Orenda was amazed at how little she felt the speed of the ship. There was a great lurch when it began, but below deck, contained within it, she did not feel the speed, the massive speed, that she knew they had to be traveling. Everyone else was occupied in keeping the ship moving, so she wandered from her room to the office she remembered Gareth taking her to her first night aboard the Burned Roc.
The door was unlocked, and the inside was exactly as she remembered. The cabinets were all closed, the mirror and art were still hanging there, and out the porthole the sea flew by at amazing speed. Orenda walked through the door into what she believed was Gareth’s bedroom.
Most of the room was taken up by a large canopy bed covered in sheer curtains, but it also held another writing desk, a basin, a vanity, and two wardrobes that seemed to be built into the wall. Orenda opened one of them and found an assortment of women’s clothes- some much more fine than she would have anticipated. A ball gown hung there with coats, tights, and traveling clothes- and Orenda wondered when Bella had ever gone to a ball.
This was, Orenda noted, not only Gareth’s room. Everything inside spoke of both of them. It was almost a perfect split. Orenda knelt to dig through the bottom of the wardrobe and came away with a box. She opened it and saw that it was full of jewels- necklaces, rings, bracelets and the like. They didn’t seem to have any sort of theme, and she didn’t know what to make of them.
She didn’t know what she had expected to find.
It was so unheard of, for a couple like them to form, to exist. Elves did not date humans at all, and they certainly didn’t build lives together- but both the Firefist brothers had done it, and Gareth at least didn’t seem to think this was any kind of revolutionary act. He had called her his beloved in public, and from the way they interacted, Orenda knew that he meant it. She had not known enough people in love to see them in the way she had seen Gareth and Bella. Most of the lovers she had known in her life had been arranged, had been like Toli and Shelly. She supposed Steve and Adam were in love, but she had not known them as intimately as Bella and Gareth. She had never seen them fight, never seen one storm out on the other, never seen one gloat over the other. She supposed they did, that they would have to, but she had never seen those things in action before. She had never seen someone get as angry as Bella had let that rage fuel her to do anything other than destroy. She had never seen two people disagree about something so important and work through that disagreement by going to the source for closure.
She didn’t know how to process it. It seemed… it seemed better. Their strange relationship seemed better than anything the Urillian nobility had ever produced. This small room was not a sprawling estate, and no one was marrying into power because no one had any power to give. Gareth lived in a constant state of paranoid fear that kept him moving too far and too quickly for something like that, and Bella… perhaps understood that? Orenda remembered the story she had told of her past, where she was pursued not for who she was but for what she was.
Orenda wondered about her parents. She wanted to know what their relationship had been like. She knew she could finally get those answers from Xaxac.
She was beginning to understand something about stories.
Captain Nochdifache was a monster who traveled with ghouls, human wizards, clockwork geniuses and werewolves. But those were not things to fear. Those were things people said in hushed tones because they did not understand them, and because on the surface, when you laid it all out like that, anyone, any normal person, would sound terrifying.
Orenda was the chosen avatar of a god, who had been born on the night of her parents’ deaths, born in the midst of a great battle. She had been lost at a young age, had joined a rebellion and killed an entire contingent of guards before she had any magical training whatsoever. She had destroyed a building as a child. She was a murderer, a monster, a destroyer- Orenda could spin any story to make anyone sound intimidating.
Gareth was a little boy running for his life through the chaos the Urillians brought to his home. Bella was a little girl running for her life through the snow, trying to find anywhere to hide, to save herself from people who were afraid of a puppy. Falsie was a little boy running for his life from the very soldiers his mother helped, because his father tried to hide rebels. Draco was watching his body decay before him, because the man who loved him would not see him die.
None of these people were monsters. None of them were worth fearing.
Yet the Urillians had spoken of them in hushed whispers as if they weren’t even real. As if they weren’t real people with real lives who had to be those things they whispered about.
Orenda carefully put the box back into the wardrobe and closed it. She glanced at the bedside table on her way out and realized that she must be looking at Gareth’s side, so she turned and walked back to it, and picked up a vial there labeled ‘hemp seed oil’. She reached up and tugged a strand of her hair out to its full length. It was getting too long again. It needed to be burned. She put the bottle back and thought of the other fire elves she had seen in the coast before they had left.
They were weakened but not destroyed.
Gareth had been as happy to see them as she had, he was just determined to dissuade her from her destiny or goals or whatever she chose to call it. Perhaps they should have stayed behind, but they needed to protect the white rabbit who could not be scried because he was made of star-stuff.
Xaxac was a legend, too. Orenda wondered what he was really like. Both of her parents had loved him. He could have been her father, if genetics worked a little differently. Bella certainly seemed to respect him.
The ship lurched again and Orenda fell forward with the force of it. The furniture had been tied down and didn’t move with her, so she went sliding into the wall that would have led to the bedroom. She picked herself up and walked into the hall so she wouldn’t be caught snooping if anyone came down, but the ship was still deserted.
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She walked forward with the intention to go above deck, but when she came into the kitchen Anilla was there with Falsie and Mr Bilge. The three of them were setting up prep, as if they were a crew in a restaurant or household kitchen, and Orenda was happy to have the comfort of the fire they had lit in the stove.
She thought that perhaps Anilla had been right all along, and sea-sickness did eventually… well, it would probably never go away completely, but it was becoming more manageable.
She decided to brave it. She took the stairs up to the deck, and stepped out into the ocean air. The stars were different in the night sky, and she had no idea where they were, but the sickness did not knock her off of her feet. It was manageable, here, on the Burned Roc, or perhaps inside of her. It was there, but she didn’t feel like she was dying.
Bella came down the stairs from the area above the kitchen and paused on the bottom step.
“He’s having an episode,” She said, “We just have to let it pass.”
“Oh,” Orenda said, “What does that mean?”
“You just can’t expect much from him,” Bella said, “Don’t worry about it, Rendy. I’ll keep checking on him. I have to run to my room for a minute.”
Orenda nodded, watched her leave, and made her way up the stairs. Gareth was lying, spread-eagled on the deck without his hat, mask, or coat. His hair spread out behind him, and Orenda noticed that his roots were not locked into dreads. She didn’t know how to fix it, didn’t know enough about her own hair type to even begin to tell him that he needed to fix it. Orenda didn’t know how to wear her sari- but she bet Gareth did.
She wondered if it was worse to never have something, or to have had something and then lose it.
Gareth didn’t seem to see her at all. He slowly reached up with his flesh hand and ran a gloved finger from one tip of his scar, where it hit just below the hairline, to the place where it ended at his chin. He raised both of his hands toward the night sky and stared at them, wriggling his fingers.
“Hasn’t worked right since I pulled your girl from that fire,” he said to the stars, “But she got it, Ronnie. She got it and it wasn’t real. It wasn’t anything. You were wrong. Again. God, don’t you ever get tired of being wrong all the time? Doesn’t it bother you? It put us in so much danger…”
He lowered his hands and spread his arms again.
“I miss you so much… You’re so stupid. I think your woman wanted to die. I don’t know what that demon did to you, but it was too much for you. You were too into the god to deal with a demon. Ronnie, she… she wants to… to fight the Emerald Knight and… how did you do it? How did you get her believing stupid legends about people chosen by non-existent gods? How did you do it from beyond the grave? Do you miss her? Is that it? Do you want here there with you? Are you trying to kill her, too? You… you left me here. You stupid selfish…”
“Uncle Gareth?” Orenda asked.
His eyes moved, though nothing else did.
“Aunty Bella says that you’re having a fit of madness. May I join you?”
He nodded, and Orenda laid on the deck next to him.
“I’m not,” Gareth said, “Or… I was. But I’m coming down. Sometimes I have fits of emotion and I can’t breathe very well. My chest seizes up. It gets worse if I stay on land for too long. I can put them off sometimes, but I… I’ve felt one building since we set foot on land. I have to remember how to breath. I forget.”
“Oh,” Orenda said, staring at the stars.
“My muscles work against me,” he continued, “they contract on me. It’s just been something I’ve done since Ronnie died. I think that’s when I went truly mad. So I lie down to let them work themselves out. If I try to move I… well in the past I’ve injured myself. I didn’t mean to frighten you. I mean, I probably didn’t. Not much seems to frighten you. But I frighten a great many people, so I feel the need to say things like that.”
“I’ve never been frightened of you,” Orenda said, because it was true.
“Ronnie was wrong, Rendy,” Gareth said, still staring at the sky, “Look at it. Just… look up. Astronomers tell us that we are sitting on a ball spinning around a star, and that every star out there could have other balls spinning around them. They say that we’re looking back in time. Did you know it takes light time to travel? It doesn’t look like it, but it does. And the universe as it is is so big that we aren’t seeing those stars as they are, we’re seeing them as they were.”
“It’s beautiful,” Orenda said.
“I only mean… Ronnie, my parents, they were all wrong. If some great creator made the universe for us, for elves- why would it trap us in a terrarium? We can’t get out. We can’t see those other balls, not in the sense that we can see Xren. No one ever hung the sky- we know that now. People didn’t always think as we do now. There was a time when people thought the world was flat, and above it was hung a crystalline firmament, and I could probably throw a rock and hit one of those stars.”
“Did they really believe that?” Orenda asked, “I’ve never heard such a thing.”
“Yes,” Gareth said, “We used to believe that we were the center of the universe, that the sun, the moons, the stars all revolved around Xren… this was before even I was born, but we learned about it. But it wasn’t true. Almost nothing we believe is true. That’s important to me, that you know that.”
“Why?” Orenda asked.
“Because if you start to believe things without proof you can make yourself believe a great many things that aren’t true,” Gareth said, “And that’s dangerous. It is dangerous to be a fool- more dangerous to be a willing fool. If you allow yourself to believe that chosen ones exist to wield broken weapons… you may as well believe the planet is flat and the sun revolves around it. In order to know what will happen, to make predictions, we cannot allow ourselves to believe that which is not true. And the truth is what the facts are. The facts are that someone, we don’t know who, possibly the man who claimed to be Magnus, put that staff in the flame to fool people. He wanted to give us false hope, I think. A pretty, useless thing-”
“It isn’t useless,” Orenda said, “It burned you. And it speaks to me.”
Gareth made a noise of non-committal confirmation that Orenda only interpreted meant that he had heard her say something.
“The djinn spoke to Ali,” Orenda said, “From an object.”
“I wish you wouldn’t call Lapus ‘the djinn’. I’ve known him for years and I only found he was a djinn so recently that it may have been last week for all I know. Time runs together when you get to be my age with my level of,” he moved the index finger of his clockwork hand in circles beside his right temple.
“Do you think there’s a djinn trapped in the staff?” Orenda asked, “Like the chalice Ali found.”
“If there is,” Gareth said, “Leave it exactly where it is. Lapus said not to listen to it, to put it back, and it’s always made me a little uneasy. We probably should put it back where we found it. We can’t actually use it. It isn’t doing us any good. It’s a liability.”