Sea of Strangers

by Erica Cameron

  Feeling them work with the katsujo’s desosa, I realize something. All the energy I’ve ever worked with has felt a little like something else. I know when I’m drawing desosa from a storm or from the desert sun or from Natani. It’s not just desosa, it carries some small part of the source, too. This, though…this doesn’t feel like anything or anyone else. If this desosa has a source, it has to be the well of energy all desosa comes from because this is pure. It might be as close as is possible to touching the hand of the Kaisubeh. Which is exactly what Chio said we’d need to push the susuji from a powerful healing spell to a liquid capable of creating immortality.

  Well before it’s finished, I can feel the difference between this version and the previous. It smells more strongly of magic—that crisp, pure scent that rose from the last one—and the glow, more silver-white than purple now, is brighter.

  Only Sanii and I have been entirely devoted to the susuji. Miari and Nairo have been running drills with Wehli, trying to help him learn how to regain his balance without the weight of his arm. Tessen is sitting nearby, eyes closed as he studies the katsujo; he’s been fascinated with what I did to it and how it changed. Everyone else has, too, but in different ways. Like Rai, who’s been trying to see exactly how high she can shoot a flare of fire with the boost the katsujo gives her. Now, as though she can sense we’re about to take the next step, Rai stops playing with her flames and comes to peer over our shoulders.

  “You can still change your mind.” Rai kicks a small stone toward Sanii.

  “No, I can’t.” Legs pulled into eir chest, ey rests eir chin on eir knees. “The possibility of forever is worth the risk.”

  I don’t look at Tessen, but I wonder what he thinks about the sumai. About the possibility of forever. I’m not going to ask, but I wonder. The permanence of it always frightened me; Tessen is braver than I am in a lot of ways. It’s not inconceivable this might be one of them.

  A few hours later, not long after dinner—and thank the katsujo for the plants growing here or we might’ve run out of food—Tsua calls out to Sanii. “It’s ready. Are you, Sanii?”

  “Ey’s already the first yonin to rise out of eir class, but ey’s an overachiever,” Rai says. “Ey couldn’t be happy with just being a nyshin. No. Miriseh or nothing for our littlest ebet.”

  I hold my breath. Will Sanii snap back? All ey does is roll eir eyes and mutter, “Only because it means I’ll automatically outrank you.”

  Rai laughs, and she’s still laughing as Tsua fills a cup with the glowing susuji. When Tsua offers that metal cup to Sanii, though, Rai stills.

  The wardstones proved the katsujo was safe to use, but this is the true test. What happens after Sanii drinks this will tell us if we wasted our time coming up here or not. Maybe we’re one mission closer to killing Varan. And stopping a war. And finding my brother.

  Sanii closes eir eyes and downs the cup, tipping eir head back to force the liquid down eir throat. From the way ey cringes, I’m guessing it still looks and smells far better than it tastes.

  The effects hit faster. Within minutes, ey’s eyes are drooping. Before half an hour is gone, ey’s sweating despite the cold. By the end of the hour, ey’s groaning but insensate. When the sun peeks over the eastern horizon, I stop worrying the susuji won’t either work or fail—I start fearing it might kill em.

  Sanii suffers shaking, sweating, and absolute agony for four days. Longer. Nearly one hundred hours of watching em deteriorate makes me hate myself for letting em do this. Even though ey asked for it. And even though ey probably would’ve punched me if I’d tried to talk em out of it. But, blood and rot, I wish I had tried.

  Eventually, it ends. Sanii subsides, unconscious but looking more like ey’s sleeping than fighting off the stranglehold of death. We keep watch, rotating in shifts to make sure ey’s never alone. Twelve hours after ey settled into sleep, eir large eyes flutter open.

  Eir gaze immediately focuses on my face, and ey smiles as ey takes a deep breath and sits up. The motion is smooth, no signs of pain or hesitation. Without a word, I hand em an anto, hilt first. Ey doesn’t lose eir smile as ey takes the dagger, adjusts eir hold on the blade, and draws it along the inside of eir forearm. Blood wells from the thin, deep cut.

  By the time ey switches the anto for a piece of cloth torn from a tunic, the bleeding has slowed. By the time the blood is wiped away to see the cut itself again, the wound is half healed. By the time I laugh, relief allowing the sound to burst out, only the bloodstains on the cloth would ever prove ey’d been injured.

  “It worked.” Sanii’s words are infused with so much relief.

  “Of all the rot-ridden luck,” Rai mutters with exaggerated frustration. “I was hoping I could have your furs on the way back down the mountain.”

  Grinning wide, Sanii shakes eir head. “Not a chance.”

  There’s more hope in eir brown eyes than I’ve ever seen before, the light of someone looking at forever with the one they share their soul with, and ey immediately begins asking questions. What are our next steps? What will counteract a potion this powerful?

  Osshi and the andofume talk about plants I’ve never heard of and use words I’ve never been taught. I listen, only understanding half of it, but I know they’re discussing how to make a potion that’s essentially poison. Incredibly strong poison. Chio is the one who suggests brewing something with the venom of the birds on the cliff as its base. It’s not a horrible idea, especially since we’ve already seen proof of its strength. Still…there’s something nagging at me, a problem with the plan everyone assumes we’ll be following that is only now occurring to me.

  “Say we trap enough of those birds to get the amount of venom we’d need, and we manage to create a potion with that and other things that can kill all of the bobasu, and we make it back to Shiara alive before Varan launches his army.” Everyone looks at me, waiting. Most of them just look confused, but Sanii’s square jaw tenses and eir round eyes narrow. “We don’t just have to come up with a weapon that will kill immortals, we have to invent something we have a real hope of getting within range of someone as powerful, protected, and paranoid as Varan. Can any of you think of a single feasible way to poison ten people who will probably be at the center of an army of thousands?”

  For a few heartbeats, all I can hear is the trees.

  Then Tsua sighs. “She has an incredibly valid point.”

  “A valid point.” Sanii’s voice is gravelly, and the words gritted out through eir teeth. “You think she has a valid point now? After we’ve wasted a full moon cycle chasing a potion, now you don’t think it’ll work?”

  “I—” I don’t get a second word out before Sanii growls a string of vicious curses and stomps toward the trees. Tessen stands up, his gaze tracking eir path, but I put my hand on his wrist and shake my head. “I’ll talk to em, just… Wait for us to come back.”

  He opens his mouth, but changes his mind, his lips pressing together as he sits down.

  When I jog after Sanii, though, I can feel his gaze on me, following me even closer than he’d tracked em. The weight of his gaze is practically tangible, and the concern in it makes me shiver as I pull my shoulders back and follow Sanii.

  Ey hasn’t gone far, barely beyond the first line of trees, but ey’s got eir hands braced against the trunk of a tree with eir head dropped low. Without looking back, ey says, “Go away, Khya.”

  “No.” I walk closer, but stop beyond arm’s reach. “You knew—we all knew before we landed that our plan was based on hope more than anything else.”

  “I know.” Sanii slams eir hands against the tree. “I do know, okay? But there’s nothing I can do to help here, and we don’t have any plan anymore, and it feels like I’ll never see him again, and we just wasted so much time.”

  And time is the one thing we don’t have. “We only thought we had to bring Varan down with a potion because that’s what he used to create immortality in the first place, but chasing his susuji is the reason we found
the katsujo, and this kind of power is exactly what we need to create a weapon that will work against him.”

  Sanii glances at me out the corner of eir eyes, seeming to weigh each of my words. “You didn’t used to be this optimistic.”

  “I have to be. We all do. If we don’t think there’s a way to win this, how can any of us keep fighting?”

  “You’re right, I just…” Head dropping again, ey exhales heavily. “It’s already been a whole moon. I know he’s alive, but that doesn’t mean he’s fine and it doesn’t mean the rest of the clan is, either. So much can happen in one moon.”

  “So we have to make sure what happens before the end of the next moon is better.”

  Sanii turns around, leaning against the trunk and looking at me with bleak fear in eir large, dark eyes. “But if we missed something as important as seeing how hard it would be to defeat Varan with a potion, how do we know we’re not missing something else, too?”

  “We can’t. No one can do or know everything, so we have to keep moving forward with what we have and what we can learn. So come back and help us figure out what we can do next, Sanii.” I hold out my hand. “You think so much like Yorri sometimes. I don’t want to have to make this decision without you.”

  Another long exhale and a look I don’t know how to read. I almost think ey’s about to walk off again, but then ey heaves emself off the tree and slips eir hand into mine. Neither of us let go until we’ve rejoined the others, and as soon as we’re settled the conversation resumes as though Sanii’s outburst never happened.

  “We can use arrows,” Etaro suggests. “Coat the tip in whatever we create and it could be enough to drop them.”

  “Only if they can get through the wall of mages ready to knock them out of the air,” Rai counters.

  Tyrroh nods, his expression focused, wrinkles lined up along the bridge of his wide nose. “Something that can be used at a distance isn’t a bad idea, though. It’s probably necessary, because Khya was right—we’ll have a hard time getting close enough to force them to drink anything. A weapon with a wide range of impact would be better. Making it capable of breaking through even Suzu’s wards would be best.”

  “Great.” I pick up a small piece of rock and toss it toward the clearing. “Let me know if you find a way to do that. I’ve only done it with my own wards, but encasing something in my wards to get it through their wards will just protect them from whatever we use to kill them.”

  “So we need something that can get through without an extra shield.” Sanii traces the arc of eir eyebrow with eir middle finger; ey looks exhausted. “Maybe we should ask the Kaisubeh to throw us another rock.”

  I sit up. “We don’t need to. We already have one.”

  Tsua and Chio’s eyes widen. Zonna blinks and asks wonderingly, “Why didn’t we even think about that?”

  “That stone can weaken wards—holding a shield against the Imaku rock exhausts mages faster than even lightning strikes.” Chio speaks slowly, as though he’s turning each word over. “But it’s never been powerful enough to break through wards immediately.”

  “But what we’ve found here— Vanafitia, it makes sense.” Tsua looks toward the clearing, her gaze sharp and focused. “The katsujo’s power seems to enhance whatever effects something would naturally have. It gives a healing potion the ability to create immortality. It creates an impenetrable wardstone. I’m sure that how close the katsujo is to the surface is why there’s life here—at this height, these mountains shouldn’t even grow grass. If it can do all of that, what might it do to the Imaku stone? It’s not impossible to think this kind of power would make it powerful enough to kill.”

  “Kaisubeh bless it, that might work,” Tsua breathes, her eyes wide and alight.

  “There’s one problem, though. We don’t have any. We barely took a handful or two away from Imaku, and most of that was lost in the storm before we landed.” The first time we tried to rescue Yorri, Sanii, Tessen, and I were more focused on stealing papers, cords, and boxes than rocks. “If it’s going to be our weapon, we need to find more here. Or sail back to Imaku for it.”

  “That is not going to happen.” Tessen shakes his head. “If we go anywhere near Shiara without a weapon, we’re as good as dead.”

  “Then we’d better hope we can track it down,” Chio says, his eyes on the clearing. “And we’d also better not waste any more time here. We’ll leave at first light.”

  “But we don’t even know if it’ll work,” Rai points out. “What if we’re wasting time searching for something that isn’t what we need?”

  “Right now, this is all we have,” Tyrroh says. “If anyone has a better idea, let us know.”

  When no one offers up another plan, we begin breaking down the camp. We’ve been here more than two weeks, so we’ve made the Kaisuama Valley as comfortable as we could. Erasing signs of our stay takes a while, but it’s work I’m more than happy to do.

  Finally, it feels like we’re moving slowly—ever so slowly—toward Yorri.

  Chapter

  Thirteen

  The journey that took us five days in one direction only takes three in the other. As nice as it was to be somewhere we were sure was safe, where no one would come after us, I find myself looking forward to seeing Ahta and Dai-Usho again. And reuniting with Lo’a.

  But less than an hour out from Ahta’s, Tessen stops. He’s breathing deep, eyes closed. Then the wind shifts and even I can smell it.

  Smoke.

  “We need to get back to Dai-Usho and Ahta,” Tessen says, the words clipped. “That’s too close to their clearing.”

  Tyrroh orders us into formation, weapons drawn and eyes out. We move with the same swift silence we were trained to in Itagami, and the fatigue of the journey falls away as my heart pumps blood through my veins at double-speed.

  It’s too much of a coincidence that they would be in serious trouble so soon after we showed up at their door. We brought this down on them. I don’t know what happened yet, but it doesn’t matter. They helped us when there was no reason for them to. If we can, we have to do the same.

  Tessen directs us along a slightly different path than the one we took before, and the smell of smoke gets thicker the closer we get. When the trail ends overlooking the clearing instead of on level with it, my stomach sinks. This is why the air burns like sulphur.

  The garden, the clearing, the house, and all the trees are char and ash. I don’t see fire; the flames seem to have either been stopped or burned themselves out, but thin plumes of smoke still rise from the wood.

  “Where are they?” I demand just as Tyrroh asks, “Do you sense anyone nearby, Tessen?”

  “There’s a smell that—” Tessen shakes his head, worry creasing his forehead. “At least one person is down there, but there’s no way they’re still alive.”

  I cover my mouth with a shaking hand and close my eyes.

  “I know fire. This wasn’t natural. There’s no way this was natural.” Rai’s talking too fast, her voice edged with fear. “It’s too controlled. If this had been an accident, most of the mountain would’ve been lost. It wouldn’t have stayed here. A person—a mage did this.”

  Tessen cleared his throat. “Well, no one’s here anymore.”

  With his confirmation, we hurry down the steep slope, dropping the last fifteen feet with Tsua’s help. This close, the smoke burns my eyes, my nose, my lungs. I feel like it’s coating my skin in grime and ash. Ignoring the sting, and the too-quick thud of my heart, I run toward what’s left of their small home; only the stones are left standing.

  Inside is the unmistakable stench of burning flesh, and the rough shape of a body. Too big to be Ahta. Too small to be any of the Ryogan tyatsu we’ve seen so far.

  “Dai-Usho.” I exhale her name and kneel at her side, breathing through my mouth to avoid the worst of the smell. She wasn’t a warrior in the way we were trained to be; that doesn’t mean she wasn’t a fighter. Life had been one battle after another for this woman,
and she won so many of them until she met us. “I’m so sorry. May your Kaisubeh grant you the peace you didn’t know here.”

  “Do you see em?” Sanii asks outside. “It looked like there was only one body in there, so where’s Ahta, Tessen? Where is ey?”

  When I leave the wreckage of the house, Tessen is searching the edge of the clearing. At the northwesternmost point, he bolts into the trees. Sanii and I are the first to follow, but the rest of the squad is only a few steps behind us. For three hours, Tessen and Tyrroh follow days-old scents and marks in the forest. Then, finally, Tessen signals—someone is ahead.

  Ahta is hiding inside what might’ve once been an animal’s burrow, crouched deep in the shadows of the space. It takes food and several minutes of coaxing before we can get the little ebet to leave.

  Ey eats silently—and fast enough that I’m certain ey’s barely eaten anything in a day or two at least—and ey watches us warily with round, puffy, bloodshot eyes. We sit in a circle around em, but no one pushes em to talk. Once ey finishes eating, though, ey clears eir throat and whispers, “You saw it then?”

  “We’re so sorry, Ahta.” I hold out another piece of dried meat, a poor offering, but all we have right now. Ey doesn’t take it. “I wish we’d been back in time to prevent this.”

  Exhaling sharply, ey shakes eir head. “Unless you planned on stayin’ a while, it would only have mattered if you’d shown up the same day those rononi yakusoro did. I wasn’t—” Closing eir eyes, ey takes a shaky breath and tries again. “I wasn’t there, either. I was coming back from hunting, and I should’ve been there but—”

  “If you’d been there, you’d have died, too.” Sanii kneels next to the child, offering a hug that ey falls into. “I’m so sorry about your mother, but I can’t be sad you survived.”

  When Ahta seems a little calmer, I gently ask, “What are you going to do now?”