As they watched, signal flags slid up the mast. “Taking on water,” the captain translated. “Able to sail, though. Signal them back. We’ll fall in beside. Help out as best we can.”
Tenaj insisted they circle close and check the water for survivors, but she knew it was useless, even as the captain acquiesced.
How many lost?
She went back down the ladder to her place at the bow. The people behind her on deck were subdued now, crying softly, speculating in whispers as to who among their friends and family was lost.
Igraine joined her, then Lyrralt. The sun set. Still she stayed, watching the black water ahead, lit by Solinari so that it sparkled like diamonds. The wind grew colder. The stars came out.
She was still standing there when the lookout shouted. “Land!”
She looked this way and that, then realized it was right in front of her. The blackness she’d taken for starless sky was an island.
A large island.
Igraine and Lyrralt joined her once more, pushing through the Ogres who had crowded up from below deck.
For a moment, Igraine stared at the black finger of land on the horizon. Then he spoke quietly. “We will be called the Irda, Children of the Stars, Watchers of the Darkness. As we have found our way to this place, we will make our own way into the future.” For the first time since Everlyn’s death, he felt hope and peace and a wonderful calmness in his heart.
Khallayne sat for days, silent and uncommunicative. She ate when food was put before her, slept when a slave led her to bed. She shivered when the room was cold, sweated when she sat too near the fire.
She hurt. Her teeth, her skin, her fingers. Her muscles, her eyes. Everything ached, and for days, a sound, even the tiniest one, made her cringe. But she knew all that would pass. Her aches would recede, and her ears would return to normal. She wasn’t so sure about her sanity.
It was all hazy, like an early morning high in the mountains when the clouds haven’t lifted and the air hangs heavily moisture laden and nothing has sharp edges.
“Why are you keeping her alive?” Kaede’s voice, tinged with jealousy, broke through the haze.
“Because it amuses me,” Jyrbian’s voice answered, his despicable voice as smooth as silk.
She watched it all as she would have watched a play, waiting for her heart to wake up and tell her she was alive. The thing that made her look, listen, made her at last return to the world of angry whispers, was a scream, the scream of a dying man.
“So,” a voice said from near the window. “You are going to wake up.” The voice didn’t sound very pleased with the prospect.
Slowly, Khallayne sat up. She spotted Kaede standing at the window, a crystal from Jyrbian’s collection held in her palm.
Bakrell’s death came back to her. “Bakrell…” she choked out.
Kaede put the crystal back onto its bronze stand and turned toward her. “Ummm. I always thought you liked my brother a little more than you let on. No doubt he’s one of Igraine’s most loyal followers by now. He never did anything halfheartedly.”
She didn’t know! Khallayne understood immediately. Jyrbian hadn’t told her. She opened her mouth to tell her, to let the anger and pain come pouring out. But she didn’t. That revelation might be something she could put to good use, later.
With effort, Khallayne pushed her legs over the edge of the bed and pulled herself up. Wobbly and weak, she made her way toward her scant wardrobe. “What does Jyrbian want with me?”
Kaede shrugged, but Jyrbian answered her from the door. He was dressed beautifully in a red uniform, brimming with good health. “There might still be a few spells I don’t know.”
She leaned her head against the door of the wardrobe. “You’ll have to kill me,” Khallayne said quietly. Then with growing vehemence, she added, "I'll die before I’ll ever teach you another thing!”
He shrugged as if it didn’t matter.
And it didn’t. What miserly, little spells could Khallayne teach him when he already knew how to torture someone to death without leaving a single mark on the body? When she glanced at Kaede, standing in the light pouring through the window, her fingers moving lazily over the crystals from Jyr-bian’s collection, she suddenly knew there was one spell to teach. And she knew, even before Kaede gasped, that he would kill her, if necessary, trying to wrest the secret from her.
At that moment, Kaede snatched up the crystal, her mouth open wide in disbelief, holding it up to the light. The clear, round ball was filled with a curling ribbon of smoke. Sunlight streamed through the crystal, creating a dancing rainbow of light.
‘The History!” Kaede gasped, holding it close to her ear. “The History. Jyrbian, how did you get it?”
Jyrbian was as perplexed as Khallayne was horrified.
“What are you talking about?” He held out his hand, but she refused to give him the crystal. He* wrested it from her hand, repeating his question.
“It’s the History. The Song of the Keeper! It’s in there. How did you get it?”
“Are you sure?” He held the sphere up to his ear, then up to the light. “That’s ridiculous! How could that be?”
“I can hear it! Give it to me. It’s mine! Someone stole it from the Keeper. She wasn’t sick. She was murdered!”
He held it higher, out of her reach, pushed away her grasping hands. Before Kaede could stop him, he’d strode to Khallayne, thrust it into her hand.
Round and smooth and cool. Khallayne’s fingers closed around the sphere. She recognized the tingle of life. She carried it, cradled, to the fire and held it up.
“You did this,” Jyrbian said with absolute certainty. “Lyrralt said something the day the Keeper took sick, something cryptic, about singing for his fortune, the same day he was so angry with you. But he alone never had the knowledge to do this, so you must have helped him. How?”
Yes, the Song was still in there. She could feel it, the way Kaede could hear it. “No. I didn’t do it.” She lied. Khallayne handed the crystal back to him. “I don’t feel anything but a piece of glass.”
Jyrbian regarded her for a moment. “Try to remember,” he said sweetly. “Perhaps it’ll come back to you. Before I have to jog your memory, the way I had to jog… someone else’s.” He thrust the crystal back into her hands.
Kaede cried out in protest. “It’s mine! You can’t-”
One glance from Jyrbian silenced her, and she followed him from the room with murderous eyes.
Khallayne carried the sphere to the bed. Propped up on pillows, buried in warm quilts, she placed the crystal in her lap and stared at it, trying to remember the night it all happened, trying to remember the spell and how it had felt and the way it had all worked together.
Then, when she thought she remembered the rib-bony darkness and the flow of the Song from the Old One’s lips, she reached out with her power. In her mind, she tapped the crystal ball.
And the sphere opened. The Song flowed out, around and about her hands, through her fingers, a music beyond description, so bittersweet that tears clouded her vision, a song about a world that would soon vanish forever. A beautiful, glittering world like an apple with a worm of decay in it.
She was lost in the Song, unable to follow the music, when she heard cheers, the uproar of something in the courtyard below. She leapt to her feet and ran to the window.
In the courtyard below, she could see a crowd of troops, all milling about, shouting, crying out greetings and congratulations. She thought she saw Jyrbian, resplendent in dress uniform, marching through the crowd of men and horses. Then she saw the reason for all the noise.
The crowd of troops surrounded a group of prisoners, chained together around a wagon on which a lone prisoner stood, chained and tied: Eadamm, the human leader for whom Jyrbian had been searching like a madman.