Five days spent staring at the ocean, nearly a fourth of my allotted time gone. I did my best to make sure the time wasn’t completely wasted as Kaylan’s nap aide. My thoughts shifted from trying to figure out how to stop the fighting to reasoning out what we needed to get the shadow blessing in the Seedling Palace as well as possible hiding places to Fellen and Rawley to mentally running through my training and back again.
I ran out of mending to do halfway through the second day and sharpening my knife and checking my other gear barely filled the rest of the afternoon. I had practice with sitting for hours from my training in the healer’s tent, but my hands were used to being busy and now I had nothing to fill them with. The rest of that shift crawled by tediously without even a hint of anything interesting out in the water.
Before the next day’s watch I sought out mending from the others, and found it wasn’t difficult to convince them to give me work. I also fell into doing the stretching and strengthening exercises Rawley had taught me. They had fallen to the wayside during my time in the Seedling Palace but, given how little room they took up, the exercises were perfect to pick back up in the lookout nest.
However, the best hour during the shift by far was when Kaylan deigned to open her eyes and break out a late midday meal. She enjoyed telling tales as she slowly ate rather than eat in silence. My portion was always gone before the first story was done, but I didn’t need anything to occupy my hands when there were new tales to hear. Kaylan seemed to enjoy the attention and I enjoyed learning two or three new stories a day—a traitorous part of me tried to insist that it made the boring work worth it, but I knew spending more time than required in the lookout was a fool’s wish if I wanted to get back to the Seedling Palace.
Still, I enjoyed my time learning about the Lace Flower Lady and the green denizens that made up her entourage, ghost trees that cursed those who didn’t pay the proper respect, and a Grandmother who protected her tribe with a wall of bloody fire from a landslide through the will of the goddess. The last brought to mind the unusual way Grandmother’s marks had changed during the mourning ritual, but I kept the observation to myself. It didn’t seem like a smart coincidence to share.
Those tales all came from Kaylan’s home region, further east in the goddess’s great forest, but the myths that were the most exciting to learn were the handful that seemed to come from the whisper women themselves. Everyone should have at least heard of Moorkin before, but these didn’t seem to be ones that had leaked from the Seedling Palace. Perhaps because of our circumstances, most revolved around fighting with the fish and other sea creatures. I learned of a whisper woman who had crushed a Shore Eater’s skull with her bare hands, and the Wave Whisperer who would slip into the ocean and behind enemy lines to strike egg clutches and other vulnerabilities hidden behind the enemy’s offense. The story that caught my attention the most was the tale of the Thousand Cut Witch who had bought us a fifty or sixty year respite from fighting the Lady Blue’s creatures that Kaylan said we were only recently spiraling out of. The Thousand Cut Witch’s morbid blessing allowed her to cut up to ten other creatures with a cut ten times as deep and long as every inch long scarring cut she got. Needless to say, she used the blessing with ruthless efficiency against the fish and stronger creatures until the blood spilled was a higher cost than the Lady Blue was willing to pay. Kaylan spoke of the legendary whisper woman as if she was dead, but when I asked she shook her head sadly. The Thousand Cut Witch was still a high ranking whisper woman, but she had used up all her skin.
Sometimes after Kaylan’s tales the image of the fish I killed would rise up, but the slim sense of guilt only accompanied it the first time. It might not have been a kill for food, but huntresses also made kills when necessary to protect the tribe from dangerous predators or animals crazed with sickness. This was little different; I had been protecting myself and the squad from an enemy that would have gladly killed us in turn. Once I made that connection my stomach stopped turning at the memory, and it helped when Kaylan casually dismissed the notion that such killings infringed on the goddess’s domain during one of her tales. We were fighting on her behalf—if anything we had her implicit blessing to get rid of as many of the enemy as we could.
It was also during one of late midday meals that I learned from Kaylan we weren’t fighting the Lady Blue herself, not explicitly. However odd it was to think about the sea creatures had some semblance of command structure that we knew about. Apparently, we were likely facing the work of a conch commander, whatever that was.
I followed up that revelation with another question. “Why doesn’t the goddess take care of the Lady Blue herself? She must have enough power to do so.”
Kaylan slanted me a knowing look from where she was getting ready to settle back into another nap. “Could you kill your mother? Your tribe?”
I don’t have a mother. I kept that particular retort and initial response behind closed lips, knowing that it wasn’t the time for it. My second impulse came nearly as quick; I wanted to say yes after the pain and neglect and how little she had ever acted like a mother, but even as I wanted it, I knew it was a lie.
I couldn’t kill her. Not just because it would go against the goddess or because she had birthed me, but because of the small moments when she had been vulnerable in front of me, when I had taken care of her, and the infrequent bits of praise tossed my way. Even more so than that, it was impossible to think of a world where she was not in it. I might not want anything to do with her, but I also wasn’t sure I could understand a world where she wasn’t healing and manipulating and doting on the twins.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
“No.” My answer was softer than I meant it to be.
Kaylan nodded. “Neither can the goddess kill her kin and, even monstrous as the Lady Blue is, she is still the closest being to the goddess other than her true sister.” Kaylan paused for a moment as she looked out over the water before adding, “We fight so that the greater beings don’t have to. There is a balance to be had and if the Lady Blue ever pushes too far, so that our goddess is forced to retaliate, then we will all suffer for it.”
She let the somber note hang in the air for a long moment before a small smirk turned the corners of her mouth. “Creepy, right?”
I shuttered my wide-eyed stare and she finished getting comfortable as she huffed out a laugh. The whisper woman’s eyes closed and I was left to curse her and contemplate what horrors the goddess’s wrath could manifest on my own.
- -
The ocean remained undisturbed as far as I could see until my last few hours up on the wall. It started as a gray smudge in the distance over the water. There were other streaks of clouds in the sky, so at first I didn’t think much of it, but then it kept growing and swirling, and when I strained my eyes I thought I saw glowing points in the roiling water beneath the growing storm.
“Kaylan.”
“Hmmm?”
“There’s an odd storm growing over the water.”
She cracked open her eyes, stretched her head up, noted it. Then she yawned. “I wondered when they would try. A little early this time, though.”
I didn’t keep the incredulous tone out of my voice, “You’re not concerned?”
“Didn’t say that.” Kaylan sat up, cracking her back in a stretch. “How long ago did you first see it?”
I calculated. “Half an hour, give or take.”
“We have some time then.” She got that far away look again, like she was no longer aware of her immediate surroundings. I sat glancing between her and the odd storm for what felt like hours but I knew could only have been two or three minutes. She blinked and seemed to come back to the present. “Sounds like a dozen storm singers.”
She didn’t elaborate for me, but instead found a breeze and spoke into it. I didn’t hear a word. My eyes narrowed. That wasn’t an aspect of the wind speaking boon I was aware of.
Kaylan caught my look. “Not everyone bothers refining their skill with the boons as much as they should.”
I nodded before gesturing to the growing storm. “Are we doing anything about that?”
She held up a staying hand. “Give it twenty minutes. You’ll see something interesting.”
I didn’t want to wait doing nothing, but I also didn’t have much choice. Kaylan was my only way out of the lookout nest. She spent the time speaking silently into the wind and, I assumed, listening to things too far away to hear under normal means. Mishtaw had called her ‘Far Listener’, after all.
I spent the time checking my weapons even though they would be useless against a storm, if that’s all it was. I only had my eating knife and sling, given that a spear seemed unwieldy and unnecessary in the confines of the high lookout. I also wasn’t wearing my new protective coat for the same reason. My cloak kept me warm from the cold, but if this somehow turned into a fight it could turn into a hindrance. Double checking my pouches came next. Everything was as secure and waterproof as I could make it by the time someone new stepped through the lookout’s shadow.
Stern, middle aged though on the later years of it, the black clad and silver haired woman exuded a presence of power. A large angular mark covered the front of her neck. I sat stiff, not wanting to draw attention by moving into a more respectful position. Kaylan snapped out of her far away look and rose smoothly to her feet.
“Commander.”
The commander kept her gaze on the roiling storm while I tried to rise as unobtrusively as possible. “You warned the others?”
Kaylan bowed her head for a breath, more respectful then I had ever seen her. “Of course. The ocean also sounds…different but I haven’t been able to locate the cause.”
The commander nodded once. “The storm will be released soon.”
Kaylan couldn’t resist making one small comment. “It’ll be a tasty treat, won’t it?”
The commander chastised her with a single look before stepping up onto the wide lip of the wall. The roots didn’t make for even footing but she didn’t seem to notice that fact.
The storm, a roiling wall of gray cloud and mist and sheets of rain, flashed with blue-green light before swiftly heading toward us. The feel of it was all wrong. It moved too fast, too linearly, while the winds blew across it. They had no effect on its course. My skin crawled and lightning the same color as the earlier flash of light crackled across the clouds.
I flinched as Kaylan gripped my forearm without warning, but I let her pull me back into the relative safety of the overhang that covered half of the lookout nest and continuously provided a shadow to travel through.
The storm swept closer with a crack of thunder that hurt my ears. It had reached the shore and would likely hit us in less than a minute. I braced myself for the impact.
The commander tilted her head back and brought her hands up in front of her mouth like a funnel. And then a thread of the storm began to pull ahead of the rest. I stared at the sheer bizarreness of it, the threat of unnatural cloud and rain streaming closer, only to watch it slide over the commander’s hands and down her throat.
The storm thread grew bigger as more of the storm was pulled into the commander’s power and Kaylan and I had to hunker as far back under the overhang as we could to protect ourselves against the whipping winds and occasional sting of raindrops as the commander swallowed the storm whole.
Kaylan shouted in my ear with a grin. “The Lady Blue might have her Shore Eaters, but we have the Storm Drinker!”
I gave her a tight smile in return, but couldn’t quite turn my gaze from the sight before me. Wind and water and cloud all poured down over the commander’s hands and into her mouth. Some small part of me wondered how she was breathing, but I ignored it. Sometime later—it could have been anywhere from a minute to an hour—the commander lowered her hands and closed her lips with a satisfied smack.
The last haze from the storm faded away under the late afternoon sun.
Seeing the commander use her blessing was amazing, awe inspiring even, but it was in that moment that I wished she was able to drink giant waves of water as well as storms.