by Jeff Seymour
The sweet smell of bread baking two floors below her wafted in through the open window. She massaged her legs nervously.
Who are you without him? Do you even remember?
Dil rubbed her eyes. She’d just about given up on sleeping for the night, she realized. She just wanted the sun to come up and the day to begin.
I’m Dilanthia Lonecliff, she told herself, and I’m just tired, that’s all.
Footsteps echoed in the hall leading to her room. A second later, there was a knock at the door.
Her back stiffened. Cole never knocked. He just entered.
“Yes?” she called.
“Mhay I cuhm ihn?”
Zahayr’s quiet, hoarse voice. In the hallway.
“Of course,” she responded.
Zahayr stumbled in and stood by the door. He wore simple black clothes in the style of the Aleani. Where his feathered cloak was, she didn’t know.
He looked exhausted.
“I have had mhore duh-rheems,” he rasped. He leaned on the stone mantel of the room’s empty fireplace. The gauzy curtains at the window reached for him, like ghostly fingers in the wind.
“More mud puddles?” Dil asked. She forced a smile, but the joke felt hollow.
Zahayr shook his head. “Nho. Bhig things. S-heerious things.”
The smile fell from Dil’s face. She swallowed.
Zahayr spoke.
“I have s-heen the S-hleeper en a waste-lhand.” Zahayr’s fingers tightened on the mantel. He opened his jaw and moved it to the side, as if it was sore. “S-heen yhor puh-rince en dharkness. The bhrother of the S-leeper en p-ain.”
Zahayr rubbed his throat. His hand trembled.
Dil’s stomach twisted in knots. She didn’t think she’d ever heard him say so many words at once before. “Do you need water, Zahayr? Or tea? I could—”
Zahayr shook his head. He gave his throat another rub, then swallowed again. Strain filled his eyes. As though whatever he’d experienced in his dreams was eating at him. Like turning the images into words was sucking away his strength.
“S-heen yhu, Whaker. Falling in the duh-ark-ness. Standing befuh-or the draghon. Prho-tecting the S-leeper’s bhrother.”
Zahayr fell silent. A bird chirped outside the window, and Dil caught a flash of movement in the gray sky. Her mouth felt dry and ashy.
Words from the campfire echoed in her mind.
“Zahayr,” she asked, “why do you call me the Waker?”
He glanced away from her. He started to push away from the mantel, then seemed to change his mind. His legs looked wobbly.
“Zahayr…”
“Yhu will wuh-ake the whorld.”
“‘Wake’ it?”
Zahayr nodded. Dil frowned.
“What does that mean?”
He gazed out the window, then across the room to the far wall. Anywhere but at her.
“Yhu will wuh-ake ets st-hrength.”
Zahayr stepped toward the window and stumbled.
Dil’s frown deepened. “You need to sleep,” she said. She’d seen him this way once on the trail, after he’d been up all night with his prophesies. In the end, the other Quiet Ones had carried him on their backs for the better part of the day.
Zahayr shook his head. He leaned heavily on the door, then on the wall.
“Thehr es one muh-orr question yhu mhust ahsk.”
His face broke out in sweat. His knees buckled, and Dil slid from the bed and grabbed him under the armpits before he could fall. His body felt surprisingly light.
There was a stone bench near the window, and she helped him to it and laid him down. The sweat on his face shone in what little light fell through the casement. His eyes were shot with blood around the edges.
Dil squatted next to him and placed a hand on his forehead. It felt feverish.
“How?” she asked. “How will I wake the world, Zahayr?”
He reminded her of her grandfather, lying burned and dying in the underwater cave in the Forest of Lurathen. His lips were as bloodless, his body as twitchy.
He stared at the ceiling and panted.
“Whith yhour life.”
The prophecy felt like the calling of a deep, dark bell. An icy feeling ran down her neck and settled in her chest. Her heart tightened with every beat, as if a smith were hammering iron bands around it.
“Zahayr, what—”
But his eyes had closed, and his chest was rising and falling with the deep breaths of sleep.
FIFTEEN
Eighty-seven days before the destruction of Eldan City
Ryse stared at the ceiling. A candle flickered in a brass dish next to her head. She had shut her window, but she could hear the hiss of rain falling against it.
She ought to have been able to sleep.
But her thoughts refused to calm long enough to slip beneath the surface of the night. Memories rolled through her mind in loops—Leramis’s face, the last time she’d seen it before he left the Academy; Litnig’s when she tumbled through his window; Cole’s as he fell from the Skellup into the cold jaws of the North Sea.
Leramis and Cole came back, she reminded herself. Against the odds.
Still, Litnig was gone. And she missed him, despite all the reasons she shouldn’t have.
Someone knocked at her door.
“Yes?” she called. She sat up. The door to the hallway stood a few feet away, a solid, dark rectangle in the candle’s dim light.
“Can I come in?” Dil asked.
There was a thin, wavering quality to her voice. It reminded Ryse of the way Dil had sounded under the mountains of Aleana.
When they’d been lost and she’d been completely, utterly terrified.
“Of course,” Ryse said.
The door creaked open. Dil slipped through and eased it shut behind her. She hovered next to it and ran a hand through her hair. Her fingers, Ryse noticed, were shaking.
“Couldn’t sleep?” Ryse asked.
Dil shook her head. “I saw the light…”
Ryse beckoned her over. “I couldn’t sleep either.”
Dil walked toward her and sat down, then leaned against the bed. Almost without thinking, Ryse reached for her hair and began to comb her fingers through it. It was an old ritual. One of the oldest things she could remember. She recalled sitting in hovels in the slums, fingers combing the hair of girls who were younger than her while older girls combed hers. She’d done the same with Jen Ryddych in the darkened dormitories of Temple Complex, whispering and braiding and whispering some more.
And at the deepest edges of her memories, she thought she remembered other fingers stroking her head. Thin but strong fingers, with more love in them than she could bear to think of.
Dil shut her eyes and leaned into the massage. Outside, the rain picked up a little.
“Anything on your mind in particular?” Ryse asked.
Dil hesitated. “No…I mean, not really.”
It was a lie. Ryse felt it in the way she tensed up as she spoke.
But she didn’t call her on it. That was part of the ritual. Lies were allowed, sometimes.
“You’ve been in love before, right, Ryse?”
Ryse let her fingers pause. She picked them up and rubbed them absently together before continuing.
“Yes,” she answered. “I think. Or thought, anyway.”
Dil craned her head up and back, so that their eyes could meet. Exhaustion and fear floated on her face, but there was curiosity there as well. “With Litnig?”
“With Leramis.” Ryse frowned and started massaging again. “Or so I thought. I was young.”
“How young?”
Ryse looked down and swallowed the words she’d been about to say.
Dil seemed to catch them anyway. “As young as me, I bet.” She looked toward the shadows dancing on the far wall.
“Are you in love with Cole?” Ryse asked. She’d heard Cole tell her he loved her. There hadn’t been enough room on that rock, with the fury of a sha
ttered glacier frothing around them, not to. But he’d been exhausted and delirious. And Dil hadn’t returned the words.
“Yes,” she said. There was no hesitation in her voice. Not a whisper of it.
It had never been like that for Ryse. Not with Leramis. Not even with Litnig, back when they’d been kids and she’d been too young to be afraid of loving someone.
“You think we’re too young for it?” Dil asked. She craned her head back again.
A bell tolled somewhere over the city. Once. Twice. A third time. Its call was low and mournful. Dil shuddered.
Ryse waited for the bell’s echoes to die before she responded. It took a while. The ridges of the Fencircht seemed to catch the sounds and hold them close, like they didn’t want to let them escape.
“I don’t know,” Ryse said. “Leramis and I were, and Litnig and I were so young we didn’t even have time to fall in love. Or I didn’t, anyway. I think Litnig fell in love with the memory of me after I left.”
Ryse’s fingers were getting tired. She removed them from Dil’s hair and scooted so that she was lying on the bed crosswise, her head dangling next to Dil’s, her hair flowing toward the floor. “Your turn,” she said.
Dil rotated and started to dig her fingers through Ryse’s hair. A shiver went down Ryse’s spine. There was something about that feeling—something deeply ingrained in her that made her relax when someone stroked her scalp like that. She shut her eyes and remembered the fingers again. Thin, strong fingers. Not Jen’s, not Leramis’s. Older than that—
“Are you scared to die?” Dil asked.
Ryse opened her eyes again. Dil’s voice had shaken, just a bit, as she spoke. Ryse looked up at her and saw the fear back in her eyes, the same as it had been when she walked in.
So that’s it, Ryse thought. That’s what she’s afraid of.
“A little,” Ryse said. Enough, actually, that she’d nearly chosen to go to Nutharion as an emissary rather than to return to Eldan and carry her warning to the Temple.
But this was her mission. She’d chosen it, over any of the other paths available to her. And she would see it through.
She let her eyes close a second time. Dil’s fingers kept kneading her scalp. “I’m more scared of the pain of it,” she said, “than of what comes next.”
Dil’s fingers kept going, and Ryse kept talking.
“They say that when you die, you get to see the face of Yenor. That Zhe smiles on you, and all your pain, all your troubles, melt away.”
Dil’s fingers stopped. She took a sharp, quivering breath, then another, like she was trying to stay calm but couldn’t do it.
“What about love?” Dil’s voice broke on the word. “Does that…can that…”
Ryse opened her eyes. Tears glimmered like orange snakes on Dil’s cheeks.
“I don’t want to lose that,” Dil whispered. “I don’t want him to forget.”
Ryse rolled over and slid off the bed, so that she was crouching next to Dil on the slate of the bedroom floor. The younger girl’s shoulders shook with quiet sobs. Ryse gathered her into her arms.
“Shh,” she said. “It’s all right.” She stroked the back of Dil’s head.
Dil continued to weep. Ryse thought she heard the echo of the bell again, ghostly and distant in the valley.
“Everything will be all right,” Ryse said. “Nobody’s going to die. I’m sure of it.”
It was part of the ritual.
Lies were allowed, sometimes.
***
Cole sat with his back to a dying fire. The trappings of a rich room rose around him. New carpets lay over the floor. Paintings and tapestries in dark, earthy shades adorned the walls. Statues of wood or stone stood in the corners.
It reminded him of Quay’s suite, hundreds of miles and thousands of hours away.
Cole had one arm draped over the back of his chair and one knee looped over its armrest. It wasn’t a comfortable position, but it was helping him stay awake. Outside, the bells had just struck three.
Quay didn’t seem to care.
“We have to leave tomorrow, Cole. I don’t have time to let you sleep and then tell me why all my ideas are wrong.”
Cole rolled his eyes and struggled to sit up. “It’s not all your ideas that are wrong, Quay. Just the stupid ones.”
The prince leaned forward in his chair, an ancient-looking, lacquered thing of dark, heavy wood. The fire snapped and popped as a log rolled over to die in the coals.
Quay’s mouth split open and curled up at the edges. It took Cole half a second to recognize that he was smiling.
“I’m going to miss you,” the prince said.
Cole’s throat dried up. He figured he ought to crack a joke. That was what he usually did when Quay got serious. That was what Quay had always needed from him before.
But as he looked at his friend now, with the ghostly light of the city playing on part of his face and the orange blush of the fire shining on the rest, he wasn’t so sure that was what Quay needed.
Maybe this time Quay needed him to be the serious one.
Cole set his feet on the floor and looked into his friend’s eyes. “You’ll never make it back to Eldan City,” he said quietly. “The Seven, the Twelve—someone will get to you first. They have too much to lose if you come back alive.”
Quay leaned back. His eyes closed. His fingers tented together. A brief sigh escaped his lips.
His plan, as he’d explained it to Cole, was to return to Eldan City and make his case before the Seven and the Temple, to try to convince them that what was coming their way was far worse than anything the necromancers could throw at them, and that they needed to take Tsu’min’s advice.
“Ryse will be with me,” Quay said. “We might make it.”
Cole rolled his eyes.
“Then what would you have me do instead?”
That was the hard part. It was easy to see that Quay’s plan was bad. It was tougher to come up with a better one.
“I don’t know. Stay here. Take time to think.”
“I’ve been thinking, Cole. The whole time you were making your way back here, I was thinking.” The prince leaned forward again. “But I’m glad you’re back. I need your help.”
Cole shut his eyes and sighed. I’m glad you’re here, Quay had said to him as the rain came down over Eldan City all those months and miles ago. I need your help.
After he’d volunteered it, the world had led him to Dil.
And to shadow, and to pain, and to the death of your mother and the loss of your brother and—
“I need you to go to Nutharion for me.”
Cole’s eyes snapped open.
Across from him, Quay was smiling. But his eyes glittered in the firelight. There were tears in them, hanging unshed.
He knows, Cole thought. He knows how bad the chances of him surviving are. And he wants to leave me out of it.
“Someone has to be my agent there. I was going to have to ask the Aleani to do it, but I’d much rather it be you and Dil.”
Cole kept his eyes on Quay’s. The tears in them vanished, sucked below the hard surface his friend had grown so good at presenting over the last ten years.
But Cole had still seen them. “You think you’re going to go back there to die? Alone? And that I’m just going to let you? I—”
Quay shook his head. Behind Cole, the logs gave a final crackle. “I made a promise to you before we left Eldan City,” Quay said. His voice sounded hoarse. “Let me keep it.”
“I’m not going to let you—”
“Then do it for Dil.”
A boulder fell off of Cole’s heart, landed in his stomach, and splashed the inside of his chest with acid. He dug his fingernails into the arms of his chair. He ground his teeth together.
Dil, he thought. Do it for Dil.
In the silence left by the death of the fire behind him, he could only hear the rain whispering against the window. Ten seconds went by, then twenty, then thirty. Cole felt his
head nodding forward. He was tired, so tired…
Cole argued.
But in the end, as usual, Quay got his way.
***
As the sky grew lighter, Dil stood next to Cole in the rain, watching three of her best friends prepare to leave. Her eyes burned. Her stomach felt like someone had danced a Nutharian tattoo on it. She’d barely been able to choke down some tea with honey and a mountain orange at breakfast.
Cole had his arm around her. She couldn’t feel his warmth through the heavy leather of his cloak and hers, but she was glad to know that it was there nonetheless, and that once everyone had gone she could crawl into bed with him and he would hold her while she cried, and he wouldn’t even need to ask why she was sad.
Quay and Ryse and Leramis were leaving without them. The soulweavers and the prince would travel north to Du Nath, then south by ship to the Nutharian port of Mansend, retracing the journey they’d made together months before. Leramis would return to his order to carry the warning of Sherduan’s freedom to it. Ryse and Quay would bring the same word to Eldan City.
And Cole and Dil would go to Nutharion City with an Aleani embassy, to speak on Quay’s behalf.
Alone.
In front of Dil, Ryse was tightening a saddlebag on a pony. Her white robe had been mended and bleached, and her fiery hair was wet and orange. Leramis stood near her, his face covered in a field of stubble. And Quay, who looked strange to Dil in a purple cape and black velvet doublet, his hands lost in silver satin gloves, was bidding farewell to Lena and Raest Heramsun in the yawning, warmth-filled entrance to Heramsun House nearby.
Ryse finished packing her saddlebag and walked up to Dil.
This is it, Dil thought hazily. This is goodbye.
The two of them had been up until dawn that morning. Once Dil had cried herself out, their conversation had turned to calmer, quieter things. It had been good to have a friend again, someone other than Cole to talk to.
When Ryse took Dil’s hands and opened her mouth to speak, Dil pulled her forward and threw her arms around her.
“Promise me we’ll meet again, Ryse,” she whispered in her ear. “You promise—promise…”
Ryse squeezed her hard enough that Dil felt the wetness of her cloak against her shoulders.