Chapter Text
Sharp got her sea-legs after a few days. A relief, but also an irony since she was born by the sheer cliffs of a seaside town. Yet that was a black ocean that strangled with its barren hostility. This ocean bore their ship up on strong rolling hills and surging valleys-- full of promise and vigor. So it took a few days, but she did overcome the roil of her stomach and the wobble in her legs.
What she did not get used to-- would never get used to-- stalked her up and down the decks. Through the mess and to her cabin door. Made her smoky trails itch.
On the second week of the journey Sharp found his cabin, extinguished the nearby sconces, and leaned against the wall for a couple hours after breakfast. He came down the stairs, no wider than a hand’s span, and made so much noise with his heavy steps tangling in his long robes you’d think he was four times his size. He didn’t even check the hall before descending; she’d have called him an easy mark in her previous life. If he were of any consequence at all in the greater scheme of things.
Beyond being a nuisance to her, of course.
He got all the way to only a few strides from his door before he froze at the sight of her.
She pushed from the wall and rolled down the hall on the balls of her boots. His neck craned further and further back as she advanced. The dwarf’s mouth went slack and his eyes widened. She knew he could only make out a vague outline of her-- her height over him and the dark crown of her head-growth-- with what little light seeped down from the stair hatch into the hall’s deep shadows.
“You--” the dwarf managed.
Her hand shot forward. The skull embroidered into the silk of his robes crumpled in her fist as she jerked him toward her, breaking his balance. She kept the robes biting beneath his armpits without quite pulling him off his feet.
“I do not give a fuck what you think I am, priest,” Sharp finally said. Her haze writhed over her neck, reaching toward his twitching cheeks. “I do not care if you think I am blessed by your blighted god. Stop staring at me, you shitheel.”
He inhaled. His cheeks still twitched, but his tongue came loose. “Why do you deny the gifts--”
“No!” she interjected. “No words! I will not spend the rest of this journey stalked by your leers. I am not holy, and trust me, you do not want me to prove to you just how unholy I can be.”
She shook him a bit for emphasis, fully lifted him off the splintered deck flooring, and spun about to switch their positions. He stumbled as she threw him back on his feet, toward his cabin door. Her own feet found the thin stair step easily, quietly.
But she stopped when he spoke.
“You squander the grace of the Twinned God at your peril! We all come to the Wheel in our time, and to pay the toll without fulfilling--”
Sharp whirled and snarled. He stumbled away again and disappeared behind his door with a clatter.
They made the journey to the Dyrwood with a minimum of that staring she’d been so annoyed by, though she could tell every time their gazes briefly met that his words sat barely contained on the tip of his tongue.
-
“You’re a fool, Watcher.”
They’d decided to camp for the night in the main hall of the ruined old keep and laid out bedrolls beneath the splintered and cobwebbed beams. Durance loomed over her as she sat on a pile of what had once been a wall with the map draped over her knees.
“Eh?” Sharp said. “My Aedyran is not so good, I am not with the understanding.” Her accent ran her words rhythmic and thick.
His bulbous eyes narrowed. “Don’t play the idiot foreigner with me. You know what I said.”
She sighed. “I guess this is the part you tell me why I am a fool now.”
“That broken old mage,” he said, leaning into the twisted knobs of his dark staff, “You had a chance buttress these old walls with his soul. Create a bulwark against your enemies with his suffering. Or better yet, imbue yourself with what secrets he stubbornly hoarded, too weak to use them himself. You could have taken from him what was wasted in his mad and shriveled grasp.”
Somewhere in the midst of this Sharp dug out her pipe. She usually waited to smoke with Edér, but it looked like this was going to go on for a while.
“Instead, you cast him back onto the Wheel, all his trials forgotten, all the scorches left upon his soul by violence washed away by the world’s tides.”
She held her hand over the pipe’s bowl and puffed, trying to get the spark to take. Durance’s greasy hair and greasy burnt robes both swung as he leaned further in toward her. The veins of his fist gripping his staff bulged. Unnecessarily, she thought, but what did she know about hedge priests and their whore-goddesses?
Caed Nua suited him. A face marked by time and violence, and walls marked by the same forces. Hollow foundations falling deep beneath the surface and full of unseen monsters. Yes, the place suited him more than her.
His wild eyes roved over her. “Are you, beneath your untruths and glib lies, actually moved by those… scars Berath inflicted on your mortal form?”
She frowned at him. And thought about all the ways she could gut him.
“You owe nothing to that lazy bag of bones,” Durance said. “None of us do. The grand scheme of the Wheel is all good and well, but Berath gives us nothing. They do not actually care for humanity and the life of man. Fate is an excuse for those unwilling to take what they can earn. For those cowards that will not suffer for real change and transformation.”
He tapped his staff. “Bowing to fate will make you weak, Watcher. Bowing to Berath--”
Sharp stood. “I have never bowed to the one you call Berath.”
She spat, uncaring her spittle landed near his feet. She gestured to her head and its crown of dark cartilage. “This? This is no blessing. It is some cosmic joke and gives me no debt to any god.”
“And yet you still followed the will of so-called ‘fate,’” he smiled.
She stilled herself, removed the hand she had at her blades and loosened the sudden tightness in her limbs. Idiot! He had obviously goaded her into anger and she had fallen for it. Such a basic mistake in the blood games of her home, of Vailia, could have cost her dearly.
“I do not need your trials and your suffering, priest,” Sharp said quietly, “To know my strength. I do not need Maerwald’s pain to be a cornerstone of this keep.”
She kicked a fragment of brick and sent it clattering over the cracked tiles. “The place reeks enough without his sweat.”
She stalked away, ending the conversation. Durance was wrong. His goddess was wrong. Suffering was just as like to baptise a man to emerge as a beast as-- as-- shit, who knew. Some fiery truth-speaker and champion. Or whatever it was that Durance was conniving to turn her into. Pain did not elevate kith. She had seen it herself. Pain was just as like to make you turn on your friends and loved ones. To say, well, they were just weak and unworthy! How convenient.
No. Kith toiled in this world for a time, and that was it.
Sharp frowned down into her pipe; she’d let it go cold. That line of thinking bothered her. It was too close to those disciples of Cirono, always watching her, expecting something. Why had she given Maerwald back to the Wheel?
Shit, what did it matter. She kicked another brick.
-
The dreams sometimes took her beyond the towering machine seen through a fever fog. Further down, down and down.
The white-yellow sun pricked relentlessly at her shoulders. Her seat beneath the jagged bare tree gazed on one side off down the main road into the village and its red-tiled roofs, and on the other toward the brown grass that dropped off at the edge of mottled cliffs. Black sea-water and salty froth lashed at the sheer rock.
At the very edge of town a group of men and women in pale and practical tunics, aprons, and skirts hefted a large cotton-wrapped bundle over their shoulders. From the maze of plastered walls behind them, a man in black silk robes darted clumsily after the group. Even here, high above them and by the cliffs, she could see the sweat gleaming off his face.
When the priest reached them, the group halted. Words were exchanged. The conversation dragged. Got heated, from the way a few villagers gestured at him, and he raised his voice loud enough to reach her. Though the words were indistinct.
But she knew anyway. The old woman had belonged to a family from the outskirts. Her living in town had been chance. But the priest should know better. He was new, from a grand city.
He hadn’t had a chance yet to learn that his god only had a superficial place in this land. Like the pretty top of a peach left too long, so the underside went black and liquid.
Finally, the tallest shepherdess pushed the priest into the dirt, a yellow cloud wafting up from beneath him. The group left him squawking in their wake.
She stood. She’d cut across the common pastures to get back to the palace. She didn’t look back to see if they would sign against the sight of her, or even ask her to help them with what they did to the body.