But I could see it in their faces now, could see it in their eyes, in the way they bowed their heads. I’d seen it the day before, when the realization that one of the Servants had fallen had cut the elation of the Chorl retreat short, as smoothly and cleanly as if it had been an ax severing a tether.
Trielle . . .
For a moment, I felt her on the river, manipulating it, assured and precise. I sensed the mocking quality in her voice as she teased me about William, about Brandan, saw her lift an eyebrow in appreciation as a man walked past on the streets of Amenkor . . . or on the deck of the Defiant.
I heard her laughing.
Then I realized that Bullick had stopped speaking, that he’d leaned toward me slightly.
“Did you wish to say anything?” he said, in a low voice.
I glanced out toward those gathered on the deck, the guardsmen and sailors lined up at the feet of the thirteen shrouded bodies— their shipmates, fellow guardsmen, and friends. Avrell stood beside me. Keven, William, Isaiah, Heddan, and Marielle surrounded me, a wall of support. Gwenn remained below, with Ottul.
All of those on deck watched me, expectant. And beyond them, on the other two ships that had suffered during the attack—the Prize and the Spoils of War—I could feel the crews standing before their own dead, waiting for the signal, for the first body to drop from the Defiant into the ocean, so that they could do the same for those they’d lost.
Normally, I hated speaking in front of a crowd. But not this time.
I drew in a deep breath, slid beneath the river and threw out a net, stretching it toward the other four ships, even Tristan’s, so that all could hear, no matter how softly I spoke.
“I was told once that there is always a price,” I said, my voice rough and cracked. I didn’t care. I sensed the shock from the other ships as they heard me, heard the murmur on the Defiant, the sudden shifting of feet. “I know this. I grew up on the Dredge. But sometimes the price seems too high.” I looked toward the bodies, forced myself to gaze upon all of their shrouds, and then I lifted my chin, jaw tight, eyed all of those on deck, stared into all of their faces, into their tear-swollen eyes or their solemn grief. “These men and women paid that price for the rest of us. They paid to give us all safe passage to Venitte. Remember that when we pull into port. Remember them.”
Bullick stepped forward into the stark silence that followed, cleared his throat awkwardly. “With those words, we commit these bodies to the sea in the name of the Mistress. And for all of Amenkor.”
A bell clanged, the sound harsh. A few of the guardsmen flinched; Marielle gasped; Heddan cried out, the sound short and sharp. Stepping forward to the first body—Trielle’s—two sailors reached down, gripped the end of the plank her body rested on and lifted, raising the end to waist height, level with the railing, then shifting and tilting it higher.
The sound of her body sliding from the plank forced me to close my eyes, the scrape of cloth on wood digging deep into my gut.
A momentary breath of silence . . .
And a splash.
The back of my throat grew hot with tears. I swallowed, choked down the sound of her body hitting the ocean, tasted phlegm, but forced my eyes open, staring unseeing across the deck as the plank shifted, as the sailors moved to the next body, hefted it up onto the plank. Marielle sobbed to one side, but I refused to look at her, knew that if I did, the carefully controlled living thing in my gut, writhing like a snake, would escape. I listened to the clang of the bell, the scrape and splash of the next body, and the next, saw the flash of tan as a body fell from the edge of the Prize to one side, and then I dove beneath the river, deep, let the river’s wind take the sounds, dampen them so that I would not hear, let the world gray so that I could not see. I let the river be my refuge.
When it was over, Avrell touched my arm. He asked a question with his eyes, but I shook my head, the motion curt.
The gathering broke. Sailors moved back to their posts on deck, guardsmen drifted to the railing to look down at the waves, to where the bodies had vanished beneath the black surface, their mood somber. Bullick nodded to me before turning away, his expression tight, his grief controlled, hands clasped behind his back as he stared out toward the horizon. Marielle took Heddan’s arm and led her below, Keven and William trailing after, William catching my gaze, face tight.
I came last.
Marielle left Heddan at our cabin, to let her rest and grieve in isolation, but she did not stay herself. Instead, Heddan settled, she followed the rest of us as we proceeded down the narrow corridor.
To Ottul’s cabin.
When I opened the door, I found Ottul sitting on her cot, Gwenn cross-legged at her feet on the floor. She looked up when the door opened, the hand that held the brush she used on Gwenn’s hair halting, dropping to her side.
The other hand moved to rest on the top of Gwenn’s head. A protective gesture.
Gwenn stood.
“We heard the bells,” she said, her voice weak, but steady. “Is it over?”
“Yes.” I wanted to say more, could see that Gwenn needed more, but no words came.
Then Gwenn took the two steps that separated us and hugged me tight, her arms encircling my waist.
I stiffened, surprised. No one had ever approached me for comfort; no one had ever thought to.
I reached down tentatively and laid my hand on her head, as Ottul had done, saw Ottul’s mouth tighten, her brow crease slightly. I felt Gwenn trembling, but she didn’t sob, didn’t cry. Her arms tightened at my waist instead. I pulled her in close, stroked her hair, as Erick had once done for me, and simply held her.
Then I pushed her away, gently, knelt down beside her, looked her in the eye.
“I need to speak with Ottul,” I said. “You can stay if you want, or Marielle can take you back to my cabin.” Which was what I had intended: for Gwenn to stay with Heddan. I hadn’t intended to give her the choice.
Gwenn watched me closely a long moment. “It wasn’t Ottul’s fault,” she finally said.
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
“It wasn’t her fault. I heard the ship, heard the Chorl on deck. I thought I could help, but you told me to watch Ottul, so I brought her with me. . . .”
I glanced toward Ottul, her blue face impassive, her eyes on me, watching. No arrogance. No defiance. Something else lined her face, something I didn’t recognize.
I turned back to Gwenn. “It’s all right. I’m not going to hurt her. We’re just going to talk.”
Relief flooded her eyes. “Then I’ll stay. I can help.”
I hesitated, even then, stood. “Good,” I said, and faced Ottul. Marielle gathered Gwenn to her, while Keven and Avrell, waiting stooped over out in the corridor, stepped into the room and to one side. The quarters were tight, almost too crowded with six people in them, but even as everyone shifted about, Ottul’s eyes never wavered from mine. She didn’t react at all, until everyone was settled.
Then, her eyes narrowed. In a voice hard as stone, weighted with importance, she asked, “You gave to sea?”
I frowned. I should have been the first to ask a question, not her.
But she was talking, in the coastal common tongue, if haltingly and with strange inflections.
Her time with Gwenn had been well spent.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Dead,” she said, motioning with one hand toward the upper deck. She’d remained above in the aftermath of the battle, as the bodies were laid out, both Amenkor and Chorl alike, as the deck was cleaned.
She hadn’t been there when the Chorl dead were unceremoniously heaved overboard.
“You gave dead to sea?” she asked again.
I nodded, uncertain. “Yes.”
“Good.” Ottul relaxed, muttered something under her breath, a prayer, and lifted her hands, palms up, to the ceiling, head back, eyes closed. I thought she might have collapsed into the hunched position she’d used so often in her room in Amenkor, but the
re wasn’t enough room here. She hummed something, not quite a song, more like a deep-throated phrase repeated over and over, and then she halted, opening her eyes and dropping her gaze back to me, dropping her hands to her lap, the brush she’d used to comb Gwenn’s hair still in one hand. There was something different about her posture, something new.
And then I realized that she was no longer tense, no longer rigid. She’d relaxed, as if she’d been freed . . . or as if she had nothing left to fear.
“All Chorl given to sea,” she said, the harshness gone, but not the intensity. “All return to sea, or become . . .” she struggled a moment, then gave up, “become ankril. Cannot find Queotl.”
“Ankril? Queotl?” I glanced toward Avrell and Keven, saw perplexed expressions on their faces.
“Lost,” Gwenn said softly. “She’s saying that you have to give the bodies to the sea, or the warriors become lost, that they can’t find Queotl.” She spoke to Ottul in the Chorl language a moment. “The ankril are those that are lost.”
“And what is Queotl?”
Gwenn shook her head. “I don’t know. ‘Que’ means fire. ‘Otl’ is like heaven. Fire-heaven?”
My eyes widened and I murmured, “The Fires of Heaven.” I turned to Avrell and Keven grimly. “That’s what the Ochean and the priest Haqtl called the White Fire.”
“When they die, they must seek the Fires of Heaven,” Avrell said. “From what she’s saying, they can only find it if their bodies are ‘given’ to the sea.”
“Where is Queotl?” I asked Ottul. “Where are the Fires of Heaven?”
Her brow knit in consternation, whether because she could not find the words or because the answer should have been obvious I couldn’t tell. “Come from ocean. From west. Lives in east.”
West. The direction the White Fire had come from. I tried not to show my frustration. Apparently the Chorl knew as little about where the White Fire came from as I did.
Except they thought it came from the ocean. Because they had seen it originating from the ocean, or because as far as they knew there was nothing to the west except ocean?
Thinking back to the rooftop on the Dredge, when the Fire had first appeared over the water on the horizon and scorched its way across Amenkor, I could understand how they could believe it had come from the ocean. But somehow, I couldn’t bring myself to believe that the ocean was its source.
And they thought it lived in the east? Is that why they’d come to the coast?
Or was it because their history told them that we were here?
I sighed. I hadn’t come down here to find out about the Fire.
I waved toward the deck above, hardened my own voice. “What happened up there? Why did you kill the Chorl Servant? Why didn’t you try to escape, to return to your own people?”
Ottul straightened. A hint of the old arrogance returned, but it did not hold, faltering and crumbling until she lowered her head, a few strands of her long black hair falling before her face.
“I . . . cannot.”
The words were almost unintelligible, soft and hoarse, full of a deep despair.
And on the river I tasted sadness, the same pungent sweet onion I’d smelled before.
“What do you mean you can’t?” Avrell asked.
Ottul jerked her head upright, her eyes red with withheld tears, but she could not meet any of our gazes, not even Gwenn’s. “I am antreul,” she said, no more than a husk of sound, her dark blue lips pressed together, trembling, shoulders slumped. “I am . . . Forgotten.”
I leaned back, remembered the ritualistic gestures the other Chorl Servant had made, recalled the look of utter horror and despair on Ottul’s face, the way she’d reeled back, as if she’d been physically struck.
“Why?” I said, although I thought I already knew.
Ottul met my gaze. If it had been any of the others who had asked, I wasn’t certain she would have answered. “I am captured. I am . . . lost.” She stumbled over the word, looked at Gwenn briefly.
The deaths of the other Chorl we’d captured in Amenkor after the attack suddenly made sense. They’d waited weeks to be freed, to be rescued, and then they’d killed themselves so that they would not be made antreul, Forgotten.
Or they’d killed themselves because they already were in their minds.
“And why did you kill the Chorl Servant?” Avrell interrupted. “Because you were Forgotten?”
Ottul didn’t answer, not in words. But she winced, and her eyes flickered toward Gwenn, before sliding away, back down to the floor, her head bowing forward again.
For a moment, I considered dismissing Avrell and Keven, speaking to Ottul alone, certain that she’d reveal more if the two men were not listening.
But then Gwenn stepped forward, moved to stand before Ottul. “I know.”
Everyone in the room stilled.
“What do you mean, Gwenn?” I asked.
She turned toward me, her face intent, serious for a moment. But then she bit her lip, as if uncertain.
Ottul said something, reached out a hand to touch Gwenn’s shoulder before turning away.
Gwenn relaxed, drew in a deep breath. “It’s because of me. I remind her of her sister, and her sister was killed by the Ochean, by the other Servants.”
I frowned, shot a glance toward Ottul. “I don’t understand.”
Gwenn stepped forward, speaking fast, voice filled with fury. “She’s been telling me what they have to do to earn the rings in their ears, what they have to go through. It’s horrible! It’s nothing like what we do to train. They’re forced into the temple once they know that they can use the Sight, taken from their families and hidden. And in the temple they get tested. If they can’t do something—raise a shield, create a warding—then they’re beaten, and beaten again the next day, and the next, until they can. And sometimes the beating is so bad that the Servant doesn’t recover.
“Ottul said she went to the temple first, that she barely managed to gain the fourth ring, that it took her years to get that far. When she had passed ket—the second ring—they brought her sister to the temple. She’d prayed that her sister wouldn’t have the Sight, and she tried to protect her once she was in the temple, tried to help her—”
Gwenn broke off, reined in her escalating rage. “But she couldn’t. One day, when her sister failed to reach ket, the other Servants beat her unconscious, left her on the sands. Ottul found her there—”
Gwenn broke off again, this time because she’d choked on her own tears. She tried to control them, almost succeeded. “She says that I remind her of her sister.”
I turned to Ottul, her head bowed forward. “You were supposed to kill yourself like the other Chorl we captured, weren’t you? Because you were Forgotten. Antreul.”
Ottul flinched, but then straightened defiantly.
“She didn’t because she hates them,” Gwenn said. “Because they killed her sister.”
But not completely, I thought. I’d seen the hope in her face when she’d come up on deck during the attack, the hope that perhaps the Chorl would take her back. Only after the other Chorl Servant had made that slicing gesture across her chest—and after they’d threatened Gwenn—had she retaliated.
I sighed. Suddenly the tension of the battle, the grief of its aftermath, the funeral on deck, were too much.
Turning to Marielle and Gwenn, I said, “Stay with her. See if you can find out anything more. Anything at all.”
Marielle nodded, although I could see her own grief bruising the edges of her eyes. Exhaustion, and more.
Motioning to Avrell and Keven, I started toward my cabin but remembered Heddan, coming up short.
“Use mine,” Keven said.
I nodded, turned sideways to slide past the steep ladder leading up to the deck, and pushed into Keven’s cabin.
Even as Keven ducked through the door and closed it behind him, Avrell said, “She seems much more cooperative now.”
“Something happened on the deck while
the Chorl were attacking, when she came up from below with Gwenn. Did you see it?”
Avrell shook his head, but Keven grunted. “The other Chorl Servant did something, made some sort of gesture, as if she were drawing a blade across her chest.”
“I think Ottul thought they might still take her back, but the other Servant cut her off. And then the other Servant tried to kill her.”
Avrell’s eyebrows rose. “So being Forgotten means death?”
“Apparently. That’s why the Chorl warriors we captured killed themselves. And Ottul seemed willing to accept death at first.”
“What do you mean? She retaliated. She killed the other Servant.”
I shook my head. “No. She did nothing at first. She only intervened when Gwenn stepped between her and the other Servant, when Gwenn protected her, tried to save her. I think she killed the other Servant to save Gwenn. She’s bonded with Gwenn, because she reminds her of her sister.”
“So can we trust her?” Keven asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. But she’s cooperating because of Gwenn . . . and because she is Forgotten. There’s no doubt for her now. Without Gwenn’s intervention, I think she would have allowed the other Servant to kill her.”
“But can we trust that? Is that enough?”
I shook my head. “No. Not yet.”
Avrell straightened, grew more formal. “She could prove her loyalties, though.”
“How?”
“She could allow you to put a portion of the Fire inside of her.”
I stilled. “I could see what she was thinking, could seize control of her if necessary.”
“Why can’t you just put the Fire in her anyway?” Keven asked. “With or without her permission.”
“Because she’s a Servant. She can protect herself with a shield.”
“And it would have more meaning if she gave her permission,” Avrell added. “It would verify where her loyalties now lie.”
“I’ll have Gwenn explain it to her. See if Ottul would be willing. But not right now.” I scrubbed at the tightness around my eyes, at the grief and pain and exhaustion.
The Vacant Throne Page 25
