Chapter Text
The world was swaying. Rocking gently, back and forth.
This motion did not comfort Essek. His perception was a haze of pain, and each shift of the wooden floor beneath him made his stomach greener and rolled his weight onto different bruises. His only cushion was a scattering of straw, like he was an animal. It smelled of dry, dead things, like kelp left to crisp on a hot beach.
Perhaps that’s what they would do with him — find a sandspit of nothingness where the sun’s hammer struck over and over and leave him there in the metaphorical Luxon’s eye to meet a slow, agonizing end. He thought of the nautilus dream and the white death of the blinding shore and wondered, not for the first time, if it had been a premonition.
But no. A slow death would leave too much room for error.
Quana had explained as much.
“We will not give you to the Empire.”
Quana was as calm and composed as if they were having a civil discussion at court, rather than in the Dungeon of Penance with Essek mage-bound and beaten at her feet.
Essek hated her for it.
She continued, those sharp eyes fixed upon him, pinning him. A predator with her kill. “You have been privy to far too much sensitive information at the highest levels of security. We would not deliver your wealth of knowledge directly into the hands of our enemies, especially not your collaborators. Nor will we exchange Taskhand Adeen as planned; he will face justice for his true crimes in the courts of Rosohna.”
Essek could not reply around the gag in his mouth. He could not say that despite the terror of the alternatives, he was relieved not to be given over to the Assembly’s care. They wouldn’t merely take his knowledge of the Dynasty or dunamancy — one slip on Essek’s part, and they’d have Caleb, too. (He thought also of being a test subject to Ikithon’s stolen siren magic, that oozing slime of a voice penetrating his mind, and shuddered.) But his would-be reply didn’t matter. Nothing he had to say mattered anymore. He was lucky they hadn’t simply cut out his tongue to prevent him speaking incantations, instead of using a gag. A courtesy to his mother’s umavi status, perhaps. If she still had it.
At the thought of his mother, he felt a twinge of something that might have been sympathy. He hadn’t cared when the umavi of Den Tasithar had been deluminated, but he found he didn’t have quite the same indifference now. His mother had always been more of a distant political figure than a parent, but his successes had added to hers, and he had felt some small connection in that way even though they did not get along. His failures would be added to hers, too. A shame. A small one in the greater context of his situation, but still there.
Perhaps she would take the opportunity to reexamine her belief in the idea of divine perfection.
“We will not have a prisoner exchange at all,” Quana continued, and all thoughts of his mother’s religious title vanished. A chill ran through Essek’s blood at the way she said it, moreso when Quana paused to breathe a small sigh as though she was not entirely satisfied with what she planned to say next. “But… we must fulfill its original intent. Instead, we will conduct a joint execution: you, and this Annex Vence. We must shake hands with the Empire while also sending a message to the true architects of this conflict among them. Your death in the place of your stooge will show them their tracks are not covered, and that they are not safe. It is the Bright Queen’s wish that we proceed in this way.”
But not yours? Essek wanted to ask. He raised his eyebrows, heart racing.
Quana held his gaze for a long moment. “It would be my preference to see it done within our own nation, under the eyes of those you have wronged. They are owed that much.” She shook her head, and Essek’s heart sank lower still. “The Bright Queen will not hear other options. And at a moment as critical as this, we must consider the situation as a whole. You will die where the Assembly can see it. Our informant confirmed that at least one of your collaborators will be attending the peace talks on the side of the Empire.”
Informant.
Essek still didn’t know who the informant was, or exactly how they’d pinpointed him as the real culprit. All he knew was that they had convinced Dynasty officials to attempt a Greater Restoration on Adeen Tasithar, which had removed the memory modification and revealed Essek’s tampering. He wondered if it was the figure he’d seen with Quana in the Bastion Gardens.
But ultimately, like his opinions, these details didn’t matter.
He was still going to die.
What’s more, he was going to die at sea. Oh, the irony. The relief?
No: the terror.
Following the original plan for the prisoner exchange, the Dynasty’s ships were bound for the neutral waters in the Biting North. There would be no familiar caress of warm, playful breezes to bid him farewell, no cheerfully-painted buildings, no docks from which one could dream of walking into the starry sky. There would be no Caleb to save him. There would only be the blades of ice-wind to cut his breath from his lungs before it was taken from him forever.
The world was swaying.
Without his injuries, the ship’s movements might have reminded him of the push-pull of the water in Caleb’s cavern, but instead it was a nauseating roil, again and again… and again… and again. The salt air was thick and sour by the time it reached him here in the bowels of the ship, and hatefully tepid thanks to magework protecting the comfort of the passengers above.
There was no reprieve, no change. Just awful sameness. His body ached.
His hands hurt the most.
The guards assigned to watch him had taken turns to stomp on them with their heavy boots, snapping bone, taking what satisfaction they could from his suffering. He had screamed when they did it. His throat was still raw.
He was lucky to have hands at all, truth be told — the Dynasty’s usual process with mages sentenced to execution was to remove their hands entirely, preventing any possibility of somatics. Essek had seen it done. Ordered it done, even, in his time influencing operations in the Dungeon of Penance. Why he hadn’t been subjected to the same treatment himself, he didn’t know. Perhaps, like his still-intact tongue, it was a final gift from Den Thelyss: an element of dignity in his death. It was the kind of gift that would benefit them, too, but he was grateful nonetheless.
Still, it was a painful labor to eat the food he was given. A painful labor to tip water to his lips. A painful labor simply to exist.
His thoughts swam.
He was technically under water, right now, though he wasn’t touching it.
Could Caleb hear him?
Likely not.
(He tried anyway. He pressed his bruised cheek to the walls, to the floor, speaking with his mental voice as loud as he could. He tried to broadcast pleas for help, for comfort, for forgiveness. There was no reply. No humming connection. He was alone.)
Caleb.
Essek’s body hurt from his punishments by others, but his heart hurt from what he had destroyed by himself.
He had broken nearly every bond of trust with Caleb. Least of these was his promise to return, though Essek felt a pang for that anyway, thinking of Caleb lingering in the cavern, in the thumbprint on the shore with its seagrass softness, waiting, waiting, until he must have finally realized Essek would not be returning. What must he have thought then?
During the Dynasty’s interrogations, Essek had kept his mouth shut about the cavern, its residuum, and Caleb — it had been easy enough once he started dropping the eye-catching names of the Assembly, using revelations of fire to obscure smoke from a different source — but Quana now possessed the cavern stone itself, which had been in his wristpocket, along with the rest of his belongings. She had the key to the sanctuary. The safety of that place would rely on the Dynasty thinking no further of the small stone with its crystal band, an unimportant detail among larger currents of information.
Yes, let them think it was a wizard’s trifle. Let them never think anything of the stone, or the phial with Caleb’s scale, or the collection of beautifully imperfect sea pearls on his laboratory table that he had never quite brought himself to use, save one.
Please.
I’m sorry, Caleb. I betrayed you after all. I tried not to. I didn’t want to.
Essek examined one of the magic-suppressing runes carved deep into the walls of the ship’s brig, which allowed him to exist here without a gag. He had memorized them all now, for lack of anything else to do. It was impossible to tell whether it was day or night. His sense of time grew fuzzy, measured only by guards coming to bring him water and thin rice porridge, or to empty the foul bucket he used to relieve himself. He hatched plans of escape, each more wild than the last.
It was all futile, of course.
His hands were broken.
He could do nothing.
Was nothing.
For what was he, when his magic was stripped away? Merely another bit of detritus on the beach after a storm. The hopelessness was hard to fight. It was easy to believe the only thing to do was wait — wait to die.
The darkness in the belly of the ship was oppressive. That he could see through it perfectly well didn’t help — there was nothing to see except the bars of the brig and the hallway the guards sometimes passed through; the walls were close, the ceiling short. The air remained sickly warm and foul, the stench of ballast water below rising through the floorboards.
Many cups of water.
Many bowls of rice.
His hands throbbed, an awful metronome.
Delirium crawled across his brain like ants. No — like crabs feeding on a beached sea lion carcass. Was Caleb upset that Essek hadn’t returned as promised? Was he angry? Would he know, somehow, what had happened, that despite Essek’s resolve, Essek had ultimately still betrayed him with the loss of the cavern stone?
I trust you, Caleb had said, giving it to him then.
You shouldn’t have, Essek thought now, far from the first time.
If only Essek could reach the water for real… would Caleb hear him from so far away in the south? If he could, would he even be able to help?
Would he even want to?
Would he—
Would he—
Would—
.
.
.
His hands were broken.
The world dipped and swayed.
When he was not overwhelmed by nausea and pain, Essek true-slept like a child, and dreamed of the embrace of water and pale eyes like the mirrored sea.
At least once, he woke up from those dreams expecting to be in the cavern, in Caleb’s arms, the tide holding them both in its gentle motion.
He was not there. He would never be there again.
His hands were broken.
The world dipped and swayed.
He was powerless to change a thing.
.
.
.
“It is time.”
With effort, Essek focused on the imposing figure of the Dusk Captain, flanked by two soldiers. She had come to get him personally — how considerate.
The meaning of her words took a few seconds to fully register.
When the soldiers entered the cell to gag him again, the haze of Essek’s existence solidified back into reality, like a precipitate formed by mixing chemical reagents in his laboratory. Adrenaline pinched in his chest and his mind sparked anew with motivation and purpose. It was meaningless how much time had passed, because he was here now. It was his last opportunity to do something, anything.
In that moment of clarity came a decision: he would not be guided like a docile animal to his death.
Perhaps he couldn’t escape entirely — not without the use of his hands, not surrounded by a troop equipped to transport a powerful mage — but he could redefine the terms of what happened next.
He would seize whatever control he could.
He must.
Even if it was only leaping into the frigid sea to attempt one last fruitless message to Caleb.
As the idea bubbled up from his exhausted mind, it grew in strength. Yes. He would try to escape into the sea. He would attempt to shout across a continent, to warn Caleb of the dangers that might be coming, to apologize. To say goodbye. Then if he was fished back out to die for his crimes, or if he drowned there, he would still have accomplished something first. An important thing. (A good thing, even, perhaps. Caleb deserved a good thing.)
At the very least, maybe the sea itself would hear him. It held so much, both vast and infinitesimally small. There was room in it for Essek’s final words.
It took some moments before his legs remembered how to stand, and to walk, but with stoic urging from the soldiers, he ascended the narrow, creaky stairs of the ship’s layers like he was emerging from deep underground. His steps were unsteady, but his eyes were looking up, hungry for the sky, eager to escape the miasma below. Was this how the older generations of his people felt, crawling up from the earth to escape from Lolth, seeking starlight above the ruins of Ghor Dranas? What irony that he should feel kinship with that, after what he had done.
Oh, his harried thoughts were running together like syrup, now. He was so tired. He staggered against the wall. A firm hand steadied him — Quana. She was not rough, however, nor cruel, which struck him as funny. She was gentling the creature she was about to kill.
Air — fresh, bright, clean air — teased his nose, then engulfed him as he stepped into the night at the main deck. And oh—!
He was nearly overcome, for it was not the frigid breath of the Biting North, but warm and humid, a familiar bouquet of salt and brine and the memory of a day’s hot sun just beginning to be tempered by the touch of night. Familiar. His knees buckled and Quana had to catch him again. He hadn’t realized how much that smell had come to feel like home.
The Dynasty had changed plans since his involvement, or more likely, because of his involvement, seeking to expunge anything he might have tampered with.
They were somewhere along or near the Menagerie Coast.
Possibly — maybe — near Nicodranas. No. Yes. No. Nicodranas wouldn’t want to shoulder responsibility of the hosting of peace talks from their warring neighbors, nor Port Damali. But—
Caleb.
Caleb.
They might be close enough that Essek would get to warn him after all. Might get to say goodbye, and hear an answer.
…If he could reach the water.
His resolve strengthened like the building of a wave: he would reach the water.
And the water—! Essek barely paid attention to the fleet of ships around them, or the hustle and bustle of soldiers and diplomats, or Quana the steady sentry by his side, or what ahead of them must be the Empire’s own fleet ahead, their decks illuminated with warm lanterns like small suns in the night.
These were unimportant.
The sea was mirrored glass, dark with stars, the sky a celestial vault whose pillars grew down until they blended with their reflection below. There were no visible moons — it was the wrong time of night, perhaps, or wrong time of day, if this was a farce of dunamancy for the advantage of the Dynasty's people — but oh. At night, the sky and the sea were the same. Essek imagined himself dissolving into that intertwining of darkness and light, the chains at his wrists and ankles falling away, the gag pulled from his mouth, the aches of his body easing, easing, vanishing. Infinite possibility.
Even if he died now, at least he’d gotten to see that wonder one last time.
No! He had to focus.
He needed to warn Caleb, to say goodbye before he was caught and hauled back up again to die on someone else’s terms. But Quana’s fingers were like talons around his upper arm, unyielding, and he was weak. His broken hands were bound in cloth, his mouth was gagged. Fatigue warred with adrenaline, threatening to pull him under at any moment and make him stupid and compliant.
People around him were talking and moving things. Essek held onto his wits as best he could, feeling like he was sleep-walking through soupy minutes and seconds.
He noticed things one at a time, methodically, like waves against the shore:
Starlight.
The sway of the deck.
Salt in the air, stinging his chapped lips, full of memories.
There was now a platform between the ships that the two nations had built together, and unfamiliar faces peering across it. Humans, and elves, and others — faces of the Empire. He didn’t see Ludinus or Ikithon among them. Beyond, though, there was a ship bearing the distinctive flag of the Cerberus Assembly. At least one of his would-be research partners must be here, as Quana had hoped. He wasn’t sure if that made him feel better or worse. Who would it be? Who would come to watch him die?
(Let it be Ludinus, and not Ikithon — the less odious of two evils.)
He noticed another thing: a heavy wooden block was being carried past him, a blotch of bright crimson in his vision. It was freshly cut vermaloc, a dense, marbled heartswood, weeping sap in the humidity.
Bloody by nature now, and bloodier soon.
“I will strike a clean blow.” Quana leaned close, murmuring in his ear. An attendant was carrying a heavy, gleaming sword, the Sun Shard, meant for the very purpose they had here today. “They were promised a death, not a spectacle.”
It was a kindness, maybe, but also a warning. Do not make any stupid moves. Do not jeopardize what we are trying to achieve. Quana might disagree with the details of Essek’s sentence, but her conviction remained strong about what was the right outcome for her country: an end to the war. Essek dying here instead of at home was simply the price of this outcome. The other Kryn on this ship — those who had guarded him — looked at him with hatred, disgust, betrayal. There were plenty who would offer him a slower, messier end, if he tried to make things complicated.
But he was Essek.
He had a talent for complicated.
Diplomats were talking now. Formalities. The agreement to execute their shared traitors. He heard his name, but paid little attention.
His mind was on other things — like vermaloc. Old-growth vermaloc was heavy and dense, uniquely so among timbers, and prized among craftsmen for this reason. Sometimes it grew so dense that it could sink rather than float if placed in water. He remembered this from the scholarly classes of his youth in which they studied properties of earthly things. So when Essek was chained by his wrists to the execution block made of Rosohna’s prized tree, he thought: good. They wouldn’t be able to take it from him.
There were also no sides to the makeshift platform between the ships. That was good, too.
Problem: there were too many people, and they were all watching.
And time was running out.
He needed to make a break for the edge of the platform, put all his strength into dragging the block and bowling over anyone in his way. But no natural window of opportunity was presenting itself. His people had planned well.
Time was running out.
Time…
Time.
Essek steeled himself to make a move, to throw off the haze of exhaustion and pain, to muster the strength he needed to pull off his wild plan. Quana’s hand was still on his shoulder — a last effort at comfort for the traitor to her country? Or pressure to remind him to keep still for his death? Not ideal that she was so close, but he had no choices left to him.
He took a breath.
BOOM!
An explosion of light emblazoned itself on his retinas, painfully close by, on one of the Empire ships. No, not just one of the ships — the Cerberus Assembly ship. Fire. Screams. The burning fury of the sun, born violently into the night.
Chaos erupted around him.
Disorientation and light-blindness made the world quaver. He had been about to do something, he knew, but he felt separate from himself. A ghost inhabiting his own shape. Flames continued to blossom in the darkness, flickering and waving like underwater plants. Hypnotic. Distantly he registered that Quana’s hand had left his shoulder as she drew her sword and readied to protect the diplomats behind them.
“It’s coming from the water!”
The frightened shout came from an Imperial soldier, a human whose pale face was white with fear.
From the water. This piece of information jarred Essek from his stupor, and when he took his next breath he felt himself snap back into the present. He registered his surroundings all over again as though for the first time: the fire on the Cerberus Assembly ship. The surprise and alarm on both sides of this conflict. His side had not planned this, to his knowledge. The Empire would not attack their own vessel.
The threat is in the water.
Hope, precious and small, was a fluttering thing that would be damaged if he so much as looked at it. But whether it meant anything or not, his next action must be the same.
He took a breath.
And he moved.
He staggered to his feet and heaved the execution block with him by the chains on his wrists, stumbling and gasping through his gag, towards the gap in the line of the Aurora Watch made by the sudden conflict. A gap through which the night opened like a door, and beyond were the stars. He felt a hand grab for the back of his tunic — Quana? — but it was too late.
His next step was into the air, and he fell, dragging the block with him.
The inside-out feeling of free-fall gripped him, and then — splash!
Essek’s body struck the mirror of the sky, passed through it, and was consumed by the sea. Water rushed through his clothes to meet his skin, familiar as a lover, and as eager.
CALEB!
He yelled in his thoughts, his mental voice made loud and blunt by his fear.
CALEB. IF YOU CAN HEAR ME — THEY HAVE YOUR STONE. I AM SORRY.
There.
He’d said it, the warning he’d desperately wanted to give. The apology.
The goodbye.
He felt the words resonate into the water, pinging that ephemeral awareness he’d developed over the course of many shared conversations with Caleb. Like plucking a string. It was what had been missing when he tried to do this from the brig, and he knew he had made a sound.
But there was no reply.
The flicker of hope he’d felt before was moonlight on a fish scale, easily lost from sight as the darkness and the weight of the water pressed in on him, and the light from the chaos above rippling like dancer’s footsteps on the surface overhead grew further away, and he sank slowly down, down, down, the execution block and its heavy chains drawing him into the deep.
The thrill of his small achievement ended, and the silence rushed in, and despair was the heaviest weight of all.
A few small fish darted past and disappeared, startling him.
He was alone in the vastness. He had no water-breathing spell. He was better at holding his breath after much practice in the cavern pool, but there, he had always been safe. There had always been an out.
Well, maybe he did have an out here — if there really was something dangerous in the water, maybe it would give him a quick end.
Or maybe not.
Maybe he had always been meant to fall. And to drown.
Maybe his fate had been sealed the moment he first touched the sea in Nicodranas so long ago.
Time stretched, fast and slow, and his lungs began to burn with the stale air they held. He looked up and saw someone dive into the water — Aurora Watch, he thought, or Quana coming to retrieve him — but the figure abandoned the pursuit upon seeing how far down he was.
He closed his eyes. Sank further.
When he opened them again, there was a pale face in the water before him. A halo of rust-colored hair, and amber-gold scales that picked up the last slivers of light from above.
Caleb. His eyes were wild, and a wound on his shoulder bled freely.
‘HELP ME,’ Essek begged, uncaring if the being before him was a hallucination. Panic was setting in. The rational part of his mind was being pushed aside, becoming smaller. He tried fruitlessly to pull his hands from their chains, the need for air overcoming his determination to escape his captors above. A burst of tiny bubbles escaped him around the cloth that stoppered his mouth, but it only gave him a split-second relief. ‘I AM CALLING IN MY FAVORS. PLEASE.’
And at last, Caleb came to him. ‘Breathe out,’ he instructed, slicing through the gag with his claws and tossing it aside.
Essek did so, desperately, a final gust of bubbles fleeing to the surface. Familiar lips quickly sealed over his and he breathed in an exquisite sip of air. He hungrily took as much as Caleb would give him.
Caleb pulled away too soon for Essek’s comfort. ‘How are you here?’ he asked. He looked over the chains and the heavy round of vermaloc wood, which were no longer pulling Essek downward due to Caleb’s intervention. ‘Why are you here? What do you mean that they have my stone?’
The wild, carnivorous look was returning to Caleb’s eyes, and Essek hurried to answer while his borrowed breath gave him sanity to do so.
‘I WAS CAUGHT,’ he began. ‘WHAT I STOLE FROM MY PEOPLE — THEY FOUND OUT IT WAS ME. I AM SENTENCED TO DIE.’
Essek had always admired Caleb’s intelligence, but it was terrifying to watch him now as he took in the words, looked up at the chaos above — where the Assembly’s ship was in flames — and back at Essek, clearly putting the pieces together. Evidently he didn’t like the completed picture he saw, because his tail lashed, and his fins flared out, the barbs above the end of his tail prominently displayed. Essek hadn’t experienced this threat display directed towards himself since the day he’d dragged Caleb to the tidepools after the storm.
His insides curdled further as Caleb bared his teeth.
‘Those you made your deal with — the ones who received the powerful arcane object you sent away. Was it the Red Mage? Ikithon? Tell the truth and I will give you more air. And I will know if you lie.’
‘YES,’ Essek sobbed, truth and fear and heartache spilling from him like his tears into the sea. ‘BUT NOT JUST HIM! IT WAS THE ASSEMBLY ITSELF. LUDINUS AND OTHERS. AND I DIDN’T KNOW, CALEB. I DIDN’T KNOW YOU WERE CONNECTED UNTIL YOU TOLD ME. I SWEAR IT!’
Claws pricked through his tattered sleeves. ‘Have you betrayed me to him?’
‘NO!’
No, not to Ikithon. Essek had achieved that much at least. He remembered months of agonizing over his options, knowing the wisest choice was to sell Caleb’s safety in exchange for his own. But he hadn’t been able to do it, not even when things were most dire, defying his own survival instinct. A stupid decision, objectively. It was why he was here now instead of Adeen Tasithar. But even now, he couldn’t fathom doing differently.
His time at the sea had changed him.
Caleb had changed him.
The air in his lungs was going stale again, but he focused on Caleb’s face before him. It was so good to see him, even angry like this, as vibrant as he had always been, exuding that charged energy, potentiality, that had drawn Essek in from the beginning. And what a marvelous gift Caleb had given him — an antidote to loneliness, a safe place to be. Wonderful while it lasted. He touched Caleb’s cheek with his bound fingertips, ignoring the pain it caused him.
‘NO,’ he repeated. ‘Never.’
Caleb’s face was doing something interesting, his aggression washing away in the wake of something stricken, but Essek was distracted by the feeling of his own animal panic rising again. Soon he would thrash, and beg, and his mind would be empty except for desperation. Oddly, the recognition of this fact made him feel calmer for a few seconds. He could pretend he was about to cast his Water-Breathing spell. There was always a little terror before breathing in water. Things would be alright, after.
He looked Caleb in the eye. ‘My people took all my possessions, including the lucky stone from your cavern. Ikithon knows nothing of it, unless he has eyes inside the Dynasty at very high levels. I don’t even know if he is here.’ He let go of his breath once it began to pain him, and this too gave him a few more precious seconds of calm as the pressure in his lungs decreased. ‘If he is, you will need to act quickly if you want to catch him before he flees. You should try. Reclaim your voice. Let something good come of all this.’
Then he squeezed his eyes closed, not wanting to watch Caleb leave him, shame running through him like a sickness for all his failures and missteps. He might not have betrayed Caleb on purpose, but he had, all the same.
Urgency filled his body as his time ran out.
But right as he began to thrash, he felt lips on his one more time, and another breath of air that he greedily sucked down.
Caleb was still there.
Relief and bewilderment rippled through him, and he opened his eyes.
‘Something good already has,’ Caleb replied, cradling Essek there in the sway of the sea. His conflicted expression had become resolute. Fierce. He began tearing at the chains, seeking a weak point, but they were strong and firmly fixed to the wooden block. Magic was at his fingertips next, and the manacles unlocked and fell away, sinking into the deep with the heavy vermaloc. He quickly began unwrapping the cloth bindings securing Essek’s hands. ‘Cast your spell of water-breathing.’
‘I can’t.’ Essek felt afresh the agony that tortured him from the wrists down with every tug of cloth. ‘Caleb, they broke my hands.’ He wanted to sob, but there was no more air to breathe in, and his chest hitched painfully. Grief swelled in his lungs for all he had lost, painful and inescapable and overwhelming. Every time he thought about it was like experiencing the loss all over again. ‘They broke my hands.’
Caleb’s eyes widened as he undid the last of the cloth bindings and took in the damage, the way Essek could barely twitch a finger.
‘Then I will do it,’ came the determined reply. ‘I have been trying to replicate it. It is not perfect yet, but—’
He let go of Essek — oh, the terror of being unmoored — and ran through somatics. They were very good, and included gestures Essek didn’t recognize, but the spell was incomplete.
Essek shook his head. ‘There is a material component. It is not possible. We need something hollow, a reed, or—’
Caleb jerked away from him, swimming fast, disappearing into the vast full emptiness of the water.
Essek had enough time to panic about being alone, to let out his last precious air, when Caleb was back with a fragment of kelp stem in his claws. He cast the spell again, and this time a thin wisp of blue-green magic drifted from his hands and into Essek’s nose.
Questioning whether Caleb’s first casting of this spell would work was moot. Essek’s body had taken over his rational mind, and he gasped a mouthful of seawater: he would breathe, or drown. The second in which it wasn’t clear which it would be was pure terror.
And then, oxygen flooded his brain. Oh, sweetness sublime.
‘It will not last as well as yours,’ Caleb said, as though that was important at all right then. ‘Only an hour or two, I think.’
‘It is perfect,’ Essek said, greedily sucking down breath after breath. Air had never been so perfect before, so sweet, so wondrous. He struggled to bring his wits about himself. ‘We— we need to move. My people… they will be after me. And the Empire after you. The fire on the ship was your doing, yes?’
‘Yes.’ Caleb looked upward, baring his teeth again. ‘I have been following the ship since it left the docks, and I grew tired of waiting to see whether the Red Mage would appear. I thought to flush him out, if he is hiding.’
An act that very well may have reignited the cooling war, or worse, united the two sides against their new attacker.
Essek’s mind whirled, and he tried to snatch coherent thoughts before they could dart away like fish hiding in the corals. They needed to run — but where to? The cavern was no longer safe. Quana might look at the lucky stone with fresh eyes after Essek’s escape into the sea. Moreover, the thought of being confined there forever made his insides curdle. Without the use of his hands, he wouldn’t have the means to stay disguised on the Menagerie Coast. He would be traveling on foot in foreign lands with few resources and no connections, except Caleb.
There was a new flash of light from high above, and more shadows in the water this time.
Someone was coming. Which side was not important — everyone at the peace talks was an enemy.
‘There is nowhere for me to go,’ he realized aloud, drawing Caleb from his scowl. ‘As soon as I go back to the surface, no matter where it is… they will be hunting me. And with myself being unable to use most of my arcane abilities, they will find me.’
‘Then stay,’ Caleb replied at once, a look of piercing intensity coming over him as he refocused on Essek. His fins twitched, fanning and settling. Restless. ‘Stay with me. I can help you.’
Essek watched him warily. ‘How do you mean, stay?’
The question energized Caleb further, and he materialized a bulging packet from his wristpocket. It looked like the casing of a shark’s embryol purse, emptied and repurposed. Glittering fragments drifted out of it where Caleb had bound it closed with sea grass: residuum. A lot of it.
‘I can change you, as I have Frumpkin. As I have changed myself to walk on land. I can make you like me.’
Essek’s newly granted breath caught in his throat. Was this what Caleb had been working towards, every time Essek had found him grinding crystals in the cavern? Planning for a moment like this? Or had he been thinking of seeking out Ikithon on foot?
Questions he had no time for.
The choice was before him now, regardless.
If he stayed as he was, he would need to return to the shore very soon. Hands useless, weak, waiting for the Dynasty or the Empire to snatch him up. Alone.
‘Will it fix my hands?’ he asked, tenuously. ‘To change.’
Caleb stowed the residuum back into his wristpocket and turned his attention to one of Essek’s hands, turning it this way and that, light as the touch of seafoam. Sorrow clouded his face. ‘It is not in my power to heal, beyond what you have already seen. The lichen will help. And perhaps in time, we will find other ways. We will try to find other ways.’
Grief swelled in Essek’s lungs afresh. ‘What if I can’t ever cast again?’
Perhaps it was foolish to wish for more than survival, but to Essek, magic was as integral to life as his breath or heartbeat. Without it, he couldn’t imagine an existence worth living.
Caleb leaned their foreheads together. ‘Then I will teach you to sing.’
Oh—
Oh.
The voices of Caleb’s kind. If Essek became one of them, he would gain that magic too — the very magic Caleb himself had lost. Caleb, voiceless, who had learned new ways to accomplish what he wanted. Perhaps Essek could do the same.
‘Then yes,’ Essek said at last, feeling as though he had stepped off a precipice without graviturgy to slow him. ‘I want to do it. I’ll stay with you. If you will help me.’
‘Yes.’ The reply was fervent, and Caleb pressed closer. Then he flickered into motion, all urgency and excitement. ‘First, we must go all the way to the bottom.’
Unable to hold on by himself, Essek let Caleb drag him as he swam down, down, down, into the yawning depths below, leaving the shadowy threats at the surface far behind. Distantly, he recalled the time long ago in one of their early meetings when Caleb had seized him and begun to drown him before realizing who he was. He had been dragging Essek down into the ocean’s maw to kill him, then. Now, he was doing it to save him.
Deep down they went, until the darkness was absolute.
Except, after a moment, Essek realized it wasn’t — pinpricks of light were emerging all around them, soft motes like stars hung in the cosmos. Infinitesimal bioluminescent creatures, hundreds of them, thousands of them.
They were swimming through the night sky.
It seemed his old fancy of stepping off the dock and walking into the stars was coming true — he’d simply been looking at the world the wrong way up.
At last they reached the ocean’s floor. Caleb navigated around strange landscapes of giant tubular sponges and candelabra deep-sea corals, schools of small fish fleeing at their approach, until he found an empty patch of pale sand. There, he paused, and gathered Essek to him once more. The motes of light around them danced and shifted and brightened as Caleb’s movement fanned the water.
‘There is just one more thing I need for this to work. The most fundamental component.’
‘What is it?’ Essek began to worry. They had very little between them, save the residuum.
Caleb cupped his cheek, those pale eyes softer than they had ever been. ‘I need your name.’
It took Essek a moment to process the words. It was silly — of course Caleb knew his name. But — wait. No. Essek rifled through memories, rapid-fire, through dozens and dozens of encounters and conversations. He didn’t, did he? Because Essek had never told him. It was the so-called precious gift he had smugly refused to give so long ago, when they were near-strangers at the end of a dock in Nicodranas. Caleb had never asked again.
‘Why now?’
‘It is the anchor of the spell. I promise I will guard it closely.’
Not for the first time, Essek wondered what ill could be done with a name in Caleb’s school of magic, but there was no time to prevaricate. It was his turn to trust. And Caleb had more than earned that trust, had even given up his chance to discover whether Ikithon was at the surface, all to save Essek. He covered Caleb’s hand with his, though the movement pained him, holding it tenderly to his face. ‘Essek. My name is Essek.’
Caleb’s eyes drifted shut, like he was savoring something delicious. ‘Essek.’ He kissed Essek’s forehead, then his lips. ‘I will help you, Essek, beloved.’
It was good to hear his name in Caleb’s voice, Essek realized. Very good.
How had he gone without it until now?
Too soon, Caleb was pulling away, his face a portrait of determination. ‘I will need to bury you here in the sand. Not too much. Enough to cover most of you.’ Caleb darted around for the right spot, and pulled Essek with him. ‘And you must remove your coverings.’
Despite Essek’s world falling apart — or perhaps because of it — he felt a tickle of amusement at the word coverings. Caleb’s knowledge of the Common tongue was extensive, but still he framed the world in a way that made sense to him. Clothes were coverings. Essek’s bath was still a tide pool. (The bath in the tower he would never see again. The home he would never see again. He could never return to Rosohna.)
‘You will need to remove them for me,’ Essek said, his humor fading rapidly as the reality of his injuries surged forth once more, choking his composure. ‘Perhaps a thrill, hm?’
Caleb looked at him. ‘Yes,’ he agreed, treating the weak joke as gently as he did Essek’s bruised and broken shape when he began to undo clasps and buttons and ease the fabric away. He was careful, as though Essek’s fine clothing hadn’t been ruined in his captivity, as though Essek was going to primly fold each garment and set it aside as he so often did before jumping into the cavern pool.
Those happy, uncomplicated meetings felt so long ago.
‘I am glad we are finally settling the favors you owe me,’ Essek said as his clothing floated away, drifting in an illusion of zero gravity. His face didn’t quite manage a smile.
‘No,’ Caleb replied, making Essek look back at him abruptly. ‘I have decided to keep them. You can call them in at another time.’ Caleb wore a smirk, sly and pleased with himself like he had been so often in their early dances around each other, and it was this that coaxed an earnest curve to Essek’s lips.
‘Very well. If it so pleases you so much to be in my debt.’
Caleb didn’t answer, but his touches remained tender. Reverent. It was almost too much to bear.
When Essek was curled up in a soft depression in the ocean floor, and Caleb began to push sand over him, he thought of the Empire. They buried their dead, didn’t they? Maybe he should consider this a shallow grave for his old self. In the Dynasty, and among the pious drow in particular, cremation was far more prevalent; space for burial in Rosohna was limited, and besides, among the consecuted the body was viewed primarily as a vessel for the soul — honored, but ultimately ephemeral. Disposable. To join the body with the Luxon’s light after death by burning it was the natural course of things.
Essek was as far from burning as he could possibly be, down here beyond the reach of the cruel sun. Here it was cool, and dark, and for the first time in a long time, he was not afraid. Nervous, yes. But he trusted Caleb — a realization that scared him in its own way — and this was his armor against the unknown to come.
The sand was glittering with residuum as Caleb instructed him to close his eyes.
‘You will help me do it,’ Caleb said, and Essek felt a kiss against his brow. ‘You will shape yourself into something new. I will show you how.’
Then the world turned warm with amber light, but it was kind, and for a time he felt no pain.
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A gasp—
Breath-as-water, easy and natural like it had never been with a spell. Gills.
The slide of dark scales, a flash of translucent silver fins like moonlight on waves.
He moved, exploring, and oh— he was flying through the water! And Caleb was beside him, radiating fierce joy and excitement, his emotions singing down Essek’s nerve endings like a shout. They darted around each other, quick-fire, heady.
The sea devoured Essek’s senses, making him forget his slinking worries and pragmatic fears, dulling the pains he still held in his body. He would pay for it later, would need to rest, would need to heal. But for the moment there was only the ecstasy of transformation. Of belonging.
‘What is that sound?’ he asked, entranced when a sweet, eerie croon reached his ears.
‘Whales,’ Caleb replied. ‘They are singing. You can answer them, if you want. Call them to you.’
Essek grinned. ‘Teach me.’ When the current pushed, he went with it like a bird soaring on the wind, Caleb close behind.
Bioluminescent motes swirled in his wake: a thousand shooting stars.
He was free.
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one week later, somewhere in Xhorhas
“You were very lucky.”
“Yes. Though I am told you played some part in the aftermath, ensuring certain outcomes. Certain… interpretations of events.”
“I did. My assessment of the situation was the same as yours: that it was an attack by an unknown third party, not a breaking of the peace treaty by either side. My influence has its limits, however, as does that of my organization, as we are not one of the Empire’s governing entities. This is far from over.”
The sound of a sigh. “Be that as it may, the Dynasty is in your debt. You will not hear it from the Bright Queen, or any formal channels, but know it from me.”
A nod. “A debt I will remember, should our situations ever be reversed.”
“I would expect so. Now. Do you know what to make of this?” Something clinked on the stone table. “It was among the Shadowhand’s closest possessions. He refused to tell us its origin, quite stubbornly, when he was willing to explain his collusion with the Assembly in full. Our mages can only tell us it is from a humanoid sea-dwelling creature originating from the southeast.”
The creak of a chair. The sound of a fingernail against glass.
“Hm. Some reports from the Dwendalian delegation indicate it was a human wizard who attacked them from the water. Others say it was a sea monster.” A pause. “Thelyss has still not been recovered?”
“No. The official finding is that he drowned. But we cannot be certain.”
The pensive tap of fingers on the table. “I am not fond of uncertainties.”
“Nor I. We are still examining everything he left behind.”
“As I still have much to uncover on my side.” The scrape of chair legs on the floor, and the rustle of cloth. “Thank you for this. I will include it in our research. However, I must return home now. My people are following many threads, and more bloodshed between our nations is inevitable if we remain idle for too long.”
“Indeed. Light be with you, Expositor.”
“Let the light come as knowledge, Dusk Captain. I will be in touch.”
THE END