Soulwoven (33 page)

Litnig felt no sadness. The thought occurred to him that death was something inevitable.
Simply another part of life, like birth or growing old.
He took a deep breath, and for a moment, he felt calm.

Then he caught sight of Ryse, standing with her arms crossed near the
Rokwet
’s other bulwark.

The feeling vanished.

When the song was finished and the bodies were gone, the others streamed back to clean up what remained of dinner, or go to sleep, or begin their shifts on watch.

Litnig caught Ryse’s sleeve. Her eyes were red-rimmed, watery, and tired.

“You said we could talk,” he said.

She sighed and looked over the ocean. “Yes, I did.”

The wind caught her hair and blew it out in tangled strands. The moon and the stars twinkled behind her.

Cold,
Litnig reminded himself.

Ryse sat and leaned her back against the bulwark. She gestured for him to do the same. “I owe you an explanation,” she said.

“You owe me a few.”

Her eyes narrowed. Quietly, she replied, “We’ll start with one.”

Litnig eased himself down and sat cross-legged in front of her. The wind and the cold nipped at his back.

“What happened today, when that Lost One caught you with the spear—
Lit
, by all Yenor’s three sights, you were dead by the time I got to you.”

Litnig shifted from left to right. He’d
felt
dead—been caught halfway in the dream and halfway in the real world, seen the deck with wide-open eyes while he dangled from the disc over darkness.

“That spear went through your liver, your spleen,
your
intestines. I should’ve had to pull you back from the brink by brute force.”

Useless.

The word whispered through his mind on the wind. He bristled.

The fear was back in Ryse’s eyes. She licked her lips. Her brow twitched.

“When I touched your soul to start the healing, Lit, I saw the dragon. And then the River responded to you like I’ve never seen it respond to anyone. The souls came quicker than they’ve ever flowed before.”

Litnig exhaled slowly. The air was growing colder. He could see his breath. His stomach whirled between warmth and sourness—hope and terror. He remembered the feeling of something rushing.

The souls came to me,
he thought.
They came to me like they come to her, to Leramis, to soulweavers.
Seven years of frustrated dreams roared over him, and he wondered,
Yenor’s eye, what if I could learn to weave?

“That’s not a good thing,
Lit
.” Ryse’s eyes had narrowed again. Her voice had a hard, unforgiving edge to it. “They came faster than I’ve seen them come to
anyone,
even my instructors in the Academy. What you did today was inhuman. Beyond the scale of what anyone, even someone as strong as Leramis, should be capable of.”

Inhuman.

Litnig learned very quickly that there were worse things to be called than useless.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with you, and I don’t know how to fix it, but it scares me. Power on that scale, all of a sudden, with no training—it isn’t natural.”

Inhuman.
Unnatural.

“Ryse, I’ve been dreaming.”

She blinked.
As if she couldn’t imagine why anyone would care about that.
As if she’d forgotten.

And then her eyes cleared. Slowly, she nodded.

Litnig told her everything.

Through it all, she remained silent. She didn’t move a muscle, except to take the heavy breaths she always took when she was afraid.

It had felt good to tell Cole about the dream. Ryse, with her fear and her judgment, was another story.

“Why didn’t you tell me before?” she whispered.

“I was worried that no one would believe me, Ryse. Or that it was ‘unnatural.
’
”

The wind whistled between them. The
Rokwet
’s bow moved up and down through gentle swells. One of the Aleani on the aft deck called something to another.

Ryse’s shoulders slumped. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her palms and sighed.

“Lit, I don’t know what any of this means, but when he’s feeling better, I’ll ask Leramis. He might be able to point me in the right—”

“No.” Litnig’s mouth went dry.
“Ryse, no—not him.
I don’t want him to know. I don’t want anyone to know.”
Inhuman.
Unnatural.

Ryse looked back at Litnig. She nodded, but the uncertainty never left her eyes.

“All right,” she said.

Her voice sounded far away. Not the voice of Ryse his friend but the voice of Ryse the soulweaver.
Ryse who’d seen the dragon when she touched his soul.
Ryse who was afraid of him.

She stood and began to walk away. He followed.

“Ryse, promise me!”

She looked back at him, nodded again, and kept moving toward the middle of the ship, where Leramis, Len, and several sailors lay recovering under a lean-to.

The wind whispered over the ship. It was the wrong time and the wrong place for asking, but Litnig had to know.

“Ryse, what happened between you and Leramis?”

She froze. The hair on the back of her neck stood up straight in the light of the moon. “That’s none of your business,” she said. Her voice was frigid.

“Ryse, please.”

She kept her back turned.

“You won’t like the answer.”

“I don’t care.”

“In the Academy, we were more than friends. He
Ascended
a year before me, full of promises, and then he left to guard the frontier and never came back. What he is now, what he’s done in between, I don’t know.” The wind caught her hair and set it streaming again. “But I dreamed for nearly a year of seeing him again, even after his funeral, and old dreams die hard.”

She turned her head a few inches toward Litnig, just enough that he could catch every word she said in crystal clarity. “You should know a few things about that. You should understand, and you should leave it alone.”

Then Ryse was gone, descending onto the midship.

And Litnig stood alone with the ghosts.

THIRTY-SIX

The shadows wrapped cold and deep around Cole’s shoulders. The chipped wood behind him bit damply into his back. The stars hung white and distant overhead, and the rigging below them creaked lonely in the wind. His nose was sore, his ribs were bruised, and he couldn’t find a comfortable position against the battered starboard rail of the
Rokwet
’s forecastle.

So he stood.

He stood, and he ignored the tension in his shoulders and the soreness in his arms. He watched his brother spill his heart all over the decking and get walked on by the only girl he’d ever loved.

And he listened to his brother say things that seemed to scare even Ryse.

Cole didn’t move, and he didn’t make a sound. But the wind changed direction ever so slightly, and as Ryse left and Litnig turned to put his back against the cold, Cole saw his brother spot him.

Litnig’s face went pale. His body tensed. The question
Yenor’s eye, did he hear?
floated
over him like a cloud waiting to burst.

So Cole burst it.

“I saw the dragon too once,” Cole said. “In my dreams, the night the first two heart dragons were broken.” He placed his hands on the rail and heaved himself onto it. His legs dangled over the deck. His back faced the sea and the stars. “I didn’t think it was such a big deal.”

The last bit was a lie. Sometimes the memory still terrified him. But with time that fear was growing dimmer and colder, buried beneath a thousand other things.

Litnig limped forward and leaned on the rail next to Cole. His chin bedded down on his sleeves. The wind ruffled his hair.

The cold and damp of the wood began to make their way into Cole’s buttocks, but Cole didn’t move.

“I should’ve told her sooner,” Litnig mumbled.

“Fuck that,” Cole said. “What could she have done? What’s she
going
to do?” Litnig didn’t answer, so Cole answered for him.
“Nothing.”

Litnig’s eyes shone as gray and cold as the stars above. He grunted noncommittally.

They stopped talking for a little while, after that.

The ship creaked and moaned. The water splashed against its keel. And in the spaces left by the music of the sea, comfortable quiet hung between Cole and his brother, buoyed by long years during which they’d shared each other’s secrets.
Sometimes reluctantly, sometimes of necessity, sometimes by accident—but always.

“You know you owe me one, right, Cole? That’s the rule.”

Cole rolled his eyes. The rule stated that every secret one brother yielded up by accident had to be answered by the other. Cole had been the one to invent it, when he was ten, and it had come back to bite him in the ass more often than not ever since.

“C’mon. I didn’t mean for you to hear me asking about Leramis like that.
Even it up.”

Cole stared into space. The wind caught his hair and curled it around his ears. The mop on top of his head had grown longer over the journey. He’d have cut it already, but he had a sneaking suspicion that Dil liked it that way.

“All right, I’m scared.
How’s that?”

Litnig laughed. “Call that a secret?”

Cole turned to face his brother and flushed. Maybe it didn’t seem like a secret, but it was. Or at least there was one underneath it. Cole had been afraid before—of the nightmares he’d had as a child, of his father’s hands, of injury in street brawls and death itself in the tunnels beneath Aleana—but this was different. This was terror born of not knowing what would come next, and of wondering whether he could do everything right and still
fail
.

Litnig swallowed.

Cole held up a hand. “Don’t bother.”

Litnig looked at the deck. His brows fell over his eyes. His lips grew thin and sharp. It was the look he always got when he was thinking hard.

“Just let me talk, Lit,” Cole said.

And he poured his damn guts out. He talked about realizing that what they were doing was serious and that they couldn’t give it up. He admitted that it scared the daylights out of him. He owned up to the fact that all of a sudden he had things to care about, and that it terrified him, and that he hated being afraid.

Litnig nodded. The look of concentration never left his face.

Cole began to feel lighter as he talked. His brother didn’t always have the right words for him, but damn if he didn’t try. Cole loved him for that, he realized, maybe more than for anything else.

Cole ran out of things to say. The wind whispered in the sails. The stars winked. The briny sea kissed the
Rokwet
’s hull as the ship creaked westward.

“So what are you going to do about it?” Litnig asked. “Being afraid, I mean—if you hate it so much.”

Cole opened his mouth to reply.

He found he had no answer.

He looked up at the stars, but they told him nothing. He looked down at the sea, but it offered only meaningless murmurs against the ship’s sides. He looked back at Litnig and saw only the question. There was no answer waiting behind it.

Cole slid down from the railing and leaned on it next to his brother.

“I don’t know,” he mumbled.

But he didn’t give up. And he didn’t let his mind feel sorry for
itself
. He
would
do something about it. He just didn’t know what yet.

When he opened his eyes, Litnig was grinning at him.

“I think you’ve grown up, little brother,” Litnig said. “Mom will be thrilled.”

“Mom,” Cole groaned. “Yenor’s third twisting eye—what are we gonna tell her when we get home?”

Litnig snorted. “‘Maybe we’re ready to take over the business.’ ‘Maybe it’s time to settle down.’ I might not even be lying about it by then.” Litnig squeezed Cole’s shoulder reassuringly, but his face looked troubled and gray, like he was starting to think that maybe he couldn’t go back.
Ever.

Inhuman.
Not natural.
Cole had heard the words.

“Think she’ll forgive us?” Cole asked.

Litnig nodded, but the smile he gave Cole looked
forced
. The fear never left his eyes.

It felt a little contagious.

And even as Cole began to wonder whether
he
could really go home either—whether his mother would welcome Dil, whether Dil would want to go, whether he’d be able to stand sharing a roof with his piece-of-shit father again—something changed. His heart, beating warm within him, felt stronger.

If Lit wasn’t going to solve their problems, then Cole would.

Because whatever else he was—out of his depth, powerless, petrified—he was still Cole Jin, and nobody could take that away from him.

Ever.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Animal!

Monster!

Get it! Get her! Catch them! Don’t let them through!

Run!

Run!

RUN!

Dil grabbed for the braided ropes that lined the
Rokwet
’s gangplank. Her hands shook. Her shoulders sweated. Her pack and her beaten, chipped bow hung from her back. The
Rokwet
floated on turquoise waters behind her, its sails furled, its crew nowhere to be seen.

Her memories of blood and death on its deck were raw and real and painful.

Stop it,
she told herself, but her mind didn’t listen. It kept coming back to the Lost Ones and the way the Aleani had called them animals, monsters,
beasts
.

Dil had listened to their words, when she could understand them, and she’d felt smaller and smaller every day.

She’d once been called animal too.

Calm,
she told herself.
Be calm.

The city of Mansend shimmered under an azure sky before her. A sea of bronzed Nutharians in gauzy, bright-colored clothes surged between buildings of creamy sandstone. The crowds rolled through dusty streets, over hills, and around the wide semicircle of the harbor. Blue towers guarded bluffs on either end of a ridge that encircled the city. A palace topped by a glittering yellow dome sat halfway between them.