Skykeeper (The Drowning Empire Book 1)

by S. M. Gaither

  From blood of keeper, one last plea

  From bended knee and sacred ground

  We come to watch the whole world drown—

  The very last line sends a chill through my bones—because it’s wrong. Completely wrong. I must have misheard. I want to believe I misheard.

  But then they sing it again.

  A second time, a third time more—and then there is no mistaking it.

  “That is not how it goes.” My voice is loud. Much louder, much angrier than I thought it would come out. Maybe because I remember first reciting this chant with my brother, and somehow this mutilation of it feels like a personal attack of that memory.

  The crowd seems shocked that I’ve finally spoken to them after my long night of self-imposed silence. They fall quiet, at least until one of the chanters grows brave, hoists himself up and hangs on to the edge of the platform long enough to spit at my feet and say, “This version seemed more appropriate.” Then he leaps down and, with his eyes glaring straight into mine, he raises another chant.

  One much louder than before.

  There are people on the other side, too. The ones who climbed to me and begged for my help are watching me. Waiting. Some shout their own protests at the chanting ones, but most of them are quiet.

  Why are the right so often silent, and the wrong so loud?

  West seems to be waiting for my lead.

  So I decide that this is how I will start our riot: with the right words, because the right words have a power that all of the wrongness in the world cannot touch. And this is how the right words go—

  Come see, come see

  From blood of keeper, one last plea

  From bended knee and sacred ground

  We come to show light can be found

  Eyes that seek and blood that cries

  We come to soothe the raging skies

  By the time I finish, other voices are joining mine, gathering into a wave that builds and builds until it is loud enough to break over the wrong ones and swallow them up.

  The wrong keep rising.

  On and on the two groups go, building and crashing into one another long after I’ve fallen silent myself.

  Just as I thought they would.

  Louder and angrier until no one—aside from a few of my guards—is left paying attention to me.

  I feel a tinge of despair, looking at this war I so easily started, at how easily divided we are. But then an eruption of smoke and fire distracts the guards, too, and I remember that I have to finish this.

  The eruption was West’s doing, I’m guessing. The fire is a strange shade of purple, and somehow not burning anything other than the air it’s oddly suspended in. As I watch, that fire scatters to miniature flames that remind me of the bobbing lights they call wisp fire back home—ghostly illuminations that draw travelers away from safe paths in the southern marshes. And these do the same: weaving their way in between the crowd and my guards and drawing them away by the dozen.

  There are only two guards left to deal with by the time the spell is done.

  I drop down and hack away the binding around my ankles. It’s thicker than what was around my hands, and it takes too long to cut; I’ve only just stepped out of the tangle of frayed rope when I look up to find one of those two guards looming. He starts toward me. I dive for his feet with the rope pulled into a taut tripping line between my hands. The rope hits his ankles, and I bring the two ends of it together behind him, throwing all of my weight into jerking it tight and pulling him off his feet.

  It half-works. He loses his balance, but when he falls, he lands on my legs. I manage to wrench one free. His grip on the other is crushing.

  But I am not dying on this platform.

  The thought moves through my brain as quickly as the knife moves through the air. I stab that knife into the back of the man’s hand, and I feel it sink deep between the bones, and he bellows in pain so loudly that all I want to do is roll over and vomit and never get up again.

  But the other guard is on me now, and I immediately have to scramble to avoid his hand grabbing my other leg. I tumble over the side of the platform and land awkwardly on my side, but somehow find my way to my feet.

  And then I run.

  I run through smoke that stings my eyes and screams that rattle my mind. I run, and I try not to think about how I started this fight all over again, and I try not to let that tinge of despair I felt earlier catch up to me again. I shove people out of my way. I force myself not to think about the way that guard’s hand twitched and writhed under my knife so intensely that I can still feel the way the handle moved against my palm.

  I run until I reach the outskirts of the village, until I see a memorial garden atop a hill, full of glowing runestones and surrounded by a high hedge wall. I stumble into the garden, and I fall behind that hedge and out of sight of anyone looking up from the village. And I pray that no one saw me come in here.

  West must have caught up to me at some point while I was running, because he comes around the corner a few moments later, before I’ve even had a chance to catch my breath.

  He’s taken care of the few who tried to follow us, he tells me.

  I don’t ask him for details.

  “So you’re planning to go back for your horse when everything’s calmed down again, right?” he asks, still panting himself. “Did you manage to get any idea of where they’re keeping him?”

  I want to laugh, bitterly, at the way he believes I was thinking of anything other than simply getting away. He doesn’t realize how shaken I really am.

  But I realize it, now that I am out of the noise and able to think clearly about everything I’ve just done. About the fate I’ve just barely escaped, and all the people I’ve left behind to deal, on their own, with bloody platforms and desperate elders.

  The boldness that made me defy that elder and raise my voice to that crowd is fading.

  Quickly.

  Because fears are louder, and strength is harder, in quiet and stillness like this.

  I fight the urge to start running again. “I can’t go back into that village,” I say.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s not supposed to be this way. I’m not supposed to divide people this way, to start fires, to stab people who—”

  “You had to do what you had to do. You were throwing knives the first night we met, too, remember?”

  “That was different. The people hunting me then were after money, rewards. These people…these people only needed hope. They only needed my help.”

  He frowns. “They could have been a little nicer about asking for it.”

  Somewhere, deep down, I know he’s right. I know we can justify what we had to do. But I don’t want to listen to him all the same. I can’t. Not when I can still hear the noise coming from the village below. And I know it makes me look like a child throwing a tantrum, but I press my hands over my ears in search of a moment away from it all, of just a single moment of true silence. My arms are shaking. My eyes sting with tears I refuse to shed in front of West.

  Staying here won’t help these people in the end, I tell myself, same as I did in the elder’s chamber.

  But it’s harder to believe, now. Because now I have faces. Every time I close my eyes, I see, with terrible detail, every face of every person who pleaded with me on that platform.

  They were worse than the ones who wanted me dead, I decide.

  “I want to go home.” I don’t mean to say it aloud, but the desire rushes up so quick and overwhelming that I can’t keep it in. I don’t want to collect any more faces. I had my sister’s, and the people of my own city, and that was enough. I want to go home and see those faces, and I want to make sure my city hasn’t broken out into riots and fire and blood like this village has.

  Except that won’t solve anything.

  There are no answers back in Garda. I’m not prepared to face the emperor, and I know there is nothing for me to do but keep moving, to keep se
arching for a solution, and the thought of it all makes me want to scream.

  But before I can, West shocks me into silence by grabbing my hands and drawing them away from my face, forcing our gazes to meet. The night suddenly seems much quieter. Several times he tries to speak, but in the end he seems as lost for words as I am. And he doesn’t find any, either—not before I pull my hands from his and back away, taking a deep breath and closing my eyes.

  When I open them again, the first thing they see is her.

  That grey-haired girl.

  She is standing next to one of the taller runestones, blue eyes shining in its faint glow. And all of the grief and despair I had been feeling evaporates almost instantly, incinerated by the angry heat that surges through me.

  How long has she been standing there, watching me break down this way?

  I storm toward her so fast that the only reaction she has time for is a few stumbling, backward steps. And then I reach her, grab her by the front of her vest, and slam her back against the stone. “Why did you bring me to this village?” I demand. “Why? You should have left me where you found me.”

  She looks too stunned at having been attacked to answer right away.

  But she gets over it quickly. And I’m too blind and foolish with anger to put up much of a fight when she replies by grabbing my arm, twisting it, and throwing me to the ground. My breath rushes from my lungs in a violent gasp. She is a lot stronger than she looks—and unlike foolish me, she actually brought a weapon to this fight; the crossbow is off her back, and an instant later it’s close enough to my face that I can see the gleaming silver dragon winding its way around the stock. I try to focus on the details of that dragon, and not on the wickedly sharp tip of the arrow that is even more uncomfortably close.

  The ground shakes with West’s footsteps. But the girl’s head jerks up, and the tip of that arrow moves even closer to my neck, and he freezes.

  “You should have left me where you found me,” I tell her again, letting my head sink into the cold ground.

  “Clearly.”

  I shut my eyes, because I am a coward in the end, I suppose—if she is going to pull the trigger, I don’t want to watch her do it. I only wish she would hurry up.

  The silence stretches on for entirely too long before I sense movement from her again.

  “But you were right,” she finally says. “What you said earlier, I mean. I only hoped you might be able to help this village.” I chance a look, and I find her attention has drifted from me to the memorial stones around us instead. When she catches me watching her, she says, “I told you: burying too many of our own.”

  Her eyes fixate on one of the closer stones, glowing what seems a brighter white than most, and etched with an inscription that I assume is in ancient Kallmarrian. Above the inscription is a symbol, one of a serpent biting its own tail, forming a circle around jagged, snow-peaked mountains. I’ve seen it in a few other places in this kingdom—mostly on things bearing the official signature of the young queen who rules from a throne far southeast of here, in the capital city of Grällsyn.

  How many scars did it take this keeper to earn the queen’s seal on her grave, I wonder?

  “I’m sorry,” I say, although it doesn’t feel as if it’s worth much in this melancholy place.

  It’s enough to make her sigh and ease her weapon away from me. Then she even offers me her hand, which I cautiously take. “I don’t agree with what they tried to do to you,” she says as she pulls me up. “I didn’t think they would take it that far.”

  Maybe it’s because she is not looking directly at me as she speaks, but there is something less harsh about her eyes now; they’re more smooth ocean than ice, perhaps.

  “Now get out of here,” she says quietly, “before someone less understanding than me shows up and really does put an arrow through you.”

  I want nothing more than to get out of here, but there is still one problem. “You have my horse,” I remind her.

  She hesitates.

  “I am not leaving without him.”

  She resituates the bow on her back and throws a worried look toward the village before answering. “There’s nothing but woods above us for a long ways yet, and there’s a river—the River Skadi—that runs through it about five miles directly north of here. Wait for me on its shores, and I’ll see that your horse gets back to you there, and then we can call it even between us, yeah?”

  “And why should I trust you to show up?” I ask.

  “You probably shouldn’t, really,” she says, “but the alternative is going back into the village yourself, which you’re also welcome to do, of course.”

  I take a deep breath. The anger seeping out of my mind leaves room for those faces to resurface. But this time, I try to focus on something other than the way they pleaded: I try picturing the way some of them lifted their voices with me. The entire small crowd of them, far from an army, and I can’t ask any of them to come with me now—not when there are already too few of them to protect the skies here. But that doesn’t matter.

  What matters is that they are proof that there are still people on my side. At least for now.

  And they are all more reasons I can’t go home, or back to who I was before.

  So I agree to go north.

  “One more thing,” I call after the ocean-eyed girl as she turns away.

  She stops, but keeps her back to me. “Yeah?”

  “Tell the keepers in your village…” I swallow, struggling to find the right words. “Let them know that things are not over. And tell them to keep their eyes on the sky. Their allegiance is to it. Not the elder. Not the emperor. Ask them to prepare to fight the emperor, to honor that true allegiance, if it comes to it.”

  She does turn to me then, but says nothing, only stares at me curiously for a long moment before nodding. And with that, she starts down the hill with a little backwards wave, leaving me cold and surrounded by too many dead beneath all these too-bright stones.

  Once she is out of sight, I make myself keep moving.

  I go to West, take my bag that he has slung over his shoulder, pull my cloak from it, and retrieve the letter from its pocket. I unfold it and scribble a few more sentences, trying to somehow capture these past hours in words that feel frighteningly inadequate.

  “I need you to do something for me,” I tell West as I refold and seal the letter. And my hands still shake a bit, but my voice is steady.

  Chapter 14

  The nightmare is different this time. Different because I can see Solvel in the distance. Different because the people in the water start as the villagers before morphing into the familiar faces of Eamon and my sisters.

  And different because I see myself this time, standing on the water.

  Myself, only pallid and wispy thin, like droplets of the lake evaporated into the shape of my body.

  I step out onto the water, walking to meet that body. There is solidness beneath me, as when the Energeia perform their magic before sealings, but the sky above is calm and free of rifts—a deep tranquil blue pockmarked with beads of light. Lights like stars in the world above. But they are not stars, because my empire is starless; so maybe they are the creatures of that other world’s ocean, lighting their way through the darkness of the deep.

  My dream-self is counting the would-be stars, her right hand snatching at the air as if she is trying to pluck them from their darkness. Her feet aren’t actually touching the water, I notice after a moment of staring. Instead she is floating, her body swaying a little every time she reaches for a light.

  One, two, three… I count the lights too, one for every step I take until I am little more than an arm’s length from her.

  “What are you doing?” I try to ask. But my voice makes no sound in the dreamy night air. I try again. Still nothing, and still my other’s lips keep moving, silently counting to herself.

  Or is she silent? No, maybe not; when I stop trying to speak myself, I think I hear soft murmurings disrupting th
e stillness. I step closer. The murmurings grow louder, clearer, and then I realize that she’s not counting at all.

  She’s singing.

  And not numbers, but words. Words that sound like:

  …round and round and round

  light that’s lost and never found

  able blood gives in to shadow

  and then the sky will drown

  we come to watch the whole world drown

  drowndrown—

  My hand shoots out and grabs her surprisingly solid wrist, bringing the song to a swift stop. She hums a few more notes to herself before slowly looking down at me.

  And where my amber irises should be, instead this girl has nothing but bottomless black. But still she stares as if she could see, and I can’t seem to let go of her, even when water begins to rise and rush from those empty eyes, and then from every pore of her skin until the girl is entirely drenched, water shearing off her and spilling into a pool at our feet. Her hair tangles like strands of dripping seaweed in her face. With every passing second, she looks more and more like a drowning victim come back to life, foam collecting in the corners of her mouth and her waxy, bloated skin shriveling up right before my eyes.

  “Let me go,” whispers the drowning girl.

  I try again.

  But I still can’t.

  The surface beneath me gives way, and I plummet into darkness.

  I tumble and twist until I feel something solid beneath me. The lake bed, maybe? And at first, I think I feel that surface trembling, but then I realize that I am the only thing still moving. The only thing still shaking.

  I feel pressure on my shoulder.

  Someone is shaking me.

  I jolt awake.

  There are blue eyes peering into mine. A girl, her face framed by wavy locks of pale grey hair, just inches away. “That must have been some awful nightmare,” she says, frowning.

  Not “she,” says a small voice through the haze in my mind. Because I know her name now, don’t I?

  Pieces of the day before slide slowly into place, until I finally remember stopping here. Waiting along the shore of the river until nightfall, until Finn finally appeared with this grey-haired girl trailing behind him. And I remember her introducing herself as Coralind, telling us she would be heading back in the morning, and then West mercilessly interrogating her about her motives for staying the night. I’d listened to their bickering until I could no longer keep my eyes open.