I suddenly remembered her question, and the way the Kennelmaster had laughed.
“Do you regret it?” I asked.
“How can I regret my own life?” she asked. “How can I regret everything I did when it was for our people? When I thought that I was doing what was necessary to save them?”
“To savethem?” I pointed out. I felt something twist in my stomach: the knowledge that, despite being a member of the Silvereyes Clan, despite being my mother’s son, despite being Yorîmu’s student, I was still something separate from the rest of them. I was still something other, a man whose existence had been for a single purpose, only to find that now that purpose had changed. What did you call a bow when there was no animal to hunt? Or a boat when the sea had dried up?
“Doyouregret it?” Iradîo asked, her eyes on me. I tightened my lips, knowing that she likely saw through me. Still, I considered her question.
Under my hands, the wood of the railing was smooth from years of touch, from the crew’s maintenance. This was no ill-maintained ship. This had once been the prize of the Jolushi fleet.
“I don’t regret it. But I do wonder who I could have been if I had known the future. I thought my life would be different. I thought my life would beoveras soon as I accomplished my task and it made me live with one foot already in a sea serpent’s mouth. If I had known the future, could I have been happy being someone else?”
“And?” Iradîo asked.
I didn’t need to look over to know Iradîo was staring at me sharply, her fierce expression likely echoing my own; we shared a desperate desire to understand if someday, we could both findhappiness in the fates that we chose for ourselves, rather than the ones that had been chosen for us.
“I must believe I can.” I thought of Tallu, asleep in his rooms below, how he had rejected the destiny given to him and found his happiness in destroying it. I thought of the future I was building for him: one free of all of the burdens his father had put upon him, a destiny where both he and I were able to simply live and discover who we were without the empire that had defined both of us.
“What will you do now?” Next to me, Iradîo looked down, fisting her hands on the railing. Above, the owl hooted again, and I wondered what the sailors thought of that, a forest animal following us out to sea. Did they wonder if it was a bad omen? Or did they accept that it was the way of their new consort and his cousin?
“I don’t know,” Iradîo admitted. “I thought of running away.”
Somewhere in Dragon’s Rest Mountains, there was a small cabin for Tallu and me to live, for us to find happiness, for us to find somewhere to simplybe. We would chop wood in the autumn and store food in the summer, so that in the winter, when the snows piled high and we couldn’t escape, we would have months to be with each other and learn who we were together.
“But you didn’t.” My heart beat heavy, the image of the cabin fading. Iradîo’s lips twitched and she shook her head.
“I didn’t,” she agreed. “I may not be useful in the way I trained to be for so many years, but you are right. We can start again. You and I were trained to be one thing, and now we choose what we will be next. I choose to serve the north, even if it is not as their queen, even if there are no plans to wrangle or alliances to cement. I will serve the north the best I am able. And you?”
“I would serve Tallu,” I said. “I will save our nation and the man I love.”
“And if those two things are separate?” Iradîo asked.
“I cannot see a world where serving Tallu is at odds with mydesire to save my home,” I said. In the dark, there was a rough squawking sound, a seal’s bark that was answered in kind.
“I often wondered if your mother and Yorîmu were doing you a disservice by cloistering you and your sister,” Iradîo said. “Had they damaged you somehow? I think they have.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“It is late,” Iradîo said. “Soon it will be morning. Sleep well, cousin.”
She turned without answering my question, waving a hand when I called after her. I stared out at the dark water when she was gone, listening to the small noises of life around me until I heard the sound of another bell marking the hour. Then I went below deck, finding Tallu asleep still.
As I lay next to him, my body still cold from the night air, I could feel my stomach clenching as I acknowledged that Iradîo was right: there might come a time when my loyalty split between Tallu and the north, and I needed to choose one over the other. And when that happened, I wasn’t sure which one I would choose.
The changein the coastline happened gradually. The Imperium’s rolling hills and grassy beaches grew speckled with trees whose long branches trailed down to the ground. The land itself became pockmarked by inlets and estuaries, the trees losing their uprightness, their branches dripping with green leaves that reached for the water.
The first islands of Tavornai were nothing more than hard, dark, charred things. The land had been poisoned and the trees burned. Nothing could grow on the islands for at least one generation. Tallu and I, side by side, observed the landscape while Iradîo stayed on the top deck near the wheel and the sailors and soldiers bustled around us.
Once, the elven kingdom had been a rich swampland with an archipelago curling around the land, as though the sea and land had simply become one, interchangeable. It was said that the elven trees had held magic and could be shaped to grow anything an elf desired.
If Forsaith had been known for its orchards and vineyards, its harvests that easily fed four nations, and Krustau had been known for its gems and jewels, sung free from stone and ready to sit on the brow of any king, Tavornai had been known for its clever machines, the endless knowledge of elves who lived too long lives and had little else to do with their time but create.
And then the Imperium had burned the elder trees that held all the knowledge of centuries and could just as easily bloom cogs and machine-workings as they could flowers.
Iradîo leaned forward, whispering to a sea bird on her shoulder, and the creature ruffled its feathers, making a cranky sound as Terror spat curses at it from the rigging.
“Foul thing! It thinks it deserves the same meals as us for nothing! Seagulls are filthy creatures and are as pathetic asrats.”
