Page 37 of The Moon Blessed King
‘No,’ Lio replies. ‘No…I don’t.’
‘I don’t think so either,’ Cat agrees.
The whales swim on. Oblivious to their tensions and concerns.
They’re a sign of peace. A superstitious sign of peace but a sign nonetheless. ‘Then…let’s trust the whales,’ Fen offers, and Cat grins at that. The first sign of amusement she’s seen on his face since before they left for Altas.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Let’s trust the whales for a little longer.’
And if the whales are right: their temporary peace will hold.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Elician
It is dark in this room.
Dark enough that Elician wonders if it is a real place at all or if he is in another dream. Another hall. Another room waiting for the flood to come. It is the uncertainty that leaves him relaxing deeper into his pillow, waiting languidly for the peaceful flow of promise and potential to lap against his skin. Listening for that echo of waves and words whispering in a language he never learned to speak and yet still could understand:Who am I?
‘El?’
He turns his head. Barely gets a chance to see the person the voice belongs to before arms are jerking him upright in a fierce embrace that leaves his head spinning and consciousness teetering back towards the brink. ‘Fen,’ he mumbles against her hair.
‘Gods, El! Do you have any idea how long it’s been?’
No. No idea at all.He blinks, struggling to pull her into focus. She seems to be glowing, radiating with life and purpose and untapped potential. It ripples across her skin like a stone dropped in a too-still pond, rolling and rolling on and on.
She answers her own question when he fails to provide one of his own. ‘It’s been five days!’
‘Oh…that’s it?’ He had dreamed of lifetimes. He had heldlifetimes in his hand. He had walked into a river of possibility and all the world had felt as though it was exactly where it needed to be. That every life is sacred, and everything happens because it is meant to pass.
‘That’s it?No one knew what todowith you. Cat’s been running himself ragged. Lio’s been unbearable – we didn’t know if you were ever going to wake up!’
‘What happened? While I was…’ Swimming, wading, bathing, drifting. ‘Away.’
Fen pulls back and slumps heavily against the bed, sitting at his thigh. ‘They just finished a census, counting everyone and seeing who’s here…who’s left…who’s missing. There are thirty-seven thousand, four hundred and twelve people in Altas. That’s including all the soldiers who diedat least onceduring the melee. You brought back thirty-seven thousand, four hundred and twelve people.’
He slides down on the bed, weary muscles struggling to keep him up. His pillow is comfortably warm beneath his head, his spine eager to settle back into place. Even his eyes are prepared to close and let him slumber once more. ‘Five days isn’t long for all that work,’ he muses idly, thoughts turning soupy.
‘Suppose not,’ Fen grants him. ‘But we worried about you the whole time. You brought people back fromashes, Elician.’
‘What?’ He blinks, trying desperately to clear his head. The exhaustion is crushing through him, all-consuming. ‘I did what?’
‘Those…those…monstershad been disposing of the corpses. Burning them on funeral pyres. But you broughteveryoneback to life. Every single person in the city, even the ones whose bodies were no longerbodiesanymore. All of them.’
‘I didn’t know.’
‘How could you not know what you were doing? When I bring people back, I know I’m bringing them back.’
Elician is not entirely sure what to say to that. He had never seentheir bodies, never known the total number of all those he was reaching for. He had simply felt the endless death and destruction of a city full of his people who wanted nothing more than to go about their lives without getting slaughtered by an army of the dead.
‘I could feel their souls,’ Elician says. ‘And all of them were…it felt like they knew that it was wrong.’ Elician closes his eyes. He tries to remember what he felt, what it looked like before him. ‘Like they had been thrown to the wrong side of a dam, and all they desperately wanted was to continue flowing forward, but they were being stopped by a barrier.’
‘And…the dam here is death?’ Fen asks slowly.
‘Mm…I could see it. I waded into the river. It should have flowed all around me, but the boulders were too high, and so I moved the stones. I just…I pushed them aside, and when they fell, the river flowed just like it was supposed to in the first place. None of Altas’s citizens were meant to die then. It wasn’t their time. It wasn’tright. So, I just…ensured that they could keep on living, just like they were supposed to. The hardest ones were the ones at the bottom of the river. Sometimes…it felt like I needed to swim into the depths, and I couldn’t breathe as I tried to push them aside. But…they’re all here?’
‘Cat organized a few parties to go through and take a count, and so far, our counts are all coming up clear. No households are missing anyone. Even the homeless population has reported in. All the tourists too. The city didn’t have an accurate census before, but…we can’t find any evidence of someone not returning with the rest. A lot of people wanted to just evacuate and leave. They didn’t want to stay after…everything. Lio and Cat kept them from doing it until we at least had a good sense of who was even here, but they opened the gates up yesterday, once it really did seem like they were all accounted for.’
