Song of Ashes

35: A Heavy Price

The beach was littered with corpses.

From where she stood, just where the land sloped and smoothed and gave way to the sand, Sarka saw them only as dark human shapes interspersed with flotsam from the wreckage. Living men milled about, examining the scene.

Perhaps they were officials from Deynaport. Perhaps they were scavengers.

Sarka began to walk on feet she couldn't feel. Her gaze darted from one still form to another, recognizing familiar figures, but there was a barrier between her eye and her mind: this could not be; it was a dream; it was delusion.

As she crossed by a boulder, something caught her eye: a slash of colored silk lying wet on the sand, obscenely bright in a gray landscape. Following the sash with her eyes, Sarka saw a tangle of red hair and a face as white as the underbelly of a fish.

Sarka fell to her knees and scrabbled over the sand. "Captain." She pushed the woman's salt-crusted braids back from her face, revealing blue lips and eyes that did not see. "Captain?"

Her gaze slid down from Etza's blank face to her still shoulders. No breath.

With trembling fingers, Sarka pushed Etza's head back, revealing the vulnerable stretch of her neck and the mottled black-and-blue bruises that ringed it. A wave of nausea swept over her.

"Did you know her, child?"

She jerked round to see who had spoken, lost her balance, and fell to her rump in the sand. "Go away."

Konn, the priest, had followed her. He stood a few paces away, his calm expression touched with sympathy as he searched Sarka's face.

"Go away," Sarka said again.

"You do not need to bear your grief alone."

"I'm not grieving." She did not know what she was feeling, but these were not tears of grief. They were hot on her cold cheeks. They burned her throat, her eyes. It hurt to cry, and her head felt full. Her chest, too. One or the other would surely burst, and she would bleed and bleed and die.

The priest watched her for a moment, his hands hidden somewhere in his sleeves. She could not trust a man with no hands. His feet squelched in the sand as he took a step toward her. She drew back. His face blurred before her eyes as he said, "Sarka."

"Go away!"

"I know who you are. I know whence you come, child."

The fear came over her, a shock, even through the grief-but-not-grief and the tears. She struggled to stand. She had to get away.

"Sarka."

She screamed, "Look at her! Look at her! She died!"

"Yes, child. She's gone. What happened? I can help you."

The tears caught, scratched, burned, clawed. She struggled to swallow them now. "She helped me. She helped me and she's dead. Go away."

"I can help you."

"No one can help me. You'll die, too. Just shut up! Shut up and leave me alone!"

Konn did shut up, but he did not go away. Sarka's legs felt weak. She slid down to sit on the sand again, breathing in unsteady gasps and looking first at the corpse of the captain, then across the beach at the litter of bodies and wreckage, all that was left of a ship that had been buzzing with life and purpose just a few weeks ago.

There was only one explanation for what had happened. With her escape, Sarka had drawn Etza into Kogoren's web. Etza had not been punished when the others had run, but no one else had made it as far as Sarka had. By overcoming her terror, she had sealed Etza's fate.