Shiress did not hesitate. She stood, removed her legs from the water, and thereby separated herself from me.
I could still see from Lona’s eyes, which gave me the perfect view of Shiress launching herself at Jaetheiri.
Jaetheiri was a huntguard to the bitter end. Assuming the attack was for Yethyr, she threw herself in front of him, ironically causing that first attack to miss. She unsheathed a dagger just in time to parry the second. Strange reed needles extended from between Shiress’ knuckles. Jaetheiri did not want to find out what poison was surely in them and was alarmed to find them eerily solid when her dagger’s edge met them in a bind.
Shiress had the advantage of surprise and of leverage and of not needing to defend a sleeping prince, and yet, frustratingly, she could not get a hit on the huntguard. Even with Jaetheiri forced to be stationary, her dagger parries and vicious kicks were enough to keep the selkie at bay.
Shiress was not a soldier, not the way Jaetheiri was.
To help her, Lona began to sing. The water rose at her call and lashed at Jaetheiri. She stumbled, caught her footing, and was more confused than alarmed.
Lona could have attacked Yethyr, but didn’t. Comprehending that the real target, for whatever reason, was her, Jaetheiri warily abandoned Yethyr’s body to maneuver herself more properly onto the rock.
Shiress ignored the sleeping prince to follow her and Jaetheiri was both perplexed and relieved.
Fearing the rising water, Jaetheiri tied herself to a jutting-out portion of the rock. She would not be swept off her feet again.
Shiress lunged again as songbound waves pounded Jaetheiri, but still, she could not do so much as scratch her.
She needed more than water to break her concentration
“Start singing,” I commanded the selkies in the water.
I felt their confusion. They did not know how to move the water in a brain without the subject resonating with them. They needed their victims to be watersingers for their lure to work.
“Raise the water to engulf her and sing your lullaby. I will make her hear.”
The selkies trusted me and began to sing. The water in Yethyr’s skull moved to their tune, but while touching the selkie’s minds, I could not be enthralled by it.
The water of the lake began to rise fast. I barely had time to force Yethyr’s sleeping form to hold his breath before he was once again submerged.
The water rose to Shiress’ toes and I could see out of her eyes again.
When it rose higher to touch Jaetheiri, our link became as firm as if she was holding me.
Eagerly, I opened myself up and flooded her with the power of the selkie’s song, just as I had done with Yethyr.
To my shock, she didn’t react.
It was as if she could not hear me or the song at all. Now that I thought about it, she had not reacted when she first entered the water or when I spoke earlier.
But how was that possible? Was our connection interrupted? I entered her mind and was immediately inundated by images. Yethyr falling off a wall. Yethyr falling off The Wily Seal. People drowning as ships burned, as Flazea burned.
I felt all the selkies scream.
Oh. Oh no.
They were all my wielders, all bound with me, all seeing what I see just as I saw through them.
And now they knew Flazea had burned.
Their song became a song of wrath.
The lake became a torrent, an ever-rising whirlpool that consumed everything it touched.
Unconscious Yethyr, me still at his hip, was flung in the current, held taut to Jaetheiri by only a straining rope. Shiress went to cut that rope and I felt Jaetheiri’s dagger leave her hand.
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I felt it plunge into the selkie’s ribs.
I felt Shiress die like I felt all my wielders die. The pain rippled through me and into every single person touched by the lake. The selkies’ scream became a senseless song of violence.
The Wily Seal was knocked down, plunging the whole crew into the water. Names accosted me.
Dozens of thralls and hunters all at once.
Dathari.
Mandorias.
Dethur.
Ruzar.
Kvelir.
Wesed.
Umbar.
Ayathir.
Topaz.
Who the hell was Topaz?
I didn’t have time to wonder. The song of the Selkie thrumming in me was now thrumming through them all.
I tried to break it off, but the music was echoing through them and rebounding onto me. It was too loud to think; it was too loud to feel.
Jaetheiri somehow still could not hear it. The torrent raged around her, the song raged around her, and bound to her rock, she could not be moved. She unsheathed her warfang and slaughtered the next selkie that came within her reach.
And suddenly, I realized she could hear nothing at all, not me, not the screams of pain as her warfang hit blubber, not even the sound of her breath.
I focused on her strangely unresponsive ears and realized I could feel something stuck in them.
Wax ear plugs.
I remembered her finding them in Arsari’s pack back in Flazea, but I had not noticed that she kept them. She must have stuffed up her ears before leaping off The Wily Seal to go after Yethyr.
The selkie came at her in a swarm, eager to devour this “Datrean” woman who killed Shiress, and all their musical might fell on literally deaf ears.
In a cruel twist of fate, the only people unaffected by the song were the very people I was trying to affect. Both Jaetheiri and Wes.
Wes could hear the watersong through me, but as his bony skull lacked any sort of brain fluid to move, he was annoyingly immune to the selkies’ charm.
I felt his irritation as clearly as if he were holding my hilt again.
“Sure! Let’s make the death sword conductive in water,” he said in a bad imitation of my father. “That won’t go wrong, not at all!”
“Don’t mock him!” I cried. It was the first thing I had said to Wes since he threw us both into the forge.
Wes ignored me.
Because he was a skeleton, he sank like a stone.
Because he was a skeleton he wasn't going to drown.
Unlike everyone else.
I could feel the Brinn drowning; I tried to cut off the music flowing from me to them and when that didn’t work, I just tried to remind them to swim.
Some did. I could feel them beginning to try, but most, the vast majority, didn't know how to swim at all.
So many. Dozens and dozens of people were dying and it was all my fault.
The Brinn weren’t my friends, I reminded myself. These people helped sack Datrea; I intended to cause them all ruin!
And yet, as I felt thralls drown, as I felt selkies fall to Jaetheiri’s frantic dagger, as I felt the spirits of them all be ripped from my senses, again and again, as acutely painful as the first time a wielder of mine fell…
I felt only horror.
Wes felt my horror, sitting at the bottom of the lake as chaos churned above him. If he still had a tongue, he would have clucked it. “You should have let me destroy you when we had the chance. I told you this would happen.”
It was out of my power now. For better or worse.
I could only watch through selkie eyes as Jaetheiri stood panting, held up only by the rock she had bound herself to and—
Kept.
On.
Killing.
I felt every stab and every death keenly. I did not shy away from it. I had caused it; I deserved to feel it. The water swirling around Jaetheiri was red with selkie blood and rippling with selkie screams.
The center of a ring of twirling inky red, she looked more like a living Death Circle than a woman.
The selkie were awed by her, cowed by her. They began to sing of Neev, a legendary Flazean sailor who tied himself to driftwood and fought the selkie of old.
They saw Neev in Jaetheiri then and were frightened. They became certain that an angelic might was behind her desperate defiance, and so they fled, down the river and out of Lake Huldrai altogether.
The water calmed in their absence, and Yethyr’s body, locked in that torrent for so long came crashing down onto the rock and out of the water.
I was severed from the dozens of minds still in the lake that had become my vision and finally, that sudden dark quiet, I could think.
Finally, in that dark quiet, I realized I had forgotten to hold Yethyr’s breath for him.
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