The Tides of Bára

by Jeffe Kennedy

  “Nooo,” he moaned, struggling to his feet. Impossible that she’d returned. She’d be slaughtered and he’d have to watch. His legs failed, that final effort robbing him of the last of his strength. Blackness swam up, dragging him back to the ground. As he fell, it seemed that the world spun, the golems whirling into the air, dancing like translucent leaves glittering with ice.

  Then gone.

  For once, he didn’t come alert as he awoke. Instead, he groped groggily for where in Arill’s green earth he could be. He ached in every fiber of his being, head swimming with … blood loss? Yes, that was it. He’d been fighting the golems and they’d been closing in for the kill.

  Why hadn’t they finished the job?

  Or had they? He’d always imagined death would take away pain, but perhaps Arill intended for him to suffer a while longer. Because he hadn’t saved Oria after all. She’d come back.

  Or had that been a vision? Please, Arill, let it have been a dying man’s selfish wish and not true.

  Sun beat hot on his eyelids, so he opened them, squinting against the too-bright blue of the desert sky. He rolled his head, his neck creaking. All around, the heaps of waxen golem bodies still ringed him, though they seemed… deflated somehow. No longer waving like wheat in a summer breeze. They’d collapsed into inert and rigid heaps, the edges crumbling here and there into glittering sand. If people went back to ashes and dust, he supposed the golems went back to glass and sand.

  His neck hurt, so he rolled his head the other direction, hoping to loosen it.

  Oria.

  Her copper braid gleamed bright, her crimson robes swirling in some breeze that also tugged tendrils of her hair, Chuffta on her shoulder. She bent and touched a golem.

  Panic roared through him.

  “Oria!” He barely croaked out her name, but he pushed at it. “No—don’t!”

  She whirled, her face a pale blur as his head pounded with the rising dark. He fought it down. His battle-axe. It should be there. He yet lived, which meant he could still protect her.

  “Lonen. Lonen, listen to me. Lie still.” Somehow she was beside him, bending over him so that the coppery strands that had escaped her braid hung around her face like the fine chain jewelry the Destrye women wore. He lifted a hand to touch one, but his arm dropped back to the ground. So weak. Too weak. His addled brain caught up again.

  “Don’t go near the golems,” he begged her, voice broken like the glass shards strewn around him. “There’s still a chance. Flee this place.”

  “Shh. Have some water.” She held something to his mouth, but he turned his head. They didn’t have time.

  “Buttercup. You have to run,” he insisted.

  “It’s okay,” she said in soothing tones that made no sense. Didn’t she understand the danger? Even now a golem could be sneaking up behind her. “Just rest. Drink the water.”

  “No!” He knocked the thing from her hand, struggling to sit, but the blackness roared up. Roared like dragons come to burn the crops and the Destrye. “The dragons are coming—you must run!”

  She’d disappeared. Good. Maybe she’d listened and fled at last. Or she had been a vision his dying mind had conjured up. Who knew it would take so long to die? He’d always imagined it fast, over before he knew it. A surprise hit and then he’d be entering the Hall of Warriors. Though he’d seen men linger for days or weeks before finally yielding to Arill’s dark kiss. Nolan… maybe he’d lain like this, somewhere in that unnatural crevasse, with not even the blue sky to gaze on, dying slowly of thirst and his injuries.

  Like himself. So thirsty. Had Oria offered him water? No, that had been a vision. Oria was safe in Dru, learning to swim and ride horses and growing ripe with his baby.

  “Look, Destrye.” Her lovely face came into view again, mouth set in stern lines, copper eyes full of fire. “You’re going to drink this or I will sit on you.”

  He blinked at her, confused. “Drink what?”

  She huffed out a sigh of exasperation and pushed the hair off her pained face, smearing it with blood. “Water, from this—”

  He knocked it aside, reaching for her. “You’re bleeding!”

  “No.” She drew out the word with infinite patience. “This is your blood. Now drink this cursed water so you don’t shattering die on me!”

  She put the cup to his lips, and he let her, watching her over the rim as cool, sweet water filled his mouth. She looked tired, worried—and angry with him, but he could handle that—but also better. The sheen of magic glowed around her, the tendrils of her hair rustling with it.

  “Good,” she said. “I’m getting more.”

  “Wait—” he reached for her, but he was too cursed slow, and she was already gone. He stared up at the sky, feeling horribly alone. Where had she gone? A weight settled on his chest, bright green eyes peering at him from Chuffta’s triangular face. “You were supposed to go to her,” Lonen chided him, his voice clouded with water. And maybe blood. The derkesthai only regarded him solemnly, and Lonen missed hearing his words in his head.

  “He says to tell you to lie still and do everything I say and you’ll be fine,” Oria said, kneeling beside him and putting the cup to his lips again.

  He drank, finishing it quickly, but took the precaution of snagging her sleeve before she could leave him again. “He did not say that.”

  Her lips left their grim line to smile slightly. “What do you know? I say he did.” She moved to rise.

  But he held on. “Don’t leave me.”

  She softened, brushing back his hair from his forehead. “Never. I came back, didn’t I? I’m just getting more water. If only I had more than this little cup.” She turned her head, meeting Chuffta’s gaze, making a sound of surprise. “Oh, good idea—I should have thought of that.”

  Her magic, green as her Familiar’s eyes, surged around him, just as it had that day in her rooftop garden. He knew it as well as he did her scent and the silk of her hair. It moved past him, to the pile of decomposing glass rubble, then faded away. She looked a bit dimmer, but pleased.

  “What did you do?” he asked her, feeling like he looked for the answer to a much bigger question.

  She reached over him and held up something from a translucent handle that looked for all the world like a bucket used for toting water, but made of glass. “Made something bigger. I’ll be right back.”

  “Don’t go,” he said, holding on, thinking vaguely that he’d asked her that once already and that he should be embarrassed for himself.

  She gently disengaged her sleeve from his grip. “Only for a moment. Chuffta is with you. See?”

  She left him with only the lizardling’s too discerning stare for company. “No bonfire to tend, huh, buddy?”

  The derkesthai cocked his head, then lifted his wings in a half-mantle and rustled them like a human shrug while turning down the edges of his mouth in an approximation of a pout.

  Lonen rasped out a laugh at the sight, which had Oria smiling more naturally on her return, lugging the far-too-heavy bucket and setting it down with a relieved sigh.

  “I should help you—”

  “Oh right. You may be a big, strong, immortal Destrye warrior, but right now you’re flat on your back and you’re not helping anybody.” She dipped the cup in the bucket and held it to his mouth. “Drink.”

  Chagrined, he followed her order. She had a point. The water was reviving him, but with that came the awareness of his body. So many wounds, all seeping blood. He swallowed down the water. “Bandages,” he muttered, more to himself than her.

  “I put some on the worst, but that’s next, now that you’re not on the brink of death.” She pushed the scraggling tendrils off her brow and he realized that she was sweating and she’d rinsed the blood from her face and hands.

  “It’s hot,” he told her, again with the feeling that he wanted to communicate more, but lacked the facility with words.

  “And you gave me grief for my keen observation skills,” she retorted. “M
aybe next time I’m in your position you’ll remember this and be nicer to me.”

  “I try to be good to you, Oria.” He’d bumbled so much, done so poorly with the gift Arill had bestowed on him. “I really do…”

  “Shh.” She dipped a white cloth in the bucket of water and wiped his face, her coppery gaze going abstract as she carefully cleaned the cuts. “You are good to me. Better than I deserve. I’m sorry I said that. You’re wonderful. Much nicer to me than I am to you.”

  “You love me.”

  Her eyes narrowed as they flicked to his again, her expression wry. “Trust you to remember something I blurted out in a moment of crisis.”

  “It helped, knowing that. Helped me keep fighting so you could get away. But you came back.”

  “That’s right. And you’re glad I did or you would be dead. Close your eyes.” She dribbled water over his face, dabbing with the cloth. “This wound looks bad, but it’s pretty shallow. You don’t think he’ll lose the eye, do you?”

  Lonen started to ask how he’d know, then realized she conferred with Chuffta.

  “Yes, I agree,” she continued. “The side is the worst. The one on his neck looks bad, but I think it’s stopped bleeding for now, so I’ll leave it packed for last. I need to gather more sgath though. Lonen?” Something nudged at his mouth. More water. “Drink some more, then you can rest.”

  Obediently, he drank. “Where are you going?”

  “Just over here. Not far.”

  “Stay away from the golems,” he said, remembering his fear at seeing her reaching for one. “They look dead, but they’re unnatural—they keep coming and coming and coming, even the pieces, and…”

  They’d been endless, coming at him.

  Had he died?

  “Everything is all right,” Oria soothed. A cool damp cloth draped over his eyes and forehead, and he sighed at the relief from the searing sun. “Trust me. Rest.”

  “The oasis…”

  “Yes. Soon. Take a nap and then we’ll go.”

  “All right. A short nap.” Sleep dragged at him, but he fought it. “You won’t leave me?”

  “Never. I’m right here.”

  ~ 15 ~

  Oria stood, stretching her lower back against the painful cramp. She should have made the bucket smaller. In her enthusiasm she’d made it too heavy and filled it too full.

  “You could make another one.”

  “I’d better conserve my sgath. Once I’ve used up all these packets, I’m out again.”

  “Unless we find more golems. Maybe we can attract and trap some.”

  “Interesting thought. Perhaps a plan for later.” She spoke out loud to her Familiar partly to conserve her mental energy, but also because it seemed to soothe Lonen to hear her voice. Reassurance that he wasn’t alone, probably. Something she understood, that profound lonely neediness of swimming up from the depths of near-death unconsciousness. He’d lapsed back into a more normal sleep now, his breathing deeper and steadier than it had been. His face remained starkly pale, whiter than the scrap of her chemise she had soaked and put over his eyes—and that angry slash that nearly followed the path of his previous scar. To be fair, though, the chemise had long since gone past being white, now a permanent brownish pink from encounters with mud and blood.

  Still. “You’re sure he won’t die?” She asked Chuffta mind-to-mind, just in case Lonen could overhear.

  “His life force is strong and you’ve stopped most of the bleeding. Once you’ve washed and bandaged his wounds—make sure they’re clean so he won’t get infection—then he should heal. The worst danger is over.”

  “I don’t know how you’re so sure,” she muttered at him, moving over to a pile of still-waving golem appendages. Lonen had a point that she had to be careful of them. When she’d first arrived to find him on his knees, the ring of golems about to deal the death blow, she’d overreacted, blowing his attackers away in a blast of ill-considered grien.

  “Understandable, really. And quite effective.” Chuffta aimed a trickle of flame to melt the scything claws of a downed golem. “Here’s a good one. Still mostly intact.”

  The best ones were those that still had most of their torso—particularly if Chuffta took care of the claws for her. In that first frenzy of squandering her accumulated sgath on saving Lonen, she’d turned to the nearest downed golem to steal its packet of sgath, and got sliced across the forearm for her trouble. Even now the three shallow cuts kept opening to ooze bright blood. A small lie to tell Lonen the blood wasn’t hers. It had worked to calm him and, compared to the blood he’d shed, her wounds were nothing.

  The man looked like he’d bathed in blood. If he hadn’t been upright, she’d have been certain he could not have survived.

  She pushed the haunting image aside, clearing her mind and emotions in order to absorb the sgath from the golem’s packet. It was a good one indeed. Chuffta had an eye for the really fresh, intact ones.

  “Now that I know what to look for, I can kind of detect in them what I feel in you, then search for that. It’s not enough just to locate the least chopped up ones, though that’s a start.”

  “A good thing, as most of them are pretty well diced.”

  “Lonen is a skilled and determined warrior.”

  Didn’t she know it. How many men could have defeated an unkillable enemy in such devastating numbers? The immense pile of golem parts staggered her. He hadn’t only dispatched them; he’d kept chopping them into smaller bits.

  At least at first. The pile told its own chronology of his desperate battle, with the smallest chunks at the bottom—and in the trail leading away from her—with nearly intact golems missing only their feet on top.

  The implicit story of what he’d been through brought up emotions she couldn’t afford. With an effort, she cleared her mind again, letting go of the terror and worry. Grimly amusing, after all this time, that hwil actually came in handy. It wasn’t some steady state of never feeling anything as she’d imagined all those years. Instead it had become more of a tool, a way of calming herself enough to become like that still lake Lonen always pictured, allowing the sgath to flow from the golems into her.

  It wasn’t a rush, like the streaming geyser of sgath below Bára. That flowed with its own power, gushing in whether she’d wanted it or not. This… this felt more like sipping from one of Lonen’s flasks. Tip it too much and it splashed out all over her, wasting itself by vanishing into the parched ground. Fail to pull on it enough and the stream broke off. She’d also discovered that once she began she needed to keep the draw going, or the connection was lost and the remaining sgath snapped back to wherever it had come from—bound so deeply that she could no longer reach it.

  She’d wasted part of several promising packets until she got the hang of it. And then the one she’d walked away from the moment she’d heard Lonen call her name, his blast of terror reaching her even before his voice. She never wanted to hear that again. Nor his broken words begging her not to leave him. Because she had left him. Alone there to fight those golems and die beneath their monstrous claws and teeth. She didn’t care that he’d told her to do it. No one should suffer what he had.

  She should never have left him and she never would again.

  If she hadn’t realized the significance of the sgath packets the golems carried and released to Lonen’s cold iron blade… It didn’t bear thinking about.

  “Then why torture yourself by dwelling on it?”

  “Hush,” she told Chuffta, returning to the slumbering Lonen. She’d have to wake him to feed him more water, but for the time being she’d take advantage of his unconsciousness to tend the terrible hole in his side.

  “He was happy, in a way, during that fight,” Chuffta said more gently, landing on Lonen’s chest and spreading his wings to shade the Destrye’s face. “He was thinking about you, imagining you happy and safe.”

  “And the Destrye, too, I imagine.” The wads of her chemise that she’d packed into the wound had dried
there. Dipping the cup into her bucket, she poured water to soak the cloth away, so as not to break the fresh scabs.

  “That too, but mostly he pictured you pregnant.”

  She choked at that, having to clear her throat. “You’re making that up.”

  “No—it was very sweet. You were all fat and happy. You make a cute mother.”

  “That will be the day.” Still, she snuck a glance at Lonen’s lax face. He’d mentioned children, more than once. Apparently it was a fondly held wish of his. One she might not be able to satisfy for him. One among many. She eased the cloth away and put it in the bucket to rinse. When he awoke, she’d fetch fresh water for drinking. This batch would go to blood removal. A stroke of luck to have so much available for once. “Look at this—does it need more cauterizing?”

  Chuffta snaked his head down to peer at it. “I think it’s good. You don’t want it totally closed, or the bad fluids won’t be able to exit. Also, if I burn him now, he’ll feel it and awake.”

  That seemed likely. The only saving grace of Lonen’s dead faint after they rescued him was that it allowed Chuffta to cauterize the worst of the bleeding without him being aware. Something else she’d thought better not to mention right away.

  Working methodically, she stripped him, tossing away the worst of the ragged and bloodied clothes, making a pile of the rest that might at least be salvageable for bandages. She washed him with care, using water liberally since she could, touching him only with the silk that had once been her chemise. The stinging pain and enervation when she accidentally brushed his skin sapped the sgath she’d so carefully scavenged, so she slowed. No sense jeopardizing that.

  As she worked, learning his body as she hadn’t been able to—the way a wife would—she channeled the sgath judiciously into the growing grien that had made her dying plants bloom. She didn’t know much about living flesh, but all life felt more or less the same through that lens. His body would do the work of knitting itself together, Chuffta advised, if only she made sure each wound was as clean as possible, and then gave him a boost with extra growing ability.