A Respite From Storms Page 14

“No,” Jasen wheezed.

  His breath was catching.

  Damn it. How had this happened? Baraghosa was seen—he had come here, brought a strange veil down upon the Aiger Cliffs. Longwell knew—yet Longwell had just up and left, abandoning Jasen, after promising that he, too, sought vengeance for Baraghosa’s cruelty.

  Jasen needed it, he craved it.

  Yet everywhere he looked—no Baraghosa, no Baraghosa, no Baraghosa.

  “Please, Jasen,” Alixa said. “Please, just drop this, and come to the Emerald Fields with me.”

  “No,” he whispered.

  “Please.”

  “I said no!”

  She flinched as though he’d raised a fist to strike her. He’d not … but he had stopped his ceaseless pirouetting, turned to face her, eyes bulging in his ashen face, accusing and hard and mad all at once.

  “I have to find him,” he breathed. “I have to find Baraghosa. Why don’t you understand that? Why?”

  “Longwell wants to find him,” Alixa said. “Perhaps he has gone alone, to—”

  “He can’t have! I have to do it! Understand? Me!”

  “But why?”

  “Because we lost Terreas,” Jasen said bitterly. “I lost Terreas.”

  “I lost it too.”

  Jasen laughed, the crazed laugh of a man teetering on the edge of an abyss he was moments from tumbling into. “Don’t you see? I lost Terreas. I destroyed it.”

  Alixa’s face contorted, a frown pulling her eyebrows down. “But how did—Jasen, Baraghosa tore open the mountain.”

  “And why? Why did he do that?”

  He’d crossed to her without realizing. She flinched again as he drew near, reached out, clasping her shoulders in those clawed hands. Maybe he was hurting her—surely he was, the way his fingers were angled and spread—but he couldn’t let go. His cousin, his last remaining relative, the last surviving link he had to the home he’d lost, was the last thing keeping him upon his feet as his mind ruptured, the way the mountain over Terreas had, and all the fiery magma of his guilt overspilled.

  “Because of me,” he said.

  “Jasen—”

  “I should’ve gone with him.”

  “No, Jasen—”

  He loosed his hold, somehow staying upright. Backpedalling—almost tripping over the square base of a conduction rod—he boomed in a voice not at all like his own, “I SHOULD HAVE GONE WITH BARAGHOSA! I SHOULD HAVE BEEN LIKE PITYR! NONE OF THIS WOULD HAVE HAPPENED!”

  He fell to his knees.

  He was crying. Didn’t know when he’d started.

  Claws dug through the hard earth. Sunbaked, it allowed only narrow troughs to be drawn through it.

  “Ancestors …” he choked out.

  Alixa was on her knees too. She clutched his face. Looked at him with a wild fear.

  “You’re not thinking straight,” she said.

  But he didn’t take her in. He’d gone blind to all but his plight.

  “Please,” he begged, his mother, his grandparents, their parents—the whole long, storied line of his people, whose bodies were gone and whose souls rode the winds.

  Alixa was speaking still.

  “What do I do?” he whispered to them, to their faces, floating just out of sight as they always did.

  They had to have answers—had to.

  “Where do I go?”

  Kuura was over him too. He clutched Jasen’s shoulder.

  Scourgey was there.

  “Ancestors,” he begged. His throat was raw. Tears turned his words into shuddering breaths.

  He cried like he never had cried before, enormous, racking sobs that felt like they would rip his body in two—

  Just as Baraghosa had torn open the mountain, buried his village, his people, in slag.

  “Please,” he called to them, shaking. “Please, answer me …”

  The ancestors crowded round, out of sight, pressing in … he could feel them, feel their ethereal hands, reaching for him … felt the hands of his mother and father, reaching out to the son who had outlived them sooner than he was meant to …

  He begged and cried, cried and begged …

  Yet none had an answer for him.

  *

  After a long time, Jasen’s fit tapered off. He stopped shaking. The lightheaded feeling that had misted his mind eased away, like a fog gently dispelled by the breeze.

  He sat in morose quiet at the base of the conduction rods, arms folded around his knees.

  Alixa perched beside him. She rubbed a hand up and down his back. On the other side sat Scourgey. She leaned against Jasen’s shoulder. For the last fifteen minutes, she had pressed her nose gently against his forehead without moving it. Her breath, rancid as it was, was almost comforting against his cheek.

  Kuura sat opposite. He’d pulled the legs of his trousers up, so they bunched around his knees, ending only a few inches down the calf.

  “No one could endure things like you have,” he said. “To go through such turmoil … it is a terrible thing. Heartache breaks all of us—and you have seen so much of it, both of you. It is only natural that you would feel as broken as you do.”

  “I don’t feel broken,” said Jasen bitterly. “I feel guilty. I am guilty.”

  “You’re not,” Alixa said.

  He ignored her. No sense arguing. Alixa wouldn’t see things reasonably, he knew now. And all her protests would not cause Jasen to reconsider what he knew was truth.

  “So what now?” Kuura asked.

  Jasen lifted his shoulders in a small shrug. “I don’t know.”

  “We can’t take him on,” Alixa said. “Not us. Probably not Longwell.” She turned to Kuura. “You know that, don’t you? You must see?”

  Kuura sighed, a long exhale. “This Baraghosa …” he began. After a pause, he restarted another way. “I’d never have believed what you said about the volcano, days ago. But after the storm …” He shook his head. “There are magics, and I would never had denied that. But … the sheer force and power of what I have seen … these are not magics I have even heard of. The scale, it’s … it’s unprecedented.”

  “He has to be stopped,” Jasen said.

  “We aren’t the ones to do it,” Alixa said, hard. “A man who can rip open a mountain will not be felled by a fifteen-year-old with a dagger he picked up off the street.”

  Jasen gave her a hard look.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but it’s true. What you want, and what you can reasonably achieve … they’re very different things, Jasen. And you need to listen to that—before it’s too late for you.”

  He pursed his lips and looked away.

  She was wrong. So wrong.

  Kuura repeated, “So—what now?”

  Jasen glanced around the forest of conduction rods, humming quietly as they waited for a storm to unload upon them.

  “Back to the city, I guess,” he conceded after a long time. Sour-faced, he added, “Not like there’s anything up here for us.”

  “Then come,” said Kuura, rising. He stuck out a hand, and helped Jasen to his feet. “You can walk?”

  He moved—but Scourgey slipped in under his legs. She swept him off his feet, so he sat—very awkwardly—upon her dangerously curved back.

  She looked up at him with black, coal-lump eyes. Her tongue lolled in her mouth.

  Kuura shook his head. “Your pet confuses me more by the day.”

  “I told you she’s different,” Alixa said.

  “Aye, you did. Right. Ready?”

  “Ready,” said Alixa.

  “Jasen?”

  He shrugged, then nodded. “Mm.”

  Kuura led them back to the path.

  Jasen held onto Scourgey. She walked unnaturally, each step sending a jarring little jolt up his spine. These, he ignored, though, same as he ignored Alixa’s presence alongside him, and her furtive looks.

  Just before the conduction rods slipped out of sight, he looked back one last time.

  No Baragho
sa.

  Their trek had been for naught … and Jasen was out of ideas, again.

  But it was a long way down, at least … and maybe he could come up with something by the time they were at the bottom.

  Maybe.

  15

  Back in the city, Jasen, still riding Scourgey’s back, moaned.

  “Where could he have gone?”

  He’d been squinting his eyes the entire way down the path, searching the constantly moving throng for any sign of Baraghosa. He searched, too, for those dancing lights that would give him away. Finding neither, he still could not stop himself from taking in face after face as he sought the sorcerer. Woman; man, but his nose was the wrong shape; another man, dark-skinned; that man was too old … Each appraising glimpse was a second long only—but though Jasen had seen Baraghosa for perhaps the sum of only two hours across his entire lifetime, one second was all it would take to identify him—and to pursue.

  “Perhaps he traveled farther inland,” said Kuura. “Stanislaus said he spoke of the heights. He may’ve been talking of them as the road we climbed is the only way out of the city.”

  “He can’t have,” Jasen dismissed immediately.

  “But you don’t know that,” said Alixa. “He arrived days ago.”

  “It is plenty of time to have moved elsewhere,” Kuura agreed.

  “No!” Jasen breathed heavily. He shook his head slightly, but without stopping. “He had to have gone to the conduction rods. They harness lightning—Aiger Cliffs is the city of lightning—and the storm—it all fits!”

  “How?” asked Alixa.

  “I—I don’t know.” He slumped. Exasperation built quickly, but after the explosion of emotion on the clifftops, it dispersed quickly again too, instead of mounting up. Possibly the exhaustion had helped there. Though Scourgey had allowed him to ride all the way down, he was only physically rested. The mental dams which usually kept everything pent up, for good or bad, had not yet recovered, and his mind felt blank and unfocused.

  “He also split open a mountain,” said Alixa. “Is that related to the conduction rods too?”

  “He’s a sorcerer,” Jasen grunted back. “How should I know what he does?”

  Scourgey looked up at him. She whined, twisting her neck farther than any normal animal’s should go so she could nuzzle her cheek against Jasen’s knee. He ruffled the spray of wiry hairs that stuck out at the base of her skull and looked away, conflicted at a show of emotional support from the scourge.

  “I think,” said Alixa, “we should just face the facts. Baraghosa came through here, muttering about the heights. But he was talking about them in reference to the roadways to the next town or city—nothing to do with the rods.”

  “That may be so,” said Kuura, nodding.

  “And what about what Stanislaus said?” Jasen challenged. “He said that a charge had come into the air since Baraghosa was here, that people saw the lights that trail him. He must still be here, or how would that still be going on?”

  “He didn’t say people were still seeing his lights,” said Alixa.

  “Yes, he did.”

  “No, he didn’t. He said his friend Flynt watched where he went by the lights—but after that …”

  Jasen racked his brains, combing over the encounter with Stanislaus again. Certainly that was what Stan had said, wasn’t it?

  But now that Alixa claimed otherwise, Jasen was not so sure. Had he only heard what he wanted to hear? Made assumptions based on his wants?

  Damn it, why couldn’t he remember the full conversation?

  “Alixa may be right,” said Kuura.

  “She can’t be,” Jasen said. “Remember—remember what Stan said about the air feeling charged? That’s Baraghosa’s doing.”

  “Baraghosa split the mountain apart without being there,” said Alixa. “He could do this too.”

  Nostrils flaring, Jasen rounded on her—or at least twisted, on Scourgey’s back. She wheeled around a second later so he could face her head on.

  “How would you know he wasn’t there?” he demanded.

  “I—well, I wouldn’t.”

  “He could be anywhere if he wanted. Remember the way he disappeared that night when he came for me? In minutes he just vanished completely—like he’d … been carried away on the wind, or something, like the ancestors.”

  Now it was Alixa’s turn for her expression to flare. “Do not liken him to them. He is an abominable, slimy—”

  “I know,” Jasen sighed. “Which is exactly why I want to find him. I just … I wish I could figure out where.”

  “It’s not here,” said Alixa. Before Jasen could open his mouth fully to protest, she said, “It’s not. Whether he needed to be outside of Terreas or not when he … when he … destroyed it—” She paused, for a few seconds, to recompose herself after this quavering tremor.

  When she resumed, she spoke more strongly, her voice more clear. “Whether that were the case or not, he cannot be in the Aiger Cliffs now. Think: the lights that follow him, they would betray him easily. We’ve been up to the clifftops and back, and seen no sign of them. He cannot be here any longer.”

  True, yes, and Jasen was horribly aware of it.

  But he changed tack:

  “His boat,” he said. “Stanislaus said it’s still in the dock—that they were glad of the lights, because it meant they’d know when he was on his way back. We could … go down to see it, maybe.” To Kuura: “Couldn’t we?”

  Kuura looked uneasy. “What are you asking? To see it only? Or more?”

  More, Jasen thought, though would not admit it.

  Admitting it aloud was unnecessary. His face gave him away.

  “Jasen, no,” said Alixa fiercely. “You can’t. If he comes back, and we’re on his boat …”

  “Then I’ll kill him.”

  “Or he’ll sink it and drown us without needing to lift a finger. Do you want that?” When he didn’t answer, she repeated, even more harshly, “Do you want that?”

  “No,” he said, sullen and quiet.

  “What?”

  “I said no, okay? No, I do not want to be drowned.” Folding his arms, he lamented, “I just … I need to know what he’s doing, what it is he wants. Maybe that could help me find him.”

  “He wants children,” Alixa reminded him. “That’s all he’s ever wanted.”

  “From us. But what of Longwell? Baraghosa sent a storm to wreck his ship. That’s got nothing to do with children. So why?”

  No answers, from Alixa or Kuura.

  The only two people who could reasonably offer some conclusion to that mystery were Baraghosa—and Longwell. Baraghosa was missing, and when they clashed, Jasen did not believe he would give the sorcerer time to say his piece; the rage in his chest, now just a low simmer once again, would surely spill over, and he would be upon him, knife to his throat before Baraghosa could say even a word—

  And Longwell had hightailed it off the Lady Vizola the moment they pulled into port.

  Jasen cursed him.

  “Jasen!” Alixa said.

  Kuura tamped down a grin.

  He wiped it from his face completely when Alixa jerked her head round to him, as if to say, You’re the adult here; reprimand him, won’t you?

  Doing his level best to keep a straight face, and no mirth in his voice, Kuura said, “Why do you curse Samwen Longwell? I thought he was a friend to you. You have talked these few days together on the Lady Vizola, yes?”

  “I thought he was a friend,” Jasen lamented. “Or at least someone who was going to help us.”

  “Help you,” Alixa muttered.

  “He said he’d help you too.”

  “Second.” She turned her nose up. “I am an afterthought to two boys dead set on petty revenge.”

  Rage bloomed, boiling ferociously in a moment. “It is not petty revenge! He’s a murderer!”

  The cry drew the attention of the people nearby, and more than a few faces turned to Jasen. In another li
fe, a flush of embarrassment would have colored his cheeks red, redder than the sudden anger had made them. These, though, were people he would never see again, and he could not bring himself to care what they thought of him.

  “Fine,” Alixa said, “it’s not petty. But you are two boys—”

  “Longwell is a man, and I am fif—”

  “—and Baraghosa is a sorcerer who can move the heavens and the earth. Between you, you have a dagger and a lance and one suit of armor.”

  Apparently the mental dams were still capable of holding onto his boiling emotions for longer than a few seconds. New anger was filling him, roiling as if someone had hollowed him out and turned that rage to boiling liquid and poured it into him.

  It bubbled ominously. And all he wanted was to let it blow again.

  He fought it back.

  With a calmness he did not feel—a calmness he did not believe Alixa deserved from him—he said, “I have heard it all before. I don’t want to hear it again.”

  “You should. You might listen to it one of these days.”

  Jasen ignored her. Turning to Kuura, he asked, “Do you know why Longwell left the ship?”

  Kuura shrugged. “I was told only that he had things to attend to.”

  “Dangerous things,” Alixa amended. “That’s what Shipmaster Burund said.”

  “What sorts of things?” Jasen pressed. He leaned forward—and, following his movements as though she were a second (and third) pair of legs, Scourgey scooted ahead too, to bring Jasen and Kuura closer together. “Where did he go? What is he doing there? Does he know where Baraghosa has gone to?”

  Kuura did not answer.

  “He’s gone to battle him, hasn’t he?” said Jasen, knowing that it was true. “He’s found him. He’s gone to fight.” The knowledge made his chest ache suddenly. He sagged back, mouth falling.

  His eyes were hot. Wetness threatened.

  Kuura placed a hand on Jasen’s shoulder. “If he had, and I knew of it, do you think I would have led you on this wild goose chase along the docks and up and down the cliffside?” Shaking his head, he said, “I do not know where Samwen Longwell has gone. But if it is to battle … you are children.”

  Jasen pulled backward. Again, with that word …