~33~
Something hard and scratchy dug into the side of Litnig Jin’s face. His lips pressed up against his teeth. He couldn’t breathe.
His eyes shot open, and he jerked his head away from coarse, twisted rope. Inky darkness surrounded him. There was more rope below his legs. His hands and arms were tangled in it and—
He was lying in a hammock half his size.
Water lapped gently against the wood next to his head.
The Rokwet. The sea. I’m at sea. Just at sea—
Litnig sat up and coughed. His head ached. His hammock swung from side to side when he moved, and he had to focus on deadening its oscillations so he didn’t get too dizzy. He heard Cole start the coughing of the dry heaves across the cabin. The others seemed to be asleep. A thin line of natural light crept beneath the cabin door.
Aside from the water and the creaking of wood and rope, the morning was strangely quiet.
Litnig heard no laughing, no singing, no thumping of feet as the Aleani worked the deck above. He swung dizzily in the air and tried to remember where the floor was so that he could get out of the hammock without falling on his face.
A moment later, he heard footsteps.
He had barely managed to get his toes down before Aldric Derimsun burst through the door and brought the light of day with him. The Aleani captain’s tattooed face was flush with color. His eyes were shining.
“Heruan, Len. Kobolds,” Litnig heard. The sentence was followed by a string of Aleani syllables he couldn’t even parse into words.
Derimsun spat and looked around the cabin. “Current pashed us ta’rd th’ shar. I wan’ t’ye all on dack in tan minnits. Odd sare, we’ll have a fight on ahr hands b’fore t’ hour’s out.”
Kobolds.
Litnig had heard the word before. The kobolds were half-sentient beast-men who lived in the coldest corner of Guedin. They had been the first children of the dragon—cursed, wretched, evil.
Litnig had forgotten they were even meant to exist.
Derimsun left, and Litnig heard a strangled gurgle from the far end of the cabin. Quay was on his hands and knees over a bucket, retching. The prince’s eyes bulged. His back arched. Saliva dripped from his lips.
For a moment, Litnig felt bad for him. Over the past few days, Quay and Cole had faced by far the worst of the seasickness. Cole had Dil to take care of him. Quay had no one.
Quay’s heaving stopped. He wiped a shaking hand across his lips and lifted his eyes. “You heard him,” he rasped. “Quick as you can. Bring weapons.”
And Litnig’s sympathy was gone. He grabbed the orphan breaker and his boots from the chest below his hammock and strode toward the door.
Cole moaned. Dil hopped lightly down from her hammock to give him a hand. Leramis and Ryse slid slowly from their berths.
Litnig stomped past his sweating prince without a word or a glance. Let Quay writhe, if he couldn’t stop giving orders for ten seconds. Let him writhe.
#
A few minutes later, Litnig was on deck and looking at the shore. The morning was cold enough that he could see his breath. There wasn’t so much as a whisper of wind in the air. The sun hovered just above the horizon. The orphan breaker hung from his hip.
The Aleani, carrying weapons of steel and iron, glanced disparagingly at it as they walked around him.
Litnig ran his hands over the wood. Let them stare. He would show them what a man could do with a good club.
He hoped.
Off the Rokwet’s port side, six or seven small fires burned on a hill covered in yellow heather. The sea washed onto a gray beach below them.
“Have they spotted us?” Litnig asked.
None of the sailors responded.
A high layer of clouds covered the sky. For a moment, the sun broke through it and painted the hill in shades of orange. Litnig spotted tall figures scampering along the beach between silhouettes that looked like twin-hulled canoes.
His stomach twisted.
Anticipation had been the worst part of danger for him since his childhood. Once a crisis was on him, he could trust his body, trust his heart, trust his mind. But if he watched a problem come on, he had time to think. Time to wonder about the mistakes he might make, and about what might happen if he made them.
His brother staggered onto the deck, pale as the sails above him and leaning on Dil’s shoulder. Ryse, Leramis, and Len followed. Quay emerged last, looking as sick as Litnig had ever seen a man.
At least the sea is calm, he thought. Maybe their heads would clear in the crisp, morning air.
The minutes passed slowly. The Rokwet’s sails flapped lifelessly above. A few birds circled high in the sky. Litnig stood with his friends at the ship’s shoreside rail.
The kobolds launched their canoes one by one.
Litnig counted maybe twelve boats, with six or seven tall, shadowy figures in each. The Rokwet’s crew numbered thirty-five. Forty-one if he counted himself and his friends. Forty-two if he counted Leramis.
He spared a glance for the necromancer. The blackrobe was standing on the ship’s forecastle, near the stairs to the main deck. His eyes were focused on the kobolds. His brows plunged sharply toward his nose. His lips were drawn thin, like he was planning, or maybe even soulweaving already.
Litnig shivered and turned away.
Derimsun said something in Aleani. Len answered. Cole’s arms shook as he held the rail. He was mouthing something that looked like come on, come on, come on, come on, come on.
Litnig had seen his brother fight before. He would do pretty well, if he could get his guts together and keep his feet under him.
And if he couldn’t, then Litnig would just have to protect him.
Dil stood trembling at Cole’s side. She had her old, battered bow in one hand and an arrow in the fingers of the other. Ryse said something to her, and the shivering girl shook her head.
A bead of sweat rolled down Litnig’s cheek. He slipped the breaker from its belt loop and swished it through the air a few times.
He hoped he could trust it.
Never put too much faith in a weapon, his father had once said. Unless that weapon is yourself.
The words still sent goosebumps skittering over Litnig’s skin.
Litnig had never tried to make a weapon of himself. He’d watched Cole spend hours playing with his daggers, learning how to move with them, strike with them, parry with them, and throw them. But he’d never joined in. A part of him had been afraid of what would happen if he did. Afraid he might be too good at violence. Afraid he might even enjoy it.
The breaker felt solid and heavy in his hand, like an extension of his body.
A voice in the back of his head whispered that if it betrayed him, he wouldn’t live long enough to regret trusting it.
But he quieted his doubts. His brother was sick. His friends were afraid.
He had little left to put his faith in.
#
Leramis Hentworth stood at the Rokwet’s rail and watched thirteen canoes dash through low waves. His breath came calm and slow. His legs felt strong and sure. His eyes saw clear and quick.
The ship’s foremast towered uselessly above him in the still air. To his right, the forecastle angled up to the bow. To his left, the six companions with whom he was traveling stood shoulder to shoulder, brothers and sisters in arms, ready to die for one another.
Leramis stood alone.
It was not the first time. As white-robed priests had lowered his father’s coffin into the earth, Leramis had stood alone. As he had awoken from nightmares as a child, he had stood alone. As his schoolmates had jeered him, as he had joined the Temple, and as he had left it, he had stood alone. He’d grown used to it. He expected it.
For all that, it still caused him pain.
The kobolds bobbed in a line on the ocean swells just outside of arrow range. They were close enough to see, and to count.
Leramis opened his eyes to the River of Souls and watched them.
They numbered about eighty. Pale, flaxen hair hung long from their heads over their ruddy bodies. Their chests and legs lay bare to the north sea air. Leramis could see their weapons lying beside them in their boats.
The River passed over them without a stir.
Accounts of the kobolds had observed that they didn’t often have the ability to soulweave. Powerful soulweavers, in particular, were extremely rare among them.
Leramis watched the River. He saw nothing that so much as resembled a soulweaver’s eddy.
That was good. It would go easier if they didn’t have soulweavers.
The kobolds sat motionless for close to ten minutes. Whispers echoed up and down the Aleani line. Some of the sailors twitched nervously, clenched their teeth, or gripped the rail until their knuckles turned white.
Aldric Derimsun repeated a word in his own language in the center of the line.
He’s calming them, Leramis thought. Good.
And then all hell broke loose.
An uluating cry rang out from the boats. The kobolds’ paddles struck the waves. Their canoes shot forward.
Derimsun cried out. The twang of Aleani bows filled the air. Ryse hurled spears of energy toward the canoes. Kobold after kobold fell from the fast-approaching boats.
Leramis pulled deeply at the River and built a ball of souls the size of his chest in the air before him.
It would take more than picking off individuals to overcome the numerical advantage the kobolds possessed.
Ryse should have known that.
Leramis finished constructing the ball and breathed the energy of his soul into it. His mind filled with one word, one image, one thought:
Fire.
The souls erupted into flame.
Leramis put the pressure of his will behind them, and they popped like a cork toward the canoe at the head of the kobold flotilla. A heavy swell pushed the little boat wide of the fireball’s path, but it tore a momentary hole in the sea wide enough to swamp the canoe anyway.
Leramis exhaled slowly, and then he wove a second fireball and let it fly.
He overturned two more canoes and hit one directly. Ryse and the Rokwet’s archerscontinued to pick off solitary kobolds. Two of the oncoming canoes lost enough rowers that they fell behind the attack. The momentum of the charge faltered.
For a moment, Leramis thought the kobolds might not even make the ship.
Then some of them stood up.
Derimsun shouted a word Leramis didn’t understand. The crew dropped to the deck and huddled behind the bulwarks. The sailor closest to Leramis grabbed his leg and tried to pull him down.
Leramis kicked his hand away. He could guess what was coming.
It did not concern him.
The kobolds standing in the canoes raised blowguns. They took a few seconds to train them on the ship, and then at some unseen signal, they all fired at once. A volley of darts filled the air. Some flew toward Leramis. Others took a steeper angle upward.
Leramis wove.
The haze of darts came on quickly, but Leramis had enough time to pull a few hundred souls into a glowing half-dome in front of him. He filled his mind with the image of burning wood.
The darts flamed to cinders a full yard before reaching him.
With half of his breath, Leramis kept his shield alive. With the other, he began to weave another fireball. There were still six canoes left in good shape, and more than enough kobolds in them to make for a bloodbath if they reached the ship. He needed—
The River pulsed.
A ball of souls rushed toward Leramis from the boats.
Fear hit him like a thunderclap. He couldn’t weave quickly enough to deflect or dissolve the ball. His body couldn’t move fast enough to get out of its way. His shield was woven to catch projectiles, not souls.
His eyes went wide. He sucked in a sharp breath.
The fireball hit him in the chest as he tried to dive out of its way.
The world slowed down. His heart flared in white-hot pain. He smelled burnt flesh.
He was in midair, falling, and the souls of the River disappeared. The world went black.
No—
The thought flashed across his mind clear as lightning. The River had betrayed him. There had been nothing, not even a ripple.
There should not have been a soulweaver.
#
Ryse Lethien crouched wide-eyed behind the bulwark and watched Leramis fly back and crumple like a straw doll in a fist. Acid filled her veins. A shriek tore from her lips. Her hands and legs raced forward, and she had scuttled halfway across the Rokwet’s deck before she even realized what she was doing.
She had felt the fireball before it hit. She had known it would be too fast for Leramis, known he wouldn’t be expecting it. If she’d been standing with him—if she’d just been standing with him—
He was dying. He was dying because she had been proud. And because she had been angry.
Voices tore through the air around her. Hands grabbed for her and missed. A hail of darts fell on the ship, but she ignored them except to tear her sleeve free when one pinned it to the deck.
The sailors near Leramis cowered behind their cover, ignoring him.
A moment later, Ryse was at his side.
His face had turned the color of a cloudy sky. His body spasmed and jerked. His eyes were open and unfocused, and his hand twitched in a frozen claw in the air above him.
Ryse took a deep breath. Still-energized souls were worming their way deeper into Leramis’s flesh. His chest was smoking. His robe and whatever had been beneath it were gone, and his torso was a twisted mess of red and black. The air smelled of burnt skin and death.
You have been trained.
She wove a shield over herself and Leramis, then sucked the souls from the necromancer’s chest. When they were gone, she leaned forward and placed her hands directly on his warm, still-bleeding flesh.
The Aleani shouted and moved around her. More darts fell on the ship.
When the little missiles hit her shield, they burned to ashes and drifted gently onto her hair.
Ryse pulled deeply at the River and pushed with her breath. A head-to-toe wrap of souls formed over Leramis’s body. Six tendrils broke from the main threads of the weave and linked with the essence pulsing in his chest.
The process worked as it always did with the powerful. Souls trickled from the River toward the wrap. Ryse breathed out to ease their passage, and then they flowed in a smooth, wide stream. Leramis’s flesh stopped smoking and cooled to a normal temperature. His skin re-reformed.
Ryse ground her teeth. Her lungs burned. It was hard to maintain a wrap when so much power was flowing through it, but she could handle it.
She had been trained.
Leramis stopped twitching. His torso jerked upward. His eyes cleared briefly.
And then he fell back to the deck.
A moment later, it was finished. Leramis’s body was whole again. His eyes closed. He breathed normally, like he was sleeping.
Ryse let the wrap dissolve into the River. Her legs shook. She tried to take deep breaths and fight the crash she knew was coming.
Next to her, someone else was breathing heavily too.
Litnig. She vaguely remembered the elder Jin brother shouting her name as she’d left to help Leramis. But she couldn’t fathom why in Yenor’s name he was watching her work when he should have been watching the kob—
She turned to face him, and her heart stuck in her throat.
There was a creature standing near the rail. Its eyes were yellow and almond-shaped. It had slits for pupils. Its skin was a scaly, brownish-red, and its ears were flattened and small. Long, white hair flowed over its chest in platinum waves. It wore only leather rags and feathers.
And it was plunging a spear directly toward Litnig’s back.
Ryse didn’t scream. There wasn’t time to. She simply sucked at the River as hard as she ever had in her life and tried to form a crude shockwave.
Souls massed in front of the kobold’s chest. Litnig’s eyes widened. He started to stand and to turn and to swing his club—
Neither of them was fast enough. The kobold’s spear entered Litnig’s back just to the left of his spine and came fully out the other side. He cried out. His club clattered to the deck, and his hands grabbed frenziedly at the spear jutting from his torso.
The kobold uttered a horrible, birdlike cry.
But the souls were almost ready. Push, she told them—
The kobold saw her. Its spear left Litnig’s torso and pivoted around. The butt of it slammed into her forehead before she could finish energizing the weaving.
Spots filled her vision. The back of her head smashed against the deck. She lost her weaving in a flood of pain and disorientation.
There was a desperate, wordless shout beside her.
It was the sort of noise a man might make as he tapped the last reserves of his strength. The sort of howl an injured necromancer might release as he managed to soulweave when by all rights he should have been dead.
The River of Souls rippled. Ryse smelled lightning and heard the crackle of an electric discharge. The kobold screamed above her. She felt it hit the deck with a heavy thump.
Ryse rolled over and found herself lying face to face with Litnig. His eyes were glassy. His mouth was open. Blood was pooling beneath his cheeks.
She left Leramis gasping on the deck behind her and knelt at Litnig’s side.
She could save him. Thanks to Leramis, she could save him.
As long as she had a little time.
A loud thump echoed from the bulwark, and Ryse whirled to see a weaponless kobold grappling with an Aleani next to the ship’s rail. She lurched to her feet. The Aleani lost his balance. The kobold heaved him overboard and turned in her direction.
Ryse began to weave. The kobold bridged the distance between them and kicked for her ribcage.
But she had been trained.
She caught hold of the kobold’s leg as it thumped into her side. It tried to jerk it back, but she clasped her hands around it and held on tight. Her feet bit hard on the deck. She spun and used the leg to hurl the creature against the rail.
It grabbed the wood and struggled to free itself. She breathed out with her soul and gathered the River around its throat.
It screamed. She roared.
She ripped its thrice-damned head off.
Two more kobolds gained the ship in front of her, and Ryse shouted something that was half battle-cry, half frustration. She lunged forward and struck one hard enough in the chest that it toppled back over the side.
The other’s eyes glowed pearly white.
A shockwave slammed into her gut.
The concussion threw her backward, and she crashed to the deck next to a paler-than-ever Litnig. Her legs went rubbery. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t weave—
A hand yanked her to her knees by the hair. A ruddy, scaly palm filled her vision. The beginnings of a fireball formed in front of it.
A shadow hit the kobold from the side.
Its blow landed with a resounding crack. The kobold let go of Ryse. A boot struck the creature in the head. Its throat erupted in a gout of dark red blood.
Then it was gone, hurled over the side of the ship.
Cole Jin stood in its place.
There was blood spattered on his chest. His daggers were in his hands. The veins stood out on his neck and forehead, and he was bellowing bloody murder.
Next to Ryse on the deck, Litnig was still bleeding.
“Help me roll him over!” she shouted.
She knelt and took hold of Litnig’s head. Cole dropped to the deck and flipped his brother onto his back. Litnig’s arms hung limp. His feet flopped unnervingly.
Ryse looked down at the hole in Litnig’s torso, and her stomach turned.
The spear had hit vital areas—liver, spleen, maybe other organs. A voice in her head whispered that the wound was too deep. Litnig’s affinity to the River wouldn’t heal it with him so far gone. She didn’t have the strength to heal him on her own. Leramis was tapped out, probably no longer even conscious—
Cole was looking at her.
And for his sake, she lied.
“I can handle it,” she said. “Just keep them off me.”
And in her head, she whispered, Please. Yenor, please—give me the strength—
Cole stood, and Ryse began to weave.
She started with the wrap, to get Litnig’s weak connection to the River doing what it could before she tried to heal him through brute force. The web formed around him. Its strands began to pulse. A white glow formed over the hole in his torso.
When she linked the wrap to Litnig’s soul, she felt as if she had fallen into deep water from a great height.
The world turned black and stormy. A weight pressed upon her chest. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. Two crimson spheres burned deep in clouds of darkness before her. The voice of the dragon thundered in her mind.
And then the vision was gone.
The sun filtered through high clouds over her head once more. Aleani struggled with kobolds on the main deck. Cole stood above her with his daggers in his hands.
And souls were rushing toward Litnig.
The whole course of the River shifted. The souls came from the mainland. They came from the sea. They came from the sky. Tens of thousands of tiny spheres surged past her to Litnig’s side so quickly they blurred into streaks of light.
Her chest lit up in fiery pain. The River filled Litnig’s wound completely. A pool of souls spilled over his body and washed over the blood on the deck.
And still, more of them came.
Litnig’s eyes glowed scarlet. Panic clogged Ryse’s throat. She knew, knew, in some part of her that was deeper than logic, that something was terribly wrong.
She tore the wrap apart. The torrent of souls stopped. The pain in her chest abated. The souls that had raced to Litnig floated near him for one, frozen moment, and then the River resumed its battle-broken flow.
Ryse knelt over Litnig and ran a hand through her hair. Her whole body felt cold. Her mind raced through question after question and found no answers.
Litnig’s wound had disappeared.
There was only a small hole in his shirt and an ocean of still-wet blood on the deck to show it had ever been there. On his skin, she didn’t see so much as a scar.
Breathe, Ryse told herself.
Litnig sat up. His eyes were clear and gray.
Breathe, said her mind again, but she jerked away from him nonetheless. Nobody—no human came back from the dead like that. Not even the strongest in the Temple had that kind of power.
And just a few days before, he had been so weak—
Litnig looked at her, and she flinched.
The clarity in his eyes melted into confusion and pain. A howl and a thud echoed from the deck below them.
Litnig rose to his feet and picked up his club. A gust of too-late wind grabbed his hair and ruffled it. For a moment, he looked like he had as a twelve-year-old. Just Litnig. Somewhere between boy and man.
He opened his mouth to speak, and Ryse shook her head. If he spoke, it would forever link what had just happened with the boy she’d grown up with.
“No,” she croaked. “We’ll have time to talk later. If you can fight, go.”
Litnig swallowed, gave her one, last, pained look, and moved toward the melee below.
An icy shard of guilt lodged itself in Ryse’s heart.
“Yenor’s third freakin’ eye, Lit.”
Litnig must have responded to his brother, but Ryse couldn’t hear him. She was already moving toward Leramis and a wounded Aleani who lay on the deck next to him. Them, she knew how to deal with.
Them, she knew how to help.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed the chapter, please tell a friend! And let me know with a vote or a comment. If you didn’t, I’d love to hear those comments, too. :-)