by L. W. Jacobs
No. No, this couldn’t be happening. She had always wondered what would happen if she slipped deeper, if the sheer resistance of air would eventually be enough to keep her from moving. How the laws of physics would change at super slow speeds. She stilled her resonance, with no change. The uai was coming from Credelen, then. How did she stop it?
At least she still had time—Credelen had just barely begun to turn his head away from her. She drew a breath to calm herself.
Or tried to. The air was clay in her lungs too. She couldn’t breathe. Her lungs hitched against, but the air was too solid, too slow. Panic set in, the scream caught in her lungs. She would die of asphyxiation, trapped between seconds, alone.
35
One minute Ella was there, the next she was gone. Marea looked to Avery, heart pounding, barrels flying and people screaming on the docks, some of them leaping into the water. The captain of their ship was shouting, telling his men to shove off, to get out.
He stood like an island of calm in the storm. “What do we do?”
He took a deep breath and blew it out. Ahead of them Ella appeared, suddenly frozen in the middle of the empty circle around Tai and Credelen. “I think we can do this,” he said, “but I’m going to need your help.”
A hundred thoughts flew through her head. She took his hand. “What if we just stayed on the ship? Let them fight their fights. Avery, you could die.”
Avery shook his head. “I won’t die. I know Credelen. I know what he’s doing. I can stop him.”
“But why? What’s the point?” Ahead Tai jerked in air as though stabbed. Ella was still frozen.
“The point is saving our lives, Em.” His eyes gazed into hers, deep and earnest. “I betrayed Credelen, and he knows we’re here. He’ll come after us next. And if he doesn’t have Tai and Ella as a distraction? I don’t know if I can beat him then.”
Em. He’d called her Em, his own name for her. Did he realize that was all she really needed?
“Okay. What do I do?”
He took her shoulders. “I can explain all this later, but just listen. You’re not a blank. You’re something rare, and wonderful, and powerful. And right now I need you to focus all your thoughts and all your feelings on Credelen. On something bad happening to Credelen. Okay? Something bad.”
Rare? And wonderful? She wasn’t a blank? Tears started in her eyes, but she nodded. “Yes. Okay. I can do that. What are you doing to do?”
Avery glanced toward the fight. “I’m going to kill him.”
And before she could so much as clutch his arm he blasted off, as fast as she’d ever seen Tai waft, shooting over the crowd toward Credelen. Fear seized her, and she shook her head. “No Marea, don’t be stupid,” she muttered, almost like she was talking to her mother-revenant again, “you’ve got to focus. Something bad. Credelen. Something bad.”
But all she could think about was Avery, about how much she wanted him to live. Needed him to. In the distance he swooped in, catching Tai as he fell, then landing and raising hands at Credelen. Why didn’t he attack?
They were shamans. Right. Marea unfocused her eyes, and suddenly the air around them was a maelstrom of revenants, spinning around their heads.
“Stains stains stains,” she whispered, trying to concentrate, knowing any one of those could knock out Avery like it had Tai. He was just a journeyman, and Credelen was probably a full shaman. Isn’t that what Nauro said? Something bad. Something bad happening to Credelen.
Barrels flipped behind Credelen, flying for Avery. He dodged, but more came, lifting out of the crowd like a swarm of wooden insects drawn to blood.
Avery ran, weaving impossibly between them, barrels smashing into the ground and each other all around him, making a terrible mess. Was she doing that? Saving him? You’re something rare, and wonderful, and powerful, he’d said. So why couldn’t she just end this?
“Friends don’t look like they’ll make it, missy,” a voice croaked behind her. Marea startled, seeing a wizened old deckhand looking at her as he untied ropes. “Pushing off, we are.”
His left eye was glass, and something about the strange glassy stare, about the intensity of his one good eye, made her forget everything for a moment.
She heard a shout, and looked to see Avery on the ground. “Yes,” she said to the deckhand, squashing the fear that rose. She could do this. Bad things to Credelen. “They are going to make it.”
The shaman kept advancing on Avery, smashing more and more barrels on top of him, arms raised. Tai and Feynrick were attacking as they could, but Credelen batted them off like springmoths.
Prophets. Prophet’s tits he was going to kill Avery.
No. She would not let that happen. Could not. Bad things. She imagined fire and hail and arrows and plague, every death she could dream of, hitting Credelen at once. “Bad things,” she muttered again, glaring down the length of the docks, resonance buzzing.
And then Credelen fell. Not from a sword, not from a triumphant sweep of Avery, who was still buried under a mountain of shattered barrels and salt fish. From a random shard of shattered barrel, struck straight through his neck.
A barrel shard. What the shatters?
Credelen fell, blood fountaining around the wood.
Did Avery do that?
Did she?
The deckhand whistled through his teeth. “Might make it after all, huh?” He clapped her on the shoulder hard enough to make her stumble. She didn’t care. Credelen was dead. And Avery was pushing out of the broken barrel heap, Feynrick giving him a hand. Alive! Thank the prophets, he was alive.
Had she done that? Did she do anything? What was she, that was so rare and wonderful?
Gods, it had felt good to hear him say it. Marea went to run down to them, needing to get her hands on him, only to find water where the gangplank used to be. The ship was pushing off. The crowd’s roar crashed in then, panicked people still fleeing the battle, porters and nobleman alike leaping into the Ein to escape, other ships pushing off the docks in a wave of wood and oars.
And a gap of water growing between the railing where she stood and the stonework of the docks. She was leaving them behind.
“No!” she cried, spinning, looking to the ship’s captain. “No, you have to wait for them!”
“This ship waits for no man,” the toothy Yershman grinned. “Sides, they already paid.”
She was just about to snap something back, about to start wishing bad things happened to him, when she saw Avery floating above the crowd, three grown people in furs clinging to his back, heading for the ship.
Relief replaced anger in the blink of an eye. “Over here!” she called, waving her arms even though he probably knew exactly where to go. “Avery! Over here!”
He turned for them, coming much slower than he’d gone but still wafting as strong as she’d ever seen the famous Tai do it. Pride welled in her breast. Avery was amazing.
And he thought she was rare and wonderful.
Maybe she could go to the Yershire.
36
Marea ran to Avery as soon as they touched the deck, Tai and the others piling off while the hum of resonance left Avery. He was hurt, one arm cradling his right elbow and blood staining his pants. “Are you okay? What happened?”
“What happened,” Feynrick boomed, “is the milkweed ran face-first into the last person he wanted to see in Yatiport.”
“I’m fine,” Avery said. “Just give me a minute. I can—heal this.”
Avery could battle shamans and brawl and waft and heal himself. “You were amazing,” she said, then realized she sounded like a star-eyed seven-year-old. In front of everyone, of course.
Stain it. What was it about Avery that made her sound so stupid?
He shook his head. “You were the one that did it.”
Ella cocked her head at them from where she was seeing to Tai, but before anyone could say anything else Captain Selwin pushed into their circle. “What’s this, now? Off my ship! I said no trouble!”
“We don’t intend to bring any trouble,” Ella said, “and we’ve already paid passage.”
“What do you call that back there?” Selwin demanded, waving his hand at the receding port.
“Trouble, no doubt,” Feynrick said, standing up straight and eyeing the narrow Yershman, “but nothing we brought. You should feel lucky we took care of it. Shaman like him, coulda sunk your whole ship.”
“Lucky? We’ll be lucky if we make it out of this Prophets-cursed mess without sinking,” he barked, gesturing at the mass of ships pushing into the Ein around them. “Eddlen, to port! Port, ye goatlover!”
A reedy youth at the tiller swung it around, a heavy slave barge clattering oars against them.
“We trust you,” Tai said, standing straight with a wince. “And you’ve already taken our money, so you’re bound to give us passage.”
The skinny Yershman spat. “I oughta turn around and drop you all back at the docks for the whitecoats to take care of. Ye know they’d have something to say about it.”
“I don’t doubt they would,” Ella said, “but you and I both know this is an unpowered barge. You can no more turn upstream than a fish could walk on land.”
“Dalhaven, then,” the Yershman said, “Turn you in at Dalhaven, and there’s an end to it.”
Avery straightened under her arm, his muscular frame making a powerful addition to Tai’s height and Feynrick’s width. “You want to talk about trouble,” he said quietly, “trying to take our money without giving us passage, that’s trouble.”
“You’ve seen what we can do,” Tai said, gesturing back toward the docks. “Is this really a fight you want to pick?”
“Criminals,” the skinny man said, eyes flitting away from the blood but not backing down. “Soon as I hit port they’ll come for me, say I was aiding you. Part of whatever that was.”
“News only travels as fast as the current, Master Selwin,” Ella said. “They’d have no way of knowing.”
“And if it comes to that,” Feynrick said, “you tell ‘em we hijacked ye. No choice of yours.”
“Basically true, ain’t it?” Selwin barked, though his eyes were starting to dart.
“We paid you,” Tai said, “and we don’t mean trouble, we just want a little privacy. You give us that, and no reason for us to actually hijack you.”
“Which we would,” Feynrick said helpfully.
“Privacy,” Selwin spat. “Shatters little of that to be hard on a barge. Ye’ve got the common room and we’ll mess on the deck, but there’s only one scatseat and ain’t much a man can say anywhere on board but the others can hear it.”
“Then ye’d best not be listening,” Feynrick said, laying a hand on his axe and offering a toothy grin.
Selwin’s eyes darted between them once more, then he said something under his breath. “Best be keeping your noses down in Fenschurch. And soon as we’re to Califf you’re gone and I ain’t knowed ye.”
“Then I think we have an agreement,” Ella said, though the captain looked none too happy about it. “That common room you mentioned?”
He showed them to the front of the boat, where a second and third story rose above the main deck. “This here’s my room, this here’s the crew, and this here’s you,” Selwin said.
You turned out to be a room not much bigger than the guyo, stinking of woodsmoke and dried fish.
“This?” Marea asked, knowing she probably sounded like a spoiled Councilate girl and unable to help it. Just one little bit of privacy, for once? Was that too much to ask?
“This.” Selwin grinned. “Lap o’luxury.”
They moved the table and chairs off to one side, Ella saying she would see about getting them some bedding in the next port. They did their best with the food droppings dried to the floor.
“Avery,” Tai said in low tones. “Nauro—the shaman that was traveling with us—knew a trick to mask our conversations. Can you do that?”
Avery pursed his lips. “I should be able to. Give me a second.”
They sent Feynrick outside while Avery and Ella chatted about the differences between the Worldsmouth docks and Yatiport. Marea found herself wanting to interject, disliking Avery enjoying conversation with Ella. The older woman was beautiful—though she also had a spate of new lines and wrinkles following the fight at the docks.
Was it bad that that made her feel good?
Was this love?
Was she jealous?
Feynrick came back in shaking his head. “Were ye talking? Couldn’t hear a thing.”
“Good,” Ella said. “Because we need to talk about what just happened. Tai, you just ran into Credelen, out of all the people on the docks?”
“Literally,” Feynrick said. “Face first.”
“And for the second time that day,” Tai said. “We saw him earlier on the street.”
Ella shook her head. “And I ran into my old ship captain, just as soon as I got close to the ships.”
Marea looked at Avery, something between dread and hope in her chest. “Did I—have something do with that?”
Avery cleared his throat. “Yes. You’ve all heard of mosslucks?”
Mossluck? Is that what she was? What was that?
Ella and Feynrick shook their heads, but Tai frowned. “Yes. I think so. Nauro said something about a sixth resonance. Fatewalkers?”
Avery nodded. “Another name for them. Marea is one of them.”
Marea flushed, hope rising inside. “So I was never a blank?”
He turned and smiled at her, like the sun breaking through clouds. “No. You have the rarest resonance of all. Some say the most powerful.”
“But I—but she,” Ella spluttered. “Timeslips are the rarest!”
Marea grinned. Not a blank. Rarest of all the resonances. Able to make bad things happen to people. It was the best thing she’d heard in years.
“Second rarest,” Avery corrected. “Most of the vulgate—ah, regular people that is—don’t know about fatewalkers because they assume they’re blanks, like they’ll call mosstongues blanks, till they notice their persuasiveness. Nothing really changes when a fatewalker strikes resonance. A few more coincidences, maybe. Nothing like floating up into the air or stopping time.”
“So she… can make coincidences?” Tai asked. “Like me running into Credelen?”
“Exactly,” Avery said. “Em, you had your resonance on since we got to the docks, didn’t you?”
Em. He said Em again. “Yeah,” she said, cheeks getting hot under everyone’s gaze. “I—strike it sometimes. Makes me feel safer.”
He nodded. “It does make you safer. Strengthens your body and speeds your mind like the other resonances. Of course you use it. And since she does, I’m guessing the rest of you have noticed some strange coincidences since you started traveling with her?”
Ella, Feynrick, and Tai frowned at each other, then Ella’s eyes widened. “The axe handle. That night we were attacked, and that throw I made that killed him even though I was nowhere close.”
Feynrick’s brows lifted. “That was an impossible shot.”
“I had my resonance going,” Marea said, a chill running down her back, remembering suffocating under all those furs. “I was trying to do something. Anything.”
Avery squeezed her arm. “Sounds like you did something.”
“We would have been dead that night,” Tai said quietly, “or all thralls to that shaman, if it wasn’t for you. Thank you.”
Her grin got wider, if that was possible.
“Prophet’s piece,” Ella whispered, staring at her. “And what just happened with Credelen? She—”
Avery nodded. “I asked her to focus her thoughts on him. Knew I was going to need a little luck to get it done.”
Feynrick let out a long whistle. “So our little lady’s a scrapper too. I thought it was barking strange when that one piece of barrel took ‘im right in the throat.”
“Barking strange it was,” Avery said, sounding for a moment ol
der than his twenty-two years. “And the only reason we got out of there.”
The looks she got then were vindication for all the time she’d felt like a fifth wheel on this trip, as the useless tagalong little girl. She hadn’t been useless. She’d saved them, twice now.
It was gratifying as hell. She opened her mouth to say so then stopped, because the odds were high she’d probably say something stupid and ruin the whole thing. She shut it again.
“And you knew this whole time?” Ella asked, turning back to Avery.
He looked uncomfortable, the expression out of place on his normally confident face. “Yeah. I thought you all did, too.”
“No,” Ella said. “At some point you had to realize we thought she was a blank. Marea, did you never tell him yourself? Surely it came up.”
“I—” Marea thought through her time with him, caught off guard. It had been so short. “I don’t know. Maybe I did. But he told me when it mattered. And told all of you. Isn’t that enough?”
Ella glanced at Tai. Marea liked her, but the woman was not good at trusting people. Ella looked back to Avery. “Anything else you want to tell us about ourselves we might not know?”
Avery shrugged. “You’ve all only got lower level revenants in except Tai, and that stands out because people usually have two? It’s hard to know what you don’t know.”
“My second level seated?” Tai asked. “I can get rid of my first?”
“Looks like it,” Avery said.
“Anything else?” Ella pressed.
“Hey,” Marea snapped, “do you really think he’s trying to hurt us? Did you forget he’s the one that warned us when Ollen was coming, and he’s the one that got us out of the last mess, when you all got shattered fighting Credelen? Why would he be holding anything back?”
Ella opened her mouth and closed it again. Good. Marea had gotten used to people not trusting her in the last half year—she was the Councilate girl who hadn’t run when everybody else did—but she wasn’t going to stand for it with Avery. She squeezed his arm again, loving how solid it was under her fingers.