Ayae shared a tent on Yeflam’s northern shore with Caeli. She had done so for close to four months, since Yeflam broke in half, and both she and Caeli had called the canvas box home without a clause for half that time. The two first named the tent ‘home’ after they erected it on the muddy shoreline, but the joke, made in storm-drenched exhaustion and fatalism, gave way to the reality of their lives. After a week, it was their home: they lived in it, just as thousands of others lived in the tent city that sprawled along the shore. Their small patch of land, halfway up the first hill that led within half an hour’s walk to the road into the Mountains of Ger, was theirs. The world inside the canvas was the world they could change and alter as they pleased, and so they littered the interior with small personal touches: Caeli attached a silver chain to the top bar of the tent that swayed when tremors from the crumbling mountains announced themselves and Ayae sewed patches of red, black and white into their grey blankets. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. Enough that, as Ayae sat at the edge of her bedroll, as she pulled the laces of her leather boots tight, as she buckled the hard, dark leather covers over the laces, she made sure that she did not leave a dirty trail across the fabric. Once she finished, her right hand dropped to her sheathed sword and, after she picked it up, she pushed through the tent’s flap. The tie that she used to lace it shut was an old piece of cloth from Caeli’s Mireean uniform.
Outside, the campfires illuminated thousands of canvas tents just like the one Ayae had left. From where she stood, the familiar sight of the camp left her less and less with the impression of a huge, burning beast that had been killed before the Floating Cities, and more with the feeling that she was gazing upon a community. She could still see the creature in the camp’s shape, but it was only at night, when the dark hid the torn centre of Yeflam in Leviathan’s Blood from her. It should have been the other way, she knew: the sight of the broken stone cities and the half-submerged wreckage that littered the ocean should have made her think of a giant monster that had risen from Leviathan’s Blood and torn apart Nale, but it was only during night that she could envisage the fantasy. Beneath the broken suns, the destruction was normal, a part of her daily life, like the tremors from the Mountains of Ger and the struggle for clean water.
Ayae buckled the sword around her waist, no longer feeling its weight. She had worn it since the night that Yeflam had broken apart, since the cart she was in made its way from Ghaam to Neela and then into the muddy land. On that night, the rain had sheeted down, and there had been little order and less shelter. Around her, now, the fires of the camp darkened and lightened her red-brown leather armour as she walked past, but on the night Yeflam broke apart, on the night the cart came to a halt in the mud, there had been virtually no light. Fires had been nearly impossible to keep lit. Aelyn Meah’s dark, lightning-lit storm giant had raged in fury in the centre of Yeflam, and they had feared that it would wade towards the shore, but it had not.
Ayae did not know why. She did not know then, and she did not know now, why the Keepers and the creatures that had emerged from the ocean did not swarm onto the shore. She did not know why they had not killed the people there.
What she knew was that, by morning, the storm giant was gone, and so were the Keepers of the Divine and Se’Saera’s monsters.
In their wake, Ayae was numb. It was in such a state that she was summoned by the two people who would seek to claim Yeflam – or at least its shorelines. She had met them in the first tent to be erected. It was no more than canvas on wooden poles, but it seemed almost decadent when she stepped beneath it and approached Lian Alahn and Muriel Wagan.
The former was the head of the Traders’ Union, a tall, white-skinned man who, in cold and precise tones, did little to win over Ayae. The latter was the ruler of Mireea, a nation that had been lost to the Leeran Army nearly a year ago. She was a middle-aged white woman who pushed out in fleshy smears.
The tent had no walls, and men and women could easily drift close enough to listen to the conversations. In the confusion, anger and fear that drove the morning after Yeflam had been broken apart, many did, yet both Alahn and Wagan pretended that they had no audience and offered Ayae a place to sit. They had no chairs, only a blanket that covered the ground, but she took it anyway. For refreshment, they offered only sombre condolences for the loss of her friend.
‘It is Zaifyr’s death that we wish to talk about,’ Muriel Wagan had said, sitting opposite her, her unadorned hands folded before her. ‘More specifically, his brothers, Jae’le and Eidan. It is said that they are still here.’
‘They are searching for their brother,’ she had replied.
‘Is he—’
‘They are searching for his body.’
She found the words difficult to say, then and now. For weeks, she awoke expecting to hear that he had emerged from the ocean. She expected him to tell her this while he sat in her tent, his smile – that half-smile of his – on his face, his fingers touching the charms woven through his clothes and hair.
‘Jae’le is the one searching for him,’ Ayae had said to the two before her. ‘He and Eidan have made a small camp by the shore. They will not leave until he has found him.’
‘And Eidan?’ Lady Wagan asked. ‘What does he do?’
‘Sleep, I imagine.’ When she had left him, the stout man had lain beneath a thin blanket in a tent, his wounds tended to by the pitch-black shape of Anguish, Se’Saera’s first creation, and first betrayer. ‘He can barely walk.’
‘Will those two Cursed fight for us?’ Lian Alahn asked, suddenly. He used the insult for them that was popular in Yeflam. ‘Will they be part of our struggle? Will they take up arms against their sister and this new god of hers, Se’Saera? Will they help us repair the damage that they have done? Will they take responsibility for what their kin has done?’
‘You should ask them yourself.’
‘I visited them this morning.’
She smiled faintly. ‘I hope you did not speak to Jae’le in that tone, then.’
The leader of the Traders’ Union straightened. ‘He is not a god,’ he said, his voice rising not for Ayae, but for those outside the tent. ‘Just as Aelyn Meah was not a god, nor any of the Keepers. Se’Saera has made that clear to all of us and I will not be treated by any of the Cursed as if I was an inferior man.’
‘Lian.’ Muriel Wagan’s voice had a quiet chill. ‘Now is not the time.’
His mouth opened, but he swallowed his words. After a moment, he rose and walked out of the tent.
‘People are afraid, Ayae,’ the older woman said, after he had gone. ‘They have lost a lot. The two brothers of Aelyn Meah have lost much, as well, but people are afraid of what they will do. There are no answers to what happened between the Keepers or Se’Saera. The ocean only washes up the bodies of their friends on the shore. There are stories that the Keepers carried Aelyn away, that the storm giant flung Se’Saera’s creatures out into Leviathan’s Blood. There are others that say they fought together. We are struggling to make sense of it all and people need to be reassured. I would give that to them, if I could. I would like to be able to tell people that they need not be afraid. That Jae’le and Eidan are not like the Keepers. I have not spoken with Jae’le, not yet. I haven’t had the time. But Lian has, and his requests have fallen on deaf ears – due entirely to his behaviour, I am sure. I would appreciate it if you could speak to Jae’le.’
‘And tell him what?’
‘Do not tell him anything,’ she said. ‘Simply ask him to understand the fear around him.’
That was how she had become the unofficial spokeswoman for the two brothers, the face for a nation of three, if she included herself.
It was Eidan who had responded to the fear, first. In the months that followed, the months where nothing was heard from the Keepers or Se’Saera, and the camp became more and more defined until it lit the landscape she walked through now . . . in those months, it was Eidan who came out to interact with the people around him. He let his beard grow out to hide the healing scars that ran down his face – the black lines that could be seen like matted hair – but he could do very little about the limp that he walked with, or the curled, unusable state of his left hand. Yet, it was exactly those things that made him amenable to the people of the camp, and when he told them that he would begin to repair his creation, when he told them that he would fix Yeflam, not a single person questioned or doubted him.
The cart Ayae used to drive herself and Eidan into Yeflam was kept in the stables. The mercenary Kal Essa had been given the task of guarding the stores of food and the animals, and it was one of his men who greeted her when she entered the stalls. Jaysun – a tall, white young man – already had a horse attached to the cart and Ayae climbed into the driver’s seat, took up the reins and released the brake.
No one questioned her as she rode through the camp. She was not an unfamiliar sight in the early hours of the morning, and would not be when, a short time later, she and Eidan rode onto the bridge into the empty streets of Yeflam’s closest city, Neela. There, the roads led out into the black expanse where the ocean met the sky, the division between the two marked by the remains of a violence that no longer appalled her.