Skykeeper (The Drowning Empire Book 1)

by S. M. Gaither

  But the moment my fingers touch the worn cloth covering, I hear commotion in the hallway: the sound of something hitting the wall, hard, followed by the metallic screech of what sounds like a blade being yanked from its sheath. I jump up and race outside—just in time to see a flash of steel as Varick thrusts his rapier at West’s neck.

  Chapter 21

  “Stop!”

  I shout it, although it’s unnecessary.

  Varick has already stopped.

  But his blade is still drawn, the tip of it perfectly balanced in the hollow of West’s throat and its flat top pressed up underneath his chin. I move quickly to their sides and reach for Varick’s arm. He tenses at my touch, but doesn’t put up much of a fight when I carefully pull the two of them away from each other.

  “He can’t leave,” Varick says simply.

  “We’ll see,” West says, pushing away from the wall, straightening up and knocking the blade away.

  “Just let him go,” I say. “I don’t care if he leaves.”

  “Coralind told me about him,” Varick says. “And you have to realize, Aven, that if he was willing to turn you in to Fane once, he would be willing to do it again—regardless of deals made or anything else that’s happened since.” He shifts his weight to his right side and gently pulls his arm out of my grip.

  “He can’t leave,” he repeats. “I won’t risk him running straight back to Garda and selling all the information he has to the emperor. I won’t risk anything happening to you, or to any of the people who followed me, who have gathered here and agreed to help us.”

  West takes a furious step toward me, disbelief flashing in his eyes. But Varick moves in between us, and the arm still holding his weapon lifts just slightly—just enough to suggest a threat.

  “Do not push me,” he warns in a low voice.

  “You can’t honestly believe him,” West says, ignoring Varick and glaring straight through to me. “I’m not going to turn you in to anybody. You know that.”

  “Do I?” The only thing in this room that is colder than my voice is my stare, vast and empty as the frozen fields we rode through in Kallmarr.

  It’s petty, I know. Not standing up for him. Petty and unfair. But it’s also unfair that he tried to make me doubt myself last night, and that he came this far with me—tricking me into caring about him along the way—only so he could abandon me in that room with this ice on my skin.

  If he wants nothing to do with me anymore, then I shouldn’t have to have anything to do with him, either. I shouldn’t have to do anything for him.

  “Now,” Varick says, “we can settle this one of two ways. You can turn around and go quietly back into your room, or we can pick up where we left off.” He lifts the rapier so that the blade is between West and me, the gleaming metal cutting off West’s glare, making him hesitate and finally look away from me. “And if you want to fight me,” Varick goes on, “and by some miracle you manage to win, I’ll die with the satisfaction of knowing that you will never make it out of here alive. Because you are vastly outnumbered, and I have already told everyone in this fortress to keep a watch on you.”

  I look away, eyes finding the safety of the floor before West can turn toward me again. I don’t want to see him anymore, don’t want to risk my mouth turning traitorous and saying anything I might regret. I can imagine his face now: those stormy eyes settling, softening, pleading with mine.

  When I finally glance up again, the tension has fallen from his muscles. He is standing perfectly still, his chin lowered, fists unclenched. He is angry—I can see it in the darkness of his eyes, in the thin line of his lips—but he is not a complete fool.

  There are at least two dozen other people in here, more coming, and none of them are on West’s side.

  My stomach tightens a little at the thought. Guilt, maybe. Because however things have worked out between us, he wouldn’t be here if not for me. Whether he deserves it or not, whether Varick is right to suspect him or not, he wouldn’t be trapped here like this if I’d never asked him to help me.

  It’s hard to feel too sympathetic, though, when I remind myself that he was the one who trapped me first.

  And when I think of that, I feel foolish for dropping my guard the way I have around him, and for not thinking of stopping him for a less selfish reason. This isn’t just about West and me. This is about the entire empire, about all the damage he could do to our cause now that he has gotten so close to me. Varick is right.

  I cling tightly to that thought, play it over and over in my mind as West turns, walks back to his room and shuts the door without another word.

  Varick watches the closed door as he sheathes his sword, and he is still watching it when he says, “I heard raised voices when I was coming down the stairs.”

  “We were just talking.” It is a flat, unimpressive lie, and I don’t bother to try harder to convince him. He saw me come from that room. And he is not looking at me now, but I don’t think anyone needs to see me, or even hear me, to sense the misery that has gathered around my body like dead fog, chokingly thick and rolling off and suffocating the air around us.

  Nowhere to go but forward, then, I try telling myself. Just like before.

  But somehow it feels as if I’ve already moved backwards in that black mist, turned around and gotten lost.

  “I’m going for a walk,” I say quietly.

  Varick does look at me then, his brows knitting together with a concerned frown and his body turning uncertainly toward me. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” I say, and I even manage a small smile, and the lie sounds a bit more believable this time.

  “Eyes on the sky, feet on the ground; magic in blood, sea stays above.”

  I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve chanted these familiar words—soft and determined under my breath—for no one to hear except me. I am alone in my dark little room, bare toes skimming the stone floor, hands raised and open in front of me.

  I’ve been obsessing over the strands of magic twisting around my wrists for hours now, pouring every ounce of strength and clarity I have left into making their green more solid, more sure.

  I cross my hands over and under one another, twisting each of the individual strands tighter until they form an opaque miniature wall of dark green that hovers in front of me. I wonder, for a moment, if I should just keep stretching it, up and around myself, until I have a personal barrier wrapped over me. Then maybe I could simply stay inside it and ignore what’s happening outside.

  There is a knock on the door. My thoughts shift violently back to my fight with West, then to fears that he is out there waiting for me. My magic untwists, shatters back into useless wisps of thin smoke. And the pain, the exhaustion that my focus was successfully fighting off, is suddenly there—sharp and merciless, splitting through my head and diving deep into my muscles.

  I rise through the heaviness, press a hand to my throbbing temple and move to the door.

  It isn’t West outside.

  “No one saw you in the mess hall when everyone was eating a few hours ago,” Varick says, holding up a bowl filled with some sort of steaming soup that’s nearly spilling over. “I thought you might be hungry.”

  My insides clench at the sight of him, so I don’t know how any food is going to successfully make its way into my stomach. But I can hardly just slam the door in Varick’s face. I step back and open it a little wider instead, inviting him inside.

  “Thank you.” I take the bowl, carry it to the roughly carved table next to the bed, and then I go to my partially unpacked bags in the corner of the room and grab the canteen sticking out of one of the side pockets. It’s full, because West refilled it in the nearby spring while Coralind and I were exploring the hold when we first arrived.

  Just thinking about the moment he handed it to me makes me want to shove it back into the corner of my bag and never look at it again. But I clench it more tightly instead, and cross back to the bedside table.

  The soup i
s steaming—its rich, creamy aroma proving much more enticing to my sick stomach than I expected—and I sit, stirring it in silence as Varick wanders toward what is left of the magic I summoned earlier.

  He moves with that normal calm, unhurried certainty that I’ve come to expect from him, and stretches his fingertips toward the wisps of magic with the same confidence. A brief moment of concentration later, blue light glides from the veins of his right wrist, slipping through the skin and circling gently around my wayward strands of green. It gathers them together, a shepherd’s hook collecting lost sheep until they become partly solid again, colliding and folding into one another.

  “How did you learn to do it so well?” I ask, my eyes on his wrists. Even as he continues to pull up more threads of blue from his blood, the skin there is still hardly showing any marks at all.

  “The same as you eventually will, I imagine,” he says, and I’m impressed by how the conversation doesn’t seem to break his concentration at all.

  His magic never falters, never wanders.

  “You sound awfully confident in me.”

  His lips pull into a wry smile. “Well, to be fair,” he says, “when I was coming into my powers, I didn’t have the potential end of the world distracting me, or all these rifts trying to pull me in every direction. I had nothing distracting me, remember? No flashy ceremonies in my kingdom, either. Only this”—he flicks his wrist, and his circling magic tightens, squeezing until it absorbs all that’s left of mine—“and it was all I ever had to think about.”

  “Even after your parents died?” I say it without thinking, and then hurriedly press the canteen to my lips, tilting the oblong container as far back as I can and trying to hide my face. The cool water rushes so quickly down my throat that I nearly choke. But I’m glad that I asked the question.

  I can’t help but think that it would make it easier if I could hear him say he struggled too. That it wasn’t always this easy for him, not after death stole through his life and took all the things he thought he understood before—but that he eventually overcame his feeling of loss.

  But all he says, in a quiet, distant sort of voice, is, “That only focused me more.”

  Then he beckons the magic back to him, lets it rest in the center of his palm, and wastes no time changing the subject. “I expected you to be angry with me, because of earlier,” he says.

  “Why?”

  He leans back against the wall, closes his fist, and crushes the magic back into his skin and out of sight. “Because of the way I treated that boy?”

  I scrape the last of the soup from the bowl and take another long drink from my canteen before answering. “I could shout at you some, if you like. Or maybe throw this bowl at you? I have excellent aim, so you’ll have to be quick if you want to dodge it.”

  Varick shakes his head. “That won’t be necessary. I only… you seem different from the girl who was so angry that night in the palace gardens, is all. Not like yourself. It’s just a little worrisome.”

  “Believe me,” I say, “I am still plenty angry. No need to worry about that.”

  “Good,” he says, smiling a bit.

  I slide back against the propped-up pillow. “I’m tired, is all.”

  And I feel as if I am growing more tired by the second, my body wilting into the straw of this worn-out mattress, while a strange, soothing buzzing starts at the base of my skull. “I imagine I’ll be perfectly furious when I wake up tomorrow, besides,” I say with a yawn. “I never particularly cared for early mornings. None of the servants back home ever wanted the job of waking me up.”

  “I’ll consider myself warned,” he says.

  I sink further back into the pillow and pretend to pick at invisible threads along the bedsheets so I can avoid his gaze. But I end up simply finding that empty soup bowl on my bedside table, and suddenly I can hear my mother’s voice, her praising his thoughtfulness and telling me to try opening up and not being such a hard-headed, prickly little thing.

  I hate admitting it, even just to myself, but maybe she had a point. Maybe I shouldn’t be so determined to dislike him as I was in the beginning. He makes more sense, after all, than most of things I’ve encountered these past weeks. He isn’t infuriating. He answered me when I called. He is steady and predictable, and—more importantly—he is moving in the same direction as I am.

  He is everything West is not, in other words.

  But I still don’t want him to stay.

  Not the way I wanted West to stay.

  It must be obvious enough, too, because a moment later, Varick says, “I should go, and let you get to sleep. Tomorrow will be a long day.”

  I try to find an excuse, a reason that I don’t want him to leave just yet. A way to trick myself into believing that I want his company more than anybody else’s, because I know he would give it to me, and it would be easier, and I wouldn’t have to fight for it. With everything happening outside these walls—with so many bigger, more important fights just ahead of us—it would be nice to have at least his easy, simple comfort to rely on. If only just for tonight.

  But I’m silent as he bids me goodnight and heads out the door.

  Better off alone, anyway, I remind myself. Fewer people I have to worry about losing.

  Varick has hardly been gone for more than a few minutes before the pillow suddenly feels incredibly inviting.

  There is a parcel at the foot of the bed, which he brought in with the food; it’s full of some of the supplies that he sent people to Silverwater to gather. Fresh clothes, for one thing, and I’m not too sleepy to be grateful for the clean nightdress made of simple, warm cloth. I change into it, take one last sip of water from my canteen, and then crawl back into the bed.

  The last thing my mind sees, as my cheek hits the cool pillow and I shut my eyes, is a picture from a book I read as a child. Two people, standing on opposite shores, while the Atesian Sea-Below—painted in violent streaks of a dozen different blues and greys—widens between them.

  And far above the people’s frightened, desperate faces, the goddess of the western lands is weeping.

  Chapter 22

  I don’t remember falling asleep.

  But I must be dreaming, because when I open my eyes, my thoughts are clear. Clear and pure, not as if I’ve successfully managed to bury my confusion, but more as if that confusion was never there in the first place. And this room isn’t as cold as I remember. It doesn’t smell dank and musty as before, either; it smells faintly of flowers—citrus with soft undertones of spice and fresh dirt.

  I know I must be dreaming, because when I rise from my bed and go out into the hallway—pulled by something I can’t explain, a voice I don’t remember hearing—West is there, waiting.

  And he doesn’t turn away from me.

  Instead, he takes me by the hand, and he pulls me close and apologizes for everything. It’s otherworldly, too, how easy it is for both my mind and my heart to forgive him, to forget what we were fighting about in the first place. It’s as if the argument never was. As if there was never any question that we belonged here like this, with his fingertips resting lightly against me, dragging a warm trance over my skin as they move to the small of my back.

  I don’t want to wake up.

  I like this dream version of us. The easy way we fit together, the curves of my body molding around him and his strong arms holding me tighter, closer. I love—with a surreal kind of euphoria—the feel of his cheek as he presses it to mine. The way he breathes in deep and his skin trembles and then seems to exhale with him, sending a rush of his scent falling over me: cold mountain spring and the bits of campfire smoke the water couldn’t wash away. The scent is completely familiar and completely, intoxicatingly new, all at once. I’m still breathing it in, still mesmerized by his nearness, by all the little things I never noticed about him from farther away, when he tilts his face and brushes his lips over mine.

  Electricity. It’s all I am aware of at first. A searing, singing electricity t
hat skips through my blood and up into my brain. And then suddenly I am not only dreaming, but floating, suspended in the space above us. High enough that I can clearly see his hands traveling up to the sides of my face, holding me still as he kisses me again.

  My body feels buoyant, porous—air passing through it and settling in my bones until they are so light that I’ve forgotten what it feels like to have weight at all, to be grounded in place by anything—and maybe that’s why I get the sudden sensation that I can’t stay here.

  I want that lightness to carry me, to bring me to wherever it thinks I need to go.

  I push away from West, smiling the dazed smile of the dreaming, and I amble away from him, down the hall and up the stairs. My steps are winding, rolling me toward one wall only to bounce me back toward the opposite, as though I’m walking across the deck of a boat gently rocking about in the waves. I reach the top of the stairs, which lead into the main room of the hold. Here the walls seem to reel away from me, expanding into an endless space full of endless beauty, sparkling lights and draped decorations made of fine silk and sequins.

  There are more people in here, too. A dozen or more moving about, talking and laughing, eating and drinking. Coralind is here, and when she spots me, she rushes over and pulls me into the laughter. We nibble on cakes and fruits unlike anything I’ve ever tasted, drink water fresh and clear from the mountains until we should be so bursting that another bite or drop of anything would be excruciating.

  But the feeling of fullness never comes.

  So we keep eating.

  Keep drinking.

  Everyone is smiling.

  The world outside is okay. The sky is not falling, the kingdoms are not flooding, no armies are rising, and everything is okay.

  Hours pass in my dream life. And then days, and then maybe weeks. The comfort of this sleep world wraps more and more tightly around me, warm and soothing, like the blankets the palace maids used to heat by the fires before tucking me and my sisters underneath them.