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books-of-the-great-leviathan · 2 years ago

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Chapter 25- Sirin

***

She and Luca didn't meet each other's eyes for a long time after they were herded down narrow hallways and into the temple prison, not until the cell door clanged shut behind them, leaving them again in the dark.

The air was thick and muggy, difficult to breathe. A knife of moonslight sliced down from the single slit window, too narrow to fit more than a hand through. Sirin could see the skyline of An Gholam as if through half-shut eyes, and beyond it the dormant volcano with its thread of smoke, like a sleeping giant, waiting to wake and rain destruction on the world once more. Cereza slumped on the floor, knees to her chest, hand pressed over her eyes. Her lips fluttered, and Sirin caught a glimpse of the dark veins branching past the collar of her shirt.

Her curse was spreading. Soon, it would kill her.

My curse, Sirin thought. It might as well be. She'd brought it, she'd inflicted it. That was who she was, perhaps, a cursebringer sowing woe wherever she walked, like some haunt thing crawling from the sea out one of her grandmother's old stories. Hadn't she brought hate and fear and death to all places? Alkona, Estara, Lapide. They really were all the same. They had all suffered under her hand. They had all suffered her curses.

Luca watched the city with her, his eyes silver in the moonslight.

Luca, Sirin signed, her chains rattling.

He didn't see her. Luca, she signed again. He still didn't look. She plucked a rock off the grimy cell floor and threw it at him.

It hit him square between the shoulderblades. He flinched and turned. "Ow."

Not the reaction I'd expect, Sirin signed, from a man who's going to die tomorrow.

A smile thinned his lips. "Yes, well. I'm saving my strength. I want my screams to be as passionate as possible when I'm torn apart."

Sirin laughed. Luca looked for a moment startled, perhaps at the choking, rasping sounds she made, but after a moment his smile widened, and he began to laugh too, hard deep laughs that doubled him over and made him brace his palms against his knees.

"I always had a feeling," Luca managed between laughs. "Not a plague, not old age surrounded by weeping wives and grandchildren, no, I was so sure I'd die in some nasty ignominious way..."

His smile faded. He leaned against the wall and stared up at the ceiling.

"I'll last ten seconds, and Bateleur knows it," he said. "All of them do. They don't even care so much about the gold. They just want their blood."

These are hard people. This is a hard place. It isn't all like Lapide, even like Estara.

"Oh, are you defending them now? They betrayed you."

I know that.

"Did you see Bateleur's little girl?" Luca said. "I think she's sick."

Sick with what?

"I think...might be glassbones. Brittle fever," he said. He shook his head. "Damn awful. Kills you slow. I wonder..."

He seemed to think hard for a moment, then shook his head. "What was your escape plan, anyway?"

Kill them. Like I killed your mother's guards.

He snorted. "Really? Not to be blunt, but that's a bit of a shit plan. Was that honestly it?"

She didn't respond.

"Were you...were you not sure whether or not you wanted to free us until then?"

Sirin stared at him, then sighed, dropping her gaze.

I don't know.

She couldn't look at him anymore, and paced away, into the dark corner of the cell, far from the moonslight. Her power flexed inside her, a muscle straining to be used. Wisps of darkness unfurled from her palms as she lifted them. The wisps spiraled, interweaving.

Her grandmother could paint entire stories in smoke and shadow, grand epic tales that moved and breathed like living things, cities and battles and beasts spun from the darkness. She had begun to teach Sirin, but once she was gone Sirin's taste for stories died. She realized quickly her shadows could do other things, too. Crueler things, sharper things. She was so good at sharpness and cruelty.

"I suppose I figured I might drown," Luca said. "Seemed a likely death for me, I mean...there was one time I was rowing out to observe a colony of arch-squid in one of Valeris's sea caves, and the current was, well, you know how beastly it can be..."

Thank you, Sirin signed.

Luca trailed off.

"What?" he said, after a pause.

You saved my life back there. I would have killed Bateleur. I would have slid the knife into his heart and welcomed the pain of my death. But you stopped them. And now I find I am grateful that you did.

"Did you just thank me?"

Yes.

He blinked. He sighed. "I couldn't watch you die," he said. "I couldn't stand by and let that happen."

Even after all I have done, all I have said?

"I've said worse."

But not done worse.

A shrug. "I'll give you that one."

Bastard.

Luca smiled, faint as a ghost. "Strange. Your insults are much less unsettling than your kindness."

He seemed a ghost himself, standing bleached of color in the moonslight. His rumpled hair looked silver as his eyes, his face all dark circles and healing cuts and skewed nose, the edge of his cheekbone limned white. How Sirin had hated him. To her he'd been all of Lapide, all the men who had enslaved her, all his country's crimes. She'd wanted to take her revenge on him the only way she knew how. Someone shut her up. Slit him open, make him bleed, make him silent. Take away his songs, his language, like hers had been taken. A corpse and a ghost, a head full of words that would never again be spoken.

I was not always this way, Sirin signed.

She went to stand beside him, just outside of the pool of moonslight. Music filtered up from below, some twanging song picked out on poorly-tuned strings.

Once I thought I knew everything there was to know. Once I was a child and I dreamed of a small island in a great stormy sea, and thought I dreamed the world.

She closed her eyes.

The world came to educate me. I told you. Slavers. Slit throats. Stolen children. The dead were left in the surf, if they were not heaped to burn. Our dead are not meant to meet water or fire, you see. They are meant to be buried deep in stone, grave-dolls carved to mark their place in the land of the living, give their ghosts a perch to watch from so they are not tempted to latch onto those still breathing. So many things I thought I knew. How to stand and fight. How to be brave. How to be strong in the face of terror.

But when the slavers came, I forgot all these things. I didn't fight, Luca. There were times I was free...moments without the weight of a fetter on my leg, or my arm, or round my neck. I didn't fight them then, just as I turned and ran on the beach, away from my friends, away from the voices crying out for help.

She made herself breathe. All I thought was how much I wanted someone to come. The witches, the Leviathan. The skies themselves, breaking wide to sear the island with lightning. The seas rising to swallow us all. Someone, anyone, come to save us.

But none came. None could. None but me. And I ran.

Her eyes were warm, her throat tight, a knot of pain pressing behind her scar. Her hands stopped speaking and fluttered to the scar, the thin ridge against her fingertips that severed so much. She opened her eyes and found Luca staring at her. A slight crease cut between his eyebrows.

Her hands were still wound around her own neck, tight enough to squeeze the breath from it.

"You were a child," Luca said softly.

He reached for her. She began to flinch away, but as his hands brushed hers she stopped, and let him take them and pry them from her neck. He lowered them, clasping them in his own.

"You were scared," he said. "There was nothing else you could have done-"

At once he was too close, too much of him touching too much of her. Sirin jerked her hands from his and turned before he could see the tears in her eyes. How many might be alive if I had fought?

"You might be dead," Luca said. "They might have killed everyone. You don't know what might have happened."

A thousand protestations, a thousand barbs. She wanted to fling them at him. She didn't. Only the Leviathan knew the weave of the world, the countless strings of what could be and might have been. Only the Leviathan, and prophets, but she could not claim to be either.

Silence unspooled like her shadows, a silence she did not want to break.

There was a story she remembered well, a story from Alkona. It told of how all things had begun. It was in darkness, primordial, absolute. It was the darkness of creation, where anything could be anything, and no creature was given form and thus precedence over the other. A vast sea. But all things must adapt in the sea or die, and soon the Great Leviathan came, and with it, light. Light flowed from it like rivers, and it gave form to the universe, and with form, order.

Bittersweet, this. Form gave all things meaning, but it locked them in place, too, and yearning persisted- to fly, to change, to stare at the horizon and dream of new beginnings.

The Leviathan could take its light away, so the story went. It could render the universe formless once more, could remake it, if that was what it wanted.

Perhaps all things should die. Perhaps the world could not be made right, and the only choice was to let it become dark again.

Sirin didn't know. She didn't reach for Luca's hand. But to be in the dark with him, to be the same in their fear, to be there and to not be alone- that didn't sound so bad.

***

Sirin dreamed. Again, of home.

She stood along the cliff's edge of Alkona, her grandmother by her side. The old woman was white-haired and wrinkled as old leather, but she stood tall and straight-backed, the sea wind whipping her white braids around her head.

It winnowed under Sirin's thick felted cape and numbed her legs, but she liked the way it made her heart pound, the way it made her feel alive. Her muscles burned from their climb, the weak sunlight pricking sweat from her hairline. She reached up to catch a handful of her own braids, watching ripples of light play across them.

Did you run? Did you fight? Did you fold?

She squinted up at her grandmother, who smiled back, warm as the hearth. "What are you thinking?" her grandmother asked.

"What's beyond the horizon?"

Her grandmother raised her head. Her profile was sharp and clean against the gray skies, her dark eyes narrowed against the wind.

"We have no ships to go there," she said. "So it could be anything. Everything, maybe. All we have is what stories come to us, and that is how we must dream."

Sirin frowned out toward the sea again. The sun crested the clouds, and for a moment the whole of the ocean was transformed, struck with light so it shone as if from within, a vast and unending nothingness.

Seabirds cried, high above, tossed and scattered.

"I wish I was stronger," Sirin said at once. "I wish I could weave so strong I could dive into the water and swim all the way to the horizon. Past it. Further."

"Maybe you'd fall off the edge."

"I wouldn't fall off. I'd go there and make people give me things from their island and then I'd bring them back to you."

Her grandmother laughed, an inelegant bray of a sound. She set down her basket- they gathered staunchmoss, deep green scabs of it off the cliffs, to take back down to the village. Chewed and spread over wounds, it stopped the flow of blood, relieved pain, made all in the body right again. Sirin's was not half as full as her grandmother's. She always ran ahead to look for adder stones and bird's eggs, forgetting all about moss.

"My girl," her grandmother said. "What is strength?"

Sirin blinked.

"The rocks," she said. She smacked her fist into her palm. "The waves pounding the rocks so hard they can smash them."

Her grandmother walked toward the cliff's edge. Alarmed, Sirin followed, setting aside her own basket and scrambling at her grandmother's heels. She stopped before the broken lip of the rocks jutting over the drop, and bent, and plucked something from the rock's shadow.

A yellow flower, small and perfect, fluttering in the wind.

Sisi flowers. They grew in these pitiless heights, hanging on to the thin soil against all odds, small faces gazing at the stars. They seemed to die when winter came, with its snows and its blade wind, but always returned with the sun.

"Strength is not always hard, Sirin," her grandmother said. She turned the flower this way and that.

"But I must be," Sirin said- Sirin dreamed- Sirin whispered, trapped in stinking sobbing darkness, bones grating against fetters-

"Maybe once," her grandmother said.

"I don't know how to not be."

Her grandmother did not reply. The sea shifted again, sun slipping behind the clouds, and Sirin saw the currents in it: warmer shallows surrounding Alkona the deep green of staunchmoss, the rippling line of colder, darker waters, the glass-blue of the horizon.

Did you run?

Sirin reached out, and her grandmother gave her the flower. Sirin cupped it in her palms, then covered it, hiding it, clasping it close to her heart.

Did you live?

When she woke, her hands were empty. Fingers longer, skin rougher. Older, wearier. The moonslight still poured in through the slit window, illuminating Luca sleeping in the corner, and Cereza, awake, sitting a few feet away and watching Sirin.

Sirin raised her head.

"Sorry," Cereza said. "I didn't wake you up, did I?"

No, Sirin signed.

"No? Was that what you said?"

Sirin nodded, slowly.

"Well, I'm glad you are awake," Cereza said in that pretty Palace accent, tongue trilling on her consonants. "I wanted to talk to you. Well. Mostly I wanted to talk, and I wanted you to listen."

Cereza was all pillowy curves and wide-spaced eyes, a sweet and blushing thing. Now those eyes burned, eerie, eldritch.

I'm listening, Sirin said.

"Luca trusts you," Cereza said. She turned to look at him. Luca slept sprawled against the wall, hair mussed, one leg kicked up, the other sticking straight out like some marsh bird's. "And he trusts like he does everything. He opens his heart to it. I don't think he even realizes how easy it is to sink knives in him. You betray him, you try to harm him again-"

I think we're past that, Princess.

"No, listen," Cereza said, and her voice was sharp and cold. Crescents of silver shone in her eyes. "You hurt him, you even try to hurt him, and I will kill you. I will destroy you. Do you understand me?"

Sirin nodded again.

Very clear, she signed.

"Good," Cereza said.

A spasm passed over her face. She clenched her fist to her heart- not before Sirin caught a glimpse of the pulse of veins beneath her flesh, the dark, twisting mass reaching out from her wound. Sirin felt the pulse of power through the skin of the world, the familiar jump in her heart that meant she was about to fight or fly.

The spasm passed. Cereza lowered her hand.

I'm sorry, Sirin signed.

It was a miserly apology, but there was no way to strengthen her words, not now. Not after what she had done.

A smile twitched the corners of Cereza's mouth.

"I'm glad you're on our side," was all she said. She turned away and went back to Luca, curling up beside him. After a few minutes, her breathing became even and deep.

Sirin lay back down, keeping her eyes on Cereza's back. She thought of yellow flowers in the rocks, of roots wound deep.

She didn't sleep again, not all the long night.

#togl #tales of the great leviathan #fantasy fiction #original fiction #serial novel #chapter 25

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