The Storyteller

by Traci Chee

  Messages from the dead.

  * * *

  • • •

  When the funerals finally began, it was a gray morning, and the sea was a chipped shield, glinting in the fragile sun.

  Mourners lined the road from the crypt to the beach, tossing bouquets of tiny white flowers, brittle as matchsticks, beneath the wheels of the funeral carts.

  Body after body arrived on the beach, where they were loaded onto barges and sent flaming onto the sea.

  Everyone paid tribute to the dead in their own way. Delieneans lit sticks of incense, perfuming the salty air with trailing vines of smoke. Oxscinians brought offerings of folded paper, pleated into the shapes of flowers and fantastic sea creatures. Evericans left palm-size stones on the beach, one for each of the dead, creating eerie sentinels of rock at the edge of the water. Outlaws on the beach fired their six-guns. Outlaws on the water fired their cannons.

  But it was those from Roku who bid farewell in the most spectacular fashion.

  After the stories—

  After the songs—

  After the lists of names—

  After the barges were set ablaze and carried off by the tide, the Rokuines raised handheld fireworks and loosed long jets of flame into the sky. Sparks showered the beach like rain.

  Somewhere on those barges were Tanin, Dotan, and Braca. Serakeen’s body still hadn’t been found.

  The candidates who had fallen in battle were sent off by the bloodletters, who saluted them like brothers—heads bowed, forearms crossed.

  On the cliffs above the beach, Sefia watched. She heard the words of mourning.

  You miss a man so much.

  She didn’t repeat them.

  She was a specter, a shadow, there and not there, with the breeze tangling in her hair, tugging at her clothes.

  And Archer’s book in her arms.

  The next day, the funerals continued—enemies, allies, friends. The skies darkened with ash.

  The bloodletters bid farewell to Keon and the other boys who’d died at the watchtower. Face streaked with tears, Griegi laid a small parcel of Keon’s favorite foods beside him on the bier.

  The crew of the Current said good-bye to Cooky and Killian and half a dozen other sailors.

  With the red lory on his shoulder, the only speck of color among the mourning white, Theo sang in his aching baritone, with Marmalade plucking out a few plaintive notes on Jules’s old mandolin.

  Sefia should have gone down there, she knew. She should have joined the crew in their grief.

  She didn’t. She couldn’t.

  But that didn’t stop her from regretting it later.

  There was no floating pyre for Cannek Reed, but Captain Meeks recited his name among those the Current had lost.

  Sefia clenched her jaw and dug her palms into the corners of Archer’s book.

  There was a tapping sound behind her, and she turned as the chief mate, led by Aly, came slowly up the path to the cliff top.

  His head was bandaged; his arm in a sling.

  But he was here, on land, using a cane to navigate over the rough ground, the metal tip clicking softly against rocks and dips in the path.

  He’d left the ship.

  For Reed? she wondered.

  But she knew. For me.

  She was silent as Aly paused beside her—there was a glimmer of silver along the curve of her ear: Cooky’s earrings. Patting the chief mate on the hand, she released his arm and embraced Sefia quickly before retreating a little ways down the trail, leaving Sefia and the mate alone on the cliff.

  They stood together for a moment, as Sefia imagined what the chief mate had come all this way to say to her.

  To accuse her. To blame her. To tell her she’d made a mistake, taking Reed’s tattoos.

  To tell her she’d done the right thing.

  But he said nothing, and after a moment, he drew her into a hug so quick and hard that for a second Sefia wasn’t sure if it was a blow or an embrace or some combination of the two.

  She tensed.

  But when he didn’t let her go, she felt herself turn watery, felt her sorrow and her anger and her guilt boiling up inside her again.

  Down on the beach, Meeks was telling the story of Reed’s single-handed assault on the Amalthea.

  Tears ran down Sefia’s face. “I’m sorry,” she blurted out. “I’m sorry I betrayed him.”

  The mate rubbed her arm roughly. “You didn’t.”

  “He hated me for it.”

  “No, girl.” The chief mate clicked his tongue, chiding her with unexpected gentleness. “He loved you like you were his own.”

  “I should’ve told him I was sorry.”

  “He knew. And he was sorry too, in the end.”

  With a sob, she buried her face in the crook of his shoulder, and he held tight to her as she cried and cried and cried and the bodies of her friends floated out to sea.

  * * *

  • • •

  On the third day, there was only one funeral—Archer’s.

  The capital was quiet. There was no sawing or hammering from the harbor. There was no conversation from the deserted market. Over closed doors and empty gardens, white banners snapped and cracked in the wind.

  The road from the crypt was so full of flowers that, from a distance, it appeared to be covered in snow.

  Clouds of mourners flocked from the city—Oxscinians, Delieneans, Rokuines, outlaws—settling on the hills, overlooking the road, on the cliffs opposite Sefia, on the pebbled beach. Everyone had turned out to pay their respects to the boy with the scar.

  The boy who’d saved them.

  The boy she loved.

  But they left Sefia alone on her cliff, as if she were untouchable in her grief.

  Below, the remaining bloodletters and the sparse crew of the Current gathered around the floating bier.

  Maybe there was a song or two, one of those old battle tunes from the frozen north.

  . . . Through the waves, we ride.

  To our deaths, we ride.

  Our foes will not forget how we fight . . .

  Maybe there was a story.

  “It’s the same with stories as it is with people: they get better as they get older. But not every story is remembered, and not all people grow old.”

  Maybe there was more, but she couldn’t remember.

  What she remembered was the size of Archer’s body, swathed in those layers of white cloth. Small. Too small for the boy who had climbed out of the fighting pit in the Cage. Too small for the boy who’d leaned her back on a cot while the snow came down outside. Too small for the boy silhouetted against the stars with the whole red desert laid bare before him.

  What she remembered were his white-wrapped hands. Still. Too still for the boy marching out of the jungle, snapping necks, throwing swords. Too still for the boy rubbing a piece of quartz in the firelight. Too still for the boy who’d ridden across the Heartland on a chestnut horse.

  Every so often, the others—Scarza and Frey and Aljan, Meeks and Horse and Marmalade—would look up at her, where she stood on the edge of the cliff, as if offering her a chance to speak.

  But what could she say?

  I left him.

  I let him die.

  I killed him.

  One by one, they turned away again.

  There were offerings of rubies and river stones, paper flowers and sticks of incense. Aljan tucked a letter among the kindling. Frey left one of her switchblades. Scarza retired his rifle. Everyone who wanted to give something for the boy who’d sacrificed himself for them placed their gifts at the edge of the water, beside the floating bier.

  Sefia kept thinking she’d get some sign from him, some signal that he was there, that he was with her. The smell of rain and lightning. A phantom touch on t
he elbow. A whisper of her name on the wind.

  But there was nothing. For hours, as the mourners came and retreated again like a tide, there was nothing.

  And at last it was time to return him to the water.

  Aly and Doc loosed the mooring lines.

  Scarza lifted the torch, the light playing across his handsome, grief-stricken features. His hand shook, and Jaunty, the taciturn helmsman who’d shared long hours of silence with Archer, before he could speak, stepped forward to steady him.

  And then, with a wave of her arms, Sefia was down there, teleporting in among them, crying, “Don’t. Don’t. Not yet.”

  She climbed onto the bier with Archer, burying her face in his swaddled arms.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there. I’m sorry I wasted the time we had. I should have shown you every day, every hour, every breath, how much I loved you. I love you, Archer. You were so, so loved.”

  She choked on the words.

  “How do I go on without you?” she asked, rubbing her cheek against the coarse linen, damp with her tears. “How can anything ever be the same as it was? How do I survive this?”

  Somehow, the others helped her from the funeral bier, clasping Archer’s book to her chest. She remembered collapsing into someone’s arms as they set fire to Archer’s body and sent him burning onto the waves.

  The Rokuine candles flared.

  The cannons of the Crux and all the remaining outlaw ships went off in salute.

  Reaching for her neck, Sefia grasped the worry stone so hard its point dug into her palm, drawing blood.

  On the water, Archer burned.

  Paths Alight with Gold

  Weeks passed. In Braska, the work went on. One by one, the Resistance repaired their broken ships and departed— the navies to their home islands, the outlaws in search of new adventures. In their place came delegations from every kingdom and province in Kelanna: from the Gorman Islands in Deliene to Umlaan in the Liccarine desert; from the Vesper swamps in Oxscini to Chaigon, the island off the hidden coast of Everica. The outlaws sent their own representatives as well: Captain Meeks, Adeline and Isabella, and Captain Dimarion, who was dedicating his life to Reed’s legacy of outrageous heroics and assorted do-goodery.

  People were calling it the Rebuilding. Everyone had lost so much because of the Guard that it would take a cooperative effort to make up for it.

  The Five Islands, brought together for one purpose—to establish stability and peace for all the citizens of Kelanna. The war really had united them, though not in the way anyone had expected.

  Sefia had been invited to take part, of course, but she dismissed the messengers who brought her dispatches. She skipped more meetings than she attended. And when she was present, she was usually silent, absently rubbing the worry stone.

  More often, she could be found on the funeral beach, staring out to sea.

  Or reading. She carried two books with her now: the Book, which she’d asked Aljan to return to her, and Archer’s messages. Sometimes she searched the Book. She’d made it to the end of the story—she didn’t have anything to fear from it now. She read about Nin and her parents. Sometimes, inexplicably, she felt as if Lon and Mareah were peering over her shoulder, scanning the lines just as she was.

  She read Archer’s messages. She read them so many times she knew them by heart.

  Some days, on her way back from the beach, she dropped in on Aljan’s classes in the castle, sitting in the back of the room while he chalked letters on a large slate wall. At Sovereign Ianai’s request, he had begun teaching reading and writing to the delegations, their recorders, their historians.

  Frey wanted to return to Deliene, where she would travel to Shinjai Province to give her brothers the first edition of her book of trees before she departed again to create an illustrated taxonomy of all Kelanna’s plants and their various uses.

  The Lonely King had offered both her and Aljan permanent positions at the Citadel of the Historians, where hundreds of record keepers lived and worked. It was the place Aljan’s twin, Versil, might have gone, if his time with the impressors hadn’t affected his memory.

  If he’d lived.

  “Versil would have been proud,” Sefia told Aljan.

  “He is,” said Frey, who was convinced they’d heard Versil’s laughter on the wind, once or twice.

  In Corabel, Aljan and Frey would give literacy back to Kelanna. To the messengers, the architects and engineers, the shopkeepers, the smiths and newsmen and traveling bards. Their idea was that everyone would have the chance to learn, to take back what the Guard had stolen from them centuries ago.

  They’d build a library there, and the first volumes would be The Chronicles of Captain Reed and the Current of Faith, compiled by Captain Meeks, and Death and Resurrection: The Story of the Bloodletters, by Aljan Ferramo and Archer Aurontas.

  Eduoar offered Sefia a job too, if she wanted one. Eventually, sorcerers would begin to emerge. They’d need new training programs, new laws, new occupations. They could use someone powerful to help them.

  She didn’t give him an answer. She couldn’t, not when thinking beyond the next day was still agony, a sudden spiral of grief, reaching up to yank her down, gasping, into its depths.

  When the Rebuilding councils finally dispersed to their separate corners of the world, each kingdom’s delegation bearing one of the Guard’s old portals to facilitate access and communication between the islands, the Lonely King and Arcadimon left for the Northern Kingdom, where the last Guardian would stand trial for his crimes.

  It was Deliene he’d hurt most, and it was Deliene that would judge him.

  The Current, with Sefia aboard, was one of the last ships to leave the harbor.

  Many of the bloodletters joined them, filling in the gaps left by those who were gone. Griegi took over Cooky’s old position. Scarza became the new second mate. They were like broken bones, knitting together, becoming whole again after being shattered.

  They set sail for Zhuelin Bay, on the southern coast of Everica. A hundred years ago, the bay had been the bustling center of commerce, art, and politics in the Stone Kingdom, but during one of their wars, Oxscini had used the Gong in an attack, summoning a storm that would last until the Gong dismissed it.

  Now, as a gesture of goodwill, the Current of Faith charged into the rains, the winds, the rough waters, and rang the Gong once more.

  The downpour ceased. The clouds rolled back, revealing waterlogged ruins along the shore, swamps where deserts used to be, great swaths of exposed earth where entire mountainsides had slid away in the hundred-year storm.

  It looked the way Sefia felt inside—wrecked—so transformed by disaster that any landmarks that might have shown her where she was or where to go were utterly unrecognizable.

  But the disaster had passed.

  And now they—she—could rebuild.

  The Current turned west, for Oxscini—for Jocoxa, Archer’s hometown—to tell them what he’d done, who he’d become.

  And to bring them his messages.

  * * *

  • • •

  One evening, poised on the deck of the Current of Faith, Sefia watched the sun sink into the waves. Night spread across the sky like spilled ink, dripping into the golden sea below.

  While the songs and conversations of the crew arose from belowdecks, Captain Meeks crept up beside her. “Look to the horizon, remember?” he said. “That’s where the adventures are.”

  She was glad of the company, though she didn’t take her eyes off the water. “I’ve had enough adventure to last the rest of my life. I don’t need any more.”

  He shook his head, making the shells and beads in his dreadlocks clink together—small sounds like raindrops. “There’s all sorts of adventures, Sef,” he said.

  The light in the water dimmed, all the gold ov
erwhelmed by the black. In the east, the constellation of the great whale was rising out of the ocean, spangled with stars.

  “You had to let him go,” Meeks said.

  “Did I?” Her voice cracked.

  He put a hand on her shoulder. “It was supposed to happen from the beginning, wasn’t it?” His warm brown eyes sought hers in the darkness. “Because it was written?”

  “I thought I could rewrite his future,” she whispered, and the words felt strange on her lips, as if she’d wanted to say something else, though she couldn’t imagine what else she would have said. “I thought I could save him.”

  With a sigh, the captain let his hand fall. Leaning down, he planted his elbows on the rail and put his chin on his fists. “He always said you did save him . . . in all the ways that mattered.”

  “I felt him. I swear I felt him with me on that watchtower, after he died.”

  Meeks nodded. “I believe you. Just like I believe Captain Reed’s still out there, watchin’ over us. Something’s changed in Kelanna, Sef. Something so big we can’t even imagine it yet . . .”

  The warm glow of the sun disappeared, and soon they were awash in the cool light of the stars, twinkling distantly overhead.

  For a long time after, Meeks remained beside her, uncharacteristically silent, watching the horizon.

  Late that night, she climbed out onto the bowsprit. Some of the branches had been snapped, but the ones that remained seemed to cradle her. She almost felt like she was back in the Oxscinian treetops, except for the water hissing and rushing below.

  The Book lay in her arms, more cracked and stained than it had been when she’d found it, the covers dimpled with dents and crescent marks from her fingernails, bookmarks peeking from the gilded edges of the pages like light through blinds.

  What would she do with it, now that there were no more answers to find? No redemption to be had? No revenge to seek?

  Captain Meeks had offered her one of the glass cases in the great cabin, where she could easily retrieve it if her longing for all the people she’d lost grew too great and she needed to dive back into the infinite pages like a diver into a wreck, searching the passages for relics of her loved ones.