The Second Death of Locke — Chapter no 14

fourteen

T WAS NOT AN easy thing, to cross the mountains at the turn of the season.I Grey kept her hands in her coat as often as possible until Kier finally relented and made each of them tiny magelights, one for each hand, pulling from her constantly to keep them from getting frostbitten. They stopped every few hours to warm up their feet or eat or let Pigeon rest or graze at the increasingly infrequent patches of mountain grass and moss. Four days they spent in the mountains, sleeping in short spurts, huddled together on a double layer of bedrolls with three more pulled tight over the top. At night, the wind screamed so loud that she couldn’t tell the difference between waking and her nightmares. She often woke tangled in Kier’s arms, in Kier’s coat, her legs entwined with Brit’s or Sela’s, to find the captain’s eyes open and staring into the night.

“Stop worrying,” she murmured to him every time, but he only sighed and stroked her hair until she went back to sleep. Between hours of sleep, they took their watch shifts, pacing and frigid, forcing themselves through exercises to keep their circulation going.

As they walked through the mountains, Grey did her best to teach Sela.

“I want you to imagine it as a ball of yarn,” she said, as her own mother had told her. “Find a thread and tie it to Brit, and let it unspool little by little.

Not like a ball you throw—a thread, Sela. That’s all they need.” They practiced until Sela was able to connect to the mage without any directional nudging from Grey. She was a weak well at most, but she was a well. Just being an unbound well made her more useful than Grey herself, a fail-safe if they needed one.

Closer and closer they drew to the other side of the mountains, until

Grey realized that they’d spent most of the afternoon going downhill instead of up. As evening fell in earnest, she hurried her footsteps, moving around Eron, then Pigeon, to catch up with Kier. “Where are we?”

He pulled out the map and said, “Aloducan peaks, crossing east.”

“Kier,” she said, fully accepting that her tone had slipped into whininess.

She didn’t think she could identify the unmarked Aloducan peaks on the map if they stabbed her in the chest. He only sighed and pointed at their location with a brief tap. She traced her finger over it, examining the space between there and Grislar, and something like hope swelled in her chest.

“What are you thinking about our next move?”

He cast his eyes skyward. The clouds were steely gray, heavy with the promise of fresh snow. Grey was tired of the stuff, but at least the hard- packed frozen ground was better than mud. “I’ll defer to you on this,” he said. “I think we need to send letters from the next village we come to.

We’re about five days out, and I need that time.”

Five days. The thought was nearly incomprehensible.

“Let’s camp here,” he said, louder, so they all could hear him. He nodded toward a sheltered patch of grass a few feet off the path.

Grey set herself up on a rock, laying her kit out as Eron began preparing the food. “Brit,” she called. “The big day has arrived.”

The mage came over, a smile creeping across their lips. “Time to take the stitches out?”

Grey nodded. When she had her workstation set up and had cleaned her hands, Brit removed their shirt, shivering in the cold, and stretched out.

Kier positioned himself nearby, ready to help if needed.

Grey focused on her work, humming just a little as she did. There was quiet contentment around the camp—it took Grey a second to realize that Eron was telling stories as he worked.

“That’s not how I heard it,” Ola protested.

“You’re from the southwest. They can’t be correct,” Eron retorted.

“And what do farmers know of folk tales, then?”

Grey had no idea what they were talking about. She finished up and applied more salve to Brit’s wounds, then bandages. The mage dressed and Grey took off her own coat, then her shirt, wincing at the cold of the wind.

Kier moved to sit next to her, taking her arm in his hands. She forced herself to pay attention to Eron for a distraction, if nothing else, as Kier

started his work.

“They say that magic is a gift from the gods,” Eron said grandly. “That all gods came down, and chose a nation, and blessed it as they saw fit. And here in Idistra, we were blessed most of all, by our own gods: for we are never forced to endure alone.”

“Bullshit,” Ola said. She was sitting on a rock, stroking Pigeon’s nose.

Sela sat at her feet, her head on the well’s lap. “No one says that.”

“Well, then you explain it.”

“In Lindan,” Sela said, “they think magic is a responsibility, and it must be learned.”

“Good thing we aren’t Lindle,” Brit muttered. “Eron, you’d be fucked.”

“I don’t have to feed you,” Eron said. “And besides—I can use Arkunish magic, and my father left me some of his spellstones.”

“Do they work here?” Kier asked, genuinely interested. He had always loved knowing as much as he could about how other systems of magic functioned.

“Not well,” Eron admitted. “And anyway, not to say too much about my father, but he only left me the shitty ones. They’re very specialized. So I suppose I’m really useful, but only if you have a drain blockage, or a thread

that keeps snagging.”

“Alas,” Kier said. “I do not.”

Brushing past this, Sela said, “And in Ruskaya, did you know that the magicians are demons?”

Kier snorted. Grey looked up at him, at the careful concentration on his face. “To be fair,” she said quietly, “some would accuse you of… demonic qualities.”

He smirked, finishing the last stitch. Grey directed him to apply a salve and wrap the healing wound as the others bickered over the relative merits of other types of magic.

“Captain,” Eron said when he saw they were getting up. For a second, Grey thought he was talking to Kier, but he was looking at her. “You grew up on the coast. Tell us, what were the stories there? Where did they say our magic comes from?”

“Oh. Um.” Grey chewed on her nail. She knew the stories she believed, the variations they used to tell around the fire at night on Locke. She glanced at Kier, but he only gave her a smile. Bastard.

She accepted the bowl Eron handed her, pausing to let it warm her hands as she settled in next to Brit. Kier took a spot across the magelight from her, closer to Eron.

“Surely you heard some stories growing up,” Eron said, tucking into his food.

Grey pushed her spoon around. “Well, they say that this land existed before we did, don’t they? Hundreds of years ago, when no one lived here —actually no one; it was an island of sheep—there was a ship lost in the sea. It bore explorers from what is now Lindan, where magic is freer.

Looser. But when they landed, they found that they were so far from home that the magic did not come as it once had.” She paused, looking up. “Have

you heard this one before?”

Ola wrinkled her nose. “I think so?”

Brit and Eron shook their heads.

Grey chewed her lip, but she continued. “Now, after a hard winter, only two explorers remained. But they were out of food, and though they’d retreated to a small isle for protection and made a home for themselves, they could not live another winter there alone. So one suggested she could go searching the mainland, close by, to find provisions. The other woman feared she would never come back for her. So in the night, she stole her heart, and with it, her magic. The intrepid explorer went in search of food, and found it, but she did not feel whole—and she could not perform any magic on her own. When she returned to the isle with her provisions, she was delighted to find that her magic had returned, but only when she remained with her lover and betrayer. And for that reason, we need both: one to love, and one to betray.”

There was quiet for a long moment. She knew Kier was looking at her, but she did not look back until he cleared his throat and said, “I think I know a different version of that.”

“Gods, I hope so,” Ola muttered. “That was bleak.”

“In the version I heard, she gave her heart freely, as a promise to return.”

Grey felt her cheeks warm. She looked up, meeting Kier’s gaze. “Who

told you that version?”

“Mom,” he said.

“Hopeless romantic.”

He shook his head, but he couldn’t hide his smile—the dimples of his

cheeks were dark in the dying light of evening. Mom had heard that version from Imarta, Grey knew, who had heard it from Grey herself. And both versions were passed from Grey’s own mother, who decided which version she would tell based on how well behaved Grey and her brother had been that day.

There were other stories after that, but Grey didn’t participate in the telling. It was too easy to slip, to say something she wasn’t supposed to know. That night, when she and Kier went on watch, she looked out into the valley below and thought of the remains of the temple that went down with Locke, dedicated to the goddesses of love and betrayal—or of love and devotion, depending on who was there to make an offering. Retarik, Locke’s goddess of forgiveness, was also the goddess of devotion, the first of the named mages.

She hadn’t thought about the temple of Retarik, she realized, in many years. It was partially intentional, since the temple had been repurposed into a festival hall—the very same hall where the Isle had met its end.

Even that made her sad: there were so many things on Locke, so many details, and she was the only one to hold them, to go on remembering when everything else was lost.

She hadn’t believed in the gods, not really, even though she’d been named for one of them: Gremaryse, the goddess of the sea. Sometimes, she wondered if that was the only reason she survived the sea that night after Locke burned, if it was her namesake pushing her further and further toward Scaela’s foreign shores.

She tucked her knees to her chest, thinking of the ruins on the edge of the Ghostwood, looking out at the sea. Alma, her mother, was named after the other character in the origin story: Kitalma, the first well, the patron goddess of Locke. That, Grey thought bitterly, hadn’t been enough to save her.

In Scaela, there used to be more monasteries and altars devoted to Locke’s gods, but half were destroyed by Eprain and Nestria, who held no respect for the Isle’s superstitious ways. Grey herself had only been to one altar on the mainland, the one in Grislar, dedicated to Kitalma. She’d gone there to think and stare out at the sea, but most of all, to ask the goddess if the burden of her blood could be taken from her. If Grey, the last of her daughters, would be blessed with the mercy to forget.

They found the abandoned remains of an old shepherd’s cottage as the dark bled through the sunset. They were dotted all over the hills in this part of the country, out of season, closed up for the year. Kier inspected it thoroughly by magelight, repeating the process he’d gone through with the one they’d stayed in two nights before, though that one had been far nicer and less shack-like.

Grey stood in the doorway with her hands clasped in front of her, leaning into the power that flowed through the tether. She’d used so little of it lately, Kier only drawing from her when he was making magelights or clearing brush or seeking heartbeats in the path ahead: it left her feeling restless and overfull, to keep her reservoir of power so high.

He moved carefully through the two little rooms and up to the loft. The floor was half rotted, glassless windows looking out over the valleys that spread below. It might’ve been nice, once, she thought. Scraps of cloth hung from the bars over the windows, and she could just barely see the cheerful blue floral print. There were the ashes of a hearth near one wall, the chimney open to the dark night. It might’ve been cozy. Quaint.

She leaned against the wall, watching as Kier examined a patch of writing on the arched doorway between rooms. There was just something about looking at him. She’d never get tired of the familiarity of his shoulders, the shifting hazel of his eyes. He had his hand against the wall now, that ring from his brother shining dull silver—how many ghosts they carried, the two of them—and she imagined, aching, what that hand would feel like on her skin.

“What are you thinking, Flynn?” Kier asked, voice soft. She realized he was pulling from her, the tether showing more than she wanted. It happened, sometimes, that her emotions came through without her pushing them.

“Just, somewhere like this would be nice, maybe. In the hills. Away from it all. When we’re retired, I mean.”

He looked over, the corner of his mouth tugging up. “We’ve been living on top of each other for years. You’re not sick of me yet?”

“Never,” Grey said before she could think better of it. “And I wouldn’t even make fun of you if you brought a whole league of cartographers to your bed.”

He snorted, glancing out the window. “I wouldn’t worry about me

bringing anyone else to our bed,” he said. He caught her hand, pressing a kiss to the back of her fingers.

Grey rolled her eyes, pulling back before he could feel the way her heart thudded faster. “Keep dreaming,” she muttered, because it was what he expected of her; because they always flirted, and nothing ever came of it; because he didn’t know how much she wished he could be sincere and let her down easy, for once.

His smile widened. “It’s clear,” he called to the others.

They filed through the open doorway. Sela and Brit laid out the bedrolls while Ola launched herself up the ladder to explore the tiny loft. Eron took the water buckets to the stream behind the house, then left one for Pigeon and brought the rest back. Grey turned away from the activity, from the domesticity of it, and leaned against the open window. Only days left, and then she and her mage would be— what? Just two good friends in a cottage somewhere? A cozy bed for her and Kier and all his would-be lovers, with just enough space for her own broken heart?

She chewed on her nail. She’d thought of telling him a thousand times, a million, how she felt. But he was just… There were so many opportunities.

He had to know, somehow, and the simple fact that he had not said anything sincere was confirmation enough for Grey that he did not feel the same.

She loved him in every way it was possible to love a person. And for the most part, she knew he loved her back, in his own way—but as she stared into the emptiness of the mountains, she wondered for the first time if that would be enough.

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Most rites of the Isle are unknown to those outside of the High Family and the close company they keep, but no processes are quite so obfuscated as the selection of the heir. It does not pass by age. If there is some divine right, a predetermined selection made by the old gods the Isle still holds dear, it remains unknown to the rest of Idistra.

“Even the seas burned”: A Brief History of the Rise and Fall of the Obsidian Isle by Bell Owndig, University of Isidar

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