Sea of Strangers

by Erica Cameron

  “Nyshin-ma, wait, I—” I need a minute to think.

  If they see us but can’t reach us because of my wards, they’ll run and carry stories about the impossible magic the hanaeuu we’la maninaio are suddenly capable of. Which will bring the Ryogans’ fury down on Lo’a and her family. If we don’t want them to tell stories at all, we’ll have to fight and kill them all. Which will only enrage the Ryogan leaders and bring out reinforcements, causing problems for us and the hanaeuu we’la maninaio. There’s got to be another way. Something…

  Oh. Could I…? I turn away from Tyrroh. “Lo’a, what you said earlier, about combining magic?” I move away from my squad to stop in front of the woman. “You agree it’s possible, right? Especially if the mages working the magic are both skilled enough to handle the power.”

  Her fingers move and the power flowing through the channels surrounding her flares, and her gaze flicks toward the elders again. There’s doubt in her eyes when she says, “It can be.”

  She knows about my wardstones, and has felt them herself, but I quickly explain more. “If you showed me which symbols you use to hide your wagons, and helped me channel my wards through your protections, it might be enough to hide us completely, right?”

  The motion of Lo’a’s fingers stops. The two elders murmur something, and Lo’a’s eyes light up. “Shomaihopa’a sha opai’hoa, yes. Come with me.”

  “Nyshin-ma?” I glance at him, waiting for permission to break ranks.

  “Go.” He waves me off sharply. “I’ll have Wehli lay a false trail to lead them off.”

  I follow Lo’a, and Tessen tries to follow me, but I shake my head. “Stay on watch. They need your eyes.”

  His lips purse for a moment, but he nods and jogs off, moving toward the position Tyrroh ordered him into. Nearby, Tyrroh finishes giving Wehli his orders, and our kyneeda bolts off to the south, his magic allowing him to push himself so fast he’s little more than a blur. Confident he’ll find a way to convince our pursuers that we’ve gone in a different direction, I turn away and run after Lo’a.

  With each of her steps, the black fabric with its vibrant green patterns flows and flutters around her legs, and the desosa seems to do the same, drawn to whatever magic she’s working.

  “This.” Lo’a stops at her own wagon and gestures to a symbol in the center of the wall. It’s large and surrounded by an intricate design hiding it in plain sight. If I couldn’t feel the desosa flowing around and through the symbol, I’d never have known it had a purpose other than decoration.

  Then I meet her eyes, and I realize she’s waiting for me to make the next move. “I know this was my idea, but I’ve never tried this before. What do I do?”

  Lo’a extends her hand, palm up. Taking a breath, I lay my palm on hers. She adjusts the hold, sliding her hand up until she can grip my forearm. I do the same, loosely closing my fingers around the thick underside of her arm.

  “Raise your protections on the camp. Once they are in place, I will try to use your power to strengthen ours.” Lo’a tightens her grip on my arm, her eyes boring into mine. “If you resist when I pull on your energy—and it is natural for you to want to resist—it will hurt. At best.”

  “And at worst?”

  “It could kill us both.” She lifts one shoulder, almost believably unconcerned.

  Is the danger worth the risk? No, that’s not the question. What matters is if I’m willing to let a risk hurt my chances of getting the information I need to stop Varan. And to save Yorri.

  Swallowing—and hoping that Tessen isn’t listening—I nod. “Let’s hope it doesn’t get that bad.”

  Lo’a almost smiles. “May the alua’sa liona’ano shilua’a bless us.”

  I take a deep breath, close my eyes, tighten my fingers around Lo’a’s arm, and bring up my wards, surrounding the camp with a shield as strong as I can make it.

  “Closing in,” Miari says nearby, likely a report passed down the line from Tessen.

  If this is going to work, it has to work now.

  Knowing my energy is going to be siphoned off any second, I reach out to the desosa to draw in more power. Instead of pulling from the channeled energy flowing around us, I stretch as far from the controlled power of the hanaeuu we’la maninaio’s magic as I can reach. It feels like climbing a sheer wall and stretching for a handhold, but I hold my breath and extend another inch, grabbing the desosa tight—

  Just as something else grabs me.

  I gasp, my fingers tightening on Lo’a until I feel the shape of her bones under her skin.

  Don’t fight. Don’t fight. I can’t fight. But it’s so hard not to when it feels like someone is trying to pull my blood out through my skin.

  It’s wrong. It hurts. This can’t be working. This can’t be worth it.

  But it doesn’t matter if it’s worth the pain or not, because I’ve already dived into the ocean, and now I’ve got to ride the current or drown.

  Shifting my focus away from my own magic and onto hers helps. A little. Enough to let me take a breath. I keep narrowing my focus, and the more of it I center on Lo’a, the more the pain recedes to the back of my awareness. It’s still there, but it’s as though I’ve stepped away from it. From myself.

  All I can see at first is my own power flowing through my body, down my arm, and into Lo’a through the connection we made. And I really can see my magic as a moving, working, almost living thing for the first time. I’ve felt it, and when I created the wardstones for myself, Sanii, and Tessen, I got a sense of color from each of us, saw it in the way the glow of the stones changed when I keyed them to our energy. This is something completely different.

  My magic is a light under my skin, pure red with sparkles of bright white that remind me of a crystal in sunlight or the stars winking in the blackness of night. It changes color where our hands join, transforming to a brilliant yellow, and then shifts to a bright, pale green when it travels up Lo’a’s arm. The sight almost makes me laugh.

  Her comparison between colors and magic was more accurate than she probably knows.

  I follow the movement of her magic. It travels beneath her skin, lighting up the designs and brightening their colors. I watch it stream up her arm, eddy in her chest, and then flow out of her even faster than in, moving into the symbol on the wall. The lines glow with magic, the light no longer Lo’a’s green, but a pure white that pulses. Each beat spreads the glow outward like I’ve always pictured my wards working, no longer constrained by the symbols.

  The light is like a wall encircling the camp. Protecting it. Hiding it. I focus on thoughts of exactly what it’s protecting, using them to push away the reality of my draining energy and my body’s ache.

  Then the soldiers are here.

  From inside the protection, it seems like there’s nothing separating us from them. It seems impossible that they won’t be able to see us—not when they’re less than thirty feet away, and not when I can see them perfectly.

  Not one of the fifteen tyatsu more than glances in our direction.

  Even though they’re dressed in gray and black and their clothes are cut in a very different style than ours or the hanaeuu we’la maninaio’s, they remind me of an Itagamin squad. They’re clearly used to following orders, naturally falling into silent, ordered rows when the person at the head of the line signals for them to halt, and each one wears several weapons—daggers as well as either swords or bows and arrows.

  “They stopped here, maybe to rest, but it looks…” The tyatsu guard searches a few more feet down the main road. “It seems like they continued on.”

  Another nods sharply. “If we push, we might be able to make it to the next town before it’s too dark to risk traveling. We’ll be able to check in at the station there and see if any new reports have come in.”

  The two who spoke confer for another moment, their voices too low for me to hear them, and then they begin to move on. But they’re moving so slowly. Why does it look like each of their steps takes so
long? And why does it feel like the air is leaking out of my lungs?

  Time passes—I don’t know how much—before the drain begins to slow. Lo’a takes less of my power. Then less. With each gradual decrease, I come back to myself more.

  My skin burns like I’ve been standing naked in a dust storm. My muscles burn like I’ve been training for hours without rest. My vision is spotted with pricks of color. My knees buckle.

  Lo’a’s grip tightens. There’s fear in her eyes. Her mouth moves. I don’t hear words. She moves closer, her other arm outstretched as if to catch me—

  I fall backward into someone else’s hold.

  “Tessen.” I sigh and close my eyes, letting him carry my weight. Of course it’s Tessen. If anyone is going to catch me when I fall, it’s him.

  “That’s unusually sweet of you, Khya.”

  “Didn’t say anything.” I feel like I’m moving, but I didn’t tell my feet to take me anywhere. I don’t think they’re touching the ground. Carrying… I think Tessen’s carrying me.

  He laughs softly. “I am.”

  “You’re doing that thing. With the knowing too much.” I want to slap his arm, but all I manage to do is turn my head to let my lips find his throat. “Stop it.”

  He’s taking me somewhere, and talking to someone else, but then it feels like I’m falling. Slowly.

  “We’re just sitting down.” Tessen adjusts his hold until he’s sitting cross-legged and I’m leaning against his chest. Then he kisses my forehead. “Maybe fighting them off would’ve been better. We could’ve done it. Easily. You didn’t have to wear yourself out like this.”

  “But I learned something new. No one on Shiara can do what I did.” I murmur the words against his neck because I don’t have the energy to lift my head. “And killing them wouldn’t have won us friends, Tessen.”

  A low laugh rumbles through his chest. “You’ve never collected friends before. Why start now?”

  “They have something I need.” But now, all I need is sleep.

  “Drink something first. You can sleep in a moment.”

  The water he helps me drink is cool and eases my aching throat. I hadn’t noticed the dryness until it began to fade. Tessen eases me onto the lower bed. As I begin to fall to sleep, he traces his fingers down the side of my face and whispers, “Get some rest, Khya.”

  His words blur with the memory of Lo’a’s voice warning me not to resist, so I exhale my breath and let go.

  …

  By the time I wake up, it’s the next day, the wagons are underway, and only Tessen is sharing the bed with me. He smiles when I open my eyes, and I reach out, brushing my fingers over the curve of his low cheekbones before I lift my head to look for everyone else. They all seem to be either crowded onto the bench, sitting on the floor, or—according to the creak of the wooden platform—on the bed above.

  “You didn’t need to give up this much space,” I tell them.

  “Oh, hush, Nyshin-pa,” Sanii teases from eir seat on the bench. “I think you earned this one privilege.”

  “I wish you could’ve seen what you did.” Excitement kindles Rai’s expression. “Your wards have always been impressive, you ridiculously overpowered fykina, but what you did deserves a new designation entirely.”

  “They walked right past the camp!” Etaro grins, so gleeful eir narrow eyes almost disappear. “We were standing there, swords drawn, magic ready, preparing for a fight, and the enemy passed us by like we were trees.”

  I did see, I almost tell them, but I keep silent because everyone has their own version to tell me, and they’re all so eager to tell me what they saw. Trying to mesh their memories with mine is hard, especially since, even though I did somehow help us disappear, I don’t understand how. But I need to understand. Maybe then I’ll be able to repeat it.

  “There is one thing you should know. The hanaeuu we’la maninaio almost dropped us here and bolted last night,” Sanii says once the stories have been told. “But Lo’a and Osshi convinced them to wait until we explained…well, everything.”

  I glance at Osshi, but he’s sitting in the chair as close to the door as he can get. From his stiff posture and pinched expression, I’m guessing he’d probably be a lot farther away from us if he could manage it. Our magic just got stronger and stranger, and now he knows—if he didn’t before—that the hanaeuu we’la maninaio have their own power. He was distant and skittish for hours after I warded Kazu’s ship. I hope he won’t do that again now; we need his help too much.

  “We had to go back all the way to Varan’s exile. It took hours.” Rai sighs, pulling my attention back to her. “I never want to hear so much about my own life ever again.”

  “But it worked? They’re letting us stay?” I assume they are—we’re still here, after all—but it’s better to be sure.

  “For as long as none of them get caught or killed,” Etaro says.

  “We’ll see how long that lasts,” Sanii mutters.

  Rai shakes her head. “Not long if what’s happened in the last few moons is any sign. And our luck hasn’t gotten any better here.”

  Unfortunately, that’s all too true. “And they didn’t tell you anything about how we worked the magic last night?”

  “They don’t seem used to admitting they can do magic,” Sanii says. “Lo’a didn’t say much, and the others… I’m honestly not sure if they speak Ryogan.”

  “They definitely understand it.” Tessen looks toward the camp and then at me. “You’ll likely have a better chance getting Lo’a to explain than we did.”

  I hope he’s right, but it isn’t until we stop for the night that I get the chance to go searching for her.

  As I cross the camp, the other hanaeuu we’la maninaio incline their heads, most of them making the same gesture—thumb pressed to their other four fingers, they touch the center of their forehead and then their chest. After last night, I half expected to be treated with fear again, a repeat of Kazu’s ship. This feels like respect; it’s like I passed some test of theirs.

  Lo’a must’ve expected me to come looking for her, because she doesn’t seem surprised when I approach her near the campfire. “I expected you a lot earlier than this.”

  “And you would’ve seen me if we hadn’t been moving all day.” I clear my throat and take another step closer. “I have questions.”

  “Not surprising, but I am afraid you might be disappointed by my answers. Come with me.” She motions for me to follow and walks across the camp, her wide hips swaying with each step. As we pass, the male elder signals something, a gesture that reminds me of the signs my squad uses to silently communicate. Lo’a doesn’t appear to respond, but I’m positive she spotted the sign before she leads me to her blue wagon.

  Her home is similar to the one we’ve been borrowing, but symbols are painted on the walls, swaths of fabric hang in front of the two beds to divide the space, and the shelves are packed with jars and boxes and books. The table is folded up and strapped to the wall, but the bench is cleared and one of the chairs is set out. Lo’a sits on the bed, her skirt—pale yellow with borders and patterns in purple and gray—arrayed around her, so I move to take the chair.

  “I’m sorry for causing trouble for your family.” If anything had happened to them because of us… I already failed Yorri and abandoned my clan. I don’t know how much more guilt I can carry before it becomes a weight too heavy to bear.

  Her face goes slack for a blink. “Not where I expected you to start, but I appreciate the apology. And…” She sighs and smooths her skirt. “I must admit that I would probably make the same decisions you have. What I told your friends stands, though—I can only help you for as long as my family is not in unreasonable danger.”

  “I can’t ask anything more. And I promise we’ll protect your family as if they were clan for as long as we’re traveling with you.” I hold her gaze, hoping she can see how much I mean what I’m saying. She seems to, because after several breaths her shoulders relax and she nods. />
  “You look exhausted, Khya. The magic hit me hard, but I underestimated how much you would pour into the work.” She leans in, lines of concern around her large, golden-brown eyes. “Are you all right?”

  “I feel like I’ve gone too far again and need another fifteen hours of sleep, but otherwise fine.”

  “Again?” She relaxes a little, toying with the end of the open purple tunic she’s wearing. Everything about them is so colorful. It almost reminds me of the desert animals who used their glaring colors as a distraction. Or a warning. “This is a habit of yours?”

  “In recent moons, yes. Usually because there’s no other choice.”

  Her hands stop moving. “Only usually?”

  “Tessen is convinced I don’t know when to ask for help. And I’m nearly certain he thinks I’m determined to find my own breaking point.”

  “Sometimes it is good to find that yourself,” Lo’s says quietly, her expression serious. “Otherwise someone else may do it for you.”

  “Maybe, but it’s like Tessen’s waiting for the day I kill myself in the search.”

  “I can understand that fear. When you began to collapse, I thought I might have to watch you die.” She clenches and flexes her hands, then seems to force herself to smile. “I feel better knowing Tessen is there to catch you.”

  What? How can she know that? Unless I really did babble anything that entered my head last night. “I—well, he is. But the magic… I know it worked, not how.”

  “Teaching our magic to outsiders is rarely allowed, but you showed me something new and beautiful last night,” she says with a soft smile. “You helped discover this, so you should share the knowledge. I consider it paying off a debt.”

  She does, or her elders do? Either way, these people seem obsessed with debt. I can’t understand it. If I kept track of every favor I did for my clanmembers or every time they offered me help, keeping track of the balance would consume me. Although, maybe that’s the difference: clan versus outsider. I feel like I owe Osshi and Kazu more than I can repay, after all. Lo’a’s fixation on balance might not be as strange as I thought.