The Drowning Eyes (6 page)

“But now nobody can do anything,” Shina said. “It’s—you need to—the new eyes change you,” she said. “Once you have them, you need them—and you need the icon.”

“What,” Kodin said. “Does it—control the eyes or something?”

“Kind of.” Shina nodded. “We’re not actually supposed to talk about how it works.” She gave them a weak smile and sipped her water again. When she finished, she corked the skin and blinked slowly for a few moments. “I—ugh.” She rubbed her forehead. “I don’t want to be rude, but do we have any food left?”

“What do you want?” Tazir asked, turning around and stepping to the pantry. “We still have some fresh mangoes, a sack of dried ananas, and—”

“A mango would be wonderful,” said Shina. She got to her feet, wobbling a little bit as she stood. Tazir took a step toward her, but she put her hand up. “I’m fine.”

“All right,” Tazir replied.

As Kodin got out one of the still-green fruits they’d bought from the discount vendor in Jepjep, Chaqal started swearing in Kuri abovedecks.

“Cap, I need you up here,” she called down.

“Coming,” Tazir said. “Kodin, we might need you too.”

Shina looked for somewhere to set her mango. “I can—”

“Nah, girl,” Kodin said. “You stay here and get feeling better.”

Shina turned the corners of her mouth down and grumbled something as she slumped back into the hammock. Kodin rolled his eyes and followed Tazir up the ladder into the blustery sunlight abovedecks.

Chaqal was at the boom, glaring at the sail while she fiddled around for an angle that worked. “I think we need to adjust the starboard tension again,” she said. “The wind shifted back.”

“Are you serious?” Tazir said.

“I mean, we can just beat into it for however long it takes to switch back again,” she said, “but that’s gonna be thirsty work.”

“May as well pull line while we’re all awake,” said Kodin.

As the three of them got to work shifting the belly to the other side of the sail, Tazir noticed a familiar black puffball sticking out of the hatch. Shina didn’t say a word as she watched, sucking on her mango.

“Go back to bed,” Chaqal yelled when she noticed her. “You can’t—”

“What’s our speed?” Shina asked.

“Not great,” Tazir snapped. “And it won’t get better until we fix this—Kodin, I got my end.” She gripped the rope and held it tight over one shoulder.

Shina wiped her mouth on the back of her hand and looked up at the sail, her eyebrows furrowed. “How far are we from the next port?”

“I would call it eighty miles,” said Tazir. “Which, at the rate we’re going, is looking to be about two days’ time.”

Shina tore the last chunk of mango from the pit and swallowed it. “How much fruit do we have?” she asked.

“We’ve got nine more of those mangoes,” said Chaqal.

“If I eat another, I can try and call up another wind for us.”

“
Now
she offers,” Tazir said.

“Is that a good idea?” Kodin asked, his eyes intent on the knot he was finishing. “All right, I’m tied down.”

Tazir threaded her end of the rope through its winch and held it tight with one hand while she wound it with the other. “Got it!”

“I’ve done it before,” Shina said.

Kodin gave her a good long gaze with his mouth turned down and his brows knit together. “You know, that’s a mighty duty you’re taking on there.”

The kid’s mouth trembled. It occurred to Tazir that Shina probably knew that duty more deeply than anyone else on the boat.

“Yep,” Shina said. She managed a brave smile for Tazir and Kodin.

There being no further objections to her plan, the kid retreated belowdecks to try to get herself in storm-spitting condition. By the time she came back up, the wind had switched twice, and the
Giggling Goat
was only a little bit closer to the next port. Tazir wasn’t sure about Kodin, but she was glad to see the Windspeaker climbing up on deck, a watchful Chaqal at her back. How many times, she wondered, had she glanced back to check up on her, made sure there were no worrisome noises coming from the hatchway?

“Hey, kid,” Tazir called. “You ready for some easy work?”

Shina smiled weakly. Her bony hands were curled into fists. “I think so.”

“Well,” Tazir said, “not being a Stormcaller myself, I guess I don’t know where to start.” She waved her hand around the ship deck. “I’ll leave this job to you.”

“Thanks,” Shina muttered. She paced around for a few steps like a dog looking for somewhere to sleep, then got down on her knees. For a few minutes, nothing happened—Shina just knelt there, perfectly still, lips barely open, face and palms held up toward the sky.

Chaqal was staring, captivated by the lanky girl who had begun to rock back and forth a little like a tree in a stiff breeze. Kodin was glaring at her with his arms crossed, standing there all puffed up like he was ready to drown her if she tried anything funny. Tazir realized her fingernails were digging into her palms as she watched Shina work.

The girl’s lower lip jerked down, and a breath shuddered into her rib cage like she was about to cry. Indeed, a sharp little gasp did emerge from her lips at the apex of it—but instead of sound, she exhaled that same strange, thick mist she’d vomited on the beach in Kuhon.

Except this time, the mist wasn’t colored a thick leaden grey. It was pearly—kind of blue, kind of, oh, maybe yellow, even—and though it was thick as molasses, it was somehow as clear as glass. Tazir watched as it drifted out from Shina’s murmuring lips, across the air above the deck, and then up toward the sky. She was struck by how beautiful it was, the whole storm-spitting thing. Why would you want to lock up a talent like that? Why would you want to mutilate it and brainwash it until it was domesticated?

“Uhh—” Kodin was staring not at the mist, but at the sail. It had gone completely limp, as had the air around the
Giggling Goat
.

Tazir felt her fingernails dig into her palm. When she looked at Shina, the mist had disappeared.

“Ohh?” Chaqal pointed at the sail. “Maybe—”

Tazir saw it, too. A new wind—a
better
wind—was filling the striped canvas. The belly they had so carefully placed with rope tension was now useless—actually, worse than that. “Hey, Kodin!”

“Yeah.”

Without another word between them, Tazir and her first mate went about lining up the sail and the wind. Now and then their eyes would meet, and they’d look at Shina, and they’d look at each other, and then they’d look as far away from each other as they could. This was weird.

Once the sail was angled as efficiently as they could get it, Kodin went to the stern to check their speed. Shina had opened her eyes again; she was leaning back on the heels of her hands and breathing heavy, as though she’d just run a race.

She looked up at Tazir and gave her a faint, shaky smile. “I’ll be fine in a moment,” she said. “That should—that should help us out a little bit.”

“I’d say,” Tazir said. “Hey, what’s our speed?”

“I need a few minutes to be sure,” Kodin said, “but we’ve picked up—we’re doing maybe ten or twelve knots right now.”

“Holy shit,” Tazir muttered . She looked at the kid, sitting stoically on the deck as if she hadn’t done a thing.

“The wind should hold for several days,” Shina said as she stood. She wobbled, took a deep breath, and went to the railing. Her smile had faded into a tight-jawed stare at the horizon. “Yeah,” she said, as if to herself. “A few days, at least.”

* * *

After only half a day, Tazir spotted land. The island of Moliki was a low, wooded collection of hills that sat to one side of a reef where the locals dove for spiny lobsters. Just the thought of one of those succulent sons of bitches, all steamed up on top of rice with coconut sauce hot enough to make your eyes bleed from three feet away, was enough to get Tazir licking her lips.

“That’s a welcome sight,” Kodin said, pointing toward the horizon.

“No shit,” Tazir replied. “You got a glass?” Though she had seen Shina spit the wind with her own eyes, she still didn’t quite believe that she was already looking at Moliki.

“Here.” Kodin handed her the intricately carved spyglass he carried around his neck.

“Thanks.” Tazir put the glass to her eye and turned the handle until the city came into—that couldn’t be right. She adjusted the lens again, but—she
had
been in focus.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” Tazir handed the spyglass back to Kodin. Her eyes were wide, and her lips were hanging open. “Or at least,” she murmured, “nothing that the kid needs to see just yet.”

Shina had first noticed the silence when she’d been stretching the wind out, past Moliki and northward toward the long banks. It wasn’t unusual, of course, for a small port to be a little quiet on a hot afternoon. Shina hadn’t believed that it was truly
silent—
she wasn’t so refined in wind-spitting that she never got a mistaken impression.

As it turned out, silence was an understatement.

“I think most everybody got to safety,” the Captain said, giving her a smile. “I’ve waited out a hurricane here myself—they have big, smooth roads and plenty of hills to shelter in.”

Shina said nothing and kept staring out at what was left of Moliki.

The storm must have hit them straight behind from the south, and suddenly. The wooden wreckage of ships made a tangled line on the shore of the harbor, dotted with bodies swelling in the sun. Although the stone foundations of some of the buildings still stood, nearly every wooden building had been smashed by a storm surge.

And she’d done it all herself.

A flash of motion on the beach caught her eye. An old woman was tearing apart a pile of broken timbers, her movements desperate and erratic. Now and then, she would pause in her work to clutch at her face, and her wails carried across the harbor.

There were others, too, searching for evidence of hope in the wreckage of their homes. It was one thing to be hit by a natural storm, or a storm called up by somebody trained and stone-eyed. Those storms—they followed rules, or at least existed within the same limits as storms that followed rules.

I did this,
she thought to herself. She’d hated wild Windspeakers in school—the ones who didn’t want to be there, who thought they had some kind of right to do as they pleased with the weather. Some of them just didn’t know what a storm could do if you spat it out and left it.

Others didn’t
care
. They were worse—and now Shina might as well be among them.
Not my problem,
they’d say.
Build your houses a little stronger, and it won’t be yours either.

“You saved our lives,” the Captain said softly. She put one of her big, rough hands on Shina’s shoulder and squeezed.

Shina opened her mouth, but couldn’t think of a word that would hold her horror. How many lives had she taken? How many more livelihoods—livelihoods she had sworn to protect—had she dashed against the rocks without a single thought?

She had to turn away. A sob rose in her chest, but she bit it back down. Who was
she
to cry over this city? Who was
she
to mourn people whose lives hadn’t even occurred to her when she’d spit that storm back in Kuhon?

The Captain patted her gently on the back. Shina flinched at the touch, but said nothing. “It’s gonna be fine,” she said. “It’s not your fault.”

Shina’s mouth hung open. “How?” she said, in a voice that squeaked and whined.

“You did what you had to,” the Captain replied. “You didn’t—you didn’t mean to do all this.”

“But I didn’t think to avoid it, either.” Shina swallowed, shook her head. “Same outcome. Same thing.”

The Captain gave her a weird look and opened her mouth, but shut it again and turned her eyes back to the shore. The two of them stood there in silence as the Captain moored the
Giggling Goat
at what was left of a short dock near the northern rim of the harbor. The crew disembarked with stony faces and hushed voices—fitting for visitors of the dead.

“There’s a fresh spring not far from here,” said the Captain, gesturing to the south. Without comment, the crew followed her into the worst of the destruction.

The main street of town was strewn with debris. A dog was harassing some chickens in the fractured remains of a butcher’s shop. Overripe fruits had washed out of their seller’s stall and lodged themselves in all kinds of strange places. A woman with long locked hair lay half-buried in splintered wood, her filmy eyes barely cracked open in the sun.

Shina stumbled, then sank to her knees. This was all too much—too much to even understand. The awful images swirled around her head, vivid before her eyes even after she had covered her face and begun weeping. There was no holding the tears back anymore. Her grief surged out of her chest in huge grey waves, salty and painful.

“It should have been someone else,” she moaned into her damp palms. “Anyone else, anyone
better—
”

“Hey, now,” the Captain said, at her side once again. “You did what you had to.”

“But I did it
wrong,
” Shina said.

Tazir put a hand beneath her arm and drew Shina to her feet. “Nah,” she said. “Whoever—whoever did the thing before the storm went in your stomach.
They
might have screwed up, but you—you’re innocent.” She took Shina by the hand and led her forward. “You didn’t have a choice in this.”

Ahead of them, Kodin and Chaqal were looking through the rubble, lifting boards and logs and stones, calling for people who’d been trapped.

“They must’ve been in a hurry,” Kodin called back, “but I think most of them got out.”

From down the beach, a fresh wail of grief confirmed his guess. Shina shut her eyes and took a deep breath.
I’m the last Windspeaker,
she reminded herself.
I’m the best option we have.

A man’s voice came from uphill, although they couldn’t see where. “Hey!” he was calling. “Hey! Hey, over here!”

The Captain and Kodin looked around, blinking. The Captain chewed on her lip.

“Hey!” the voice repeated. Another voice asked something in a dialect Shina didn’t understand.

“There, coming toward the harbor mouth!” replied the first. “Ships!”

The Captain looked back at Shina and raised her eyebrows. From where they were, what was left of the marketplace blocked the view of the harbor.

“Come on,” Shina murmured to Tazir. “I need to get back to the ship.” She pulled her hand from the Captain’s grip and ran toward the ruin. Her stomach felt like she’d just swallowed a big gulp of air—or maybe a handful of Galinese death chiles. “I forgot my—”

When they rounded the corner, they could see those red-striped sails, those painted dragons.

“—compass.”

For a few moments, Shina and Tazir watched the almost silent advance of the Dragon Ships. There were three this time. One of them—going by the fire kindling in Shina’s stomach, at least—had the icon on board.

“I need to eat,” Shina said. She turned around and started searching the street for something that wasn’t too badly damaged. Wedged in a wrecked doorframe, she found a mango that was just beginning to rot. With shaking fingers, she peeled off the spoiled part and devoured it like she hadn’t eaten in weeks. Her stomach ached more and more with every bite—by the end, it was a chore to chew the oversweet pulp and get it down her throat.

“Here,” Tazir said, tossing her some browning bananas she’d found beneath an overturned rowboat.

“Go get Chaqal and Kodin,” Shina replied. She scanned the ruined city for a good place to sit. “Get to safety.”

Tazir nodded. “And you?” she asked.

Shina kicked some debris off of a flat stone slab. “I’ll be fine,” she said through a mouthful of fruit.

“You’ll be fine?” The Captain glared at her. “You’ll be—dammit, Shina, you passed out last time!”

“This is my duty,” Shina replied.

“That’s great!” Tazir said. “It’s
my
duty to make sure my—
you
don’t get killed trying to save us.”

Shina met the Captain’s eyes. She was standing all puffed up with her fists balled and her shoulders drawn up on her neck. “Your what?” she said.

“Never mind,” Tazir said. She gritted her teeth and turned to leave.

“If you and Chaqal want to come back for me,” Shina called, “I won’t be able to stop you.”

Tazir stopped, turned back. She flashed a smile at Shina before running off to find Chaqal and Kodin.

The ships were close enough that Shina could hear the monstrous heartbeat of the oar drums thumping across the water. They were coming in slow—cautiously, even, judging by their formation.

Shina stuffed half a banana in her mouth and forced herself to swallow, kneading at her throat and shutting her eyes. Her gut was roiling, burning, starting to swell with the pressure of the storm building inside it—but she couldn’t let it out. Not yet.

She sat down with her legs crossed and shut her eyes. As her chest began to rise and fall in rhythm with the waves, she could start to feel the weather in her body. The harbor was bathed in the wind she’d called the day before—but here, the air was a little slacker. Spent. Shina frowned as it filled her lungs, and when she exhaled she cast her mind out as far as it would go along the filaments of herself that remained in the wind.

Now, she could see clearer. Well, she couldn’t really
see,
but that was the best she could explain what she was doing. The wind wasn’t weak, she realized. It was slow, straining against something in its way.

The storm in her belly grew. It wouldn’t be long, now; whoever had first designed it had made it more than capable of bursting out of her body the hard way.

Shina could feel it more distinctly now—the huge, wet, dark mass struggling with her wind. It rumbled and groaned, weakened in the last few hours but still angry, ready to lash out with surging waves and stinging salt spray. When Shina reached out for it, the storm growled and tightened; several mammoth waves raced through the sea around it.

She had not created this.

Somewhere behind her, back on Moliki, a ripple of pain went through her body. Shina struggled to stay focused on her storm. It would take a huge, rapid wind to move a wild storm like this, and it would take a wild storm like this to dash the hollow hulls of the Dragon Ships against the rocks of Moliki Harbor.

Come out,
she whispered to the storm inside her.
Come out here and make a friend.

She could tell that her forehead had smacked against stone—and then her whole body smacked against something else. She kept her focus on the storm.
Come out,
she said.

As a dark, foaming wind shook the sea around the wild storm, Shina was vaguely aware that her body was seizing up and thrashing. She hoped the Captain really had returned for her.

Come back,
she whispered, stroking the storm that was now taking shape on the clear blue sea. It was swirling around with the wild storm, testing its boundaries, but not yet pushing it where she wanted it to go. She tugged on it, struggled with it, pleaded with it—

But wouldn’t it be easier, she thought, if she just spat out the last storm she had in her stomach?

All things considered, it wasn’t the wisest idea in the world. She had no way of knowing whether her body was safe or not, and there was a good chance she’d drown along with the raiders who came in the Dragon Ships. But what was one more corpse among the masses of innocent people she’d already drowned? What was her own safety compared to the safety of the thousands who lived under the threat of the Dragon Ships? What was the point of trying to stay alive if it meant giving up the
one chance
she had at making it bearable to live with her powers?

She had to strain to call this one out. For a frozen moment, she felt her focus slipping—terrified, she jolted herself back into her task. This wind did not want to go. It did not want to leave her mouth. It did not want to press its bulk against the mass of hissing cloud and spray in front of it. Even when Shina had drawn the headwind to the side, she had to use every ounce of energy she had left to push this mass of cloud back toward Moliki.

She stayed conscious until it was almost in the harbor mouth.