Skykeeper (The Drowning Empire Book 1)

by S. M. Gaither

  And everything since then has been just another of my increasingly frequent nightmares.

  It wasn’t real.

  Not real, not real, not real…

  Once, when I’d woken from nightmares as a child, Eamon helped me build a fortress around my bed. We tied pillowcases together and roped them between the four posters, and then draped silk sheets over them to form the walls. Then Eamon placed lanterns around the room so that they shone through the embroidered patterns on the sheets, casting an elaborate show of golden light and shapes across the walls of my bedroom. To confuse the monsters, he told me. They run from the light, because they’re afraid someone might see them for what they really are outside the dark.

  And I was small, so of course I asked what he meant, what the monsters really looked like in the light. Eamon was silent for a long moment, absently building a barricade of pillows around the edge of the bed. Then he answered me with an easy smile.

  People just like us, of course. So, not so scary, huh?

  I laughed, because his answer made me picture my baby sisters dressed as monsters, tromping around in the dark and bumping into things.

  The memory doesn’t make me laugh now, but the thought of my brother’s voice does bring a dull, aching comfort with it. I stare into the fire we built earlier, which by this point is little more than ember and ash, and I silently will its flames to glow more brightly. To give me a little more light.

  Only a nightmare…

  So why does it still feel as though I am drowning in that river, my body soaked through and shivering from the icy water?

  “Not much further to warmer lands now,” Coralind says, slowly taking her hand from my shoulder.

  I try harder to make myself stop shivering.

  West is awake, too, and judging by his wide-open eyes and the way he’s sitting, I guess that he has yet to go to sleep. I brace myself for whatever sarcastic remark he has for me this time.

  But he only turns away from the two of us and busies himself with rebuilding the fire. “Why is it so damn cold here, anyway?” he asks, long after what began as mostly smoke turns again to crackling flame.

  “No one really knows, now do they?” Coralind replies. “People will call it a curse, or they’ll blame it on something happening in the sea above our sky, or—if they’re feeling optimistic—they’ll call it the will of Austri, and say she has a reason for it.”

  At the mention of their patron Creator, she touches her thumb and index finger to her forehead. It’s a tradition you don’t see much anymore where I’m from—at least not among the people as young as her. But it is fitting, I think, because between the cold and the grey, there is a feeling in this kingdom that everything is as it has always been, frozen in place and time and tradition and stretching eternally in every direction.

  “Well, what do you think is the reason for it?” I ask.

  She shrugs. “I’ve never known anything but the cold, so it doesn’t matter to me, whatever the reason. I suppose I have an advantage there.”

  I nod, although I’m not sure it really counts as an advantage at all, if you just don’t know enough of warmth to understand the chill.

  My gaze shifts just an inch, just enough so that I can see West clearly across the flames. He’s searching through a bag at his side, taking out a random assortment of things: a pair of gloves, a carving knife, what looks like a silver ring hanging from a thin chain. With the ring he hesitates, turns it over in his palm a few times. But then he quickly shoves it into his pocket, picks up the carving knife and a half-charred piece of wood that has fallen from the fire, and starts to whittle at it.

  Coralind clears her throat. “So,” she says, “have you two been friends long?”

  West’s hand slips, shears a large chunk of the wood, and sends it tumbling over the ground.

  “We’re not friends,” I say. “He’s my guide. I hired him to take me to the islands.”

  “Oh?” She looks to West, who is intently studying what remains of the carving in his hand, and then with a nod at me, she says, “Well, given how this one seems to enjoy defying powerful people, I hope you got a deposit upfront for your services.”

  He still doesn’t look at her, but the corners of his mouth turn up slightly. “I fully intend on charging a fool’s tax,” he says. “Every time she does something foolish and nearly gets herself killed, my rate doubles.”

  I consider telling him that I don’t really plan on paying him anything at all, and that nothing doubled is still nothing. But in the end, I hold my tongue. Because he did send that letter for me. And after that, and everything else…

  He glances up from the figure he has started to free from the wood—a horse, it looks like. Our eyes meet for a quick moment, and suddenly the fire seems unbearably hot. I lower my gaze and scoot back a few inches. The drop in temperature over just that tiny distance is brutal and immediate, and another violent shiver races through me before I can stop it.

  I can feel West still watching me, but thankfully, he doesn’t say anything; he might have, but Coralind’s voice interrupts the silence first.

  “Atlas, come here for a minute.” At the sound of his name, the dragon she introduced me to back in the village lifts his head from the branch he’s perched on and yawns. He lazily unfolds his wings, climbs to his feet, and twists his body around to meet her gaze. “Can you warm her up?” Coralind asks, nodding toward me.

  I have no idea what she means, but Atlas seems to understand. He yawns again, then jumps from the tree and soars straight into my lap, snuggling down between my knees and my chest and making himself comfortable.

  “What is he—”

  “Just give him a second.”

  I look down at him. Brynn would adore this little creature, I’m sure; she used to love following Fane’s dragons around. Always from a distance, because although she would never admit it, I think she was a bit afraid of them.

  Atlas is a much less frightening size.

  I wish I could show him to her somehow.

  How long will it be before I see her again, I wonder?

  The little dragon’s eyes are already closed, and his body rises and falls with deep, even breaths. His hard scales are sharp, and every time he moves even the slightest bit, they catch on the worn, loose threads of my tunic and pick them further out. But he looks so content that I hate to move him.

  At least a full minute has passed when those sharp scales start to change colors. At first I think it’s simply a trick of the flickering firelight, but the longer I stare, the bolder the new colors become—from teal and blue to a shimmering purple, and then glowing to a deep blood red. I’m so focused on watching the colors that at first I don’t even notice that the air around us has warmed, until it becomes so sweltering that I could likely take off my cloak and still be hot. A very thin, very real line of sweat collects on my forehead, but even then, a part of me is convinced I must be hallucinating. Coralind meets my incredulous look with an explanation.

  “Atlas is a Frey dragon,” she says with a yawn.

  “I thought they were extinct.”

  “They very nearly are,” she says. “If they weren’t, this kingdom would likely be a whole lot warmer.”

  It makes sense, because every legend I’ve read about Frey dragons claimed they could affect the climate around them—even control the weather for entire villages, once they were old enough and powerful enough.

  I look back at the sleeping dragon, whose mouth is hanging halfway open and emitting tiny purring noises every now and then. “Well, thank you, then.”

  She waves the words away. “Don’t worry about it.” The more I hear that no-nonsense tone of hers, the more it reminds me of the head maid back at the palace—a young woman with equally understated beauty, who I had always admired and saw as more of a mother than my actual mother.

  I watch Coralind fuss with her makeshift bed of blankets and clothes on the edge of the fire’s light, and another sharp pang of homesickness spasms throu
gh me.

  I carefully lift Atlas from my lap and set him down on the ground beside me so I can stretch out. It’s childish, I decide—not sleeping for fear of nightmares. I just need to get better situated is all. The dragon makes a disgruntled noise deep in his now-scarlet-colored throat, but doesn’t open his eyes when I move him. He simply turns several circles and then curls up against me again and goes back to purring. He looks comfortable enough, at least.

  But no matter how I toss and turn, I can’t seem to get comfortable enough.

  West hasn’t moved from his spot across the fire from me, and all his concentration is still on whittling away at that piece of wood. I try to focus on the constant scrape scrape scrape of the knife peeling away at the figure, trying to let its rhythm lull me to sleep. But it’s no use. After I turn over for what may be the twelfth time, he looks up from the near-completed carving in his hands, sighs, and tosses me a black drawstring pouch.

  Inside, I find dozens of diamond-shaped pills.

  “What’s this? Poison?”

  He laughs softly. “It’s a natural remedy,” he says, “to keep away nightmares.”

  “Natural? As natural as the other spells and magic you’ve obtained in the back alleyways of Bastian?”

  “Don’t take it if you don’t want to.”

  “I don’t need to. I was almost asleep.” The look on his face makes it clear that I haven’t fooled him, but he doesn’t argue. I focus on drawing patterns in the dirt with my finger, and several minutes pass in uncertain silence before he finally speaks again.

  “What were you dreaming about before, anyway?”

  My eyes flash back to him. I don’t answer right away, too busy turning over more lies I could tell him, and thinking of just not saying anything at all. I’m not sure why I settle on telling him the truth in the end. But I do.

  “Drowning,” I say. “Everybody drowning.”

  He stops carving the piece of wood, studies it for a second. And then he tosses it into the fire. It catches slowly, flames licking it to ash while his face glows in the fresh burst of light, contemplating. Probably wishing he’d never agreed to go anywhere with me, or thinking the same thing he was that first night: that I must be out of my mind.

  I am beginning to wonder if he may be right.

  He is still watching me carefully, so I say the only other thing I can think to say: “Thank you, by the way. You know…for helping me back in Solvel. For coming back.”

  He nods, gaze dropping to the fire. “But you should know,” he says, “that if you’re trying to get yourself killed to get out of paying me the money you owe me, you may as well not bother. It’s not going to work. We had a deal, and I plan on keeping you alive and in one piece until this is over, whether you like it or not.”

  “Duly noted.” I return the small smile he gives me, in spite of myself, and the weight on my chest lifts a little more. “So, what about you?” I ask, and I’m surprised at my own decision to keep the conversation going. Because I don’t want anything past this business contract we’ve made. I keep telling myself that. Keep warning myself that getting too close, that grabbing too tightly to people and things only means you have to eventually deal with letting them go, and I am no good at letting go.

  I still have my brother’s stone—now safe in my pocket again—for proof of that.

  But suddenly talking to West seems like the most natural thing in the world, and I can’t stop myself from asking, “So why do you carry these things around?” I pick up the pouch full of pills and give it a little shake. “What sort of nightmares are you trying to avoid?”

  He leans away from the fire, and his eyes become guarded and unfocused, same as they did when I questioned him about his home on the first night we met. “What are you talking about?” he asks. “That’s poison. I carry it around to kill people with.”

  I frown. “Keep your secrets, then.” I have to work to sound indifferent, because for some reason, I suddenly feel a bit…deflated. I study the pouch of pills a little closer. There is teal stitching across the center of it, forming an artfully vague picture of a woman with long hair and feet that resemble fins.

  “Pagkati,” West says when he catches me running my fingers over the design. “The demigoddess of the tides back home. The fishermen used to slap her picture on everything. Hoping to flatter her, I guess—make her a bit more benevolent towards them. Waste of time, if you ask me.”

  I thought Coralind had fallen asleep, but she stirs suddenly amongst her blankets. “Waste of time?” she repeats.

  “I’ve yet to visit a village where there aren’t at least a dozen starving fishermen’s families,” West says, looking startled. Either because of her sudden intrusion into the conversation, or because of her questioning him, I’m not sure which.

  He recovers quickly.

  “So yeah,” he goes on, “would make more sense for them to spend that time building better nets, I think.”

  Coralind hesitates, sitting up and twisting her hair into a messy bun before answering. “If some people didn’t believe, it might be two dozen starving families instead.”

  “Or it might be zero. Or maybe eighty dozen. Who knows?”

  “Certainly not you.”

  “Never claimed to, did I? And I wouldn’t. The ones who think they know this sort of thing are the ones who end up tying people to stakes.”

  Even from this distance, I can see the way her body recoils at the accusation. “I didn’t tie anyone to any stakes.”

  “You didn’t cut her down, either.”

  “Stop it,” I warn West, because I am too tired to break up a fight between the two of them, and Coralind looks as though she is ready to hit him.

  And I feel like I should be, too.

  I don’t think I have ever heard someone speak with such open disapproval toward the gods and goddesses of our world, and it’s…strange.

  Weeks ago, it would have enraged me the same as Coralind. So many gods, so many prayers—my life has been full of them, these things that made me believe that we keepers could hold the world together, somehow.

  But now?

  Now I try to sleep, and instead I feel the weight of my brother’s stone, and I see darkness above, and I hear the desperate pleas of all the villages I’ve passed. And then suddenly I am thinking of a world not divine and not held together at all, but breaking at the seams and disappearing beneath that falling sky made of sea. And I can’t help but wonder if any god—high Creator or otherwise—would be able to hear us over the crashing waves.

  If they would answer me, if I looked to that sky and started shouting for answers.

  So I can’t be angry at West.

  It makes me more tired than anything to listen to him, so I would have been perfectly content to roll away from them both and attempt to sleep again. But as soon as I try, Coralind stops me. “I told the other keepers what you said,” she says. “And for whatever it’s worth, I wanted to cut you down.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I say, mimicking her words from earlier. “Tomorrow morning, you’ll go home, and I’ll keep going my own way and pretend that whole almost dying thing never happened.”

  She gives me a look that clearly says she doesn’t think anybody could pretend that well. Then she is quiet for a few minutes, lost in thought, before she asks, “What if I didn’t? Go home, that is.”

  I open my mouth to speak, to tell her that we are finished and she cannot stay and I don’t even want to see her when I open my eyes in the morning. I don’t want to see any of Solvel’s faces, or anything that will remind me of what is happening there.

  Only, none of those words come out. Nothing comes out. West is frowning at me, probably thinking of saying all these things for me. But for some reason, I give him the same glare I did earlier: one that says, Stop. Don’t push her away. Because the memory of standing on that hill overlooking her village is making my stomach feel weak all over again.

  I couldn’t go back myself.

  S
o what must it be like for her, when the devastation she would be walking back into is her own home?

  “I’ve been thinking of leaving for a long time now anyway,” she quietly tells the embers sparking to the ground. “Or I was, before things started to get nasty, and I felt like I couldn’t abandon everyone there. But…” Her gaze trails slowly up to mine, where it stays for a long moment before she says, “You left home for the islands, then? To see if you could find an answer to this growing mess over there?”

  “Yes.”

  “So I guess not all of the southern kingdom is as indifferent to the rest of the world as they say, yeah?”

  “No. Not all.”

  Not anymore.

  She laughs, but it isn’t the cynical sort of sound I’ve grown used to hearing from West. It’s…sad, almost. It’s tired and it’s stretched and it’s thin. “Just you, then?” she says, her eyes finding embers once more. “One girl, against what so many are calling the end of our world?”

  “Others are coming,” I say. “Another force is gathering in my kingdom; some to come join me and face the islands, others to stay, to confront the emperor, stop him—whatever we have to do to set things right throughout the empire.”

  Coralind’s head bobs in the slightest of nods—more to show she’s heard me than believed me or understood me, I think. And she doesn’t wait for me to find better words, or more confidence to convince her; instead, she wraps herself in her oversized parka and stands up, collects the rest of her things, and goes to the riverside to lie down next to her horse instead of us.

  “I don’t trust her,” West says after she’s been gone for a few minutes.

  I pocket the bag of possibly toxic pills he gave me. “And I still don’t especially trust you, but here we are all the same.”