Page 38

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

LORE

Do not let yourself be lulled: The first calm is the eye of a storm, not its ending.

I t took Dani longer than either of them would have liked to find a boat.

They probably should have expected it—it wasn’t like there was much need for sailing vessels in the Harbor—but after a day of compulsory gardening once Sersha found them, they were even more on edge with each other than before.

When Lore was finished and caked in dirt, she went to Raihan, fiddling with his silver instruments, carefully fielding questions about her days in the Citadel.

Despite the fact that they’d each tried to steal from the other and that she’d threatened his life, they were companionable.

Raihan knew what it was like to live on the run.

Lore knew what it was like to be desperate for answers that wouldn’t come.

They weren’t friends, but a friendship could grow, given time.

So she felt incredibly stupid for not thinking of taking Raihan’s boat before Dani did.

On their second night in the Harbor, Lore crept into the hut after moonrise, hoping that maybe the other woman wasn’t there.

No such luck—she was pacing back and forth over the rough floor, and when she looked up, there was fire in her eyes.

“So when were you going to tell me you’d gotten cozy with the Ferryman? ”

“When I decided it was your business. So, never.”

“You idiot,” Dani hissed. “You let me spend a day looking for a damn boat when you could just convince him to let us take his?”

Her mouth opened for a poison retort, then closed again. It wasn’t really a bad idea.

“You didn’t think of that?” Dani tilted her head with a sneer. “It’s really a wonder you survived in the Citadel for so long.”

“He won’t give it to us,” Lore said. “He needs it for rescuing escapees.” Part of the reason it hadn’t occurred to her was because she knew Raihan would say no. They’d spoken of the work he did, how important it was to him to provide a way out of the Isles to those who wanted one.

“He does that maybe once every two months,” Dani said, crossing her arms. “The rest of the time, it’s just sitting there. Tell him we need it. To save the world, or some shit.”

Which was why Lore was here again on their second morning in the Harbor, hoping Raihan would lend them his boat.

She didn’t finesse the question. She just asked it outright, standing on his threshold with all his silver instruments pointing at her. “What would it take for you to let me borrow your boat?”

He looked up from his notebook, where he’d been scribbling in the margins of the page with his tracing of the Fount piece. Slowly, he closed it. “To get to the Fount?”

“No, to host a party.” She rolled her eyes. “Yes, Raihan, to get to the Fount.”

His mouth twisted to the side. “That would be less borrowing and more taking indefinitely.”

Lore shifted on her feet. The rest of the thought hung unspoken—if she took the boat, it meant no more ferrying prisoners from the Isles. “This is bigger than that,” she said, as if he’d spoken it aloud. “This is…” She made a hoarse noise, not a laugh, and echoed Dani. “This is saving the world.”

Raihan just looked at her, mouth still pursed, trying to fit something into language. “Is that what you think repairing the Fount will do? Save the world?”

She gave him a withering look. “I think it’d be a start.”

“And what if I think the world is beyond saving?”

“Don’t tell me you’re a nihilist, too. I can only take one.”

“Not a nihilist,” Raihan said. “But I am of the opinion that the world can only be as good as the people in it.”

Lore slumped into the chair by his piles of books. “The world is fucking doomed, then.”

“Now you sound like the nihilist.” Raihan poked at one of the sliver instruments, sending it spinning before it settled on Lore again.

“Taking away a material good—a means for people to escape the mines—for something that might eventually be good, someday, seems like boarding up a well because you’re hoping for rain. ”

Lore didn’t have a rebuttal. She chewed her lip.

“You should fix the Fount,” Raihan said after a stretch of quiet. “And maybe that will start the process of making things better. But as long as there are people on the earth, fixing things won’t be a onetime occurrence.”

“So it’s pointless.”

“Not pointless. But harder than fixing a Fount.” He shrugged. “There are no absolutes, Lore. We won’t ever reach some worldwide utopia where nothing bad happens again. Living is work. Goodness is work.”

He was right, but she didn’t like it. Didn’t like the idea that she couldn’t somehow fix everything and keep it that way. What was the point of power, if the universe couldn’t be forced into goodness? If there wasn’t a terminus that could be reached and maintained, damn the costs?

In the back of her mind, that place where Nyxara used to be, something nudged. The ghost of a glimmer, there and then gone.

“You can take the boat, if you want it,” Raihan said finally. “It’s still at the dock.”

Lore looked up from the floor. “Come with us.”

It hadn’t occurred to her until this moment to ask, but now that she did, it made perfect sense.

She could prove to Raihan that she could make the world be good.

She needed someone to think she was capable of fixing something, that she alone could force the world to be what she wanted. She needed someone to believe in her.

A glimmer in her mind again, like sunlight cutting through clouds.

He looked at her with his brows drawn down, shadows cast over the planes of his face. The moment hung, expectant, a convict in the seconds before the gallows rope hauled them skyward.

“No,” Raihan said.

She threw up her hands. “Why not? You’re too smart to spend the rest of your life rotting away here. You said yourself that there’s no way to safely navigate to the mainland; the Mount-finders only help on the Isles. So you’re just going to stay here and breathe in ash until you die?”

“Everyone in the Harbor relies on one another. I have shifts to till the fields, turns to pull in the fish nets. I can’t just abandon them.” He paused, resting his elbows on the table. “And it doesn’t… feel right, to leave. It feels like my place is here. For whatever comes next.”

Lore didn’t press him further. Intuition, that bitch, driving them all. Part of her wondered if Raihan felt like she had at the beginning of the summer, strung along on star-lines, played like a puppet by something bigger. She doubted he would tell her, even if she asked.

She also doubted she would see him again.

Dani wouldn’t want to linger, and Lore didn’t, either.

She wouldn’t be able to fix the Fount until Alie and Gabe somehow found the other pieces, and somehow managed to get them to the Golden Mount.

But surely, if she’d come this far, they would, too.

Surely their puppet strings would play them in the right direction, bound like insects in spiderwebs.

“Thank you,” she said. “For helping me.”

Raihan nodded. He knew this was goodbye, too. “Good luck, Lore.”

She left the hut as midday burned through the ash veil, casting shadows on the should-be-dead trees that had never recovered from the Godsfall.

The village was awake, but no one spoke to her as she slipped through the streets, headed toward the tiny house Sersha had given her and Dani when they first arrived.

Dani was waiting, her nails dirty from garden work. She gave Lore a pointed look.

“It’s done,” Lore said, slumping into one of the chairs by the rough table. “He said we can take it.”

“Then let’s go.” Dani brushed past her with barely a glance.

Lore stood with a sigh, gathering the bag with the Fount piece from the back of the room before following Dani out of the hut.

They were halfway down the dirt road before Dani turned back around, eyes narrowed. “What’s in the bag?”

Dammit.

Lore kept her face impassive. “Food, mostly. Unless you wanted to keep eating jerky salty enough to pickle your insides for the entire journey? I also got us both a change of clothes. You smell.”

It wasn’t even a lie. Raihan had given her the food, and she’d found Sersha after gardening yesterday, asking for a pair of tunics and trousers in the loose, undyed linen that everyone in the Harbor wore. All of it was tucked carefully around the Fount piece.

Dani eyed her warily but didn’t ask to see inside the bag. After a moment, she shrugged and kept going. Lore followed close behind.

The Harbor was bustling. The dirt road that housed both their hut and Raihan’s was one of many, all spiraling out from the central green.

Children played around the edges of the garden, the older ones helping harvest and till.

Sersha was bent over, pulling potatoes from within a dark box she’d dug up.

A community. People helping one another. She was robbing the prisoners on the Isles of a chance at this, by taking Raihan’s ship. The ash wouldn’t let them go home, but they could make a home here.

Lore focused on her feet and tried not to think of that too much.

As they passed, Sersha raised her head. She didn’t ask them where they were going, but she lifted her hand in a wave. Lore returned it. Dani didn’t.

The beach itself was empty, Raihan’s boat bumping against the dock with every swell of the waves. Lore eyed Dani’s back. “I hope you know how to sail, because I sure don’t.”

“Relax.” Dani clambered up the ship’s side, then lowered the gangplank for Lore in an uncharacteristically thoughtful gesture. “I wasn’t lying about having a lover at the shipyards, that day at Alie’s tea. He taught me a few things.”

Lore boarded the boat without a word.

“Now,” Dani said, sitting the silver instrument on the deck. It spun, once, then pointed at Lore. “How do these things work?”

“Raihan told me.” Lore gathered up the silver balance quickly, hoping Dani didn’t notice how it reacted to her and the thing in her bag. “I have to take it below, set it up properly. Give me a second, and I’ll tell you where to go.”

For a moment long enough to make her stomach twist, Dani just stared at her. Lore twitched one finger, winding a thin thread of Spiritum. Just in case.

“Don’t fuck with me,” Dani said quietly.

“I’d never,” Lore replied. “We are the very definition of mutually assured destruction.”

Though was that really true now? Lore had no doubt that she could make her way to the Golden Mount using her own power.

Steering the boat could be a problem, but even that she might be able to figure out, manipulate her magic in some way that made it unneeded.

She could kill Dani right now, and it would barely interrupt her plans.

But… she didn’t want to. So many deaths already piled on her heart, all the villages, Anton, Jean-Paul. She didn’t want to add another unless there was no choice.

And she hadn’t been lying, that day in the shipping office. She did feel for Dani. They were both only what impossible circumstances had made them, and what it had made them really wasn’t so different, in the end.

Dani watched a minute more, eyes narrowed. Then she nodded.

Lore took the Mount-finder belowdeck.

The room where Raihan had kept the silver balances was cleared; he’d come back and packed them away at some point. Lore set hers in the middle of the table, warily watched the point of the pin like it was an accusing eye.

Well. Time to see what she could do.

Tucked into her bag, the Fount piece called out to her, singing its low song. With a glance at the door to make sure it was still closed, Lore pulled the carved stone from the tangle of spare clothes. The Mount-finder whipped around on its pin, pointing so directly it trembled.

Immediately, the world slipped into the grayscale of channeling-space.

Black threads of Mortem wound through the dead boards of the ship, wavering lines of pearlescence dancing with orange-red in the air. Every strand of the world, open to her senses.

A thick band of gold stretched out from the Fount piece in her hand, reaching forward. Through the ship, into the waves, like a gilded road. In her preternatural vision, she could see through the wooden walls, into the ocean beyond, that golden path leading into the depths of the sea.

The Fount piece was like a compass now that it was out here in the open ocean, close to its whole. Leading them to the source.

She didn’t come all the way out of channeling-space as she left the room, staying far enough under for everything to still be black and white, to still hold the awareness of that ribbon of Spiritum emanating from the piece of the Fount.

On the deck, Dani waited, hands white-knuckled on the wheel of the ship, face all hard angles. Lore raised a hand, pointed in the direction of the golden road. “That way. It’s a straight course to the Fount.”

Dani spun the wheel.

The boat lurched in the proper direction, sent on its way by sails that Dani had apparently adjusted while Lore was below catching the breeze.

When the Harbor was behind them, almost fully hidden in ash, Dani glanced Lore’s direction.

“I’m not sure how you feel about the whole only-channeling-Spiritum thing, but it’s certainly an aesthetic improvement. ”

Lore knew what she looked like when she channeled Mortem.

Opaque eyes, black veins. Her only reference for what she looked like now was what she’d seen on Bastian.

The phosphorescence around his hands, the way he seemed to glow.

She looked down at herself and saw the same, as if gold ran beneath her skin instead of blood, as if she’d swallowed the sun.

“It’s an improvement all around,” she said. Her voice sounded different. More resonant.

Dani gave her a sharp look.

Lore just gazed at her hands, glimmering softly, coated in a thin layer of light.