she said, “at the palace. And he lunged at me this time—and his eyes, Dorin—I cannot explain how they looked.” His eyes, his teeth, his stained fingers and mouth.
Dorin said, “Perhaps he was afraid.”
She did laugh then. “You said that before, in the Throne Room. But he is not afraid—not of me.” She bent her head into her hands. “I have to leave,” she said, over an old fear. “I have to follow him, again. He will go to Fane now—he has already been here too long. I must follow. This is the Ladhra River.” She looked at him. “Please come with me, Dorin.”
“I cannot.” Quiet voice, a ripple beneath. He smiled his crooked, twisting smile. “Must we say all this again? I cannot share this journey with you. And I cannot live with people. With their pain and their need and their noise. I thought I could be happy here with you—perhaps the only place this might be possible. But of course I was wrong; this is not enough for you.”
Jaele shook her head; tears blurred his face. “No. Not now—not any more.” They were silent again. The curtain blew gently in, out, changing their shadows on the red earthen floor.
“Stay with me,” he said, and she lifted her eyes to his. “The Sea Raider may die before you find him again. And you would be a fool to cross the ocean alone. Stay with me,” he said, softly. “I am sure that in time you would forget the strength of this need.”
She tried to smile, though there was anger, now, prickling through fear and sadness. “Now you try to convince me to change my mind?” She shook her head. “I need to go right away—I have already stayed too long.”
He looked sharply up at her and she flinched from his words before he spoke them. “You have stayed too long? Forgive me: I did not realize—”
“Stop,” she said. “Please.”
He pulled his fingers through his hair, savagely. She saw tears rise in his eyes before he ground them away with his palms. “No—you are right,” he said in a low voice. “You are right to leave me here.”
She shook her head again but did not speak. Reached out and pulled her bundle and pouch toward her—other things forgotten, for a time. Windblown sand hissed from the cloth and settled on the russet of Keeper’s tunic. She wrapped herself around the colours; she could feel the dagger, and almost bits of green that would crumble like the sand, no smell of sea.
“Farewell, then, Dorin,” she said, and smiled her own smile of sorrow and bitterness. She knelt with her sack and her pouch and could not move. They had lain here together, touching, this morning only. Now a dream scattering.
He put his hand to her cheek and she kissed it—the deep threads of his palm, skin cool and shaking. “Farewell to you, love,” he said, so quietly that she could hardly hear him. She rose then, before she could see him clear again, and stay.
Outside, the same silence and sun, distant cold silver. Footprints leading to the water and back, endless smudges, smoothed and remade. She walked among the houses and did not look around, though she half expected, even now, his step behind her, his voice crying, “Wait!”
Lallan was sitting by the river. She looked up at Jaele, shading her eyes. “I do not know why—I cannot sleep,” she said, and in a different voice, “Jaele. Queenswoman-friend.”
“You were right,” Jaele said, slowly, so that she would not dissolve beneath the urgency of her leaving. “This . . . he is not for me. I must go.”
“There are lynanyn in my house,” Lallan said. “You take them. Do you want more from me?”
Jaele nodded. “Please—could you say farewell to Saalless for me? I cannot stay to tell him myself.”
“Of course,” Lallan said. “Though you know that we shonyn do not have a word for this. I will speak it in your language.”
Jaele smiled. “Thank you, shonyn-friend.”
Moments later her frayed seagreen bag was full of lynanyn; she held it briefly to her chest before she tied it to her belt. Stillness and no one, not even Lallan. Jaele was on the bank, stumbling through mud that sucked at her feet. Then she was in the river, swimming with her head above the water so that when she turned—once—she saw the huts and the black-barked trees shrinking behind her. The river bent and she was beneath, far from the surface, her arms and legs cutting her away and nothing in her eyes except golden-brown and remembered trails of fish.
THE LADHRA RIVER
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Jaele walked and swam, and her fingers were stained with blue. She followed the river as it wrapped through sand, shining to a distant flat place of earth and air. Drifts of crimson and gold lit her face at sundown, and still she walked. Beneath star-flung darkness, when the water made another sky. She swam, and floated on her back, so still that she felt her blood, and heard it. Sometimes plants hung over the river and she touched them, and the leaves were smooth or sharp or dusted with down.
Her skin felt bruised by the wind, by sun and dusk. With the shonyn she had seen soft, comforting details: the child’s flesh at Saalless’s throat, the ridged curve of a lynanyn stem. Now she saw with a vividness that shocked her. She saw the water around her ankles and the minuscule forked tracks of unknown creatures in the wet sand of the bank. Shadows and light on skin, deep and shallow river. The order and texture of stars or clouds. She rarely slept.
At first she watched the river for movement beneath: shadows, waves behind webbed hands and feet. Once or twice splashes woke her from light sleep, and she knelt, looking into the darkness. Each time s
he saw only the moon-limned spines of fish, or nothing at all. In daylight she often felt eyes on her as she walked, and would turn slowly or swiftly, gaze leaping from water to rock to sand. Emptiness, only. Emptiness ahead and behind. She thought again, He is far ahead of me, by now—but she remembered the desert and the lynanyn trees, and she slept with her hand on her father’s dagger.
One night she found some sticks and small logs stacked on beaten dry grass by the river. The wood was a bit blackened but still intact—gathered carefully from the sparse riverside trees, a cook fire that had been hastily abandoned. She knelt and scraped her fingernail along one of the sticks: black ash, but good dry wood beneath. She looked at the sticks and logs, then out into the desert, where there were dark hills of rock, terraced and looming in moonlight. Suddenly there were Alilan hoof beats in her ears, and Aldreth’s voice and Nossi’s, clear and pure. Jaele struck sparks from the flint in her pack and cupped her hands around the thin flame that sputtered and rose. When it had caught, she stood up.
At first she did not move. She watched the fire until it blurred; she saw twigs curl and fall and logs blister, and she felt heat on the sand and through her gripping toes. She closed her eyes. Her fingers began: they opened and closed around flame air, stroking its weight, its shape. Her arms wove, swept water and wind and strained up to rocky sky. Her toes and feet arched and her knees bent. She pounded the earth, slowly then faster, and her eyes were wide as she began to turn.
The fire climbed and swayed. She whirled away from it onto cool sand; whirled tiny in the shadows of the stone. Her head was echoing, throbbing with her own cries, and the hills sent them back to her: Mother Father Elic Serani Llana Murtha Aldreth Maruuc Nossi.
When she fell to the earth beside the fire, she was shaking, and sand clung to the smudges of tears on her cheeks. She cried until the flames had begun to gutter; she cried for the names and for her journey, and could not remember having cried for them before.
She slept at last with a knuckle of anger pressing against her ribs; when she woke, it was a clenched fist, bones and flesh feverishly hot. The sky was still blue-black, but there was a sickle of red wavering along the far-off line of sand and maybe water. She untied her necklace and thrust it into her pack. Her eyes were swollen and burning. What I did, didn’t do, because of him. How far I could have gone. The sea, by now. Instead, this.
The rage was like a skin, and she stretched into it with relief. She knelt for a moment and touched the wood, powder on her fingertips. Then she rose and ran. She ran along the bank, each footfall away, the air still cold and smelling of somewhere and everywhere. The rock hills dwindled behind her. She leapt, sometimes, for breaths a bird or an arrow. She ran until her lungs were white. Then she slowed, dropped dizzily and panting. I am here. I am going to the sea.
She looked at her map that day, for the first time since Nossi had laughed and told her to put it away. Now she unfolded it slowly, certain despite Bienta’s assurances that it would fall to ragged pieces in her fingers. It did not. She touched the parchment, feeling the smoothness, the surface like scales or fins. She saw no Palace of Yagol, no shonyn village—nothing but the river that widened and widened as it swept east.
An old map, Bienta had said. There might be other villages before Fane; other people who would listen to her, walk with her to the river’s last widening. She stared down at the map, tracing the river’s lines, and could not imagine or even want these people. Nossi, she thought, and Aldreth, and she wept again, with her head bowed over the map.
She held her dagger balanced lengthwise on her fingertips. It was clean and cold. She pointed its blade away from her, toward the Eastern Sea.
She followed the dagger with her steps. “The Eastern Sea is crested and grey, children, even when the sky is blue. Perhaps you will never see it.” She was light with unburied rage.
The river was spreading now, spooling tributaries like silver-blue thread. Sometimes pools bubbled up from below, fresh water that tasted of stone. Jaele lay on her stomach and watched her face: eyes and nose broken apart and joined and smiling. “Water-girl,” she murmured in the shonyn language, and thought of Lallan for the first time since she had swum away. The banks rolled scattered green and there were flowers, so tiny that she had to stoop to see them.
One day she found people, in a place without green. She was running; they quivered out of heat and sweat, and she slowed. Her eyes darted and sought—but she knew immediately that he was not among them. The figures were bent and small, hunched over the water. She realized as she approached that they were holding cloth, swirling it before they wrung it out, drops like shattered glass raining down around their arms and ankles. Others were holding children. Rough hands scrubbed dark, wet hair, smoothed it back from foreheads and eyes. The children made no sound. There were no voices at all—nothing except the dip and fall of water.
They had not seen her; they were leaning over, strung loosely along the shallow middle of the river. They wore short, shapeless white; the children wore nothing. Jaele looked away from them and saw the houses: gaping rocks with no roofs, some with only three walls, two. Crumbling bricks of sand slowly returning. Smoke curled into breath against the sky and its gauze of cloud. A smell of old meat and dry, bitter grass.
She began to walk again, between the houses and the riverbank. She and Dorin had approached the shonyn at dusk—but this was different. The shallow, dirty river, people straightening to gaze at her from black eyes. Silence that was heavy and sore.
She had intended to speak, to smile, but her mouth was dry and their faces shocked her with bones. Even the children’s cheeks were hollows where lips would slide away. Their eyes were huge, round with hunger or dread that made them ancient. They stood very still and stared—and Jaele walked carefully past them as a smoky rotting wind choked her and lynanyn hung like stones against her back.
“Jaele, my daughter, my breath, be still and listen and do not disturb your brother! Now, if you follow the Ladhra River to the Eastern Sea, you will come to Fane. When Queen Galha rode down its streets with her army behind her, it was a bright, rich port, and its harbour was so full of ships that it looked like a forest. Now it is a place of ruffians and filth; a low, sad place, like the rough grey sea it overlooks. A forgotten place.”
She smelled it first: salt and foam and fish, seagreen lying tangled and dark on tide-washed sand.
Grasses and plants had returned, after she left the crumbling huts and the silent children. Small trees bent before the wind. She looked at her map and knew that she was close, closer.
The river began to broaden. It rushed now, rippling with the gleaming graceful backs of fish. All following the same course, pulled by sunrise. Jaele ran while they flickered just below the surface; her feet felt slow and clumsy. She yearned for and feared the shape of the town, the ocean whose scent was rage and aching.
She came within sight of the sea at night. She climbed a gentle hill and stood still where it sloped away. She knew, despite the darkness: her iben-sight showed her the vast star-picked shifting of sea water. The river roared, but beneath it she heard the booming of waves. They would be white and laced with birds; but quiet, only a heartbeat from below, where eyes opened wide on bone-chill and fingers brushed spinning green and stone. She clenched her fists and cried out.
When the sun rose, her father’s words were false, just for a moment: crimson-gold light flooded the water, calm and still and waiting before the wind that she could smell. She gazed along the path of the river and saw the place where it darkened and disappeared. She looked along the river and saw Fane: pointed roofs and plumes of smoke and, edging along the coast, a thin, empty road. She was far enough away that there was no sound but the sea; no sound, no movement except for the smoke which struck the golden sky and turned it grey.
As she watched, the wind rose in cold, wild gusts and the sunlight wavered behind cloud that was driven thick from somewhere, from the water or beyond. “A
low, sad place, like the rough grey sea it overlooks.” She looked at the dull, smoky stone of Fane, the white-capped choppy slate, the cloudy distance where another land raised its rock from the ocean. She thought of Queen Galha’s fleet blackening the waves, thought of herself, and shrank from the solitude that had been filled with Queensfighters, silga, fishfolk, Alilan riders, a giant, a boy: at least a boy.
I am here, she thought. She breathed the sea and gazed at the roofs of Fane and remembered the army that had massed enormous and invisible behind her on the sand of her harbour. She remembered the ocean song of the iben. I am here. And then she went down toward Fane and the Eastern Sea, trembling, bobbing alone in the dark salty wind.
FANE
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Jaele walked into Fane at night. There had been a beaten path by the river—not a road, although perhaps once, long ago. Now the roads led from the town along the coast; the scrub and desert lay distant, connected only by an overgrown dirt track. Jaele followed it down; and as her feet fell on the weedy path, she did not look around her, and so moved past small creatures and flowers and eddying water that she did not see and would not recall.
The waves were deafening and black by the time she reached the first buildings of Fane. There were other noises beneath the sea roar: screams of laughter, a baby’s wail, a woman singing—all caught thin and vanishing as spray on her eyelashes and lips. She felt the path harden into stone and realized that her shoes and clothing were rags—rent, bleached bits of fabric that fluttered as she walked. She hesitated beneath an archway. For a moment she remembered the arches and fountains of Luhr and a fist of loss, pushing her to numbness. It was very dark here, despite the points of fire that wavered in the thin windows above her. There was no one on the cobbled street. She stepped out beyond the arch.
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