Soulwoven: Exile

Chapter Nineteen

~19~

Seventy days before the destruction of Eldan City

A hand rested on Ryse’s shoulder.

A hard, callused hand.

Her skin felt numb and rubbery, her hair tousled and tangled and matted. She shook like a wet cat, her feet bare on flagstones in the port of Densel, and she clutched the tattered remains of her nightclothes around her. Lights shone dully on a hill to her right. The sky was gray and growing lighter every minute. Low, thick fog misted around her ankles. The tall shadows of warships hung around her in the grayness, like the bodies of whales waiting to be hacked apart for a bit of meat and bone.

She wished it would rain.

She couldn’t feel the pain. Not yet. Her body wasn’t working right. It was hard to walk, and something sticky was trickling down the inside of her leg. The pain was waiting. For what, she didn’t know.

The hand left her shoulder.

She didn’t look at its owner. She didn’t want to see that face.

“Eh, here.”

A blanket of thick blue wool was placed in her arms. She snatched at it greedily and wrapped it around herself, but it wasn’t the comfort of wool she wanted. She wanted the River. Wanted to gulp it in and breathe it out in torrents, wanted to tear the man’s head off like she’d done to the Lost One in the North Sea, wanted to rip holes the size of boulders in the Folly of Man and send every man aboard to the bottom of the harbor.

But her breaths were shallow and sharp, and she couldn’t make the River come.

Her head felt hot and feverish. What they’d done—what they’d done to her—

Not to you, said a voice in her head. That happened to someone else. Don’t think of it. Just let it pass. It never happened. Not to you.

Someone she’d thought was Quay had come into the room while she was sleeping. Something had struck her head.

The next thing she’d known, she’d been in a strange place. Orange light surrounded her. A cloth was wrapped so tightly across her mouth that it was hard to breathe. There were sounds she didn’t recognize—didn’t understand—and dark shapes moving in the shadows. A heavy weight sat between her shoulder blades.

Her hands had been bound, and her legs. She’d heard the sound of something ripping. There’d been a curious coldness and then a warmth, and then she’d realized what was happening and screamed into the cloth and there had been horror, long horror and pain, pain, pain—

Don’t think of it. It never happened. Not to you.

“The Temple,” she whispered.

“Eh?”

“Where is it?” Her lungs heaved. Her fingers picked desperately at the edges of the blanket. She had a job to do. A message to deliver. Everything else had been taken—her power, her pride, the promise she’d made to herself that it would never happen to her, not to Ryse Lethien, not like other girls in the slums—

—not to you—

—but she had a warning that needed to be heard. Words that had to be said to the only people who could possibly put the world to rights. The world could kick her, violate her, destroy her, but still she would do this thing, a firefly flashing messages long after careless fingers tried to crush it.

Because that was Ryse Lethien, and she was hard to crush.

She heard a hand scratching at stubble.