by D. N. Bryn
If I hurry to Thais and finish the trek to her mother’s hoard, everything we originally wanted will still work out. That’s my best bet right now. My only bet. I conveniently ignore the fact that it’s the only bet that lets me see Thais the longest and still gets me all the ignits I want, just as I ignore some other facts, facts revolving around the Murk and a fisher’s threat. Maybe the group of elders will find Lily before she can get to the coast. This is their home—they can deal with her.
I draw back into the mangroves and slip far beneath the surface. With my belly brushing the silt, I swim across the rivulet and dive back into the trees. Something large and crocodilian moves along the edges of my senses, but when I pause to consider my heading, I lose track of it.
I pull Rubem’s little compass free of the wire caging. I can’t wish for Thais’s suffering, but the needle steadily pointing me toward her current spasm douses me in relief. Judging by the way it shifts as I swim, she’s a slight curve to the north and a little closer to the sea.
I nearly miss her and Xera curled in the hollow of an old split mangrove, a dead branch half covering the opening, their canoe wedged into the roots a few trees away. The fog lingers in the shadows outside, and the gentle morning light turns everything silver and grey. Thais sleeps with her head in Xera’s lap. I climb in with them, my ancient-wrapped hand tucked beneath my necklace. Only the distant clamber of monkeys through the trees breaks the stillness.
Xera smiles at me. The reek of rotting wood blocks out their smell, but from the way they duck their head afterward, their expression must not be entirely happy. Their gaze moves out the hollow’s entrance. Slowly, that half-sad smile falls. I don’t have to smell their worry to know what it means.
“The elders got Fern,” I tell them.
Xera’s hands flutter in a soundless oh. They close their eyes. “She’ll be all right,” they finally sign, their motions stabilizing with each word.
“Yeah,” I repeat, “she’ll be all right.”
I fiddle with Rubem’s compass for a moment. With a great heave, I throw the whole mess out of the tree. A watery plop vibrates over my ridges, then it sinks.
Thais shifts in her sleep. Her face pinches, and her arms wrap tightly around her chest, dirty curls rubbing into the tree’s brittle wood and dusty floor. My heart does a terrible painful thing at the sight of her, as though it alone shatters the way my bones do.
As slowly as I can, I wrap my tail beneath her, lifting her into the coils. Chunks of her hair stay behind. Bile rises in my throat, and I look to Xera, who swallows.
Thais’s long lashes flutter. A rumble vibrates through her chest as her eyes creep open. Crust rims her swollen lids, and red veins turn her haunting ignit irises into a terror.
“Cacao?” she signs with small shaking motions.
Her rain-cleaned scent floods me, calming and exhilarating all at once, but a tinge of sickness coats it, sticking to the inside of my nostrils like a mold, growing fuzz and digging through flesh toward my brain. I glance at the locks she left behind. She follows my gaze. Her whole body trembles, and she presses her face against my scales.
I scoot closer and run my hand along her back, trying not to catch my fingers in her hair. What can I say to make this better? Nothing.
I caused this. I didn’t get that poison ignit from Rubem, I took too long at the ancient to save him from the fishers, I thought of myself when I should have been thinking of Thais. Worthless greedy me caused this.
Xera tucks their lip in their mouth and touches a steadying hand to Thais’s shoulder. “I will shave it off for you, make it look nice. When you’re better, it will grow back, and look, look nice long again then too.”
Thais sniffles a few more times and weakly sits up. She pats her hair, cringing as it comes out in her hands. Closing her eyes, she flicks the strands away. “Do it.”
Xera draws out the little blade they keep in their belt and sets to work. They move like the mist. Thais’s hair falls in long coiling strands until it coats my scales. A short patchy fuzz remains. Thais tries to pull away, water—tears—brimming in her eyes, but Xera wordlessly holds her in place. They draw their blade smoothly around the thinner patches. As they shave, a pattern appears, spiraling out like the tendrils of a vine or the fluttering end of Thais’s scarf when she dances.
Thais touches the designs tenderly. When she looks at Xera, her lips turn up just a little, but the smile immediately falls away. Her legs shake as she stands. She grabs the side of the hollow for support. “I’m going to sit in the trees.”
“If we’re not leaving, you should sleep,” I protest.
“I’ve slept enough.”
Somehow, I doubt she can sleep enough until she has a green ignit in her necklace to dampen the poison flooding her veins. “I’m coming with you, then.”
“Fine.” She stares straight ahead as though I no longer exist, despite my announcement.
When I offer her help, she hesitates. She reaches past me for the next branch. Her foot slips. I catch her, and she shrugs me off like I’m part of the scenery. If that’s what it takes for her to accept my aid—if she needs to pretend she’s not being helped in the first place—then so be it.
An era passes between each of her clumsy steps, and she holds herself with the weight of the world. My heart refuses to piece back together, like her weakness torrents the broken bits farther and farther apart. I grip the backside of my necklace with my ancient-wrapped hand.
The ancient’s soothing pulse returns. Its velvet body wiggles free of my skin, twisting itself around my blue ignit, a soft rainbow sparkle flickering off its surface. Then it goes dark again, looking like nothing more than a big black rock in my collection. I poke at the ancient, a little worried for my ignit’s sake, but I still feel the gentle pulse of it through the layers of its otherworldly creator.
Above me, Thais finally settles into a crook in the strong branches of a young mangrove beside our hollow. I wind loosely around her. She leans her head against my shoulder. Watching her suffocates me, but looking away is impossible. She’s beautiful—her bravery and her determination and the lovely patterns wrapping around her skull, her blue eyes still alight despite all she suffers. But the poison taints every part of her body now, her skin ghostly and glossy, her lips chapped from stomach acid.
I could have stopped this. If I had been fast enough, certain enough, selfless enough. The knowledge settles like a weight between my collarbones, my rock-holding necklace three times too heavy.
Thais’s hands move, slow and shaky. “I wanted to rescue you.” A shudder runs through her, and she wipes the edges of her eyes.
I slip my fingers under hers, brushing back the tears. Whatever earlier annoyances I had at being left with Rubem vanish entirely when she leans into my touch. I wish I didn’t need to pull away to sign. “You were too sick—there’s nothing to feel guilty for. And it all turned out fine, more or less.”
Maybe the sickness wears on her too much to object, because she only asks, “What happened with Rubem?”
The words wall up inside me, coated in a heavy film of shame. How can I tell her the truth? How can I explain that I chose to stay with Rubem, to steal an ancient for him, even after I had agreed to help Thais get to her mother’s hoard? How can I convey the way the shock overtook me when I saw Rubem’s poison ignit, or my decision not to dash after him?
I can’t. I won’t. Fern isn’t here to prove me a selfish silt-breather.
“Nothing happened,” I reply. “Rubem’s not such a bad guy, really. It turns out he wants your hoard to give to those light-skinned fishers so they don’t bring their friends from the north and try to tear down the Murk.”
“They want to what? Why didn’t you lead with that?” She tries to swat me in the arm, her attacks bouncing off. She could lose a fight with a mosquito right now. “Wait, but those two died?”
“Apparently, they’re harder to kill then they look.”
“Damn fishers.” Thais mumbles,
her hand motions sloppy and her brow lowered. “I might not be a Murkling, but the mere idea of tearing down the Murk makes me shudder. Those northerners must be despicable.”
“Despicable? That’s the best you can do?”
“Despicable as foulmouthed sons of corpses oozing fungal slime.”
“There’s my ignit eyes.” The words slip out, and I regret them the moment my hands finish moving, because Thais’s whole being changes. For better or for worse, I can’t tell. I search for something—anything—to distract her, to help her relax. “Lily took over the cartel boats while I was on my way here. I don’t know what happened to Rubem.”
The admission hurts like a spear to the gut, despite the fact that when I ran, I ran to Thais’s aid. When I’m away from her, it hurts, and when I leave behind people whom she would’ve wanted me to save, it hurts as well. This is a fucking mess.
Thais’s chest shudders. “Then we have to help him.” She leans forward, another tremble wracking her body.
My lungs catch, and I grab her shoulders. “What’s wrong?”
“I saved one of them, remember?” Her signs form so small. “If those two fishers are here, killing people—if they come destroy the Murk . . .” Tears slip down her cheeks, making a new kind of rain now that the smell of sickness pollutes her scent name. “I couldn’t just let him die, but . . .”
“You did what you felt was right, ignit eyes.” I pause to wipe her clammy cheeks again. “And, maybe I still think that thing was a little bit dumb, but it doesn’t make all the bad things Wolf’s done since then your fault. He’s his own person. He gets his own blame.”
“You make it all sound so simple.” Thais reaches up as though to tuck a curly lock behind her ear. Her fingers meet only air. They shake. “My hair . . .”
“I’m sorry. It was so long and silky. You know, before you decided to fall in the swamp a few dozen times and spend the night in a log.” I smell nothing except her failing body, but I catch an upward twitch in her expression. “If it means anything, though, I think you look beautiful with the haircut. I’m a boiuna after all, I’m attracted to bald heads.”
“You’re attracted to me?”
“I didn’t say that.” But even the implication stings like a lie on my fingers, my scales aching with the memory of Thais’s hands when we danced. “I also didn’t not say that.”
She smiles, a real smile, I think, and melts against my side, tucking her head into the crook of my neck. Her breath seems to sink straight through my scales, warming my chest until it must glow with heat. I ache to touch her in new ways, but I scold the instinct. Thais needs to rest more than anything right now. I wrap my arm around her in support as she trails her fingers in weak circles over my stomach, a slow rhythm to them, harmonizing with my heartbeat.
Her necklace lies against my side, poking through her thin shirt. Its empty edges dig between my scales, and my guilty conscience puts words to her song: You did this, your fault, you did this, selfish silt-breather.
That poison ignit probably still sits in Rubem’s secret pocket, pressed against his chest. Or his corpse. If we do go back, if we fight Lily and win, then there’s a chance to retrieve the ignit. It’s not our best option, but Thais deserves to know. My hands tremble as I lift them. Muck, I hope she doesn’t hate me.
I poke her. “Hey, Thais?”
Her chest rumbles in response, but her eyes barely open, her fingers still mindlessly moving.
This is so hard; too hard, maybe. As I force my hands to start on the next sign, Xera’s soft leather shoes leap through the leaves above us. They drop down at our side.
“We have to, to go. They’re here. I don’t know how, but they, they found us.”
My insides knot together. “The fishers?”
“Worse.”
The whole canopy trembles, and ripples appear along the water. A host of Murkling warriors arise from all corners, a dozen humans and hoatzis perching in the trees, outfitted in scales and feathers and crossbows. Four boiuna, each a little bigger than Fern, slide up the nearby trunks. But the fear building so thick in my lungs that it clouds me with its stench comes from the three great ridges growing in the swamp, nearing us at a speed I could never match.
The massive boiuna breach the surface in unison, water streaming off scales. One of Acai’s otters lies across their green shoulders, and the sharp-smelling Cayenne bares fangs so big he could bite my head clean off, the rows of his teeth nearly the same banana hue as the splotches along his deep-grey body. Between them swims a boiuna larger than either and twice as angry.
Her deep-brown scales warp around the edges, as though age is turning her into a crocodilian, and her ridges jut like horns from her skull, a twisting mess that resembles living roots. Chains of beads and sharp carnivorous teeth hang off them in such a painful number it seems the ancient ridges no longer feel a thing, but I know she can sense the very beat of my heart in my chest and the thrum of every ignit for a mile. A harsh briny scent like the entire wind-whipped sea compressed into a single breeze flows from her, nearly demolishing the names of everyone in her vicinity.
I force a grin, wrapping myself around Thais like she’s my ignit. The stone buried beneath the ancient on my necklace barely keeps my bones from jittering out of my body as I sign, “Hey, Mom.”
SEVENTEEN
Damn Salty in Here
Ugh.
Mothers.
BRINE REMAINS HAUNTINGLY STILL, but her disappointment sloughs off her. I tuck myself instinctively behind Thais’s shoulder. My heartbeat bursts like a fan boat skidding precariously to its doom.
“You, little bittersweet earthen one, are in direct violation of the council’s appointed ruling.” My first forebearer’s hands move like the rage of the waves upon the shore, elegant yet terrifyingly powerful. “If entering the Murk was your only transgression, then perhaps this slight could’ve been overlooked. But you have brought boat humans with you, both the one you cling to now and known enemies of the Murk, including a fleet of fishers and members of the notorious Fang Cartel.”
“That’s not fair! I didn’t bring them here. They were chasing me,” I protest, but my weak signs won’t save me. Nothing ever has before.
“All the same, they are here because of you,” Brine replies.
A shudder runs through Cayenne. “Because of you, an ancient lies in ruins!”
I swear the creature wrapped around my necklace grows heavier. “I did that, yeah, but, see, I had a reason.” A reason I couldn’t follow through on. A reason Brine’s unlikely to believe.
“A reason? Ha!” Cayenne’s hands fly, humorless and terrifying, and he bares his rows of dagger-like teeth.
My fingers trace over the ancient as though it’s another stone in my collection. Like this, it might as well be one. I drop my hand. “That doesn’t matter now. What matters is my friend. She’s dying. Please, she has to get to the shore to retrieve a cure. That’s why I’m here. I never meant to hurt the Murk.” There’s no lie in my words, but they feel dishonest all the same, a far better portrait of me than I could ever live up to.
“What kind of cure is there at the coast?” Acai asks, the thick mass of darker green scales along their brow drawing together.
I wish for Fern’s ability to lie. In the Murklings’ mess of scents, I catch a whiff of her wet fern smell. She’s nearby, at least.
Thais nudges my waist. “Tell them. It’s fine.”
I hate that she’s probably right. And I hope that right means something good in this case. “My friend is dying from a powdered green ignit infecting her bloodstream. A mechanic made her something that will reverse the effects, but it needs another of the same stone to power it. The only one we know of is hidden near the coast.” But it’s not the only one, my shame objects. I add hastily, “She’s a good person, even if I’m not. She deserves to live.”
Acai and Cayenne focus on Thais, clearly taking in her colorless complexion, the languid way she lies against my chest, the red vein
s of her shadowed eyes. But my first forebearer never looks away from me, her gaze boring through my soul. I clutch my necklace and wish to vanish like the morning mist.
Thais stirs in my arms. Her breathing feels too heavy, but when she signs, her motions come out strong. “Whatever this boiuna has done in the past may have warranted his banishment, but he’s not the same person as he was then. I care about him, and he cares about me.”
Despite the fear and guilt and dread, a blossom of warmth springs in my chest. Tenderly, I set my chin on her shoulder, pressing my forehead to the side of her shaved hair’s spirals. “I do, ignit eyes.”
“The only green ignit, you say?” Brine’s chest vibrates, not with sound but with sheer fury. “Would your friend feel the same if she knew you were so near one just this morning, that you could have brought it to her, but you didn’t?”
My chest seizes. Motherfucking—how, how does Brine know? She saw me, she or another boiuna or—or—
Fern. Fern, with all her lies and fibs and half-truths, must have slipped up in this, accidentally or on purpose, I don’t know.
“That’s not—”
But Brine continues her assault, not pausing for the mess of thoughts in my head and the tangle of my hands to settle. “What are you gaining from this, little earth? Ignits?” she guesses, her salty scent turning bitter. “Or have you progressed to taking life for the fun of it?”
No. No, no, no, this can’t—oh muck. “It’s not—I don’t—I wanted the ignits, yeah, but I—” Muck. Motherfucking—
Thais slips out of my coils, her whole body shaking, shaking. She looks at me, but then she doesn’t, flashing her eyes elsewhere, red and wet. The smell of her shock and pain fills the air like a downpour. “Cacao, you really . . .” But her hands fall. She wobbles, and Xera catches her.
