To Dream of White & Gold (Death Dreamer Legacy Book 1)

by R. K. Hart

  It was lucky for Lida that the sailor’s gift was slight. Even so, she was strong in desperation, and Lida felt illae pull all around her, all over her, all through her, in an insistent spiral. It dragged on her skin, her hair, catching at the very essence of her, trying to wrench her apart to gift her pieces to the dying woman. To give in would be easy, the illae seemed to whisper, circling around Lida’s mindshield, tantalising, enticing, insistent. Help your sister live. Lida struggled against it, furiously channelling power to her shield, digging her nails into her palms so hard that blood welled. It was only when the sailor’s fingers stilled on the wood beneath her and her last breath left her lips that the relentless pull ceased and Lida was able to come back to herself, sobbing for breath and wiping her shaking hands on her thighs, leaving trails of blood. The illae that had swirled through the sailor dispersed into the world, and as Lida had not stopped drawing she felt it flow into her. Bile rose up her throat; it was both comforting and repulsive to know that the dead sailor was now sustaining her, strengthening her mindshield, making her whole. She doubled over, retching.

  ‘Come on, Lida!’

  Lorcan grabbed her arm and pulled her away from the jetty and across the meadow, following the path the horses had made as they crashed through the long grass. They ran until they stumbled across a cairn of grey stone, half hidden by the waist-length grass around it. Lorcan climbed atop it and Lida followed him; they lay on their stomachs and watched as the black ship made its way further into the port.

  ‘What makes that noise?’ she cried, as the booming sound came again, causing a destruction she could not comprehend. Orange and red blossoms of fire had broken out among the houses lining the port; the breeze gusted towards the cairn, and she could hear screaming. From this far, she could not see the arrows, but she could see the rhythmic movements of the ship’s sailors, see them nock and draw and loose as one towards the shore.

  Lorcan wiped his face. ‘Canons make that noise, ais-la,’ he said grimly.

  The breath left her lungs. ‘But the Three-Land Council banned canons!’

  He didn’t respond, though his fingers tightened on her hand; his eyes were on the port, where one ship had caught ablaze and smoke was pouring into the sky, the blue turning an oppressive thick grey. His body was rigid. ‘Get off, get off,’ he whispered, so quietly Lida wasn’t sure she’d heard properly. ‘Gods, get out.’

  Lida wept silently. Her instinct was to run towards the town to help; reason told her she should not. The black ship made no move to dock, nor to breach the gate of woven iron, which had lowered to block the mouth of the Little Lifeblood. Instead, it completed an unhurried, deliberate loop around the port, leaving fire and blood and ash in its wake. They were too far away to feel any more death spirals, but from the intermittent screaming carried to them by the capricious breeze Lida had no doubt that there were many people hurt. She watched a group of portspeople gather to throw bottles of flaming oil at the ship; she watched as its sailors nocked arrows and, with terrifying accuracy, cut down every single one of them.

  Lida lay her cheek flat on the stone of the cairn, unable to watch any more. She registered dimly that Lorcan was drawing again, at a massive rate and scale; the hairs on the back of her neck stood up and she disentangled her hand from his, moving her body away, scared to touch him. The urge to relinquish her own power was great, just as insistent as the sailor’s death pull; she took a number of deep breaths and channelled to her shield, as much and as fast as she could manage, to try to combat Lorcan’s draw.

  She didn’t understand what he was doing until she looked up, feeling something wet hit her neck. Where there had been clear sky and a warm spring sun there were now menacing black clouds laced with smoke, sitting so low that Lida imagined she could reach out and touch them. Lightning crackled, illuminating the grey from the inside; thunder rolled and Lida cried out, curling herself into a ball as rain began to fall.

  It came in sheets that drummed her skin, hard enough to bruise. Within moments she was entirely drenched, water streaming over her face, making it difficult to breathe. The pull of illae stopped suddenly; Lorcan hooked an arm around her waist and dragged her off the cairn to crouch in the grass next to it. He doubled his coat over, pulling it up to shield his head and face, standing half over Lida, sheltering her. She collapsed down to her knees, gasping for air. The rain ran off them in tiny waterfalls, pooling to turn the earth beneath them into sandy mud.

  She wasn’t sure how long it lasted. It might have been only minutes, but it felt as if the entire ocean had fallen on them. When the rain finally stopped, it was immediate. Lorcan peered out from under his coat, his face white, his breath light and too fast.

  ‘It has finished, I think,’ he said.

  Lida looked out warily; she could still see black clouds, but no deluge of rain. She got awkwardly to her feet, the mud sucking at her boots, and stripped her coat from her arms, swearing as it clung stubbornly to her shirt. Everything was dripping wet, though there wasn’t much she could do about it. She wrung out her hair and knotted it on top of her head as she turned back toward the town.

  The black ship was gone. So were the fires. Her tired brain registered that they had been Lorcan’s target.

  ‘Gods,’ she whispered. ‘Gods, Lor. You did it.’

  He staggered slightly, bracing himself against the cairn. His eyes were black and glittering but his face was entirely drained of colour, and he looked as if he were struggling not to be sick. Lida took his free hand, concerned, but he shook his head.

  ‘I just need a moment to catch my breath,’ he said.

  Lida turned back to the port. She could see activity, see people running back and forth, and hear a child wailing. She stepped towards it, but Lorcan pulled her back, his brow drawn.

  ‘There are people dying down there,’ he said softly. ‘You will not be able to unsee this. Are you sure?’

  She wiped her face. She wasn’t, but she knew she had to go anyway.

  ‘I’m sure.’

  Lorcan nodded, and kissed her hard on the lips, almost desperately. ‘Then shield, Lida,’ he whispered.

  ***

  Lida wondered many times over the next few hours whether she had made the right decision.

  She didn’t mind the dead. Her fingers had gone numb as she worked, so she didn’t mind what they felt like, and their glassy eyes looked through her, further. They were gone and past the pain and what remained was only flesh, drained of illae and empty of soul. It brought Lida comfort to think that they might have passed through the peace of the white place, that they might have looked upon the white and gold and known that something new awaited them.

  It was the dying that bothered her. Their pain pressed relentlessly against her shield and their prayers for help echoed loud and clear in her mind. Gifted or ungifted, it made no difference: their terror and their agony broke over the world in unrelenting waves. Lida could give them nothing but makeshift bandages and words, and she moved from one to the next as if her arms and legs were weighted with helplessness. When they cried in pain she sang to them; when they choked on their own blood, or tried to patch flesh back onto their own bodies, she held their hands and tried to soothe them, tried to give them comfort. She gave so much of it away she wondered whether she would ever feel it for herself again.

  The cobbled town square, flanked by shops and open on one side to the sea, had been quickly set up as a makeshift hospice and morgue. One of the shops to the southern end was beautifully decorated, with a carefully painted doorway and grey stone walls covered with climbing roses; it was completely untouched and unnervingly idyllic given the bodies arranged in neat rows before it and the sooty sky hanging over its roof.

  Lorcan was asleep to one side of the injured, his head pillowed on one arm. Lida had almost lost her mind when he’d stumbled and fell as they came into the square; it had been Eve who had caught him, Eve who had calmed her - it’s illae-sickness, Sivasdotter, breathe - and Eve who had gently la
id him down. The First had given Lida and Jessa a choice: help with the dead, or go and find the living. Lida hadn’t been able to speak, so Jessa had answered. I’ve seen enough of death.

  They had found plenty, though.

  At first, there had been many injured lying on sheets ripped from nearby beds, uncomfortable with the hard stone beneath them; hours later, their numbers were fewer. A handful of physicians and two illae-healers moved through the square, some of them weeping. One of the buildings, which had been the local healing practice – full of both healers and patients – was now reduced to a mess of stone. From the look of the building, Lida didn’t think it possible that any inside had survived.

  She and Jessa were working to clear rubble. Buildings that just hours before had been four storeys tall were now piles of stone and shards of wood; some had been homes, and some had been shops, bustling with customers. The worst was the remains of what had clearly been a crèche: tiny bodies wrapped in bloodied coats were being carried through the remnants of a brightly-patterned doorway. Lida had taken one look and had turned aside to retch until the inside of her felt wholly empty.

  In the hours they had been working, only twice had they found unharmed survivors. They had been both trapped and protected by the way the stone and wood had fallen around and above them. Lida wondered if it meant the gods were real, and if there was some plan for those two souls; in the next breath, she wondered if it didn’t mean a thing at all.

  More than anything else, Lida felt overwhelmed, mostly by guilt. She wasn’t sure that she deserved to be as lucky as she was. It had been luck they’d gotten off the Belle when they did, luck that they’d been out of the range of the black ship’s arrows. It had been luck that she’d been with Lorcan, who had the presence of mind to pull her away so they could watch it all unfold from a distance. It was luck that she was alive and whole, and a different kind of luck that so many others were not. She supposed that she ought to have been grateful, but when she looked across the ashy mess that had been a bustling port town, she didn’t think she could muster the energy for gratefulness.

  She and Jessa worked silently. Jessa’s face was covered in soot; tears had tracked down her cheeks and left rivulets of skin through the muck. Isla, tired and grim, was working with Eve to keep the still forms of the dead lain out respectfully as their numbers grew.

  ‘How long do we keep going?’

  Lida wiped her sleeve across her face, smearing ash and tears and dust everywhere. ‘Until we have to stop, I suppose.’

  Jessa collapsed down to kneel on the hard stone, as if all her energy had suddenly fled. ‘Why would someone do this?’ she burst out. ‘Where did that ship come from?’

  Lida coughed to cover the sob rising in her throat, thinking of the crèche. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, giving up and letting the tears come. ‘I don’t know.’

  Jessa took her hand and they both wept quietly, overcome with tiredness. When they were done, Jessa pulled Lida back to her feet and nodded to a large sheet of wood, an entire internal wall from a shop that had fallen over, intact, onto rubble.

  ‘That next,’ she said. ‘Then we will almost be to the ground.’

  Lida nodded, and together they slowly cleared the stone atop the fallen wall, stacking it neatly to one side. Together, they used their shoulders to heft up the wood, tipping it up and laying it gently on its other side to check the rubble beneath.

  A woman lay beneath it, curled into a ball on her side. Lida could see that she was breathing, but her face was a mess of blood and dirt from a cut to her temple. Her auburn hair was braided across her head to fall over one shoulder, and she was dressed in a long-sleeved tunic of olive-green and fawn tights, her brown leather boots lacing to the knee. Her strong arms cradled her pregnant belly, protective even in unconsciousness.

  The woman stirred and moaned, and when she moved her head and opened her eyes, Lida’s legs gave way and she collapsed into the rubble.

  It was Maya.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Brave

  Lida could feel Jessa next to her, her hands on Lida’s shoulders; she even felt Jessa give her a small shake, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away from Maya’s stomach, swelling out from her body in a neat round shape. She didn’t have much experience, but guessed that her sister was at least five or six months pregnant.

  ‘Oh, gods,’ she whispered, as things fell into place. ‘That’s why you left when you did. Oh, gods. The mint-leaf tea. You knew, even then. Oh, May.’ She gathered herself back together. ‘Healer!’ she shrieked. ‘Healer!’

  She scrambled over the rubble surrounding Maya and sought her pulse. When she found one, it was steady and strong; Maya stirred further as Lida gently touched the skin near the wound on her temple. She blinked slowly at the sky.

  ‘May?’ Lida said softly.

  ‘Lida?’ Maya winced and put a hand to her head, then focused on Lida. ‘Oh, thank Eianna. I thought you were on The Ice Maiden. I saw it catch alight.’

  The Maiden was now a skeleton of wood floating aimlessly in the middle of the port, buffeted by the current, its anchor rope and most of its body burned to ash. Lorcan had seen it just before he’d fallen, and he’d made a soft keening noise, as if he was in pain. Lida wondered if he’d known some of its crew; she didn’t want to think about their fate.

  ‘No,’ Lida said, weaving an arm behind Maya. ‘We were on the Belle. Jessa, can you help?’

  ‘Good,’ Maya said absently, trying to push herself up on shaky arms. ‘Isla said she’d look for you.’

  Between the two of them, Lida and Jessa got Maya upright. Lida kept an arm around her, half to make sure Maya stayed that way, and half because she couldn’t bear to let her sister go. Before Lida could ask what she’d meant, one of the illae-healers, a short, grey-haired woman called Lola, arrived breathlessly, kneeling by Maya’s side. Lida felt her draw, and she closed her eyes to watch as Lola placed her hands on either side of Maya’s face.

  Maya tried to push her off. ‘My daughter. Check my daughter.’

  Lola ignored her, tilting Maya’s chin to check her pupils. ‘The mother comes first,’ she said, poking at Maya’s wound and then the back of her head and neck.

  ‘I’m not concussed,’ Maya snapped. ‘I don’t feel sick, and my vision is clear.’

  ‘No, you’re not. And if you’re a healer, you can help at the square once you’re back on your feet.’ Lola moved her examination to Maya’s stomach. Maya gave an involuntary jerk as Lola checked the baby.

  ‘He’s fine,’ she said. ‘You’re lucky that you’re not further along. He’s well-cushioned still.’

  Maya’s eyes went very wide. ‘He?’ she repeated. ‘No. She. I dreamed it was a girl.’

  ‘Trust what you see under the sun, girl, not the things that dance in dreams,’ Lola said. ‘He.’ She got to her feet. ‘I’ll see you in the square when you’re ready.’

  Maya nodded, dazed, as the healer walked away. Jessa and Lida hauled her to her feet and helped her navigate through the rubble to cleared ground. Maya squeezed Lida’s arm, trying to distract herself from what Lola had said.

  ‘You’ve grown muscle, Lida!’

  ‘Mmm. Not by choice,’ Lida answered with a slight smile. Her lips twisted as she inspected Maya, her eyes straying to Maya’s belly once more.

  Maya squirmed internally, though she lifted her chin proudly as she moved carefully over the uneven ground. She hadn’t missed Lola’s quick glance at her hand, searching for a ring that wasn’t there. There is no shame, she told herself, as she did every day. There wasn’t, not on the ship and not on the Isle, but it was hard to let go of the expectations with which she’d grown up. She was trying to prise the claws away, one by one, but some were stuck fast, and she wasn’t sure they would ever be gone.

  Lida didn’t comment on her belly, though. ‘How did you get so tanned, May?’

  ‘I’ve been on a ship for the best part of the last two months.’

  ‘You found the Myrae, then,�
�� Lida said, lightly touching Maya’s braid.

  Maya nodded, wincing as her head throbbed with the movement. ‘Well, they found me, really, at Little Buck Port. My captain - Aife - came up to me after she heard I’d been begging for passage to the Isle. I’ve been on the Restitution ever since.’ She gestured across the water to the ship, smaller and more elegant than the wallowing merchant ships all around it, moored intact at a now-ruined jetty. ‘She took me to the Isle first, though.’

  Lida shivered in the cold air as she navigated a smouldering pile of wood. ‘What’s it like?’

  Maya considered her. ‘Beautiful. Different to Eilan.’ She paused. ‘You should come back with me.’

  Lida huffed an uneasy laugh, guiding Maya across a pool of liquid staining the cobbles. Maya had an awful feeling she knew exactly what it was. ‘I should probably start my apprenticeship properly, May. I don’t think I’ve done anything the right way. I’m not sure Tiernan would be happy if I decided to take a holiday to visit the Isle.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be a holiday, Lida, it -’ Maya faltered as they came upon the square. Body after body was stretched out and covered with an eclectic mix of cloth: bedsheets, tablecloths, blankets, even ship’s sails. Maya imagined that they had used anything they could find. Her hands went to her stomach, rubbing back and forth across the tight skin. In those seconds before the shop fell on her, she found that she did believe in the gods, after all - or she hoped in them, at least – and she’d known it was going to be bad, but she hadn’t expected this.

  Across the square, Isla looked up from the body she was wrapping. One still arm rested outside the makeshift shroud, pale in the moonlight. Brinnican? Maya wondered. The skin was too light to be Myrae or Eilin.

  ‘Maya, thank Eianna,’ Isla said. ‘Aife said you were somewhere. The girl over there needs her leg set.’