by Jeff Seymour
“I promise,” Ryse whispered.
She broke away and wiped a tear from Dil’s cheek with a smile, and then she was gone.
Leramis came to her next. His eyes were bloodshot and squinting, but his robe was dyed newly black and his grip was strong and firm. His bony arms clasped around her back, and then he gripped her by the shoulders and looked her in the eye.
“Be strong,” he said.
She smiled and said, “You too,” and meant it.
Quay said farewell to her last.
Quay, who’d asked so much of her. Quay, whom she’d known as a cold, hard leader long before she learned he was her prince. Quay, who’d been the first to tell her he didn’t care that she was a Wilderleng.
He came up to her and Cole at the same time, taking their hands and pressing them together as he did. Quay had said his real goodbye to Cole already, she knew, while she’d cried on Ryse’s shoulder.
This goodbye was for her. And for both of them together.
“Keep each other safe,” he said. His hands squeezed theirs. “Keep each other strong.”
And then he bent down to hug her, dark and warm and still the calm young man who’d kept them alive when by all rights they should’ve died several times over.
He hugged Cole as well. The two exchanged a few whispered words, and Cole curled his hand into the back of Quay’s doublet and shook him.
They broke apart. Quay walked to his pony and mounted up between Ryse in her white and Leramis in his black.
The soulweavers waved as the Aleani led their train of ponies down the slippery walk into Du Fenlan’s upper city. Cole wiped tears or rain or both from his eyes. Together, they watched their friends pass into the gray.
At the bottom of the walk, Quay held a hand up in farewell.
And then they disappeared into the mist.
Cole squeezed Dil’s fingers, but it did nothing to warm the coldness of her skin or wash away the heavy pit in her stomach.
A moment later, she felt a gentle touch at her elbow and turned to find the smooth face of Lena Heramsun behind her. The Aleani wore a violet robe beneath a brown cloak. Her dreadlocks, flecked with beads of purple and amber, hung in tight bonds down her back.
“Come,” she said. “The emissaries to Nutharion leave tomorrow. You will want to meet them first.”
SIXTEEN
Sixty-four days before the sack of Death’s Head
“I was wrong, you know.”
The sky lit up with stripes of red and pink and yellow and orange as the sun sank into Gulf of Teeth. Soon it would be dark and cold, and Leramis would be lonely in the hold of the Aleani clipper ship Fetuan Mir once more.
He had grown to dislike the nights. The summer solstice had passed, and every day there was a little less light in the world. He felt claustrophobic.
The night before, he’d tried to do something about that.
Following the steps of an old ritual, Leramis had stood in the darkness of the ship’s hold, dragging a razor over his scalp. It was a meditation, and one of the reasons the necromancers kept their heads shorn. The scrape of the blade peeled off layers of guilt, of doubt, of fear and denial and self-delusion, until all that was left was the bald, cold core of a person.
At his core, Leramis had discovered he had things to finish with Ryse before they said goodbye.
Each breath of wind planted a cool kiss on the top of his head. His hair was growing back already, and he felt all the emotions he’d stripped off returning with it.
“About what?” Ryse asked. She stood a few feet away from him, her hair tied back but still fiery and wind-tossed in the sunset light. Not so close that he could touch her, but not so far that they couldn’t speak. Comfortably, safely distant.
She’d grown softer toward him after they left Du Fenlan. He wondered if she’d done some thinking of her own and come to some of the same conclusions he had.
“About us,” he said.
She turned to look at him. Sadness swam in her eyes, along with maybe, like the dots of indigo that speckled her irises, a little bit of forgiveness.
The Fetuan Mir sliced through waves that extended as far as Leramis could see, but that wouldn’t last. They were only a day or so out from Mansend, where he and Ryse would part ways for what was likely to be the last time.
Leramis held Ryse’s gaze. For the first time in months, he felt comfortable next to her.
It’s cruel, he thought, for us to make peace only when we’re parting.
But in his heart of hearts, he was grateful to be making peace with Ryse at all.
“I thought—” He swallowed. The sun continued to dip beneath the waves, and the colors in the sky shifted inexorably toward black.
“I thought Yenor had brought us back into each other’s lives because we were meant to be together. I thought there was some new road I was being directed to, one that ran between happiness and service. I thought you’d show it to me.”
Her eyes cooled. She crossed her arms and stood with most of her weight on one foot.
“I guess that might’ve been a little arrogant,” he said.
He couldn’t read her face. Couldn’t guess her thoughts. Once, when their hearts had beat so close together he’d felt like they were puppies in the same basket, that had seemed impossible.
“You want to hear what I think now?”
“Leramis—”
“I think Yenor brought us together in the first place so that we’d stick together over the last few months. So that you’d run to me in Du Fenlan, and I’d follow you to the White Forest and beyond. So that you’d save my life on the Rokwet and I’d save Litnig’s in turn. So that, together, we could keep everyone safe in Eldan City and the Estmarsh.”
Leramis paused and licked his lips. He’d seen many things in the glint of his razor the night before, including the hand of his god, in a way that he hadn’t for some time. “I think Zhe brought us together so that you wouldn’t bear the burden of Litnig’s secret alone, and so that I would love you enough to keep it.”
He stopped talking. His skin pricked up in goose bumps. Love. The word had slipped out of his mouth without permission.
Ryse stood by the rail with the wind tossing her hair and the sun turning it into a halo of dying fire. She frowned.
Leramis breathed.
I do love you, he wanted to say. Still.
But he couldn’t speak.
I never lied to you, he thought. He remembered the giddy lightness that had filled his chest when he discovered she was interested in him, the way her skin had shone in the practice field, the electricity that had run over him when he held her, the taste of her lips.
I never lied, he wanted to tell her, as if that was enough to excuse letting her believe he was dead. He wanted to hold her one last time too, but that would’ve been asking too much. Taking too much. Claiming a gift he had no right to any longer.
Hold me, he thought. I feel small.
In the darkness of the Academy, hidden from their teachers and their friends, he’d used to hold her. She’d passed him in hallways and whispered, Hold me, I feel small, and later they’d met in one of a dozen secret places where she would crawl into his lap and tell him all her troubles, and he would comb his fingers through her hair and try to help.
Leramis closed his eyes, and he breathed, and he searched for calm.
The deck creaked. A foot compressed the planks near his.
Ryse wrapped her arms around him. She rested her head on his shoulder. She smelled like sawdust under the sweat and grime and salt of the voyage, and her breath was as soft and warm as Leramis remembered.
She knew, he thought. His throat closed up, and the feelings in his chest whirled between bliss and despair. He was far from calm, far from rational, but he didn’t care.
She loved him too, at least enough to hold him.
Ryse lifted her head. Her eyes were clear and bright and breathtakingly beautiful.
“Me too,” she said softly, and she put her head back
on his shoulder. The wind picked up. All Leramis saw was her hair and the sky and the sea shining in the sun.
Darkness approached.
The sun slipped below the edge of the world. The warm colors of day’s end faded into the cool shades of twilight. Clouds flashed with lightning on the southeastern horizon. The sails of the ship flapped, and he remembered that Quay was standing somewhere on the deck, almost certainly watching them.
He was still glad that Ryse was holding him.
The thought raced across his mind that maybe that was what had been missing for so long. That maybe that, in the end, was what had truly torn them apart. When they’d been younger, he’d never let her comfort him the way he’d comforted her. He’d always insisted on being the strong one, never given her the chance to take on that burden and rush of responsibility herself.
If I had, he thought, maybe I wouldn’t have needed to leave the Temple to find peace. Or maybe she would’ve understood why I did.
Her arms tightened. He pressed his lips against her hair and kissed it softly.
Thank you, he thought, and he meant it to Ryse, to the Temple, to Rhan, to Yenor, to everything and everyone in his life that had led him to that moment and the happy times he’d shared with her.
Thank you for bringing us together. In the past, in the present, in the future, for any reason or none at all.
***
The next morning, Leramis stood on wet flagstones and watched Ryse disappear. She wore a turquoise dress that shimmered like sea stone in a flash of light between rainclouds. Her hair hung unbound and wavy in the damp air of the port. She’d bought the dress and a couple more at the great bazaar in Du Nath. Quay stood at her side, arms crossed behind his back like he was a servant, ready to attend to whatever she required. The dresses, the servitude, were part of their disguise. They would help keep her safe.
There’d been a time when that would’ve made Leramis jealous. It hadn’t been all that long ago.
But as he watched the only woman he’d ever loved walk out of his life for what was probably the last time, Leramis felt his lips tug up in a grateful smile.
Yenor’s eye, he thought. I’m happy to have known her.
And then the clouds closed back in, and he turned to find his way toward the dark, storm-ridden shores of Menatar.
SEVENTEEN
Seventy days before the destruction of Nutharion City
Litnig’s shoulders ached. So did his back, and his arms, and his hands—especially his hands. He swung a pickaxe at blue-black rock in front of him, crumbling it bit by bit into a basket. Several hundred feet of sky-blue ice dripped water on his head, and behind him a frigid river, its undulations a flat shade of slate gray, raced from the shadow of the ice into a steep valley.
Maia squatted on the other side of the water, working a bellows the size of his torso and heating a thick bed of coals in an iron container. Scattered around her were an anvil, a forge, a crucible, tongs and hammers, and other tools he didn’t recognize. When he’d asked how the objects had gotten under a glacier a hundred miles north of Du Fenlan, Maia had shaken her head and told him that he didn’t ask the right questions.
“The right question,” she’d said with a smile, “is ‘What am I to do with them?’”
Then she’d slammed her spear through his midsection so hard that it broke through his back.
He remembered the shock of it, remembered the horrible sucking feeling of the spear pulling free of him, remembered falling to his knees with the sky gray and formless above him and the roar of the glacier’s meltwater in his ears.
And then souls had wrapped around him, and the River had pulled toward and through him. The wound in his stomach had closed, and Maia had jerked him to his feet and told him that he had much to learn.
He’d learned a lot since then.
The pickaxe rose and fell. When the basket at his feet was full, Maia would heat the ore until it melted, and the metal they were searching for would separate from the waste. Eventually, she’d create enough of it that he could beat it into the shape of a weapon and imbue it with souls.
The glowing blades he’d fought with and against in Sherdu’il haunted his memories.
Now, with Maia’s help, he was going to make one.
She cursed loudly from the bellows, and the mechanism’s breathing stopped. He swung the pickaxe one final time, then turned to see what had happened. Maia was bent over the big brown folds of the machine, fiddling with something. He couldn’t see what.
“Come here, Litnig Eshati,” she called. “I do not have enough hands for this.”
He let the pickaxe fall.
It was easy to see the damage once he was next to her. One of the folds of the bellows had torn. Maia had a strip of replacement canvas ready, but it was too long for her to hold in place and sew on at the same time. She tapped her foot impatiently as Litnig picked it up and pressed it against the torn fold.
Once it was in place, she went to work.
Maia sewed with a steel needle as long as Litnig’s index finger and as thick as a finishing nail, trailing dense black thread in and out of the wounded machine. Her fingers moved with confidence, as if she’d done such repairs a thousand times before.
“Maia?” Litnig said as she worked her way closer to him. The coals on the other side of the bellows made the air sweltering. His face was already slick, and he could smell the musk of Maia’s sweat.
She grunted in reply. Their hands were nearly next to one another.
“What did you do, in Duenel?”
Her fingers brushed over his, and her body pressed against his back as he ducked beneath her to let her finish joining the top of the patch to the cloth beneath it.
“Everything,” she muttered. She stared intently at the cloth she was sewing and blew a strip of silvery hair out of her eyes. The coals lit her face in orange.
She looks too young, Litnig thought. He was uncomfortably aware of the closeness of her body. Not ten years older than I am. He knew not to ask her how old she really was. He’d started the question once, and the look on her face had been more than enough to keep him from finishing it.
Still, he couldn’t help but wonder.
Maia pursued Litnig along the length of the bellows. It took her no longer to sew the bottom of the patch than it had the top, and Litnig ended up caught between her and the device while she put the final stitches in. She stood up, her chest pressing against his torso, and looked him in the eye.
“Are you going to try it today?” she asked. She was breathing hard—a quiet, fast sound out of place in the gloom beneath the glacier.
She’d been teaching him to soulweave.
Breathe, Litnig Eshati. Breathe! You will not weave until you remember to breathe!
He could feel the River of Souls now, and he’d spent hours watching it flow through the glacier in thick, quiet swells. He could grasp it. He could even, on occasion, move it toward or away from him. He knew, too, what Ryse had called the eddy of another soulweaver. Maia shifted the River’s flow in incredible ways even when she was sleeping.
He hadn’t exhausted his potential. Not nearly. He had unfinished business with himself, and it was holding him back.
Pinned between Maia’s body and the bellows, with the rushing of the glacial river in his ears, he closed his eyes and passed into the dream.
The disc was waiting for him, its three pillars reaching toward the dome of darkness surrounding it, the carved characters on its surface pulsing gently. He knew now what it was. Maia had told him.
It was his soul.
Put more accurately, it was the mechanism that bound the three souls that created his will. The runes etched into the gray disc were Sh’ma in origin, and although he couldn’t read them, he could feel the tug they exerted on the River. They held together the three souls that made him—the three walkers, each with its own light and darkness.
It was because he was afraid to face that darkness that he hadn’t reached his potential.
Every soul on Guedin will feel the pull of the dragon, Maia had told him. Everyone will feel the urge to abandon what is best in him or her when Sherduan is close. Her eyes, gray and unyielding, had stayed pinned to his. Our people, with three souls to react to it, will feel the tug more strongly than most. Always remain aware of that. Always fight back.
Litnig swallowed. I ran, he thought. Without even thinking about Cole or Ryse or the others. I just ran. I couldn’t stop myself.
The jet-black gargoyle of the Aleani dark walker stood chained to its pillar on his right. Its eyes goaded him, daring him to free it, to challenge it, to fight it. It whispered dark things in the back of his mind, telling him what would what happen if he did, how it would consume him utterly and completely in this place where no one could help him.
He closed his eyes and backed away from it. Maia had warned him it would be like that. The darkness in his heart would chip away at his will, at his confidence, any way that it could. He was stronger than it, she’d assured him. But if he refused to believe in his strength, it would consume him anyway.
He wasn’t ready.
The disc was warm when he pressed his forehead to it. He opened his eyes in the real world and found Maia’s face inches from his own. The smell of onions and goat cheese hung on her breath. She frowned.
“You will have to challenge them one of these days, Litnig Eshati. Whether you like it or not.”
He pushed her aside to get away from the bellows and back to his pickaxe. Soon the bellows was heaving and hissing again. He felt Maia’s eyes judging him.
But he wasn’t strong enough to stand against the darkness in his soul.
Not alone.
Not yet.
***
That evening, Maia came to him as he sat on a house-sized boulder next to the mouth of the glacier. The last light of day was dying over the long, U-shaped valley of black stone below him, and the waterfalls dotting the rock walls were growing dim. He could already feel a chill in the air. A wind came off the glacier at night, bringing the crisp, damp scent of ice and freezing him even through the heavy clothes he’d been given in Du Fenlan.