The world is full of unfinished visioncloths.
OLD SHEANNITE PROVERB
‘You know,’ Solen said, ‘it is told that Ranouf of Vespi could wavespeak a ship so that it would remain in the eye of a storming until it died of exhaustion around him, so great was his skill.’
Glynn gazed at the isle of Ramidan and its strange red-tinted cliff city, trying to discern if it was the crimson dawn that gave it that ominous bloody hue.
‘I wonder what happened to him in the end …’
Solen shot her a look. ‘Ranouf? No one knows.’
‘Do you think he killed himself?’
Solen shrugged gracefully. ‘Perhaps he courted death until his luck ran out. But from the stories, I do not think he would have been coward enough to kill himself.’
That caught her attention. ‘You think that choosing to die is cowardice?’ She was thinking of the feinna. There had not been any lack of courage in that tortured little beast.
He knew what was in her thoughts, so close had the past night brought them. ‘The feinna had no choice,’ he said. ‘She fought nature by forging an unnatural link with the draakira to save her babies. The way she died was natural to her species. But it is different for people. For us, suicide is surrender.’
‘Don’t you think there might be times when surrender is the best thing to do? The only thing?’ Now, tangentially, Glynn was thinking of Ember and wondering how her sister’s stoical wait for death would be viewed by the Acanthan. Would he call that fighting or surrendering?
She noticed a ship pull away from the pier and squinted to make out its name, but it was too far away.
Solen stared down at Glynn intently, his coat flapping in the sharp breeze which was all that remained of the wild storming that had driven them from the Turin Straits to the isle of Ramidan in record time. She seemed to him, in this soft dawn light, as golden as Kalinda and very fair.
With difficulty he brought his thoughts to bear on her question, though it was not truly a question. ‘Perhaps there are times when it seems there is no alternative to surrender, but while we breathe, there is hope. It takes courage to hope though.’
While there is breath in you, you would fight with a courage you do not even seem to understand is in you, he thought, but did not say.
Glynn sensed something flowing from him as heat and fire. But she was thinking of Ember, pale but for the flame of her hair. She hadn’t tried to kill herself, but wasn’t there a kind of weakness in her embrace of death?
The tiny He-feinna uttered a mewling noise, and Glynn looked down to find it staring up at her with its mother’s liquid seal-eyes.
‘The feinna had to die, yet it resisted death long enough to help its child live,’ Solen said, and there was a break in his voice that moved Glynn.
Like Solen, she had been deeply affected by the birthing. It had also stripped something away between them. Having shared that extraordinary night of storms and death and, in the midst of it, this one precious birth, they could never quite be ordinary together. More was born last night than the He-feinna, Glynn thought.
Her eyes blurred anew at the memory of Bayard’s sudden, shocking death, and of the two dead feinna dropped into the sea with their mother while the storm faded about them. They could have waited to reach land, but somehow it had been fitting. In this new wordless way, they had both known that.
She had passed the little He-feinna to its mother, and its eyes had shown a brief radiance before they clouded and the soul-spar flew where its mate’s had gone, and Bayard’s. Weeping bitterly, for she had not known this would come, Glynn had swaddled the tiny He-feinna and held it to her breasts, still not understanding what she had done to make it live.
She knew exactly what had happened in one way; it was just that there were no words to fit the experience. No human words.
‘Those born who must tread strange and dangerous paths are given gifts to aid them by the gods,’ Wind had said once.
Glynn shivered, wondering what the future held now.
She would have to explain Bayard’s death when the Draaka woke. She was free of them now, though. They would not dare to drug or bind her with so many witnesses on hand.
There was still a link to be taken into account, but the link she had with the He-feinna was not like the one that had existed between its mother and Bayard. That link had changed the feinna, maiming and altering the creature’s spirit in some unnatural way. The link between Glynn and the He-feinna was not a mating link, but something else altogether that had been shaped by the dead She-feinna and had changed Glynn; changed her in ways she could not yet even begin to comprehend.
Changed her forever, she suspected.
Not the He-feinna; only herself. But maimed was not the right word, because rather than feeling unnatural and crippled as the feinna had felt after linking with Bayard, the gnawing emptiness that had haunted Glynn was stilled. Not a maiming, but a completion of her.
She thought of a passage she had read in Bayard’s scrolls. Humans had an emptiness in them, one of the scholars had written, or perhaps they were quoting Lanalor or his sister. There had been a name for the emptiness but she could not remember what it was. The scribe had gone on to say that the aim of humanity had been to find a way to fill the emptiness. The Song directed them to seek completion.
If the object of humanity was to be completed, then she had come very close. And if she had been searching for something unknowable, as Wind had always believed, then the arrow of her spirit had found its mark in this world; found it in the link with the He-feinna, and in what she felt for Solen.
For he was part of it, that much was evident.
This morning after the sea burial when they had stood quietly together, he had said, ‘I spoke as I did at the wing hall because I wanted Jurass to believe that I cared nothing for you or Hella. To keep you both from danger.’
Glynn had nodded gently, understanding that this was an apology if she needed one. She didn’t.
Then some while later, ‘Donard said you wept when you told him I had died.’
A day ago, she would have denied it and turned her face away.
She looked at Solen, letting him see, from her face and eyes, what the thought of his death had meant. But she did not say the words and, as if a pact had been made to that effect, neither did he.
It was not the time for it. But it would come. That, too, was unsaid between them.
She had not told him yet that she was a stranger, yet she would, as soon as she disentangled herself from the Draaka. She would tell him and take the help she knew he would offer. But, for now, it was best to leave things as they were.
For there was Ember to be considered. If there was any emptiness left in her, Ember was at the heart of it.
The gold-sailed Waterdancer carried them gracefully over the crests of the waves towards the long stone pier, and through the sea mist Glynn could see the rambling multi-layered city constructed on and within the variegated cliffs. The rest of the island appeared to be a dense wilderness and flat, save for a single blunt jutting thumb of a hill in the central region of the land mass. Highreach Bluff, Solen had named it.
From the corner of her eye Glynn caught sight of the ship leaving port, and turned to watch as it passed the Waterdancer; a small vessel with fluttering yellow pennants, turning neatly into the wind. She wondered where it was bound. Then someone began to beat a wild tattoo, announcing their intention to land.
It was late, but at the Pole, the sun shone endlessly in a white night. A young seal drowsed on a narrow shelf. Soon it must find food to fill its shrunken belly, but for the moment it was warm. It was content with this, though the world was utterly changed. Its mother had vanished, to be replaced by a luminous sky from which shone a warm bright eye.
High above, beyond the glowing horizon, and above the earth’s envelope of oxygen, a comet flew.
Only one watched, and waited to see what would come.