Lightsong blinked. His face was pressed up against something painted on the wood. A red panther, glistening in the lanternlight and the rain.
The name of the ship, he remembered, the Red Panther.
He wasn’t Lightsong. Or he was, but he was a much smaller, pudgier version of himself. A man accustomed to being a scribe. To working long hours counting coins. Checking ledgers.
Seeking for lost money. That’s what he’d done. People hired him to discover where they’d been cheated or if a contract hadn’t been paid properly. His job was to look through the books, searching out hidden or confusing twists of arithmetic. A detective. Just not the sort he had imagined.
Waves crashed against the boat. Llarimar, looking a few years younger, yelled for help from the prow. Deckhands rushed to his aid. It wasn’t Llarimar’s ship, or even Lightsong’s. They had borrowed it for a simple pleasure trip. Sailing was a hobby of Llarimar’s.
The storm had come on suddenly. Lightsong lurched back to his feet, barely managing to stay up as he made his way forward, clutching the railing. Waves surged across the deck, and sailors struggled to keep the boat from cap-sizing. The sails were gone, only tattered shreds remaining. Wood creaked and cracked around him. Dark, black water churned in the ocean just to his right.
Llarimar yelled to Lightsong, asking him to lash down the barrels. Lightsong nodded, grabbing a rope and tying one end to a davit. A wave hit, and he skidded, almost falling over the rail into the water.
He froze, gripping the rope, looking into the sea’s mad, terrifying depths. He shook himself free, then tied the rope in a wide slipknot. It came naturally to him. Llarimar had taken him on enough sailing trips now.
Llarimar called for help again. And, suddenly, a young woman left the cabin and ran across the deck, grabbing ropes as if to lend assistance. “Tatara!” a woman called from the cabin. There was terror in her voice.
Lightsong looked up. He recognized the girl. He reached out, rope looped in his hands. He shouted for her to go back below, but his voice was lost in the thunder.
She turned to look at him.
The next wave tossed her into the ocean.
Llarimar cried out in despair. Lightsong watched, shocked. The deep blackness claimed his niece. Engulfed her. Swallowed her.
Such great, horrible chaos. The sea in a storm at night. He felt useless, his heart thumping with fright as he watched the young woman get swept into the churning current. He saw flashes of her golden hair twisting in the water. A weak splash of color passing his side of the ship. It would soon be gone.
Men cursed. Llarimar screamed. A woman wept. Lightsong just stared into the bubbling deep, with its alternating froth and blackness. The terrible, terrible blackness.
He still held the rope in his hand.
Without thinking, he leaped up onto the railing and threw himself into the darkness. Icy water took him, but he reached out, thrashing and churning in the tempest. He barely knew how to swim. Something passed him.
He grabbed it. Her foot. He threw the loop around her ankle, somehow managing to get the knot tight despite the water and the waves. As soon as he did, a surge in the undulating water yanked him away. Sucking him down. He reached upward, toward where lighting lit the surface. That light grew distant as he sank.
Down. Into the black deep.
Claimed by the void.
He blinked, waves and thunder fading. He sat on the cool stones of his cell. The void had taken him, but something had sent him back. He’d Returned.
Because he’d seen war and destruction.
The God King was yelling in fear. Lightsong looked over as the fake priests grabbed Susebron, and Lightsong could see into the God King’s mouth. No tongue, Lightsong thought. Of course. To keep him from using all that BioChroma. It makes sense.
He turned to the side. Blushweaver’s body lay red and bloodied. He’d seen that it in a vision. In the vague shadows of morning memory, he’d thought that the image had been of her blushing, but now he remembered. He looked to the side. Llarimar, eyes closed as if asleep—that image had been in his dream as well. Lightsong realized the man had them shut as he wept.
The God King in prison. Lightsong had seen that too. But above it all, he remembered standing on the other side of a brilliant, colorful wave of light, looking down at the world from the other side. And seeing everything he loved dissolve into the destruction of war. A war greater than any the world had known, a war more deadly—even—than the Manywar.
He remembered the other side. And he remembered a voice, calm and comforting, offering him an opportunity.
To Return.
By the Colors . . . Lightsong thought, standing up as the priests forced the God King to his knees. I am a god.
Lightsong stepped forward, moving up to the bars of his cage. He saw pain and tears in the God King’s face and somehow understood them. The man did love Siri. Lightsong had seen the same thing in the queen’s eyes. She had somehow come to care for the man who was to oppress her.
“You are my king,” Lightsong whispered. “And lord of the gods.”
The Pahn Kahl men forced the God King facedown on the stones. One of the priests raised a sword. The God King’s arm jutted out, his hand toward Lightsong.
I have seen the void, he thought. And I came back.
And then Lightsong reached through the bars and grasped the God King’s hand. A fake priest looked up with alarm.
Lightsong met the man’s eyes, then smiled broadly, looking down at the God King. “My life to yours,” Lightsong said. “My Breath become yours.”
* * *