The woman ran her hands across the baby’s wet hair, down her back, to her scaly fin.
Gryshen gasped and black water gushed into her mouth.
A light in the darkness appeared. The water swirled, and rock was pulled away to reveal the chamber opening. As the light spread through the room, Gryshen saw the giant sculpture far below her. As she had reached for her visions, she had moved closer and closer to the edge of the womb tomb. She half expected to see the memories standing there, living pictures now visible and real and alive, but it was just the shrine and crumbled ruins and wall markings beside it.
“Come,” a steady voice, a familiar voice, commanded. Gryshen, still shocked and disoriented, obeyed slowly. She swam in inches, arms before her as a kind of shield to the lit hole, the blue doorway.
Only Apocay waited outside, a pouch in one hand, a lidded pot in the other.
“Name?” he asked, surveying her.
“Gree—Gryshen,” she replied, puzzled, looking around herself anxiously. The mouth of the womb tomb was a hill of rock and ice, and she was resting her tired body against it. Apocay sat with his long peeling fin folded out beneath him.
“Your new name.”
“What?”
“Tell me your function, Chieftainess.” He lifted the lid of the pot. Ashes began rising, just like before when her father had shown her.
“I—I don’t know.”
It was over. It was over, and she was supposed to know something. The recent images swam in her mind, but told her nothing about this. Gryshen was at a complete loss about what to say. Should she tell him about the rescue? She felt she should not. She would not speak of the human at all.
Was it a cheat? A landkeeper freed her. She didn’t get out of that net naturally. Was it a cheat? It couldn’t be fair.
Apocay blew the ash again and waited.
The shaman expected an answer, and soon after the dust swirled, she was bracing herself for the grave proof of her self-doubt.
Apocay squinted his ancient eyes, and looked back down at the pot as if it must contain a faulty batch. He lifted the lid a second time and shook it around to release any residue. A puff of the grains made its way out, and he closed his eyes and gave a final blow. The granules swirled into tiny eddies, whirlpools void of any symbol or sign.
Nothing.
“Nobody.” Gryshen whispered the word like a curse upon her head, and as she spoke, she felt herself marked.
Apocay stared at her with an expression he had not worn for a long, long time.
“So it is.”
He loosened the pouch, and pulled out a plump green kobee pod.
Gryshen knew what this was for. She clung to her braid, closing her eyes tightly as Apocay pressed the pod against her right shoulder blade. The burn was reminiscent of the eels she had escaped hours . . . or days before? She couldn’t tell. But it felt a little more like when she’d cut herself on shells. It was a branding, this identity tattoo on her skin. She felt straight, long marks slice into her, curving sharply at the edges. Then it was over.
“What . . . what does it say?”
Shaman looked at her with a strange expression. Was it sadness?
“What am I?” she pleaded. She stretched her hand to touch the wound with her fingertips. She couldn’t quite reach it.
“Apocay?”
“You’re crossed.”
Chapter 13
Gryshen shook, rasping, sobbing, feeling her insides shatter like shale along the beach.
Crossed.
A criminal. That’s who was crossed.
A lax who had a vicious way with gentle beasts, who had promised to steal his mother’s eyeballs while she slept—and was caught just before he accomplished this, was deemed too dangerous before his paces were to begin.
The other pods were warned, and he was banished to the open sea. Just before this, he was marked.
Crossed. There was no one else in the pod with the mark.
Unknowable, unidentifiable, or unbelievable.
That’s what the sign meant, a universal symbol between ceasids and humans, the sign for mystery, marked off.
The sign of X.
And now she bore it. Like she was convicted of a crime she’d yet to commit.
Was it because of her plan with Coss? But that wasn’t a crime. Wrong, foolish, idiotic, yes—but not illegal.
“Apocay?”
The shaman nodded, as if agreeing with words that Gryshen could not hear. “This is finished. You will sort yours out.” He turned, his ancient tail bending like individual vertebrae, his thin white hair trailing.
“Apocay!”
“Lunch is waiting for me,” he signaled without looking back.
This was not in her natural range of nightmares. She had never even considered it, because it was not considerable.
But here it was. She tugged at a piece of this realization in her head, like loosening the weave on a human garment. It was ripe to unravel, but if it did, if she let it, she could never put it back again. And if she couldn’t put it back, she couldn’t get the Great Pearl. And if she couldn’t get the pearl, everyone in her tribe would die.
She stopped testing the edge of her breaking brain.
“So be it.” Gryshen spoke in a new tone, with the ring of one who has only one purpose, one mission, allowing everything else to fall away.
The water felt cooler than usual, considering the season was on the dawn of shifting into the closest to warmth the Rone ever got. The mark on Gryshen’s back burned, but her eyes had cleared, and she drew herself into a smooth motion, moving purposefully back toward the cavern, Apocay a few movements behind. She had gotten her bearings now, and she knew where she was going.
War had begun.
Who she might be—it couldn’t matter. The turn in the pit of her stomach about it, the very real possibility that she was a fraud—no, she was a fraud. Gryshen shuddered at this. She wasn’t who anyone thought she was, but she couldn’t grip what she took from her vision. No way. Still fraud. She cheated through her paces with a human saving her. None of this had time or space to matter. It was done.
She was going to make it all right. She was going to do something right, finally.
A humming teemed from the cavern as they approached it from the side and seemed to pour out all the openings. Chatter? Energy? She couldn’t be sure. But it was palpable. Gryshen closed her eyes tightly.
Now is your time. Now is your time to make this right. Just go forward. Just go forward. Just go forward.
These three words became a little chant, a charm, a mantra as she pressed on to face her tribe and face the coming season of war.
There was no hiding the mark. Jode had kept watch at the mouth of their home, and his grin could not have stretched wider when he looked up to see his sister alive, with fin intact. It was as if the past few days’ pain fell away for the sweetest moment when he gripped her in a back-breaking hug. “Jode,” Gryshen croaked as her brother squeezed the air out of her lungs. “No beast was so violent, buddy.”
“Shut up.” He wouldn’t let off.
She laughed, and in spite of the fact that every bit of her still ached, it felt like a great sigh of relief.
“All right, all right.” He held her arms, pushing her back in front of him. “Turn around. Let’s see it.”
In her moment of happiness, she had forgotten about the mob that had gathered behind him, waiting.
These ilorays were like family, even if a few were akin to awful cousins she was bound to protect.