The river was loud in her ears, but Alira wasn’t in it. She wasn’t wet.
She blinked awake. She was in a boat. She was wrapped in blankets. The boat wasn’t moving.
Moaning at muscles that seemed to object at every movement, she turned and pushed herself up a little. The boat was drawn up on the shore.
There were people around—Stormborn, faces that she knew—and they were piling things up on other boats nearby. And there were trees above them. Great and glorious Furywood trees.
She was home. Anjel.
“Awake, I see,” came an old but familiar voice. Amaru. One of the elders who’d long been her friend.
The older woman came into view, hobbling on her familiar cane. When she reached the side of the boat, she lifted the cane and set it inside, then slowly started to climb over the edge.
Alira tried to push herself up into a sitting position to help, but Amaru shooed away her hands. “Lie back and rest,” she said. “For once, I’m in better shape than you. I want to savor it.”
Alira did as she was told and settled back against the side of the boat. “Elder,” she said. “How—?”
“Did you get here? Kora brought you.” The elder finally clambered over the side and onto a bench seat just beside her. “See? Spry for my age.”
Alira leaned up again to try to look for Kora, but once more, Amaru waved her back down. “She’ll be along in a moment. She’s gone to fetch water and food for you. Then we’ll talk.”
Not a minute later, Kora appeared. She was thinner than Alira could ever remember, her eyes sunk into her skull and her cheeks hollow. She walked with a limp of exhaustion, but someone had fashioned a proper sling for her arm and shoulder, and she was smiling as she carried a skin of water over her other shoulder, and a bowl in her good hand. “Alira,” she said as she climbed into the boat and sat beside the elder. “You’re awake.”
Kora’s voice was ragged. Alira assumed her own was even worse. She nodded in thanks as she took the bowl—filled with a simple warm broth—and the fresh water. She devoured the one and drank down the other.
As she did so, she looked around at the village. Everything was scarred by fire. The walkways in the trees were empty, some dangling, broken.
The Stormborn were on the ground, and there were so very few of them. “What happened?” Amaru asked them when Alira set down the empty bowl.
Alira and Kora told the elder everything that had occurred after they’d been taken. How they had labored to escape. How the Bloodborn had begun growing new kinds of trees—fusing Furywood and Char—that might possess terrible dangers. Then Kora told how she’d burned the trees and escaped, before Alira told them about Whéuri and the strange machine with its magickers and its portal. She told them about how she’d used something of the magick in those trees, how she’d sent the fire into the soulglass crystals and blown them apart—the machine and so much else with them. Then she pulled out the pouch with the seeds.
“I don’t know what to do with these,” she said.
The elder had listened most intently at the end of the story. “Alira,” the older woman said, putting a hand on her knee, “the magick in these seeds—however it was made—is beyond all knowledge of the Stormborn. It will be up to you to decide its fate. But I do not need to tell you the dangers of power. We heard the sound of the destruction you wrought even here, though we did not know what it was.”
“I survived.”
The elder seemed to shake a little at that. “I think the magick was still with you.”
Alira felt numb. “I’m so tired. I was tired before, but the magick … it was so different from Char, but it still almost took the life from me. How long was I asleep?”
“A day,” Kora said. “You had a terrible fever.”
“I feel I could still sleep for a week.”
Amaru made circles with the tip of her cane against the bottom of the boat. “We do not have a week, Alira Stormborn. I worried that we waited too long already, but we did not dare move you in your condition.”
Alira now knew why the boats were pulled up onto the riverbank. The survivors were loading them. “You’re … leaving?”
Amaru sighed. “I told you once, not long after you came here, that people were like the trees. Do you remember that?”
“You said they needed to put down roots to grow.”
The elder nodded and smiled in a way that reminded Alira of her mother. “It was a long time ago.”
“I was just getting good with my bow.”
“Whéuri was training you,” Amaru said. She smiled in shared pain. “I remember. I think it was the day you took this young one into your life.”
“It was,” Alira said. Her voice was quiet, but she smiled over at Kora.
The young woman responded by reaching over and gripping her hand. “A good day for me,” she said.
“You needed to hear what I said about taking roots,” the elder continued. “You need to hear this too. We can’t fight the Bloodborn. You killed many. But there are more. And we’re too few to stand against them here.”
Alira wanted to protest, wanted to fight, but in truth she was too weak to do either. “I’ll do as you say, elder. Is there word from other trees?”
“None. Kora said the Bloodborn had captured women you did not recognize.”
Alira nodded. “It’s true.”
“Then we must fear the worst.”
Alira took a deep breath. “But if not to another tree … Where would you have us go?”
The elder turned her gaze up into the damaged limbs of the Furywood high above them. “I’m thinking of another day now. The very first day you came here. I told Whéuri to take you to the height of the tree. Do you remember this?”
“I do,” Alira said, looking up. “It was the day she showed me the bay where the Bone Pirate lived. The day I knew my friend was dead and there’d be no going back to Myst Motri, no leaving here, no going back to the Seaborn.”
Amaru’s gaze came back down, and their eyes met.
After a moment, Alira suddenly realized what the elder was suggesting. “Wait, the pirates? That’s where you want to go?”
The old woman’s smile was gentle. “The Bay of Bones, yes. And I need you to lead us there.”
Alira shook her head in disbelief. She wanted to get up and storm off, but she wasn’t sure she even had the strength to stand. “I loved Bela,” she said. “Loved her. And if she lived beyond that night, the Bone Pirate murdered her. Now you want me to go there?”
Amaru straightened up and gestured toward the people moving around them on the shore. “Look around you, Alira. There aren’t many of us left. We can’t stay.”
“But the pirates—”
“The people here look to you, Alira. Those of us who live, we saw what you did.” The elder turned to Kora. “What you both did. We saw your bravery. We see you survived. Many now live because of you.”
Alira shook her head. “But so many are gone because I—”
“No.” Amaru hit the tip of her cane against the bottom of the boat. “This is not the way forward, Alira Stormborn. You fought hard, and you fought well. You live. As do we. None of us gets to choose where the lightning comes down. It strikes where it will. Some trees it will destroy. Other trees—the Furywood—are strengthened by this. The bolt struck here. It struck hard. We who were struck are left to decide whether we will be stronger for it.”
Alira opened her mouth to argue, then thought better of it. Amaru was the wisest woman she’d ever known. “The Bay of Bones,” she repeated. Then she shook her head again.
The elder shrugged. “I think it is a fight either way. We can stay and fight alone. Or we can go down the river and hope the pirates fight with us.”
“It might work,” Kora said. “You were Seaborn. You can talk to them, right?”
Alira wanted to laugh at the notion. The Bone Pirate preyed on the Seaborn. Salted women, veteran hands, would wake screaming from nightmares about meeting the Pale Dawn at sea. But she heard the desperation in Kora’s voice, and when she looked around, she saw that others had been listening in. All of them were looking for something.
Hope.
“I absolutely can,” she said. And then, because she couldn’t think of a reason to wait to find out whether they were floating downriver to their deaths, she lifted herself up a little to talk louder. “We should leave right away,” she announced.