Chapter 9: The Old Woman’s Tale

Veyra's home turned out to be a cramped room above a fish-smoking shed, the smell of woodsmoke so deeply soaked into the walls it seemed to have become part of the stone itself. The old woman seated her guests on low benches around a single table, lit an oil lamp — not for herself, she noted dryly, but "for those of you who still need your eyes to see" — and sat silent a long while before beginning.

"Once," she said at last, "long before these three kingdoms even called themselves kingdoms, there lived along this coast people known as singers. Not so many — not in every village, not in every generation — but enough that every captain knew: with a singer aboard, a storm would swerve wide of the ship, and a shoal would give warning long before the keel ever touched sand."

"How did it work?" Mira asked, leaning forward.

"No one truly knows how, girl, not even those of us born with the gift. The sea simply… listens. Not the way a person listens — with ears, with a mind. It listens the way all the water in the world listens, all at once, every time a raindrop falls, every time a wave breaks against a shore. And singers are the few whose voice the sea can pick out from a million other sounds. Some called it a blessing. Some called it a curse. I, for my part, in a long life, never quite decided which was right."

She sipped from a clay cup something steaming, and continued, and in her creaky voice Mira caught not only wariness this time, but old, deeply buried pain.

"So it went on, generation after generation, until about half a century ago the Crown decided a power that couldn't be fully controlled was too dangerous to exist unchecked. That's when the Inquisition was born — first as a small order at court, tasked with 'studying and guiding' the singers' gift. Guiding turned out to be a euphemism for something far less pleasant."

"A massacre," Hasso said quietly, and the old woman nodded.

"A massacre," she repeated bitterly. "Though in the royal chronicles, if you ever read them, girl, this era is called something far gentler. 'The Age of Clarification.' As if killing people for what they were born were some kind of dawn after a long night. Winners always find pretty words for ugly deeds.

"A massacre stretched over years, so no one would ever call it a massacre out loud. Some were declared heretics and burned before large crowds, to sow fear. Others were taken 'into the Crown's service' and never seen again. The most cautious of the third kind simply stopped singing — forever, hiding to the grave what they'd been born, from fear the gift would pass to their own children and destroy them in turn." Veyra smiled without mirth. "I was one of the third kind. Buried my voice so deep I nearly convinced myself it had never existed. And then I grew old, went blind, and realized there was almost nothing left to fear — what did I have left to lose, but a few final years of life?"

"Can you teach me?" Mira asked. "How it works, how to control it?"

"I can tell you the little I remember, but teach you — no, girl. I was never especially strong in the gift, even in my youth. But you…" Veyra reached out her hand again, as if to touch her palm once more, then thought better of it halfway. "What I felt at the market was stronger than anything I've known in my whole life. I've never met strength like yours, not once. It frightens me and gives me hope, both at once."

"Hope for what?"

"That the Storm has finally remembered what it feels like to be truly heard." Veyra lowered her voice nearly to a whisper, and the lamp on the table, as if responding to her words, dimmed for a moment, though not the faintest draft stirred in the room. "The marks on the water, girl. 'She has returned' — that isn't about you personally, understand me right. It's about the Storm itself. About the fact that behind this sea stands something ancient and sentient, that has been silent for centuries because there were fewer and fewer singers left able to hear it. And now it's spoken again — which means it's searching for someone once more."

"What does it want?"

"That I don't know for certain. But I remember one old tale my own grandmother used to tell me: the Storm has never forgotten what was once taken from it. It's patient — more patient than any king, more patient than the Inquisition itself. But sooner or later it will demand payment for what was stolen from the sea generations ago. And I fear, girl, that since it's spoken to you specifically, the payment will fall to you. One way or another."

Silence settled in the room, broken only by the crackle of the lamp's wick. Mira sat motionless, trying to absorb what she'd heard, while Hasso beside her grew grimmer still, as if half his own childhood memories of the cave on the southern shore had suddenly taken on a far more ominous meaning.

"Where should we sail next?" he asked finally. "Do you know where to look for answers?"

Veyra thought a moment, and it seemed to Mira the old woman was weighing not so much what she knew, but how much of what she knew could safely be entrusted to strangers, even ones with a history such as theirs.

"West," she said at last. "To the Rocky Strait. Among the reefs there, there are places the Storm remembers better than any living person does. It isn't the full answer, I know. But it's the only road I can point you toward with a clear conscience. The rest you'll have to learn yourselves — and, I fear, far faster than you'd like."

"One more question," Hasso said, before they rose to go. "An Inquisitor's ship is already hunting us. An inquisitor named Renhart. Have you heard of him?"

Veyra's face, weary but calm until now, twisted for a moment into something resembling genuine, long-buried terror.

"I've heard of him," she said quietly. "Not personally, but enough to remember the name. They say he's not the kind of inquisitor who works by sword and fire from the start. He's patient. Studies, gathers information, waits for the right moment — and only then strikes, surely, so the victim never even realizes they were caught long before the trap closed. If he's already on your trail, girl" — she turned again toward where she unerringly sensed Mira's presence — "then you have far less time than you think. Run west, to the Strait, as I said. And run fast."

When they finally stepped out of the cramped room back into the noise of the port streets, the sky over Keraven had already begun to darken, taking on the same restless, troubled hues Mira had seen over the sea on the night of the first storm. She couldn't help but think that even here, on solid ground, far from the water, she still felt that same patient, unrelenting attention on her — as if the Storm the blind old woman had spoken of was now watching her from everywhere at once, waiting for a single question: was she finally ready to pay her debt.