Hark folded his arms and crouched his chin into his chest, embarrassed suddenly, and feeling oddly petulant. “For what? My coin purse, no doubt, you mongrel woman. I bet you’ll never be satisfied, even after you’ve murdered the last Great Beast and are awash in gold and steel!”
Spear snorted, and then in a sudden motion took Hark around the shoulders and pulled him close, into a hug, tight; he could feel various weapons poking him in places he did not wish to be poked. “There it is! Oh, there it is, Hark. I see it now. Sometimes you hide it, but I know it’s always there.”
His heart leaping at the physical contact, he recoiled and shoved out of her embrace, almost knocking over a cart of bowls and utensils. “What in the Myriad Hells are you talking about? Are you drunk? Did you sneak into my wine cellar when I wasn’t looking? I bet you did!”
She laughed again, higher, and Hark sensed a mania he did not like. Spear’s eyes shone with a sinister light, and Hark began to fold in on himself as she advanced, her shadow falling across him. “I guess you could say I drank madness and developed a taste for it. It’s easy to go mad when you have nothing left to live for.” She sidled closer, leaning down until her hot breath danced by his ear. “I used to have a lot to live for. But the Hollowed saw to that: reached right through reality and burned it all down with everyone inside. So I’d rather just fucking work for them and die than try to pretend I have anything left to live for; let them crumble the world to cinders. My own world is already ash.
“But you?” she hissed. “I know all about you; I’ve read up on you. You don’t want the world to end because you hate it. You don’t even care about the world. You’re just bored and beaten down. Bitter. Arrogant. Lonely. And the Hollowed gave you a challenge. Who cares if you help bring about the apocalypse? You’ll have done something no one else has done. You’ll be able to step on the necks of all those who told you that you’d fail.”
Spear took a step back then. She smiled down at him, pity in her eyes. “That doesn’t make you mad, just petty. And that makes you worse than me, Hark. You’re far worse.”
And then she laughed. It pierced Hark’s heart as surely as an arrow. And she kept laughing. And her laughter followed her across the Wild World as she left the manor.
It lingered, wrapped itself around Hark like a noose, and pulled tight.
Hark’s manor was in the seaport town of Awrant, just off the Spidered Sea, and with Spear’s laughter echoing after him, he found himself bursting out into the bright spring day and lurching toward the water.
He would do this as a boy, fresh bruises from his aunt and uncle shivering into existence on his stomach, his shoulders, the back of the legs, where no one would think to look. And now, as then, Hark’s feet stepped staccato, his whole body quaking with the aftermath of a beating, unseen, but his soul was already bruising over.
His manor nestled in a patch of gardens, tucked away from the main road but only a short distance from his once greatest triumph. Now, as he came upon the ruined shell of his old restaurant, he could barely look at it. Even passing it brought noxious memories to the surface like cold apples in water, bobbing and demanding attention. And just like the taxes he didn’t pay, and like the codes he chose not to follow, and the workers whose plights he passed by, he chose not to see those memories. The restaurant died because not enough people loved it, he had reasoned to himself; it had not been his fault.
So he staggered past, ignoring the dark interior, the graffiti, and the smell of garbage that stroked his cheek. Fuck the restaurant, he thought desperately. It didn’t want to live, so let it die. It wouldn’t matter, not as long as he did his work.
He walked down Main Street, composing himself in front of the men and women and children going about their day. His chef whites gleamed in the late-afternoon sun, looking like raiment compared to the drab wear of the Awranti. His uncle was a naval scorpion, his aunt a jungle weaver, his parents unknown to him and better off that way. He would never wear anything to remind him of any of them again, and so he pushed himself forward with pride in standing out. Better to gleam like a bright blade than be smothered in the burlap crowd.
Children sang for alms on Viscounts Way, and he ignored them all. Let them work, if they were to earn a living. Through Dishra’s Gift, the wide, sweeping park green and lush, ignoring the families as they ran and played, doing his best to ignore the longing for what he could’ve built with Fenli and never had the time for. If Hark looked closely, he could almost see Fenli waiting for him under the cherry trees, his poet’s face long and sad. Hark shook his head then, sweat forming on his upper lip; Fenli wasn’t here. He had moved on, to take up a fisherman’s life with his husband in Albercari. Hark was alone.
Huffing, almost out of breath, his heart racing, he turned onto Sandrazi Road and made his way through the fashion district, scenting for the cologne of the sea on the wind. Salt, wet wood, and gull feathers. He was close; he had to hurry, his ghosts were gaining on him.
And then, past the stalls of crafts, textiles, and coffee shops before the port, he turned and saw the ocean. Something in him finally gave way. Endless, blue and green, the sun a dazzling orange lance thrown across the horizon, Hark forgot his age and ran, ran for the water. Down past the docks, past the Endless Empire war galleys and the Julaywi song ships, he ran out and past them, into the sand, past the sand, into the surf, past the surf, and into the water proper.
He pushed out, farther, farther. The water rose from ankles to knees to waist to chest, to nose. Hark, harried by Spear’s laughter, the ghosts of his failures, the anger and arrogance of his youth, found himself up to his nose in the sea he had once loved and given up for the kitchen. The ocean did not let him live, and so he had been ordered to stop swimming. He felt it coming, a great peace that the sea always offered and which he had been aching for, for many years.
Except the sea-salt sting in his nose offended him, and the endless blur of water in his eyes brought him back to the Sea Mother, that godbeast he had as surely helped kill as Spear, and too quickly the water was too close and he was too deep, and it seemed at the thought that the entire sea lifted him up and away, and Hark’s gut churned, and he retched into the water, emptying himself, sobbing.
As he stood there in the water, floating in the sea that was the home of his youth, standing amid his ruined lunch, gasping for air, he saw something slice through the sky. A flash of white against the bright blue, then gone. He blinked, rubbing at the saltwater tickling his eyes.
Again, a glimpse of white, then gone. Hark blinked, turned, tried to push himself on his toes, back toward land.
A third time he saw it, and then heard a string of curses in a high-pitched squeak. He followed the sound, the absurdity of it distracting him from his despair long enough to see a small girl on the shore, uttering every curse known across the Spider Coast and farther, holding in her delicate brown fingers a broken kite. White sailcloth bunched up in her hands, straddled by beams of thin wood, as she cursed at it for not working. Her mother stood behind her, laughing, but doing it quietly enough for the girl not to notice. All Hark could do was watch as, after a moment’s chuckle, the mother came forward, knelt by her daughter, and slowly pointed out where things had gone wrong and how to make it better.
Hark’s heart ached, knowing that in a few short days the Hollowed would be freed by his hand, and there would never be any chance to make it better.
It would be all his fault, just like everything in his life.
If he were not too stubborn to give up, he would have floated out to sea. But Hark was not one to give up, even his life. He had only given up on the world being good to him.