Soulwoven: Exile (Soulwoven #2) Read online

  “Ugh,” he said.

  He put his back against the rail and slid down until he reached the deck. Aleani sailors bustled in front of him in flashes of blue and brown and white. He shut his eyes and pressed his fingers against his temples.

  “Do you want some water?” Dil asked.

  He nodded, and her feet danced away.

  The Aleani had sent a ship, but it hadn’t exactly been what he was hoping for.

  The Skellup was maybe forty feet long and ten wide. It was crewed by seven tanned, bearded fishermen from some town in the Aleani borderlands that Cole had never heard of. The ship seemed seaworthy, but it was slow, the area belowdecks was crammed and stank of fish, and there almost always seemed to be somebody working its bilge pump.

  Only the captain spoke any Eldanian. When Quay had asked why the Skellup had been sent to find them, the red-capped Aleani had spit over the side of the ship and muttered about crimes and judgment.

  Cole wondered what sort of welcome they’d get when they reached Du Fenlan.

  The wind raced over his neck, and he shivered.

  He felt squashed and adrift, as if the months of pent-up change that had started with Litnig’s dream were crashing down on him all at once. He no longer had a mother, no longer had a home, no longer had the thieves who’d been his adopted family for so long.

  All he had left was Litnig, Dil, and Quay, and Litnig was changing too. There were times that Cole looked in his eyes and couldn’t find the brother he’d grown up with.

  Those times scared him.

  A lot.

  Thunder grumbled in the northern sky. Cole felt a storm coming, even over his pulsing nausea. The air was getting heavier. The wind ripped like a wild beast out of the endless ocean.

  Dil’s footsteps returned.

  “Here,” she said.

  Cole took a cup of water from her and sipped it. He hadn’t been able to keep more than the thinnest broth down at sea, and his body was starting to feel weak and jittery.

  The wind picked up again, and a curtain of frigid spray blew into his face.

  “You sure you don’t want to head below?” Dil asked.

  Cole stifled the urge to shake his head—doing that would set it spinning for minutes.

  “No,” he said. “It’s better out here.”

  He looked up. Dil’s eyes glowed golden against the gray river of clouds behind her. Her dark hair, matted and caked with sea salt and dirt, swirled in the wind.

  “You know,” he said with a smile, “your head looks like a charging octopus.”

  Dil grinned and rubbed his arm. “Yeah? Well your face looks like a dead one.”

  Cole laughed. Behind Dil, three Aleani sailors and the captain broke into a shouting match.

  “How’re the others?” Cole asked. A gust of wind shook the sail and spattered him with water.

  Dil shrugged and settled down next to him. “Same as they’ve been. Litnig’s grumpy. Leramis and Ryse are whispering. Quay’s a million miles away. Tsu’min isn’t talking to anybody.”

  Cole finished off the water in his cup and sighed. “How far are we from Du Nordt?”

  “Still a few days, if the wind holds. Quay says we’re passing between Patch’s Fingers and the Bay of Reeds.”

  Great, Cole thought. He’d heard stories about the Aleani expedition to colonize the Bay of Reeds. All lost but a few. Famine. Cannibalism. Disease. He shivered and stood up to look back over the rail. This time he spotted hazy strips of land swimming in the clouds—a stripe of light colors that might signify a beach, a darker line that was probably forest beyond, and mountains disappearing into the gray cotton of the sky to the southwest.

  We’re too close, he thought.

  As if he’d called it, a gust of wind hit the ship and knocked it toward the rocks. His stomach leaped into his throat. More shouting erupted from the Aleani.

  Cole’s cup clattered to the deck, and he braced himself against the railing with both hands.

  After a moment, the ship stopped pitching any more than usual. His stomach settled and he turned back around. Dil peered into the wind, her nose high in the air like she was sniffing for something.

  Cole thought he might be able to see the storm. A line of clouds darker than the rest masked the northern horizon. Rain, probably. Lots of it, falling hard. It was moving toward them.

  “Yenor’s balls,” he muttered.

  The wind got worse, and the ship rolled sickeningly to port. Cole clutched the railing and stared at the horizon, willing his guts to calm down.

  Voices speaking Eldanian broke the air behind him.

  “—don’t really care right now, Lit. I want to find out what the heck—”

  “How long did you keep it from me, Ryse? Who else did you tell?”

  The second voice was his brother’s, and it sounded angry.

  Cole followed the sound and found Litnig, Ryse, Quay, and Leramis exiting the staircase that led belowdecks. Quay strode to the aft castle of the ship, where the Aleani captain was standing next to his pilot at the wheel, looking nervously at the rocks to portside and the storm to starboard.

  Ryse made to follow him, but Litnig held her back. “Who else knew, Ryse? Who else did you tell?” The wind picked up, but his voice cut through it. His face was getting flushed. His eyes flashed.

  Nine-tailed, stepdancing hells, Cole thought. He stumbled his way across the deck.

  “Did you tell him?” Litnig thundered. He jerked a thumb toward Leramis.

  Ryse looked at her feet.

  That seemed to say enough for Litnig.

  “Yenor’s eyes, Ryse!” He ran a hand through his hair and grabbed a tuft of it. “Why didn’t you trust me? Why didn’t you—”

  The ship rolled to port again, and Litnig stumbled into Cole.

  Litnig outweighed Cole by a solid eighty pounds, but Cole had always been good at leveraging his weight. Even the sea couldn’t take that from him. He caught Litnig and wrapped his arms around him.

  “Easy, Lit,” he said. The ship righted and his head tried to turn a somersault, but he controlled it. “Calm down, all right? Just calm…”

  Litnig turned his head. His hair had grown long and shaggy, and his cloud-colored eyes were red-rimmed and underlined with shadows. “Cole,” he growled, “stay out of this.”

  Cole squeezed. It was the same thing Litnig had done to their father at least a dozen times.

  He hoped Lit would get the message.

  “Cole—”

  Cole squeezed tighter.

  “I’m warning you, Cole. Don’t—”

  A few fat drops of rain struck Cole across the face. The storm clouds were growing closer. The rain began to drum against the deck. The wind shoved them toward the rocks.

  None of that mattered. He couldn’t control it. He couldn’t even affect it. All he could do was hold on to his brother, and if he was very lucky, make him listen. “Lit,” Cole said as quietly as he could, “do you remember when ’Ta would get mad?”

  Litnig’s muscles bunched underneath Cole’s fingertips. “Don’t talk to me about ’Ta,” he growled. “You don’t understand, Cole. You don’t…”

  “So tell me,” Cole said. His arms were starting to get tired.

  Litnig mumbled something.

  “What?”

  “I said, ‘I can’t!’” Litnig roared. He lowered his hips and broke free of Cole’s grip. His elbow slammed into Cole’s chest and sent him stumbling backward.

  As he did, the ship rolled to port again, deeper than it had before.

  Cole scrambled to keep his balance. His arms wheeled. The ship rolled deeper, and he found himself staring upward and northward into the darkening sky. Litnig reached for him, but he was too far away, and Cole was falling toward the portside rail, falling toward the sea—

  He crashed into something warm. Something just about his size. Something that grabbed at his arm and yelped as it was knocked into the ocean in his place.

  The Skellup righted itself
and began to climb another swell. The wind screamed. Cole turned in a slow circle.

  Dil was gone.

  It took a second for him to register the fact.

  Dil was gone.

  There was a warm place on his shoulder where he’d crashed into her. He craned his head over the side of the ship, but the swells were so high he couldn’t spot her.

  Gone, he thought again. The word didn’t seem real.

  He faced his brother. Litnig’s eyes shone wide and panicked. His face had gone from flushed to ghastly pale.

  The Aleani shouted and heaved and pulled at things. The storm grew fiercer. Another wave struck the ship.

  Cole shivered in the wind and the rain, and then he began to move.

  He spotted a coil of unused rope hanging by the stairs to the aft castle. Not too heavy, not too light. Enough to hold his weight but not drag him down. He picked up one end. It felt old and coarse.

  Everyone was talking, but he didn’t care.

  Dil was gone.

  He fumbled numbly to tie the rope around his waist.

  He used good knots. Climbing knots that had borne his weight as he scrambled up stone walls in Thieves’ Rise. He handed Litnig the other end of the rope.

  “Cole…” said Litnig.

  Cole stepped toward the portside railing. His body still felt shaky and weak, but that hardly mattered anymore.

  Litnig’s hand landed on his shoulder, pulling him back, keeping him on the ship, keeping him from Dil.

  Something inside Cole snapped.

  “Don’t you fucking touch me!” he shouted. He whirled around, elbow first, harder than he meant to, harder than he’d hit Lit since they were kids. There was a heavy crack. A dark red welt formed under Litnig’s left eye.

  Litnig let go and reached for his injured cheek. Cole spun around. The ship rolled. His stomach tried to jump out of his throat.

  Cole ran forward, planted one foot on top of the railing, and leaped into the sea.

  It was an ugly dive, and his face hit the water with a cold, wet slap. His chest contracted, but he’d spent enough time in thrice-damned freezing water not to lose his breath or his head anymore. He didn’t sink too deep, and soon he was back on top of the salty swells, treading water and sucking in air while the wind sent drops of spray skittering along the heaving ocean surface.

  “Dil!” he screamed into the storm. The Skellup’s low, rolling gait had already taken it past him. He took a few strokes away from the ship, keeping the rocks to his right. The swells pulled at him more strongly than he’d expected them to. He bobbed six or eight feet up and down with every one. The cold sapped what strength was left in his arms and legs.

  “Dil!” he screamed again.

  The water churned in dark, angry mountains. The rope around his waist played out foot by foot. He kicked and pulled and spat and shouted.

  “Dil!”

  A voice called out in return, far to his right. Toward the rocks. The water swelled, and for a moment he was on top of everything.

  He spotted a dot in the water near one of the rocks.

  Cole’s legs scissored, and he swam as fast and as hard as his numbing body would take him. The line stretched out. The rock drew closer, even as his face lost feeling and the outsides of his arms and legs grew rubbery. When he was on the crests of the waves, he saw that the dot was coming out to meet him. It grew closer, closer, larger, larger. No longer a dot but a person. No longer a person but Dil.

  He’d almost reached her when the line caught around his hips and dragged him backward.

  He cursed and shoved down on the rope belt as it took him underwater. It didn’t budge. His knots were strong.

  Cole rolled over. His head broke the surface again, but he was on his back, not swimming but trolling through the water like a worm on the end of a fishing line. The cold, briny sea filled his mouth. He spat it out and spotted Dil in front of him. She was just out of reach, struggling through the chop. She looked worried, and she was getting farther away. She wouldn’t catch him, couldn’t catch him—

  His fingers closed around the handle of his knife.

  Cold, confused calculations ran drunkenly through his brain. He pulled the knife.

  He cut the rope.

  It didn’t take much. He slid the blade back and forth twice, and then he was free—no longer being dragged anywhere but with the current. The frayed end of the rope skimmed across the tops of the waves and flew beyond his reach.

  Arms grasped his shoulders. Legs kicked next to his in the waves. He turned to face them.

  Dil wrapped her arms around him. Her eyes shone a bright, lustrous gold. “Cole—why?” she whispered.

  Cole kicked to stay above the churning surf. The wind whipped sheets of spray into his eyes. A sheet of lightning forked across the bottoms of the clouds.

  “I love you,” he mumbled into her shoulder.

  As if it solved everything. As if it solved anything.

  They floated together, a mile or more offshore, a mile or more from safety, surrounded by wind and water and black, jagged rocks.

  And filled by desperate, flickering love.

  TWO

  One hundred days before the destruction of Nutharion City

  Somehow things had gone very, very wrong.

  Dil bobbed on top of gnashing, biting waves, holding Cole against her chest in driving rain. His lips were blue, and he hadn’t said anything in a few minutes, so she shook him gently.

  “Mmmalright,” he muttered. He had his arms wrapped around himself, and he was shivering.

  Idiot, she thought. My wonderful idiot.

  She considered channeling a soul into him—like she had in the forest in Lurathen—to keep him warm. But there he’d had nowhere to go. Here if she lost him and he lost his mind, he might spend the rest of his life at the bottom of the ocean, thinking he was something he wasn’t. She didn’t want to take that risk.

  So she clung to the soul of a sea lion and swam for both of them, and she did her best to keep him warm in the frigid water.

  Directly ahead of her was one of the flat-topped rocks she’d seen from the deck of the Skellup.

  The swells gravitated to it like bees to a lavender bush. She was only a few hundred yards away, and every time she rose and fell, she found herself a little closer. Even through the sheets of rain, the rock looked big. It towered twenty or thirty feet high, riddled and pocked with caves and overhangs. Seaweed and kelp dripped from its edges and mired the froth around it. Dil smelled life in the tide pools at its base―tiny crabs, urchins, little fish and anenomes.

  There was food there then, and shelter. And with this much rain, there’d be fresh water in the crevices of the rock as well.

  They just had to get there.

  The sea and the rock didn’t coexist easily. Waves thundered against the stone and sent clouds of spray into the air in twisting, ephemeral fountains. To get caught in that struggle between earth and sea would mean a hard death, smashed against the rock until her body gave out.

  So Dil flicked her feet and swam sideways, away from the chaos at the front of the rock. The rear looked just as dangerous; whirlpools seethed below it, sucking kelp and foam and water into the depths.

  That left only the rock’s near side, where the heaving water was rising and falling ten feet or so with every swell.

  “You hanging in there, Cole?”

  “Mmm-hmm.” He clutched her arm like he was a child.

  She spotted a ledge just above the tops of the swells, a little rearward of the center of the rock, and angled for it. The sea lion in her was as nervous as she was. This was dangerous water. Child-eating water. Death water. The lion wanted to head for shore, but there were dozens more rocks between her and the land, and the currents between them looked fast and vicious.

  The ledge drew closer.

  “Cole, you’ll have to climb,” she said.

  “Hmm?” His head came up, but it looked like he was having trouble focusing.

&n
bsp; “The ledge, Cole. Ahead of us.” She kicked to keep them from drifting to the rear of the rock. The current was stronger than she’d expected.

  “You’re going to have to―” Kick. Grunt. “Grab it and climb. Can you do that?”

  He blinked. Took a deep breath. “Yeah,” he said.

  “I’ll boost you as high as I can. At the top of the wave, grab the ledge and pull yourself up.”

  Cole nodded.

  The sea dipped them down. The sea pushed them up.

  Dil kicked, grabbed Cole underneath both armpits, and heaved as hard as she and the sea lion together could manage.

  She got him high enough out of the water that he didn’t even really have to lift himself. He just grabbed the rock and spun around so that he was resting on the ledge.

  Still, he was breathing hard and shivering when he was done.

  The current kept trying to pull Dil to the rear of the rock.

  “You have to move, Cole!” she shouted.

  “Move where?”

  “Up!” The sea dipped down, and the sea pushed up. “There’s a hollow above you!”

  Shakily, Cole started to climb.

  At the top of the next swell, Dil stretched as high as she could and caught the ledge. She let go of the sea lion’s soul once she did. It was no good for climbing.

  The black rock of the stack was full of tiny toeholds, and she scrambled up and onto the ledge before the next swell came through. The top of it kissed her heels and disappeared, and she looked back out to sea.

  It was tough to spot much of anything through the rain. There was no sign of the Skellup.

  Dil saw Cole disappear into the hollow she’d pointed him to, and then she climbed after him.

  ***

  The hollow was about six feet long, four feet wide, and three feet deep. When Dil arrived, Cole had already scooted to the back of it. He was curled in the fetal position, shivering.

  She pursed her lips. With the sea lion gone, she was beginning to feel the cold too. The temperature wasn’t all that much above freezing, and the wind and the rain made it feel worse.

  Dil wriggled into the little hollow. A thick layer of moss carpeted the bottom of it, but the rocks above were sharp, and the entrance was barely tall enough for her to squeeze through. She wondered if she’d find cuts on her back when she warmed up.