Seablood

by Cameron Bolling

  “You would just give up, then?”

  “I’ve run out of options!” said Oleja, waving her hands in the air. “If I was truly meant to succeed and be the hero, my people would be free already. I’ve tried—so many times—but nothing has worked.”

  Sreovel narrowed her eyes. “What makes you say that?”

  “That nothing has worked? What evidence is there to say otherwise. I’ve—”

  “No, not that,” said Sreovel shaking her head. “The other part. That if you were meant to succeed, you would have already. What makes you say that?”

  “Because… because I was supposed to be a hero. Or I thought so, at least. I could feel it. I’m Oleja Raseari, I’m skyborn, I’m the first ever in history to successfully escape from my village. I knew that I was born to be the hero. But everything I do—it just doesn’t work. If I was supposed to be the hero, why would I just keep failing?”

  Sreovel hummed a note of thought. Oleja continued, her words tumbling faster now, like her pocket of air racing for the surface after she released herself from the stone at the bottom of the world of water. She didn’t think she could stop them if she tried.

  “I thought my original plan would work. And then I thought I just needed to regroup and try again. And then I thought I’d been driven all the way here for a reason—to get help from the people of Ahwan, to find resources and aid. When nothing worked, I felt so confused, but then it all seemed to make sense when I learned about the trials. Like suddenly I knew why I was here. But then I failed.”

  “The trials are very difficult. It’s impressive that you completed even the record four. Many have begun to feel that the fifth is impossible.”

  “But I thought I could best them all!” said Oleja. “Just because I’m skyborn. Because I’m me. The trials are destined to be beaten by a hero, and I’m a hero, so I thought that was enough. Just like I thought it would be enough to save my people. But I was wrong.”

  “You thought you were destined to beat the Seablood Trials because you are you?” asked Sreovel.

  “Yes,” said Oleja flatly. She felt she’d made that much clear, at least.

  “But what part of you is enough to beat the trials?”

  Oleja stared at her for a moment. “That I’m a hero. Or thought I was. I don’t know.”

  “What makes you a hero?”

  “I—” Oleja’s voice cracked. The words still sat ready on her tongue. I’m skyborn. I’m me.

  A moment passed; Sreovel watched her closely. Then the woman spoke. “No one person is fundamentally more good than another, Oleja. Heroes aren’t born heroes, just as good people aren’t born inherently good, nor are the bad born bad. Heroes become heroes because they prove themselves worthy. Maybe you will be a hero, but no fate will dictate that, or imbue you with the power before you have earned it. You must create a hero to be regarded as one.”

  “And I’ve tried.”

  “And you’ve failed. On many occasions. You’ve said so yourself—several times—while sitting there and moaning about it. Fate doesn’t tell a hero they’re a hero, Oleja, and it certainly doesn’t lay out the path before them. You cut that path yourself like a river through solid earth. Most end up miles down the coast from where they wanted to meet the sea. They reach obstacles, they give up hope, and they are diverted far around by the will of the land. But reaching an obstacle doesn’t mean you shouldn’t find the next best path, and all the while wear away at that obstacle before you. You create your path, Oleja. You decide where it leads.”

  “Clearly not, or I’d be there.”

  Sreovel shrugged. “Then perhaps it does twist endlessly through dark mountain gullies. But only because you have chosen to let other powers tell you your fate, not because of any circumstances surrounding your birth or your nature.”

  Oleja scooped up the scrap of metal again and bounced it across the table. It skittered across the wood and then pitched off the other side of the surface, striking the stone floor somewhere out of sight with a shrill ting, ting, ting ting. She did not respond to Sreovel’s longwinded talk of fate and destiny and whatever else she tried to get at.

  “Just think about it,” said Sreovel with a sigh after seeing that Oleja made no move to respond. “It’s getting late—I’m going to head out for the night. I will be out back in my cabin of you need anything.” And then, with a sad yet warm smile, Sreovel stepped out through the back door, leaving Oleja and Tor alone in the forge.

  Sreovel’s words hung thick in the room, joining the heat in turning the air heavy and tense in a way that felt as though the pressure built with plans to burst the building into a thousand bits of brick and metal. She had tried to stoke the flames back into Oleja. She tried to rekindle the fire that once blazed there but now let off nothing but cooling smoke and the faint glow of what once burned so hot and bright it seemed capable of overpowering anything that sat in her way. No dose of optimism could save her now.

  She appreciated the woman’s words, but they only felt hollow as she sat there with the weight of the sky pressing down all around her. What claim to heroism did she have, honestly? Her skyborn heritage was a sham—that much she knew, and had for a while. Only denial and her own trickery kept her believing the myth. And to simply say that she could become the gallant hero her people waited for—to praise and shower in their adoration—because she was Oleja Raseari? Heroism didn’t lie in the future, waiting in the middle of her path like a fine treasure poking up from the mud washed aside in the last storm. Only her own hopes—her desperate, desperate hopes—led her to believe she could sense grandeur laid out before her.

  The fifth trial was impossible. The idea of someone beating all five and becoming the hero of Ahwan offered only a faint hope the people could cling to for many decades to come, if not centuries. She certainly didn’t have what it took within herself, at least.

  No hope—no fate—would beat the trial. She just couldn’t do it. Even if she still had both legs or permission to use her prosthetic, the stone sat too heavy on that ledge—too large to move and too dense to split without tools. And the gravel ground took all traction and leverage away. She simply couldn’t do it.

  And just the same, it seemed like she couldn’t save her people. She had tried. So many different methods, different angles, different plans lay behind her, discarded after their failure. All she had now was the hope that walking back into Itsoh alone—knowing full well how desperately the eclipsers wanted her back and how on-alert they were with the knowledge that she remained out there somewhere in the wilds, fully capable of dispatching entire squadrons of their soldiers singlehandedly—wouldn’t get her immediately killed. The eclipsers watched her; the last member of the envoy escaped. Honn had kept tabs on her, and the envoy had as well. They knew where she waited, and if she headed back for Itsoh, they’d track her right to their borders. When she arrived within twenty miles of the camp, the eclipsers would be there, surrounding the place in a heavily scouted perimeter, waiting to catch her in their net and already knowing from their informants that she headed right towards it. It was hopeless. She couldn’t breech Itsoh alone—not anymore, if she ever could at all—and without the ability to get within, she could never save her people. She’d never be the hero. She simply didn’t have what it took.

  She wasn’t a hero—not like Tor, Ude’s father, and not like Orin, the soldier in the stars that Cyrah told her about, and not like Aila Aukai. She was just Oleja Raseari, and she lacked the power to do anything at all.

  Even move a damn rock.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Oleja let the night pass over her as she sat there with her arms folded on the workbench and her head laid atop them. Sreovel’s words still filled her ears: You create your path. You decide where it leads.

  That’s what she had always done. When she lay at the bottom of that crevice in the desert with a crushed leg, she pulled herself out by deciding that she could—and would—do it. She had decided to get herself out of that desert
by any means necessary, even if it called for her to employ cheap tricks to bring Honn to his death—even if it took every ounce of willpower left within her to haul herself out of that hole and get his sled up with her. She survived because she did what she had to. Anything she had to. No options left off the table.

  If she wanted to finish this, she had to commit to doing whatever it took.

  Something shifted within her. A single drop of determination reentered her veins. That was all she needed.

  Whatever she had to do to become to hero, she would do it. The rules of the trial meant nothing.

  She thought back to the stone sitting there atop the cliff. To shift it, she needed leverage. That could be done.

  When she worked to construct her own forge out behind her cabin, she had shifted stones approximately the same size. Then, she used a branch as a lever to move them more easily. She could do the same now. Using a branch—or any tool—went against the rules of the trial, but it didn’t matter. If it was the only way to succeed, she had to do it.

  Finding something to use would be tricky, however. Some trees bordered the final trial site, just up the hill, but the king’s attendant said that going up the hill or straying from the cliff’s edge marked an immediate forfeit. They’d spot her if she tried to go up the hill for a branch, no doubt, but no one watched what she did down on the edge by the stone. As long as she brought her lever with her to the trial site, she could use it without garnering suspicion from the attendant.

  But it was the process of getting such a thing there that stood before her as an immovable obstacle in her path. The king and Helis watched her leave the king’s chamber with nothing but the robe, and they would certainly notice if she carried a long stick with her. Even if she managed to conceal it in the moment she stood before them, she had a long way to travel with the attendant and could never keep such a thing secret from someone who walked so close to her. She doubted she could bribe the attendant either—they oversaw one of the most revered processes in Ahwan, and surely took on their role with the utmost level of honor and duty. Letting some girl through with a clear cheating advantage went against everything they worked towards.

  So she needed another way to get it past them all, some way to either conceal it, convince them to let her bring it, or obtain it there, out of sight from the attendant.

  Her eyes swept the room, looking for ideas that may spark an answer in her mind. And then her eyes fell on something that lay beneath the bench where she did all of her work in the forge. There, gathering dust on the stone floor, lay her old prosthetic.

  She looked down at the newer one where it dangled just below her off the edge of the stool. Not as long as a branch, and far more irregular, but if she convinced the king to let her take it—and give her a retrial, of course—she could walk right up to the stone without question, bearing exactly what she needed to win.

  The idea of using her prosthetic in such a way left a sour taste in her mouth, but this was for her people—this was to become the hero she was born to be.

  She just needed to convince the king for a retrial, and that she deserved to bring her prosthetic along this time. It had been an unfair disadvantage that she went without it the first time, but she hadn’t protested strongly enough. Now she would bring that injustice before him, and alongside it, a plan to assert herself as the hero. Rightful title or not, she had to do it. She had to.

  And just the same, she had to convince the king. She wouldn’t leave his chamber until he granted her a retrial with the conditions she demanded. No other choice lay before her now.

  She created her path. She decided where it led. And it didn’t end with her feeling sorry for herself in a forge; it ended with her as the hero of Ahwan, the hero of her people, the destroyer of Itsoh. No matter the cost.

  But still more pressing: she had to return to the king’s chamber before he melted down her spearhead and returned it to the earth as the trial rules dictated. Under no circumstances did she have any intention of redoing the rest of the trials just to retrieve the items necessary to make another ceremonial spearhead. She had to hurry.

  By whatever means necessary, she had a trial to beat.

  “The king is about to retire to bed,” said Helis with one eyebrow raised. He stood just outside the entrance to the king’s chamber, the door ajar just wide enough for a single person to slip through.

  “It’s quite urgent,” said Oleja, already making an effort to step around him. Helis blocked her way.

  “You cannot enter the throne room unbidden.”

  “Helis!” called the king’s voice from within. “Who seeks an audience?”

  Helis paused, then cocked his head to call back through the crack in the door. “It’s Oleja Raseari, your majesty.”

  “Ah! Don’t be so crass with the girl. She is bidden.”

  With a grumbling sigh so low the king would never be able to hear it from the other room, Helis stepped aside to allow Oleja to enter the room. She bowed to him in mockery as she strode past. Helis followed her inside.

  “Back so soon?” asked the king when Oleja stepped through the enormous doors leading into his chamber. He did not meet her eyes at first, and a hint of sorrow lingered at the edges of his words, but he seemed to be keeping a cheery demeanor nonetheless. “What business brings you back here now?”

  Oleja stepped up towards the dais. The wooden base of her prosthetic clunked across the stone floor. The body of it creaked under her weight, straining against the metal bands that held the cracked wood together. Tor trotted along at her side. “I seek a retrial.”

  Helis scoffed. The king shot him a glare. Without another word, Helis hurried up to his position a few steps down from the king’s side, keeping his eyes downcast but his jaw tense.

  The king scratched his beard. “I intended to set no precedent before when I allowed you a retrial in the first of the tests. The first is more of a bar one must meet to be granted entry into the other four, and that was why I showed such compassion for your case. A second attempt of the fifth trial is not to be thrown about quite so lightly. None has ever received such a thing at all. Your spearhead is set to be melted and returned to the earth where it belongs.”

  A wave of relief surged in Oleja. The spearhead had not yet been melted. Some hope remained.

  “But none had ever received a retrial on the first either,” said Oleja. “Until I requested one, that is. And you allowed it because you said no one else had ever asked. Well, has anyone ever requested another attempt at the fifth trial?”

  “Well, no, but—” started the king.

  “Then why not give me one? A disservice was done to me on my first attempt. That injustice has to be righted.”

  The king raised an eyebrow. “And what is this ‘injustice’ you feel that you have suffered?”

  “I was not allowed to wear my prosthetic when I made my attempt.”

  “I explained the reasoning for that rule,” said the king, shaking his head. “We cannot permit anyone to take anything along when they approach Aukai’s stone. It is the law of the trial, the very same we have observed since the beginning of our city. We cannot break with that tradition.”

  “But I have to wear it,” said Oleja, taking another step forward. “My prosthetic is as much a part of me as your leg is a part of you. Demanding any other trial-goer leave a leg or other limb behind when they approach the stone is no more fair than asking me to leave my prosthetic behind.”

  The king pinched the bridge of his nose. “I understand your grievances with the system, but it simply cannot be changed.”

  “Why?”

  The king froze. Helis looked up at her now, his nostrils flared.

  “Excuse me?” asked the king.

  “Why can’t it be changed?” asked Oleja, the same hard defiance ringing in her voice.

  “It’s… the way the trial has always been run,” said the king.

  “Who presides over the trials?” asked Oleja.

  “Wel
l, I do of course, as the king of Ahwan. Jurisdiction over the trials and the search for the successor of Aila Aukai was granted to whoever sits upon the throne by Aukai herself.”

  “Then change the rules,” said Oleja. “It is within your power, so you can’t tell me that you cannot change them. You can. And you must. Because they are unfair.”

  “Your majesty—” interrupted Helis. “I can remove her from your chamber for this insolence.”

  The king waved a hand to silence Helis. Helis clenched his teeth, but in doing so also closed his mouth, thankfully enough.

  “I did not stand before the stone with the extent of my strength and power available to me. In fact, I could hardly remain standing at all. Where is the justice in that? How does this reflect a fair system, when I am able to stand before you now, on my own, with neither the help of your attendant nor a wall to prop myself against?”

  “Well—”

  “If someone returned to the city bearing all three materials, yet weary or sick or injured from their travels, would you have them rest and recuperate before attempting the fifth, or would you usher them up to the cliffside and demand they undertake the trial right then?”

  “Well, we would allow them to rest if they required it. We would not push them in such a way after a strenuous set of tasks.”

  “And why not? Why allow them to rest?”

  “So that they may attempt the final trial when they are ready and well equipped with their wits and strength about them,” said the king. As soon as he said the words, a flash of something crossed his face—a recognition of the information he had conceded. Oleja’s heart beat faster.

  “Then why demand that I go before Aukai’s stone without the full extent of my own strength? Different circumstances may surround the two examples, but the intent should remain the same throughout—if one is to truly prove themself in Aukai’s final trial, they should have their full strength to do so. After all, what is the good of a trial that asks only for a shard of the individual’s might? The true hero will only be able to best the trial when exerting all that they have in the face of it.”