SONG of EMBER

66

SENTIMENT

🙜

In the light of a hazy summer afternoon, Crescent Lake appeared strangely black. The sun reflected off a dancing surface which might have been lost to him forever; somewhere out there, a body was floating, but it was not his—and for that he thanked the Maker.

He wiggled his bare toes, sinking deeper into the cool dark mud of the shore, almost within reach of the lapping wavelets but not quite. He could never bring himself to enter those waters again, and indeed found he had acquired a distinct disliking for ponds and lakes; he wondered if that made him a coward.

Ember contemplated this.

Half-spoken whispers and fragments of a starry sky misted his vision; confessions scented with spring crocuses, and the heady fragrance of a strong summer wine, weighted down by the iron warning of blood upon his tongue; encroaching death, elation and despair, tangled together as one. Surely, if he had to do it over again, he could do it again—he would do it again.

But he would not enjoy doing it, and he thought that was alright.

“You followed me,” Ky mused softly beside him, “though I ran from you. I did not know why at first…”

Ember twined their fingers together. “I might be very young in your eyes, but together we are stronger. I’ll keep you safe, Ky, whatever happens. I can promise you that.”

She hummed happily. “And so you do.”

“I had help that night, you know,” remarked Ember, even more quietly. “If Fishbiter hadn’t shattered itself, you wouldn’t be standing beside me now.”

The woman from the river glanced down, blinking rather hard.

“Fishbiter.”

Ember reddened, and then smiled ruefully, and then frowned, rubbing the back of his neck. “Yes. That was… it’s name? His name, I suppose?”

“Yes, I know. I heard that name… in your dream,” she admitted distantly.

“Oh. Right. I only kept it from you because—well, I suppose it’s obvious now, isn’t it?”

She absently untwined their fingers, letting her hand fall to her side. Ember noticed the chill of her absence, but graciously pretended he did not.

“A fit name. Those spells did not like me,” Ky said stiffly, tipping her head as a late summer breeze glided across her face, ruffling her hair and stirring up the scent of crushed flowers; Ember took a deeper breath, eyes half shut. “But some fish ought to be bitten. We came to an agreement because of my mistake; the metal, and I. And now I am sorry for Fishbiter, though more sorry for your loss.”

“Not all weapons are lucky enough to choose their own end,” Ember reminded her, thinking of his ill-fated fishing spear, lovingly hewn for a simple life and broken by blood and bone. “I'll never forget him, at the least—I’ve been marked by that blade forever.”

He punctuated the sentiment with a short laugh, touching a hand to the makeshift bandages.

Ky cast him a quick, concerned glance. “I am certain that, in time, I will be singing your scars away.”

“Maybe I want to keep them,” he shrugged, ducking his head and squinting into the sparkling blackness of the waters. “Maybe I want something to remember all of this…”

An unsung woe he could not name pricked at the corners of his eyes as he thought of the mangled corpse beneath the mountain, of the pale woman in white whose essence was now scattered forever to the winds, of the ancient voices which had crowded his mind and then fled, leaving nothing but a glimmer of desire in their wake.

Ky bent low to observe him, wreaths of hair falling across her shoulder, and when he did not respond she crouched in the mud, shuffling in front of his shoes and tugging insistently at his hands.

“Metal and runes… they are not really being alive,” she ventured kindly, but even she did not sound certain, though the lull of her words soothed his soul. “Metal cannot die.”

“But a weapon can die,” Ember stated, a belief he had not known he possessed until he spoke it. “An enchanted one, anyway. Something left that sword when it shattered, and I never got to say thank you, or say goodbye. I can’t help feeling it might have understood me, if I had… I suppose that's a bit foolish.”

There was a short pause, and Ky shifted closer, wrapping her arms around his legs and pressing her cheek against his thigh. “It would have.”

“What about Bren’s ring?” Ember asked as carefully as he could manage, putting a gentle hand upon her head. “Aren’t you rather sad? I saw it, woven into her hair…”

Ky lifted her chin, but her usual sullen sadness when he mentioned that name had been replaced by a quiet resolution. “Only another trinket she took. She can keep her sorrow-met spoils, and all the grief along with it. Why should I wish to be reminded of such bitterness all the long days of my life?”

He found he had no argument for that. “I’m sorry to bring it up, then.”

“Do not be sorry. I am mourning the man in secret for many winters, Ember. It is better to let his memory rest with my sister, now.”

They were silent until the sun had risen over their heads and some of the afternoon haze had retreated into the deep of the green woods, when Ky unexpectedly loosed her grasp on his hand and stepped forth, balancing at the edge of the water. She tipped her head to one side and set a few searching notes adrift across the vast lake—forlorn, like a lonely goose calling for its flock. The echoes sang back to them, and he thought the surface of the lake itself was disturbed by her song; the pattern of the wavelets shifted briefly before finding their usual path again.

“Ember… do you trust me?”

The remark pinched his brows. “Yes. But why—?”

“Do you trust me?” Her mouth curved upward in a toothy smirk.

He stammered for a moment, taken aback.

“If I didn’t,” he settled on at last, “you would know.”

“Then trust I shall return swiftly.”

And Ky waded into the dreadful shallows with hardly a sound, humming quietly to herself as she swayed with the ebb and flow of the lake, taking one patient step after another. Ember watched her closely, afflicted with some barely repressed instinctual premonition that a half-dead sirena would leap from the waters and drag her out of reach again.

“Trust,” she repeated softly, the words carried back to him as if she could hear his quickened heartbeat. “I shall not stray far.”

“What are you searching for?” he asked, baffled.

“Hmm-mh-hm,” she replied cheerfully and unhelpfully.

It was not until Ky had submerged almost to her shoulders that she let out a sharp croaking cry and disappeared with a splish and a plop of rumpled water, only a ripple left in the place where she had vanished. Ember shouted after her, stumbling into the shallows.

She reemerged when he was still in ankle-deep water, drenched in dark dripping hair which parted around a wild grin, fangs glistening as she let out a triumphant laugh. It rang around the lake in playful echoes which bounced across the blackness and into the rustling forest. “I am coming back to you now!”

“Damn you, Ky!” Ember panted, backing out of the muck and mud and hunching over to catch his breath, limbs trembling with nervous anticipation from the fight which never happened. He meant to rip into her for frightening him, but what came out instead was something rather different. “My—my shoes are all wet, now! Just you wait, rogue, I swear I'll get you for that—”

“Oooh, I hope you do,” she interrupted with a pleased trill, and began making her way toward him with the swiftness she had promised. “I hope you do much more than that.”

Why am I the one blushing? he thought furiously; his pounding heart now beat a different rhythm.

When Ky emerged fully from the lake, the smile vanished and she wiped the hair from her eyes with one wrist, the other held behind her back. With a dignified sniff, she revealed her prize: the gleaming hilt of Fishbiter.

It rested securely in her dark-fingered grasp, the crossguard damp and shining brightly against the moonstruck pallor of her palm, and the shard which remained of the blade almost crystalline in its sharp imperfection.

Ky held it out to him expectantly, the look on her face strangely uncertain, yet hopeful.

Ember stared at her in silence, painting a portrait in his mind. Ky stared back, dripping with lakewater, the speckled weeds slowly slipping across her oily hair as if it were the surface of an inky pond. She gasped as he dodged around her offering and clasped her tightly to his chest.

For a moment she did not move, her arm still outstretched, and then he felt her careful hand upon the small of his back. Her face turned against his shoulder, and as his chin fell to rest on her hair any lingering tension seeped out through the soles of his feet and soaked into the ground beneath him with the water from his shoes. They remained locked together until the rest of the afternoon haze had lifted from the lake and Ember’s curiosity overpowered him.

He withdrew, slipping his hand around hers and accepting the proffered gift.

That crystalline reflection of the metal dazzled his eyes.

No. Not a reflection. It was translucent—like cut glass. A warped view of the grass and pebbles beneath his feet wavered through clear metal as Ember turned it in his hand, remembering how the sword had appeared in his dream. He carefully appraised what remained of the fuller, the etching of an unseen F rune indenting his finger.

I’m holding a ghost, he thought grimly.

“What happened to this blade?”

Ky observed the jagged edges with some emotion that was indecipherable to him, but bordered on distaste. “Perhaps it perished of shame when it stabbed you.”

Ember cast her a reproachful look. “You sense nothing magical about this?”

She touched a finger to the flat of the glassy surface. “The magic has sundered itself. There are only echoes left, and it still sings of war and death. It has… changed, somehow. As if it is no longer made of metal. It is more like… stone. Though not so heavy as stone, within the echoes is a voice like stone-voice. I know not what changed it, but… I suppose everything changes in death.”

There was a pensive note to her words.

“I’m no longer convinced of that,” Ember said softly. “Maybe when the spell unraveled—or when I dreamt about it—I did dream of it, you know?—maybe it had some unpredictable effect on the original weaving… or perhaps this was the intention all along, if ever the magic came undone, though I can’t imagine why…”

He trailed off, lamenting that he had none of his ancestors’ knowledge of magical things, except that which lay buried in the recesses of his memory along with the thousand wailing voices.

“I wonder what sort of enchantments these were,” he said instead. “I wonder if they’re gone forever, or if they could be reawakened somehow? Not that anyone alive today would know.”

He gently drew the blade across his finger, and a tiny sliver of blood bloomed forth.

Whatever enchantment had been woven into the metal was well and truly dead.

“Ember!” Ky shouted at him, grabbing his hand and pulling his finger into her mouth. She hummed irritably, a chirring sound that shivered up from the deep of her ribs, and the stinging subsided with its vibrations. She stared up at him, her eyes accusing.

“Sorry,” he mumbled contritely. “I just wanted to know for sure…”

“You know now.” Her voice had an edge to it, and she did not release his hand, but ran her thumb across the pad of his finger, over and over; he thought it was self-soothing more than it was meant to soothe him.

Ember allowed it, feeling a bit guilty, and twirled the hilt. It was soberingly light in his grasp, fractured edge glinting in the sun.

“I feel I owe this sword a debt, somehow; it wouldn’t be right to abandon it here.”

“You will not,” she affirmed. “We take it with us. Perhaps it can be remade by one who knows more than we do, if any yet live who remember such things.”

He fidgeted, thinking of the ancient voices and the rush of power which had fled his grasp not so very long ago.

“Speaking of magic—”

Her attention snapped to him sharply.

“I heard the songs you speak of, I think. Or felt something like them.” He glanced down, almost embarrassed by the recounting; after all, he had sensed an opportunity and failed to grasp it, hadn’t he? “It never came to anything, but I thought, that night… maybe if I just knew the right words to say, I could have—I could have touched your song. Made it stronger. Or… let your song touch me, somehow. It made me wonder if men still have the same sort of power as the river-folk, only different. Or—no, that’s not quite right—”

Cold fingers grasped his arm, and Ember flinched.

When he looked up, a pair of dark eyes sparkled back at him eagerly. “You felt this, then? Was it the first time?”

“No, not exactly. When the demon—that demon-thing—”

Ky’s left eye squinted slightly, but she did not interrupt him.

“It pulled me out of my body, and I wondered if it put me back wrong, when it let go? I could hear all those souls it was devouring, and they knew so many things. While we were together, I knew all the things they knew, too, but I’m finding it difficult to remember them. They keep—the words, rather—or at least I think they're words, maybe it's more of a feeling—they wriggle away from me somehow, and I can’t hold onto them.”

“Like a slippery fish,” Ky murmured with a thoughtful hum.

Ember laughed slightly despite his dismay. “Yes, like that.”

Her grip tightened. “I do not think you came back to yourself wrong, Ember. But I do know… that something was unsettled within you. For that unpleasantness I am sorrowed—”

“I love you, Ky.”

Her mouth twitched but not into a smile and she licked her lips, glancing away strangely. As if the thought was still distressing to her in some way, or, perhaps, unfathomable. Ember fought back the rising desire to smother her doubt in his arms. It is well enough; I have all the time to show her the truth of it.

“—but if it shook your soul in such a way and the magic of men has awakened to your song, and you long for it, then you ought to grasp it if ever you can, however you might, and with all the ambition you are knowing.”

He blinked, returning to the present moment, and then gaped at her as he comprehended her enthusiasm. “Do you think so?”

She bounced on her toes, shaking his arm. “Yes! I will help you.”

A breathy laugh escaped him. “You will?”

“Think what you might be accomplishing if you can one day weave magic as well as my kin,” she mused, huffing the words out quickly. “I do not think the strength of men is in a song, but perhaps there is the place to begin… it is all I know of words and magic.”

Ember was not sure what he had expected from Ky. Perhaps disapproval or trepidation, but not this wild excitement. It was infectious, and bolstered his own curiosity.

“Your language will be difficult for me to grasp,” he admitted, “and mine is changed from what it was, once…”

“No matter,” she rebuked him blithely. “If there is a way for you to become knowing of the things that I know, then I wish to help you—after all, you let me dream with you.”

She shrugged as if this was a perfectly fair trade.

“Oh, and because I shared my dreams with you once, you’re bound to share all your siren secrets with me, eh?” he prompted, poking her in the chest.

Ky grinned, poking him back. “Not all of them.”

“Most, then?”

“Hmmm.” Her claw tapped her chin. “A few.”

“All of them, or I seek my revenge for the fright you gave me just now,” he declared, narrowing his eyes at her and acutely aware that the smile threatening the corners of his mouth severely eroded his composure.

Before she could respond, a distant clarion cry from above echoed a thousand times off the face of the mountain, and Ember turned to see a flock of dark-winged geese sweeping across the vast blue fathoms of the sky. They wove deftly in and out of the welkin currents, necks outstretched toward the coast to the west, speaking earnestly amongst each other of the journey ahead.

As they dipped below the peaks of the Sisters, which yet held the faintest hint of summer snow, Ky hummed in rhythm with their song—a song which had brought Ember to the stoop of his cabin more than once, hands braced between the doorframes as he leaned out to catch a wistful glimpse of the passing flock through a break in the branches above, and hearken to their call.

“A few secrets, and I shall sing for you many, many tales about the beautiful ocean you wish to know.”

The air was rich and resonant beneath her promise, and he shivered from the plucked weight of it, holding his breath as he recalled a blue-green wisp upon a distant mountainside, its fractal colors drifting like the languid river shallows he once called home. At last, he said, "I have a proposition for you, Ky."

Ky smiled as if she knew the words before he spoke them, her wide eyes alight, anticipation dancing in their depths.

"Let us wander there, you and I, to see it for ourselves."