“How could you possibly?”
“I’ve seen her!” she yelled.
“It’s not enough!” he answered in kind, turning to face her and shaking his head in disbelief. “Dreams? This is what you follow, Hells, what you ask us to follow to Tohrepur?”
Even as he posed the question he felt some small part of himself want it to be true. Though he had little faith in or desire for his own dreams, his nightmares, he hoped that somehow Ghaelya’s dreams had some meaning or truth to them. Despite that faint hope, he was too familiar with the nature of reality to invest in her faith. And he had his own reasons to suspect the nature of her dreams. As she stood in the center of the room, glaring at him, he could almost hear the distant murmur of singing. But this time he could not determine if it was memory or something else.
“I didn’t bring you here,” she said through clenched teeth. “Brindani didn’t bring you here, and my dreams didn’t bring you here… So why are you here, Uthalion?”
The question slid into him like a boning knife, the kind his wife wielded so expertly on the fish he would bring home for dinner, fresh from the spring. His wife’s voice asked him the question again, echoing across the years, her thin shoulders slumped as she leaned back against the dining room table in the lamplight, their daughter fast asleep in the back bedroom. Uthalion blinked, and she was gone. He turned away from the angry genasi with a scowl as fresh pain erupted from old wounds.
“Save your questions and your breath,” he answered gruffly. “I have no apologies or excuses for you… or anyone.”
His hands balled into fists, Uthalion felt stretched between anger and exhaustion. The silver ring was heavy on his hand, and he feared sleeptrue sleepwas not as far away as he had hoped. He relaxed somewhat as Ghaelya fell back a step, leaned against the east wall, and let the sudden weariness settle into his spent body even as old resentments boiled to the surface of his heart.
“You know, I see someone running, it’s not where they’re going that makes me curious,” Ghaelya said, quieter, but he still felt the edge of anger in her words. “I’ve got to wonder: what are they running from?”
Sighing, Uthalion looked at her over his shoulder with a sly, tired grin.
“I think perhaps, on that point, we seem to understand one another,” he replied knowingly. He looked away, the answers still only half-formed in his own thoughts and muddled by memory and beguiling song, obligation and compulsion.
The chirping of crickets and the buzzing of spring-beetles filled the quiet between them, though Uthalion knew she wouldn’t let things go. There was a youthful stubbornness in her that he envied; or rather, he envied the memory of feeling the same way when he’d been young, leaving his grandfather’s farm in far away Tethyr.
“She is alive,” Ghaelya said at length, breaking the silence between them. “In the end, I will prove that to you.”
– “Keep your hope alive,” he said. “And I will consider that feat enough, no matter what happens.”
She turned away without another word, her footsteps diminishing down the short hallway and slowing cautiously on the stairs at the back of the house. He glanced out the window looking north and wondering how much farther he ‘ would have to run before he could turn back, find his family, and try again to be the husband he’d once been, to be the parent he’d never had.
Returning his attention to the old porch and the maturing evening outside, he let the whistling breeze and the buzzing of insects soothe his darkening mood to a mere frown. Though he still did not fully trust Ghaelya’s tale, he felt confident that at least she believed in it. Only one voice in their small group did not yet ring fully true.
He listened carefully for the sound of voices outside, but detected nothing of Brindani or Vaasurri in the dark. Tired as he was, he did not remove the silver ring and kept his sword loose in its sheath, trusting to the killoren’s instincts, but ready to respond should trouble erupt in the middle of the night.
Ghaelya stood at the closed door for long moments, shaking and wanting to break something. She squeezed her eyes shut, taking easy, slow breaths, before sitting at the edge of the rotted bed frame against the northern wall. Over and over again she reminded herself that, despite the human’s uncanny ability to anger her, she needed a guide across the Akana, to find Tessaerilbut also, that she must watch him closely.
No matter where she ran, no matter where Uthalion led her, the Choir had been quick on their heels, the dreamers’ howls as predictable as a rooster’s morning crow. Until Tessaeril was in sight, in her arms, and safely away from Tohrepur, Ghaelya would be vigilant and guard her trust well. She refused to imagine her sister as just a body waiting to be found;
Furious at the thought, she kicked out, splintering the leg of a bedside chair. The satisfaction of feeling something snap and fall apart calmed her, and she exhaled softly. She flexed her knuckles as she opened her eyes and scanned the sparse bedroom. Two windows, west and south, their shutters fallen away, lay open to the evening air. The scent of lavender, heady on the cool, damp air, blew in the windows and stirred her to investigate the room. She stood and approached the west, hearing crickets outside as she looked up the long hill. The insects were one of the first night sounds she could recall hearing on the Akana. Turning back to the moonlit chamber, she saw nothing of importance, no sign of why she had been brought here, why the dreamTessaerilhad shown her this place.
She slumped down beneath the window, running her fingers across the swirling lines of energy, the constant tingle of her element, coursing through her flesh. Her thoughts were dull and muddied, useless for puzzling out answers from dust and rotting wood. Instinct told her only that rain was on the waymaybe in a day, perhaps two and she wondered if her intuition might be stronger when the storm came.
Rolling her cloak into a pillow, she reluctantly lay upon the dusty floor and stared at the ceiling, alone in the dark for the first time in what seemed like months. Time slipped away as she tried to calm the inevitable restless urge to just get up and leave, to keep moving no matter what. Placing her hands behind her head, her elbow bumped against something that rolled away, bouncing and slowing between the uneven floorboards. Reaching out, she found what felt like an old candle, half-melted, but still bearing just enough wick to light. She sat up, took out her flint and steel, and brought the candle back to life.
Sitting in its glow, she watched shadows play along the floorboards and flicker on the ceiling, and felt her eyelids growing heavy. She looked to the south window and saw something on the wall, just beneath the sill. She crawled forward, her curiosity aroused by what appeared to be letters scrawled on the faded wood in dark riist. Bringing the candle closer, her eyes widened as a familiar script came into focus, its color suddenly less like rust and more like dried blood applied with a fingertip. She shook her head and looked away, not yet ready to read the words. Though she believed with every fiber that the message was there, that the medium truly was blood, confronting the possible source of that blood was a concept that set her hands to trembling and her blue-green eyes to boiling.
With a half-lidded gaze of dread, she looked up and read what had been written.
The Song calls us
The Choir bring? us
The Lady dreams us
And her blood feeds us Bile rose in her throat at the last line, and she pulled away, still staring at the letters unmistakably written by Tessaeril’s hand. The crickets had stopped their chirping outside, and the message grew darker, more distinct and wet, until a few letters began to drip down the wall.. Her heart hammered in her chest, and her head swam as the floor pooled with red. The letters were lost in a stream of wet crimson, and in their place a crude note was left, barely more than a smear across the old wood. HELP ME