Oathen (52 page)

“You keep forgetting you’re so much taller
than I am, don’t you?” she panted.

A distant voice caught everyone’s attention.
As they turned to look back at the cavern floor, Meena shouted,
“Down, everyone!”

Geret grabbed Sanych around the waist and spun
her behind a wide mausoleum. He stumbled, and they fell together.
She landed atop him in a narrow alley, both of them scuffing knees
and elbows against the constrictive rock walls. A hail of arrows
clattered against nearby roofs and steps.

Silently assuring each other that they were
all right, the pair got to their feet and peeked around the corner.
In the orange light, they could make out a few dozen cultists just
outside the distant tunnel.

“Fast,” Geret breathed.

Sanych wordlessly agreed. “And
numerous.”

She held out her hand to Geret, and he clasped
it. The enemy began streaming across the floor toward the
stairs.

Just as they darted out onto the steps again,
another few arrows clattered on the nearby roofs. One caught Geret
high in the thigh, causing him to stumble and fall onto the
steps.

“Folly,” he cursed, pushing himself to his
knees. “Yank it out, Sanych!”

With a swift jerk, she did so. Geret hissed
with the pain of the arrow leaving his flesh. “That’ll leave a
mark,” he said.

“Not with Meena around,” Sanych replied.
“Besides, it didn’t even sink in past the arrowhead.”

Salvor and Ahm descended to the pair and
grasped the prince under his arms, hauling him to his feet and
half-dragging him up the steps to where Meena waited, determination
and fear playing across her features.

“Which way?” Ahm grated, as she dropped the
torch and pressed a hand on Geret’s wound.

“I’m never going to have any interesting
scars,” Geret complained.

Meena gave him a sharp look. “Be careful what
you wish for, princeling. Follow me.”

She headed up the steep stairs again. At the
next junction she bolted to the right, then darted behind and over
a series of mausoleums covered in dragon carvings. Geret, tingling
from the recent healing, scampered behind her as best he
could.

Below them, Dzur i’Oth had taken up an
ululating war cry. More arrows clattered around the fleeing
group.

A few moments later, while the arrows still
rained down, Meena crouched in the shadowy lee of one of the tombs
in the row below her. She rested two fingers on her lips, while
pressing her other hand to the stone at her back. “Even now you
shelter me,” she murmured, eyes closed.

The arrow storm let up. Her eyes opened,
staring across the uneven path. “They’ve dismantled the whole
building!” she blurted. “Used to be full of traps, too.”

“Well that makes it easier,” Salvor
said.

“That’s what it hid,” Meena said, indicating
the narrow corridor that squeezed between two buildings and headed
back into the cliff, appearing to take a right turn in the dimness.
“The portal out of the dead zone. Now listen,” Meena said in a
rushed voice, her eyes looking past them for approaching Enforcers.
“Put your left hands on the wall and walk straight ahead. Keep your
eyes closed. That back wall isn’t real, and the things you might
see if you peeked…well…just don’t. Walk until I tell you it’s safe
to stop.”

She crawled across the path, standing only
when she was safe from arrows. Ahm followed her in, fingers
trailing along the left wall. Salvor went next.

Geret heard voices coming from the main stairs
below. He darted across the dusty stone path and into the corridor,
pulling Sanych with him. He tilted her face to his and whispered,
“You’re my Oathen, Sanych. I’m totally incapable of letting you
fend for yourself now, magic or no. You’re not alone. You have me
at your back. And you always will.”

Her pupils wide in the dimness of the
corridor, she gazed up at him, chest heaving. She slid a hand onto
Geret’s cheek and brought his face down to hers, giving him a warm
kiss. “Thank you,” she murmured.

“Now before we test our Oath further,” he
murmured, placing her left hand next to his on the wall, “let’s get
you your magic again.”

Eighty years ago

The lumpy wizard woman cackled with glee. “Of
course one lives there! There’s one everywhere that’s got space for
them! You think the name is coincidence?”

Her young, blonde guest squinted in disbelief,
handle-less teacup pausing on its way to her mouth. “You’re quite
mad, aren’t you?” Tyana asked of the older woman.

“Bah!” the gnarled octogenarian grumbled,
waving a hand in the general direction of the alpine buildings
clustered across the snowy mesa. “Don’t believe them. They have not
the wit to see the truth! You, now,” she waggled a knobby finger
mere inches from the younger woman’s nose, “might be an exception.
If you want to be.”

“See what truth, exactly?” Tyana asked,
looking around the small tearoom in the wizard’s four-room
hut.

The wizard snorted, then peered at her guest,
raising a wispy white eyebrow. “Do you really want to
know?”

“That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?”

The wizard cackled again and rose from her
knees at the tea table. She donned a thick parka and deerskin
mittens, then picked up a hefty walking stick. Tyana pulled on her
own cold-weather gear, and they stepped out into the
snow.

The chubby old woman led her guest away from
the buildings of Ocula Senmei and through a narrow valley. The
trail led back into the rugged, snow-blanketed spires of the
highest mountain in the south of Eirant. The track that comprised
the flat bottom was gravelly under a thin layer of snow.

After stamping through a maze of slushy
canyons, they emerged into a rounded hollow, hundreds of paces
across. A massive, spiraling hole gaped ahead of them, like the
home of an enormous funnelweb, descending into the earth at a
shallow angle. Faint white billows of steam rose from its inner
walls, curling and twining together before dissipating in the warm
sunlight above the peaks’ shadows.

“What is this?” Tyana asked. “Why are we
here?”

The wizard turned to her, panting, leaning on
her staff. “It used to live here.”

Tyana raised her eyebrows. “Not the poshest
accommodations.”

“They need the earth to sustain them. The
legends about their past are true.”

The young woman sighed. “You’ve brought me out
to an empty steam vent, with no proof to back up any of the mad
stories you’ve told me. Why should I believe you over the other
wizards back at the Ocula?”

The old woman put her chubby fists on her
ample hips and glared. “You don’t have to believe me. But—if you
can do what you say—at least have the courage to go see for
yourself!”

“See for myself? You said it’s
gone!”

“No, O Deaf One,” she said, holding a hand to
her ear. “I said, it used to live there. When I was seventeen, I
came out on the Spring Equinox to sing it into wakefulness…” The
old woman paused, sighing. “The earth just couldn’t keep it alive
any longer. Its remains are within, still.” She lowered her head,
feeling fresh tears for an old loss edge her eyes.

The young woman remained silent.

The old wizard raised her hooded head. “It
told me about the others, back when we would commune. It told me
everything, from the greatest gift they ever bestowed to the reason
they are no longer with us. But you do what you want out here. I’m
going back to my hut. I’m not going to stand here and be mocked by
yet another myopic idiot.” She waved her arms in irritation, then
turned and stumped away.

The wizard had been home long enough to warm
her toes when an urgent pounding came at her door. She set her face
in a grimace and stalked over to open it, expecting yet another
diatribe filled with insults based loosely around the words “raving
mad”.

Tyana stood panting in the snow, her pale
curls plastered to her forehead. The wizard could smell the sulfur
wafting off of her.

“You entered the steam vent!” she
said.

Tyana’s eyes were amazed, insistent. “Teach me
that song.”

Narjin leaned back against the wall, panting.
“That might do it.”

“Thank you,” Rhona whispered, keeping a
bloodied hand on Ruel’s chest. Together, she and Narjin had slid
the Enforcer’s blade from his back and seared the wounds closed
with a heated dagger. So far, it hadn’t killed him. His breathing
was terribly shallow, though, and his forehead was beaded with
clammy sweat.

Narjin felt at the lump on her forehead,
wiping away a slender trail of blood. “You said something back at
the lodge about ‘dirtwalker cousins’. What did you mean by
that?”

A rude reply leaped to Rhona’s lips, but she
checked it; concern for family was currently foremost in her mind.
“Meena is my great-great grandmother. She stayed with the Southern
Sea Clans for a while and bore a daughter who raised our clan,
Agonbloom, to prominence. Jaeci had some of her abilities; so did
others in her line. Meena didn’t think they’d transfer.”

“You’re actually related to me by the
Shanallar’s blood! Your family has Meena’s abilities? What can you
do?”

Rhona stared at the woman’s face, so like
Meena’s.
What can
I
do
?

Despite her pride in her newfound Shanallese
heritage these last seasons, she’d never considered that she might
have any more to her than the eye-catching hair colors she’d been
born with. Her eyes darted to Ruel, and she licked her lips. “If I
could have any, I’d take healing. I’d kill for it,” she murmured,
turning to her unconscious cousin and gently putting her hands
against his skin, as she’d seen Meena do to those she
healed.

Narjin shifted, watching.

“Ruel,” Rhona said quietly, “help me. We share
blood. Between us, we can fix you, I know it.” She closed her eyes
and willed his body to knit beneath her hands. “Gods above, help
me,” she prayed. “Wisdom…dragons…anyone. I’ll take any god—Clan or
dirtwalker—who will listen right now.”

The green torches along the edges of the walls
gleamed down on the tableau; long moments passed.

“Rhona,” Ruel whispered.

Hope and amazement soared in her chest. Her
gaze lit on her cousin’s face. His blue eyes were lined with pain,
though, and she winced in empathy, placing her hands on his cheeks
and bending close.

“I tried to heal you, like Meena. Did it work?
You woke up,” she said, face alight.

Ruel closed his eyes and coughed as quietly as
he could, though the effort still seemed to hurt him. “Maybe it
did…just for a while…”

Narjin looked down at her hands. Rhona’s face
clouded over. “Ruel, you can’t leave me,” Rhona said. The concept
was inconceivable.

“Sorry, wench,” he breathed. “Give me back to
the sea, after. It’s calling.” His eyes met hers with a singular
focus.

“I…” She swallowed. “I would, if you were
actually dying.” Her jaw jutted in stubborn denial.

He breathed through a smile. “You ever
think…having me by your side…didn’t support you so much as hold you
back…from your potential?”

“I never thought that!” she said, shaking her
head, her braids whipping against her cheeks. “Woman or man, you
were the best first mate! The gods themselves could not have given
me better.”

“Time to stand alone…” Ruel sighed and closed
his eyes. “Be strong…Rhona…they’ll sing of you one day…”

Ruel Menihuna’s quest ended.

Rhona’s eyes searched his face, repeatedly
seeking a sign that he still lived. She felt for his heartbeat, her
hands pressing against his bloody tunic. But his chest was
still.

“I’m sorry,” Narjin offered in a quiet
voice.

Rhona blinked, unable to comprehend her loss.
Ruel had been here a moment ago, right here with her. Now he was
gone—sailed over that final horizon—and not even Meena could fetch
him back. Her right hand, her first mate, her strongest ally and
her loudest challenger, Ruel was dead. She was alone, surrounded by
the enemies of her family, far from familiar waters.

At that moment—far, far too late—Rhona finally
realized why her mother had sent her on this journey. A single
thought coalesced in her mind: no promise of gleaming swag, no mere
dirtwalker lover,
nothing
was more important than her
Clan.

She gazed at Ruel’s body. “You were right. You
were always right. This I swear on the immortal blood of the
Seamother, Ruel Menihuna: you will have your own
Lay of the
Worthy
. I will write it with my blades, and my ink will be the
blood of my enemies. Your name will be my battle cry, and only
death will still my song.” She kissed him, willing her tears into
strength, then stood, gathering her swords.

Narjin looked up at the pirate’s stormy
expression. “Rhona?”

Rhona m’Kora stared down the body-littered
hallway, dark promises mirrored in her turquoise eyes. Grimacing in
eager anticipation, she hefted her fiery sword and said, “I beg
your leave, Narjin. I’m going to cleanse this reeking backwater of
my slain kinsman’s enemies. Tag along if you like.”