By the time they’d snuck through darkened streets to the southern Palisade wall, even Lunurin was sweating with exertion. Built of three-needle pine, which grew over a hundred feet tall in the mountains, the bark-stripped trunks were painted in black pine-pitch. Like her, the trees had been uprooted and remade into something foreign. The Palisade stood at a modest eighty-five feet, with a narrow parapet along the top edge. Wooden guard towers and wide platforms supported hulking cannons.
Near marshy sections, iron grating had been installed to allow drainage during storms or when the Saliwain overflowed its banks. The salt of the river’s reverse flow would help. Lunurin counted grates, looking for the telltale peaked hatch mark carved into the wall. There! She waded in.
Goddess willing, her handiwork three months before had gone unnoticed… damn.
Lunurin pulled her crucifix over her head. Dipping her hand into the cool salty water, she touched the silver cross to the iron bars.
Addressing the dream of a storm over the water, Lunurin called softly, “Lintik, come to me.”
She didn’t need a storm. She didn’t want a storm, but a seed of lightning? That would do nicely. The dugong amulet grew warm, warding off any attention this tiny draw of power might cause.
It came to her like one of the volcano’s spark-striker birds, now a rare sight flitting indigo and turquoise along the flanks of Hilaga. The seed of lightning perched on her outstretched fingers, gentle as a firefly. She guided it through the crucifix into the iron grate. Iron bars pitted and crumbled like they’d been soaking in seawater for generations, not months.
Wrapping both hands around the grate, she lifted it free. The metal gave a protesting shriek, sending ice down her spine, as some unseen section she hadn’t corroded completely gave way. Lunurin stopped breathing.
Catalina crushed Inez flat against the Palisade wall as a circle of light high overhead paused, an oil lantern swinging in a soldier’s hand.
Lunurin’s arms cramped. Her hands slicked with sweat. Her legs burned, but she didn’t dare move. Discovery would mean expulsion from the convent at best, arrest and execution for sabotage at worst.
Catalina made the sign of the cross, her lips moving soundlessly. Lunurin envied the ease with which Cat prayed. She missed how the prayer ballads of her youth had tasted on her lips, but she’d learned long ago that prayer was dangerous. Some gods answered.
Finally, the guard moved on. Lunurin lowered the grate.
They were lucky the rains were late. Usually all but a foot of this grate would be underwater.
Inez went through first. Lunurin kicked a few brittle fingers of metal so Catalina could follow. She went last, her habit catching on the ragged edges. She heaved the grate back into place. They waded some distance before they were able to climb onto the bank.
Now, the tricky part: crossing the bridge into Aynila without being stopped by soldiers. While Catalina and Inez readjusted their habits, Lunurin reached again for the thread of power that still bound her to the goddess that made her a stormcaller. Her dugong bone amulet had thinned the connection, but never severed it like cutting her hair.
Without the amulet, hiding in the convent would be impossible. She’d have been burned as a witch years ago.
Now though, Lunurin could control the thread of her power. She let down a lock of hair with a quiet plea. This time, she didn’t reach for the bay, but the peak of Hilaga. She curled her fingers, beckoning the swirling clouds that graced Hilaga’s slopes like a lady’s piña cloth shawl. Her mutya nestled in the thick bun at the nape of her neck hummed. She spread the clouds over the water, a haze that limited visibility and muted sound.
It was difficult to move cloud and not stir it into storm when it so wanted to soak up water from the river. She gripped the mists like a pack of spectral hounds, bidding them hold.
Catalina exclaimed in surprise. “When did it get so foggy?”
“It’s good for us. We can walk across the Puente de Aynila and not wade clinging to the side.”
Catalina bit her lip. “You’ve done this before.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Lunurin tapped her knuckles to the amulet on her breast. “I put you at enough risk using your ‘lost’ passes from DeSoto. If I got caught, I didn’t want you in trouble with me.” This was a half-truth, if not all of it. Lunurin had given up being too honest with Cat about her abilities, much less Alon’s. For all that she loved Lunurin, Catalina was fearful of the full force of these islands’ native magic.
The Church must never discover the Lakan’s only heir was a water witch. Lunurin would not be the reason Aynila burned.
“How did you climb out the window without my noticing?” Cat asked.
Lunurin smiled fondly, glad this was the issue Cat had raised. “You are a very heavy sleeper, my love.”
They had become good at tiptoeing around her power’s existence and the fact that no amount of prayer or piety made it truly wane.
Lunurin dropped a light kiss onto Catalina’s brow and reached for Inez.
“Almost there, Inez, I swear.”
The poor girl panted, shivering in the muggy night air. Lunurin lifted her onto the bridge with care.
The ten-span bridge floated over the water, stone pilings disappearing into white mist below. Nothing moved on the river, the grates were lowered so no one could smuggle goods to the Aynilan port without paying the Palisade’s toll. There were ways around on the far side of the central delta, for now, but the new Puente de Hilaga would fully span the Saliwain, connecting Aynila to Hilaga, and the metalworkers’ conclave.
Soon the black bulk of the Palisade receded and before them lay only a white murk. No sounds from the city across the water reached them, although with no Palisade curfew Lunurin expected late-night carousing and social calls, while the evening air was cool and pleasant.
Her weather tricks wrapped silence around them like a cloak. The soft thump-thump-thump of their footfalls rippled through the mist.
The city came alive the farther they walked from Puente de Aynila and the strange sound-dampening mist. Music and laughter poured from upper-story windows where families and friends gathered, enjoying the night air and good company. They trudged on upstream toward Alon’s estate bordering the river, inherited after his mother’s death.
The main building was in the same mixed stone and wood style as the convent, but it had none of its dour presence. Alon’s home was the heart of the community, more so than the Lakan’s palace. The ground floor served as a local shop for raw dyes, ink, and cloth in every shade of blue from the palest sweet potato flower to deepest indigo. Alon’s doors were always open to those who needed the sea’s mercy.
The upper story was still illuminated. Most of the city kept late hours, sleeping in, enjoying afternoon naps during the hottest part of the day, and relegating work and social activities to the evenings. A schedule Lunurin had been trying to convince the convent to follow for years, but the sisters were adamant that rising with the sun was a godly thing.
They approached the wooden door to the shop, and Lunurin lifted a bronze door knocker shaped like a cresting wave. She wondered if the Lakan knew how rebellious his heir was these days.
The sound echoed hollowly. Catalina and Inez tucked themselves against Lunurin’s sides, seeking reassurance. They waited.
An older Aynilan man with grey hair in a braid down his back answered the door, leaning on a cane. “Forgive me, we’re closed for the evening—ah, Sister Lunurin.”
“Mano po, Tito Kawit, I’m here to call on Gat Alon.” Lunurin greeted him affectionately, pressing his hand to her brow when it was offered.
“I will see if the lord is awake.” Kawit cast a critical eye over the three of them. His face softened, and he waved them inside. While the women removed their shoes, he bade them not to touch the wares while he went to see if Lord Alon was taking visitors.
Kawit left the oil lamp in a nook beside the door and stepped deeper into the shop around a wall, the creak-tap of his cane on the stair echoing as he ascended. The warm light lifted Lunurin’s spirits. She’d gotten them this far. Whatever happened next, at least she wouldn’t face the problem alone.
Lunurin coaxed Inez and Catalina to sit on a bench beside the door. Poor Inez was exhausted.
“What if he won’t see us?” Inez whispered.
“He will,” Lunurin assured her.
“What if he can’t do anything?”
“He is a healer. He will do his very best,” Lunurin promised.
Inez sucked in her full cheeks. “Is that different from the Palisade physician? He almost never comes, and he put leeches on Abbess Magdalena before she left for Canazco. They made her worse.”
Lunurin squeezed Inez’s hands. “Yes, a healer is very different.”
A loud thump came from the upper floor, and Lunurin bit her lip on a smile of relief as it was followed by the fast tread of someone taking the stairs two at a time. Catalina, made dour by fear and her disapproval of these clandestine doings, frowned.
Alon, when he appeared, was very composed, walking calmly into the shop area. The Lakan’s second son was tall, of an eye with Lunurin—he’d finally caught up to her when he was around twenty. He wore his shoulder-length black hair caught back from his face. Lunurin was glad he’d abandoned his attempt to grow a mustache matching his father’s. She preferred him clean-shaven.
He approached Lunurin with his long easy stride, his deep brown complexion almost amber in the lamplight. He was comfortably dressed in the Aynilan style. His mutya was disguised as a false rosary, mother-of-pearl beads carved to mimic sampaguita flowers. A cross set with a perfectly round pearl at its center gleamed subtly gold against the deep indigo of his barong, as if spots of sunlight were shining through saltwater. A bold risk, one none but the son of the Lakan would dare. On his right hand, he wore an ornate set of gold rings set with mother-of-pearl. The blessing of Aman Sinaya upon him was a subtle push-pull in Lunurin’s blood. He was one of the last tide-touched in Aynila.
His brow was furrowed with concern, but his arms he held open as if he would embrace her.
Lunurin dropped into a curtsey. “Gat Alon,” she greeted him, and was pulled to her feet.
He leaned in, less a kiss of greeting than a soft press of his cheek against hers, as between visiting nobility or dear friends. She leaned into him.
“If this is about Biti, I swear I can explain,” he murmured.
She wished she could drop her face onto his shoulder and groan. As if she didn’t have enough worries tonight.
She took a deep breath—and regretted it, as his scent of indigo ink and salt flooded her senses. “It’s not, but how do you already know about Biti?”
Alon squeezed her shoulders and released her in precisely the amount of time appropriate for an unmarried man greeting a married woman, bride of Christ, or whatever a nun was. Alon always remembered himself, even when Lunurin didn’t, but Catalina still radiated disapproval.
Last Christmas she’d caught them smuggling lagundi leaf past the convent quarantine so Lunurin would have cough syrup for the students as the fever spread. You’d think she’d walked in on them kissing. She’d stubbornly rejected the remedy, her cough lingering weeks.
Lunurin shook herself. Alon was just as much to blame for the standoff as Cat. He had no patience for the inconstant nature of Cat’s piety. Lunurin needed to drag herself free of the magnetism of his presence.
Just as a firetender’s warmth could burn, the alluring depths of a tide-touched spirit could easily drown. The attraction she felt toward him now was only a trick of her magic, not real like her love for Cat, no matter how real it felt. Still, his nearness soothed the phantom thunder rumbling in her mutya, and eased the exhaustion weighing her muscles like lead. Tonight, he felt like resting in a brewing typhoon over warm saltwater. She was grateful for his strength, even if Cat never understood why she turned toward it, time and time again.
“Sister Lunurin. As pleased as I always am to see you, you never come with good news this late,” Alon said, his words loud enough for the room at large.
“I’m not one to break with tradition,” she responded, gesturing to the sisters rising from the bench. “You know Sister Catalina, and Inez.”
Alon executed a shallow bow, greeting Cat as she preferred in the Codicían fashion. His dark eyes raking over each of them for hurt or malady, before settling with their usual accuracy on Inez. Inez shivered against Cat, trying to melt into her side. The circles under her eyes were dark as bruises. How had Lunurin not noticed something was terribly wrong sooner?
Alon’s stern expression softened, a look he reserved for injured animals and small children. “Hello, Inez. You look tired. Let’s get you to my treatment room. Tea should warm you right up.”
He led the way upstairs. Alon invited Inez to sit on a low cot in his treatment room.
“Excuse me, Sisters. I will return shortly,” he said, stepping out.
Lunurin released a long deep breath and dropped onto a stool near the door. The fog she’d spread over the river reached chilly fingers into Aynila, searching for her. “What would you have of us? What can we be? May we rage? May we rain? Stormcaller, but twist us into shape and tell us our names and so we will be.”
Did the tides pull so on Alon? How did he stop himself from pulling them in, until everything but the peak of Hilaga lay underwater? For surely Aman Sinaya saw how the Church had wrapped her lover in rosaries and set her above their false altar. They’d stripped from her all her power and rage and majesty, and left her with grief. Surely even the gentle Sea Lady must whisper, “Drown them! Drown them all!” with every slap of her waves on the beaches of Lusong.
How could she not, with so many of her blessed children dead on Codicían pyres? So many struggling to keep the Palisade from closing its iron fist around the city?
Lunurin was exhausted. As if the tug and pull of politics and greed alone weren’t enough to tear Aynila apart. The energy of the world was drawn tight around her, her mutya ached with it, a powder keg waiting to go off. If the volcano didn’t erupt, raining ash and fire from above, would the next earthquake allow a desperate tide-touched to pull in a tsunami? Or would she lose control and summon the storm of the century her goddess craved?