Stasia
Stasia awoke to the sensation of drowning, smothered in a heavy wetness. She struggled against it, trying to pull herself out of the water. It was difficult to breathe, and her thoughts swam as though in a soup. A sodden hide covered her body, holding her in place. She could not lift her head for weariness. When she managed to open her eyes, a brilliant light flooded her vision.
"Shhhh," said a soft voice. "Lie still. Shhh. It is ok."
"I Dreamed the Khell were in the City of Ruin," she said aloud. "The traveling camp was erected in its streets, and Kaliri was braiding my hair on a building roof. We will find your people, Maia."
She lay in the basket of the polloon. Maia's face hovered over her, the long braids tickling Stasia's cheeks, and she put a chip of ice into Stasia's mouth. The cold morsel soothed her dry throat. The sun was up again, and the air was hot. She remembered her over-use of T'Jas during the storm, and wondered how many vaerce she had left, but she could not muster the strength to unwrap the hides to check. It hardly mattered; she could tell by her own weakness that the end was near.
Dynat stood on the polloon's rim, looking outward. He had discarded his hides and his golden scale garments gleamed in the bright light. He looked strong, almost radiant, the opposite of how she felt. A shiver of hate ran up her spine. How dare he look so happy in the face of her impending death?!
Bitter anger faded quickly; she was too weary even for that. Acceptance and compassion flooded her. Perhaps it was because she was so near the edge of death. She could not forgive him. But she was ready to stop fighting.
Dynat entered her mind without invitation, but she did not protest as he filled her with information. Maia was helping him use the position of the sun to return to the same heading that they had been on before the storm, but they could be far to the east or west of where they had started. It was possible, Maia said, that they would miss the land to the north altogether and drift on the water until their supplies ran out.
They were moving drastically slow, and supplies were low already. Maia had had the foresight to crush the remains of the melting ice and capture it in leather bags, but there was only enough to last a day or two. The mussels had all fallen overboard during the storm. The polloon was tired, hungry and obstinate; the water here was too deep for it to draw a meal. Its basket meandered on the surface of the water, the float above wilting as its seaweed fuel ran out. Dynat was pulling huge amounts of T'Jas from the sun, creating a meager breeze to push the polloon along the water.
You will exhaust yourself, Stasia worried to him. He did not have vaerce to tally the loss, but if drawing T'Jas from the sun was anything like drawing it from the storm, Dynat should be aging as rapidly as she.
You are wrong, he replied. I do not feel exhausted. I feel more alive than I ever have before. I still believe it will help you, if you draw it.
Stasia shook her head and even that tiny movement exhausted her. She lay in her meager shade and entered a shallow, broken sleep, dreaming ordinary dreams of drifting on a boat in Lake Lentok.
She did not rise that night to steer the polloon. While Dynat slept, they drifted aimlessly. For the next two days, they floated in the vast waters, unsure where they were or where they were going. Stasia dreamed of nothing at all. Her breathing became a labored, agonizing thing. She fidgeted in the bottom of the basket, unable to get comfortable, but every movement she made was tiring. Even with Dynat keeping her oriented in her mind, her thoughts drifted as aimlessly as the polloon.
When the sun was directly overhead on the seventh day since they had left Khell, Stasia saw an image cast into her mind by Dynat. A thin, dark line floated where the water met the blue ceiling. As he steered the polloon closer, the water below went from grey-green to deep blue, then a softer blue clear enough to make out the bottom. Huge, dark patches of seaweed stretched across the bottom and bobbed on the surface. The polloon stopped and began to feed. As it expelled tiny fish and crustaceans, Dynat and Maia fed too, gorging on the sudden wealth of food. Maia chewed raw fish until it was soft and then fed it to Stasia, but she could not hold it down.
"Ice," she begged.
"There is no more ice," Maia said, and offered her a sip of water instead. The water made her retch, and the effort of retching was so great that she thought she would die from it.
"Ice," she pleaded again. Maia shook her head sternly, but her eyes burned with compassion.
"Give me the waterskin," Dynat said, and Stasia tensed. But he only held it for a long moment. When he handed it back to Maia, she extracted a chip of ice and fed it to Stasia. Dynat had drawn T'Jas from the heat of the water, freezing it for her.
Through his mind, Stasia could see rocks jutting out of the water, and huge waves crashed against them, like the tiny wake in Lake Lentok stirred by boats crashing into a child's pebble castle. Beyond that, cliffs rose and made a narrow line between waves and ceiling.
On that line, a jagged tower pierced the sky, surrounded by several ruined buildings. It looks small, Stasia thought doubtfully.
Dynat suggested her perspective might be off, but before they could argue, the horizon went feathery and a black mass of Dhuciri climbed into the sky above the city.
"Get down," Stasia rasped at Maia, and Dynat joined them in the bottom of the polloon, buried under his cloak and Maia's parka. In his mind, Stasia saw one taorn fly low, circling the wilted polloon. Then they flew south.
"Do you suppose they saw us?" Stasia wondered.
"If they think you have interfered with tithe, they will not pass you by," Maia said grimly. "They must not have seen."
"Let's keep it that way," Dynat said. "All we have is the element of surprise. We need to sneak in, capture a Dhuciri and question it."
He was looking at Maia, and Maia stroked the pouch where she kept the metal leash.
"No," Stasia said aloud, struggling to compose her thoughts into words. Thinking was tiring. "What will we do when we capture one? How will we make him talk?"
"Fun as it might be to torture one of them, we don't need to," Dynat said. "All we have to do is plunder its mind."
"And when we do this thing, how are we different from them?"
Dynat shrugged. "This is war, Stasia."
As she was pondering his calling this a war, he said in her mind, It is war, Icer. They captured us knowing what we were capable of. Whether they knew it or not, they imprisoned the King of Chraun and the Queen of Iskalon. In doing so they declared war upon Sholaen.
"I think if you are going to save the Khell, you will have to pull some dirty raiding tricks," Maia said softly. "I do not like it either, but I like it better than ending as dust in these waters."
"Alright," Stasia capitulated. She was not likely to last long enough to ensure that the war against the Dhuciri was fought morally. "How do we find one alone?"
"Guards on the outside of the city," Dynat said. "We always posted lone guards at the Spiral Tunnel. There will be something like that here."
"We should take two," Maia said slowly. "Then we can disguise ourselves in their robes. We can hide and enter the city that way, to see if the Khell are there or any of your people."
"Two?" Stasia asked. She raised her head and began to push away the sodden hides, every motion an agony of exhaustion. By the time she had sat up, she was gasping for breath, but she managed to say, "I'm coming with you."
"Of course you're not," Dynat said. "You can't even sit up. You will stay right here until we return."
"How dare you tell me what to do?!" Stasia flared weakly.
"If you can lift yourself from the polloon," Dynat said, "By all means, join us."
Stasia would have tried to argue further, but her head chose that moment to grow dizzy, and she lay back down, trying to catch her breath again. The soft lining of the polloon felt like stones on her bone-thin back.
"I think I will rest here a little longer." In truth, the mere thought of walking a few steps made her tired enough to cry.
That decided, Dynat steered the polloon up the shore, to the north. The tower sat on a small point south of where they landed, connected to a crumbling stone wall with a bridge.
"Return soon. If you find my people . . . Glace . . . Larc . . . anyone, bring them." It would be good to see a familiar face before she died.
Maia and Dynat slipped out of the polloon and drifted toward the cliff. Stasia watched them disappear into the distance over the rim of the basket. Then she lay again in the bottom, shivering and ill. She was so tired she almost hoped the Dhuciri would find her and make a clean end to her life.
She drifted in her thoughts, wondering what death would be like. Would her people find her and bury her in an ice shaft? It seemed unlikely. Where would her soul go, without a proper burial? Would she haunt these shores forever?
A shout roused her from her heavy thoughts, and she lifted her head weakly to look out. Huge, foam-capped swells crashed against the cliffs. An array of ten or so boats bristling with spears spread across the waves directly ahead. The boats made straight toward the polloon at full speed. Just as Stasia registered this, she saw another set of boats behind her, coming from the point with the tower. She was trapped on either side between two armies of spear-bearing warriors and crashing waves.
Something hit the polloon's sphere, and it gave a gurgley howl and began to sink into the waves. Air hissed out of the sphere where it had been hit, and Stasia felt a drop of its blood on her forehead. She looked up.
More figures stood on the cliffs above her, holding crossbows made of bone. Stasia held onto the polloon. She would sink with it, and the attackers would think she drowned. Stasia could swim away to safety. She accepted that she would die soon, but she did not want to die like this.
As soon as the water came up over the sides of the basket and engulfed her, Stasia realized her mistake. She had not yet touched the waters on this coast, so she had not realized they would be so warm. There were no icy depths here for her to draw cold, and the shallows were not warm enough to draw heat. There was nothing extreme enough for her to have a source for T'Jas. Without the ability to create an air-bubble, she would drown.
With that realization, her acceptance of death was shattered. I don't want to die, she thought. I want to live just a little longer. Just long enough to see Glace one last time.
Stasia struggled past the waterlogged sphere to the surface and drew T'Jas directly from the heat of the sun.