by Holly Lisle
“They are alive, then?”
“All six of them are very much alive. And apparently very much out of my reach.”
“But you know where they went? You’re sending the assassin after them?”
“Not at all. For now, at least, I cannot touch them. But they have thoughtfully left their relatives behind, and put me in a position where I have come to know them. After all, as family of these ‘heroes,’ I have given them every courtesy.”
Imogene chuckled, and felt her secretary shudder.
“Then the assassin . . .”
“I want to play a little game. I want this assassin to kill off Ry’s friends’ families, person by person, in creative ways. Let’s see how many of them we can annihilate before the boys get back home. Don’t you think that will be amusing?”
Porth said nothing.
Imogene let the silence run for a while, then said, “Porth?”
“Yes, Parata. Amusing.”
He didn’t sound amused at all. Poor Porth—he lied so badly.
Chapter 5
The water simultaneously weighed her down and buoyed her up as she slipped through a world marked by shifting, fluid light. Water flowed in through her mouth and out through the sides of her neck, and though something about that seemed wrong, she didn’t know what it was. She heard the pounding of the tide in her bones and felt the movement of prey through her skin, as if her entire body had become her eyes. Pain lay behind her; ahead of her lay uncertainty. In her present, she knew only hunger, a hunger so immense that it devoured her. She knew she was more than appetite, but she could not reach the part of her that insisted this. She knew that breathing water was somehow wrong, but she didn’t know how she knew, and for the moment she didn’t care.
She rolled, shifting fins to arch her body around, and caught sight of a cloud of silver shimmering before her. With a flick of her tail she was gliding toward it, hardly disturbing the water through which she moved. She slammed into the center of the cloud and devoured a dozen of the fish before the school erupted, then followed the largest group that broke away, pushing after it with three hard thrusts of her tail, conserving energy. She hunted, and fed. When the school of silver fish scattered beyond convenient reach, she moved into a smaller school of large red and yellow ones, and then another, and another sort of fish. She avoided anything that created a bigger pressure line while moving than she did, and when she tasted blood in the water, she stayed away.
She refused to question her existence, avoiding her mind’s nagging insistence that she was not what she seemed to be. She fed, because she had been weak and damaged and near death; and as she fed, she grew stronger.
And when she was strong enough, her mind forced her body to acknowledge its presence. It named her to herself, and with remembrance of her name came the flood of other memories.
She was Kait.
She had friends who would need her help.
She had a task she had to accomplish.
And trouble was coming.
Shifted into human form, exhausted, waterlogged, naked, freezing, and with her senses dulled and slowed, Kait dragged herself back to the camp. She could not guess how long she had been gone, and she could only hope that she would find her friends alive when she returned. The burned wasteland through which she’d come had been nothing but a sodden stew of ash, with the ruins of the Ancients’ city suddenly standing as clear and obvious as if they’d been abandoned only the day before.
In that sea of ash, the perfect circle of ground that Hasmal had been able to protect from the spellfire stood like a vision of Paranne: heavy with evergreens, laced with the fine sculptures of deciduous trees picked out in black against the gray winter sky, carpeted with leaves that still retained some of their autumn color and that lay like gemstones carelessly tossed upon the ground. The castaways’ camp lay within the center of that circle. Kait heard voices inside the ruin they used as their base. She also smelled decay and death. She knew that when she stepped into the shelter, she was going to get bad news, but her nose refused to tell her how bad it could be. Post-Shift depression, post-Shift dullness.
She went in.
Her bad news greeted her by the door. Turben lay to the right in the first room, his body pulled under the intact portion of the roof. She knelt at his side and touched him. His corpse was cold and rigid. He’d been dead for a while.
A soft groan from the back room caught her attention next, and she hurried in. Ian and Hasmal crouched at either side of Jayti’s bedroll. Jayti twisted and groaned again.
“Not Jayti,” she whispered. She’d come to admire the crewman, who had impressed her with his loyalty, his common sense, and his courage. “What happened?”
Jayti looked at her with pain-fogged eyes, and managed a smile. “You’re back,” he said. “Gives me hope that the captain’s prayers for me will be heard, too.”
“Kait!” Hasmal shouted. “You’re alive!”
Ian leaped to his feet and ran over to her. He picked her up and swung her around, holding her close, unmindful of her nakedness. He kissed her passionately, then pressed his cheek to hers. “Ah, Kait,” he whispered. “I thought I’d lost you.” He pushed her back from him briefly, studied her, then pulled her into his arms again. “You’re nothing but bones, girl,” he said. And then, when he let her go, “How’d you get through it? And where have you been? I . . . we . . . I gave up on you yesterday.”
“How long have I been gone?”
Hasmal had been digging through her bags; he handed her spare breeches and tunic to her as he said, “Three days, two nights.”
“That long?” She frowned, surprised that she’d stayed in Shift longer than a day. “I was . . . under the water. Lost.” She tugged on the clothing. “Lost inside my head. I was in the bay, but I’d forgotten who I was. I jumped into the stream to get away from those . . . the beasts, and to escape the spellfire. I remember that well enough. And after I went over the waterfall, I just barely remember hitting those boulders at the bottom. And then I don’t remember anything else until this morning, when I suddenly recalled my name and remembered that I wasn’t supposed to be a fish. Or whatever I was. My body Shifted me into a form that would let me heal and eat, and I guess that’s all I’ve been doing since I disappeared.”
They looked awed. “You can do that?”
“I’ve only done it one other time,” she said. “And that for less time than the passing of a single station. When I jumped into the bay in Maracada, the night I met you”—she looked at Ian—“I hit the water so hard it stunned me, and I nearly drowned. My body Shifted me then, too—partly. Left me human, but gave me gills so that I could breathe in the water. Until that happened, I didn’t know I could take any form but the four-legged one.”
Hasmal looked thoughtful. “To answer your question, Jayti walked past the corpse of the beast you disembowled after the spellfire stopped burning,” he said. “Except it wasn’t truly dead. It grabbed him by one leg, mangled the leg. We got him away from it and finally managed to kill it, but . . .”
“Hasmal took the leg off for me. Did a good job of it. I’ll be back t’ myself soon enough.” He said it, and he might have believed it, but Kait knew it wasn’t true. She smelled the stink of blood-rot—faintly, perhaps faintly enough that human noses couldn’t detect it. Jayti wasn’t going to get better. She looked quickly at Hasmal and saw the bleakness in his eyes. He knew, then.
Ian said, “Jayti will be helping us build our boat before you can blink.” The pain was in his eyes, too. They were keeping it from him, the fact of his impending death. Keeping it from him as long as they could.
She turned back to Jayti, and knelt by his side. She looked into his eyes, and willed him to fight off the blood sickness. “We need you,” she said in a voice pitched only for his ears. “Especially Ian. He’s lost his ship, his crew, everyone he thought he could count on except for you. Don’t let him lose you, too.”
Jayti, face gray and waxy, smiled a little
, and in a voice even softer than hers, said, “I smell it. I know—but they’re happier thinking I don’t. So we play this game.” He patted her arm. “But even when I’m gone, the captain hasn’t lost everything. He still has you.”
She returned his smile with a false sincerity that hid the pained awkwardness of the truth. Ian would need Jayti. He would need a friend from his past to stand by him in the days to come. And sitting in the back of the room they all occupied was the one thing she could think of that might save Jayti’s life, and spare Ian’s friend.
The Mirror of Souls glowed softly, its light rising up through the center of the tripod pedestal and shimmering into a lake of radiance that pooled within the ring resting on the pedestal. She had crossed the uncharted vastness of the Bregian Ocean to this abandoned continent to obtain it. It was an artifact from the long-gone Ancients, the people who had once ruled all the world, and with it, she was supposed to be able to resurrect her slaughtered family. The spirit of her long-dead ancestor, Amalee Kehshara Rohannan Draclas, had insisted that her dead parents, her dead brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews, were not entirely beyond her reach. That they could come back; that they could be brought back; that she could resurrect them with this artifact, which she had obtained with terrible struggle and at terrible cost.
But Kait did not know what to do with the Mirror now that she had it—and she had been unable to find Amalee’s spirit since she’d made the decision to take the Mirror to the Reborn. When the Peregrine marooned her and her companions on the western shore of North Novtierra, she’d been sure Amalee would return, full of advice on what she had to do to get home. But that yattering voice had fallen silent, and the sick feeling grew in Kait that she’d made a mistake somewhere.
Had she been wrong to trust her ancestor’s spirit in getting the Mirror, or had she been wrong in ignoring Amalee’s assertion that if Kait got the Mirror and took it to Calimekka, the Reborn and his needs would not figure into her future? She couldn’t know, and Amalee wouldn’t answer her silent call for help.
Amalee could have told Kait how to use the artifact to resurrect dead Turben and save dying Jayti. Instead, the Mirror sat there useless because Kait didn’t dare touch the glowing inscriptions that curved around the front quarter of its rim. Magical artifacts could be deadly. Without instructions, Kait feared she would unleash destruction on the survivors instead of salvation on the lost. Raised in Galweigh House amid its deadly mysteries, she’d learned that caution was the first and best of virtues.
“Hang on,” she told Jayti again, and took his hand in hers. “Please.”
He smiled, and she rose and turned away.
Ian pulled her aside. “I need to talk to you. Alone.”
She nodded and followed him out of the ruin.
When they were out of sight of the others, he embraced her again, pulling her close and stroking her damp hair. “I thought I’d lost you forever,” he told her. “I don’t want to lose you again.”
“We may not survive this,” she said.
“I know. We probably won’t. But I know that I want to be with you for the rest of my life. I love you, Kait. With all my heart and soul, I love you. I’d do anything for you—”
She pressed her fingers to his lips and said, “Hush,” and pulled him close, praying that he wouldn’t say anything else. She stroked his hair and closed her eyes tight, and wished with everything in her that she could make him not love her. She cared about him, but whatever magic it took to create the sort of love he professed to feel for her did not exist inside of her. Not for him. Not, perhaps, for anyone.
He held her close to him, rocking from side to side. She remembered her father rocking her like that, and for a moment she felt both small and safe. Then he pulled away from her and looked into her eyes, and said, “Marry me,” and all feelings of safety fled. He said, “I have nothing but myself to offer you, but I’ll find a way to win back all that I’ve lost. We’ll get back to Calimekka, and you’ll want for nothing.”
She closed her eyes, trying desperately to think of the acceptable excuse, the one that would let her refuse him without hurting him. It came, and she thanked whichever god watched over such things. “I know we’ll make it back somehow. That’s why I cannot accept a proposal of marriage without knowing if either of my parents still live.”
She saw him consider that and see the reason in it; if her mother or father still lived, a suitor would have to ask permission before broaching the subject with Kait. This was the way things were done among Families. So she bought herself time, but did nothing to solve the problem—her answer led him to believe she would find his proposal acceptable if her parents did.
She turned away—and in that instant she felt a delicate touch in her mind, and eyes looked out through hers, seeing the devastation before her. Ry Sabir. Her heart raced; she felt his elation, his relief . . . and his nearness.
She snapped a magical shield around herself—one of the few bits of magic Hasmal had been completely successful in teaching her so far—and the sensation of being watched, even inhabited, vanished. She turned to face Ian and said, “Trouble’s coming.”
He laughed bitterly. “We’re stranded on the far side of the world, probably the only humans on the continent, down to four survivors and”—he nodded back toward the ruin—“perhaps soon to be three. We have no food stores, we had to burn our ground, winter won’t be over for months, and will surely get harsher before it gets better.” Ian leaned against a tree and rubbed at his eyes with his knuckles. Kait realized how exhausted he looked. “I’d say trouble is already here.”
“A ship will reach us soon.”
Ian stared at her, his immediate disbelief clear on his face. She met his eyes, and saw that disbelief become hope. “A ship. Bad news? Please tell me you have more bad news.”
“This ship doesn’t intend to rescue us. My Family’s enemy followed me across the ocean, using a . . . a link that the two of us share. Something related to the fact that we are both Karnee, I think. This enemy intends to take me prisoner. But you and Hasmal and Jayti . . .” She frowned. “I expect he and his men will try to kill the three of you. You aren’t the reason that he’s coming here, and if you aren’t his friends, you’re unknown, and unknown is often the same as enemy.”
Ian turned away from her and stared at the blackened ridge before him. “Perhaps we can negotiate with them. Perhaps we can work our passage. Perhaps we can do something to help you, and in helping you, help ourselves.” He glanced over his shoulder at her. “So which of your Family’s enemies are we talking about? Dokteerak? Masschanka?”
“Sabir,” Kait said.
Ian winced. “Ah. Sabir. That’s bad, or at least it could be bad. I have an unfortunate history with the Sabirs. Clever as I might be at offering my services as a navigator, or helmsman, or whatever the ship might need, if I’m recognized the Sabirs aren’t likely to want my help.” He sighed and looked back at the burned ground. “I wish we’d known earlier that Sabirs were coming. We could have been preparing. We could have had ramparts in place, made some sort of weapons . . .” He frowned and shrugged. “Well, that can’t be helped.” He licked his lips. “You don’t know exactly which Sabirs are following you, do you?” he asked. He put the question to her casually enough, but Kait heard the tension hidden below the surface.
“I only know of one for sure. Ry Sabir. There may be others, but he’s the only one who’s”—every bit of color had drained from Ian’s face as she spoke—“linked to me. Ian? What’s the matter?”
“Ry?” he whispered. “Ry Sabir?”
Kait nodded. “You know him?”
For a long time he said nothing. Then he glanced at her, and he was a changed man. Cold. Deadly. Full of hate. “I know him,” he said. “We have things to do. We’re going to have to get his ship, and we’re going to have to beat him to do it.”
“Three of us against a ship’s crew? We can’t take the ship by force.”
Ian rested bot
h hands on Kait’s shoulders and stared into her eyes. “If Ry and I meet, one of us is going to die. I know my chances of killing him aren’t good. But if I have to die, I’ll die fighting.”
He stalked away from her, heading for the bay.
She looked after him and considered the trouble that was to come, and what she might do to prevent it. She ran through her head all the histories she could recall where smaller forces had defeated greater ones. Somewhere in the past, someone she’d studied about had found himself in a similar situation, and had managed to survive. In most of the cases, like the Brejmen defeat of the Cathomartic hordes or the Marepori repelling the Jast invaders, the smaller force was better-armed and better-disciplined.
With the right terrain and the right weapons and plenty of time to prepare, Kait thought the three of them might have had similar success. But without those advantages . . .
There is always a way to win, General Talismartea had written in his masterwork, The Warrior’s Book. If you are willing to redefine winning.
Ian had defined winning as taking over Ry’s ship and forcing the crew to sail back to Calimekka. But she knew that even if she and her friends could wrest control from the captain, they’d have a hellish time keeping it—and if they lost it, they were dead. But what if they didn’t need to be in charge to win?
She had to redefine winning. They won if all of them got back to Ibera alive and free, with the Mirror of Souls in their possession. That was the only thing they had to have.
If they didn’t have to take over the ship and control it for months, they were free to consider any form of safe passage as winning. They couldn’t hope to have safe passage given to them. But they might hope to demand it.
