Skykeeper (The Drowning Empire Book 1) Page 9

  “Bathed in them?”

  “They thought the water had healing powers,” he says. “That the water was burning away whatever illnesses they had, I guess. People have believed stranger things.”

  “Seems like they’ve lost their faith in it,” I think aloud, my gaze wandering around the empty pools. Convenient for us, since it explains why we haven’t seen any signs of other people for miles now—which is likely why he wanted to take this route.

  “Wised up, more like,” he says.

  I frown, but I’m not especially up for a discussion of beliefs right now, so I don’t challenge his choice of words.

  “Is your mother still practicing medicine back home?” I ask instead, trying again to steer the conversation back to the islands, hoping he may let more information about them slip. But it’s useless; his only reply is a dismissive look and a pointed attempt to distract himself with anything that isn’t me.

  The pools are growing more scattered now, the fog clearing and revealing the open water of the Atesian Sea-Below to our left, far below the cliff edge we’re cantering along. The spring’s steam must have been more disorienting than I realized, because it doesn’t feel like we could have traveled this far west, like we could be this close to the sea already.

  I hold in a sigh and try to push down that unnerving feeling inside me, that sense that West is already thinking of changing his mind about going back to the islands, and the feeling that I am a fool for still wanting to go there myself.

  I think of my letter, neatly bound and waiting in the pocket of my cloak. I wonder if it will matter, even if it does reach Varick. Even if he manages to gather an entire army, will we really be able to stop anything? To change anything?

  That sea to my left looks big and impossible, so I lower my head and look forward instead.

  And then a sudden pressure slams against my rib cage.

  At first, I am sure it is only that doubt and fear solidified, racing up to weigh me down.

  But then a more familiar, sick feeling starts in my stomach. It twists quick and cruel up into my lungs and sends me into a coughing fit. I jerk Finn to a stop. The burning follows then, as if his reins were on fire and I’ve pulled the flames onto my arms with my movement. It isn’t the tingling I felt from the Devil Spring’s steam, either; it’s hot, searing just below the skin and out of reach. So unbearably hot that I have the mad thought that if I could, I would flip myself inside out and go back and jump into one of those pools to try and wash away the fire.

  Because even that boiling water could not be as painful as this.

  “What’s wrong?” I hear West ask the question, but when my mouth opens to answer, no sound comes out. He circles back around, his eyes darting to the path behind us, and then back to me as I rub frantically at my skin. “Mine’s irritated too,” he says. “Maybe we should have avoided those pools after—”

  “No,” I choke, cutting him off. Because almost as quickly as it came, the pressure is ceding enough that I am able to think clearly, and I know this has nothing to do with those pools. Maybe the tingling in my skin never had anything to do with them at all, and it was only the beginning of this warning that is so obvious and undeniable now.

  It seems I haven’t lost my ability to sense rifts after all.

  West says my name. It’s the first time he’s actually used it, I think, instead of just referring to me as fugitive, or some variation of that word, and it gives me pause for a moment.

  But then I feel that pull in my blood, and it pushes me to veer right and then to run. Not away from West, like I’ve thought of doing several times these past few days, but towards the place that this rift must be threatening.

  The feeling is more powerful than ever.

  Too powerful to ignore.

  The landscape begins to blur again, into a swirl of grey ground and indigo sky. My head is whirling along with all of it. But I don’t stop. I just push Finn faster and faster, until West’s shouts are a dull buzzing in the back of my mind. Until I begin to feel cold mist stinging my cheeks, and until the ground stretching out in front of me is cast in shadows so black I can’t see anything—no rocks, no trees, no anything that may lie in my path.

  Only darkness.

  All darkness.

  I stop so fast that I feel Finn’s body tense irritably beneath me. My focus doesn’t stay on him.

  Because my eyes are drawn upwards to the Sea-Above, and they stay there even as I press my hand against the river horse’s withers and roll myself from his back.

  It’s nothing compared to the rift that claimed my brother’s life. The barrier around it is just as dark, casting those shadows just as deep, and the forming rift itself is an equally thin, weak shade of grey—but it’s much smaller than the one over Isce was. There’s a river close by—one we crossed over a few miles back—that might be quick to flood if this rift breaks, but that river is shallow enough that even that wouldn’t be inherently catastrophic. This is the controllable sort of rift, the sort I grew up with, the kind our world is used to. The kind a Pure-blood could, and would, probably deal with single-handedly.

  The kind I should be able to deal with.

  I’m drenched in sweat, and wisps of sealing magic are evaporating up like steam through my veins, drifting toward the darkness above without my say-so.

  I should be strong enough to keep this under control, I think vaguely.

  It is the only clear thought I manage before my mind floods with memories of that day—images of raging waters and breaking skies, of waves crashing over my head and a shore too distant to reach. Memories that all bring the same thing with them.

  Fear.

  And suddenly, I can’t move anymore. Whatever fire was pulling me before smothers to ash that settles in my throat, leaving it dry and raw and aching. I can’t swallow. Can’t think. Can’t seem to convince my feet to move another step. I feel the way I usually do in the countless nightmares I’ve had since that day: paralyzed while the storm above rages on and on and everything threatens to fall down around me.

  Except this isn’t a nightmare.

  It’s going to break, hisses a nasty voice in my head. It’s real and it’s going to break, and you’re just going to stand there and watch everything drown. You’re useless.

  It isn’t pain in my stomach this time, but the sinking sensation of falling. The ground seems more dangerous than the sky all of a sudden—perilously close and hard on my hands and knees as I hit it. I remember the way the surface gave from underneath me at Isce, and I imagine that happening now; I think I feel the frozen soil tremble, and in my mind, I see the ground splitting the way the water did, picture it swallowing me up into a grave that I could never swim out of. I close my eyes and dig my fingernails into the dirt, clinging like a corpse come to one last bit of life, desperate not to fall into that grave.

  Then I hear a voice, soft and musical in a way that reminds me of wind breezing through the chimes in the palace gardens.

  And I don’t know why, but it makes me let go.

  Chapter 12

  My wrists are bound.

  That is all I can think—all I can process—for a long time after I wake up.

  And then everything else about the situation hits me all at once, and it takes every bit of discipline I can muster to keep myself from panicking.

  I will not panic.

  I must not panic.

  My hands and arms are covered in dried blood and fresh scars, and I am in a room that smells like mold and dirt. It’s so tiny that, when I try to shuffle around and stagger to my feet, I end up banging my knees several times against walls that feel impossibly close in the near-darkness. My attempts at calming breaths echo with a thin, ragged hollowness in the small space. I try to focus on finding any possible way out.

  But there is no way out.

  There is only a door of black stone in front of me, and a grimy strip of a window high, high above. The floor is solid. The walls are solid. The ceiling is solid, and I can�
��t see the sky, and I need to see the sky. I want to be home, in my bed, staring up through the palace’s clear glass ceilings and letting the ripples of that Sea-Above dance patterns over my eyes until I fall asleep.

  Home is so very far away.

  And I can’t think any more of it just now.

  Because just now, someone is opening the door to this prison.

  I scramble away from the light that spills in with the opening door. As if I could hide in the shadows of this place, and whoever put me here might somehow forget they’d done it. A silhouette of a person disrupts the spilled light, and my bound hands desperately, clumsily feel along the cold dirt floor for something—anything—I can use to defend myself with.

  I find nothing before the door opens the rest of the way, and I’m blinded by brightness that I have no more room to run from.

  “This is her, then?” A man’s voice. I blink and my sight adjusts, and his face becomes clear: skin that is cracked, leathery with age. And ripped through with keeper scars. My heart wants to leap at the sight of those scars—because here is another like me, and maybe, I want to believe, things aren’t as dire as they seemed when I first opened my eyes.

  But something about the way he is looking at me keeps my heart heavy and sunken in its place.

  “Awfully young to be causing all of this trouble, isn’t she?” The man glances back over his shoulder as he talks, and now I can see who he is talking to: a girl who looks like she may be a few years older than me. There is a strange beauty about her that holds my attention for longer than I mean to let it; she reminds me of the sort of deadly brilliance that characterizes most of the frozen landscape in this part of the world—the way her lips curve cold and graceful on her pale, diamond-shaped face. Her hair is the color of thinly scattered ash, her eyes like glacier ice. The combination of it all gives her a sort of elegance that doesn’t seem to fit with her tattered vest, or with the well-worn leggings tucked inside her scuffed boots.

  But what holds my attention the longest is that crossbow that is strapped to her back.

  “It doesn’t matter,” says the girl.

  I recognize her voice immediately: it is the same one I heard before I lost consciousness. It reminds me less of wind-chimes now, and more of a story I once heard—one about creatures in cold lakes who used their music to lure men to their deaths.

  “Because look at her wrists,” she finishes in that ice-song voice, and then moves into my cell and grabs me by the arm. She jerks me forward so fast, so excitedly, that I stumble face-first into the man’s chest. He has to take a step back so he can see what has her so excited: The Pure markings etched into my wrists, which she is holding up for him to observe.

  I want to run—to hit this girl who thinks she can jerk me around like this and then run—but I hear more voices just around the corner of the narrow hallway that leads from this room. And without any sort of weapon, it doesn’t seem especially smart to hit anybody before I know how I am going to get away from them.

  The man’s eyes jump from my wrists to my face. Still appraising me. “This must be her, then, I guess. She just looked a little older—a little more formidable—on the poster, didn’t she?”

  Dread curdles my stomach.

  Is there any place in this godforsaken empire that my wanted posters haven’t reached yet?

  “I don’t care what she looks like,” says the girl. “She comes from a family of legends—and now she’s ours.”

  “Yours?” The word snaps out of my mouth.

  “Didn’t stutter, did I?” She flashes her frigid smile at me, meets my eyes for a fraction of a second before turning back to the man. “I’m taking her to Elder Ana,” she tells him.

  He nods. The girl tries to yank me forward again. But, foolish or not, this time I brace myself and refuse. “Where am I?” I demand. “And what have you done with my things? My horse?”

  Her eyebrows lift. Amused, and who could blame her? I am in no position to be making any demands of her, and we both know it.

  But she humors me all the same. “That beast of yours nearly trampled two of our village’s best keepers, so he’s been…sedated, for the time being—”

  “Sedated? If you’ve hurt him, I swear I will—”

  “—and your other belongings were recovered by the boy who you were apparently traveling with? He followed us back here…here being the village of Solvel, which is not full of thieves, thank you kindly. We have no use for any of your things. Although the islander apparently did, because he’s since disappeared with them.”

  That bastard.

  “No need to look so upset,” says the girl. “You’ll be provided for well enough, so long as you cooperate.”

  I think of my brother’s funeral stone, of how I tucked it in the corner of my bag for safekeeping when we were crossing a river yesterday. My voice is quiet, hard-edged when I say, “There were things he took that can’t be replaced.”

  “Then I guess you should have held them closer, eh?”

  “I normally do, I—”

  “Now, out you go,” she interrupts, whipping the bow from her back and jabbing me between the shoulder blades with it. And it is hard to argue with that. Particularly since, at that moment, another man joins my two captors, and I am suddenly facing even more miserable odds at escaping.

  I’m marched outside, into air so cold that it chokes and a night so black that it seems endless. It seems like a darkness I could disappear in, at least, if I could manage to break free; but where would I go without Finn?

  I smell smoke.

  I hear pounding drums in the distance, and my heart pounds right along with them. There is a fervor in the air, something wicked and wild that tries to coil around me, that raises little bumps along my skin as we move deeper into the village and more sounds begin to pierce through the drumming.

  Shouts.

  Screeches.

  And then I see the first people—although I don’t recognize them as people, not at first, because of the thick smoke and because most of them wear elaborate costumes of silver feathers and scales, of terrifying masks with red-rimmed eyes and toothy beaks and curling horns. The majority of the costumed are gathered in a semicircle, curving around a platform in the center of one of the village squares. On the platform is a figure dressed entirely in white flowing robes, and wearing an equally pale, expressionless mask.

  So much plainer than the others, but for some reason this figure is the one who is impossible to tear my eyes from. When I finally manage to, I notice the dozens of normally dressed people on the outskirts of the crowd. It is them doing the shouting I heard, and as they shout they throw stones and jab lit torches toward the others, seemingly intent on disrupting whatever sort of ritual those others are in costume for. Fights are breaking out between the two groups. Someone has set fire to a building nearby, and it is slowly building, flames whipping brighter and longer, and no one is bothering to put it out.

  “Rioting fools,” I hear the girl mutter behind me.

  We’re close enough to that riot now that I can see scars on the necks and faces of some of the unmasked. More scars like the ones on the man dragging me along by my elbow. More keepers.

  Why are they behaving this way?

  “What is going on?” I ask.

  “Keep walking, and don’t make eye contact with anyone,” the girl says with another light jab of her bow. We turn then, at least, so I don’t have to walk closer to the chaos. I’m steered toward a quiet, unassuming little hut of a house and left on its porch with the two men while the girl disappears inside.

  I don’t want to look back, afraid of what I might see.

  But I do it anyway. And the distance makes the scene even more unsettling, somehow, makes the smoke and flame and the keepers wielding those things seem as if they are part of some other world. A world where they are demons instead of saviors.

  There are no saviors among the masked ones, either, it seems, because now the white figure reaches down from its
platform and takes up a gleaming blade, and in that same moment, a body, bound and still, is lifted up from the crowd and rolled to the figure’s feet.

  I start automatically toward it, forgetting I am still bound myself, and I’m yanked painfully backward in response.

  “What is that? That body, that person, we have to…” My protests die the moment they leave my lips, smothered by the sound of chanting that is suddenly rising up from the semicircled crowd. The white figure lowers its blade toward the still body below in slow, calculated motions. Up and down, up and down, adjusting the blade and lining it up a little better with each practice swing.

  “Do something!” I shout at the men holding me back. But the men only stare straight ahead at nothing, and the chanting grows louder, and the swings fall closer.

  Faster.

  Up and down, faster and faster, until—

  “No!”

  I look away just in time, but the thwack of the blade falling shatters through me, leaving me dry-mouthed and shaking. And the figure doesn’t stop with just one swing. Over and over, the noise of it splits the night, somehow clear and somehow loud over the chanting and shouting and burning.

  I want to go inside. I am desperate to get inside. I don’t know what awaits me in there, but anything would be better than staying out here.

  I am still staring at the door of the hut, eyes wide and mind trying to unsee, when the grey-haired girl reemerges. She glances from my trembling body to the scene behind me, and then to the man on my right, and quietly asks, “The piecing? They’ve already done it?”