Dream Storm Sea (28 page)

“Quite rude of reality not to conform to my dreams in every particular,” she said.

The enchantress knew of only a few patterns true to this facet, the first ones she had seen on the kraken when it had lifted them in
The Paragon
. She repeated those back with water.

“I know these mean something,” she said. “I hope they are some manner of greeting.”

“In my experience, the key to being a good ambassador is not communicating at all, except in good manners.”

Hiresha held her breath, waiting for the kraken’s reaction.
Would it rage in a frenzy of tentacles?
She hoped not. Her legs still tensed, ready to spring off the wave she balanced on.

The kraken coasted underwater. Two of its arms picked up the remains of Emesea. One sucker cradled the warrior’s skull.

Tethiel’s grip tightened. He said, “If the kraken eats her bones, you may want to reconsider the reprieve.”

With another fuchsia-hued arm, the kraken picked up their capsized boat. The Murderfish tipped out the water, righted
The Roost
. It laid the warrior’s body inside the vessel.

Hiresha let out a long breath. She realized she had been rolling the edges of the red diamond against her chest.

The kraken rested the boat in front of them. Its suckers unlatched from the hull, and its arms lit with new patterns of lime eyespots.

Hiresha could only guess at their meaning.
An apology? A peace offering?
They might even be the signs for “boat,” “death,” or “abalone shells.”

I’ll know soon enough.
Confidence warmed the enchantress’s skin at the same time an exquisite sorrow prickled her from within.
Emesea would’ve loved to see the kraken’s colors.

An image of the warrior came to mind. She looked both familiar and strange. She wore no clothes, not even a tattoo. Her face looked wrong without a smile, and her eyes flared like green sunspots.

Hiresha’s fall stopped above the waves. She levitated, alive again with power. The cut on her knee closed. Her sari readjusted itself around her waist. Her ribs knit. The swells and valleys of water beneath her were made of infinite facets, and each lit in their turn under the angle of the sun. Her fingers indented the sea as she pushed herself upright.

After the death of Skyheart, Hiresha had fallen from the boat, but not into the water.

Feet scrambled behind her. Tethiel threw one leg overboard. Then a grin barbed the corner of his lips. “I see you’re no longer in need of saving.”

Urgency whirled in a cyclone inside Hiresha, gales of alarm that shrieked against the rock walls of her focus. She lacked the time to tell Tethiel that she would return, if she could.
And if I can’t, sail to shore. Never come back to the sea. Don’t ever risk your life again.

Hiresha touched his hand. She had to hope it would tell him enough.

She leaped. The sea sped beneath her. Its waves were like ripples of silk. Her own dress flattened in its smoothness against her legs and waist. A fold of fabric streamed behind her left shoulder.

In seven bounds she reached the seamount. Its caldera was dark, but even above water she detected the sparkle of her diamonds amid the coral. They converged toward her in lines of whitewater. The paragon gem burst upward. The pyramid revolved in a spinning blur of points. When the enchantress raced north, her jewels zipped in front of her then looped far back around in ellipses.

Hiresha traveled as fast as dreams on the wind. Her quarry only moved at the speed of a tsunami. The enchantress knew she had overtaken Emesea when she saw the gorge and the hill of water. It looked like the wave of the rogue fish, and Hiresha suspected it would surge to even greater heights if Emesea’s anger reached land.

The great waves rolled forward in a spearhead formation. Hiresha dove at the foremost point. The sea boomed with Emesea’s footfalls. The sediment she kicked from the ocean floor billowed in a dust storm. Sharks and a great platehead fled. Kelp forests flattened. Reefs shook and fractured.

The enchantress split through the currents and cast forth a scythe of diamonds.

Emesea had already seen her, sensed her, and the being of wild magic jumped over the gemstone volley. Fury vented out her mouth in whitewater.

She spun in a vortex to grab Hiresha. The enchantress knew those arms had ripped a dragon’s head off and held no illusions that she could withstand them. Emesea moved with such force that her updraft alone could have crushed the enchantress in half, or so Hiresha feared. She wrenched herself away from death, upward to the paragon diamond. She had left it coasting on the wave.

Hiresha broke the surface. Emesea erupted after her, batting aside the next gems with shields of gushing sea.

The enchantress needed to draw the wild magic from Emesea. The diamonds had collected the essence from the tempest, and they could strip this being of her power if they could touch her. That seemed unlikely. Emesea snapped off of the sea’s surface with insect reflexes. A wave towed after her in a cape of water.

Emesea’s voice was thunder echoing from mountain crags. “You owe me, enchantress.”

The sea itself reached to kill Hiresha. The water formed cutting edges, serrated by whipping spume. Hiresha skirted around these only to face fists of rippling blue, knife storms of liquid, and a hammer of tide. This last clipped her foot, spinning her through the air and breaking her leg.

Even as her bones fitted back together, a larger pain pulsed through her in head-throbbing flashes of chartreuse. Fleeing from Emesea was the natural response, and not doing so brought agony.

Hiresha knew she did not have to win this contest. Withstanding would be enough. Each moment of Emesea’s pursuit, the tsunami lost momentum. Its waves drooped by degrees. Emesea would run out of wild magic in time.
Long after I’m dead,
Hiresha thought.

Emesea pawed at her with an air-tearing sweep of the arm. Hiresha flipped out of reach. Her next glittering attack was blown aside by a puff of Emesea’s breath.

The wind changed, disrupting the orbits of her gems. Hiresha glanced up to see waterspouts descending from the cloud like wobbling spears. The cyclones pulled the enchantress in while Emesea leaped straight through them. The gusts buffeted Hiresha closer to the slicing swords of water.

I am only outmatched in speed, muscle, and magic.
Hiresha thrashed about for a plan, anything that could save her and Oasis City.

The answer flared in her mind. The warrior had provided the tactic herself, in the other facet. ‘
When your foe is strong, make yourself appear weak.’

If the red facet predicted the blue, then that must mean…
Hiresha set that thought aside. She accepted the insight as another power of her dream inversion.

Veering around a waterspout, she escaped Emesea’s view for an instant. Hiresha slipped a diamond beneath her tongue.

The enchantress flung herself toward Emesea with a hailstorm of jewels.

She swept them away. “You’ll pay your debt.”

“Can you even remember what you wanted?” Hiresha skirted around a war-club made of sea and jellyfish, calculating the exact amount the nearest waterspouts would deflect her flight. Her precision carried her within the reach of Emesea’s fingertips. Close enough to grab, not so close that the enchantress looked to be hurling herself at the being.

Emesea’s grip felt as movable as a mountain. Her eyes were moss-filled caverns. For the first time, she blinked. In a human, it would have looked like a moment of uncertainty.

“Do you even know who you are?” Hiresha asked.

“I am Emesea,” she said.

“Can you remember the land of your birth? Your gods? Your desires?”

“What do you know of them?” Emesea slammed herself and Hiresha into a waterspout. The world blurred. The wind roared, and vapor choked the enchantress.

Perfect!
Hiresha leaned closer, as if to be heard above the cyclone.

She spat a jewel into Emesea’s ear.

A bubble of wild magic bulged from the side of her head. Emesea clawed at the leeching jewel. Her hand stuck. Then the diamond shattered in a wave of magic, and Emesea latched onto both sides of the enchantress to tear her in half.

Those hands of stone lost their hold. The paragon diamond had plunged through the wall of the funnel to smash into Emesea’s neck. The enchantress knew she should have felt pity for the woman instead of this ascension of happiness.

Hiresha flung herself clear of the waterspout. The wind yanked her hair but not hard enough to pull it out. She circled, Attracting her diamonds so they zoomed in from all directions to pepper Emesea.

Spheres of wild magic bloated in the vortex like blisters stretching to the bursting point. At the center of the light, a silhouette flailed and screamed.

Forgive me, Emesea.
Hiresha hoped that the warrior would soon return to sanity.
Or as close as she can come.

The globes of power stopped growing. Hiresha judged she had extracted all the wild magic. She released her Attraction enchantments on Emesea, and the woman spun downward in the funnel. The power flowed upward, a cyclone of green ribbons that exploded into the cloud.

Hiresha thought of searching for the remaining dragon, but with Skyheart dead, she decided she had to lay their vision of a joined sea to rest as well. She had passed the kraken’s carcass near the seamount. Focus and need for haste had blinded Hiresha to it, but now she allowed herself to see the memory.

Seagulls flocked in droves of white and black wingtips. They shrieked at each other, fighting for a spot on the island of flesh. Sharks worked the waters into a frenzy, while a giant black worm had risen from the deep to devour the carcass. The most dreadful part of all was the kraken’s skin. It was a wrinkled grey. Death had robbed Skyheart of all color.

Hiresha could only hope that the Fate Weaver had accepted Skyheart’s soul into the World Cavern, to view the marvel of the weave of life. The priesthood had mentioned that intelligent creatures like parrots and monkeys had their place in the grand tapestry.

The enchantress still might have wept, but she sensed that the kraken yet lived in her other facet. Hiresha felt as if a needle had lodged into her side, scraping her ribs with each breath, a sharp pain amid a shimmering bliss.

I stopped the tsunami,
she told herself
. Oasis City is safe. Nothing now prevents my sailing to shore and beginning a new life.

The waterspouts shrank back into the cloud. The wild magic shone through like spreading branches.
Or tentacles.
A dream storm uncoiled, its light sifting downward in veils that enlivened the waves. Sky skates breezed past Hiresha into the tempest. Dolphins chased each other through the tinted waters, chirping and trilling their delight. Sea life returned in force to frolic and feast beneath the storm.

Fifteen diamonds snaked down and around Hiresha, the paragon at their head. The enchantress ran her fingers over the gem pyramid’s side, feeling the precise roughness of its width of facets. Her hand filled with reflected sparks of purple, crimson, and blue. By the Fate Weaver’s mercy, the paragon had not been cracked by Emesea.

The warrior swam with the dolphins. She kicked her way out of the water, outdistancing the finned creatures.
She must have some little magic left in her.
More surprising was her laughter, a ringing of delight. She snatched a fish then floated on her back to eat it in a careless fashion.

Has she forgotten our fight already? Could Emesea have regained her mind?
Hiresha flew through the dream storm to find out. She willed the wild magic not to touch her, and it flowed away in green rivulets.

The warrior spotted the enchantress. Emesea dove with the speed of a creature that had spent all its life in water. She still clutched her fish, and she hid beneath a whale shark.

She remembers me tearing her magic from her, then, and likely nothing before.
Hiresha considered towing the warrior through the water, hauling her back to the boat. The enchantress decided against it.
Where better to leave Eme of the Sea? Here she can do little harm and might even be happy.
I certainly owe her that much.

As the enchantress flew away, she worried she had convinced herself to abandon Emesea.
Am I betraying her? Or would I only torture her by extracting the last of her magic and reminding her of memories lost forever?
The enchantress only knew that with every bound she took over the water, her heart felt lighter.

The horizon rolled away to reveal a sail of tattered robes. Tethiel waited for her on the deck of
Pharaoh’s Wisdom
, his hand upraised. He looked as if he had stood that way for an hour and might have done so to the end of his days. She folded her fingers between his straight and healed ones. The relief she felt frightened her with its potency.

“You’re right,” she said. “It’s time we left the sea.”