Soulwoven

by Jeff Seymour

  His legs buckled. His arms shook. His lungs heaved with sharp, staccato breaths.

  It had taken five of them, working together, to kill the Lost One.

  Cole stood on shaky feet near the Rokwet’s rail with blood dripping from his nose. Quay leaned heavily against the ship’s center mast. On the deck, pulling his leg from under the Lost One’s body, lay a red-faced Captain Aldric Derimsun.

  The ship groaned. The stairs to the aft gallery creaked as Dil descended from the perch from which she’d saved them. The sails flapped aimlessly in wind that had come too little, too late.

  Beyond that, there was only silence. The Lost Ones had fought to the death.

  Litnig’s lungs burned. His temple was sore from a blow the Lost One had given him with the guard of one of its swords. He had a piercing headache.

  In the end, after Litnig had been knocked to the deck and the orphan breaker had soared into the sea, Aldric Derimsun had faced the beast alone. The Aleani captain had lost his balance. A cutlass had gone for his chest.

  An arrow had caught the Lost One in its scaly throat.

  A second had struck it in the arm, then a third in the ribs. It had staggered forward, smiling through blood that welled between its teeth. Litnig had grabbed a broken sword from the deck and rammed it into the beast’s black heart with both hands.

  Still, the Lost One had taken nearly a minute to bleed out on the Rokwet’s deck.

  The creature lay below him. Its pale muscles had gone soft and dead. Its scaly yellow feet lay sole-up. Its eyes stared blindly at the sky above a satisfied, ecstatic smile.

  Litnig turned from the body and helped Derimsun to his feet. The Aleani captain ran a hand through his beard and surveyed his ship.

  Litnig closed his eyes. He didn’t want to look again.

  The sight of the ship filled his mind anyway.

  The dead lay everywhere. At least fifty corpses, Lost One and Aleani alike, occupied the deck. Below, gray sharks set the sea seething as they took care of those who had fallen into the water.

  The gorge rose in Litnig’s throat, and he focused on breathing.

  Soft footfalls echoed behind him. His brother’s hand, light and reassuring, landed briefly on his shoulder and then was gone.

  Litnig opened his eyes and found that Derimsun had moved and Ryse was kneeling by the bulwark. Her eyes were tinged white. The torn, singed hem of her robe dripped with blood.

  Beneath Ryse, Len slumped against the shoulder of a dead Aleani.

  A long, thin dart sat in his open palm. His leather armor was dark with his blood, but his chest rose and fell in slow, peaceful repetition. Every so often, his lips moved, as though he was murmuring in his sleep.

  Ryse exhaled heavily. She ran a hand through her hair and used the ship’s rail to help her stand.

  When her eyes met Litnig’s, she looked away. Her gaze drifted toward the ship’s forecastle, where more Aleani were lying.

  Where Leramis was lying.

  The blood rushed to Litnig’s face.

  Cold, he thought. Colder than the wind and the sea and the sky. Colder than the world had felt as he’d stared into the void with his life bleeding away. A long-ignored part of his heart told him to forget her, to leave her to her damn necromancer, if that was what she wanted. He’d seen the look on her face when Leramis had been mangled by the fireball, and it had changed the way he saw her anger, the way he saw her distance, and the way he saw her years of silence in the Academy.

  He spun around, grabbed the railing of the stairs that led to the aft gallery, and took a step upward.

  “Lit!”

  There was pain in Ryse’s voice.

  He turned back to face her.

  “I want to talk to you, Lit, later. Just…” Her right hand wrenched her hair into a tangled mess. Her left twisted the cloth of her robe. She looked like a spring wound too tight—coiled, ready to break. “Just not yet.”

  Litnig nodded. He didn’t speak. He didn’t apologize. He didn’t let his heart soften.

  He could be cold too, when he had to.

  On the aft gallery, he found Derimsun speaking in low tones with ten other Aleani. The captain’s eyes came up when Litnig approached.

  “I’ll nayd yer halp, bay,” he said. “Thare’s only a fyaw af us laft can craw tha’ shap. Raggin’ nayds redone. Bodies nayd clarrin’. Sails ta bay r’set.”

  Litnig nodded. Behind the Aleani captain, Cole and Dil were standing near the ship’s wheel, forehead to forehead, holding each other’s hands.

  Cold, he told himself.

  “T’ Rokwet nayds sax on dack at all tams. Y’ll nayd t’ halp craw har.”

  “Could we turn back?” Litnig asked.

  Derimsun shook his head.

  “Na’. T’ winds blaw t’ wrong d’raction. Et’d tahk us as lang t’ ga back as fahr’ard.” His eyes hardened. “I’d jast as soon w’ sahl on, mahk sure t’ craw dadn’t da in van.”

  Litnig dipped his chin down and up again.

  And he became a sailor.

  He threw himself into the work recklessly. His body was tired, but his heart was broiling. Ryse went from body to body, helping those she could. And every time he saw her ministering to a feverish-looking Leramis, the steam in his blood grew hotter.

  He wrestled mangled Lost One bodies unceremoniously into the ocean. He hauled coils of rope from below, and he pulled and stretched and strained to wind them through new tackle. He cleared the deck of fallen rigging, threw his weight against the ship’s capstans and cinched the sails down turn by turn until they filled with the brisk eastern wind.

  Derimsun took the helm, and the Rokwet took course north and west, away from the shore and into the open ocean and the shipping lanes its crew had never meant to stray from. By sunset, the ship had returned to some semblance of order. As Litnig was limping from fore to aft, two Aleani sailors appeared from below with a supper of biscuits, cheese, salted meat, and pickled cucumber.

  Litnig ought to have been hungry, but he wasn’t. The ship’s bell, chipped and dented on the aftcastle, rang twice.

  The Aleani set the meal on a blanket near the center of the freshly scrubbed midship. Litnig sat next to it and watched his friends and the crew hobble toward the food. Some of the sailors had blood-soaked bandages wrapped around their heads, their ribs, or their limbs. Cole and Dil looked at the food with exhausted, sunken eyes. Quay collapsed in a heap near the others and lounged unceremoniously on his side. Litnig could see big lumps on his forehead and a shallow cut along the side of his neck.

  The crew and the party sat together, a circle of bruised and bloody shadows breaking bread, equals under the sun’s last rays.

  Litnig was given a piece of cold meat, and he bit into its salty flesh and chewed. The sun slipped below the horizon in a fountain of blues and purples and yellows and reds. The stars flared forth in clusters and fits, until they speckled the heavens like a thousand grains of sand.

  Silence reigned. The sounds of eating and the ship filled the gloaming, and Litnig didn’t disturb them. His hands were raw from club and rope. His face was swollen and bruised. And his stomach—his stomach—he looked down and saw the flapping cloth where the Lost One’s spear had gone through him, and his stomach twisted itself in knots.

  When the food was gone, Derimsun stood without a word. His mouth turned down. A white-haired, wrinkled Aleani sitting next to Litnig lurched to his feet, and one by one the rest of the crew followed him. The quiet grew pregnant.

  Derimsun headed for the forecastle, where the bodies of his crewmen had been laid in rows.

  The sailors followed him reverently. One of them produced torches from a chest near the door to the captain’s cabin, lit them, and placed them in what brackets remained on the ship’s railings. The moon rose nearly full on the northern horizon. Derimsun proceeded to the middle of the group of shrouded corpses that had once been his men.

  Litnig followed. As he reached the forecastle, the wind picked up behind him, an
d the moon took flight.

  Derimsun leaned his head back and began to sing.

  His crew joined him. Their tune was slow and sad and complex, rising and falling and drifting and filled with Aleani words that Litnig didn’t understand. Some of the sailors wept. Others wrapped their arms around one another or pressed them against their own bodies.

  They grieved.

  Derimsun walked among the dead sailors. He raised each Aleani’s shroud, touched his or her eyes, murmured something, and moved on. Three of the singing sailors went to join him, and together they gently lifted their compatriots over the Rokwet’s rail and released them into the sea. The bodies hit the waves with soft splashes, and with each splash the Aleani dirge rose into the same phrase.

  Litnig mouthed it with them, and something in his mind translated, Walk with Yenor, fly south with Hir grace. He recalled the memories of the Aleani walker in his dream, and he shivered.

  Several sailors left to tend to the ship’s course. Only one singer remained. She was an older Aleani with a soft, beautiful voice, and she sang the highest strain of the requiem.

  Litnig felt no sadness. The thought occurred to him that death was something inevitable. Simply another part of life, like birth or growing old. He took a deep breath, and for a moment, he felt calm.

  Then he caught sight of Ryse, standing with her arms crossed near the Rokwet’s other bulwark.

  The feeling vanished.

  When the song was finished and the bodies were gone, the others streamed back to clean up what remained of dinner, or go to sleep, or begin their shifts on watch.

  Litnig caught Ryse’s sleeve. Her eyes were red-rimmed, watery, and tired.

  “You said we could talk,” he said.

  She sighed and looked over the ocean. “Yes, I did.”

  The wind caught her hair and blew it out in tangled strands. The moon and the stars twinkled behind her.

  Cold, Litnig reminded himself.

  Ryse sat and leaned her back against the bulwark. She gestured for him to do the same. “I owe you an explanation,” she said.

  “You owe me a few.”

  Her eyes narrowed. Quietly, she replied, “We’ll start with one.”

  Litnig eased himself down and sat cross-legged in front of her. The wind and the cold nipped at his back.

  “What happened today, when that Lost One caught you with the spear—Lit, by all Yenor’s three sights, you were dead by the time I got to you.”

  Litnig shifted from left to right. He’d felt dead—been caught halfway in the dream and halfway in the real world, seen the deck with wide-open eyes while he dangled from the disc over darkness.

  “That spear went through your liver, your spleen, your intestines. I should’ve had to pull you back from the brink by brute force.”

  Useless.

  The word whispered through his mind on the wind. He bristled.

  The fear was back in Ryse’s eyes. She licked her lips. Her brow twitched.

  “When I touched your soul to start the healing, Lit, I saw the dragon. And then the River responded to you like I’ve never seen it respond to anyone. The souls came quicker than they’ve ever flowed before.”

  Litnig exhaled slowly. The air was growing colder. He could see his breath. His stomach whirled between warmth and sourness—hope and terror. He remembered the feeling of something rushing.

  The souls came to me, he thought. They came to me like they come to her, to Leramis, to soulweavers. Seven years of frustrated dreams roared over him, and he wondered, Yenor’s eye, what if I could learn to weave?

  “That’s not a good thing, Lit.” Ryse’s eyes had narrowed again. Her voice had a hard, unforgiving edge to it. “They came faster than I’ve seen them come to anyone, even my instructors in the Academy. What you did today was inhuman. Beyond the scale of what anyone, even someone as strong as Leramis, should be capable of.”

  Inhuman.

  Litnig learned very quickly that there were worse things to be called than useless.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with you, and I don’t know how to fix it, but it scares me. Power on that scale, all of a sudden, with no training—it isn’t natural.”

  Inhuman. Unnatural.

  “Ryse, I’ve been dreaming.”

  She blinked. As if she couldn’t imagine why anyone would care about that. As if she’d forgotten.

  And then her eyes cleared. Slowly, she nodded.

  Litnig told her everything.

  Through it all, she remained silent. She didn’t move a muscle, except to take the heavy breaths she always took when she was afraid.

  It had felt good to tell Cole about the dream. Ryse, with her fear and her judgment, was another story.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?” she whispered.

  “I was worried that no one would believe me, Ryse. Or that it was ‘unnatural.’”

  The wind whistled between them. The Rokwet’s bow moved up and down through gentle swells. One of the Aleani on the aft deck called something to another.

  Ryse’s shoulders slumped. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her palms and sighed.

  “Lit, I don’t know what any of this means, but when he’s feeling better, I’ll ask Leramis. He might be able to point me in the right—”

  “No.” Litnig’s mouth went dry. “Ryse, no—not him. I don’t want him to know. I don’t want anyone to know.” Inhuman. Unnatural.

  Ryse looked back at Litnig. She nodded, but the uncertainty never left her eyes.

  “All right,” she said.

  Her voice sounded far away. Not the voice of Ryse his friend but the voice of Ryse the soulweaver. Ryse who’d seen the dragon when she touched his soul. Ryse who was afraid of him.

  She stood and began to walk away. He followed.

  “Ryse, promise me!”

  She looked back at him, nodded again, and kept moving toward the middle of the ship, where Leramis, Len, and several sailors lay recovering under a lean-to.

  The wind whispered over the ship. It was the wrong time and the wrong place for asking, but Litnig had to know.

  “Ryse, what happened between you and Leramis?”

  She froze. The hair on the back of her neck stood up straight in the light of the moon. “That’s none of your business,” she said. Her voice was frigid.

  “Ryse, please.”

  She kept her back turned.

  “You won’t like the answer.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “In the Academy, we were more than friends. He Ascended a year before me, full of promises, and then he left to guard the frontier and never came back. What he is now, what he’s done in between, I don’t know.” The wind caught her hair and set it streaming again. “But I dreamed for nearly a year of seeing him again, even after his funeral, and old dreams die hard.”

  She turned her head a few inches toward Litnig, just enough that he could catch every word she said in crystal clarity. “You should know a few things about that. You should understand, and you should leave it alone.”

  Then Ryse was gone, descending onto the midship.

  And Litnig stood alone with the ghosts.

  THIRTY-SIX

  The shadows wrapped cold and deep around Cole’s shoulders. The chipped wood behind him bit damply into his back. The stars hung white and distant overhead, and the rigging below them creaked lonely in the wind. His nose was sore, his ribs were bruised, and he couldn’t find a comfortable position against the battered starboard rail of the Rokwet’s forecastle.

  So he stood.

  He stood, and he ignored the tension in his shoulders and the soreness in his arms. He watched his brother spill his heart all over the decking and get walked on by the only girl he’d ever loved.

  And he listened to his brother say things that seemed to scare even Ryse.

  Cole didn’t move, and he didn’t make a sound. But the wind changed direction ever so slightly, and as Ryse left and Litnig turned to put his back against the cold, Cole
saw his brother spot him.

  Litnig’s face went pale. His body tensed. The question Yenor’s eye, did he hear? floated over him like a cloud waiting to burst.

  So Cole burst it.

  “I saw the dragon too once,” Cole said. “In my dreams, the night the first two heart dragons were broken.” He placed his hands on the rail and heaved himself onto it. His legs dangled over the deck. His back faced the sea and the stars. “I didn’t think it was such a big deal.”

  The last bit was a lie. Sometimes the memory still terrified him. But with time that fear was growing dimmer and colder, buried beneath a thousand other things.

  Litnig limped forward and leaned on the rail next to Cole. His chin bedded down on his sleeves. The wind ruffled his hair.

  The cold and damp of the wood began to make their way into Cole’s buttocks, but Cole didn’t move.

  “I should’ve told her sooner,” Litnig mumbled.

  “Fuck that,” Cole said. “What could she have done? What’s she going to do?” Litnig didn’t answer, so Cole answered for him. “Nothing.”

  Litnig’s eyes shone as gray and cold as the stars above. He grunted noncommittally.

  They stopped talking for a little while, after that.

  The ship creaked and moaned. The water splashed against its keel. And in the spaces left by the music of the sea, comfortable quiet hung between Cole and his brother, buoyed by long years during which they’d shared each other’s secrets. Sometimes reluctantly, sometimes of necessity, sometimes by accident—but always.

  “You know you owe me one, right, Cole? That’s the rule.”

  Cole rolled his eyes. The rule stated that every secret one brother yielded up by accident had to be answered by the other. Cole had been the one to invent it, when he was ten, and it had come back to bite him in the ass more often than not ever since.

  “C’mon. I didn’t mean for you to hear me asking about Leramis like that. Even it up.”

  Cole stared into space. The wind caught his hair and curled it around his ears. The mop on top of his head had grown longer over the journey. He’d have cut it already, but he had a sneaking suspicion that Dil liked it that way.