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“Traitors! I’ll kill all of you!” Xi Ro cries, hurtling at the knights in their path. Aurash stares at the prone form of their father, arms still outstretched.
Sathona does not look at the knights who loom bright and terrible and wrong, or her father the king, whose back was turned when they struck him down, or even at Taox, who is watching all of this with terrible calm.
Taox is mechanic and engineer first, reluctant mentor second – or third, now, with usurper taking that place. This is a decision that must have been made after long thought, the cost – however cruel – somehow outweighed, though Sathona could not begin to glimpse the shape of what it was balanced against.
The benefit of wisdom carved from a life longer than a handful of years. A wisdom Sathona herself would never have, now.
She looks at the pale husk that was her father’s familiar, tumbled to the floor and forgotten. She looks at it, and it speaks to her in a voice that is not a voice, stitched together from the hiss of rain biting into stone, and the charged silence of seafire setting the horizon alight.
The dead worm says, in its voice of danger: You can save yourself. You can save your sisters.
It says: You can survive this, but only if you listen.
When Xi Ro snarls and flings a handful of light at the Helium Drinkers – even Sathona, who saw her reach for the bait stars at her belt and had prepared for it, nearly turns to look, and her nerves sing with [bright/safe/warm] – she picks it up and tucks it into the crook of her arm. Not even wise, far-sighted, traitorous Taox sees her do it.
It is silent all through the flight from the court to the shore where Aurash’s ship waits. It is only once Aurash is at the helm and Xi Ro sleeps slumped against her shoulder that Sathona dares to lift the stiff, weightless thing to eye level.
“Tell me,” she whispers. “Tell me how to save us.”
And it does.