‘Yes, but you don’t understand what happened,’ I implore. ‘They used me.’
‘If you are magic, and you came from the Bastion, you must be...’ Finlyr says, slowly putting the pieces together.
‘The priestess,’ I confirm.
Ris is struck by paralysis as she watches me, slack-jawed. ‘Holy Aistra.’
Finlyr grabs her arm, and the crew moves close together, keeping an eye on me as they mutter. Where would I run? I have no desire to return to the ocean. I wouldn’t leave Raina.
Children and a talking otter-cat. Are they a family? What are they doing out here? I stare again at the bodies, dead but animated, moving in repetitive rhythmic fashion. These were once people,their bodies marking the violence of their death and decay. Now they are husks, moving by rote, by distant memory. I haven’t yet discerned what power impels them to move like this, but I want to know it. I feel the same strange, bright and burning energy that I did in the bowels of the Tree. Fresh anguish, like a wound reopened, at the emptiness of my power stilled within me.
‘So the queen is after you?’ Finlyr asks eventually, breaking from the group and pacing the deck. He’s broad and tan in the same way as Ris; people of hard labour and hard lives. I would have been someone like that if I hadn’t been touched by magic.
‘She will be, eventually,’ I say quietly.
‘Paranish, that’s just perfect,’ he says, still pacing. ‘Here we are trying to find this cursed treasure to placate that bitch. Meanwhile, we dredge up the number-one enemy to the crown. We may as well just throw ourselves into the Maelstrom now and die.’
I try to understand his babbling speech. ‘Maelstrom.’ I hold on to the word. It feels familiar, like a memory from a dream.
Finlyr continues to unravel. ‘That’s assuming we still make it there.’
‘What is the Maelstrom?’
They all look at me. Isagani shakes their head.
I sigh. ‘Look, they already hurt me and banished me,’ I say, opening my hands in supplication. ‘Who am I going to tell? What do I have to lose?’
Finlyr looks at his crew.
‘Fine,’ Sinigang says eventually.
‘The Lahon Maelstrom,’ Finlyr confesses.
‘I know a little of it.’
‘Well then you’ll know nobody’s made it back alive.’ Finlyr glares.
‘Apart from you,’ Isagani says, tentatively hopeful.
‘You’ve been there before?’ I can’t hide the surprise in my voice.
‘At a distance was plenty,’ he corrects.
‘And what do you hope to find there?’ I try to keep my voice level, curious but afraid.
Finlyr and Ris shrug, making non-committal noises.
‘Do you know what’s down there?’ Biba asks, approaching me slowly.
A Maelstrom. Cursed treasure.
She was a trickster and a thief.
She was a traitor to the crown.
She was corrupt beyond belief.
Follow her way and you will drown.
