The Restless Shore

CHAPTER EIGHT

8 Mirtul, the Year of the Ageless One

(1479 DR)

The Akana, Edge of the Wash, Akanul

My sister is alive,” Ghaelya said.

Uthalion watched Brindani walk across the old porch and noted the swift shadow of Vaasurri following the half-elf, before responding. He casually ran a thumb over the hilt of his long sword, not sure of what to expect from Ghaelya or the half-elf, but prepared for anything.

“I don’t know that,” he replied coolly. “And more importantly, I don’t believe you know that.”

He heard her sharp intake of breath, felt her eyes pierce his back from across the room, and sensed a strange familiarity in the experience. Though there was dust on the windowsill, and the curtains had rotted away, he half expected to blink and find the green flower print curtains he remembered from his old life, the sill clean and smooth beneath his hands as Maryna’s voice sang to him from somewhere else in the house … He blinked, and the farmhouse remained as it was, the genasi approaching him from behind.

“I know it,” Ghaelya said, her voice rising as she strode into the room. “I’ve always known it, ever since-”

“How could you possibly?”

“I’ve seen her!” she yelled.

“It’s not enough!” he answered in kind, turning to face her and shaking his head in disbelief. “Dreams? This is what you follow, Hells, what you ask us to follow to Tohrepur?”

Even as he posed the question he felt some small part of himself want it to be true. Though he had little faith in or desire for his own dreams, his nightmares, he hoped that somehow Ghaelya’s dreams had some meaning or truth to them. Despite that faint hope, he was too familiar with the nature of reality to invest in her faith. And he had his own reasons to suspect the nature of her dreams. As she stood in the center of the room, glaring at him, he could almost hear the distant murmur of singing. But this time he could not determine if it was memory or something else.

“I didn’t bring you here,” she said through clenched teeth. “Brindani didn’t bring you here, and my dreams didn’t bring you here … So why are you here, Uthalion?”

The question slid into him like a boning knife, the kind his wife wielded so expertly on the fish he would bring home for dinner, fresh from the spring. His wife’s voice asked him the question again, echoing across the years, her thin shoulders slumped as she leaned back against the dining room table in the lamplight, their daughter fast asleep in the back bedroom. Uthalion blinked, and she was gone. He turned away from the angry genasi with a scowl as fresh pain erupted from old wounds.

“Save your questions and your breath,” he answered gruffly. “I have no apologies or excuses for you … or anyone.”

His hands balled into fists, Uthalion felt stretched between anger and exhaustion. The silver ring was heavy on his hand, and he feared sleep-true sleep-was not as far away as he had hoped. He relaxed somewhat as Ghaelya fell back a step, leaned against the east wall, and let the sudden weariness settle into his spent body even as old resentments boiled to the surface of his heart.

“You know, I see someone running, it’s not where they’re going that makes me curious,” Ghaelya said, quieter, but he still felt the edge of anger in her words. “I’ve got to wonder: what are they running from?”

Sighing, Uthalion looked at her over his shoulder with a sly, tired grin.

“I think perhaps, on that point, we seem to understand one another,” he replied knowingly. He looked away, the answers still only half-formed in his own thoughts and muddled by memory and beguiling song, obligation and compulsion.

The chirping of crickets and the buzzing of spring-beetles filled the quiet between them, though Uthalion knew she wouldn’t let things go. There was a youthful stubbornness in her that he envied; or rather, he envied the memory of feeling the same way when he’d been young, leaving his grandfather’s farm in far away Tethyr.

“She is alive,” Ghaelya said at length, breaking the silence between them. “In the end, I will prove that to you.”

“Keep your hope alive,” he said. “And I will consider that feat enough, no matter what happens.”

She turned away without another word, her footsteps diminishing down the short hallway and slowing cautiously on the stairs at the back of the house. He glanced out the window looking north and wondering how much farther he would have to run before he could turn back, find his family, and try again to be the husband he’d once been, to be the parent he’d never had.

Returning his attention to the old porch and the maturing evening outside, he let the whistling breeze and the buzzing of insects soothe his darkening mood to a mere frown. Though he still did not fully trust Ghaelya’s tale, he felt confident that at least she believed in it. Only one voice in their small group did not yet ring fully true.

He listened carefully for the sound of voices outside, but detected nothing of Brindani or Vaasurri in the dark. Tired as he was, he did not remove the silver ring and kept his sword loose in its sheath, trusting to the killoren’s instincts, but ready to respond should trouble erupt in the middle of the night.

Ghaelya stood at the closed door for long moments, shaking and wanting to break something. She squeezed her eyes shut, taking easy, slow breaths, before sitting at the edge of the rotted bed frame against the northern wall. Over and over again she reminded herself that, despite the human’s uncanny ability to anger her, she needed a guide across the Akana, to find Tessaeril-but also, that she must watch him closely.

No matter where she ran, no matter where Uthalion led her, the Choir had been quick on their heels, the dreamers’ howls as predictable as a rooster’s morning crow. Until Tessaeril was in sight, in her arms, and safely away from Tohrepur, Ghaelya would be vigilant and guard her trust well. She refused to imagine her sister as just a body waiting to be found.

Furious at the thought, she kicked out, splintering the leg of a bedside chair. The satisfaction of feeling something snap and fall apart calmed her, and she exhaled softly. She flexed her knuckles as she opened her eyes and scanned the sparse bedroom. Two windows, west and south, their shutters fallen away, lay open to the evening air. The scent of lavender, heady on the cool, damp air, blew in the windows and stirred her to investigate the room. She stood and approached the west, hearing crickets outside as she looked up the long hill. The insects were one of the first night sounds she could recall hearing on the Akana. Turning back to the moonlit chamber, she saw nothing of importance, no sign of why she had been brought here, why the dream-Tessaeril-had shown her this place.

She slumped down beneath the window, running her fingers across the swirling lines of energy, the constant tingle of her element, coursing through her flesh. Her thoughts were dull and muddied, useless for puzzling out answers from dust and rotting wood. Instinct told her only that rain was on the way-maybe in a day, perhaps two-and she wondered if her intuition might be stronger when the storm came.

Rolling her cloak into a pillow, she reluctantly lay upon the dusty floor and stared at the ceiling, alone in the dark for the first time in what seemed like months. Time slipped away as she tried to calm the inevitable restless urge to just get up and leave, to keep moving no matter what. Placing her hands behind her head, her elbow bumped against something that rolled away, bouncing and slowing between the uneven floorboards. Reaching out, she found what felt like an old candle, half-melted, but still bearing just enough wick to light. She sat up, took out her flint and steel, and brought the candle back to life.

Sitting in its glow, she watched shadows play along the floorboards and flicker on the ceiling, and felt her eyelids growing heavy. She looked to the south window and saw something on the wall, just beneath the sill. She crawled forward, her curiosity aroused by what appeared to be letters scrawled on the faded wood in dark rust. Bringing the candle closer, her eyes widened as a familiar script came into focus, its color suddenly less like rust and more like dried blood applied with a fingertip. She shook her head and looked away, not yet ready to read the words. Though she believed with every fiber that the message was there, that the medium truly was blood, confronting the possible source of that blood was a concept that set her hands to trembling and her blue-green eyes to boiling.

With a half-lidded gaze of dread, she looked up and read what had been written.

Bile rose in her throat at the last line, and she pulled away, still staring at the letters unmistakably written by Tessaeril’s hand. The crickets had stopped their chirping outside, and the message grew darker, more distinct and wet, until a few letters began to drip down the wall.. Her heart hammered in her chest, and her head swam as the floor pooled with red. The letters were lost in a stream of wet crimson, and in their place a crude note was left, barely more than a smear across the old wood.

HELP ME

She recoiled from the wall, her movement slow, as if the air had grown thick and viscous. A sound like a hundred large wings beating in unison buzzed around her. Dark shapes fluttered by the window at speed, shadowy forms swarming through a night sky and flashing with white light as she pushed herself to the bed. She attempted to stand, but the wood frame crumbled in her grasp.

A dry whimper, hollow and echoing, came to her quietly from the southwest corner. She fumbled at her belt, unable to draw her sword or look away from the flickering shadows between the windows. There, just at the edge of the candlelight, a small nude figure sat huddled and shivering. Her pale blue skin trembled with a sheen of sweat; eyes as blue-black as the deepest ocean stared at Ghaelya from beneath long tresses of wet green hair; and gracefully pointed ears emerged from between the vinelike strands.

Deep blue lips, puckered and split at their edges, parted, loosing whispers of song, like steel scraping on steel beneath ocean waves. Small bumps formed along the strange girl’s skin, rising and turning a deep red before bursting open into fleshy blooms. The song exploded into a screeching chorus, and Ghaelya tore her eyes away and jumped to her feet, suddenly free of the thick pall that had held her down. She ran from the room.

Nimbly leaping down the stairs, she drew her sword and rushed into the common room to find it empty. Uthalion was nowhere to be found. The door at the top of the stairs she’d rushed down creaked open, and slow footsteps pressed noisily upon the old steps. Ghaelya ran outside, searching for Vaasurri or Brindani, but she found herself quite alone and surrounded by buzzing shadows and discordant, singing voices. Raising her sword, she turned to the figure now in the common room and charged back inside.

She yelled a challenge, but coughed as her voice failed her. Lowering her blade in the darkness of the hallway, she stepped closer to the curiously familiar silhouette. Tentatively she raised her hand, placing her fingertips against the cold surface of a mirror. The screeching song and the buzzing of wings faded away as she stepped back in disbelief, dizzy as her mind struggled to comprehend. She stumbled over a loose board and tripped, falling backward and feeling the boards break beneath her weight.

In a long impossible pit of shadow, a well of blackness that caressed her skin like warm velvet, a sudden calm filled her, and she saw the dream for what it was.

She woke up.

Opening her eyes, she found herself still stretched out on the bedroom floor, her hands laced behind her head. Her fingertips were still cool from touching the mirror as she sat up, gripped her sword, and rolled to her feet only to find the strange girl in the corner gone.

There was no blood on the wall or the floor, and not even a ghost of the candle’s smoke gave evidence as to whether it had ever been there. On the verge of a sigh of relief, she caught the trailing edge of a haunting howl echoing from the north.

“The Choir,” she whispered breathlessly. “They’re coming!”

Pushing weeds and bits of abandoned junk aside, Brindani crawled through a labyrinth of refuse into the shadows of the windmill. Spiders skittered out of his way to escape, abandoning unfinished meals in the webs pulled apart by the half-elf. Sitting in the dark, he breathed easier, leaning back against the stone as the rafters above creaked and groaned in the breeze. He sat and listened, studying the dark to assure himself of being alone before setting his pack on the ground and working at the tight knots that held it shut. His nimble fingers worked the knots faster and faster, paranoid and worried that his brief sanctuary would be ruined at any moment.

Slipping his hand into the leather satchel, he could already feel old names and places trying to slip back to the forefront of his thoughts, each accompanied by a fresh stab of pain in his abdomen. He’d been warned about the pain, had seen the bodies, doubled over and burned at pauper’s funerals; but he’d never heeded the advice, just as he’d never found a seller that had turned down hard coin in favor of any moral responsibility. There would be no one to see him to a proper grave, and no one who would care when he was gone-no one he would likely recognize by that time anyway. The silkroot would see to that, would take it all away in time.

He grew frantic, throwing things from the old pack in his search for the soft bundle he kept at the bottom. He whispered a stream of profanity so coarse he could almost feel the gentler portion of his elf blood cringe. He turned the pack on its end, spilling its contents into the dirt, and dug through pouches of dried food, loops of thin rope, tinder-twigs, and empty, thick-glassed bottles. Finding nothing, he swore louder and lifted a bottle to hurl in anger, but the sound of a heavier creaking from above stopped him.

He peered through the dust and webs, squinting to see between roping vines of ivy and weeds. Frozen in place, his heart pounded as he searched for movement and pulled close a long silver dagger that had fallen beside his leg. A low shape darted through the murky shadows, sending a shower of dust falling from the rafters. Sudden pain tore through Brindani’s stomach, and he leaned forward in agony, struggling to keep his neck at an upward angle. Tears sprang from his eyes at the effort, and the blurry shadows shifted again, growing closer. As the pain subsided, he brushed the wetness from his eyes, raising his head enough to see the gleam of an ebony gaze watching him from above.

Gods no, he thought, the dark was not deep enough.

“How are you feeling?” Vaasurri asked, crouching predator-like upon a low rafter. “Is there much pain? I imagine so, and more to come, surely …”

“Wh-what do you mean?” Brindani stammered, averting his eyes from the black stare and trying to appear casual as he gathered his belongings, stuffing them back into his satchel.

A soft bundle thumped into the dirt near his feet, the scent of it unmistakable. It caused his mouth to water, though his lips had never felt drier. He didn’t want to look at it, he didn’t have to; but he couldn’t stop himself, couldn’t hold back the needy fixed stare that the pain in his gut and the ghostly voices from his memory demanded. He faced the silkroot, no longer alone, and saw it for all that it was: guilt, shame, secret, and addiction wrapped up neatly in a small leather knot.

“I smelled it just last night,” Vaasurri said, prowling down a thick support beam. His long black hair did not obscure the menacing gleam of his pitch-dark eyes. “You must have nearly used it all by the time Uthalion found you in the Spur, else I would have detected it earlier. But your pack has the odor of silkroot-faint, but it’s there.”

“What do you know about it?” Brindani growled angrily through his pain.

“Some,” Vaasurri replied “Speeds reflexes and induces a temporary sense of euphoria, it’s also known as Knight’s Veil, Styxroot, Velvet, and most commonly Widow-Pin … A name I’m sure you are quite familiar with, correct?”

“None of your business,” Brindani answered defensively, though a fresh wave of needlelike pains flowed through his abdomen. “I can manage just fine, no one needs to-”

“Oh, I am afraid it is my business,” Vaasurri said ominously, the glossy blade of his curved bone-sword coming into view. “You see, out on the Akana the silkroot is also known as Wolfbloom. The stems mark any passing creature with a scent that can be tracked for miles.”

“What are you saying?” Brindani asked as his hand closed over the soft bundle lovingly, easily resisting the almost non-existent urge to crush the small lumps within and hurl them into the dark.

“I’m saying”-the killoren crept closer-“that you have betrayed us all.”

“Wh-what?” Brindani stammered again, clutching the silkroot to his chest. The scent alone eased his mind and teased the agony in his stomach. “N-no, I haven’t-”

He stopped short, his breath quickening as the sound of eerie howls joined the whistling wind through the windmill. With a flash of the bone-blade and a puff of disturbed dust the killoren was gone, disappearing into the night outside and leaving Brindani alone to stare in horror at the leather bundle in his fist even as the familiar, needling pangs worked their way through his gut.

In the notebook laid limply across Uthalion’s lap, a half-drawn bloom of lavender had been neatly sketched out in thin lines of charcoal. Tiny notations on the page detailed the region’s conditions, the season and current weather, the consistency of the soil, and the sweet scent of the bloom-a smell that somehow, at some point during the drawing, had become important to him, almost familiar.

The tight handwriting scrawled away into meaningless lines near the bottom of the page, forgotten as he stared out the window, peering into the southern darkness. His eyelids felt heavy, but would not close, fluttering as the whispering trickle of song of the last few nights became a steady stream. The corners of his mouth curved into a smile as the familiar tune was made clearer, and the memory-one of his wedding day-more distinct.

Maryna’s oldest niece had sung before the ceremony, an old rhyme that spoke of destiny and promise, of a warrior lost and lonely, a love taken away, and a promise of peace at the end of the road. Paralyzed by the tune, part of his mind squirmed at the memory, like the lucid moment of a dream before waking up, when the terrors of a nightmare are drawn clear and escape is but a gasping breath away.

The girl’s voice changed, growing deeper as the lyrics slurred and shifted, digging rhythmic claws into his waking mind, dragging him back from the edge of escape. Though he struggled not to hear, he was powerless as the rhyme overtook his senses in a soothing grip of thundering chant.

Uthalion blinked at the last words, flailing his arms as he pushed away from the window. He sat heaving deep breaths as the voice faded away. A damp chill passed through him, and he ran shaking hands through his hair, furious at having been caught unawares again. Calming himself, he lowered his arms and stared hard at the sorcerous silver ring on his right hand, somehow certain that he’d been betrayed by his own lack of sleep. Endlessly awake by his own design, he hesitantly gripped the ring, wondering if he might be able to trade beguiling song for recurring nightmare.

As one held breath led to another, the decision was made for him as the howling voices of the dreamers reached him, close to cresting the top of the long slope into the Wash. A hand fell on his shoulder, and his frayed nerves reacted swiftly, gripping the slender arm in a tight grip as his free hand drew a handspan of blade from its sheath.

Ghaelya looked down at him in surprise, wrenching her arm free as he recognized her and loosed his grip. He made no comment, staring at her, troubled, as the eerie lyrics of the song repeated themselves in his mind.

Bring her to me, bring her to me …

He shook his head and stood, stretching his legs as he joined her by the window and studied the edge of the tall hill, searching for movement.

“They’re here,” he whispered solemnly.

“Hmph,” Ghaelya replied, glancing at him with a wry smile. “Keep up the good work.”

He ignored her derision, though he’d earned it well enough.

“How soon do you think?” she asked quietly.

The trailing edge of the last dreamer’s howl echoed once from the southern valleys as Uthalion listened. A shadow prowled silently into sight, slowly rising into the silhouette of Vaasurri, his sword in hand at the foot of the porch-steps.

“Soon enough,” Uthalion answered grimly, drawing his own sword and quickly shouldering his pack. “Be ready for a fight.”

“Not sure I know how to be otherwise anymore,” she replied with a sigh and stepped outside.