by Jeff Seymour
The craft was remarkably stable. Maegan Heramsun crossed it and sat next to Tsu’min. Her eyes shone. Her hand moved toward him. She opened her mouth to speak.
Tsu’min caught her wrist.
He held it high, held it tight so that she couldn’t move it. Her eyes flickered with fear, and he was glad for it.
“You would have to live a thousand years,” he said, “to grasp what has happened to me.” He took hold of the River, let her watch the whiteness flow into his eyes. The soulflow was strong here.
Tsu’min began to weave.
Maegan’s pulse thundered like a mouse’s.
“I will share a moment,” Tsu’min said. “One moment.” She’d provoked him. She would learn not to do so again. “It should be enough.”
He wove a tendril of souls between her mind and his and pulled a memory from the vast library of his past. One short burst of feeling. One fragment of the tapestry that was Tsu’min Nar’oth and Eraic a’Soulth and everything else he’d been.
And in his mind, he was kneeling in thick black mud, holding Mi’ame. Around him, the Sh’ma lay dead in the thousands, like trees felled by a windstorm—blackened by lightning or fire or hacked into bloody grotesques of their living selves. Guedin had chosen life over nothingness. The dragon was vanquished, the Duennin routed. He heard shouts of victory from the humans and the Aleani.
He wore no armor. The wristblades he’d wielded were snapped and bloody, and his clothes were torn and ragged. His body was whole, but he’d wrung the last gasps of energy from it long before. He shook as he held Mi’ame’s limp weight. It was so simple to heal someone, such an easy weaving, but he couldn’t find the strength to move the River.
He couldn’t even find the strength to speak.
Mi’ame was still conscious, still moving, but the green of her eyes was far away, and she didn’t see him any longer. Long hair of turquoise stuck to her forehead in sweaty strands. Her skin and lips were pale and bloodless. Her hand caressed his face, and she whispered his name. He’d come. He’d come for her, at the end. He hadn’t let her die alone, and for that they both were glad.
But his heart was breaking. His world was breaking. Her armor was shattered—the silver breastplate clear but the chainmail that covered her stomach split and red with blood. The shaft of a spear jutted from her abdomen. Tsu’min didn’t dare to touch it, but he held her and let her caress him and listened to her fears and words and her last desperate plea.
He cried.
He cried and he cried, until she stiffened in his arms and his world went black with despair.
Tsu’min released the weaving. He had to fight to do it, as though his soul wanted to keep flooding Maegan Heramsun with his memories, but the one was enough. She was trying to pull his hand from her wrist, her eyes wide and wet and terrified. When he let go of her, her hand went to her heart and she leaned away from him. Her breath came in huge, desperate gasps.
Beads of sweat grew cold on Tsu’min’s forehead. He could still feel the weight of Mi’ame in his arms, the touch of her hand on his cheek. The pain was as fresh as it had been the day her death created it.
On top of it, he felt a wave of guilt.
The girl in front of him, kneeling on the deck and digging her fingers into her thighs, hadn’t deserved to feel all he’d made her feel. He’d done it out of spite and out of malice.
He’d made his memories of Mi’ame into a weapon.
Tsu’min breathed deeply and fought for calmness. His throat felt tight, full of shame and shadow.
Forgive me, he thought. Mi’ame, forgive me…
Blissfully ignorant shouts echoed from the sailors. The oars beat softly in time to a heavy drum. Someone at the front of the craft set off a firestar, and a long, green trail of light soared into the sky and hung there for a few seconds before fading.
It floated on the surface of the river before sinking, an orb of jade winking at the sky before it was snuffed out forever.
Tsu’min watched Maegan wrestle with his grief. He trembled when he thought of what he’d done.
I lost control. Control was all that had kept him sane for millennia.
He removed his shoulder wrap and covered Maegan with it, then placed his hand on her shoulder and left it there until it brought her sleep. She slumped. Her face relaxed. In dreams, at least, she might find peace.
Tsu’min lay on the cold deck of the barge and closed his eyes. His heart hammered.
Sleep, when it came, brought him no relief from the pain of living.
It never had.
THIRTEEN
Eighty-eight days before the destruction of Emeth’il
In the morning, she was watching him.
Tsu’min woke to the feeling of the barge slipping through the waters of the Deru. The sun prickled his eyes, and the wind nudged his cheeks. The blanket he’d wrapped himself in partway through the night sported droplets of dew in spidery patterns, and his arms and legs were cold.
As the sun rose higher, he lay on the deck and watched Maegan in return. Her eyes were rimmed with red, her dreadlocks frayed and unkempt in a few places.
“I am sorry,” he said in Aleani.
The words felt awkward and sticky in his throat. It had been a long time since he’d used them.
Maegan shook her head.
“I shouldn’t have pushed you,” she said. “Thank you for the lesson.”
On the other side of the barge’s deck, near the staircase that led to its hold, a few Aleani were cooking strips of lamb over a brass brazier. The smell, savory and spiced with hints of sage and thyme, was mouthwatering.
“We should eat,” Tsu’min said. “And then I wish to ask you some questions.”
Maegan nodded.
A few minutes later, they were standing on the barge’s portside rail, licking the grease from their fingers and watching the countryside go by. In the distance, blue-white glaciers glittered among the western peaks, dusted white with new-fallen snow. The Aleani hadn’t settled many of the northern valleys. In the summer, herders drove flocks into makeshift camps within them, but by autumn the cold pushed them either all the way north to the coast or south to the warmer lands around Du Fenlan.
If whoever had taken Litnig was looking for solitude, it was into those valleys they had likely gone.
Tsu’min fished a strip of lamb up and swallowed it. “Why did you insist upon accompanying me?” he asked.
The girl, standing next to him with her dreadlocks trailing over her shoulders, sighed. She looked briefly toward the bundle of her belongings where she’d slept.
“I don’t think I want to tell you that,” she said.
Her arms bunched. She wrung her hands.
Tsu’min drew himself up and stared at her, but she wouldn’t meet his eyes. She looked instead at the mountains, or the few white clouds that hung in the vast sky above.
“As you wish,” Tsu’min said. “Then I do not think I wish to speak to you at all.”
***
A few hours later, Maegan Heramsun sat in the center of the barge and pulled a wooden case out of her belongings. From it, she withdrew a thick, leather-bound volume, a jar of ink, and an iron-tipped quill pen. The wind had risen during the morning. It whipped over her head, tugging at her hair and chilling the tips of her ears. She wrapped a wool-lined cloak closer around her, pulled the hood up, and began to write.
Journeys with Eraic a’Soulth: A Chronicle
by Maegan of Clan Heramsun
We set sail on 7 Harvestmonth, with the stars over our heads and the Deru calm as a sleeping infant. I learned many things, very quickly…
She wrote for hours, but when she reached the place where she ought to explain why she’d decided to travel with Tsu’min, she faltered. She’d told no one—not even her mother or her brother—everything that underpinned the exile on which she was embarking. The truth was complex.
The mountains skated by her, calm and unchanging, the guardians of the Aleani for millennia. She
thought of her father, dead in a chasm somewhere to the east, his body lost forever, and she shivered.
It’s for posterity, she told herself.
My father was Len, Head of Clan Heramsun in his time, and my mother is Lena, Head of Clan Heramsun in hers. My father left his family at a young age to hunt his father’s killer.
Maegan breathed more easily. The tale, once begun, became a less difficult thing. Her pen flew over the page, scratching character after character, the words falling from her mind like ripe apples, one by one, in blots of iron ink.
So I grew up on stories of my father, rather than stories from him. And chief among them was the story of his courtship with my mother.
The barge splashed along. The clouds flew by overhead. The sun slid across the sky, and Maegan Heramsun wrote.
My father met my mother at a folk dance. They were young and rebellious, as my brother and I have been, and they disobeyed their elders to be there. I have been told that my father trailed off in the middle of a story when my mother approached him, and that his dancing left her breathless and blessed with a long-lasting smile.
They were married within the year.
Maegan smiled. She had memories of her father’s voice, and of it trailing off when her mother entered the room. They were few, but they were as precious to her as anything in the world.
After my father left, to speak of him to my mother was to see her in pain that I never wanted to inflict. With no way to complete the tale of their romance, I began to invent it in my spare hours.
I found, as many searching for love stories do, Eraestus of Clan Phaeon’s History of the Two Travelers, Eraic a’Soulth and Mi’ame Greatheart. In the story of their love, which bridged centuries and the whole of the world, I found the framework upon which to construct a myth of my parents. When I read that Eraic and Mi’ame had traveled, I decided that so had my parents. When I read of Eraic and Mi’ame’s struggles with hunger, with pain, with doubt, I imagined that I read of Len and Lena’s. When I read of the travelers’ undying commitment, of the way they looked at each other like new lovers even after hundreds of years, I knew the way that my parents must have felt.
The wind, still rising in the west, ruffled the pages of the book. The sun had grown cold and distant, as though it had been muffled by clouds. The air felt damp.
I grew out of these fancies, but the story of Eraic and Mi’ame stayed with me. It gave me hope as I grew, filled a void in my life, and if in mine than certainly in others as well.
She looked up. A curtain of rain was falling on the mountains to the west.
Stories have power. And the story of Eraic and Mi’ame had a power over me greater than any other. So when I saw the chance to record a new chapter in it, you will understand that I could not let it pass. And now I am here, on a barge, soon to pass beyond all I have known and into the mystical world of the stories of my childhood.
A drop of rain fell on the page, then another.
The world faces peril of a kind it has known only once. Great events are occurring, and great people are attempting to save the things I cherish. If I were to stay in Du Fenlan, I might be safe from danger. But at Tsu’min’s side, I may have a chance to affect the story of the world for the better.
And, like my father, I cannot resist that urge.
The wind and the rain picked up strength, and Maegan blew quickly upon the ink to dry it, then pressed the volume shut and returned it to its case. The crew of the barge hustled around her, preparing for the squall. The sky to the west had become a formless wall of gray.
She hurried to tuck the case in her sack and get under cover.
There were things she hadn’t written about. There always seemed to be. In a few years, she would be expected to take a leadership position in the business dealings of her clan. The trip with Tsu’min might very well be her last chance to travel the world.
Like her father had for thirty years, instead of raising her and her brother.
She wanted to understand that as much as it was possible to. She wanted to know her father.
The rain poured down.
Maegan walked through it, shielding her book and cherishing the smell of the mountains in a summer storm and the taste of life lived, for once, on her own terms.
INTERLUDE ONE
One hundred twenty-three days before the destruction of Emeth’il
The ghost wakes up with his feet in the river. His head hurts. His heart hurts worse.
I shouldn’t be alive.
Everything in front of him looks white. Blurry shapes try to manifest in the blankness, but he cannot make them into forms he can recognize. There’s snow on his face. He knows that. The whiteness isn’t real. He knows that as well. The world should be gray. Unless it’s covered in ice. But it can’t be covered in ice because his feet are in the water.
He’s wet and cold, and he feels as if he’s been trampled upon by a mountain.
He remembers letting go. He relives the sickening lurch of his stomach and the sight of the boy’s legs receding and the shocking, permeating relief that it’s finally over.
“Ha. I didn’t think I could do it.”
He sees a black shape. The whiteness resolves into shades of gray. More of them than he can count. Other shapes emerge. A rock. A cliff. A skyline dotted with the jagged teeth of rotting mountains. The black shape comes closer.
D’Orin? thinks the ghost, but it cannot be D’Orin. D’Orin is dead. The ghost cut his head off to end it.
Except that it did not end. Everything went wrong instead, and then the ghost made a choice to die.
A choice that someone has taken away from him.
The swimming shapes become clearer. The ghost moves his feet out of the water. It hurts him greatly to do so. His legs ache, deep in the marrow. They feel as if they have been pieced together from splinters.
Given what he can remember, he considers that that may have been the case.
“Leramis?” the ghost croaks. His lips feel dry and cracked.
The black shadow walks past him, grabs his collar, and drags him away from the river over a gritty bed of wet sand. He lets it. He feels too weak to fight. Too tired to fight. He looks up and spots blond hair and the unmistakably tall and skinny shape of a human. The shadow can’t be Leramis. Leramis doesn’t have blond hair.
“Guess again,” the shadow mutters. It leans the ghost’s back against something hard and cold and sits nearby. It’s breathing heavily.
The ghost’s vision clears. He recognizes the young man sitting next to him—the piercing blue eyes, the face pinched by arrogance. The young man’s eyes are sunken. His lips are thin and close to colorless. He holds a hand to his stomach, where his necromancer’s robe is stiff with what looks like dried blood.
“You are one of them,” the ghost rasps. He cannot remember which one, but he knows it nonetheless.
The necromancer snorts and shakes his head. “Not anymore.”
The ghost wets his lips. He’s beginning to feel cold, and he wonders whether he’ll survive the night. “Why didn’t you let me die?” he whispers.
The necromancer’s eyes narrow. There is hatred in them. A great deal of it. “They tried to kill you. That means they want you dead. And anything they want, I don’t want. When I’m standing in front of them, holding their guts in my hands, I’d like them to see you and know they failed even at such a small thing.” The necromancer spits. His eyes turn white with soulweaving. The rock he has dragged the ghost against begins to heat up.
The sun is setting over the mountains. The tall, gray, angry mountains that would not take the ghost’s life, even when he offered it freely in return for another’s.
“What makes you think,” the ghost chokes out, “I will help you accomplish that?”
This necromancer had a hand, perhaps, in corrupting his son. He ought to destroy him, if he can. He attempts to stand, but his body refuses to cooperate.
The necromancer laughs. An easy laugh. The laugh of a man
who believes himself untouchable.
“What makes you think,” he says with a grin, “that I’ll give you any choice?”
FOURTEEN
Eighty-four days before the destruction of Nutharion City
Dil sat with one leg crossed beneath her on a pillow-strewn bed. The walls of Lena Heramsun’s home stood around her, dyed a grainy purple by light reflecting off the city outside the windows. Dil’s head ached. She missed the mountains and the fresh air already.
Though not as much as she missed Cole.
She lay back down and stretched her arms and legs so that they covered as much of the bed as possible. Through an open window, she listened to rain fall over Du Fenlan. It hadn’t been so long ago that she’d slept alone every night.
But that had been before the past two weeks. Now it was hard to fall asleep without him next to her. She was always wondering where he was, what he was doing, whether he needed her.
She thought she knew what he was up to. Leramis and Ryse were due to leave at dawn. Cole was probably talking to Quay about what to do next, where to go, what the plan was, and what had happened to Litnig.
I should be with them, she thought.
She didn’t know why Cole had left her out. Truth be told, it hurt. She was as smart as any of them. They should’ve asked for her help. She’d thought they would, and being left out stung.
Dil sat up again, ran her fingers through her hair, and sighed. Outside, the light faded as a ribbon of cloud covered the stars and the sliver of moon hanging over the northern sky.
It only hurts because you’re still worried about being left behind, she told herself. How many times has Cole shown you that he’s not going to let that happen? He jumped off a ship for you, in the middle of the ocean.
The thought didn’t make her feel any better. She was starting to feel reliant on him, and it rankled.