Black Sun by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Epic Fantasy
Publisher: Gallery / Saga Press
Published: 2020-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20

THE CRESCENT SEA

YEAR 325 OF THE SUN

(12 DAYS BEFORE CONVERGENCE)

The sea has no mercy, even for a Teek.

—Teek saying

The storm didn’t strike until well into the next week. Seven days of clear skies, favorable winds, and steady progress through the endless blue were more than Xiala had hoped for, and every morning that dawned clear, she gave thanks to her mother, the sea. But experience warned her that the weather wouldn’t hold, and she had never been wrong before.

After an increasingly cloudy night that obscured the stars and left her with her ear pressed to the floor of the canoe, listening to the way the waves moved around them to determine direction, she knew a storm was hours away and not days. When the morning dawned a fiery red, she cursed her fickle father above. Serapio had kept watch with her, and he asked what was wrong.

“Red skies mean rain,” she said, “and skies that red mean a whole fucking lot of it.”

“Is it beautiful?” he asked.

She laughed, low and skeptical. “Beautiful enough to kill you.”

His lips ticked up, but he said nothing.

Ever since that first night when she had used her Song to give the crew a break, Serapio had shown up once the moon was high and the crew was mostly asleep and sat vigil with her. She had indulged him at first, amused by his enthusiasm for her stories and, admittedly, flattered by his attention and unusual curiosity. But by the fourth evening, she realized that she was impatiently glancing toward his shed, wondering when he would come out. She had already thought of a handful of stories to tell him that night, knowing that he would like best the one about the seabird that flew a thousand miles to save its hatchling.

“Look at you, Xiala,” she whispered to herself with a wry shake of her head. “You like him. The blind foreigner who doesn’t say much. Well, you always do like the strange ones.”

Which wasn’t true. She usually liked the pretty ones, the easy ones she could leave in port the next day and not feel bad about. But there was something about his quiet presence beside her night after night, something intentional about the way he sat next to her, his hands folded in his lap. Or if she was telling a particularly enthralling story, the way he would absently trace a finger over his palm, circling an invisible line on his skin. She took pleasure in his proximity, the kiss of his breath against her skin, the smell of distant smoke that lingered on his clothes.

He was peculiar, though. There was no denying that. But she no longer felt uneasy in his company or saw giant crows around his head. She was willing to chalk his awkwardness up to being a foreigner, and a sheltered one at that. How could one know anything about the world, about people and the way they interacted, if one had grown up isolated in the mountains like

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