by L. W. Jacobs
And he liked her. Enough to want to come with them. To save all their lives.
She kept cracking her eyes to look up at him, or gaze at his arms around her waist, or just watch the water as the sun rose and savor feeling comfortable for the first time in what felt like years.
Since her parents were murdered, at least.
“What are you thinking about down there?” he murmured one of those times.
Marea started. “Me? Ah, nothing. Just—I’m glad you’re along.”
“Me too.”
“Me three,” Feynrick said from the back of the boat, which was about a pace and a half from the front of the boat. “Avery. You look like you could work an oar. Give an old man a break.”
“Yup,” he said, giving her a last squeeze before getting up. She sighed, wanting to follow him and knowing everyone would stare. That they were probably already staring at her leaned against him. What she’d give for some privacy.
Feynrick thumped down next to her, and she immediately caught a whiff of his beard stink, poor replacement for Avery’s cedar-and-woodsmoke scent.
Tai cracked an eye. “Where are we?” He’d been cuddled up with Ella since they shoved off. No one looked twice at them, of course.
“Gariba, near as I can tell,” Feynrick said, shifting himself around trying to get comfortable, boat rocking wildly under his weight.
Tai cleared his throat. “Which is?”
“About halfway down the Yanu,” Marea said, remembering the trade routes her father had made her memorize. They were mostly water, which made sense now that she’d realized walking somewhere took forever. “It’s a Yati county named for the medium-sized market village along the river, known for its black fleshed salt pork.”
Feynrick and Tai both stared at her, and she shrugged. “What? I told you I knew my maps.”
“So how long does that put us from Yatiport?” Tai asked.
“Another day,” Feynrick jumped in, shooting her a look. He obviously wanted to be the expert about his own nation. “Long as we don’t see trouble with the warlords.”
“Warlords?” Ella asked, voice mirroring the sudden dread Marea felt. First shamans and then warlords. How had the Councilate ever conquered anything?
Feynrick shrugged. “They get bored sometimes, start to shoot at boats, or pirate ‘em. You never know.”
“Well, you sound pretty scatting casual about it,” Marea said, trying to scoot herself further away from his beard stink in the cramped boat.
“Don’t you remember? You’ve got Tai-barking-Godslayer with you,” Feynrick said, waggling his eyebrows. Tai scowled but Avery nodded at the back, as though it made a lot of sense.
She was going to have to tell him what kind of guy Tai actually was.
“The real question,” Ella said, “is what we do when we get there. Avery, you said you know some people in the city?”
He nodded. “I—was part of the cell in Yatiport, for a time.”
“You said you were a journeyman?” Ella pressed on. “That’s above apprentices and initiates?”
He nodded, and Marea felt an irrational surge of pride. Her boyfriend was a shaman, or almost.
If he was her boyfriend, that was. It seemed like it, but in books you always had a talk. Swore your love to each other, that kind of thing.
Marea started. Did she love him?
Ella was still talking. “—refused to give me one, but if you have any shamanic revenants around, maybe you’d be willing to do it?”
“Sure,” Avery shrugged. “I can do it now, if you want. Or, as soon as someone takes these oars for a second.”
“And me, too,” Marea said, a little more quickly than she probably should have. No way she was letting Ella get private lessons from Avery, the woman was too old for him. “If you have two, that is.”
He shrugged. “I do, actually. We had a lot of time to gather spirits while we were out there.”
“Great,” Ella said. “And we need to continue training. Nauro showed us some of the basics, but we need to know more.” Tai nodded at this.
Avery leaned on an oar, steering them around an outcropping of rock like it was second nature. “I’ve never taught anyone before, but sure, I could give it a try. Teach you the basics at least.”
Sudden fear stabbed into her, as deep as any moment of danger they’d been in so far. He was talking like they’d be together a long time. “But you’re—coming with me, right? Back to Worldsmouth?”
Avery glanced between her and Tai. “I—didn’t know you were parting ways.”
“Worldsmouth,” Marea said, though the dread was already forming in her gut. “I need to get back to my family. My cousins—”
It sounded so stupid when she said it out loud. So childish. I need to go home. Can you take me home?
Avery licked his lips. “I guess I had thought to go on with Mr. Kulga. Earn a place in your cell. At least, if this is a cell?”
“Close enough,” Tai said. “I’d promised Nauro a similar share to what we promised you. And we could use your help.”
Dread pounded through her stomach now, working its way up her chest. She’d just met Avery, and now they were going to get split up? She couldn’t let that happen.
But keep traveling with Tai and their ridiculous quest?
“Marea?” Ella asked, voice gentle. “Are you still thinking to book passage from Yatiport?”
“Well, it’s not really any different I guess, anyway,” she said, mouth suddenly running with a mind of its own. “I mean, if I take a boat from Yatiport, or we wait and figure out where you’re going. Maybe it’ll be the same direction, right? Isn’t there a stone in Worldsmouth? Maybe we could go there.”
It sounded so stupid. She sounded stupid. She glanced at Avery, whose steady eyes were on her, and her cheeks burned. Why did they have to be having this talk now, with everyone staring at her? When she and Avery hadn’t even really talked yet? Descending Gods what she’d give for some privacy.
“There’s not a stone in Worldsmouth,” Ella said, “but some of the other stones would need us to take waterways north.”
And some of them would not. Most of them, if she was reading Ella’s face right.
Avery cleared his throat. “Well, hopefully we’ll all be going in the same direction.”
Marea’s face lit up, and then it fell, and then her emotions were such a rush she had to just stare at the water and pray they talked about something else, anything else. Did Avery mean he hoped she would come with them? Or that he hoped he could stay with Tai a little longer because he was definitely coming with her? Did he not care at all?
Ella said something about Nauro and thank Prophets they moved on. Marea kept staring till she felt like she could at least trust her mouth, and her cheeks weren’t burning, though she still couldn’t bring herself to look at Avery.
“—do think he’s gone,” Tai was saying. “There were ten or fifteen shamans still standing when he fell, and the lightning bolt—”
He choked. Did Tai actually care about Nauro? Someone not from his precious rebel city?
Ella put a hand on his shoulder, even though she’d obviously never liked Nauro.
“Then I guess the question, me dears,” Feynrick said, pushing himself up from his sprawl with another dangerous rock of the boat, “is how we’re going to know where to go, without Nauro along. He said he’d be able to feel it, though pissed if I know what that meant.” He turned to Avery. “Can you feel the stones, boy?”
“I’m not sure what he meant by that either,” Avery said. Marea still couldn’t look at him, but he sounded uncomfortable. “But you all know about Semeca’s—well, obviously you know about it, with Mr. Kulga and all. I figure that much uai, anyone nearby has got to notice it. The Wanderer doesn’t have many people around it, but most of the other ones do—the Seingard Rock, the Ascension Stone, and the Minchu Stone. Even the At’li make regular trips to their stone, I hear.”
“And if the stone isn’t on Sai
cha?” Ella asked. “News won’t travel fast across the seas. If the Brineriders tell us at all.”
“Well we’ll have to go to Worldsmouth to find out,” Marea said, perking up. Riders rarely left their ships, and weren’t allowed past the Worldsmouth delta.
“I think we’ll see what we can learn in Yatiport first,” Tai said. “It’s a major Councilate port so there should be plenty of talk, and Feynrick and Avery, you both said you have people there. Hopefully someone will have heard something unusual, and we can make a plan from there.”
Make a plan from there. The weight in her stomach since Avery said he wanted to stay with Tai solidified into a solid rock of dread. What if they heard it was the At’li stone, way out on the ice sheet? Would she go? Was she never going to see her family again?
But what were a bunch of cousins compared to Avery?
Her mind spun on it the rest of the day, as Avery then Feynrick oared their way west, Yanu’s current slowing some as it widened. More villages began appearing along the coast. Yatiland looked much like the land around Ayugen, only with more stone, the river often running against gray granite cliffs or rushing around jagged outcroppings of rock.
There were more people, too—Ayugen seemed pretty isolated, but the lower they floated on the Yanu, the more red-haired people Marea saw doing their wash or trading or just watching the water. The forests patched out too, replaced with open farmland, and by the time the star was sinking low most every hilltop they saw was settled and fortified, and they were far from the only boat in the water, others laden with saltpork or hairy tubers headed downstream. The chill air carried the scent of smoke and human waste carried in the dirty streams flowing from the fields.
Feynrick and even Tai spelled Avery at the oars throughout the day, but he never held her as closely as he had during the night. She didn’t know if it was because he didn’t want everyone to stare or had a change of heart or something else, and hated that she couldn’t talk to him about it without talking to everyone about it. She ached for his touch, for some reassurance things were still okay between them.
That he would go with her and not Tai.
They shared a last round of stale bread and Yati saltpork—it was delicious, after weeks of wintergrass—as the star dipped low. Fires spangled the hillsides and water slushed against the oars. The air smelled of needleaf sap and burning dung.
Tai cleared his throat from the back of the boat. “Feynrick, aren’t you from this area? Any chance you know a safe place to put us up for the night?”
The Yatiman had been unusually quiet that afternoon, watching the shoreline pass and rubbing his beard. He rubbed it now then dropped his hand with a sigh. “Wish I did, milkweed, but things change fast around here.”
“Don’t you—have family here? Come from one of these villages?” Ella asked gently. She must have noticed the Yatiman’s melancholy too.
“I did have,” he said. “Now? Probably better to go on to Yatiport. Plenty of inns there.”
“Is that it?” Marea asked in the uncomfortable silence that followed. The horizon glowed, like Worldsmouth did at night.
“It should be,” Avery said. “We’re getting close.” He sat next to her, their arms interlinked, the single spot on her body that didn’t feel frozen.
“You’re still willing to ask around your contacts tomorrow?” Tai asked him. “See if anyone’s heard anything about a waystone?”
“Yes,” Avery said. “First thing. It’s no good for any of us if someone beats us to it.”
It’d be fine with her. What did she care if someone became a secret immortal being?
“If they did we would know about it by now,” Ella said. “At least, Nauro seemed to think we would.”
Avery licked his lips. “We would—all the uai I’ve gathered would be suddenly gone. But I doubt no one’s gotten there yet. They must just not know how to open the stone.”
“Neither do we,” Marea said. Avery knew that, right?
Ella resettled her furs. “Well it’s not the first mystery about the resonances I’ve solved,” she said. “I just hope we have all the clues we need. Speaking of which, Avery, what do you know of what Ollen was trying?”
“Just that it was based on a scrap of old text his cell had,” the muscular youth said. “Spears nine fall not before an unholy chorus was how most of them translated it. Or fall in time with, Credelen thought.”
Ella flexed her chin. “Not a lot more to work with.”
Tai leaned into an oar to steer them around a train of empty boats paddling back upstream. “Hopefully, it’s more than anyone else has,” he said, voice annoyingly casual about all the danger. “If someone figures it out first, well—”
He shrugged.
Shrugged! Because he didn’t want to say then we’re all instantly dead out loud?
No one else said it either, and the next bend in the river revealed the lights of Yatiport spread out like a landed colony of fireflies. Marea sighed and snuggled herself into Avery’s shoulder. Prophet send the gossip pointed them toward Worldsmouth tomorrow. And that she could convince him to leave this whole stupid thing if not.
Because if he didn’t want to, she’d have to choose between love and survival.
And what kind of choice was that?
29
The very currents themselves seemed to guarantee Worldsmouth’s ascendancy. Lying at the end of all rivers, even barges stacked high need little propulsion to travel downstream, beyond steering. And once we have lightened them of their load, they row easy against the current to fetch more.
—Telen Fostler, Empire Reconsidered
Yatiport was a city of towers. Not massive towers, like the Councilate had built in Ayugen, but miniature ones all over the city, each surrounded by its own wall and guarded with a surly-looking man out front.
“Not enough hills,” Feynrick said with a wink, when Tai asked him about it. The man was back to his jolly self after some heavy rounds of dreamtea last night. “Yati don’t feel safe unless we’ve got the high ground, but you can’t build a port on a hillside. So every clan and tribe has their own tower, and they watch each other as close as we do out in the counties.”
Tai was feeling better too, after a night in a real bed and a meal of something other than wintergrass. “Is that why you didn’t want to stay out there last night? Is your clan at war?”
“Clans are always at war,” the grizzled man said, stepping out of the way of a porter with a goat on his back, its bleats echoing from the high wood walls. “That’s what they do. But no. Regular war I could deal with, especially since the Councilate outlawed vengeance killings. Most they do is shoot a few arrows these days.”
Tai nodded, pulling his furs closer about him. It was warmer here, but the air still carried a chill. “What then?”
Feynrick worked his beard for a second, then brightened. “Did I ever tell you about the bottomless inn here?
There was something there the man didn’t want to talk about, which was fine. Everyone had their secrets. “No. Is that where we’re going to get information?”
“Information?” the man guffawed, drawing no attention in the noisy street. Turned out Feynrick wasn’t the only loud Yatiman. “Hounds no, man, you don’t go there for information. Though I don’t doubt those ladies know a thing or two. No, I know some houses I can stop, places people might still think kindly on old Feynrick of Rotwen. But you’d do better to stay out front, keep that hood up. I don’t doubt word of the Ayugen Savior has spread this far.”
Feynrick turned in to a sag-roofed tavern a few blocks down and Tai took his advice. It felt very strange, to be known this far from home. Even in Ayugen, the attention of the cultists and the way everyone looked at him had felt odd, but these people didn’t even know him.
They knew me, once upon a time.
Ydilwen. The voice had been mostly silent since the battle at the waystone, but Yatiport was his home, after all. Or, the home of the person his revenant was pretending to b
e, anyway.
You don’t think I’m real? Let me show you my mother’s house. Let me see her.
Tai did his best to ignore it, to keep his eyes on the street without drawing attention. Fortunately, this was something he had years of practice in, even if the streets of Yatiport felt different than Ayugen’s, with stone gutters and slate roofs and a humid breeze carrying the scent of burning dung. By the time Feynrick emerged Tai had identified the kids begging for change, the keepers minding them from a distance, and had guesses about which ones belonged to different gangs.
He pushed off the wall, raising eyebrows at his friend. “Learn anything?”
“Red Dogs are hunting Bent Stakes across the city, and Gealon Banewillow is trying to scrub an army big enough to take Splitsap and Bentow counties. But about what we’re looking for? Nah.” He spat green. “Drank enough dreamtea to last me a week, though.”
The next place they tried was a stone-faced restaurant on a wide street, though Feynrick entered through the back door. Tai took up position next to a pile of broke-staved barrels nearby, again spotting beggars from a gang he assumed used facial scarring to get sympathy, and a team of boys about Curly’s age working to pick pockets.
Would have been Curly’s age, anyway, if he’d survived.
And you still think you can kill whoever you please, in the name of your mission? Isn’t that what the Councilate did to your kids?
“I don’t kill kids,” Tai said under his breath. “And you might have noticed I didn’t kill most of Ollen’s brawlers in the forest, just knocked them out.”
And Ollen himself? Did you just knock him out?
Tai had choked the man with air—it was hard to know what had become of him. He rolled his shoulders. “He was attacking us.”
And that gives you the right to kill him?
“Yes,” Tai muttered, glancing around. “He was trying to kill us.”
Because you lied to him and were trying to find out what he knew.
“No. Because he found out who I was, and that was all the reason he had to want us dead.”
