Royce rowed as hard as he could away from Lethe’s island, and it felt as though every stroke of the oars through the water put a little more of her spell out of his mind. Maybe that was just the concentration needed to keep from capsizing when all around them, the water rose and shifted in peaks and troughs like small hills, threatening to tumble them down each one and into whatever was waiting underneath.
Gwylim sat at the prow of their boat, looking out over the water. Neave and Matilde sat toward the middle, where there were a few supplies, as if the boat’s previous owner had expected an exploration of several weeks. Mark and Bolis were still unconscious in the stern, although even as he thought it, Royce heard Mark groan and saw his friend start to stir.
“What…” Mark began. He sat up, clutching his head. “Where… no, I have to get back to Lethe…”
Royce passed his oars to Neave and Matilde, ready to tackle his friend if he had to.
“Mark, you’re further away. Try to think, try to breathe.”
He saw Mark look at him with anger, as if he might leap forward in the boat.
“You took me away from her. You ruined everything.”
“It was a spell,” Royce said, trying to get through to his friend. “Think, Mark. What do you actually feel right now?”
“I feel… I feel…” Mark shook his head. “I’m not in love with her. It… I can remember how perfect she was, and how much I loved her, but I can’t remember why. I remember… I was planning to kill all of you.”
“It’s all right,” Royce said. “That wasn’t you; that was just the effect that thing has on people.”
“It was just…” Mark winced, clutching his head. “It hurts. It feels as though my brain is on fire.”
Mark all but collapsed again, and Royce found himself wondering if this was some side effect of the craving Lethe had induced. Perhaps, in making the world seem so perfect, she made everything without her hurt. If so, it made sense that Mark, who hadn’t been able to break through the spell, would hurt more.
“Do you two hurt like this?” Royce asked Matilde and Neave.
He saw Neave grit her teeth.
“A bit,” Matilde admitted. “Not as bad as that, though.”
And Royce didn’t hurt at all. Just thinking about Genevieve seemed to push all of it from his mind, even as he knew that he ought to be thinking about Olivia.
He heard Bolis groan then, and Royce went to get a hold on him, stepping over the spot where Mark lay almost helplessly as the knight recovered consciousness. He was just in time, because Bolis’s first reaction was to surge up against him in apparent rage.
“I’ll kill you! You will not…”
“It’s a spell, Bolis,” Royce said. “You don’t love Lethe.”
“I love her! I love her more than any of you!”
Royce kept his grip on the knight for the seconds it took for the knight’s breathing to calm, and his brain to register that he didn’t love the creature that had sought to kill them. Even then, Royce kept his grip on Bolis’s arm for several seconds longer.
“How are you feeling?” Royce asked him at last.
“Ashamed,” he said. “I am supposed to be a knight, not a fool to be taken in by a creature who… oh, my head!”
He groaned and collapsed as Mark had. If anything, it was worse, because Bolis barely seemed to be conscious. It seemed as though his whole body was being torn apart by the aftereffects of the spell.
Once he was sure Bolis wasn’t about to attack them, Royce let the knight go. Matilde and Neave paused in their rowing for a moment or two, and the boat drifted, carried by the currents that ran between the islands.
“So,” Matilde said. “Those two are back to themselves, kind of, but what now?”
Royce wasn’t sure. They had almost no equipment or weapons now, with even the crystal sword left behind where they didn’t dare go back to find it, because if they did, there was too much of a risk that they would just end up caught in Lethe’s spell again. Royce cursed himself for having lost something so precious.
Around them, the water spread out, and it wasn’t one flat landscape. There were patches where the currents ripped in different directions, and where white water sprung up around rocks and shoals. There were flat patches that suggested deep water beneath.
There were fins in the water too, and for a moment, Royce thought there might be sharks tracking them, but then a dolphin leapt from the water, spinning in the air for a moment before splashing down into the water again. A great whale surfaced amongst them, the scale of it enough to dwarf the boat, the wash of its surfacing pushing the small vessel back.
It felt like a moment to simply sit there and absorb, but Royce could see the danger in that. The creature that had attacked before was still out there somewhere in the depths, and while he didn’t know if these shallower waters would be enough to deter it, he didn’t want to sit there and find out.
“We need to head for an island,” Royce said.
“Not the one we have just come from,” Neave replied.
Royce could only agree with that, but eliminating one of the Seven Isles from the equation still left six more, and those were just the main ones, five ringed around the bulk of the large central island. There were dozens more small islands that ranged from the size of the boat to the size of a farmer’s field, covered in everything from grass to trees, bare rock to volcanic ash.
“How do we find your father among all this?” Matilde agreed.
“There will be a settlement somewhere,” Royce said. “If we row, maybe we will find one. It’s our best chance.”
They took turns rowing, although it turned out that neither Mark nor Bolis could row for long, as debilitated as they were. Their small boat cut through the water, but only slowly, and Royce could feel his arms starting to ache with the effort. He started to worry that they would be stuck out there on the water until they starved, or died of thirst, or were finally claimed by sea creatures.
The islands were very different from one another. The one Lethe had been on had been a place of tropical forest, but Royce could see another that was as arid and sandy as any desert, apparently swept clean of vegetation by the wind. There was one that was grassy and green, but with only patches of trees rather than the thick covering of them that Lethe’s island had possessed. One seemed to be a rockier place, with spikes and peaks across its surface, and large, aggressive-looking birds nesting among them. There was an island that was almost at sea level, with mangrove trees sticking up out of the water, almost permanently submerged, and there was one…
“There’s a settlement of some kind there,” Neave said, pointing.
As she did so, Royce saw the place. It was a thing of old, gray stone, slate roofs, and baked clay bricks. It looked as ancient as anything Royce had seen there amid the islands, the buildings as much ruins as living places. There were towers there that looked half toppled, and buildings that were little more than shells. As he sent Ember out to fly over it, he thought he saw figures standing there amid the ruins, gray and still, staring as if waiting for something. It was only as the hawk flew closer that he realized they were statues.
No, not statues, perfectly preserved people, each one caught in some moment of staring, or running, by what seemed like ash. The whole city was covered in it, turning it into a living memorial, caught between one moment and the next by the power of the volcano at the heart of the Seven Isles.
“Who built it, do you think?” Matilde asked, and it took Royce a moment to realize that she meant the city.
Neave answered. “The same ancient folk who built the places of power. My people say that they lived and traveled the world, and they knew more about magic than anyone, bringing back knowledge to a great city. Then they were… gone, just gone.”
“The volcano killed them,” Royce said. “There are people there, they must have been caught just as it erupted.” He thought for another moment or two, and it seemed that the others were thinking too.
“If your father was looking for magic,” Mark said, “maybe he went to their city.”
It made sense. It made so much sense that they started to row for the city without even thinking about it, moving toward it in slow strokes. Even if Royce’s father wasn’t there, a city sounded like the best place for them to get supplies with which to continue searching the islands.
Then Royce saw a flicker of white from the corner of his eye, and it was enough to make his head snap around, sending out Ember almost as a reflex. The hawk’s wings took her closer to the island, and as she got closer, Royce saw a tower of black that looked as though it had been carved from the obsidian that littered the volcano. He might have ignored it even then, except that he saw the remnants of a faded banner hanging from it.
That banner showed the symbol of the white stag.
Instantly, Royce found himself thinking of the vision he’d had of his father, when he’d been down underwater, fighting his way to the surface. He’d been heading through a forest then, and it had been the white hart that had led him to his father, hadn’t it? The symbol seemed like too much to just ignore.
“There!” Royce said, pointing. “My father is there!”
“Where?” Mark asked, still sounding bleary and in pain.
“On the main island,” Royce said. “His symbol is there.”
“Are you sure?” Matilde asked. “The city seems so much more likely.”
“And we can get weapons there,” Neave said. “Besides, if it is a place of the ancient folk…”
Royce shook his head. He knew his friends’ arguments were good ones, but he knew with almost absolute certainty that they were wrong. His father had left that symbol, had led him this far, and Royce felt as if going to the city even to gather resources would be to ignore that. Somehow, he knew it wasn’t a mistake that he had seen it now, when he’d been thinking of turning back.
“We have to go to the island,” Royce said.
“Royce—” Mark began, but Royce cut him off.
“Please, all of you, I know it doesn’t make sense, but I need you to trust me,” Royce said. “This… this is what we have to do.”
He looked at his friends, hoping they would understand, not sure how to persuade them. He couldn’t show them what Ember saw, could only ask them to trust him. Royce just hoped that it would be enough.
“You saved me on the Red Isle,” Mark said. “You’ve saved all of us plenty of times. If you say that’s where we need to go, then I’ll go with you.”
Neave nodded. “You have the talents of a true king. I will go where you lead.”
Bolis managed a groan. “You are my king.”
Matilde shrugged. “I guess we can always look at the city after.”
They turned the boat, slowly pointing it toward the central island, with its volcanic slopes and magma floes, black sand beaches and craggy outcrops. Royce took the first stint on the oars, pulling hard on them so they cut across the waves, while the others called out the rocks ahead.
They took turns rowing as the sun crept its way across the sky. Mark was well enough to row a little now, although Sir Bolis was still laid low in the bottom of the boat. He looked better than he had been in the moments after he’d woken, but even so he was almost gray with pain and the aftermath of Lethe’s twisted “love.”
Slowly, they made progress toward the island. They were close now, but Royce found himself looking back toward the city, wondering if, after all this effort, it would be worth it. Had he really done the right thing by persuading them to go this way on the strength of just a banner?
He was still looking back when he saw the city shift. The sunlight struck it at the right angle, and in that moment it was transformed into a living hell of ash and fire, fleeing figures and violence as people fought to get away. Magic flared in a kind of warfare that had nothing to do with the world now, and fire rained from the sky, making the water around the city rise in steam.
Screams carried out across the water and Royce looked around at the others, wanting to make sure that this was real. Just the horror on their faces was enough to tell him that they could see it too.
“It… it’s like the city is dying all over again,” Neave said. Royce could hear fear in her tone, but also fascination; the Picti knew about the ways of the people who had come before, with their magic.
Matilde swallowed. “Do you think it’s real? Not just an image?”
Royce could see the steam coming off the water, turning into the mist that had surrounded the islands when they got too close.
“I think it is,” Royce said.
That just made Matilde look more afraid. “If we’d been there…”
If they’d been there, they would be dead, caught up in an endless replay of the disaster that had destroyed the city so long ago. If his father hadn’t left a signal behind, they would have gone to the city, and they would have burned along with the rest of it.
They sat there in the boat and watched it for most of an hour, before the sun finally shifted enough that the city faded back into stillness. After so much horror, the stillness was almost worse. It seemed like forever before Royce realized they should be rowing, and set his hands to the oars again.
They picked their way through the shallows around the central island, dragging their boat up onto a beach that seemed to be composed of fragments of obsidian ground so small that they became like sand. The island spread out around them, the volcano towering over all of it, more massive than Royce could have believed. From here, it wasn’t possible to see the tower, but he knew that it had to be there somewhere.
Where though? Royce could see the others looking at him, waiting for him to decide where they should go next. Even Gwylim sat there expectantly, occasionally looking up toward the peak of the volcano, where steam rose in the promise of future fire and violence.
Royce looked around, trying to work out the best way to get up the mountain. He was still looking when he saw a small image, scratched into the island’s black rock with chalk. He recognized the image of the stag, and he knew then that there was only one route to take.
“This way,” he said, setting out along the trail. He wasn’t sure what kind of dangers lay along it, but he knew it was the way they had to go.