Blood of the Watcher (The Dark Ability Book 4)

by D. K. Holmberg

  Jessa watched him, the corners of her eyes pulled in a frown, but she said nothing.

  Chapter 8

  Rsiran stood on a darkened street of Lower Town, listening to the sounds of waves crashing along the shore. Down here, he could practically feel the power of the ocean as it slammed against the rocks, much like he had when he’d been on Firell’s ship. At least here, he didn’t fear falling from the ship into the water. Always before, he’d been afraid that if he ended up someplace where he couldn’t move, he wouldn’t be able to Slide himself to safety, but now he knew how to Slide without stepping into it. It still didn’t make him feel safer.

  Gulls circled overhead, casting moon shadows across the ground. Rsiran ignored them, and ignored their harsh cawing as they hovered, occasionally diving, before flying off with whatever they caught. In some ways, he felt more like the fish, waiting for the gull to dive and snatch him away from everything he knew, much like what had happened to Alyse.

  Jessa stood along the rock, dipping her boot into the water and tracing a pattern in the foam. She had been silent since they left the Barth, knowing that he needed a chance to process what he’d learned.

  And what did he know? If Alyse was gone, and abducted because of him, what could he do about it? Haern had suggested that he needed to pick a side, but how could he when he had no idea which side wanted him and which side wanted only to use him?

  Worse, as easy as it was to believe that Alyse had been abducted because of him, there was the possibility that she hadn’t. What if it wasn’t tied to him at all, but to his father?

  Rsiran thought that Venass had wanted his father because they wanted some leverage over him, but maybe there was more to it than that. What if his father was more valuable than he had realized?

  That would give Venass a reason to abduct Alyse. His father would do anything for her.

  Still, he didn’t know, and that left a worried knot that grew with every passing moment.

  “You’re silent,” Jessa said.

  “So are you.”

  “I know what you’re thinking, and I don’t think I like it,” she said. Jessa lifted her foot from the water, and a long strand of seaweed clung to it. She shook it off and left it lying across the rock. A gull nearby hopped to the rock and grabbed it, taking to the air and flying off.

  “What exactly am I thinking?”

  “You want to do something.” She jumped from the rock and touched his arm. “I’ve seen you like this before, Rsiran. It was the same way that you looked when Brusus was hurt. The same as when you decided we needed to find the Forgotten. Damn, Rsiran, it’s the same as when you decided to Slide into the palace.” She looked over his shoulder, and he didn’t have to follow the direction of her gaze to know that she looked at the Floating Palace. From here, it would stand out starkly from the rock, and appear as if it hovered, as if the Great Watcher held the palace in his hand, holding the Elvraeth above them.

  “I…” He hesitated. Jessa was right. He not only wanted to do something, but he needed to do something. “If they’re willing to take Alyse—”

  “You worry what will happen if they come for one of us.”

  “They already have,” he said. “Both the Forgotten and Venass.”

  “Josun wasn’t with the Forgotten. From what Inna told you, they didn’t sanction what he did.”

  “You’re making excuses for them. They were plenty willing to attack me—”

  “Evaelyn didn’t seem too pleased about that, either.”

  Rsiran sighed. “What would happen if I hadn’t been able to find you when Josun took you?”

  Jessa squeezed his arm and smiled. “I always knew that you would,” she said.

  He remembered his terror all too well. Finding her hadn’t been guaranteed. “And the next time?” he asked. “Now that Inna knows how I feel about you, what happens the next time? Or the time after that? We always have to be on watch.”

  “There’s no way to avoid that. And it’s no different from what we’ve done in Lower Town for as long as I’ve been here. You find a way, Rsiran. That’s how it is. There are those with power, and then there’s us.” She shrugged. “With Brusus, we’ve always managed to stay safe, or safe enough.” She kicked at the foam, sending it splashing. “And now we’ve got you. You’re added safety.”

  There had to be a way to find real safety. There had to be a way for him to find a home where he didn’t always feel like he was in danger of losing it. The smithy was safe enough now, but it wouldn’t always be that way.

  With what he’d seen in the forest, he knew it couldn’t. Having his Slides influenced was bad enough, but he thought that heartstone could keep them protected. Having someone able to follow his Sliding, even with heartstone, meant that they would never have real peace. There would always be the concern that he’d have to watch behind him, fearful that someone would be tracking him. With the Forgotten, and the gifts that the Elvraeth possessed, he would never be able to learn enough to counter them, regardless of what Haern thought to teach him.

  “They need to fear us,” he said softly.

  Jessa glanced over at him, and laughed. “Fear us? What are we but a few to their many? They have nothing to fear from us. No, Rsiran, I think we make all the preparations that we can, and settle in.”

  “Settle in for what? For this war that is coming? What does that get us, but chased? Constantly harassed by others where we don’t even know what they intend. How many more of us will need to be in danger before we stop settling?” he asked.

  Jessa cupped a hand around her charm and made her way across the rocks, jumping from rock to rock until she reached a small point that stretched away from the shore. Rsiran Slid to join her.

  “What happens if we go after them?” she asked. “What then? I worried about you when we went for the Forgotten, but what you intend to do here is different. We can’t stop them, Rsiran. We’re not enough. Not strong enough, not many enough, not… just not enough. I didn’t agree with how we hunkered down in the smithy before, but I do now. I understand the value in having a place like that to keep safe, where we don’t have to worry about what might be coming after us.”

  “But it’s not safe,” he said. “If there’s someone able to—”

  He cut off, detecting the sudden appearance of lorcith. The sense of it came from down the street, nearer the rest of Lower Town and away from the docks. The suddenness of it made it almost certain that someone had Slid to them.

  “What is it?” Jessa asked.

  He focused on lorcith, shifting his attention to the knives that he carried. If needed, he could push them from him, but he didn’t want to have to attack if he didn’t need to, not until he knew if there was anything to be worried about. Maybe this was nothing but lorcith that had been there all along, and he’d not detected it before, but Rsiran didn’t think that likely. Had there been lorcith before, he would have noticed.

  Strangely enough, this was not one of his forgings.

  Still, he could pull on the sense of lorcith, could draw on it if needed. Lorcith that he forged always answered him better, but all lorcith was attuned to him in some ways.

  “Lorcith,” he whispered. He dropped to the rock, pulling Jessa with him. He didn’t want to Slide, not until he knew whether this was the person able to track his Sliding.

  Jessa rolled on the rock to get a better view, and tilted her head toward him. “Where would lorcith have come from?”

  Rsiran shrugged. “Same place it did when I was in the Aisl.”

  Jessa pieced what he said together quickly. “If it’s them, can you Slide us to safety without them following?”

  “I don’t know.” There seemed to be something that he’d done that she hadn’t been able to track, but Rsiran wasn’t sure what that was. When he’d Slid from the Aisl, he’d made a few different jumps, each time emerging only long enough to get his bearings and then take off again. It would be different were he to try the same with Jessa with him. Not slower, bu
t he suspected that whatever ripples he formed would be louder, and easier for the other woman to follow.

  “Then we sneak,” Jessa whispered.

  She slid off the rock, moving silently. Rsiran followed her, keeping low, suspecting that if whoever was after them was Sighted, they’d easily be able to see them, but Jessa slipped across the street and stopped in a pool of shadows left by a small tree. She held a hand up to silence him, not that Rsiran needed the warning here.

  Rsiran knew that Jessa was incredibly skilled as a sneak, but he’d never had need for her to prove it before. Always before, he had been able to Slide them to safety. And he could Slide them now, but he didn’t want to risk it.

  He needed to know if it was the same two people that he’d seen in the Aisl earlier. If it was, the next step was learning why they had come for him, and then if they were responsible for what happened to Alyse. Maybe if he could get close enough, he could find out whose side they were on. Or, as he’d feared earlier, if he had a new enemy altogether. That would be valuable to know. And if they had taken Alyse, could he capture them and force them to tell him where they’d taken her?

  Jessa pulled on his sleeve, urging him onward. She raised a finger to her lips, keeping him quiet. “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked.

  “I’m…” He stared down the street, trying and failing to get a clear view of who might be down there. The sense of lorcith remained, but didn’t move any closer. At first, that reassured him, but what if they knew of his ability with lorcith? Josun did, which meant that the Forgotten could by now. They could use it to distract him, and lull him into a sense of safety, before coming after him. “I need to know who it is,” he said, careful to pitch his voice low like Jessa did. “After what happened with Alyse, and what I saw in the forest…”

  Jessa stared at him for a moment and then nodded. “Let me sneak down there,” she whispered. “You’re too noisy.”

  She crouched as she darted down the street, somehow finding a way to remain hidden in the shadows along the rocks. At this time of night, there were many places for her to fade into the shadows, and Jessa managed to find them all. Rsiran remembered how she had once described her Sight, and the way that it gave her the ability to see gradations of shadows in the dark. Did she search for the darkest shadow or was there some other trick that she used?

  Jessa moved silently as well. Whereas Rsiran was too noisy, each step practically scraping across the stone, Jessa padded softly, the soles of her boots designed for her to sneak with as much silence as she did.

  Nerves caused his heart to flutter as he watched Jessa fade to little more than a dark figure outlined in the night. As she walked, he focused on the lorcith she carried with her. The charm pulled on him easily now. Rsiran made a point of keeping his connection to it and allowed the lorcith to guide him. Were he to ignore the lorcith, and focus on the heartstone in her chain, he had another way to keep track of her.

  Jessa stopped moving. He shouldn’t have allowed her to go without him. What had he been thinking? She was a skilled sneak—at least Brusus and Haern certainly felt that she was—but if Sarah and Valn had returned, and had found him… then Jessa would be in real danger. He could hold onto her, connected with the lorcith, but what if they Slid her someplace so quickly that he lost his connection to the charm or the necklace?

  Now that she had gone, there was nothing to do but wait, only Rsiran didn’t care for waiting. It left him feeling helpless, a sensation that he’d gotten far too familiar with over the last few months.

  Then the first sense of lorcith that he’d detected disappeared.

  Rsiran held his breath, checking to make certain that Jessa hadn’t disappeared, but she was still there.

  Slowly, the sense of her made its way back toward him. When she was barely two-dozen steps from him, he sensed the return of lorcith, this time much closer.

  Rsiran didn’t dare wait.

  He Slid to Jessa, grabbed her, and Slid away.

  * * *

  The Slide pulled him quickly, the flash of colors and the hot, bitter scent of lorcith streaking past, almost the same as if he stood in front of the forge, and then they emerged. Rsiran’s Slide had brought them to Ilphaesn, but the part of the mountain that had once been hidden from him. This was where he thought Josun had been mining, though he still didn’t know what Josun had hoped to gain by providing lorcith to the Forgotten.

  As he emerged, he listened to the sounds of the mountain around him, the call of lorcith. Something about it had changed, but he wasn’t completely certain. Had he more time—and more willingness to search without Jessa—he thought he might be able to figure out what seemed different.

  Jessa released his arm. “What was that? They had disappeared. And why did you bring me here?”

  Rsiran hated that he had to bring her to this place, but this was the first place that came to mind when he thought of finding a safe place to Slide. He could have Slid them to the smithy, but he didn’t want to risk them following them there, and at least here, they might follow, but there would be no way that they could Slide past the alloy that Josun had placed in the mouth of the cavern.

  “They hadn’t disappeared,” he said. “Not entirely. When you made your way back down the street, they had reappeared.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He pulled on the lorcith charm. “I could sense it when they left, and then when they returned. They must have known to follow you.” He looked at the walls of the mine. The walls seemed to have something like a faint glow to them. Rsiran suspected it was his newly enhanced Sight that allowed him to see the change, but he still didn’t have nearly the skill Jessa did.

  “Damn,” Jessa whispered.

  “Did you learn who they were?”

  She shook her head. “Not well enough to know who might have chased you to Elaeavn.”

  “Not just me,” he reminded.

  “You don’t know that they were the same ones that took Alyse. For all that we know, they’re separate issues.”

  The likelihood that there would be two different attacks at the same time seemed unlikely, but then again, the idea that there were multiple groups trying to gain access to the Elvraeth and what they stored in the palace would once have seemed equally unlikely. Even the idea of one other group trying to reach the palace would have surprised him, but that had been before he knew what he did now. In that way, he had been protected living in Elaeavn.

  “If they’re separate, then I still need to find out what happened to Alyse,” he said.

  “Only Alyse and not these other two?”

  They had to be connected, why else would Sarah and Valn appear in the city at the same time Alyse went missing?

  And he needed to know if they were the Forgotten or Venass. Though both wanted to use him, knowing changed how he approached them.

  He sighed, took another look at the mine, feeling the pull of the lorcith, before grabbing Jessa’s hand. “Are you ready?”

  “Where now?”

  “The smithy. I think that it’ll probably be safe to return from here to there. The alloy should shield us.”

  He hoped that it would, but what if it didn’t? What if he couldn’t be safe anymore? What if even Sliding had been taken from him as a way to keep Jessa and his friends safe?

  Chapter 9

  “Tell me again why you want to walk?” Brusus asked.

  Rsiran shook his head at his friend as they made their way along the street. It was true that Rsiran rarely walked anywhere. Why walk when Sliding took him all that much faster? More than that, he had the need to practice, to improve his Sliding. Or, he had, until he began to fear the safety of Sliding.

  “I told you what I saw.”

  “You don’t know that they can track you. Didn’t Della tell you that ability was rare?”

  “I don’t know much about that ability,” Rsiran said. “Only what I had heard. Why risk it?”

  Brusus sniffed. “Because you have me walking throug
h here,” he said, pointing at the alleyway in disgust. “This place… If we could have found you a smithy anywhere else, I think we would should have.”

  Rsiran glanced back down the street, toward the old smithy he’d taken over and made his own. He had to admit that it felt good in some ways to actually walk. “This location has its advantages. I mean, who in this neighborhood would bother reporting the noise to the constables? And why would the constables bother to believe them even if they did? Besides, this keeps me out of the eye of the Smith Guild.” He wondered if the guild even knew of his smithy. They had to have kept records of all the smiths in the city. Would they continue to track the ones that had supposedly shut down?

  “That was part of the appeal at first.”

  “Where else would we find a smithy like this?” Rsiran asked with a laugh.

  “No place safe,” Brusus answered. They turned onto a wider street and started down toward the docks. “You sure this is what you want to do?” he asked.

  Rsiran had thought about it for the last few days. “I think this is what I need to do.”

  “And Jessa?”

  “She isn’t convinced.”

  Brusus watched him a moment, his face pulling into a broad smile. “Not convinced? You didn’t tell her, did you?”

  Rsiran didn’t answer right away. What was there to say? That he hadn’t told Jessa he intended to come down to this part of Lower Town, or that he wanted to know what might have happened to Alyse, or even that he intended to find his mother to see if she knew anything about what happened?

  He’d tried using the lorcith Alyse wore, the chain that their father had forged for her, to find her, but had so far discovered nothing. Until he knew about Alyse, he wouldn’t be settled. Only after he understood could he begin to move onto the next step that needed to happen, whatever that might be.

  Only, he began to suspect that the next step involved finding out more about who targeted him in the city, and then he would need to find a way to deter them, however he could. A part of him feared what that might require. If he wanted his friends to be left alone, if they were to be allowed peace, then it might take a more aggressive stance than he’d taken so far. Jessa didn’t understand that, but he’d seen the lengths that the Forgotten would go; he’d seen the way that Venass had sought to use him. He began to think he needed to do more than deter them; he needed to frighten them. Maybe that started with Sarah and Valn.