Soulwoven (29 page)

He dug his fingers into his palms.

There would be accusations of treason if it was ever discovered that Quay had worked with a necromancer. The Temple and some among the Seven would call for his father to disown him, exile him, imprison him,
execute
him. With every step Quay took at Leramis’s side, he undermined his footing in Eldan. With every passing set of eyes, he multiplied his risk.

But some risks had to be taken.

The ones breaking the heart dragons were Duennin, Hentworth had said. Part human, part Aleani, part Sh’ma. Humanesque monsters cobbled together with the power of the dragon and bred to wage war on creation. They weren’t supposed to exist.

Quay wasn’t yet convinced that they did.

But Leramis had made an interesting case. The plan he’d outlined made a certain kind of sense—
obtain
help from a group of iconoclasts, then frame them for your actions. And while the world readies itself for war against them, free your people and the dragon and bring both
south
to burn creation.

Quay’s visions of Eldan City in flames returned to his mind.

Two white birds fought over a scrap of bread in the street. One of them backed into Quay’s boot as it did. The bird startled and flew off toward the merchant zone, honking raucously as it went. The other took the bread and flew in the opposite direction.

Quay frowned.

It was difficult for him to believe that Leramis and his order wanted to help him. He didn’t particularly like the necromancer, and he couldn’t get a handle on his connection to Ryse—Leramis seemed to spend an awful lot of time watching her, like he was trying to figure out what to do about her presence. Quay had spent his whole life believing that necromancers were amoral at best, backstabbing at worst, and dangerous above all else. He couldn’t throw all that away on the words of one person, no matter how interesting the words were.

But he could give Leramis a chance to prove himself.

The Aleani ships had grown smaller as the party filed east around the harbor. The massive dromons were long gone. A row of three-masted caravels filled the docks in their place. The stones beneath Quay’s feet gave way to wooden planking.

Len stopped at the bottom of a long gangway leading up to the deck of a caravel. The Aleani shielded his eyes from the seaside sun. He looked down at a parchment in his hand, then back up.

“This is it,” he said. His voice was passionless.

The vessel was half the size of those around it and built of what looked like strong pine. It had been washed to perfection and painted black below its waterline. At the water’s edge itself, a sky-blue stripe ringed the vessel before giving way to the natural color of its hull. White sails hung from its three masts. They were triangular in the fore and the aft and slanted lateen style in the middle.

Quay frowned again.

His unvoiced displeasure was answered by a husky Aleani striding down the gangplank.

“Small, aye, but t’ fastest in t’ fleet, my
Rokwet
is.”

The Aleani was blue eyed and mostly bald. He sported shoulder-length, dirty-blond dreadlocks that sprouted from the hair around the sides and back of his head. Rings decorated six of his fingers, and his ears and nose were pierced. He had a tan, wrinkled face, and he wore a forked, red-yellow beard.

As Quay watched, he reached the dock, turned to Len, and lifted the unmoving Aleani into the air.

“Len Heramsun!” the Aleani sailor roared. “Hoo many yars has
et
been?” He set Len back on his feet with a thump.

Gulls cried in the sky. The stomping of marching soldiers echoed off the waterfront. The wind filled the air, and the ocean lapped gently against the harbor walk. Len never took his eyes from the sailor’s, but Quay could read the message in his stare:

If you’re still my friend, I need your help.

“Captain Aldric Derimsun,” Len said.
“Pride of the Aleani fleet.”

Derimsun released Len with a queer, concerned look. The Aleani captain offered Quay one hand while rubbing his chin with the other. “You’ll be t’ Prince Eldani then, yeh?”

Quay shook the hand. Derimsun had an unusual accent. His vowels were elongated. His consonants were sharp and clipped.

The Aleani captain swept his other hand toward the ship. “
Me
second mate will shew ya to yer bunks. Wind blows strong out the part t’day. Sh’d be ready ta layve in twenny minutes, high.”

Len stumped up the gangplank. His shoulders were hunched. His face looked troubled. Derimsun walked close behind him, twisting his beard with one hand.

That something was wrong was obvious.

What it was, Quay assumed he would never know.

The party’s cabin was a square room belowdecks framed in dark brown timber. Eight hammocks hung from hooks in its walls. A few sea chests were bolted to its splintery floor.

When Quay arrived, the cabin was empty except for Cole stuffing his belongings into a chest. Quay’s pack and the armor the Aleani had given him sat alone in the center of the room.

Cole looked up when he entered, then back down. He looked a little pale.

Quay leaned against the doorjamb and watched his friend. The ship rolled gently underfoot. Long moments passed, silent except for the sounds of rustling cloth, creaking wood, and water splashing outside the ship.

But eventually, Cole spoke.

“Y’know,” he said, “Dil said something to me the other day. About there being things in the world worth dying for.”

Quay crossed his arms and waited. Cole placed the last of his belongings in the chest.

“I disagreed,” he finished.

Sailors called to one another and thumped around on the deck above. A high whistle blew. Seabirds filled Quay’s ears with honking.

After a moment, Cole asked, “What do
you
think?”

Quay uncrossed his arms and sighed. “You should already know that.”

“Yenor’s third
fucking
eye, Quay. You used to be a lot less—”

“I’m sorry,” Quay said. The motion of the ship had started to play havoc with his equilibrium, and he decided he would prefer to finish packing quickly and talk to Cole out on deck. He walked to his belongings, found his hauberk, and placed it into one of the chests.

“Yes,” he said. “I think there are things in the world worth dying for. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.”

“And worth killing for?”

Quay turned around. Cole was sitting on the edge of a hammock. He looked a bit queasy, but the color had risen in his cheeks too.

“Yes,” the prince said.

“Worth getting other people killed for?”

“Cole—”

“Answer me.”

Quay met Cole’s eyes. He didn’t blink.
Didn’t flinch.
“Yes.”

“Even those who’re depending on you?”

Quay kept silent. Cole sat as still as he could in the hammock, glaring at him.

“No one’s here because they have to be,” Quay said eventually.

“Bullshit.” Cole stood up. “Where else are they going to go? Ryse ran from the Temple—”

“That’s not my fault.”

Cole twisted his head and looked down on him
.
It was a look Quay had gotten from his friend more than once, in private. A look he rarely got from anyone else. It said,
I’m talking, and I’m smarter than you, so shut up.

It wasn’t a look he enjoyed being on the receiving end of.

“That doesn’t make it all right for you to take advantage of her.” Cole held his fingers out and counted people off on them as he talked. “Dil would have a hell of a time getting back to Lurathen on her own, don’t you think? And how would she feel about leaving, after how hard she begged to come with us in the first place?”

Quay said nothing.

“
I
could leave, but you know I won’t without my brother and Dil. Len puts up with you because he thinks you’re his best shot at finding this D’Orin Threi. Even the fucking
necromancer
is here because he was sent to you.”

Quay’s stomach twisted. In his memory, his mother’s voice whispered a hundred things about being kind to those who had no choice but to follow him.

That voice mattered to him, and he was certain that Cole knew it. His friend had been in the room more than once when she’d broached the subject.

You’re dancing on my mother’s grave,
he almost said.
Stop.

But it was Cole’s job not to stop with him. Not ever.

“And Litnig?”
Quay asked.

Cole’s face hardened. The pallor left his cheeks. He straightened up like a mother standing over her child.

“Something’s wrong with him,” Cole said. He jabbed a finger at Quay’s chest. “And I don’t know what it is, but I’ll be damned if I let you take advantage of it. You’re using us.
All of us.
And it’s bullshit.”

The wind picked up outside. The waves of the harbor slapped against the ship. Quay’s stomach churned. Cole reached for the wall to steady himself.

“Then what would you have me do?” Quay asked. He straightened. “If we fail, Cole, the world burns. Do you understand that?”

Cole rolled his eyes, and Quay narrowed his own.

“I have to keep us moving. I can’t afford to be soft. I can’t afford to be nice. You think I like it?”

Cole stared at Quay. “Then it sounds like you’re a much poorer man than I thought.”

The words stung. Quay locked eyes with Cole. His friend didn’t flinch.

Quay turned back to the sea chest.

The floorboards creaked. A familiar arm hooked under Quay’s armpit. Something hard and cold pressed painfully against his rib cage.

Quay froze.

“Cole—”

Cole pulled the blunt end of a dagger away from Quay’s ribs.

“You’re not fucking invincible,” he whispered in the prince’s ear. His breathing sounded loud and fast.

After a moment, it faded with his footsteps into the shadows of the ship’s hold.

Quay knelt in silence. For several years, Cole had been the eyes in the back of his head, his warning when he couldn’t see the dangers he was walking into.

Later, Quay would begin the process of heeding Cole’s words.

But for the moment, the prince simply packed his belongings, alone, with his stomach churning and the words of his friend and his mother ringing in his head.

THIRTY-TWO

Stars filled the heavens like ten thousand dandelion seeds. The waters of the North Sea caught and reflected them, swelling and withdrawing below the
Rokwet
’s keel like the sides of an enormous bellows. It was cold, and the oily scent of the ship’s lamps permeated the air.

Leramis struggled for peace. He sat near the
Rokwet
’s bow and listened to the ship slash through the waves below. He took long, slow breaths. He imagined a field of light.

It still wouldn’t embrace him.

The others were belowdecks, displaced, disgruntled, displeased at his presence. They wouldn’t stay down for long. He’d seen greenness in their faces before the sun had even set.

When he’d seen their faces at all.

Companionship had been the price he’d paid to assume the mantle of the necromancer. He’d thought he had come to terms with that. Everyone gave something up when she or he joined the order—family, friends, a normal life. In return for his sacrifices, Leramis had gained purpose and a closer connection to Yenor.

He needed that purpose. He wasn’t made for simple things.

You will do great things, Leramis, if you find the courage to seize them.

The sails flapped above. One Aleani sailor called to another and laughed. The ship’s wheel turned. The hull creaked. The sails filled out again.

When Ryse had reappeared in Leramis’s life, a childish, hopeful part of his heart had awoken. Dreams he’d tried hard to bury beneath the hard stone of purpose had resurfaced.

I’m sending
you
to Prince Quay for a reason.

The cold wind blew over Leramis’s shoulders. He shivered. He saw the breath of Yenor in the events playing out, and that frightened him. His god had brought him and Ryse together once, as teenagers, when they’d needed each other. She’d taught him, briefly, what it meant to truly, selflessly love.

Now Yenor had brought them together again.

There are no coincidences.
Only the illusion thereof.

Leramis’s heartbeat quickened and slowed. There were other illusions too. The fact that he could see only one purpose behind his reunion with Ryse troubled him.

And yet a voice inside him whispered,
Perhaps…
Perhaps…

Footsteps thumped up the steps behind him. Someone lunged over the rail and retched. Leramis turned to face the sound.

The shadow bent over the railing was short.
Maybe Len, maybe Cole.
Whoever it was, he was losing most of his dinner. A second silhouette appeared out of the ship’s innards. It moved slowly and softly toward the first. The retching on the rail stopped. The retcher let fly a string of curses.

Cole.

The second shadow—
Dil,
Leramis told himself—approached Cole tenderly and placed a hand on his back. Leramis heard caring, comforting murmuring.

A pang shot through his heart. It refused to listen as he denied its existence. It grew stronger as he told it it was just a phantasm, an emotion tied to an illusion that would distract him from his purpose in life.

I miss that.

It was a simple admission, and it complicated everything he’d come to be.

His brow trembled. Two years prior, alone in the cold mud beyond the wall that separated Eldan from the White Forest, he’d knelt and sworn his life to Yenor. He’d offered everything he was for the greater good. He’d given up the niche of happiness he had almost carved for himself as a temple soulweaver and asked to be aimed as one would aim an arrow.

A sense of peace had filled him. He’d walked south, and in time, he’d met Rhan.

For the first time since, he felt directionless.

Cole retched again. Dil kept rubbing his back.

Leramis turned from them and faced the open sea once more.
Peace,
he told himself.