That is the story, my love. My story, but yours, too.
The Vuo Ton found me on the island three days later, a slender boat sliding out of the warm morning mist, tattooed figures silent as idols, even those at the oars motionless as the hull drifted toward the shore. The Witness stood near the bow, one foot on the thwart. When the boat was still a pace and a half from the sand, he leapt, landed easily, then stood watching me for a long time.
“You are alive,” he said finally.
I nodded, but didn’t get up from where I was sitting. I’d made no effort to escape the island. If Ananshael wanted me, he knew where to find me.
I’d spent the first day burning the bodies of the dead. I laid Kossal and Ela, Ruc and Chua on a great pyre of dry rushes, labored half the morning to kindle an ember with a dry stick in a piece of driftwood, then stood back and watched as the fire devoured the piles of bone and meat. The four warriors were gone, utterly unmade, but their bodies burned bright as anything still alive.
Sinn, I did not burn. I carved his head from his shoulders with the bronze knife, then spent the afternoon shaving away the skin from the skull, prying out the eyes, scooping clear the brain—which seemed heavier than human brains, more dense—then washing the bone in the river until it gleamed. When it was finally clean and dry, I placed it atop the wall of skulls, packed the sockets of the eyes with dirt, then planted a pair of river violets.
I spent a long time looking at the monument. To the people of Dombâng, the island is a sacred place, the abode of their gods. It is not sacred to me—no more sacred than any other place where my god has unmade a creature—but it is beautiful. I smiled, laying Sinn’s skull atop the pile; he had been a gorgeous creature, and it seemed appropriate that what was left of him, too, should be gorgeous.
After that I spent the days and nights seated on the shore, listening to the birds, watching the clouds. I expected my god to gather me to him, but instead of my god, the Witness of the Vuo Ton had arrived in his long boat.
“You are alive,” he said again.
I realized that I hadn’t replied the first time, rose to my feet, and smiled.
“I am. The only one.”
“The Three gave you back.”
I considered telling him that his gods were not gods, but the remnants of a near-forgotten race, then decided against it. People worship as they will. It was not my place to take the faith of another.
“Now there are Two,” I replied.
He blinked. “The gods…”
“… Wanted a hunt worthy of them. They found it.”
I pointed to the skull. It was larger than a human skull. Thicker, too.
The Witness crossed to it, lifted it to the sky, stared into those dirt-packed eyes for a long time, then laid it reverently back on the pile. When he turned to me, his eyes were full of tears.
“Where would you have us take you?”
I smiled. “Home.”
I didn’t mean Dombâng. Rassambur was my home, my true home. It had been my home even before I knew its name. I stayed in Dombâng a little more than a year, however. I knew, shortly after I’d returned to the city, while I was still healing, that I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t the only one to have survived the island after all.
Love sang inside my heart—Ela’s last gift—and you were growing inside me, tiny but getting larger every day. You are a child of the delta, son, conceived in a hut of the Vuo Ton. Your father was a scion of your city, and you are the last of that line, the last of Goc My’s lineage. What you’ll do with that fact, I don’t know. This story might not matter to you, but it is your story as much as mine, and you deserve to know it.
I stayed in the city long enough to see you born, then to nurse you. You were a wide-eyed, laughing child from the first. No one would have guessed at the violence of the first days of your gestation. You rarely cried, and your laughter sounded like song. It was hard to let you go, but I owed a debt for a prayer I had made, a prayer answered finally on that island in the delta. One night in autumn, just after you were weaned, just before the Annurians arrived with their legions and their blockade, I laid you on the altar of the temple of Eira, trusting to her priestesses and priests, to the goddess herself, to raise and watch over you, my only child. I imagine you in that temple now, surrounded by white light and the smell of jasmine. The thought makes me smile.
I used to loathe your goddess. She seemed to me a player of favorites, a fickle, capricious creature, the opposite in every way of the god I serve. I was wrong. Our gods, of course, are beyond all human understanding, but I imagine Eira as the daughter of Ananshael. I imagine the two of them holding hands, her smooth fingers laced through his old, gnarled joints. The Nevariim do not die—not natural deaths—and they do not love.
We do both. We must do both.
Perhaps I will come back to the delta one day and hold you in my arms again. Perhaps not. In either case, I hope this finds you well, my son, child of my doubt and my delight, your heart full of life, and your mouth still brimming with song.