Gryshen tightened one final knot, and Bravis tied up a loose rope.
“Let’s stop near the island before we get there.” She avoided Bravis’s question.
“The island?” Almost immediately, understanding registered on his face. Now he was swimming alongside her and Misra.
“You must be exhausted.” Gryshen remembered that the orca he had ridden had died in battle. He had been swimming himself the whole way, which was simple enough for a rested iloray, but for a battle-beaten one?
“I’m all right,” he reassured her, swimming alongside.
Misra was already carrying two ceasids; she would tire out too quickly with a third.
But Bravis was not leaving her side, now that she wasn’t leaving his.
“Bravis?”
“Yes, Gryshie?” It might have stung a bit, the familiar term, but knowing that someone she loved might still call her that name melted some of the ice that had surrounded her even in warm waters.
She thought for a moment.
“You know a little landkeeper speak.” It was more of a statement.
“Yes. A little.” Again he watched her carefully.
“Will you teach me some of their words? There are some things I need to be able to say.”
Gryshen kept her eyes open the rest of the way, as they moved to a place before the little island, far enough out from Rone that they shouldn’t encounter hunters. The group had remained virtually silent—even Gracke. The healers worked to change his ointment and redress his wound, but it was only to keep it clean enough to heal into a thick stub. He could still swim, but his movements were jerkier, pained.
Suddenly, Gryshen noticed a strange smile appear on Tollo’s white face, and looked down to see the leaves peeling away from her chest, black billowing behind them.
“Tend to her. Now,” she ordered the younger healer who had been rubbing a spiky orange plant on the place where her fingers had been. He joined the older healer at Tollo’s side, and Theus, seeing her, rushed over.
Even now, her movements were musical as she raised her arms toward the surface of the water, watching as they went in and out of camouflage with the gray sea, an effect Gryshen was sure had a connection to her injury.
The grave look on the older healer’s face left her sick.
She reached for her own brother’s limp hand as Theus held his sister’s, as it disappeared and reappeared in the foggy ocean.
“There must be spear left. Those sharp-shelled arrows they used . . . ” the young healer remarked thoughtfully.
“Those spears had a hundred tiny points on their end!” Gracke cried out, pushing toward them. “You have to help her! We can’t lose them both. They’re just babes!” Gracke gazed at Jode, then Tollo. He looked to each of them, the healers and Theus, frantic.
“Yes, let’s get to work.” Bravis began hauling more supplies from the back of an orca.
Both healers just looked helplessly at Tollo as she smiled.
“Fix her,” Gryshen commanded. If she couldn’t order the saving of this one life, what could she do?
“There’s nothing to fix.” Tollo offered Gryshen a sympathetic smile.
“Crazy leen!” Gracke roared at Tollo, “Enough! Look at yourself—blood’s pouring out of you!”
Tollo wrapped her small hand around one of Gracke’s enormous fingers. Then she turned to her brother.
“Meet you later.” Tollo’s eyes rolled back, her eyelids fluttered, and her whole body shimmered in and out of view once more.
Now they all knew what it was to watch a spirit leave.
“What?” Gracke sputtered.
Theus took his dead sister in his arms and gently kissed the top of her head. He held her as she floated in his hug, then said, “She’s had her burial spot picked out since she was a child. Will you help me prepare her?” He looked right at Gryshen. She looked down at her own brother, tucked safely into his net, tied fast to Misra's side. She nodded, swimming over.
Gryshen waited while Gracke held Tollo’s other hand, finally releasing his grip and bowing his head. She gently rested her palm on his hulking, shaking shoulder. He kept muttering, “They might has well have killed little babes. Little babes.”
Jode’s friends moved by his side, along with his pod’s warriors.
Bravis unfurled a net and handed one end to Theus, one to Gryshen. The three of them swept the mesh knots like a veil over her head, then like a cloak covering her whole form. They all bowed their heads, while Theus sang something low in their native signal. The remaining Nereids circled them in a kind of dance. Gryshen leaned forward, looking to Theus for approval. He nodded, and she kissed the smooth white forehead of the strange, beautiful leen. Then she swam with Theus to tie his sister to a pair of dolphins that bobbed alongside Misra. They would part ways here, taking her home with his pod’s fighters.
“Go.” Gryshen took Theus’s hand. “You belong with her.”
“Oh, but we are always together. I will meet up with this part of her soon. First, I go with you.”
There was no questioning it. Theus’s words were final.
They began their preparations to settle in their hobbled little encampment before the time came to move home, to explain to Rone that she had gotten their beloved prince killed. That she had not returned with their salvation in some kind of wretched exchange. That she was the reason the pearl was broken. And then, somehow try and convince the mothers, fathers, young ones, the hearthkeepers, and the makers, hunters, healers, leaders, shaman, that none of it mattered to begin with. That their whole wide world grew up on a lie.
“Bravis.” He had come by, making sure that Jode’s net was still secure as Misra now took the time to rest.
She had to say the words out loud. “I have no idea what to do. And—” She dropped her signal for a moment, then realized how ridiculous it was to try and keep anything secret at this point, when all was laid bare, when what had been hidden in plain sight exploded in front of her entire army.
She used her normal tone again. “I don’t even know what’s true. I don’t know for sure that the pearls have all been a hoax—” That last word felt like a knife sliding along the edge of her mouth. A hoax.
A trick.
Bravis gave her that look, waiting.
“I don’t—I don’t believe they’re what we think they are. The pearls. How could the Rakor have been so strong? And we’ve had no report of illness, or even excessive weakness, from our pod. And I feel . . . well, war-battered doesn’t count. I’m healthy. You’re healthy. After they destroyed”—she couldn’t say his name, not now. Not yet—“I’m healthy enough.” Except for my heart, but she knew that kind of sickness couldn’t be healed by any outside force.
“I agree with you,” Bravis said, simply.
His words brought relief for her pod, and another wave of nausea over the useless war her brother had died in.
“I also don’t think it was a hoax,” Bravis finally added.
Gryshen just looked at him, puzzled.
Bravis continued, “A hoax would be something malicious. A trick.”
“But it was a trick. At least, a deception.”
“A deep deception,” Bravis agreed.
“Reaching all of us. Killing—” she didn’t need to gesture.
“Let’s go up,” he signaled softly, watching Theus tuck Tollo in her net with the dolphins closing in to hold her as they slept. “Jode is s—secure.” It was as if perhaps he was going to say safe, then realized how insane that was. Gryshen nodded, realizing the center of her grief-stricken, war-broken army wasn’t the ideal place to continue this conversation. Together they swam up, Bravis taking her hand reassuringly as they moved toward the surface. They hit air just beside Gryshen’s rock, the viewing point where she used to watch the woman she now knew to be her mother, in a time that seemed so long ago.