It was not the First Queen of Ooila who hung from Mercy’s mast. The morning’s sun revealed a face that was too young and too healthy to be her and the sombre duty of identifying the woman fell to Bueralan.
‘Greena Fe.’ He spoke as a small boat was lowered into the black water from the huge form of Glafanr. ‘She was the First Queen’s daughter. Her oldest daughter. This was her ship.’
‘The dreams of our god are still flawed,’ the Innocent said, standing beside him. ‘Fate does not convey itself in the subtexts and promises of an unconscious mind. She will come to understand that as she experiences it more and more like her parents did. For them, fate was not a dream, but how they viewed the world. They saw all the possibilities, all the strands of possibility before them, and they would nudge and push events until one was realized and another destroyed. In a dream, there is no conscious choice. There is misunderstanding and absence. There is doubt where there should be none.’
What that meant in relation to the three creatures who were responsible for the destruction on Mercy, Bueralan did not know. No answers were forthcoming, either. The blond man – the normal man – had introduced himself as Zilt, but he had not elaborated on who he was, or how he knew that Se’Saera had wanted the ship, or why he was begging for forgiveness. Ren must have had the same questions, but he had not asked any. Instead, he had nodded at Zilt, accepting what he said and then, with his scarred hands on the hilts of his old swords, walked to the stern of Mercy, to where the ship’s wheel stood empty. There, he had waited, unresponsive until the morning’s sun had risen and the First Queen’s daughter had been revealed.
‘She will be bothered by the mistake, but not by the actions,’ Bueralan said. ‘She will look at all those who have died here and shrug.’
‘Her parents would have done the same,’ said Ren. ‘Why should their child be any different?’
Bueralan did not know how to respond to that.
‘You cannot lie to yourself,’ the Innocent continued, his voice solemn. ‘Servitude does not require you to believe that everything your master does is fair, or even kind, for often it is not. You are in error if you look for morals in a god, for your morals are made by those around you, by those who have raised you, and each of them is born from a mortal concern. No such thought occurs to a god. When you realize that, when you have lived long enough that your own morals are no longer understandable in the world, but are something that you hold to nonetheless, you will finally begin to comprehend the true nature of a god. You will see that mortal men and women change. That they seek to remake the work each generation. That they are but a small stain in an eternity. When you do, you will realize how precious the words of a god are. How they use those words to define the world around you, to give truth where there is none, and substance that no mortal can see.’
That certainty, Bueralan knew, was what drove Aela Ren. In the last four months, he had come to believe that the scarred man saw and recognized the destruction he was responsible for. He was not without self-reflection or awareness and he knew the ramifications of his actions: but for the Innocent, there was no act he could perform other than destruction. He saw a world in constant flux to the morals and wills of mortals, and he saw a world of chaos.
In Dynamos, before the plank to Glafanr had been lowered, but as it drifted into the strait of the port, Bueralan had walked the town’s empty streets. Around him, the buildings stood tall but silent, as hollow as the old butterfly corpses that cracked beneath his boots. Without any goal in mind, he found himself at The Mocking Quarrel, the inn that he and Samuel Orlan had stayed in when they first arrived in Ooila. Inside, he walked up the stairs and past the rooms. Through the open doors, he saw unmade beds, open drawers, and other signs of a hasty exit.
When Bueralan returned to the ground floor, he found Samuel Orlan sitting at one of the centre tables, a pitcher of beer and a glass beside him.
‘I realized,’ the cartographer said, ‘that I have not seen a butterfly alive for days.’
‘No.’ Bueralan picked up a glass from the bar. ‘In Cynama, I thought the fires had driven them away. But here, I have seen only their husks.’
‘They will not rise again,’ he said. ‘She has drawn Maita’s power from the ground as she rode here, as if she were putting a comb through her hair.’
The saboteur was not surprised. He placed the glass on the table and unstrapped his sword, laying it before him.
‘It is what Aela wanted us to see,’ Orlan said, raising his gaze as he spoke. ‘Remember when he came to us in that barn, after they had conquered Cynama? He could have left us there. She had no need for us. But he came back for us, so we could see what she has done. So we could bear witness to her birth. He called us his prisoners when he stepped through the door, but we misunderstood the nature of our prison. We have waited for a shackle and a cage but there is none. We are not prisoners in the way we know the word to be used. Such a prisoner is not allowed to hold a sword. He is not allowed to ride off and reclaim it before he returns to the city.’
‘We should walk away, then.’ Bueralan began to pour warm beer from the pitcher into his glass. ‘If it is that simple, after all. So why don’t we?’
‘Because we are caged regardless.’
He sat down across from the other man. ‘Yes, we are,’ he said, after a moment.
‘I did not expect a god to return in my lifetime.’ The cartographer turned his gaze to his own still full glass. ‘Every Samuel Orlan has feared that it would happen, but I did not think it would be me. I am too old for it now. I should be finding a successor. A new god should be a concern for the eighty-third Samuel Orlan. Or for the ninety-first, or the hundred-and-ninth. One of them should be witness to this, not me.’
‘But it is you.’
‘Yes, and everything I have done to try and stop her—’
‘Has been useless.’ Bueralan took a deep drink, a quarter of the tall glass. ‘I’ve not been any better,’ he said, after he had lowered the glass. ‘I don’t have a plan. I don’t know how to stop this. I am still trying to find a way to do that. But I know that when that ship comes to port, I will walk up the plank and I will find a cabin in it. I can do nothing else after what was done to Taela and Zean. Ren knows that. That is why he let me go back to my mother’s house that night. That is why he allows me to wear a sword. What he knows about you, I do not know. I imagine it’s something similar.’
‘He wants me to believe in her,’ Orlan replied sourly. ‘No, not believe. He wants me to know. He wants me to stand beside him and support her. He wants me to admit that the world is better with her. He wants you to acknowledge it as well.’
‘What we think matters very little to him.’
‘No, what we think does matter. What all god-touched men and women think has always mattered to Aela Ren. They are his family.’
‘There’s a thought,’ Bueralan said, and drank more of the warm beer.
He and Orlan drank the rest of the pitcher and another one before the saboteur left. At the door of the inn, he had seen the old man return to the bar for a third, intent on drowning his thoughts. But he had not seen him again until the last of Aela Ren’s soldiers boarded Glafanr. He had been in their midst, a drunk and forlorn figure who, after he had found a cabin, had retreated into himself. In the months that they had been at sea, Orlan had rarely left his cabin and had spoken only when the door was opened, and when a question was asked of him. Even then, he had only spoken in brief snatches.
Beside Bueralan, the Innocent watched not the arrival of his new god at the wreckage of Mercy, but the three figures who stood at the broken rail awaiting her.