The words and their meanings flashed in her mind. She felt no need, nor did she want to tell the woman to “get away,” and she knew she was not in danger with her, so there was no reason to threaten her with death. She just needed confirmation.
“He—help?” Gryshen pointed a long finger at the woman.
The woman nodded, then said, “Yes. Help.” She stared for another moment, pressing her hand against her chest. “Safe.”
Gryshen recognized that word.
“Safe.” Gryshen nodded in return, then pressed her hand to her chest in the same place she had seen the woman do it. “Safe,” she said again.
“Mother!” A call came from the top of the cliffs. The woman shot up abruptly. She crouched before Gryshen and this time the iloray didn’t flinch. The woman took Gryshen’s hand that held the teacup, wrapping her own around it. She spoke a few hushed words that Gryshen did not understand, then lifted her skirts to run up the stone stairs, leaving the teapot and the iloray behind. Gryshen blinked several times, trying to make sense of what had just happened. After a few more moments, she felt sure that the woman would not return for some time. And she was supposed to be somewhere, but she couldn’t quite catch her mind up.
Forms.
Chapter 12
Gryshen startled with the realization. She couldn’t shake the desire to understand what had just transpired—her own dreams, the woman’s behavior, how she had found her in the net . . .
She would have to get answers later. Gryshen set the teacup carefully in a crevice after taking a long draw of its deep amber contents, laid her spear across her shoulder blades, and dove back into the water to find what awaited her.
She swam toward the rock where she had been trapped, hoping there was a sign to lead her forward. Her hope was rewarded by a string of lanterns leading down, down into the water. She drank up the smoothness, the coolness of the ocean like she never had before. She followed the lanterns on their winding path—it was all in outer places, well past their cavern, off course from typical hunting routes. The way pointed toward what looked like a large boulder on the ocean bed with one lantern at the top, and the last of the rope tied to a large anchor that lay beside a small opening.
It was the end of the line, and Gryshen took in a large gulp of water, bracing herself as she swam into the most obvious of all traps.
Light crackled and danced across the ocean floor and the walls of this place. It puckered through skinny crags in the ceiling, a faint wisp of sunlight pouring in through the way she came; the only way out.
And here she saw what appeared to be a giant shell, an oyster shell. Gryshen swam hesitantly toward the open mollusk that looked just like the one from the stories of her youth.
It was the legend, the force of her ilorays.
She felt awe. She felt wonder. She delicately reached out an arm, stretching her fingers gingerly toward the . . . sculpture.
Gryshen sank, noticing how the jagged marks of sunlight illuminated what looked like hundreds of gray shells sealed together to form the likeness of the ceasids’ birthplace, empty now. As the real one would be.
Only this was just a wish, an imagining. She felt foolish for getting so excited, for believing for a moment that this was her ancestors’ first home, when she had been told her whole life that the original womb had been long since hidden, that they had been unable to find it—surely, many storytellers suggested, because of Mother’s anger. Mother would keep them from finding it, perhaps until death. Then they may find themselves back in the Great Womb, not unlike this foreign space she was in, and they would see their cradles and they would lay in Mother’s arms, like fresh pearls, waiting to be released into a new adventure.
But the only pearl that mattered right now was gone. She had failed at her most important task before she had begun.
And adventure? Her adventure came and went with love, loss, and betrayal.
Now it was only about the mission: The mission to take back the Great Pearl. The mission to slit Coss’s throat. Gryshen’s finger’s clenched, and her eyes filled up with ink, so it took her a bit longer than it should have to see that a large rock had been placed to block the way she came in. When she did realize this, something began to cover even the tiny stretches of light shining through, crack by crack.
Gryshen looked frantically around for the beast that was surely waiting for her in the darkness, preparing for the fight in which only one of them would swim out of this manufactured womb. She reached around her back to tug her rescued spear from its seaweed tie, and as the lights continued to go out, she swam to the massive ashen oyster shrine. This was where she would wait. At least whatever it was couldn’t sneak up behind her here. If need be, she could swim up and trap it with her spear . . . possibly.
Not another giant squid. A fight-trained great white shark? She shivered. Or more electric eels . . . she winced. No, some sort of shark. Or a more aggressive killer whale. Or iloray warriors? Would they do that? After having been strangled, electrocuted, and nearly dried out to death, Gryshen was sickened by the possibilities. And as the last light went out, she tried to capture a final image of her surroundings, clutching her spear with both fists, pressing her whole backside against the grainy lumps of broken shells, waiting.
And waiting.
The black water seemed as if it had the power to drown, so dark and enveloping, when not long before she was blinded by daylight and stifled by omnipresent air. Now it all faded off, floated away into the black, like the whispers of bugs and tiny sea pods. Hints of other life seemed to appear before her eyes. But she had to be imagining. All light had been blocked out. Even with a ceasid’s eyesight, which was more heightened than their landkeeper brothers and sisters, she could only see suggestions, ideas in the pitch. And she waited still.
Nothing approached. No turbulence in the water. Not a sound past the current shh of water in her ears, the soft pressure of her heart thudding in her chest. The waiting began to shift into something else in this womb reproduction.
Something like . . . being.
In the whooshing, in her heartbeat, she could collect her thoughts, curate her ideas. Gryshen tried to steady her focus, as what she had imagined to be specks of life drifted up like tiny, glowing, reflective pieces of her whole existence.
Her father’s coffin.
Coss’s lips against hers.
Tea down her throat.
Her burning throat.
Coss’s pinning grip.
She tried to force this last image back into the black, tried to make way for fresh shards of vision, but the memory insisted. It pressed against her brain like a carving. Their ride on the beasts. Open water. Freedom. Secrets and heart swells. Her daddy decaying. The pieces of vision drifted slowly at first, then zoomed into view. She imagined each experience carved into her own coffin lid, much like her father’s, inlaid with the stained-glass pictures, the etched-into-wood details, telling her story. Jode—so hurt. Bravis watching over her. The curiously suspicious Apocay.
Morfal’s anger—just a distraction. She saw a new image: Morfal pushing his son, pushing a spear in his hands, pushing him into war.