Harmony and Harbingers
MARY
We parted fromThe Red Tempestwithout incident and continued our course, following the Free Channels close to Mereish waters until darkness fell, then veering across the line.We sounded no bells and we lit no lanterns, though we spied others on the horizon.
Either Olsa or Sam attended every watch, lending their Sooth’s foresight to the task of keeping us away from prying eyes.Spring on the Winter Sea, they said, was a fortuitous time—a time of great luck or greater ill fortune.The former, thankfully, seemed to grace us.
During one of Samuel’s watches, I joined Olsa in the main cabin.She sat at the central table with a lantern swinging overhead and an array of papers spread around her—the documents Faucher had given to Samuel, along with the cipher that was intended to decode them.
“How goes it?”I asked the Usti, sinking down across from her with a mug of hot tea.
The older woman frowned and picked up a page covered with indecipherable Mereish.“I am beginning to wonder if this Faucher is Yissik Ocho himself.These are encoded, and not lightly, either.I believed this here to be a key to the cipher, but I cannot unravel it.Ris cannot.Why did he think Samuel could?”
Ris was Olsa’s ghisting.I saw the being’s spectral flesh flutter across Olsa’s hands at the sound of her name.
“Who, ah, is Yissik Ocho?”I asked.
“An old Usti god.The trickster who led St.Helga to her death in a snowstorm,” the other woman clarified.“The Mereish call him Saint Yalen, Saint of Fortune.”
I picked up one of the letters and tilted it towards the light.Tane, too, turned her attention to the paper, but the beautiful, sweeping letters remained as obscure as ever.
“All I have learned today—or that I have guessed—is that all of these are copied from originals,” Olsa said.“Their dates, which Samuel deciphered last night, are years apart, but this paper is all new, and the writing matches Faucher’s supposed key.”
“So Faucher kept the originals.”I laid the paper back down.“That seems natural.”
The older woman let out a long breath and sat back, lacing her fingers over her breasts.“Tane, will you try?”
“She doesn’t recognize the writing.”
“Try, please?”
Tane slipped from my skin with my next breath and considered the papers, rounding the table in a slow, steady gait.She could not pick the pages up, linen as they were.But she stopped in front of the key, clearly displayed, and stared down.I felt her thoughts as distant whispers, a quiet wind through a forest canopy.
She lifted her sea-glass eyes to Olsa.Did you try to read it in the Dark Water?
Why would I do that?Her response was inaudible, channeled through Ris, but came to my mind all the same.
Tane gestured to the table.Faucher gave them to Samuel, a Sooth.They are indecipherable, yet clearly intended to have meaning.Why not try everything?
Faucher is no Sooth, though, I interjected.How would he make something like that?Is it even possible to tie paper to the Dark Water?It’s not wood or flesh or bone.
Tane glanced between us, disapproving.Both your powers come from the Other, and yet somehow you forget it pervades everything.
Olsa stood.“Fine, we will try.Mary, join me?”
I hesitated.Tane slipped back through the wood of the table and into my bones.
“I’ll only have four breaths,” I reminded her.Even beingghiseauand bonded to a Mother Ghisting, my body was still human, and taking in too much of the Other’s foreign air would begin to change me.Unlike Sam, whose physical body remained in the mortal world when he looked into the Other, mine came with me.I truly walked into that other place, and so we had begun to call it Otherwalking.
“And?”Olsa countered, unbothered.“You should practice.”
“But it’s dangerous.And uncomfortable,” I mewed, heard how pathetic I sounded, and caught myself.“Fine, I’ll come.”
Olsa’s smile was smug as she reached out her hand.I rarely missed my mother—I’d spent most of my life without her—but the look in Olsa’s eyes and the feel of her fingers in mine reminded me painfully of her absence.
Olsa’s eyes took on a distant quality.I inhaled, deep and only a little shaky, and let Tane tug me out of the human world.
The ship faded to transparency, bulkheads growing thinner and thinner until I could see an endless expanse of black waves.A chorus of lights awoke, glinting like stars at dusk.
