Page 55 of Beyond the Shadowed Earth
Lady Rinar shrugged her thin shoulders. “There’s very little opportunity for common Enduenans to improve themselves or their stations. Land and power are squabbled over by the nobility, like my late husband, and there’s nothing left for anyone else. If you’re born poor, you are very likely to die poor.”
Eda thought about Niren, who would have lived and died a sheep farmer’s daughter if not for her. Didn’t that mean Eda had improved her lot? And what about the temple? Eda had constructed it specificallyforthe common people. A traitorous thought wormed through her mind:Temples do a poor job of filling anyone’s belly.She pushed it angrily away, forcing her thoughts back to the present. “Are you an immigrant, too?”
“I’m a pilgrim,” said Lady Rinar softly. “Journeying to Tal-Arohnd. My son Torane made a pilgrimage there two decades ago and stayed to become a monk. I want to see him one last time before I die.”
Eda didn’t ask if Lady Rinar was ill—clearly her age would not allow her to make another such trip, if she even survived this one. “Tal-Arohnd,” Eda mused. “The monastery in Halda.”
The old woman nodded. “Then you’ve heard of it?”
Eda felt woozy again, her heart beating overly fast. She laid her head back against the wall and shut her eyes, fighting against the memory of Ileem lounging on the roof tiles, the moonlight kissing the curve of his cheek.The monks believe Tuer himself is there,somewhere, he’d said.Trapped in his own mountain. They claimed they could hear him sometimes,his weeping tangled up with the wind.
“Yes, I’ve heard of Tal-Arohnd. That’s where I’m headed, too.”
By the afternoon, Eda felt strong enough to drag herself out of bed. The ship still tilted alarmingly, but she remained upright, and the little bits of food she’d managed to get down stayed where they were supposed to.
She had no wish to stay cramped inside with strangers and sickness, so she stumbled out onto the lower deck.
Sea air hit her square in the face, cold and damp and salty, and beyond the ship’s metal railing there was nothing but the endless waves. She clapped her hand over her mouth and turned away from the dizzying view—she was helpless out here, at the mercy of the merciless gods, impossibly far from land in every direction. She shuddered, and wondered what in all of Endahr would ever possess someone to become a sailor.
She wasn’t alone on the deck. A mother sat nursing a baby on a rough wooden bench that butted up against the outside wall of the horrid steerage cabin. The mother looked sickly and thin but the baby seemed content, one tiny fist curled tight around a length of the mother’s dark hair.
For a moment, Eda stared at the child, seeing her own future with Ileem, a false future, one that had never truly existed.
And yet her traitorous heart still longed for it. What would her and Ileem’s child have looked like? Smooth skin, black hair, dark eyes, surely. But what else? Ileem’s singing voice, perhaps. Eda’s dimples. Treachery, engraved into the child’s very soul.
They weren’t very different, her and Ileem. Like, calling to like.
Eda jerked her gaze away from the mother and baby, her insides roiling with more than nausea.
An Enduenan man and his teenage daughter emerged from steerage and went to stand by the rail. The daughter stared longingly out over the water, a faraway look in her eyes, and for some reason, she reminded Eda of Talia.
Caida’s bleeding heart. Eda didn’t want to ponder her old rival’s fate, or contemplate with slightly guilty pangs the elaborate lengths she’d gone to to make doubly and triply sure Talia would be miserable for the rest of her life. Eda didn’t want to think, even for an instant, that perhaps she had wronged Talia. Talia had been all the things Eda wanted to be, and was not: the true heir to the Emperor, a daughter of royal blood.Somebody.
But Eda was nobody, now.
She always had been.
The steerage passengers ate in a cramped mess hall adjoining their sleeping quarters. Portholes looked out to sea, where the setting sun sank fiery into the waves, and an Odan chef in a dirty apron spooned what looked like pig slop into tin bowls.
Eda took her slop, plus a mug of beer, and sat at a rough wooden table near Lady Rinar. Eda tried a bite from her bowl. It was some kind of stew, and thankfully tasted rather better than it looked.
“I was hoping you would join me,” said the old woman with a smile in Eda’s direction, though Eda had no idea how she knew it was her. “What did you say your name was?”
Eda opened her mouth to give Lady Rinar Niren’s name, but found she couldn’t do it. Her grief and guilt choked her. So she gave her own name. “Eda.”
“Like the Empress,” said Lady Rinar.
Eda looked at her sharply, but there was no suspicion in the old woman’s face. “Like the Empress.”
Lady Rinar sipped what appeared to be overly watery tea from a chipped mug. It smelled like dishwater. “What sends you to Tal-Arohnd? It is rare that the very young have any interest in religion, although you have the air of one who has seen the gods. Even treated with them.”
Unbidden, the green meadow from her dream in the holding cell came into Eda’s mind. She saw the stone temple where the scarred man sat writing in his book. All around the temple shadows slipped through cracks in the sky—shadows with teeth.
“I’m going to find Tuer,” said Eda without meaning to. “He wronged me, and I mean to make him answer for it.” She couldn’t quite speak her true purpose out loud.
Lady Rinar’s blind eyes fixed on her face. “That is a dangerous quest, little one. But I fear you won’t find him. The stories say he’s trapped in the Circle of Sorrow, though no one but the Bearer of Souls could know that for sure.”
The boat swayed, and Eda’s stomach dropped. “What is the Bearer of Souls?”
