“What if someone saw you?” he demanded when he had himself under control.
“Didyousee?”
“I saw,” he said sullenly. “And so?”
“The gods still answer prayers. Even Death does, and Taran killed him.”
Drutalos fell silent, unable to argue that point with Iona Night-Singer.
Wesha was waiting across the sea, I knew it. The sworn priests of every god but Death had boarded ships in the first weeks of the war, called through their vows to flee across the Sea of Dreams. I would be going without an invitation, but I was certain I could find Wesha, and the goddess of mercy might still grant her last priestess one final blessing.
Nobody came to stop us when I boarded the boat I’d decided to steal.
“Do you know how to sail?” Drutalos pointed out when I gingerly situated myself between the oars. The square sail was in a heap at the bottom of the single mast, and I poked at the ropes that might allow me to raise it.
“I’ll make the wind blow in the direction I’m going,” I said confidently.
“I think there’s more to it than that,” he said with some doubt, and since his former patron god invented ships, he might be onto something, but I wasn’t about to stop and take a few weeks to study sailing.
It wasn’t like I was going to a real place, anyway. Wesha’s prison wasn’t on maps. It wasn’t in the mortal world. She would either let me find it or she wouldn’t.
“Are you coming back?” Drutalos asked, hands gripping the prow of the boat.
I wouldn’t lie to him.
“I don’t know. I’lltry.”
He looked very young as he silently begged me to reconsider; he was trying to grow a beard, and that project might be more successful if delayed a year or two. I hoped I’d be back to see it.
When he realized that I would not make more of a promise than I had, he nodded and untied the boat from the dock.
The tide was going out, so I was pulled out to sea before I could even get comfortable with the oars or the tiller. But nonetheless I waved at my friend, who stood on the dock and morosely watched me go.
I drifted out of the harbor, far enough that nobody was likely to notice that I didn’t own the boat. An hour’s worth of tugging on ropes got the sail into what looked to be the correct configuration. I found a mechanism to lock the oars and set a course east, toward the rising sun.
I whispered a blessing for a small wind and called a breeze to push my tiny boat forward more quickly. The sail filled, and a rush of hope swept through my chest with the sea air. There were several songs about making this voyage, which I sang for good luck.
There had been no storms since the day Skyfather’s priests left on this same voyage, and the surface of the water was like glass as the night slipped toward dawn. Sailing was easy, it turned out, if the storm god’s arm no longer stretched out to touch the waters. I spent the night looking up at the stars. For the first time since Taran died, it was easy to fall asleep. I didn’t have to figure out how to live in a world without him, which was what everyone else had wanted. I just had to make this one voyage.
This serenity persisted through the second night, and the third. On the fourth night, I started to worry. I saw the fins of sea creatures on the horizon and the occasional distant sail, so I knew that I hadn’t crossed out of the mortal realm. I was following the sun precisely, but there was no way to tell how far I’d gone. I hadn’t thought it would take more than a day. None of the songs made it sound like the Gates were very far away.
On the fifth night, I ran out of food. I hadn’t brought a fishing line, and when I tried calling for rain to refill my water jugs, I nearlyswamped the boat. I squeezed some water out of my dress to drink, but it was as foul as the ocean from all the dried salt in the fabric. Always, I prayed to the Maiden, who was as silent as ever.
On the tenth night, I ran out of water.
By the next morning, I was comforting myself with the thought that I’d soon see Taran again whether Wesha answered my prayers or not.
4
The boat bounced.I had drifted aimlessly, becalmed, for a couple of days. Yesterday a thick mist had risen up and formed just enough dew to keep me alive, but I’d lost my bearings without a view of the sky.
The sudden lurch roused me to wakefulness, and I shook off my daze to find a seagull perched on the prow of my little boat. It examined me through one red-rimmed eye as though wondering whether it dared hop down and eat my face.
I fumbled for an oar and tepidly jabbed it at the bird.
“Go away,” I croaked. “I’m not dead yet.”
The seagull took flight in a rustle of affronted feathers, making one circle around the boat before landing back in the same spot. It settled down, seemingly determined to wait for my demise.
