Nobody had asked her if she even wanted to claim the throne. Not in all these years.
‘Is everything well, Lucia?’ Cailin asked. Lucia looked up at her fleetingly, then returned her gaze to the pool.
‘She’s probably wishing we had chosen to build the Fold nearer a stream she could talk to,’ Yugi quipped. ‘I’ve heard the brooks in our valley curse like soldiers.’
This brought a faint smile to Lucia’s lips, and she gave him a grateful glance. He was half right. It was dangerous to go outside the valley, but this was the closest body of water that flowed directly from the Rahn, and its language was less muddied by the ancient ramblings of subterranean rocks and deeper, darker things. She cupped her hands in the water and lifted it carefully, not spilling a drop.
Listen.
Her head bowed, her eyes closed, and the physical world fell quiet to her ears. The rustle of the leaves in the sluggish wind dimmed and the sound of calling birds diminished to a distant staccato. Her heartbeat slowed; her muscles loosened and relaxed. Each exhalation made her sink deeper into unreality. She focused only on the feel of the water in her palm, the trembling of the liquid from the slight movement of her hands, the way it slid into the minuscule gullies in her skin and filled the whorls of her fingertips. She let the water feel her in return, the warmth of her blood, the throb of her pulse.
Everything natural had a spirit. Rivers, trees, hills, valleys, the sea and the four winds. Most were simple, merely an existence of life: an instinctive thing, as incapable of reason as a foetus and yet just as precious. But some were old, and aware, and their thoughts were massive and unfathomable. This water came from the belly of the Tchamil Mountains, flowing along the Kerryn for hundreds of miles until it had split off into the Rahn and travelled southward to the Fault. The great rivers were ancient, but beneath their incomprehensible consciousness they thronged with many more simple spirits. Lucia would not dare try to communicate with the Rahn itself; that was a magnitude of mystery beyond her. But here, at this place, she could sift out something that was within her capabilities. And gradually, while she kept practising like this, she was gaining the control that might one day let her make contact with the true spirit of the river.
She let the water trickle through her fingers, allowing it to carry the feel of her into the pool, tentatively announcing herself. Then, gently, she let her hands rest on the surface, her touch turning it to a chaos of ripples.
Something coming
.
Something
—
It rushed shrieking at her, a black wave of horror that forced its way into her throat, her lungs, choking. Death and pain and atrocity, washed downriver in the water. And with it something cold, cold and corrupt, a blasphemy against nature, a monstrous clawing thing that rent at her. A terror on the river,
terror on the river
, and the spirits were
screaming!
Her mind blanked out, overwhelmed by the unimaginable ferocity of the onslaught, and she tipped backwards onto the pebbly floor of the glade without a sound.
EIGHT
The
Servant of the Sea
drifted in an endless black, the lanterns along its gunwale and atop its mast casting lonely globes of light in the abyss. A single gibbous moon stood sentry in the sky overhead: Iridima, her bright white surface spidercracked with blue like a shattered marble. Thick, racing bands of cloud obscured her face periodically, extinguishing stars in their wake.
An unseasonably chilly wind fluttered across the junk, setting the lanterns swaying and making Kaiku hug her blouse tighter to her skin as she picked out constellations on the foredeck. There was the Fang, low in the east – a sure sign that autumn was almost upon them. Just visible through the cold haze of Iridima’s glow was the Scytheman, directly above her: another omen of the coming end to the harvest. And there, to the north, the twin baleful reds of The One Who Waits, side by side like a pair of eyes, watching the world hungrily.
It was late, and the passengers were asleep. Those men that kept the junk sailing through the night were quiet presences in the background, their voices low. But Kaiku had not been able to rest tonight. The prospect of arriving at Hanzean tomorrow was too exciting. To set foot on Saramyr soil again . . .
She felt tears start to her eyes. Gods, she never thought she would miss her homeland this much, after it had treated her so badly. But even with her family dead and she an outcast, destined to be shunned for her Aberrant blood, she loved the perfect beauty of the hills and plains, the forests and rivers and mountains. The thought of coming home after two months brought her more joy than she would have ever imagined it could.
Her gaze was drawn to the face of Iridima, most beautiful of the moon-sisters and the most brilliant, and she felt a chill of both awe and fear. She said a silent prayer to the goddess, as she always did when she had a moment like this to herself, and remembered the day when she been touched by the Children of the Moons, brushed by a terrible majesty of purpose that humbled her utterly.
‘I thought it would be you,’ said a voice next to her, and she felt the chill turn to an altogether more pleasant warmth that seeped through her body. Turning her head slightly, she favoured her new companion with an appraising glance.
‘Did you?’ she answered him, making it less of a question and more an expression of casual disinterest.
‘Nobody else wanders the decks at night,’ Saran replied. ‘Except the sailors, but they have a heavier tread than you.’
He was standing close to her, a little closer than was proper, but she made no move to lean away. After a month of seeing each other every day, she had given up trying to conceal her attraction, and so had he. It had become a delicious game between them; both aware of the other’s feelings to some extent, neither willing to give in and be the one to make the next move. Waiting each other out. She suspected that part of it was the allure of the message he carried, the implied air of mystery which it lent him. She was desperately curious about the nature of his mission, yet he always evaded her probing, and the frustration only added to how tantalising he was.
‘You are thinking of home?’ he guessed.
Kaiku made a soft noise in her throat, an affirmation.
‘What is there for you?’ he persisted.
‘Just home,’ she said. ‘That is enough for the moment.’
He was silent for a time. Kaiku suddenly realised that she had been callous, and misinterpreted the pause. She laid a hand on his arm.
‘My apologies. I had forgotten. Your accent has improved so much, sometimes you seem almost Saramyr.’
Saran gave her a heartbreaking smile. As usual, he was immaculately dressed and not a hair out of place. He might have been vain – something Kaiku had learned over the past weeks – but he certainly had something to be vain about.
‘You should not apologise. Quraal is not my home, not any more. I have been away a long time, but I do not miss it. My people are blinkered and reluctant to leave their own shores, afraid that mingling with other cultures is offensive to our gods, afraid that the Theocrats might accuse them of heresy. I do not think that. Those Quraal that do deal with foreigners stay aloof, but I find beauty in all people. Some more than most.’
He was not looking at her as he delivered the final sentence, nor was it weighted any more that its predecessors, but Kaiku felt a blush anyway.
‘I thought that way once,’ she said quietly. ‘I suppose I still do, but it is not so easy nowadays. Mishani tells me I need a harder heart, and she is right. To think too much of someone only makes a person vulnerable. Sooner or later, one will disappoint or betray the other.’
‘That is Mishani’s opinion, not yours,’ Saran said. ‘And besides, what of Mishani herself? You two seem close as kin.’
‘Even she has wounded me in the past, and that hurt went deeper than any had before it,’ Kaiku murmured.
Saran was silent for a time. They stood together, listening to the sussurant breathing of the sea, looking out over the darkness. Kaiku had more she wanted to say, but she felt she had already said too much, revealed too great a portion of herself to him. She kept her inner self guarded; it was her way, and experience had taught her that there was little point in trying to change it. Somehow, whenever she let her defences down, she always chose the wrong person; yet if she kept them up, she drove people away from her.
She had fallen into two relationships since she had lived in the Fold, both fulfilling at the time but ultimately proving empty. One man she was with for three years before realising that she stayed with him to alleviate the guilt she felt over the death of Tane, who had followed her into the Imperial Keep out of love and had died there. The other lasted six months before he revealed a terrible temper, made worse by the fact that he could not physically overpower her since she was an apprentice of the Red Order. She did not see the rage building until it burst out. He hit her once. She used her
kana
to crush the bones in his hand. Unfortunately, despite his other failings, he had been a skilled bomb engineer and a great asset to the Libera Dramach, but Kaiku’s actions had put paid to that. She felt more sorry about causing trouble for Zaelis’s organisation than about maiming him.
But there was one other, who had got under her skin a long while ago and would not be dislodged, persistent as the whispers from her father’s Mask that sometimes woke her in the night with their insidious temptations.
‘I miss Asara,’ she said absently, her eyes unfocused.
‘Asara tu Amarecha?’ Saran said.
Kaiku’s head snapped around to meet his gaze. ‘You know her?’
‘I have met her,’ he said. ‘Not that she was going by that name, but then, she never did keep to one identity for too long.’
‘Where? Where did you meet her?’
Saran raised a sculpted eyebrow at the urgency in Kaiku’s voice. ‘Actually, it was in the very port that we are docking at tomorrow. Several years ago, now. She did not know me, but I knew her. She was wearing a different face, but I had intelligence of her arrival.’ He smiled to himself, enjoying Kaiku’s attention. ‘I made contact with her. We are both, after all, on the same side.’
‘Asara is on nobody’s side,’ Kaiku said.
‘She chooses her allegiances to suit herself,’ Saran said, then turned away from her and into the wind, flicking his hair away from his face with a flourish. ‘But you of all people should know that she is helping the Red Order and the Libera Dramach.’
‘She
was
,’ said Kaiku. ‘I have not seen her since Lucia was—’ She stopped herself, then remembered that Saran already knew. Brushing her fringe back in an unconscious imitation of him, she continued more carefully. ‘Since Lucia came to the Fold.’
‘She spoke highly of you,’ Saran told her, pacing slowly about the foredeck. He stood too rigid, too straight, and Kaiku felt that his movements and speech were pretentiously theatrical. He annoyed her when he became like this. Suddenly, now that he knew he had information she wanted, he was showing off, making the most of his advantage. She should have deflated him and feigned disinterest, but it was too late. Quraal were legendarily arrogant, and Saran was no exception. Like many people who were naturally beautiful, he did not feel he had to cultivate the finer points of his personality since women would fall at his feet anyway. What irked Kaiku more than anything was that she
knew
that, and yet she still kept coming back to him.
Saran wanted her to ask what Asara had said about her, but she would not give him the satisfaction this time.
He leaned on his elbows against the bow railing, the moon at his shoulder, and studied her with his dark eyes. ‘What were you two to each other?’ he asked eventually.
Kaiku almost felt that she did not want to tell him; but tonight she felt reflective, and it did her good to talk.
‘I do not know,’ she said. ‘I never knew who she was, or
what
she was. I knew she could . . . shift her form somehow. I knew she had watched over me for a long time, waiting for my
kana
to show itself. She could be cruel, or kind. I think maybe she was lonely, but too obsessed with being independent to admit it to herself.’
‘Were you friends?’
Kaiku frowned. ‘We were . . . more than friends, and less than friends. I do not know what she thought of me, but . . . there is a piece of her still in me. Here.’ She tapped her breastbone. ‘She stole the breath of another and put it into me, and some of her went with it. And some of me went into her.’ She became aware that Saran was watching her coolly, shook her head and snorted a laugh. ‘I do not expect you to understand.’
‘I think I understand enough,’ Saran said.
‘Do you? I doubt it.’
‘Did you love her?’
Kaiku’s eyes flashed in disbelief. ‘How dare you ask me that?’ she snapped.
Saran gave an insouciant shrug. ‘I was merely asking. You sounded like—’
‘I loved what she taught me,’ she interrupted him. ‘She made me accept myself for what I am. An Aberrant. She helped me to stop being ashamed of myself. But I couldn’t love
her
. Not as she was. Deceitful, selfish, heartless.’ Kaiku checked herself, realising that she had raised her voice. She flushed angrily. ‘Does that answer your question?’
‘Quite adequately,’ Saran said, unruffled.
Kaiku stalked to the other side of the foredeck and stood with her arms crossed, glaring at the moon-limned waves, furious with herself. Asara was still an open wound that refused to heal. She had told Saran far more than she intended. It would be better to cut her losses and leave now, but she stayed.
After a moment, she heard him walk over to her. His hands touched her shoulders, and she turned around, her arms unknitting. He was standing close to her again, his dark eyes piercing in the shadowed frame of his face, heavy with intent. She felt her pulse quicken; a salty wind blew between them. Then he bent to kiss her, and she turned her mouth away. He drew back, hurt and angry.