Page 101 of Minor Works of Meda

“Kalcedon!” I shrieked. He didn’t answer, didn’t wake. They were carrying him further away. The ropes didn’t loosen. I curled my cramped fingers, trapped beneath them; useless. I couldn’t form anything properly, even if I had the power to. I kept screaming his name.

As the rowboat left the curving channels and returned to the Etegen, the spell on me finally began to fade. The ropes loosened and fell away, my hands and feet tingling like needle-stabs as the blood returned. I stumbled to my feet and lunged for the stern of the boat. I hauled the anchor, panting as I wrestled with the heavy weight, finally pulling it up from the silt and mud bottom of the marsh.

Then I raised the sail and began to slip down the channel, picking up speed. But even though no rowboat could match a sailboat for speed, the rowboat had a head start, and plenty of magic at its rider’s command.

The rowboat met with the warship, and both blinked out of view. I couldn’t feel a trace of magic in the air.

Kalcedon and his captors were gone.

Chapter 44

The sea was terribly wide and terribly empty.

I sailed to where the warship had been, frantically hunting for even the faintest flicker of magic. But there was nothing, not in any direction. For all I knew the ship had sunk beneath the surface and slithered away like a sea-drake. All I could see were the waving grasses of the marsh, and the hazy cliffs of Nis-Illous.

A storm petrel flew overhead. I tracked it desperately, wishing it was larger and full of magic; a faerie in costume. But to all appearances it was just a dumb, stupid bird. Flying over a dumb, stupid sea. A sea that had swallowed the one person I cared most about in the world.

I screamed. I screamed as loud as I could, and I hoped the damned, horned, blasted faeries could hear me, and hear my rage.

They were idiots for leaving me alive, I thought, because I was going to hunt them all down and I was going to kill them and I was going to bring Kalcedon home. Except that I was just a powerless human.

And I didn’t even know which way they had gone.

Chapter 45

The wolf-boat wasn’t like the other fish-craft in Missaniech village, all of which were built for fishing, not speed.

There were a lot of stares when I sailed through the scattered boats. There were even more stares when I tied the wolf to the dock and stepped back onto Nis-Illous.

To my right, the husbands raked salt from the salt-ponds by the water, gathering glistening white piles left by layers of evaporated sea. I saw a baby strapped to a man’s back, and a bigger one sitting to the side beneath a cloth shade, turning over one of the wood buckets in his pudgy hands.

To my left, the old women sat where they always did. One raised a hand to me.

“Eudoria’s girl,” she called in a weak voice. “The old witch didn’t come down for the merchants last week. Batia can sell her cured sausage or grain, if she needs.”

I stared at her for a long moment, my brain slowly trying to make sense of her words above the roar in my skull. Why was anybody trying to talk to me, at a time like this? Couldn’t she see I was in the middle of something? Didn’t she know the world was in pieces?

“Eudoria’s dead,” I managed at last.

I started to walk past them, towards the road to the tower.

“Was it the faerie-boy?” the woman called after me.

I stopped walking and slowly turned. The grandmothers all watched me from their little stools. My mouth felt dry and my head was pounding.

“...Kalcedon?” I asked quietly. She clucked her tongue.

“Him with the gray skin. Whatever his name. He do for her?”

Never mind that he had lived in the tower above them since he was barely older than the babies by the salt-ponds. Never mind that he’d accompany Eudoria down to the village nearly every time she went.

“You’re asking if Kalcedon killed the woman who raised him,” I clarified. The women shifted uneasily, perhaps spooked by the tone of my voice. I lifted my chin. I remembered clearly now why I hated Missaniech and the little towns like it, the little towns like the one I was from. “If he killed the woman he dearly loved. Kalcedon? Who loves to garden? That Kalcedon? The one who cured that root-rot in the village vineyard a year ago? The one who brought down basket after basket of vegetables when that big storm upset the fishing two years back? The one who healed a fisher’s arm when she fell off her ladder, fixing her roof? That Kalcedon?”

The woman waved me off with a scowl, unwilling to answer. I took a step closer.

“No. Kalcedon didn’t,” I said. “Kalcedon has got a better heart than anyone in this village, you miserable sack of bones.”

The woman spat on the ground. I curled my lip, then turned and hiked the two miles to the tower. She was lucky I was so weak, or else I might have done something stupid, something even prickly Kalcedon wouldn’t have approved of.

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