The Blade Bearers (Blade and Bone Book 6), page 34
What if the Alainsith wouldn’t agree to it?
He didn’t know. So far, even though they had people who had gone into the Alainsith lands, there had been no sense of the Alainsith helping them. There had been no sense of protection or safety the farther north they went. Finn kept hoping and thinking that it wouldn’t take much more for the Alainsith to offer their protection, but there was no sign of it. Which meant, at least in his mind, that the Alainsith may have chosen to stay out of it.
And why wouldn’t they? Regardless of what else was happening, the Alainsith may view this as a battle they didn’t want to be a part of.
“I choose to believe that Kanar has been successful,” Morgan said. “He was going to his friend—somebody who is connected to the Alainsith, and somebody who would know that power and the power Kanar has been using, so yes.” She shrugged. “But I don’t know. And I suppose if you pushed me to answer, I would admit that I’m worried about it. Is that what you’ve been worried about?”
“Not entirely.”
“What have you been worried about, then?”
He sighed. He shifted, feeling the weight of Justice on his back, something he had grown accustomed to in the time he had been traveling with Morgan. It was strange that it now felt bonded to him in some way. Maybe it shouldn’t, but the sword had a comforting weight. Not because he was some skilled swordsman—Finn was most decidedly not skilled—but because of everything they had been through, and everything he had seen. All of it had required the particular magic within the blade.
It was that particular magic that Finn found himself wondering about more and more, curious as to why his sword would have so much power trapped inside of it. He had long believed that it was tied to witchcraft and that kind of power, though perhaps that was a simplistic view. At this point, he simply did not know.
Morgan followed him, saying nothing, although he knew that he had not answered her question.
He wasn’t sure he had an answer for her.
The only thing he did know was that he worried about what would happen once he was done with his journey. He would get back to Verendal, and then what?
Considering how many people were out on the road with them and had been brought into the caravan, Finn wondered what it might be like in Verendal—assuming that it still stood. He had to believe that it did, though.
“Finn?”
“It’s the same as everything,” he said softly. “We don’t know what’s here, do we? We don’t know what’s there, do we? If whatever has happened here has persisted there…”
“Hopefully not.”
“But why not there?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I was hoping you might have the answer.”
“The only answer I can think of is that the Alainsith might’ve offered protections to the city. But that would require us to be far enough north. And…” He shrugged. “Porman would often go to Verendal to meet with the Alainsith, so I don’t really know.”
They reached the edge of the caravan, and then they slowed. A band of thick fog obscured much of the forest around them, but not so thick that Finn didn’t think they had any way of getting past it. Morgan had proven that she was adept at controlling it and removing it, at least in this part of the forest. This was what gave Finn hope.
If it worked, and if they could continue to remove the fog, he had to believe that they would be able to keep their people safe.
Morgan let out a heavy breath. “Well, not only do I have to deal with the water, but it seems as if we have something else here.”
“It seems like it.”
“Hopefully we can get past this fog soon. I’ve got this. You go do whatever it is that you need to do.”
He nodded. He wanted to say that he didn’t have anything he needed to do, but that wasn’t entirely true. He was bound to be summoned. And he knew that he would have to fulfill his responsibilities, even if they were so vastly different than any responsibility he ever thought he would have.
Once he got back to Verendal, he could let them go again.
At least, that was the hope.
Chapter Thirty-Four
JAL
When the steady tapping shifted, Jal was ready.
Every so often, he would add his berahn howl to the song he heard around him. It required that he build it in a way that swirled outward, flowing from him, but it also required him to have a measure of control with it, which he simply did not. All Jal could do at this point was to try to disrupt what he heard around him.
He looked over to the door. He had lost track of how long he’d been here. Had it been days? Longer? Periodically, somebody would come bring him food and feed him, never freeing his hands, nor his legs, so that he was always bound in place. He was forced to soil himself in his chair. He was forced to sit in it, compressed by the energy of the song and the effort of what was happening around him, all while trying to ignore it so he could maintain his focus on what the berahn had taught him.
The longer he sat here, the more Jal started to question if he would be able to continue doing that. It seemed to him that all of this was designed to wear him down, and he started to suspect that it would eventually succeed. He was getting tired, and Jal no longer knew if he’d be able to withstand this torment. What person could?
The door came open. It was the woman. He hadn’t seen her since that first time, as she had seemed to let others take the lead. No one had tortured him. They had come and fed him and made sure he had water, and they had let the song swirl around him, becoming too much for him.
That, he suspected, was intentional. They were trying to force him to fall in line with the buildup of the song, the tapping, the music, even the swaying of the waves against the boat. All of it seemed designed to overwhelm him. And it was working. Every so often, Jal found himself falling into the same rhythm as the tapping, his own howl starting to mix with it, rather than opposing and disrupting it. He knew the danger in that, as there was a very real possibility he would end up joining in their song rather than countering it.
It was like many things. The longer you were exposed to it, the easier it was to simply go along with it. His grandfather had warned him of such things. He remembered that all too well. When he had first gone to learn how to fire a bow, his grandfather had taught him how to shoot against the wind.
“It pulls on your arrow,” his grandfather had said, standing in the middle of the grassy clearing. The wind whipped around him, pulling on his hair and his cloak, yet he had stood motionless. “You can feel it, and if you’re smart enough and quick enough, you can start to direct the force of the wind.”
He held out the bow, set an arrow to the string, drew it back, and aimed. Despite the heavy wind, his grandfather’s arrow flew true. It curved in the wind and then hit the target. Jal had recognized the skill even then.
“Sometimes you have to work against the stream, sometimes work with it,” his grandfather said, and he spun, aiming and firing his arrow in another direction. When he did, it flowed with the wind and quickly found its target.
Jal knew where his grandfather had been aiming, as they had worked together often enough that he recognized what his grandfather was trying to teach him.
When his grandfather turned around again and aimed into the wind, he closed his eyes for a moment, gritting his teeth, and then pulled back on the string.
“Going against the wind entirely is the most difficult. Not because you don’t know how to aim. You do. It’s just harder to draw, and you find that you need to use more force than you would otherwise. Your arrow will slow, and if you’re not careful, it will not find its target the way you intend.”
He released. When the arrow streaked away from him, it sunk into the tree in the distance.
“I suspect you will find similar challenges in your life, Jal. You have to learn which way you’re targeting, and which you need to. Do you go with the flow and try to exceed it so you can fly faster? Do you need to adjust your aim because of the current? Would you have to fight against it altogether, needing to be stronger and more powerful for you to find the target you know you must?”
He patted Jal on the top of his head, and Jal smiled. They progressed to taking turns, targeting different things, and while Jal had never been as skilled as his grandfather, he had begun to make some progress where he could at least hit most of the time.
Those thoughts came back to him now.
Why had they returned to him? Was it something about the song, or was that his own need? Jal could believe that he needed those memories so he could think about what would be necessary for him to overwhelm the song, but perhaps they were somehow influencing him. He wouldn’t be terribly surprised to learn that they had some way of forcing him to share his song with them.
“You still fight,” she said.
She smiled at him, and even in her smile, Jal began to feel the influence of the song. There was a bit of movement to her cheeks that seemed to flow with the song in a way that Jal could not quite grasp. He was reminded of his grandfather, the way he had helped him understand various songs, and he couldn’t help but feel as if there was something to that that he needed to better understand even now. Though he listened, he could not hear anything.
“We will have a different conversation,” the woman said.
She moved behind him, her steps careful. Jal stomped on the ground, disrupting the rhythm of her movement, which caused her to pause ever so subtly before she began to loosen the chains around his wrists. He stomped again, and again disrupted what she was doing, wanting to create a cacophony of noise and as much chaos as he could that would counter it, but he found it increasingly difficult.
Could he even overwhelm this song?
He thought about what his grandfather had taught him about fighting the wind. In this case, he wasn’t going to be able to overpower it, he didn’t think. Not by himself. Maybe if he found others, and if they were able to join together, Jal thought that maybe he could use that connection in order for them to be stronger than the song to overwhelm it, but by himself that would not work.
If he cut across it, he would have to adjust his aim. Jal didn’t know what that meant in this case, but he suspected that there had to be some way for him to try. The only other option was to shift his footing so that he flowed along the same current, but tried to go faster. He didn’t think that made sense either.
When his hands were free, Jal moved them in front of him, and began to rub them together. He recognized that he did so in sync with the song without even meaning to. It was almost as if she had known that he would do that, as if she had waited with him long enough that he would have no choice but to do so.
“Free your feet,” she said.
She stepped to the far side of the room, by the door, and waited on him. She tapped her foot, patted her leg, or snapped her fingers, each time correcting the rhythm that Jal attempted to disrupt, making very little headway in what she was doing.
He leaned over, his world swimming for a moment. He was hungry—his rumbling stomach gave truth to that—and his mouth was dry. How long had it been since he’d had enough to drink? He had managed to get the chains free from around his legs, and he shook them off, letting them drop to the ground with a thump.
He looked up at her. She seemed to wait until he recognized that she had once again stomped her feet, adding to the song as she had each time he had tried to disrupt it, and then she watched him.
“Come,” she said.
Come. What was he supposed to do now? What did she really think he was going to be able to do? Jal didn’t have much hope that he could go anywhere. With the rhythm building around him, he wouldn’t be able to do much, but he had to try.
He got to his feet. He felt disgusting, and suspected that he smelled worse than he ever had while traveling with Kanar. What would Lily say to him? She’d probably tease him, tell him that he needed a bath, and then offer him sympathy.
The woman stepped up next to him and pulled the door open, waiting for him. When she did, Jal made a shuffling noise, but the tapping immediately began to build around him, interfering with what he did. Every time he tried to do something different, such as stomping on the ground, rapping his knuckles along the wall, even breathing funny, the rhythm shifted around him and interrupted what he tried.
She guided him to a set of stairs and motioned for him to go.
He climbed slowly. Light streamed down, though it was faint, suggesting that it was early morning or late in the day. Either that, or there was some sort of magical light that she had used to torment him. He wouldn’t put that past her.
When he reached the top of the stairs, he took a deep breath. The salt air swirled around him, yet it was also fresh in a way that the room beneath him had not been. A bird cawed, and he flicked his gaze up to the sky, thinking of some of Lily’s talismans, wondering if she might have any of them active now. But there was nothing. The sky was an overcast gray, and there were birds, but not the kind he thought Lily used.
He looked around. There were others on the deck, many of them dressed in the same dark leathers and with similar features as the woman—pale skin, dark hair, and moving in a strange manner that suggested they were flowing with the connection of the song. That was what had Jal on edge the most. They were all slowly moving, adding to the song, which was something he had not considered before. He made an attempt to try to disrupt it, tripping intentionally so that he stumbled forward, but as soon as he did, the song shifted, accommodating even that.
Once he rolled onto his back, the woman was standing over him, watching him. “Get up.”
“Your ship is slippery,” he said, and he flashed a grin. He didn’t expect that his expression would make any difference with her, as it certainly hadn’t made a difference with his own team, though there were plenty who found his grin to be disarming. Some thought him ridiculous, which certainly served him, whereas others found him charming. He didn’t think she would find him charming, but at the same time, there was no point in not trying.
He had no idea what had happened to his bow or the rest of his team, and hoped that Wular had managed to get away. If she hadn’t, then the berahn would be lost.
Jal looked around at the others on board the ship. They would occasionally make a soft knock on the ground, smack their hand on their side, whistle, or just blow into the air. It was almost as if they had to add their connection to the song every so often for them to be a part of it. But there was some other element of the song that had lingered. Though Jal did not see the source of it, he could hear it. It was almost as if it were filling him, coming from someplace he had not seen and that he did not know how to find.
That song continued to build around him, sweeping outward and suggesting that there was a great power nearby. If only Jal could understand it, he thought he might be able to make sense of what it was and where it came from. Maybe he could learn how to disrupt it if he could do that. Maybe.
“What do you see here?” the woman asked, striding away from him and moving to the railing.
Jal made a point of walking over as noisily as possible. He began to drum his fingers on the railing, intentionally trying to counter what he heard and what he sensed, but even as he did, it felt almost as if he was being forced to try something else. He felt the way he was urged to move, to slowly turn in place, and he felt the way that the drumming began to build within him. It was like the song tried to redirect anything he did, countering any attempt on his behalf to overwhelm what he heard, yet as he focused on it, Jal knew he could not ignore it.
“What am I supposed to see?” Jal asked, looking out over the ocean.
But as soon as he did, he recognized what she was showing him.
Ships. Dozens of them. They blackened the water, far more than ever had when they’d attacked Sanaron. Even in Sanaron, there had not been this kind of a threat. Jal swept his gaze around, staring at one ship after the other, trying to get an accurate count on the possibility that he might manage to escape, yet he could not.
But that wasn’t all he noticed. There were ships surrounding this part of the sea, but there were also more in the distance.
“Did you think we were unprepared?”
“I didn’t know what you were,” Jal said. “You came to attack. Why?”
She turned to him, stepping softly, her footsteps creating a staccato rhythm. “You believed us gone?”
“I don’t know anything about you. I recognize that you must be cousins—”
The woman laughed, which was somewhat musical. “Cousins? Do you believe us to be merely cousins?”
Jal shrugged. “To be honest, I don’t really know. We don’t speak of you.”
His people had always known there was a family of the Lost, but during his journey, he had begun to question if what they had believed was accurate. There had been different types of ruins, different markings, all of which made him think that perhaps there had not been just one family of Lost.
And if there was one, how many more were there?
He thought of what he had seen in his time since leaving his home, traveling to Sanaron, and withstanding the attack on it. There had been what Honaaz had referred to as the Weather Watchers, but now there were what he referred to as sorcerers. And there were even Honaaz’s own people, with their own magical resistance.
What if all of them were Alainsith, or at least a form of them?
“Of course you do not,” she said. “Why speak of what you cannot tolerate? Why speak of what you fear?”
“We don’t fear,” Jal said.
But he wondered if that was true. Did they fear? Most believed the Alainsith had done so because of Reyand and the attack they had faced, but Jal knew there was more to it than that. The song told him that there were other layers to it, and all he needed to do was try to recognize what those layers were, and he might be able to understand more about his people, what they had done, and why.
