The Blade Bearers (Blade and Bone Book 6), page 14
Lily nodded, and a frown creased her brow. “Kanar thinks he knows what he’s doing, but I’m not so sure.”
She had been relieved to see Reims, though Honaaz couldn’t deny that he had also had a moment of relief at seeing him. Not that he felt like he fucking needed Reims around, but he also couldn’t deny feeling a sense of reassurance at his presence.
And then there was the tall bastard. He had his own ways of doing things, and had seemed to change quite a bit after reaching the city. He had always had an air of mystery to him, but now it was even more than just that. Now there was something else to him that left Honaaz thinking he had gone a little mad.
And maybe he had. Who knew when it came to somebody like that?
“We shouldn’t stay here,” he said.
“We aren’t going to. I’m going to finish with this and then—”
“I don’t mean that we shouldn’t stay here right now,” Honaaz said, crossing the distance between them and staring out over the water. Waves splashed along the dock, and an occasional spray caught him. The salt reminded him of his home.
It was that thought that kept coming back to him. Home.
Something Reims had said stayed with Honaaz. If they could get enough ships, they might be able to turn the tide of the attack. He could have a navy.
First, though, they would need people to sail and crew those ships. Otherwise, even if Honaaz could get on board and steal a few, they wouldn’t have any way of using them.
“We have to get past this blockade,” he said.
“We’re just going to make enough preparations to push them back while we retreat. That’s what we told Kanar we would do.”
Lily sat up, and she paused in the middle of carving whatever it was that she was trying to make. She had stopped using only bone. It was almost as if the other hegen woman had influence Lily’s thinking, regardless of what Lily had claimed.
“I’m not saying we’re going to do something stupid.” He looked up briefly, realizing that whenever he denied he was going to do something stupid, it became obvious that he was thinking about doing something stupid. “It’s just that I feel like we need to do something else. We need help.”
“Which is why we plan on retreating, Honaaz.”
“Not just that kind of help,” he said. “Even if we bring these people inland, and we get them to wherever it is that Reims wants to bring them, they”—he motioned out at the water—“will continue to attack. How long do we have before they succeed?”
Lily pursed her lips, and as she turned and looked out at the ships, she picked up the bone she was carving and continued to scrape along its surface. “I don’t know,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “I feel… Well, I don’t know how I feel.”
“We need to get a ship past the fleet out there. Then we can get to the Isles.”
If they had men like that, then they wouldn’t have to worry about who could crew the navy.
“You want to go home.” Lily smiled sadly. “I can’t blame you. You’ve been away from your home long enough, and this really isn’t your fight. This has nothing to do with you or your people or—”
“Would you stop talking,” he said, crouching down next to her and taking her hand. “I can’t do this without you. I’m not doing this for me.” He let out a frustrated grunt. “We’ve got this fucking attack about to happen, and we need ships.”
“So you want to go home, and you think you can somehow encourage your people to join us?”
“Well… yes.”
“Why?”
“Because look at them,” he said. “They have the numbers, and we won’t be able to do anything until we can counter that. They have command of the sea, and—”
“That’s not what I mean. Why would they help?”
He hesitated. It was a good question, and it was one he didn’t have a good answer for.
“I don’t know.” He dropped his voice low. “Maybe it’s a mistake.”
“I do think we need help,” Lily said, and Honaaz looked up. “But from everything you told me about your people, they’ve been working with the Weather Watchers, which suggests that they’ve been working with those who have their own kind of power. They were after you.”
Honaaz still didn’t really understand why they had come after him. Maybe it was about his uncle, or maybe it was just him in general. He didn’t know.
“Honaaz?”
He shook his head. “I’m here.”
“I know you are. How many of your people do you think they’ve drawn into this?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they were always part of this. Maybe they’ve been used.”
“If they were used, do you think they can be helped?”
It was a difficult question. “Depends on why they were used. If it was coin, well, we don’t have any money. If they were forced…”
That was the part that Honaaz didn’t have a good answer to. If his people had been forced, what would he do? The only ones capable of doing that would’ve been the Weather Watchers, or maybe the fucking sorcerers.
And if it was either one, it meant that everything he knew of his homeland, everything he knew of the people of the Isles, might already be gone.
“I’ll do whatever you think we should,” she said.
Honaaz peered out over the water. “I don’t like running.”
“I don’t either. But sometimes the smart move is to retreat. Regroup. Find a different way to attack.”
He looked over to Lily. “Where? We can’t go by water. We go by ground, and we retreat where?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know this land well enough. My people move. We don’t have any particular home. We make our home wherever we are.”
She glanced up to the ship, where several hegen had remained. Honaaz could hear them on board, and though they didn’t make that much noise, he was aware of his ship at all times. It was his fucking ship.
“It sounds fucking miserable,” he muttered.
“It’s not like you have a home either,” she said. “Other than your ship.”
“A ship is a home.”
She smiled. “I suppose. You didn’t feel like that was hard when you were growing up?”
“It was a place. I had a bed. I had family. And I had friends.” He breathed out, looking out toward the ships moving in the water, though not nearly as much as they had been. They were slowing, as if they were starting to make plans for their invasion. “It’s all I knew.”
“And you made me question what it was like when I was moving around,” she said.
“I didn’t—”
She took his hands, squeezing them briefly. “You don’t have to apologize. I just wanted you to know that we’re not that different. You move around on board a ship. I move around across the land. It was home for both of us. It was all we knew, so it didn’t feel strange.”
Honaaz still missed the camaraderie on a ship, though had he been sailing, he never would’ve met Lily.
He breathed out carefully. “We do this, and once we stop them, then we go on a journey.”
“I already told you I was willing to go on a journey with you. I want to see your home.”
“It’s going to be long.”
“Have I ever seemed like I couldn’t handle a little discomfort?”
“I never said it was going to be uncomfortable,” he said.
“I did,” she said, grinning at him. “A long journey aboard a ship? Even a short journey is uncomfortable.”
“You just never got used to it. The longer you’re on a ship, the more you start to feel at home.”
She laughed as she stood and wrapped her arms around him in a tight embrace. She raised herself up on her toes and kissed him. “I’m going to be happy wherever you are.”
He hugged her back, but his gaze drifted past her, out toward the ships. His mind continued to churn as he watched them. He wasn’t sure what he was going to have to do, only that he felt as if he still needed some answers he didn’t have. And he wasn’t sure he would find them here—or that he would find them at all.
“Now, go finish with your preparations,” Lily said. “I’m going to keep working on mine. We need to have more of these exploding rods stationed along the shoreline. We can use them against the Alainsith as a distraction to get the people out.”
Honaaz sighed heavily, and he grabbed the bundle resting on the ground next to her. After slinging it over his shoulder, he headed down to the shore. It didn’t take long before he left the city. He had already set many of those exploding rods around the city, though he wasn’t sure how effective they might be.
He didn’t know how much these would take out of the person who activated them, but he had committed to Lily—and he wasn’t going to let her risk her strength when he had the strength to do it himself. He reached a rocky section of shore and planted one of the rods into the ground, ensuring it was stable. As he angled it out toward the water, he tried to position it in a way that it would explode far enough to keep the ships from getting too close to shore.
As he moved onward, he saw tracks in the ground. It looked as if some massive creature had walked through here, which suggested that it was the tall bastard and the berahn.
Unless it had been Boney.
Boney had been somewhat distant over the last day or so. He had been roaming around, which left Honaaz wondering what was going on and why the talisman had essentially abandoned him. Then again, Boney was changing. Honaaz didn’t know why, or how, only that he liked the connection he had to Boney as it was.
He moved farther up the shore, where the rock dropped down. As he situated another of the blasting rods, he noticed an abandoned dinghy.
Was that what Reims had been talking about?
He got to his feet and continued making his way until he saw three bodies lying on the shore below. They had been washed against the rock, yet the ocean hadn’t swept them away. Not yet. That was strange enough. It left him wondering if there was some magical connection to them that had kept them in place. Not that he knew about such things, but he also didn’t know why they would have simply stayed in that spot.
There was no way down to the water, but he wanted to know.
“I don’t know how to get down there, Boney,” he said, looking back as the talisman bounded up behind him.
Boney moved forward. He was larger than before, now almost standing as tall as the top of Honaaz’s chest. A sense of energy radiated from him. Boney was the largest berahn Honaaz had ever seen, and all the berahn were large. He might not be real—at least not to others, though he increasingly felt real enough to Honaaz—but he acted as if he was.
“I just want to see them.”
Boney nuzzled against Honaaz’s hand, and there was a distinct feeling of fur that had not been there when Boney had first been activated. There had been a smoothness to him then, not this coarse hair Honaaz felt now.
“We need to protect Lily,” he said, “and I don’t know that I’m going to be able to do that until I can get a sense of what we’re dealing with. She may not be wrong, though. My people might’ve gotten involved.”
And here his thought had been all about what it would take for him to return home, to try to get help, but she had made a sensible point, as Lily often did, that it might already be too late for them to find any help. His people might already be lost, forced to serve these fucking sorcerers.
If so, then there would be nothing for them to find if they returned to the Isles.
Not that he really thought he could go back. After his exile, the only way he had wanted to go back was with his own ship—or a navy—but it might already be too late.
Fuck.
“I need to get down there,” Honaaz said, this time mostly to himself.
Boney shoved his head toward Honaaz and forced himself between Honaaz’s legs, jerking his head up quickly, which dropped Honaaz down onto Boney’s back.
Then the talisman jumped.
Honaaz wrapped his arms and legs around Boney, too startled to do anything else.
What was the talisman doing?
They landed on a small ledge of rock that Honaaz could not even see, but Boney must’ve known it was here. Then he jumped again, this time landing on the narrow rock protruding from the ocean near one of the bodies. Boney stood, somehow stable as could be on top of this rock, unlike Honaaz, who felt like he was going to fall off at any moment.
“Now that you got me down here, I suppose you expect me to hop in the water.”
Fuck.
Boney surprised him again by jumping.
When he landed in the ocean, Honaaz was pleasantly surprised that it was only up to the middle of his body, but Honaaz stayed mostly dry.
Boney walked over to the nearest of the bodies. Honaaz pulled the man up by his jacket and rolled him over. He was a little bloated from his time in the water, but he had a wide face, black hair, and light gray eyes that stared blankly up at the sky. He found no weapon on him.
He moved on to the next, who looked much like the first, only he had reddish hair, pale skin with freckles, and a mark on one arm. Honaaz frowned. He had seen marks like that before—it was a tattoo that signified rank in the Isles.
Once he moved the third body, Honaaz froze. He recognized the man, Dalzon, who had served on another ship, though Honaaz and his uncle had interacted with that captain more than a time or two. Dalzon was a good man. He was older, probably Honaaz’s uncle’s age, and had as much experience on the sea as anyone. How had he gotten drawn into this?
Honaaz let him go, pushing him out toward the water, where a wave pulled him down. Dalzon didn’t come back up. Honaaz forced the other two bodies down as well, letting the ocean claim them. He was thankful that none of them popped back up.
He looked out toward the horizon.
He might not be the only one who had been betrayed.
And now Honaaz couldn’t help but wonder what was going on—and if he could find any way to help the people he had once called his own.
“Fuck.”
Chapter Fourteen
LILY
The nondescript building was situated on the outer edge of the city, far enough away that Lily had to cross through most of the city to reach it, but still within the borders. The windows on the front side of the dark stone had bars set into them, giving the building an impenetrable appearance. There was something imposing about the feel of this place, something that Lily appreciated, though some of it came from the aspects that she had added.
As she looked over to the building, she felt the same surge of irritation that she’d experienced ever since she had first dealt with these people come back to her even now. She reached into her pouch, fingering the various prizes she had carved, and starting to think through what she might need to do here, if anything. This was only a matter of trying to find answers.
“I don’t suppose you’ll tell me why you brought me here,” Esmerelda said.
Lily looked back at her. She had resisted bringing Esmerelda with her, though it had been out of stubbornness rather than any real logic that had made her feel that way. Esmerelda could be useful, not only because she was hegen, but also because she was married to the executioner. Unfortunately for Lily, that was the aspect of Esmerelda that she needed now. She wanted the woman who might know techniques that Lily did not.
“When we came to the city, we met some resistance,” Lily said, not taking her gaze off the plain wooden door. “We didn’t know what it was. To be honest, we thought it was probably nothing more than a misunderstanding, but the more we came to learn, the more we realized there was a danger here that we could not fully understand.” She turned to Esmerelda. “The people in the city were in league with the Alainsith, and as far as we were able to determine, they were responsible for the Bloodless—people who had been human but were turned with a form of dark witchcraft.”
Of course, in Lily’s mind, all witchcraft was dark.
“You said as much,” Esmerelda said. “I take it that this is where you’ve decided to bring me. You thought I should see this?”
Lily shifted her satchel on her shoulder, then turned her focus to the door again. “I don’t need you to see it. What I’m looking for is your help.”
“Help with what?”
“I need a few questions answered, and I think you might be the right person to help me get those answers.”
Esmerelda’s face soured, and annoyance flared in her eyes. “If you think I’m going to—”
“I don’t think you’re going to do anything, but I did want to see if you might be willing to assist. This is important in helping our people, along with people of the city. If you don’t think you can do it, just tell me, and I’ll make whatever arrangements I need for me to find the answers I need.”
Lily waited, hoping that Esmerelda might be able to help. At this point, she did need the help of somebody who had experience with interrogation, but she wasn’t sure if Esmerelda was going to. The woman had offered to work with her on her art, training her to a certain extent, but had not done much else. She had been trying to glean the various options she had to try to master more of the patterns needed to do what they were doing, but Esmerelda hadn’t given her any additional advice, and certainly nothing that would help Lily with this part of what she needed to do.
“I suppose you asked Isabel already?” Esmerelda said.
Lily had forgotten about the connection that Isabel had with Jagger. She shouldn’t have. She had talked to Isabel about it before, and even though she had asked for Isabel’s help in questioning, she had not forced her to do anything she didn’t want to. Ever since the attack, Isabel had been scarce.
“I asked her for help. She was willing to offer a little, but I don’t think she cares for it.”
“I’m not surprised,” Esmerelda said.
“What do you know of her story?”
“Not as much as Finn. He was asked to help her. I can’t say I know how, or what that would look like, only that he was asked to do that.”
“By the king.”
Esmerelda shrugged. “Does that bother you?”
